Beyond Eurocentrism, 

Post-Colonial, 
Transnational, 
Diasporic, 

Stuart Hall's
Cultural identity and
Cinematic representation.
1989.
 Stuart McPhail Hall FBA (3 February 1932 – 10 February 2014) was a
Jamaican-born British Marxist sociologist, cultural theorist and political activist.

Hall became one of the main proponents of reception theory and

developed a theory of encoding and decoding called 'Hall's Theory' -
('Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse, 1973).

Dominant, or Preferred Reading - how the producer wants the

audience to view the media text. Audience members will take this
position if the messages are clear and if the audience member is the
same age and culture; 

Oppositional Reading - when the audience rejects the preferred

reading and creates their own meaning for the text. Oppositional
reading can also occur if the audience member has different beliefs or
is of a different age or a different culture.

Negotiated Reading - a compromise between the dominant and

oppositional readings, where the audience accepts parts of the
producer's views, but has their own views on parts as well.

Useful articles & resources : https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/stuart-hall-and-the-rise-of-cultural-studies

Who is this emergent new subject of cinema?  From where does it speak?
New
Caribbean
Cinema

What is cultural Identity as production in process not an

Positions of enunciation   already accomplished historical fact
identity?
Emerging
Third World cinemas of
Cinemas Afro-Caribbean
Diaspora
Premise

Open a dialogue on the subject of cultural identity and

cinematic representation. The ‘I’ who writes here (Stuart
Hall) must be thought of as itself ‘enunciated’.

We all write from a particular place and time, from a

history and a culture which is specific (always in context,
positioned). 
 Stuart Hall’s Enunciation
Background

“I was born into and spent my childhood and adolescence in a

lower-middle class family in Jamaica. I have lived all my adult
life in England, in the shadow of the black diaspora – ‘in the
belly of the beast’. I write against the background of a
lifetime’s work in cultural studies.”
 Pre-1960’s representation of pan African culture in cinema

During the colonial era, Africa was represented exclusively by western filmmakers. African life was shown only by
the work of white, colonial, Western filmmakers, who depicted blacks in a negative fashion, as exotic "others"

Laval
Decree
(1934)

Congorilla (dir. Martin E. Johnson, 1932)

The African Queen (dir. John Houston, 1951) Voyage au Congo (dir. Marc Allegret, 1927) Tarzan of the Apes (dir. Scott Sidney, 1918)
 Anti-colonial films before the 1960’s independence in Africa

Africa 50 (dir. René Vautier, 1950) Statues also die (dir. Chris
Marker&Alain Resnais, 1953)
Etnographic documentaries by Jean
Rouch not explicitly anti-colonial, but
did challenge perceptions of colonial
Africa.
 Post independence and 1970s representation of pan African culture in cinema

Black Girl (dir. Sembène Ousmane, 1966) Soleil O (dir. Med Sondo, 1967) Touki Bouki (dir. Djibril Diop Mambéty, 1973) Yeelen (dir. Souleymane Cissé, 1987)
 THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT - Post colonial.

Other Useful resources -  Discourse on Colonialism, (1950), by Aimé Césaire,  The Colonizer and the Colonized  (1965), by Albert Memmi,  Orientalism (1978), by Edward Said,
               AFRICAN INDEPENDENCE - 'YEAR OF AFRICA', 1960

In 1960 the culmination of a number of African Independence political movements that led to the
independence from Colonial rule of 17 African nations encouraged by a reemergence of a Pan-African sentiment
that encouraged the unity of African people on the African continent and the diaspora. 
(From France 1960),  Cameroon – 1st January, Togo – 27th April, Mali Federation – 20th August, Madagascar – 26th June, Dahomey – 1st August,
Niger – 3rd August, Upper Volta – 5th August, Ivory Coast – 7th August, Chad – 11th August, Central African Republic – 13th August, Republic of
Congo – 15th August, Gabon – 17th August, Mauritania – 28th November.

(From Britain) -  British Somaliland became the Independent State of Somaliland – 26th June, Nigeria – 1st October

(From Belgium) -  Congo – 30th June.

The following former British Caribbean island colonies achieved independence in their own right; Jamaica (1962), Trinidad & Tobago (1962),
Barbados (1966), Bahamas (1973), Grenada (1974), Dominica (1978), St. Lucia (1979), St. Vincent (1979), Antigua & Barbuda (1981), St. Kitts &
Nevis (1983).
 Cultural Identity

a) Shared culture ‘one true self’ hiding inside b) Since history has intervened ’what have we
the many more superficially and artificially become’ (it qualifies but does not replace the
imposed selves. first)
a) Shared culture ‘one true self’
This oneness is the truth, the essence of ‘Caribbean’ – it is this identity which a Caribbean cinema
must discover, excavate and bring to light through cinematic representation. 

This conception of cultural identity played a critical

role in the post-colonial struggles which have reshaped
our world.

It lay at the centre of the vision of the poets of

‘Negritude’ (i.e Aimee Ceasire, Leopold Senghor) and
the Pan-African political project earlier in the century. 

The Jungla (Wilfredo Lam, 1943)

            Poets of Negritude: Aimé Césaire, Leopold Senghor, Leon Damas, David Diop, Birago Diop,

Dear White Brother  / Cher frère blanc  

When I was born, I was black,

When I grew up, I was black,
When I am in the sun, I am black,
When I am sick, I am black,
When I die, I will be black.

While you, white man,

When you were born, you were pink,
When you grew up, you were white,
When you go in the sun, you are red,
When you are cold, you are blue,
When you are scared, you are green,
When you are sick, you are yellow,
When you die, you will be grey.

So, between you and me,

Who is the colored man?
Léopold Sedar Senghor
 PAN AFRICAN CULTURE as a symbol of the Post-Colonial discourse.

"The core of the Black Revolution is in Africa, and until Africa is united under a socialist government, the Black man
throughout the world lacks a national home. It is around the African peoples' struggles for liberation and unification
that African or Black culture will take shape and substance. Africa is one continent, one people, and one nation."
Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, page 88, Class Struggle in Africa.

Fespaco – 1st edition 1969

Useful resources - 'Class struggle in Africa' by Kwame Nkrumah (1970).

These politicians, artists and poets represented Africa’s attempts to
redefine a post colonial African voice and identity or a one true self or
oneness – an idea reiterated by Fanon when he said - 

“A passionate research directed by the secret hope of discovering

beyond the misery of today, beyond self contempt, resignation and
abjuration, some very beautiful and splendid era whose existence
rehabilitates us in regard to ourselves and in regard to others”

“Colonialization is not satisfied merely with holding a people in its

grip and emptying the native's brain of all form and content. By a kind
of perverted logic, it turns to the past of the oppressed people and
distorts, disfigures and destroys it” 
         

Franz Fanon – Wretched of the Earth, ‘On National Culture’ (1963).

 Two questions that Fanon’s observation poses: 

1. Is it only a matter of unearthing that which the colonial experience buried and overlaid? 

2. Is the production of identity not grounded in the archaeology but in the re-telling of the
past? (Imaginative Rediscovery) 
The photographic work of Jamaican-born Armet Francis (who has
lived in Britain since the age of eight) is an attempt to reconstruct
in visual terms ‘the underlying unity of the black people whom,
colonization and slavery distributed across the African Diaspora’ 
 

It brings an imaginary coherence on the fragmented history of

enforced African diaspora. He uses Africa as the mother of these
different civilizations, making it the missing term that lies at the
centre of their cultural identity and gives it a meaning which it
always lacked. 
Fashion Shoot, Brixton Market', London, 1973. Archival C-type, 12x16" © Armet Francis / Courtesy of Autograph ABP, London. Supported by the
National Lottery through the Heritage Lottery Fund. 
Black Church, London 1980, Fibre-based silver gelatin print, 12 x 16". © Armet Carnival Sound System, London. n.d, Fibre-based silver gelatin print, 12 x 16".
Francis / Courtesy of Autograph ABP, London © Armet Francis / Courtesy of Autograph ABP, London
b) Cultural identity in this sense is a matter of ‘becoming’ as well of ‘being’ – it belongs to the future as much
as to the past. Africans as a matter of ‘what they are’ and ‘what they have become’

Cultural identities undergo constant transformation, they are not fixed in some essentialized past, they are
subject to the continuous ‘play’ of history. 
“Far from being grounded in a mere ‘recovery’ of the past, which is waiting to be found, and which, when found
will secure our sense of ourselves into eternity, identities are the names we give to the different ways we are
positioned by, and position ourselves within, the narratives of the past.”

the ability to make people see and experience themselves as ‘Other’.

the individual is an effect of power

traumatic character of ‘the colonial experience’ 

cultural power and normalization 

“It is one thing to place some person or set of people as the Other of a dominant discourse.
It is quite another thing to subject them to that ‘knowledge’“ 
(from Black Skin, White Masks – Fanon) 
Similarity and Difference and
Caribbean identities
continuity rupture
The islands in the Caribbean have been fought over and owned by various European powers in the past,
mainly the British, French, and Spanish. All of these cultures, as well as their respective culinary traditions,
have played a role in forming the multi-national cuisine of the Caribbean as it is nowadays.

Pelau Trinidadian Callaloo Curried Goat

The uprooting of slavery and transportation and the insertion into the plantation economy of the Western world
that ‘unified’ these peoples across their differences, in the same moment as it cut them off from direct access to
the past. 

Play (used as a metaphor with double meaning): 

1.The permanent unsettlement, the lack of any final resolution 

2.The doubleness is most present within the varieties of Caribbean music. 

The cultural ‘play’ could not be represented cinematically as a simple, binary opposition - past/present, them/us.  
 Jacques Derrida’s (July 15, 1930 – October 9, 2004) play of
words helps to capture this sense of difference which is not pure
‘otherness’. 

“Where Derrida breaks new ground… is in the extent to which ‘differ’ shades into
‘defer’… the idea that meaning is always deferred, perhaps to the point of an
endless supplementarity, by the play of signification.” (Norris, 1982, p32).
Black Girl (dir. Sembène Ousmane, 1966) The Mask (dir. Chuck Russell, 1994)
Hall’s three presences as suggested by Aimé Césaire and Léopold
Senghor.

Présence Africaine Présence Americaine

Présence Europeenne
 Presence Africaine – origin of displaced African identities
     “Defined as the site of the repressed. Apparently silenced beyond memory by the power of the
new cultures of slavery, it was in fact present everywhere; in everyday life and customs of the slave
quarters, in the language and patois of the plantations, in names and words often disconnected from
their taxonomies, - Africa the signified which could not be represented, remained the unspoken,
unspeakable presence in Caribbean culture”  

“It is hiding behind every verbal inflection, every narrative twist of Caribbean cultural life. It is the
secret code with which every Western text was re-read. This was - is- the Africa that is alive and well
in the diaspora” -  (Hall, 1976). 

Made through the impact on popular life of:

- the post-colonial revolution;
- the civil rights struggles;
- the culture of Rastafarianism and the music of Reggae;
- the figures of signifiers, of a new construction of ‘Jamaican-ness’.

The west appropriates Africa by freezing it into some timeless zone of the ‘primitive, unchanging past’.
 Presence Europeenne – exclusion, imposition, expropriation

“The European presence thus interrupts the innocence of the ‘whole discourse of difference, in the Caribbean by introducing the
question of power. Europe belongs irrevocably to the question of power, to the lines of force and consent, to the pole of the
dominant in Caribbean culture”. 

In terms of colonialism, underdevelopment, poverty and racism of colour, the European Presence is that which in visual
representation has positioned us within its dominant regimes of representation:
- the colonial discourse;
- the literatures of adventure and exploration;
- the romance of the exotic;
- the ethnographic and travelling eye;
- the tropical languages of tourism;
- travel brochure and Hollywood and the
 Presence Americaine – continues its silences, suppresion

"Ground, place, territory" where people and cultures from around the world collided. It is, as Hall
puts it, "where the fateful/fatal encounter was staged between Africa and the West", and also where
the displacement of the natives occurred"

Tony Gum - Black Coca-Cola Series

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.
Frantz Fanon, 'On National Culture’, in The Wretched of the Earth, p.188
Tank yuh!