In Stuart Hall’s Who Needs Identity (1997), the scholar postulates that identities are constituted within, not outside representation. This piece has led me to think about how the scholar would have received Derrais Carter’s Black Revelry: In Honor of the Sugar Shack at the Symposium. I first thought about my recognition as a subject and the questions of identification that arose through my experience consuming the presentation as a Black scholar, who, within this academic space ( especially within sociology), rarely witnesses a project so distinctive to the Black experience. In thinking about Hall’s writing about suture as an attempt to hail us into place - in that specific moment, I was hailed! But in his analysis of suture, he also mentions (p. 5) that identities are temporary attachments to the subject positions which discursive practices construct for us.” I wonder what Hall would have thought about the temporal element of Carter’s presentation, more specifically on the evolution of how Black artists have paid homage to the sugar shack and why this cultural symbol has resonated so much with the identity of Black arts on not just an individual, but a meso-macro level? Is this a form of racial essentialism? or even to his quote about suture, a temporary attachment? And if so, why has this symbol resonated so much with the Black identity over the 20th/21st century?
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