Cultural Appropriation or Appreciation? A Critical Look at Power, Exchange, and Respect

“Cultural appropriation” has become one of the more controversial and confusing terms in liberal discourse over recent decades. From Purim costumes to fashion runways, the boundary between inspiration and theft, between tribute and offense, often remains blurry—emotionally charged and conceptually vague. But beyond the headlines and hashtags lies a deeper question: When does cultural exchange become exploitation?

To answer that, we must ask not only who is borrowing from whom—but how power operates within that exchange.

Between Appropriation and Appreciation

Cultural appropriation occurs when members of a dominant culture adopt symbols, practices, or aesthetic elements from a marginalized culture—typically without context, understanding, or consent. More than mere borrowing, appropriation often strips these elements of their original meaning, commodifies them, and reproduces existing power dynamics.

It’s not just about hurt feelings—it’s about extraction. Entire cultures, often historically oppressed, are mined for their symbols, while those adopting them gain profit, prestige, or style. Meanwhile, the original communities continue to suffer exclusion, stigma, or discrimination for the very same expressions.

Cultural appreciation, by contrast, is grounded in respect. It begins with genuine curiosity, relationship-building, and recognition. It involves learning from the source, giving credit, and understanding the historical and emotional depth of specific traditions.

The key difference lies not only in what is done—but in how, and by whom. Who holds power? Is the culture being commodified or celebrated? Are members of the originating culture included, compensated, and heard? Appreciation isn’t just aesthetic—it’s ethical.

An Anthropological View: Cultural Diffusion and Inequality

Anthropologists have long studied “cultural diffusion”—the process by which ideas, technologies, and styles move across societies. No culture is static or sealed; all are shaped by movement, encounter, and exchange.

But diffusion isn’t always equal. In colonial and postcolonial contexts, dominant cultures often absorb elements from the margins without reciprocity. Anthropologist Arjun Appadurai reminds us that globalization intensifies this imbalance: symbols are severed from their original lifeworlds and turned into consumable trends.

Examples: Fashion, Music, and Food

Fashion: Fashion houses have repeatedly faced backlash for using Native American, African, or East Asian motifs without credit. A model in a feathered Indigenous headdress isn’t just “dressing up”—she’s participating in a long history of erasure and exoticization.

Music: Elvis Presley built a career on Black musical styles that were stigmatized when performed by Black artists. Today, white rappers or K-pop stars often adopt Black aesthetics without engaging the communities and histories behind them.

Food: Fusion cuisine can be creative and delicious, but when upscale restaurants repackage immigrant dishes while ignoring their cultural roots—or the economic struggles behind them—it becomes erasure, not tribute. Foods born out of hardship become luxury trends, with no mention of the people who created them.

Why It Matters

No culture is pure or isolated—cultural exchange is a fundamental part of being human. But without critical reflection, it can reproduce the very injustices it claims to transcend. To distinguish inspiration from appropriation, we must ask: Who profits? Who is silenced? Who gets arrested for dreadlocks, and who gets a Vogue spread?

At its best, cultural exchange can be a space for solidarity and mutual growth. But that requires humility, not entitlement. Respect begins with listening—not only to flavors, sounds, and styles—but to the people and histories behind them.

Stuart Hall / The Multicultural Question — Summary

Stuart Hall’s essay “The Multicultural Question” unpacks the ideological, political, and cultural complexities behind one of the most overused yet under-theorized concepts in contemporary discourse. Hall argues that “multiculturalism” is not a single coherent idea or policy, but a contested terrain where struggles over identity, governance, and difference unfold. Rather than viewing multiculturalism as an already-achieved harmony of plural identities, Hall invites us to see it as an ongoing negotiation—marked by tensions between cultural recognition and social inequality, between universal liberalism and particularist claims.

Distinguishing “Multicultural” from “Multiculturalism”

Hall begins by differentiating between the descriptive term “multicultural” and the normative-political term “multiculturalism.” The former refers to the demographic fact of cultural plurality—the coexistence of different cultural communities within the same society. The latter refers to the policies, ideologies, and strategies developed in response to this condition. This distinction is key to understanding the ambiguities and failures of multiculturalism as a project. Societies can be de facto multicultural without adopting multiculturalism as a political commitment.

The Crisis of the Nation-State and the Myth of Homogeneity

Hall challenges the assumption that nation-states were ever culturally homogenous. The idea of a single national culture is a historical construct, often forged in colonial and imperial contexts. As globalization, migration, and postcolonial return reshuffle the boundaries of national identity, the fantasy of homogeneity becomes increasingly untenable. Hall calls this the “unsettling” of the nation-state, where previously marginalized voices now demand presence and participation in the national narrative.

The Rhetoric and Politics of Inclusion

The essay critiques dominant forms of multiculturalism that operate through liberal tolerance or superficial inclusion. These models often require minorities to assimilate or conform to dominant norms in order to be accepted, thereby reproducing inequality under the guise of diversity. Hall highlights the paradox: multicultural discourse celebrates difference in theory, yet often neutralizes it in practice. This generates a backlash, where multiculturalism is blamed for national fragmentation or cultural relativism.

Transruptive Difference and Vernacular Modernities

Borrowing from Barnor Hesse, Hall discusses the “transruptive” power of multiculturalism: its potential to disturb and transform established political vocabularies. He situates this in the broader context of globalization and the rise of vernacular modernities—cultural forms that challenge Western narratives of modernity by rearticulating them through the experiences of the global South, diaspora communities, and subaltern groups.

From Doctrine to Struggle

Ultimately, Hall refuses to see multiculturalism as a coherent doctrine or policy package. Rather, it is a field of ideological and political contestation. He calls for a deeper engagement with the historical and material conditions that shape multicultural struggles, and for a rethinking of political solidarity that neither erases difference nor fetishizes it.

A Decentering Moment

Hall closes by suggesting that the “multicultural question” signals a deeper crisis of the West’s universalizing mission. As the margins re-enter the center, and as new hybrid identities emerge, the challenge is not to defend multiculturalism as a utopia—but to live with its uncertainties. The task is to construct a politics of difference that is also a politics of justice.

Stuart Hall / What Is This “Black” in Black Popular Culture? — Summary

In "What Is This “Black” in Black Popular Culture?", Stuart Hall challenges us to rethink the cultural and political significance of “black” in black popular culture—not as an essence, but as a signifier of struggle, contestation, and hybrid creation. At a time when global popular culture circulates with increasing speed and ambiguity, Hall interrogates both the risks and the radical potential embedded in the forms and styles that have emerged from the black diaspora. He urges readers to move beyond essentialist understandings of black identity and instead embrace a more nuanced view of cultural production as always mediated, historically situated, and politically charged.

A Site of Contradiction: Resistance and Incorporation

Hall begins by asserting that black popular culture is a contradictory space—a site of tension between resistance and incorporation, authenticity and commodification. It cannot be reduced to binary frameworks. While often co-opted by dominant media and distorted through stereotypes, black popular culture retains within it traces of diasporic memory, vernacular creativity, and expressive agency. The significance of black music, oral traditions, stylized bodily expression, and counter-narratives lies not in their “purity” but in their capacity to signify otherwise—to produce meaning from a position of cultural marginality and historical dispersal.

Diaspora Aesthetics and Hybrid Forms

The essay explores how black cultural forms have been “overdetermined”: shaped both by African inheritances and by the diasporic conditions of dislocation, survival, and adaptation. There are no pure forms—only hybrid ones. In fact, Hall emphasizes that the vernacular genius of black cultural production lies in its hybrid, improvisational nature. The diaspora aesthetic emerges not as a retrieval of unbroken tradition but as a rearticulation born of necessity and improvisation, engaging dominant codes in order to subvert and transform them.

The Trouble with Authenticity

Hall also problematizes the notion of “authenticity” in cultural politics. While black cultural texts often reference black experiences and community histories, the invocation of “the black experience” as a stable political foundation is no longer sufficient. Strategic essentialism—the temporary embrace of black identity for political mobilization—may have once been effective, but it risks solidifying into dogma. Today, Hall argues, the complexity of black subjectivities—including gender, sexuality, class, and generational difference—demands a politics that is flexible, dialogic, and attentive to multiplicity.

Blackness as a Space of Political Possibility

He concludes by calling for a deeper engagement with popular culture as a mythic, contested, and performative arena. It is not where we discover our “true” selves, but where identities are played out, imagined, and contested—both by others and by ourselves. The question is no longer just whether a cultural text is “black,” but what it does with blackness: what political visions, what forms of solidarity, and what critical insights it opens up. Blackness, in this sense, is a space of action, not just identification.

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Stuart Hall / Old and New Identities, Old and New Ethnicities — Summary

In the modern cultural landscape, the idea of identity has become both more urgent and more elusive. Stuart Hall’s essay “Old and New Identities, Old and New Ethnicities” is a critical meditation on this complexity, offering a theoretical framework for understanding identity not as a fixed essence but as a process—fluid, constructed, and inherently political. Hall invites us to let go of nostalgic certainties and instead to dwell within the contradictions of our time, where subjectivity is fragmented, identity is hybrid, and politics must grapple with the unfinished work of difference.

Hall begins by revisiting traditional notions of identity, grounded in stable categories such as nation, class, race, and gender. These “master concepts” were once seen as cohesive, totalizing frameworks that organized not only social position but also personal meaning. Whether through philosophical conceptions of the unified Cartesian subject or through psychological narratives of a coherent self unfolding through time, identity was imagined as singular and stable. Yet Hall notes that this model no longer holds. The disintegration of grand narratives—accelerated by globalization, postmodernity, and the decline of national and economic certainties—has revealed identity to be inherently contingent, constructed through discourse, and in perpetual transformation.

This shift is not only theoretical but deeply cultural and political. Hall identifies a paradox: while the traditional anchors of identity are eroding, the need for identity persists and even intensifies. Instead of a return to essentialism, however, he advocates a new model of identification—one that recognizes the multiplicity and ambivalence at the heart of subject formation. Identity, he argues, is a process of becoming rather than being; it is articulated across difference, never finalized, and always shaped by the interplay of power, culture, and desire.

In this reimagined framework, identity becomes a site of negotiation. Drawing on feminist theory and psychoanalysis, Hall emphasizes the split nature of the subject, formed not in isolation but in relation to the “Other.” Identification always involves ambivalence, projection, and exclusion. It is through this process that categories such as “black,” “British,” or “Caribbean” acquire meaning—not as static labels, but as provisional and contested positions within a dynamic cultural field.

Crucially, Hall connects this theoretical shift to the lived experience of diasporic and postcolonial communities, particularly in Britain. For second- and third-generation immigrants, identity is not singular but layered—black and British and Caribbean all at once. Their cultural production resists neat binaries and reflects a refusal to choose between inherited affiliations. Through examples such as Hanif Kureishi’s My Beautiful Laundrette, Hall shows how this complexity manifests in art that is disruptive, hybrid, and politically charged, even if it defies conventional positive representation.

In closing, Hall reframes the task of cultural politics: not to recover lost essences, but to construct new forms of solidarity from the fragments. This requires embracing the instability of identity, not as a weakness but as a generative space for cultural resistance and political creativity. Identity, for Hall, is neither an endpoint nor a retreat—it is a site of struggle, an unfinished story told in multiple voices, and a terrain where the politics of the future will be fought.

See also: 

What Is This ‘Black’ in Black Popular Culture?

The Multicultural Question

The Local and the Global: Globalization and Ethnicity

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Stuart Hall / The Great Moving Right Show - Summary

Stuart Hall’s 1979 essay “The Great Moving Right Show” is a landmark political analysis that sought to explain the rising tide of conservatism in Britain during the late 1970s, especially the emergence of Thatcherism. Rather than treating it as a simple shift in party power, Hall presents it as a profound transformation of political culture, ideology, and consent—what Gramsci would call the formation of a new “historic bloc.”

Crisis and Conjuncture

Hall begins by framing the shift to the Right as a response to a deeper organic crisis in British society, not just a cyclical change in political fortunes. This crisis—marked by economic decline, industrial stagnation, and the erosion of postwar social democratic consensus—had structural roots but also profound ideological dimensions. Thatcherism, he argues, was not simply a reactionary swing, but a new project that sought to redefine national identity, class relations, and the role of the state.

Thatcherism as Authoritarian Populism

A central concept in Hall’s essay is authoritarian populism. Unlike classical fascism, it retains democratic forms while reconfiguring consent through nationalist, moralist, and market-oriented rhetoric. Thatcherism mobilized public anxieties—around crime, race, national decline, and welfare dependency—into a cohesive common-sense worldview that combined neoliberal economics with a tough moral discourse.

From Economic Recession to Ideological Revolution

Hall shows how the Right succeeded in turning economic crises into opportunities for ideological transformation. While the Left remained stuck in old categories and assumptions, the Right told a compelling story: blaming welfare dependency, immigration, and trade unions for national decline. Through emotional appeals—like the image of the welfare “scrounger” or the “enemy within”—Thatcherism displaced structural explanations in favor of moral and populist ones.

The Role of the State and the Media

Thatcherism’s genius, Hall argues, was its ability to recast the state from benevolent protector to meddlesome enemy, thus justifying cuts to public services under the guise of restoring “freedom.” This ideological pivot was bolstered by the media, particularly the tabloid press, which played a pivotal role in constructing a populist common sense around law, order, and market values.

Hegemony and the New Historic Bloc

Using Gramsci’s theory, Hall explains how Thatcherism created a new hegemonic project that brought together segments of the ruling class and working class in a reconfigured alliance. This alliance was not based on economic interest alone, but on a re-articulation of values, national identity, and fear. The Right redefined “the people” as aligned with capitalist interests, masking contradictions through an emotionally resonant discourse.

The Left’s Strategic Failures

Hall is critical of the British Left’s failure to engage with this new ideological terrain. He argues that many on the Left clung to economistic or abstract frameworks, missing the cultural and political shifts unfolding before them. Revolutionary optimism and dismissals of Thatcherism as merely reactionary mistakes blinded many to the depth of the change underway.

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Stuart Hall / Culture, the Media, and the ‘Ideological Effect - Summary

Stuart Hall’s 1977 essay “Culture, the Media, and the ‘Ideological Effect’” offers one of the most comprehensive statements of Cultural Studies’ critical approach to media. Building on Marxist, Gramscian, and semiotic foundations, Hall investigates how the mass media function not merely as channels of information, but as powerful apparatuses of ideological work—shaping, framing, and classifying our perception of social reality.

Media as Ideological State Apparatuses

Hall critiques the reductionist Marxist “base-superstructure” model and instead adopts Althusser’s concept of ideological state apparatuses, noting the media's relative autonomy. Media are not directly controlled by the state or ruling class, but operate within dominant ideological formations. Their authority rests on a professional ideology of objectivity, neutrality, and balance, which paradoxically enables them to reinforce the ideological field while appearing impartialEssential essays Volume….

The Shift from Bias to Structural Ideology

Hall argues that analysis should move beyond identifying media “bias” to uncovering the structuring absences and limits—what the media never say because it is “common sense.” This ideological effect consists of naturalizing dominant values and assumptions as self-evident, thus rendering them invisible and uncontested. These “taken-for-granted” truths set the boundaries for public discourseEssential essays Volume….

The Role of Classification and Representation

Media don’t simply reflect reality—they construct it by classifying and representing events and social groups through selective codes and lexicons. Drawing from Barthes and Durkheim, Hall highlights how media messages rely on symbolic codes that organize cultural knowledge. These codes structure the field of meaning and help define what is thinkable or unthinkable within societyEssential essays Volume….

Hegemony and the Struggle for Meaning

Using Gramsci, Hall presents hegemony as a dynamic process of ideological struggle. Dominant ideologies are never total—they must be continuously reproduced and re-secured. Media play a central role in this struggle by disseminating preferred meanings while containing oppositional ones. The concept of negotiated readings, introduced in his encoding/decoding model, reappears here: subordinate perspectives are not silenced, but are selectively incorporated and rearticulated to serve dominant frameworksEssential essays Volume….

Legitimacy, Consent, and Consensus

Hall emphasizes that ideological domination in liberal democracies relies on consent rather than coercion. Media construct the “consensus” not through overt propaganda but through subtle framing, repetition, and exclusion. This process gives the illusion of free, spontaneous agreement while masking the conditions of domination. The media thus appear to mediate between competing views, but actually anchor debate within a narrow ideological fieldEssential essays Volume….

Summary: Media as Instruments of Social Knowledge

Hall’s essay concludes by positioning media as the principal mechanisms for producing and distributing social knowledge in capitalist societies. They offer not merely stories or facts, but the very frameworks through which people interpret and navigate the world. This “ideological effect” is not accidental—it is the core of media’s cultural function under capitalism.

See also: Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse

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Stuart Hall / “Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse” - Summary and Overeview

Stuart Hall’s foundational essay “Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse” proposes a groundbreaking model for understanding communication in mass media, particularly television. Hall critiques the linear “sender-message-receiver” model, replacing it with a dynamic, multi-phase process that highlights the complexity and ideological struggle embedded in the production and reception of media messages.

The Communication Circuit: From Production to Reception

Hall introduces the concept of a “circuit of communication” that involves three critical moments: encoding, the message-form, and decoding. Encoding refers to the production phase, where institutional structures, technical apparatuses, and professional ideologies shape content into a communicable form through symbolic codes. Decoding refers to how audiences interpret or reconstruct the message—often in ways not foreseen by the producerEssential essays Volume….

These moments are “relatively autonomous”: they are connected but not identical, which allows for slippage, misinterpretation, or resistance. The model emphasizes that meaning is not fixed at the point of production—it is negotiated and often contested at the point of reception.

Systematically Distorted Communication

One of Hall’s key insights is that communication in capitalist societies is often “systematically distorted” due to asymmetries between broadcasters (producers) and audiences. These asymmetries reflect broader structural inequalities—of class, education, cultural capital, and ideology—which affect how effectively a message can be decoded in its intended form.

He draws on semiotics and cultural theory to show how language and codes shape meaning, noting that events must become “stories” before they can be communicated. In this transformation, the dominant ideological frameworks become embedded in the symbolic structure of the message.

Three Reading Positions

Hall famously outlines three positions from which audiences decode media messages:

1. Dominant-Hegemonic Position – The viewer accepts the encoded meaning in full, aligning with the producer’s intentions and the dominant ideology.

2. Negotiated Position – The viewer partly agrees with the message but adapts or resists elements based on local experiences or personal perspectives.

3. Oppositional Position – The viewer decodes the message in a contrary way, effectively rejecting its ideological framing and re-signifying it through alternative codes.

Implications for Media Studies and Cultural Policy

This model challenges the assumption that media consumption is passive or uniform. It paved the way for a more nuanced understanding of audience agency, subcultural interpretation, and ideological contestation. Hall warns that treating communication breakdowns as technical flaws ignores their political nature: attempts to “improve communication” often mean enforcing dominant codes more efficiently—a partisan move disguised as neutrality.

Conclusion: A Paradigm Shift in Media Analysis

By reconceptualizing communication as a complex, contested, and coded exchange, Hall’s encoding/decoding model significantly shifted the field of media and cultural studies. It moved beyond behaviorist models toward a semiotic and sociological analysis that foregrounds ideology, meaning, and power at every stage of the communication process.

See also: Culture, the Media, and the ‘Ideological Effect’

Notes on Deconstructing 'The Popular'"

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“Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies” by Stuart Hall - Summary and Review

“Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies” is a rich and personal reflection delivered at a 1990 conference by Stuart Hall. In it he reconsiders the development, tensions, and future of Cultural Studies by tracing its theoretical legacies. He approaches the subject not as a definitive history, but through an autobiographical lens that emphasizes Cultural Studies’ shifting trajectories, methodological pluralism, and political stakes.

Cultural Studies as a Discursive Formation

Hall begins by rejecting any origin myth of Cultural Studies. Instead, he characterizes it as a “discursive formation” in the Foucauldian sense—multiple histories, practices, and theoretical tensions converging in an unstable but generative project. Cultural Studies never had a single center; it was marked by moments of rupture, argument, and “theoretical noise” rather than linear progression or consensusEssential essays Volume….

The Marxist Legacy: Influence, Trouble, and Distance

Hall situates the project within his own political formation in the British New Left, noting that Cultural Studies inherited Marxist questions (capital, class, ideology, power) but never fit neatly within orthodox Marxism. Instead, it worked “with, on, against” Marxism, taking inspiration while resisting determinism and EurocentrismEssential essays Volume…. He emphasizes that theory was never pure abstraction—it was a response to lived historical crises and practical engagement.

Feminist and Postcolonial Interventions

A central theme is the way feminism and race theory interrupted Cultural Studies. Feminism, in Hall’s view, made a “ruptural” intervention: redefining power, making the personal political, reintroducing the subject and the unconscious into theoretical work, and challenging the patriarchal tendencies within the field itselfEssential essays Volume…. Likewise, race forced Cultural Studies to confront its own Anglo-centrism. Texts like Policing the Crisis and The Empire Strikes Back emerged only after difficult internal struggle and critical reassessment.

The “Worldliness” and Danger of Cultural Studies

Hall draws on Edward Said’s idea of “worldliness” to argue that Cultural Studies must remain entangled with the messy, political, material world—not retreat into pure textuality or abstraction. He warns of the danger of academic institutionalization, particularly in the U.S., where Cultural Studies was rapidly professionalized and potentially depoliticized. For Hall, theory is a tool of intervention, not of retreat.

Positionality, Provisionality, and “The Arbitrary Closure”

Cultural Studies, Hall insists, cannot be anything anyone claims it to be. While it resists being a master discourse, it still stakes political and theoretical positions. Hall endorses what he calls “the arbitrary closure”—the idea, drawn from Homi Bhabha, that political agency requires taking positions, however contingent, partial, or revisable.

Conclusion: Intellectual Work as Agonistic Practice

Hall closes by reaffirming Cultural Studies as a dialogic and agonistic field—never unified, never finished, always contested. Its power lies not in providing settled truths, but in its restless commitment to opening up space for political and intellectual debate. He urges practitioners to hold the tension between theory and politics, plurality and commitment, openness and specificity.

See also: Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms

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Stuart Hall / Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms - Summary and Review

Stuart Hall's landmark essay “Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms” charts the theoretical development of British Cultural Studies by contrasting two dominant frameworks that have shaped its trajectory: culturalism and structuralism. Hall does not present these as mutually exclusive or chronologically sequential, but as overlapping paradigms in creative tension, each responding to broader intellectual and political conditions.

The Culturalist Paradigm: Experience and Humanism

Emerging in the 1950s and 1960s through the works of Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams, and E. P. Thompson, the culturalist approach emphasized lived experience, consciousness, and historical agency. This tradition rejected deterministic forms of Marxism and instead sought to give voice to working-class cultures on their own terms. Culture was seen not as a superstructural reflection of economic base but as a vital, expressive field through which people made sense of their lives.

Williams's notion of “structures of feeling” and Thompson’s focus on “the making of the working class” exemplify this orientation. Both resisted static or mechanistic models, proposing instead a historically situated, human-centered theory of cultural practice. Culture here was defined anthropologically as “a whole way of life” and analytically as a “common process of meaning-making.”

The Structuralist Turn: Language and Ideology

By the late 1970s and 1980s, this humanist tradition came under pressure from structuralist and post-structuralist critiques, particularly those informed by Saussurean linguistics, Althusserian Marxism, and Lacanian psychoanalysis. Structuralism challenged the primacy of “experience,” arguing that subjects are not authors of meaning but are constituted by language and ideology. From this view, experience is not an origin but an effect—an imaginary relation shaped by deeper structural forces.

Althusser’s concept of ideology as unconscious structure, and Lévi-Strauss’s work on cultural systems as akin to language, played pivotal roles in this shift. In this paradigm, the subject is “spoken by” structures rather than speaking them, and meaning arises not from intentional acts but from systems of signification. Theory, rather than description, becomes the privileged mode of analysis.

Hall’s Mediating Position: Toward a Synthesis

Hall resists choosing between the paradigms. Instead, he argues for a dialectical engagement with their tensions. While both paradigms are partial, their antagonism has been productive. The culturalist emphasis on agency and experience retains analytic value, especially when refined by Gramscian concepts such as hegemony and articulation. Meanwhile, structuralism’s rigor and emphasis on ideology help uncover the invisible constraints that shape consciousness.

Ultimately, Hall calls for a Cultural Studies that holds together the insights of both paradigms without collapsing into reductionism or abstraction. He advocates for a materialist theory of culture that accounts for both historical agency and structural determination.

See als: "The Emergence of Cultural Studies and the Crisis of the Humanities" by Stuart Hall

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Summary and Review of Stuart Hall’s “Cultural Identity and Diaspora”

Stuart Hall’s essay “Cultural Identity and Diaspora”, originally published in Framework (no. 36), is one of the most influential texts in postcolonial and cultural theory. In this seminal work, Hall challenges static and essentialist understandings of identity, especially in the context of the Afro-Caribbean diaspora. His essay addresses how cultural identity is not simply discovered or inherited but rather produced through historical processes and representational practices.

Challenging the Myth of a Fixed Identity

Hall opens with a reflection on Caribbean cinema as a space where new representations of black identity are emerging. He asks, “Who is this emergent, new subject of the cinema? From where does he/she speak?” He immediately critiques the idea that identity is transparent or fixed, urging readers to think of identity not as “an already accomplished fact” but as “a ‘production’, which is never complete, always in process, and always constituted within, not outside, representation.”

Two Conceptions of Cultural Identity

Hall outlines two dominant ways of thinking about cultural identity.

The first is an essentialist view that sees identity as rooted in a shared culture and ancestry—“a sort of collective ‘one true self’”—which forms a common foundation among people of African descent. This vision was crucial for anti-colonial struggles and for reclaiming suppressed histories. As Frantz Fanon wrote, such rediscovery is driven by “the secret hope of discovering... some very beautiful and splendid era whose existence rehabilitates us.”

The second conception, which Hall advocates, recognizes that identity is also shaped by difference, rupture, and transformation. It is a matter of “becoming as well as of being.” Hall stresses that “far from being eternally fixed in some essentialised past, [cultural identities] are subject to the continuous ‘play’ of history, culture and power.”

The Impact of Colonialism on Identity Formation

Drawing from thinkers like Fanon, Edward Said, and Michel Foucault, Hall explores how colonialism did not merely distort identity from the outside but fundamentally altered how colonized people understood themselves. Fanon’s vivid image of the self being “fixed by a dye” captures this internalization of colonial power. This reveals how identity is often formed under the duress of being objectified, silenced, or distorted by dominant regimes of representation.

The Three Cultural Presences: Africa, Europe, and the Americas

To explain the complexity of Caribbean identity, Hall identifies three “cultural presences”:

1. Presence Africaine

Africa is the “site of the repressed,” historically silenced by slavery but present in language, music, religion, and cultural practices. Although it was unspeakable during colonial times, Africa persists as the unacknowledged ground-bass of Caribbean culture. Yet Hall cautions against seeing it as a static origin: “The original ‘Africa’ is no longer there. It too has been transformed. History is... irreversible.”

2. Presence Européenne

Europe represents colonial dominance, a power that is “endlessly speaking us.” This presence is not merely external; it shapes diasporic identities from within. Citing Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, Hall shows how black identity was not just suppressed but profoundly split and reconstituted by European discourse.

3. Presence Américaine

The New World—the Americas—is the geographical and symbolic space where African, European, and Indigenous histories collided. It is the birthplace of hybridity, creolisation, and diasporic culture. For Hall, this “third presence” is where the trauma and creativity of Caribbean identity take root, making it the ground for constant transformation.

Hybridity, Diaspora, and the “Cut-and-Mix” Aesthetic

Hall’s understanding of diaspora is notably anti-essentialist. Diasporic identity is not about purity or a sacred homeland but about “a necessary heterogeneity and diversity.” He celebrates the hybrid forms of Caribbean culture, seen in music, language, food, and aesthetics. Quoting cultural theorist Kobena Mercer, Hall points to the power of Creole and patois as “strategic inflections” that destabilize the linguistic domination of colonial English.

This fluid, syncretic identity is embodied in what Hall calls the “diaspora aesthetic”—a creative, critical space of “cut-and-mix” practices that challenge dominant narratives and allow new subjectivities to emerge.

Representation and the Role of Cinema

Hall argues that cultural identity is constituted through representation—not just reflected in art, but actually formed through it. Cinema, in this view, becomes a powerful tool for shaping new subjectivities and reclaiming history. He writes, “Cinema [is] not as a second-order mirror held up to reflect what already exists, but as that form of representation which is able to constitute us as new kinds of subjects.”

Modern black cinemas, especially those emerging from Caribbean and black British contexts, are therefore crucial. They create new “points of identification” and offer alternative histories and narratives of the self.

Political Implications: Identity as Positioning

Throughout the essay, Hall insists that identity is not a discovery but a “positioning.” It is strategic, contested, and inherently political. There is no “absolute guarantee” of an original, pure identity. Instead, identities are always “the names we give to the different ways we are positioned by, and position ourselves within, the narratives of the past.”

This framing has critical implications for cultural politics: it calls for a vigilant awareness of how identities are formed, manipulated, or resisted through representation and discourse.

Impact and Legacy of the Essay

Stuart Hall’s Cultural Identity and Diaspora has had a lasting and transformative impact across multiple disciplines, including cultural studies, postcolonial theory, film studies, and diaspora studies. His emphasis on hybridity, positionality, and the constructed nature of identity has informed the work of scholars, artists, filmmakers, and activists.

The essay also influenced broader conversations around multiculturalism, migration, and the politics of belonging. In a time of rising nationalism and cultural essentialism, Hall’s insistence on complexity, contingency, and openness offers a powerful counter-narrative. His work encourages a deeper, more nuanced understanding of how individuals and communities make meaning in the aftermath of empire.

Conclusion: Identity as an Ongoing Story

In closing, Hall reminds us that cultural identity is not something to be discovered in the past but created in the present and future. It is a process of narration, of positioning, of struggle. His vision of identity embraces multiplicity and change, offering a critical framework for anyone seeking to understand the dynamics of culture, power, and representation in a globalized world.

As Hall writes, quoting Fanon: “A national culture is the whole body of efforts made by a people in the sphere of thought to describe, justify and praise the action through which that people has created itself and keeps itself in existence.”

More by Stuart Hall:

The Emergence of Cultural Studies and the Crisis of the Humanities

The Local and the Global: Globalization and Ethnicity

Notes on Deconstructing 'The Popular

Meaning of Subculture Explained and Defined

Definition: The term "Subculture" is used in sociology and anthropology to define a group of people with a distinctive set of behaviors and beliefs that differentiates them within the dominant culture of which they are a part.

A subculture can be formed from the age , ethnic group or gender of its members. The qualities that determine a subculture to appear can be aesthetic, political, sexual, or a combination of these.

Subcultures are often defined by their opposition to the values ​​of the dominant culture to which they belong, although this definition is not universally accepted, since an opposition between subculture and culture does not always occur in a radical way.

Features of a Subculture

A subculture is frequently associated with people of all ages and social classes who have common preferences in entertainment, in the meaning of certain symbols used and in the use of social media of communication, behavior, idiosyncrasy and language, among others not so notorious. In this sense it is also said that corporations , sects and many other groups or segments of society can be observed and studied as subcultures .

According to leading theorists who have studied subcultures, such as Dick Hebdige , members of a subculture will often signal their membership in the subculture by distinctive use of clothing and style. Therefore, the study of a subculture often consists of the study of the symbolism associated with the clothing , music and other customs of its members, and also of the ways in which these same symbols are interpreted by members of the dominant culture. . If the subculture is characterized by systematic opposition to the dominant culture, then it can be described as a counterculture.

Origin of the term "Subculture"

In 1950, the American theorist and sociologist David Riesman observed that in a majority community there was a group of people who did not follow the same life patterns. Riesman viewed this subculture as a culture with its own peculiarities within the prevailing culture.

In turn, several theorists of the twentieth century have carried out specialized studies in culture. This is the case of Dick Hebdige, social researcher, who published his book: Subculture: The Meaning of Style, in 1979 and which constitutes a valuable contribution to the cultural studies carried out at the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCS) from the University of Birmingham, England, an institution where he acquired his studies in sociology. Thus, Hebdige is taken as an important reference when dealing with the subject of youth subcultures. In addition, Hebdige considers that the members of a subculture when validating their belonging to it must have certain peculiarities such as style, clothing, language and / or the way of relating,

The Frankfurt School: summary

•         Frankfurt school is not a place

•         It is a school of thought

•         It is a group of similar theories that focus on the same topic

•         The scholars that made up the Frankfurt school were all directly, or indirectly associated with a place called the Institute of Social Research

•         The nickname of the thinkers, originates in the location of the institute, Frankfurt Germany

•         The "Frankfurt School" refers to a group of German-American theorists who developed powerful analyses of the changes in Western capitalist societies that occurred since the classical theory of Marx

•         Prominent theorists within this school of thought are: Max Horkheimer,T.W. Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Leo Lowenthal, and Erich Fromm

•         Each of these philosophers believed, and shared Karl Marx’s theory of Historical Materialism

•         Each member of the Frankfurt school adjusted Marxism with his additions, or "fix“.

•         Then, they used the "fixed" Marxist theory as a measure modern society needed to meet

•         These ideas came to be known as "Critical Theory"

Note: Remember Marxist Theory

•         Developed by Karl Marx in the 19th century. 

•         Argues that hierarchical class system is at the root of all social problems and must be ended by a revolution of the workers.

•         Dominant classes directly control the means of production (labor, factories and land), which is called the base of society.

•         Rulling classes also control the culture, which is called the superstructure of society. Therefore, the dominant ideology of a society is the ideology of rulling class.

•         Base: the means of production

•         Superstructure: a society’s culture

•         Ideology: ideas present in a culture that mislead average people and encourage them to act against their own interests

The Neo-Marxist Approach: Frankfurt School

•         The Marxist approach to the media studies developed in parallel with the functionalist approach. It is best characterized by the work of the Frankfurt School founded in 1923.

•         The school was concerned with developing a revolutionary, philosophical variant of Western Marxism, opposed to capitalism in the west and Stalinism in the East, which came to be called critical theory.

•         In 1930s when Hitler came to power, the Institute was forced to leave Germany for New York.

•         In 1953 it was re-established in Frankfurt.

•         Adorno and Horkheimer developed a Marxist sociological approach to media studies. They saw the media as a cultural industry that maintained power relations and served to lessen the ‘resistance standards’ of cultural aesthetics by popularizing certain types of culture.

•         They produced some of the first accounts within critical social theory of the importance of mass culture and communication in social reproduction and domination.

•         They generated one of the first ,modes of a critical cultural studies that analyzes the processes of cultural production and political economy, the politics of cultural texts, and audience reception and use of cultural artifacts (Kellner 1989 and 1995) 

•         Frankfurt school developed a critical and transdisciplinary approach to cultural studies and communications studies, combining political economy, textual analysis, and analysis of social and ideological effects

The contribution of the Frankfurt School

•         Frankfurt school made historical materialism a centerpiece in social theory

•         It forced Marxist ideology to broaden its scope

•         While Marx said, "This is historical materialism, and this is what it does”

•         The Frankfurt School said, "This is historical materialism; this is what’s right with it, this is what’s wrong with it, and this is how it works” 

•         The Frankfurt school also had it’s own effects on philosophy as a whole

•         It affected philosophy by preserving the notion of meta-analysis of society through its economic, political, and social systems

•         It introduced the notion of social philosophy and made theory part of everyday practice by "mixing" philosophical problems, and empirical problems 

See: One Dimensional man / Herbert Marcuse