Everyone, even the most modern, speaks from a located ethnicity under erasure

Evidence

We should remember that “ethnicity,” and its naturalized relationship to “community,” is another term operating “under erasure.” We all locate ourselves in cultural vocabularies, and without them we are incapable of enunciation as cultural subjects. We all come from and speak from “somewhere”: we are located—and in that sense even the most “modern” bear the traces of an “ethnicity.” As Laclau paraphrases Derrida, we can only think “within a tradition.” However, he reminds us, this is only possible “if one conceives one’s relation to that past as a critical reception” (Laclau 1996). — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 369

Categorization

Category: Definitional Content

• DEFINE: Introduces ‘under erasure’ / sovereignty, and the idea that tradition is engaged as critical reception — key deconstructive vocabulary.
• XREF: The ‘under erasure’ concept underpins how ‘Muslim identity’ gets analyzed in later Islamophobia readings as constructed yet unavoidable.

Related

• Terms like multiculturalism and race can only be used under erasure yet remain indispensable. (similarity 0.83)
• Ethnicity is a discursive capacity to enunciate identities, and everyone has one. (similarity 0.79)