Page 75 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

DICTIONARY OF CULTURAL STUDIES

involves hybridized cultural forms. His prime example is the concept of the Black
Atlantic. Here, cultural exchange within the black diaspora produces hybrid
identities and cultural forms of similarity and difference within and between its
52 various locales.
It is a sign of our times that forms of hybrid cultural identity associated with
diaspora populations are appearing all across the world; from the United States to
Australia and from Europe to South Africa. The physical meeting and mixing of
peoples across the globe that is exemplified by diaspora throws the whole notion
of pure national or ethnic cultures into doubt. For example, in a Caribbean context
the idea of the ‘Creole continuum’ has gained in significance. That is, a series of
overlapping language uses and code switching that deploys not only the specific
modes of other languages, say English and French, but invents forms peculiar to
itself. Here, neither the colonial nor colonized cultures or languages are best
understood as ‘pure’ forms separated from each other but rather as elements in the
construction of new hybrid cultural forms.
Links Black Atlantic, ethnicity, globalization, hybridity, identity, race

Différance The concept of différance – difference and deferral – is central to the work
of the philosopher Derrida and the influence of poststructuralism within cultural
studies. Derrida’s starting point is the argument derived from structuralism that
language is to be understood as a system of differential signs that generate meaning
through phonetic and conceptual difference rather than by correspondence with
fixed transcendental meanings or by reference to an independent object world.
Derrida goes on to argue that since meaning is generated through the play of
signifiers and not by reference to an independent object world it can never be fixed.
Words carry multiple meanings including the echoes or traces of other meanings
from other related words in other contexts. Language is non-representational and
meaning is inherently unstable so that it constantly slides away.
One way to understand the notion of différance is to look up the meaning of a
word in a dictionary. Here we are referred to other words and then other words and
then other words in an infinite process of deferral so that meaning slides down a
chain of signifiers abolishing a stable signified. That is, the production of meaning
in the process of signification is continually deferred and supplemented in the play
of more-than-one.
Here the logic of the ‘supplement’ forms a challenge to the logic of identity.
While the latter takes meaning to be identical with a fixed entity to which a word
refers, a supplement adds to and substitutes meanings. That is, the meaning of a
word is supplemented by the traces of other words. Nevertheless, even this use of
‘the supplement’ is problematic for it assumes that the supplement adds to an
already existent self-present original meaning. Instead, the supplement is always
already part of the thing supplemented. Meaning is always displaced and deferred.
The continual supplementarity of meaning, that is the continual substitution and
adding of meanings through the play of signifiers, challenges the identity of noises
and marks with fixed meaning.