Page 161 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

9

IDENTITY BLUES

Rescuing cosmopolitanism in the
era of globalization

There is something distinctly idealistic, if not utopian, in the statement that
identities are a matter of becoming rather than being, a question, as Stuart Hall
(1996g: 4) puts it, not ‘of “who we are” or “where we came from”, so much as
what we might become’. This idealism is tinged with a deep sense of historical and
political urgency. In foregrounding the connection of ‘identity’ with the future,
with what we might become, Hall’s reflections on the meaning of cultural identity
in contemporary life seek to provide a counter to the rampant tendency to use
‘identity’ as unfailingly chained to our real or imaginary past. Identity, says Hall,
belongs to the future as much as to the past: ‘Cultural identities come from
somewhere, have histories. But, like everything which is historical, they undergo
constant transformation. Far from being eternally fixed in some essentialised past,
they are subject to the continuous “play” of history, culture and power’ (Hall 1990:
225). Consequently, so is the implication, cultural identities may be the very
subjective instruments, or discursive conduits, through which we may shape and
construct our futures: they provide the ‘stuff’ that enables us to become political
agents. Our role in the making of history depends on how we conceive of ourselves
as active, changing subjects, in ways which generate meaningful links between ‘how
we have been represented and how that bears on how we might represent ourselves’
(Hall 1996g: 4). By emphasizing the notion of becoming as central to our iden-
tities, Hall rescues the possibility for ‘identity’ – the way we represent ourselves to
ourselves and to others – to be a resource of hope, the site of agency and attachment
that energizes us to participate in the making of our own ongoing histories, the
construction of our continuously unfolding worlds, now and in the future. It is
in this implicit faith in the future that we can discern the idealism – in the non-
philosophical, existential meaning of that word – of Hall’s politics of identity. But
how sustainable is this faith in these cynical times, when pessimism abounds and
the future is envisaged by millions across the globe more with fear and dread than
with hope and anticipation?
Against the background of a world-wide proliferation of particularist, exclu-
sionary, and determinist modes of identity politics – both on the right and on the
left, in the developed as well as in the developing world, in the West and the ‘rest’
alike – Hall has been at pains to foreground a double focus in his theoretical

150