1. In “Hybridity, Multiplicity: Marking Asian American Differences”, Lisa Lowe writes in her discussion of hegemony and race that “we might say that hegemony is not only the political process by which a particular group constitutes itself as "the one" or "the majority" in relation to which "minorities" are defined and know themselves to be "other," but it is equally the process by which positions of otherness may ally and constitute a new majority, a ‘counterhegemony.’12”
In the footnote for the sentence, Lowe begins by noting that “'hegemony' remains a suggestive construct in Gramsci, however, rather than an explicitly interpreted set of relations. Contemporary readers are left with the more specific task of distinguishing which particular forms of challenge to an existing hegemony are significantly transformative, and which forms may be neutralized or appropriated by the hegemony.” Lowe then goes on to discuss various interpretations of how counterhegemony might relate to the original hegemonic forms. Yet, I am still puzzled by counterhegemony’s relation to hegemony in Lowe’s formulation. Is counterhegemony subsumed within hegemony? Or outside and oppositional, but necessarily based on hegemony? Or related to, but not dependent on the original hegemony as the formulations may have occurred in different sociopolitical contexts?
2. In the introductory chapter to Questions of Cultural Identity, Hall writes that the concept of identity being proposed in the work “does not signal that stable core of the self, unfolding from beginning to end through all the vicissitudes of history without change; the bit of the self which remains always-already 'the same', identical to itself across time.” (3) Hall further dismisses "identity" as a static category, writing that “identities are about questions of using the resources of history, language and culture in the process of becoming rather than being: not 'who we are' or 'where we came from', so much as what we might become, how we have been represented and how that bears on how we might represent ourselves.” (4) Although Hall is negating the association of identity with "that stable core of the self," is Hall remarking that such a thing exists? If so, what is "that stable core"? If not, is there any part of the individual (at least in Cultural Studies) outside a "process of becoming"?
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