Colonial identity construction disavows subaltern histories that cultural translation work must restore

Evidence

In the Caribbean cultural formation, white, European, Western, colonizing traces were always positioned as the ascendant element, the voiced aspect: the black, “African,” enslaved, and colonized traces, of which there were many, were always unvoiced, subterranean, and subversive, governed by a different logic, always positioned through subordination or marginalization. Identities formed within the matrix of colonial meanings were constructed so as to foreclose and disavow engagement with the real histories of our society or its cultural “routes.” The huge efforts made, over many years, not only by academic scholars but by cultural practitioners themselves, to piece together these fragmentary, often illegal, “routes to the present” and to reconstruct their unspoken genealogies, are the necessary historical groundwork required to make sense of the interpretive matrix and self-images of our culture and to make the invisible visible. That is, the “work” of translation that the African signifier performs, and the work of “perfidious fidelity” that Caribbean artists in this post-nationalist moment are required to undertake. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 857

Categorization

• DEFINE: Lays out the colonial matrix mechanism: ‘ascendant/voiced’ vs ‘unvoiced/subterranean’ positioning of cultural traces.
• XREF: The ‘routes to the present’ and genealogy-reconstruction project anticipates the biopolitics/genealogy scaffolding the Islamophobia field uses. — connects to: Settler-colonial solidarity persists only through materially maintained structures, not primordial identity — Nadim N. Rouhana and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, When Politics Are Sacralized:…, 2139; Pastoral synecdoche can erase colonial and industrial space from national identity — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 1347; the MOC “The Word Is a Fence: Language as Battleground, Property, and Partition”