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Thinking "Diaspora" with Stuart Hall

Thinking "Diaspora" with Stuart Hall jenny sharpe In my twenty-five years of teaching Caribbean literature at American universities, I have found that the most difficult concept for students to grasp is the different historical formations of identities across the African diaspora. They are often perplexed when confronted with Afro-Caribbean characters of the colonial era who do not identify themselves as black. “But how can they not think of themselves as black?” declared one student with indignation. “I have always known I’m black.” The answer to her question leads us, as does Stu- art Hall’s work, to the power of language, narrative, and culture. “Although everyone perfectly understood what ‘black’ meant,” he explains in his posthumously published memoir, Familiar Stranger, “the very word was taboo, unsayable, especially for the middle clas- ses in Jamaica in the 1930s and 1940s.” Caribbean novels written on the cusp of decolonization, like George Lamming’s classic In the Castle of My Skin, describe the damaging effects of an educational system that promoted Englishness to instill in the colonized an iden- tification with the white ruling class. Settled in 1605, Lamming’s island home of Barbados was known as Little England because cul- turally it was the most English of all Britain’s http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences University of Nebraska Press

Thinking "Diaspora" with Stuart Hall

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Publisher
University of Nebraska Press
ISSN
1938-8020

Abstract

jenny sharpe In my twenty-five years of teaching Caribbean literature at American universities, I have found that the most difficult concept for students to grasp is the different historical formations of identities across the African diaspora. They are often perplexed when confronted with Afro-Caribbean characters of the colonial era who do not identify themselves as black. “But how can they not think of themselves as black?” declared one student with indignation. “I have always known I’m black.” The answer to her question leads us, as does Stu- art Hall’s work, to the power of language, narrative, and culture. “Although everyone perfectly understood what ‘black’ meant,” he explains in his posthumously published memoir, Familiar Stranger, “the very word was taboo, unsayable, especially for the middle clas- ses in Jamaica in the 1930s and 1940s.” Caribbean novels written on the cusp of decolonization, like George Lamming’s classic In the Castle of My Skin, describe the damaging effects of an educational system that promoted Englishness to instill in the colonized an iden- tification with the white ruling class. Settled in 1605, Lamming’s island home of Barbados was known as Little England because cul- turally it was the most English of all Britain’s

Journal

Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences – University of Nebraska Press

Published: Aug 17, 2018

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