Stuart Hall: diasporic Caribbeanness and discourses of ethnocultural belonging

ABSTRACT Hall’s analyses merge the intersecting fields of Black Britishness, diaspora studies, Caribbean studies, postcolonialism, and cultural studies, centering on the ways in which new arrivants and their descendants came to represent their experiences of displacement, exclusion, and cultural duality. The complex modernities of ethnicity, nationality, and belonging outlined by Hall rewrite traditional perspectives on those categories. Hall inscribes the foundational framework of the Caribbean as the locus classicus of diaspora, such that this double diasporization of the Caribbean population engenders an analytical and discursive interrogation of identity and its corollaries that leads to a critical rereading of existing models of nation and belonging. In outlining and defining a new Caribbean re-diasporization whose amorphous geographical boundaries locate its subjects in an explicitly transnational and transformative space of change and renewal, Hall draws on Caribbean communities both at home and abroad to rewrite the boundaries of diaspora as a concept.