Rejecting essentialism need not collapse into postmodern nomadism that erases difference.

Evidence

And specifically with race, what I’m trying to do is not then slide from polemicizing against an essentialist conception of race to the point where difference doesn’t make any difference. What I call a kind of postmodern nomadism where we are all a different identity every time you wake up. I want to hold on to specificity but where specificity is not reducible to an essence. It’s more diverse than that; it’s a set of positionalities rather than one position. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 1017

Categorization

• DEFINE: Hall defines the middle path: specificity without essence, as a set of positionalities rather than a single fixed identity.
• XREF: Directly relevant to Islamophobia scholarship’s need to name Muslims’ specific positioning without essentializing an ‘Islamic essence’ or a reified ‘Muslim identity’. — connects to: Circular nomadism is forced movement with no aggression and no root — Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 117; Nomadism’s anticonformism does not automatically make it subversive — Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 115