In this essay, Hall considers the nature of the "black subject" (392) who is represented by "film and other forms of visual representation of the Afro-Caribbean (and Asian) ‘blacks’ of the diasporas of the West" (392). "Who is this emergent, new subject of the cinema? From where does he/she speak?" (392). Referring to the seminal work of Émile Benveniste (signalled by the gesture towards "enunciation" [392]), he contends that what

recent theories of enunciation suggest is that, though we speak, so to say ‘in our own name’, of ourselves and from our own experience, nevertheless who speaks, and the subject who is spoken of, are never identical, never exactly in the same place. (392)

Hall’s thesis is that rather than thinking of identity as an "already accomplished fact, which the new cultural practices then represent" (392), we should think instead of "identity as a ‘production’ which is never complete, always in process, and always constituted within, not outside, representation" (392).

Hall points out that there are two principal ways of thinking about (cultural) identity. The traditional model views identity

in terms of one, shared culture, a sort of collective ‘one true self’, hiding inside the many other, more superficial or artificially imposed ‘selves’, which people with a shared history and ancestry hold in common. . . . This ‘oneness’, underlying all the other, more superficial differences, is the truth, the essence of ‘Caribbeanness’, of the black experience. It is this identity which a Caribbean or black diaspora must discover, excavate, bring to light and express. . . . (393)

Hall acknowledges that the "rediscovery of this identity is often the object of what Frantz Fanon once called a ‘passionate research’" (393) and that such a "conception of cultural identity played a crucial role in all post-colonial struggles" (393). However, he questions whether such a view merely entails "unearthing that which the colonial experience buried and overlaid" (393).

For Hall, however, it is better to envision a "quite different practice" (393), one based on "not the rediscovery but the production of identity. Not an identity grounded in the archaeology, but in the re-telling of the past" (393). Such a viewpoint would entail acknowledging that this is an "act of imaginative rediscovery" (393), one which involves "imposing an imaginary coherence on the experience of dispersal and fragmentation, which is the history of all enforced diasporas" (394) and leads to the restoration of an "imaginary fullness or plentitude, to set against the broken rubric of our past" (394). Africa, he stresses, is the "name of the missing term, the great aporia, which lies at the centre of our cultural identity and gives it a meaning which, until recently, it lacked" (394).

The second model of (cultural) identity (which Hall favours) acknowledges the "critical points of deep and significant difference which constitute ‘what we really are’; or rather--since history has intervened--’what we have become’" (394). From this point of view, cultural identity is a

matter of ‘becoming’ as well as of ‘being’. It belongs to the future as much as to the past. It is not something which already exists, transcending place, time, history and culture. 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. Far from being grounded in mere ‘recovery’ of the past, which is waiting to be found, and which when found, will secure our sense of ourselves into eternity, identities are the names we give to the different ways we are positioned by, and position ourselves within, the narratives of the past. (394)

Drawing upon the work of Michel Foucault and Edward Said, Hall argues that cognizance must be taken of the "ways in which black people, black experiences, were positioned and subject-ed in the dominant regimes of representation" (394), these latter being the "effects of a critical exercise of cultural power and normalisation. Not only, in Said’s ‘Orientalist’ sense, were we constructed as different and other within the categories of knowledge of the West by those regimes. They had the power to make us see and experience ourselves as ‘Other’" (394). Hall stresses that it is one thing to "position a subject or set of peoples as the Other of a dominant discourse. It is quite another thing to subject them to that ‘knowledge’, not only as a matter of imposed will and domination, by the power of inner compulsion and subjective con-formation to the norm" (394).

Hence, Hall contends that, from this perspective, it simply must be acknowledged that cultural identity

is not a fixed essence at all, lying unchanged outside history and culture. It is not some universal and transcendental spirit inside us on which history has made no fundamental mark. It is not once-and-for-all. It is not a fixed origin to which we can make some final and absolute Return. (395)

Cultural identities are the "unstable points of identification . . . which are made, within the discourses of history and culture" (394).

The foregoing raises an indispensable question: if "identity does not proceed, in a straight unbroken line, from some fixed origin, how are we to understand its formation?" (395). In response, Hall offers his model of Caribbean identity. He suggests that we should think of "black Caribbean identities as "‘framed by two axes or vectors, simultaneously operative: the vector of similarity or continuity [the first model of identity]; and the vector of difference and rupture" (395). Employing a Bakhtinian metaphor, he contends that these two axes exist in a "dialogic relationship" (395): paradoxically, "what we share is precisely the experience of a profound discontinuity" (395). To be precise, the

uprooting of slavery and transportation and the insertion into the plantation economy (as well as the symbolic economy) of the Western world . . . ‘unified’ these peoples across their differences, in the same moment as it cut them off from direct access to their past. (396)

Firstly, Africa and India are not monolithically united entities. Moreover, each island is profoundly different from the others. What is more, we do not stand in quite the same relationship of ‘otherness’ to the metropolitan centres. "Difference, therefore, persists--in and alongside continuity" (396), Hall stresses.

The task for Hall is, therefore, how to "describe this play of ‘difference’ within identity" (396). While he acknowledges that a common history has unified us across our differences, this common history "does not constitute a common origin, since it was, metaphorically as well as literally, a translation" (396). Drawing upon the work of Jacques Derrida, Hall contends that such "cultural ‘play’ could not be represented . . . as a simple binary opposition--‘past/present’, ‘them/us’. Its complexity exceed this binary structure of representation. At different places, times, in relation to different questions, the boundaries are re-sited" (396). Hall finds Derrida’s notion of ‘différance’ particularly useful to describe that "special and peculiar supplement which the black and mulatto skin adds to the ‘refinement’ and sophistication" (397) of European culture. Différance "challenges the fixed binaries which stabilise meaning and representation and show how meaning is never fixed or completed, but keeps on moving on to encompass other, additional or supplementary meanings" (397). The question is: where "does identity come in to this infinite postponement of meaning?" (397). Hall contends, gesturing towards the Derridean view that people arrest signifying play in a Procrustean fashion, that meaning "depends upon the contingent and arbitrary stop" (397). Such a view does not contradict the view that meaning is potentially infinite: it "only threatens to do so if we mistake this ‘cut’ of identity--this positioning, which makes meaning possible--as a natural and permanent, rather than an arbitrary and contingent ending. . . . Meaning continues to unfold . . . beyond the arbitrary closure which makes it, at any moment, possible. . . There is always something left over" (396).

Drawing upon Derrida’s notion of différance, Hall posits that it is possible to "rethink the positioning and repositioning of Caribbean cultural identities in relation to at least three ‘presences’, to borrow Aimé Césaire’s and Léopold Senghor’s metaphor: Présence Africaine, Présence Européene, and Présence Américaine" (398), none of which can ever be fully present (presence is displaced / deferred). Drawing upon both the spatial and temporal metaphors which Derrida employs, Hall is implicitly and simultaneously comparing Caribbean society to a sign within a wider sign-system, a signifier located along the chain of signification and, by extension, a text which is linked ‘intertextually’ to other region-texts. Drawing upon the notions of both displacement and deferral, Hall insinuates that the Caribbean is neither an isolatable and autonomous place which exists in a social and historical vacuum nor is the past separable from the present. Rather, the Caribbean as we know it today is a dynamic entity produced by its relation to those other socio-historical entities whose inhabitants migrated to and came to form the region. The last of these ‘presénces’ is Hall’s term for the New World, the "juncture-point where the many cultural tributaries meet" (400), the "primal scene" (401) where the fateful/fatal encounter was staged between Africa and the West" (401). Interestingly, in an omission as grave as those exclusions for which he would not fail to censure European racists, Hall fails to make any mention of that very ‘Présence Indienne’ to which he himself had alluded and whose influence is very marked in countries such as Trinidad and Guyana.

By far the most important region-sign-signifier-text in this regard is evidently, in the light of what Hall writes earlier, the African ‘presence.’ (Europe’s legacy is an undeniable, ineluctable but troubling one for most Caribbean persons to confront. "For many of us, this is a matter not of too little but of too much" [399], he writes. The question is, can we ever "recognise its irreversible influence, whilst resisting its imperialising eye?" [400], he asks.) Africa is the "site of the repressed" (398), the "signified which could not be represented directly in slavery" (398) but which "remained and remains the unspoken unspeakable ‘presence’ in Caribbean culture" (398). Gesturing to the work of thinkers like Brathwaite (e.g. "Timehri"), Hall is at pains to stress that it is not a question of ever recovering a lost Africa per se:

whether it is . . . an origin of our identities, unchanged by four hundred years of displacement, dismemberment, transportation, to which we could in any final or literal sense return, is . . . open to doubt. The original ‘Africa’ is no longer there. It too has been transformed. History is, in that sense, irreversible. We must not collude with the West which, precisely, normalises and appropriates Africa by freezing it into some timeless zone of the primitive and unchanging past. Africa must at last be reckoned with by Caribbean people, but it cannot in any simple sense be merely recovered. (399)

Rather, Hall is gesturing to the new texts of all kinds, literary, filmic, etc., even the new social texts of Africa which Caribbean persons have managed to fashion in their quest for nationhood. Writing with reference to Jamaica, Hall argues that an "Afro-Caribbean identity became historically available" (398) to Caribbean persons only in the 1970's through an "indigenous cultural revolution" (398), through the "impact on popular life of the post-colonial revolution, the civil rights struggles, the culture of Rastafarianism and the music of reggae" (398). These and related factors made possible or became the "metaphors, the figures or signifiers of a new construction of ‘Jamaican-ness" (398). These and similar cultural endeavours "signified a ‘new’ Africa of the New World, grounded in an ‘old’ Africa: . . . this Africa, as we might say, . . . as a spiritual, cultural and political metaphor" (398): this is the "Africa we must return to--but by ‘another route’: what Africa has become in the New World, what we have made of ‘Africa’: ‘Africa’--as we retell it through politics, memory and desire" (399). From this point of view, Africa "‘has acquired an imaginative or figurative value that we can name and feel’. Our belongingness to it constitutes what Benedict Anderson calls an ‘imaginary community’" (399). This ‘Africa’ is a necessary part of the "Caribbean imaginary" (399): the displacement which has marked the region has given rise to a "certain imaginary plentitude, recreating the endless desire to return to ‘lost origins’, to be one again with the mother, to go back to the beginning" (402).

Hall’s notion of diasporic identity is one based upon différance and hybridity. It rejects old "imperialising" (401) and "hegemonising" (401) forms of "‘ethnicity’" (401). Gesturing to the ongoing problem of the Palestinian homeland, he argues that his model does not conceptualise the securing of identity solely "in relation to some sacred homeland to which they must at all costs return, even if it means pushing other peoples into the sea" (401). It is "defined, not by essence or purity, but by the recognition of a necessary heterogeneity and diversity . . . hybridity" (402). Hall claims to offer a "different way of thinking about cultural identity" (402) by theorising identity "as constituted, not outside but within representation" (402) and hence of cinema or literature "not as a second-order mirror held up to reflect what already exists, but as that form of representation which is able to constitute us as new kinds of subjects, and thereby enable us to discover places from which to speak" (402). Hall ends by citing the relevance to his model of identity of Benedict Anderson’s redefinition of the community as "distinguished, not by their falsity/genuiness, but by the style in which they are imagined" (402).