Strategic essentialism was historically necessary but may no longer suffice

Evidence

I have the feeling that, historically, nothing could have been done to intervene in the dominated field of mainstream popular culture, to try to win some space there, without the strategies through which those dimensions were condensed into the signifier “black.” Where would we be, as bell hooks once remarked, without a touch of essentialism? Or, what Gayatri Spivak calls strategic essentialism, as a necessary moment? The question is whether we are any longer in that moment, whether that is still a sufficient basis for the strategies of new interventions. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 288

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines strategic essentialism (Spivak, bell hooks) as a historically necessary condensation of diverse dimensions into the signifier ‘black’.
• XREF: Connects directly to Spivak’s strategic essentialism and to the construction-of-the-Other vocabulary the reader is building for Islamophobia readings. — connects to: Strategic essentialism meant reusing hegemonic universals, not repudiating them. — Elizabeth Grosz, Criticism, Feminism and the…, 120; Strategic essentialism collapses when applied to consciousness-in-general rather than class. — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of…, 1763
• QUESTION: Hall explicitly asks whether strategic essentialism is still sufficient in the 1990s; this open question is worth tracking across his later work.