ON POST-COLONIAL AUTHORITY, CARIBBEANNESS, REITERATION AND POLITICAL COMMUNITY

Abstract

This paper is a dialogue with particular threads of Hall's work on racialized subjectification and the words and other practices of a single respondent. Framed by re-emergent notions of fixed, unchanging identities and bounded, homogeneous ‘secular’ and ‘religious’ cultures and communities embedded in contemporary political discourse on the ‘rights’ and ‘responsibilities’ and ‘core values’ of ‘Britain's citizens’, this paper considers how post-colonial authority is interiorized or incorporated and re-emerges and re-circulates in our daily practical life. It further considers Hall's theorizations of cultural identity with which to understand an internally heterogeneous, obedient and defiant subject composed of different, dissonant, potentially irreconcilable selves. The paper considers particular strands of Hall's work to develop our understandings of a subject who polices their own practice and protects the experiential effect of a self-governing, internally homogeneous and bounded self. It further considers contemporary formations of political community in a late modern, post-colonial, neo-liberal disciplinary social order.

Keywords:

• cultural identity
• Stuart Hall
• repetition
• reiteration
• Caribbeanness
• racialization
• sexualization
• political community
• post-coloniality

Notes

1 Interview with Jamal 16 March 2002.

2 Working People's Alliance.

3 Several studies have concluded that racial harassment and violence has increased as opposed to following a path of gradual decline (CRE 1997, PSI 1995, Home Office 1998, CPS 2003, 2007).