| Title | : | The Fateful Triangle: Race, Ethnicity, Nation (The W. E. B. Du Bois Lectures) |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0674976525 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780674976528 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Hardcover |
| Number of Pages | : | 229 |
| Publication | : | Published September 11, 2017 |
From the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, the concept of race stressed distinctions of color as fixed and unchangeable. But for Hall, twentieth-century redefinitions of blackness reveal how identities and attitudes can be transformed through the medium of language itself. Like the “badge of color” W. E. B. Du Bois evoked in the anticolonial era, “black” became a sign of solidarity for Caribbean and South Asian migrants who fought discrimination in 1980s Britain. Hall sees such manifestations of “new ethnicities” as grounds for optimism in the face of worldwide fundamentalisms that respond with fear to social change.
Migration was at the heart of Hall’s diagnosis of the global predicaments taking shape around him. Explaining more than two decades ago why migrants are the target of new nationalisms, Hall’s prescient vision helps us to understand today’s crisis of liberal democracy. As he challenges us to find sustainable ways of living with difference, Hall gives us the concept of diaspora as a metaphor with which to enact fresh possibilities for redefining nation, race, and identity in the twenty-first century.
The Fateful Triangle: Race, Ethnicity, Nation (The W. E. B. Du Bois Lectures) Reviews
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Still only THINK I know what the titular triangle is.
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Hall never ceases to amaze me. In these lectures from 1994 Hall carries forward his analysis of analyzing the dialectics of race, ethnicity, and nation that he initiated in earlier essays like "New Ethnicities" and "Minimal Selves" among many other pieces. As often with Hall's writing, it takes on a new resonance with the present moment as he speaks about ethnic nationalism and cultural fundamentalism. There is far too much to account for here, but his lectures remind one of the importance of Paul Gilroy's transationalism framing of diasporic cultures in a transnational light. If anything, Hall's insistence of the importance of writing diasporic cultures as always mobilizing the past to guide themselves into the futures is particularly relevant as global climate change, inter-ethnic strife, and the whims of transnational capitalism continue to displace more and more people, leading to a world where diasporic cultures dominate much of the scene and hold the potential to see things in less naturalized and essentialist ways, but can teach through design the ways in which they reassemble complex networks and channels between the past, present, and future.
This book should be read in conjunction with Hall's *Cultural Studies 1983* lectures as well as some of the lectures recently translated of Foucault's from the 1970s-- most notably *The Punitive Society* and *The Birth of Biopolitics*, since they all have a similarly materialist form of analysis that Hall similarly employs. -
If you don't love Stuart Hall already, you might just fall in love with his mind and open endedness after/while reading this one. One of the best books on race, ethnicity, nation and diaspora. A must read.
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Hall, como sempre, incisivo e dono de uma prosa quase literária. sempre fico contente quando vejo que tenho leitura dele pra fazer, e esse livro em particular é excelente em fazer genealogia e desestabilizar as categorias de raça, etnia e nação.
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Everyone should read this, it's as relevant today as it was when these words were first spoken.
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You cant go wrong with Hall.
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Su análisis sobre los conceptos de raza y etnia son bien interesantes.
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The Fateful Triangle is based on three Harvard lectures Stuart Hall gave in 1994 but which were only published posthumously. Unfortunately. These lectures are concise examples of Hall’s work as a cultural think and include thoughts on race and ethnicity as “sliding signifiers”, their impact on the construction of nations and the (African) diaspora. The lectures, almost 30 years old, at times read so contemporary that they could be mistaken for reactions to the 2010s. Oh, how I wish Hall was still around to bring his discursive analysis to the problems of 2021. The Trumpist problems aren’t new, it’s just the veneer that has covered white supremacy has been chipped away. This passage, for instance, made me think of the “America is better than this” rhetoric after the storm on the capitol or the “battle for the soul of the nation” in 2020:
“But, in fact, nations do not just emerge; they are formed. And national identites, more over, are not attributes we are born with, but are formed and transformed within discourses and other systems of representations. (…) Such discursive operations in the making of national cultural identities are always, of course, closely articulated to power and to the way power functions in society. We should think of the nation not only as a political entity but also as something that produces meaning and constructs identification.”
(Also published on my blog.) -
'[O]f course there are indeed material differences of all sorts in the world. There is no reason to deny this reality. However, it is only when these differences have been organized within a discourse, as a system of marked differentiations, that the resulting categories can be said to acquire meaning, become a factor in human culture, regulate conduct, and have real effects on everyday social practices' (50)
'Indeed, by making difference intelligible in this way, each regime [of truth] marks out human differences within culture in a way that corresponds exactly to how difference is understood to function in nature, that is, 'naturally,' such that the differences represented in the discourse of race are put beyond the capacity of culture and history to rework or reconstruct them' (57)
'[W]ithin the traditionalist conception of diaspora culture there is always a linear movement whereby authenticity fades the further you go from its original source or depart from its sacred text, which will inevitably entail the sad declension of diaspora identity into inauthenticity and impurity. With the newer conception of diaspora, however, 'tradition' is understood as itself always being remade and transformed, as something that is always *produced* as a discursive structure, thereby constantly recomposing itself as the relations of similarity and difference are repositioned - disarticulated and rearticulated - in new chains of equivalence. In breaking with the narrative of authenticity, we have a critical account of diaspora that also disrupts the fatal disposition that regards diaspora peoples as continually suspended between a traditionalism of the past, to which they cannot return - impure and corrupted as they are - and a modernity of the future, equally impure and inauthentic, which they are forbidden to enter' (170-71 - cf. Turki's shift from early to late memoirs)
