Cultural Studies - Ezra

Stuart Hall approaches the notion of ‘cultural identity’ as a historically contingent production shaped through a dialogue between similarity and difference. He contrasts this to a perspective of fixed or transcendental essences. Furthermore, he describes how black Caribbean cinemas creatively re-engage with the discontinuities of the past to construct new diasporic identities. When addressing the persistent impulse of reconstructing a unitary subject, he references the idea of an  “imaginary plenitude”, prior to the violence and fragmentation of slavery (394, 402). Nonetheless, he emphasizes a relationship of play toward this temporality, affirming the possibility for multiple, non-national formations to emerge.

This dynamic seems relevant to my own research which traces the utopian doctrine of ‘free love’ in early 20th century southern cone literature. 'Free love' was a set of radical proposals that interrogated practices of marriage, rejected the role of the state as a mediator of social bonds and contested normative gender roles, thus producing grounds of legitimacy for erotic same-sex relationships. Many anarchist immigrants and exiles even joined ‘free love’ communes in attempts to undo prevailing ideas of morality and public health. My question then is how can diasporic subjects like these be said to engage in the construction of imagined geographies? What other scales for the apprehension of community are at play beyond the bridging of a prior plenitude? Is there also a sense in which futurity  becomes a vector for identity even for otherwise disconnected subjects of different national or geographic provenance?

Shifting gears a bit, my final question relates to Lila Abu Lughod’s arguments in Writing Against Culture. Abu-Lughod challanges and tries to find alternatives to the use of 'culture' on the grounds that it is “the essential tool for making the other” (143). However, she paradoxically defends the use of the concept of 'humanity', admitting its complicity with similar mutilations, because, “humanism continues to be, in the West, the language of human equality with the most moral force”. How can a method which tactically/cynically embraces the language of humanism actually overcome its anthropocentric and western connotations rather than reaffirm its signifying power?