Multiple sometimes conflicting identities can coexist in one subject’s politics

Evidence

Third-generation young black men and women know they come from the Caribbean, know they are black, know they are British. They want to speak from all three identities. They are not prepared to give up any one of them. They will contest the Thatcherite notion of Englishness, because they say this Englishness is black. They will contest the notion of blackness because they want to make a differentiation between people who are black from one kind of society and people who are black from another. Because they need to know that difference, that difference that makes a difference in how they write their poetry, how they make their films, how they paint. It makes a difference. It is inscribed in their creative work. They need it as a resource. They are all those identities together. They are making astonishing cultural work, the most important work in the visual arts. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 262

Categorization

• XREF: Concrete exemplar of the ‘no essential black subject’ argument; grounds the theory of non-essential identity in lived cultural production in 1980s/90s Britain. — connects to: Personal and political framing both shrink problems but operate in opposite directions. — Nina Eliasoph, Avoiding politics: how Americans…, 1266; Multiple modes of relating define the world simultaneously, not as guises but identities; Conspiratorial predispositions partition evenly across both parties — Joseph E. Uscinski and Joseph M. Parent, American Conspiracy Theories, 589 (+4 more)
• ADDENDUM: The rejection of a singular, given identity (here blackness, Englishness) parallels the Muslim-as-Other construction that downstream Islamophobia readings take up — same mechanism, different axis.