Hall’s nonbinary position opposes both essentialist identity politics and pluralist smorgasbord multiculturalism.

Evidence

People sometimes misunderstand what I’m saying. They don’t think they disagree with me as much as they do. And this is because I don’t polarize; I’m trying not to think in a binary way. So of course I always recognize the moment of specificity, the moment of naming the African unsaid. It’s absolutely critical. When I say that people say, “Oh, I know where he’s coming from.” I’m not really coming from quite that place. But I’m not from the point of view that we’re all a smorgasbord, you know, the mix, the fruit cocktail, you’re a bit of this and a bit of that. I am very much opposed to that notion of pluralism. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 1018

Categorization

• XREF: The double refusal — essentialism AND pluralism — maps onto Islamophobia scholarship’s insistence that Muslims are neither a fixed essence nor simply ‘one culture among many’.
• SEED: Angle: how scholars of ‘critical Muslim studies’ navigate the same double refusal Hall stakes out here — anti-essentialist yet anti-pluralist.