Stuart Hall: Race as a floating signifier PDF

Preview

Summary

Notes on Stuart Hall's explanation on the fluidity of race. ...

Description

Notes Stuart Hall “Race as a floating signifier”



Racism is a cultivation of our imagination, i.e it is entirely constructed by us.



Racism, as a philosophy contends, is that there is a natural connection between the way people look, the differences of colour, hair and bone and what they think and do how intelligent they are. Racists believe that these characteristics are not a result of our environment but of our biological genes. That black people, for instance, are not born intelligent as whites. Hall’s basic argument is that all attempts to show this scientifically have failed, yet there is a wide and persistent belief in the inferior mental capacity of the black population.





Hall argues that we have to pay attention, not to the objective facts of the situation alone but to the stories that the culture spins for us about what the physical differences we are born with mean. This involves examining the discourses surrounding race. Taking what he calls a “discursive position, that is, analysing metaphors, anecdotes, stories, the jokes that are told by culture about what physical racial differences mean.



Historically, things like skin colour had been given many different meanings over the years. There is nothing solid or permanent to the meaning of race, it changes all the time, it shifts and slides (the Irish example).



-What racial difference signifies is never static or the same



-Classification gave things “meaning” but it is important to note when those systems of classification become the objects of the disposition of power (i.e when one group has more power over the other due to certain physical traits like skin colour etc). This is the use of classification as a system of power, this can also apply to gender identities, which like race, is also a social construct.



-Classification is a very generative thing, once something is classified a whole range of other qualities can fall into place to fit the stereotype -Classification is a way of maintaining the order of any system and what is most disturbing is if anything breaks that classification. For example, if a black man has the traditional characteristics of a white man then he is seen as an anomaly in both the black and white societies.This, in turn, generates tension in society. (See also “Matter out of place” race functioning as a “common sense code” in society)





-Hall is interested in seeing how these definitions of race come to operate and function. More specifically, how they function in the system of classification used to divide populations into different racial and ethnic groups and to ascribe different



characteristics to these different groupings and to assume what their normal behaviour or conduct would or should be like based on preconceived notions. -This preconceived notion also creates ideas which determine if someone's published work/ or any work, in general, can be determined good/efficient or not based on their race and that a certain race is predicted to produce a certain kind of work (i.e The preconceived notion that black people tend to be more expressive and produce art that reflects that.)



We have to look at race in a political lens instead of a biological one



-Race is more like a language than it is like a way in which we are biologically constituted. Signifiers refer to the system and concepts of a classification of a culture to its making meaning practices. And those things gain their meaning not because of what they contain in their essence but in the shifting relations of difference which they establish with other concepts and ideas in a signifying field. Their meaning because it is relational and not essential can never be finally fixed, but is subject to the constant process of redefinition and appropriation."...