I could talk about Stuart Hall's brilliant essay on identity, "Who Needs Identity?," all day, I think, in which he defines identity as "a suture" between discursive practices and subjective processes. It seems to me like he's substituting "identity" for "ideology." Maybe identity is the site of ideology? Anyway, my big question has to do with a trope of late-20th-early 21st Century critical theory to describe our era as "increasingly fragmented and fragmentary." How, then, in such a fragmentary world, do we account for the rise of territorializing nationalisms? Is it a result of this fragmentation? Is it correct to say that globalization causes fragmentation or heightened visibility? I'm still not sure where we locate this fragmenting in action...
Which leads me to my reading of Hall's "Global, the Local, the Return of Ethnicity." His conception of the narrative of the nation, inspired by Perry Anderson's imagined communities, that differences between nationalisms have to do with how they are imagined to cohere by their constituents. I wonder, though, how do we apply this to today--not so long after Hall wrote the essay in the grand scheme of time, but at a different conjuncture where, at least among the youth, there seems to be an intense indifference to nation-imagining.
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