Being named and hailed by others constitutes one’s identity

Evidence

Indeed, the truth is I call myself all kinds of other things. When I went to England, I would not have called myself an immigrant either, which is what we were all known as. It was not until I went back home in the early 1960s that my mother, who, as a good middle-class colored Jamaican woman, hated all black people (you know, that is the truth), said to me: “I hope they don’t think you’re an immigrant over there.” … I said, “Well, I just migrated. I’ve just emigrated.” At that very moment, I thought, that is exactly what I am. I have just left home—for good. … I went back to England, and I became what I had been named. I had been hailed as an immigrant. I had discovered who I was. I started to tell myself the story of my migration. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 237

Categorization

• DEFINE: Live demonstration of Althusserian interpellation — ‘hailed as an immigrant’ is the mechanism of identity formation being named.
• XREF: Directly the interpellation concept from Althusser; fertile bridge into how Muslim subjects get ‘hailed’ into being by racialized naming in the Islamophobia literature. — connects to: Recognition as a citizen and producer precedes and grounds a man’s worth. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1255; Individual identity is strengthened by representation in others’ attention — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 493; Naming any being by name is an act of respect that builds relationship — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural…, 81 (+2 more)
• DEEPTHINKING: The whole arc — not-immigrant until named immigrant, then ‘I became what I had been named’ — is the quotidian machinery of identity constitution, told as lived experience rather than theory.