A strategic essentialist identity can silence the very groups it unites

Evidence

The truth is that in relation to certain things, the question of black, in Britain, also has its silences. It had a certain way of silencing the very specific experiences of Asian people. Because though Asian people could identify, politically, in the struggle against racism, when they came to using their own culture as the resources of resistance, when they wanted to write out of their own experience and reflect on their own position, when they wanted to create, they naturally created within the histories of the languages, the cultural tradition, the positions of people who came from a variety of different historical backgrounds. And just as black was the cutting edge of a politics vis-a-vis one kind of enemy, it could also, if not understood properly, provide a kind of silencing in relation to another. These are the costs, as well as the strengths, of trying to think of the notion of black as an essentialism. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 248

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Articulates the epistemology of strategic essentialism in one move: the unifying sign ‘black’ simultaneously does political work and imposes a cost by erasing the internal plurality (here, Asian experience and language-based cultural traditions) it aggregates.
• XREF: Directly anticipated by Spivak’s ‘strategic essentialism’ and Chantal Mouffe on constitutive outside — and prefigures how a monolithic ‘Muslim’ or ‘Southeast Asian’ category in later Islamophobia work will silence internal difference. — connects to: Strategic essentialism meant reusing hegemonic universals, not repudiating them. — Elizabeth Grosz, Criticism, Feminism and the…, 120; Strategic essentialism collapses when applied to consciousness-in-general rather than class. — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of…, 1763; Corporate epistemic authority silences the people it constructs by branding them ignorant — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 221 (+2 more)
• DEFINE: This is Hall’s operational definition of how an essentialism functions: it cuts as a political weapon while exacting a silencing cost.