The Fateful Triangle: Race, Ethnicity, Nation

The W. E. B. Du Bois Lectures

by Stuart Hall, Kobena Mercer (Editor), Henry Louis Gates Jr. (Foreword)

In The Fateful Triangle—drawn from lectures delivered at Harvard University in 1994—one of the founding figures of cultural studies reflects on the divisive, often deadly consequences of our contemporary politics of identification. As he untangles the power relations that permeate categories of race, ethnicity, and nationhood, Stuart Hall shows how old hierarchies of human identity in Western culture were forcefully broken apart when oppressed groups introduced new meanings to the representation of difference.

From the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, the concept of race stressed distinctions of color as fixed and unchangeable. But for Hall, twentieth-century redefinitions of blackness reveal how identities and attitudes can be transformed through the medium of language itself. Like the “badge of color” W. E. B. Du Bois evoked in the anticolonial era, “black” became a sign of solidarity for Caribbean and South Asian migrants who fought discrimination in 1980s Britain. Hall sees such manifestations of “new ethnicities” as grounds for optimism in the face of worldwide fundamentalisms that respond with fear to social change.

Migration was at the heart of Hall’s diagnosis of the global predicaments taking shape around him. Explaining more than two decades ago why migrants are the target of new nationalisms, Hall’s prescient vision helps us to understand today’s crisis of liberal democracy. As he challenges us to find sustainable ways of living with difference, Hall gives us the concept of diaspora as a metaphor with which to enact fresh possibilities for redefining nation, race, and identity in the twenty-first century.

Genres: Nonfiction, Race, Politics, Sociology, Cultural Studies, Theory, Cultural

229 pages, Hardcover

Published September 11, 2017

About the author

Stuart Hall was an influential Jamaican-born British sociologist and cultural theorist. He was Professor of Sociology at the Open University, the founding editor of New Left Review, and Director of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham.

Reviews

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hall never ceases to amaze me. In these lectures from 1994 Hall carries forward his analysis of analyzing the dialectics of race, ethnicity, and nation that he initiated in earlier essays like "New Ethnicities" and "Minimal Selves" among many other pieces. As often with Hall's writing, it takes on a new resonance with the present moment as he speaks about ethnic nationalism and cultural fundamentalism. There is far too much to account for here, but his lectures remind one of the importance of Paul Gilroy's transationalism framing of diasporic cultures in a transnational light. If anything, Hall's insistence of the importance of writing diasporic cultures as always mobilizing the past to guide themselves into the futures is particularly relevant as global climate change, inter-ethnic strife, and the whims of transnational capitalism continue to displace more and more people, leading to a world where diasporic cultures dominate much of the scene and hold the potential to see things in less naturalized and essentialist ways, but can teach through design the ways in which they reassemble complex networks and channels between the past, present, and future.

This book should be read in conjunction with Hall's *Cultural Studies 1983* lectures as well as some of the lectures recently translated of Foucault's from the 1970s-- most notably *The Punitive Society* and *The Birth of Biopolitics*, since they all have a similarly materialist form of analysis that Hall similarly employs.

[Aymara · Rating 5 out of 5]

volviendo a goodreads por todo lo alto (me había olvidado la contraseña). Hall, en este libro, ha cambiado el concepto casi inamovible del siglo XX sobre la diáspora para entender los cambios en los movimientos migratorios de la nueva era de la globalización. Los significantes de raza, etnia y nación se diluyen, se dispersan y se modifican, pero no dejan de sostenerse en la diferencia. Los discursos hegemónicos hoy en día se erigen en la diferenciación y subalternidad de una “raza” sobre otra. De la misma manera que Marx habla sobre la acumulación originaria, Hall desentraña los pilares fundamentales de la construcción lingüística y discursiva de la nación y cómo lo colonial atraviesa la historicidad de la misma.

[Victoria Hawco · Rating 3 out of 5]

Still only THINK I know what the titular triangle is.

[May Kosba · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you don't love Stuart Hall already, you might just fall in love with his mind and open endedness after/while reading this one. One of the best books on race, ethnicity, nation and diaspora. A must read.

[Dawn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Coming to The Fateful Triangle as someone new to Hall’s work, what stood out immediately was the bridge he constructs between the French theoretical influences that inform his analysis—think Lacan, Foucault, Derrida—and the later interventions of thinkers like Fred Moten, Katherine McKittrick, and Paula Gumbs. Hall’s lectures trace a line from the European theories of discourse and subjectivity to contemporary Black studies, illuminating the shifting politics of identity, race, and belonging in truly generative ways.

[KT · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stimulating, if slow and dense at times, read on race, ethnicity and nation/diaspora

Found commentary on how race is grounded in the biological and slides towards the cultural, whereas ethnicity appears to be grounded exclusively in the cultural interesting

Particularly enjoyed the chapter on nations and diaspora that delved into the construction of identity in nation building, role that creation myths have, and brings together ideas about race and ethnicity forst raised in the prior two chapters

[Akim Aalou]

It's a shame I haven't read this earlier. Any scholar of identity should begin here, if you ask me. The basic arguments could be said to be common-sense by now, but as often happens in common-sense, they become vague and barely understood. Only by fully applying oneself to such thoughts and the thinking behind it, can one understand its depth and implications. But as I said, I believe that Stuart Hall is a -- if not, the -- starting point, but not necessarily our endpoint, definitely not mine.

[Luisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hall, como sempre, incisivo e dono de uma prosa quase literária. sempre fico contente quando vejo que tenho leitura dele pra fazer, e esse livro em particular é excelente em fazer genealogia e desestabilizar as categorias de raça, etnia e nação.

[Lydia Camel]

Everyone should read this, it's as relevant today as it was when these words were first spoken.

[Aysegul · Rating 4 out of 5]

You cant go wrong with Hall.

[Write Read Fight · Rating 4 out of 5]

Su análisis sobre los conceptos de raza y etnia son bien interesantes.

[Anjali · Rating 5 out of 5]

LOVED THIS.

[Christoph · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Fateful Triangle is based on three Harvard lectures Stuart Hall gave in 1994 but which were only published posthumously. Unfortunately. These lectures are concise examples of Hall’s work as a cultural think and include thoughts on race and ethnicity as “sliding signifiers”, their impact on the construction of nations and the (African) diaspora. The lectures, almost 30 years old, at times read so contemporary that they could be mistaken for reactions to the 2010s. Oh, how I wish Hall was still around to bring his discursive analysis to the problems of 2021. The Trumpist problems aren’t new, it’s just the veneer that has covered white supremacy has been chipped away. This passage, for instance, made me think of the “America is better than this” rhetoric after the storm on the capitol or the “battle for the soul of the nation” in 2020:

“But, in fact, nations do not just emerge; they are formed. And national identites, more over, are not attributes we are born with, but are formed and transformed within discourses and other systems of representations. (…) Such discursive operations in the making of national cultural identities are always, of course, closely articulated to power and to the way power functions in society. We should think of the nation not only as a political entity but also as something that produces meaning and constructs identification.”

(Also published on my blog.)

[Christopher Iacovetti · Rating 4 out of 5]

'[O]f course there are indeed material differences of all sorts in the world. There is no reason to deny this reality. However, it is only when these differences have been organized within a discourse, as a system of marked differentiations, that the resulting categories can be said to acquire meaning, become a factor in human culture, regulate conduct, and have real effects on everyday social practices' (50)

'Indeed, by making difference intelligible in this way, each regime [of truth] marks out human differences within culture in a way that corresponds exactly to how difference is understood to function in nature, that is, 'naturally,' such that the differences represented in the discourse of race are put beyond the capacity of culture and history to rework or reconstruct them' (57)

'[W]ithin the traditionalist conception of diaspora culture there is always a linear movement whereby authenticity fades the further you go from its original source or depart from its sacred text, which will inevitably entail the sad declension of diaspora identity into inauthenticity and impurity. With the newer conception of diaspora, however, 'tradition' is understood as itself always being remade and transformed, as something that is always *produced* as a discursive structure, thereby constantly recomposing itself as the relations of similarity and difference are repositioned - disarticulated and rearticulated - in new chains of equivalence. In breaking with the narrative of authenticity, we have a critical account of diaspora that also disrupts the fatal disposition that regards diaspora peoples as continually suspended between a traditionalism of the past, to which they cannot return - impure and corrupted as they are - and a modernity of the future, equally impure and inauthentic, which they are forbidden to enter' (170-71 - cf. Turki's shift from early to late memoirs)