The Fateful Triangle: Race, Ethnicity, and Nation, new this month, is the first publication of the W. E. B. Du Bois Lectures delivered by Stuart Hall in 1994. Hall, a Jamaican-born theorist and a founding father of the field of cultural studies, said that his aim in the lectures was to update Du Bois’s formulation of the problem of the color line by viewing the question of ethnicity’s unresolved relationship to race, on the one hand, and to nation, on the other in a way that radically unsettles all three terms. “Posing the question in this way,” said Hall, “presents us with what I see as the problem of the twenty-first century—the problem of living with difference—in a manner that is not only analogous to the problem of the ‘color line’ that W. E. B Du Bois pointed to more than a hundred years ago but also a historically specific transformation of it.” As Henry Louis Gates, Jr. remarks in his Foreword to The Fateful Triangle, Hall “wanted to show both the fallacy of relying on the old categories, laced as they were with power, and the risk of courting fundamentalism in defending them, a warning that seems remarkably prophetic today.” A passage from Gates’s Foreword is below.
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What we might think of as “Hall’s Dilemma”—the challenge of keeping people from investing meaning into “race” as a category of biological difference, based on superficial differences visible to the eye—is as old as some of the earliest European encounters with “the other” in Africa and the New World in the modern period (beginning five hundred years ago), when differences of culture and phenotype soon fused with economic desire and exploitation to produce “the African” as a new and mostly negative signifier. And for centuries, this toxic compound has played into our very human instinct for defining ourselves through some of our most obvious, often “measurable” differences, such as skin color, cranial size, width of nose, and other body parts, all haphazardly gathered under the category of “race,” which itself at various times could either be an amalgam of ethnicity, religion, and nationality, or be separate from each of these.
Through what Hall described as a loose but lethal “chain of equivalences” (a concept he borrowed from the Argentinean political philosopher Ernesto Laclau) drawn between what the eyes could see and what the mind could perceive, hierarchical scaffolding of one kind or another has been erected, with those in power seizing the authority to produce knowledge about what those differences, arbitrarily elevated over others in importance, signified, and then to act on those differences, or that chain of differences, with devastating real-world consequences.
What also intrigued Hall was how oppressed groups themselves, in acts of seeming self-liberation, inverted these categories without discarding them, instead championing racial or ethnic pride as if they believed that after surviving the lethal effects of essentialization, the most efficacious way to defeat, say, anti-black or anti-brown racism or colonialism was to flip the script, embrace physical differences, and essentialize themselves. And so the boundaries of nations-within-nations were drawn, with those at the center and those on the periphery locked in a struggle over power rather than a struggle over the discursive terms expressive or reflective of that power. In other words, in a messy world of mixing and migrations, he observes, the boundaries of race, ethnicity, and nationality somehow maintained their distinctiveness—a development that not only offended Hall’s cosmopolitan sensibilities but troubled him as he searched for a better, more just, more reliable signifier of cultural difference.
Giving Hall’s quest its urgency was the fact that the world in the mid-1990s was rapidly shrinking, with one century giving way to another at a time of increasing technological change, economic interdependence, and mass migration, accompanied by a rise in fundamentalism along racial, ethnic, national, and religious lines. Hall saw pockets of hope in the creative yearnings of marginalized groups laying claim to new “identifications” and “positionalities,” and fashioning out of shared historical experience “signifiers of a new kind of ethnicized modernity, close to the cutting edge of a new iconography and a new semiotics that [was] redefining ‘the modern’ itself”—a theme Hall had explored in his seminal essay “New Ethnicities,” first delivered as a conference paper at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London in 1988.
At the same time, however, he saw that there was cause for grave concern that the world could pull apart along the old, worn-out seams just as it had begun to come together, with rigid categories of racial, ethnic, and national differences only hardening in the face of the prospect—or threat—of meaningful change. Hall “advocated for a different, postcolonial understanding of multiculturalism,” the historian James Vernon writes. “It was one that both acknowledged and celebrated the hybrid and mongrelized nature of cultures that slavery and colonialism had both produced and displaced. Colonial history ensured that it was no longer possible to conceive of specific communities or traditions whose boundaries and identities were settled and fixed.”
Realist though Stuart Hall was when it came to the potency and indisputable resiliency of racial, ethnic, and national schemes, he did not come to Harvard in April 1994 to replay broken records. Instead, he came, as he said in his first lecture, “to complicate and unsettle” society’s persistently held notions of race, ethnicity, and nation—what he referred to in the title of the lecture series as a “fateful triangle”—and to open up new possibilities for defining our twenty-first-century selves. Not only did he teach that those old categories of difference failed to capture the blurriness of human existence, the myriad intersections of identities, pasts, and backgrounds; he also made plain that, in pretending to represent anything close to pure boundaries between groups, those old categories carried with them histories of oppression, perpetuating dangerous group-think while reinforcing hierarchical notions of cultural difference. The slate needed to be wiped clean, and Stuart was holding the eraser.
