Resignifying racial terms can generate political rupture and social change.

Evidence

As Mercer observes, it is the “possibility of breaking with oppressive regimes of racial meaning … at stake in the polysemic agency of difference, which makes discourse the medium in which historically subordinated subjects can … activate resistance.” Putting the point less abstractly, he explains that in his work on “new ethnicities” and identities Stuart turns his attention to the resignification of the term “black” within antiracist politics by Afro-Caribbeans and Asians in the UK in the 1970s and shows how this discursively transformational act provided the ground of resistance and was “the generative source from which political rupture and social change [was] born.” — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 66

Categorization

• DEFINE: Polysemic agency of difference: discourse offers subordinated subjects a medium to re-signify oppressive terms and activate resistance.
• XREF: The resignification of ‘black’ in 1970s UK antiracist politics parallels how Islamophobia scholarship tracks resignification of Muslim identity — a directly applicable mechanism.
• SEED: Possible essay angle: how ‘resignification’ functions as a resistance strategy across racial and religious identity movements, comparing the UK ‘black’ politics case with contemporary Muslim self-identification.