Political reclamation rearticulates a stigmatized term rather than replacing it

Evidence

I heard “black” for the first time in the wake of the civil rights movement, in the wake of the decolonization and nationalistic struggles. “Black” was created as a political category in a certain historical moment. It was created as a consequence of certain symbolic and ideological struggles. We said, “You have spent five, six, seven hundred years elaborating the symbolism through which black is a negative factor. Now I don’t want another term. I want that term, that negative one, that’s the one I want. I want a piece of that action. I want to take it out of the way in which it has been articulated in religious discourse, in ethnographic discourse, in literary discourse, in visual discourse. I want to pluck it out of its articulation and rearticulate it in a new way.” — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 233

Categorization

• DEFINE: Hall’s core move: rearticulation — plucking a signifier out of negative discourse chains and re-suturing it. This is the mechanism of political reclamation.
• XREF: Exactly the mechanism the reader’s downstream Islamophobia readings need: how communities take back loaded terms (e.g., ‘Islamist’, ‘fundamentalist’ reclamation debates) via rearticulation. — connects to: The residual term in a binary opposition can become the powerful, privileged term — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 468; The meaning of ‘civilisation’ was politically retooled after the war toward social welfare. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 143; The binding sacred-land slogan gets revised and redeployed as contexts and wars change — Nadim N. Rouhana and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, When Politics Are Sacralized:…, 1510 (+5 more)
• SEED: Article angle: rearticulation as a general theory of political language — how terms get ‘plucked out’ and re-stitched in any identity struggle.
• DEEPTHINKING: Top-tier theory content: the mechanism of rearticulation is the load-bearing concept carried forward — resistance happens inside signification, not by inventing new words.