Stuart Hall: Old and New Identities

I return to the question of identity because the question of identity has returned to us; at any rate, it has returned to us in British politics and British cultural politics today. Ithas not returned in the same old place; it is not the traditional conception of identity. It is not going back to the old identity politics of the 1960s social movements. But it is, nevertheless, a kind of return to some of the ground which we used to think in that way. I will make a comment at the very end about what is the nature of this theoretical-political work which seems to lose things on the one side and then recover them in a dif- ferent way from another side, and then have to think them out all over again just as soon as they get rid of them. What is this never- ending theoretical work which is constantly losing and regaining concepts? I talk about identity here as a point at which, on the one hand, a whole set of new theoretical discourses intersect and where, on the other, a whole new set of cultural practices emerge. I want to begin by trying, very briefly, to map some of those points of inter- section theoretically, and then to look at some of their political conse- quences.
(from: "Culture, Globalization and the World-System: Contemporary Conditions for the Representation of Identity" edited by Anthony D. King, 1997, University of Minnesota Press)