On Stuart Hall’s Therory Of Post-colonial Cultural Identity

With arising of the post-colonial academic trend, cultural identity problem also became the focus of attention of well-known cultural theorist and scholars. As the father of the cultural studies, Stuart Hall’s view of post-colonial cultural identity, of course, become one of academic issues.When Hall lived in the former colonies of Jamaica, it occured that the racial discrimination and class struggle within the home environment in his childhood. After moved to Britain,early experiences made him take extra attention on politics and culture. Britain’s double diaspora experience always affects the emergence and development of the cultural theory of Hall,in 1980 s and 1990 s,Hall started his transformation of post-colonial theory of identity.“Seek Differences in the same and the same in the difference” is the characteristic of Hall’s diaspora theory and the three types about identity of the Caribbean that he put forward has general guide meaning to cultural identity theory.The formation of Hall’s difference theory has a closely relationship with his previous research of media and codes and the shaping of its ideology. Saussure’s linguistics, Althusser’s “ideological state apparatus” and Foucault’s “discourse/power”established Hall’s anti-essentialism and relativism position. Hall considered that cultural identity is built by the “other”, different “the other” constructed different groups, and the individuality inside groups will also present difference identity because of the existence of differences. Authority populism is the height summarizing of Hall’s “Thatcherism” theory, it is Hall’s one of the most successful and brilliant subjects to criticize the British social reality by using the difference theory.Along with globalization and break of binary opposition, it seems that global cultural tend sameness gradually. But different regional culture formed resistant strategy, it is necessary to rewrite their own cultural identity. Hall thought that we should discriminate multicultural, multiculturalism and the problem of multiculturalism. Hall put forward “the play of differences” to deal with these problems,and pointed out that we need to seek universal value in differences without destroy its own particularity.The intervening criticism of local, global and modern in Hall’s theory of the cultural identity have set an example and guide for the later theorists. At the same time, his post-colonial theory on cultural identity made a great guiding significancefor Chinese academic circle and the real world.