Hall- Questions of Cultural Identity

As Stuart Hall explains the concept of identity, he begins by tackling "identitification". When one recognizes with a common set of characteristics of one certain person or group, one identitifies with that person or group. Identification is a process, a construction. It can be won or lost or obtained or discarded. Hall defines it as: "Identification is, then, a process of articulation, a suturing, an over-determination, not a subsumption".
Freud calls the concept of identification "the earliest expression of an emotional tie with another person". Identification involves ambivalence; of associating with one and opposing the other. It may not be a harmonious process; identification can have conflicting ideals and processes within it.

The concept of identity is also not stable. It changes over its lifetime, and does not come from the same roots. Historic processes like globalization and free/forced migration tend to affect the identity of cultures, which in turn affects individual identity. These historic developments have an effect on our becoming an identity, not being an identity. When we question identity, we should question not who we are but where we come from. Identities are constructed within, not outside of discourse- historic, cultural, social...any kind of discourse. They emerge from power struggles (which are a part of discourse), and they come out of difference/exclusion as much as unity.

Hall points out that identity is constructed through, not outside, difference. Identity can only be constructed in opposition to that which is different, in relation to the Other. One constructs an identity by finding what one lacks in comparision to the Other. Hall sees identity in two ways: a meeting point to interpellate us into social subjects of particular discourses, and the processes which construct us as subjects which can be spoken.

For the remainder of the article, Stuart Hall discusses Foucault and Lacan, which did not seem to directly relate to postcolonialism.

One thing that I would like to mention, however, is that based on Hall's teachings about identification and identity, I conclude that the colonizers identified with each other, and within the discourse of colonialism, they identitfied themselves as different from the natives. This difference with one group and association with another group allowed them to construct an identity that spread. And this way, their identity reinforced their differences from the natives, and imposed colonial rules on them.