Week 6_Natalie Lortz_ASA 114

Stuart Hall, a classic Asian American Studies literary author, discusses cultural identity as an ongoing creative process. Additionally, cultural identity can be considered as a reflection of a combination of self and a collective self in the purest form. There are many points where culture can be cited. Culture can be described as derivative from history, memory, narrative, myth, fantasy, as well as a certain location and time. He describes two main ways to discuss cultural identity. The more common way to discuss literature requires looking at it as one shared culture. It considers personality as more of a false pretense in comparison to culture, which is described as a true collective self that cuts through the falseness of individuality. Hall refers to this collective self as the identity that can be shown in cinematic representation. 

As a French man of the African diaspora, Fanon talks about discovering cultural identity as unearthing what colonization has buried. The second way to discuss cultural identity that Hall describes is more complicated. In this category, culture can not be contained to one experience or identity. Culture, “belongs to the future as much as the past”. It can also show trauma of the colonial experience. Those in the diaspora are the same as and different as those who never left. What are other ways to describe cultural identity besides these two descriptions?