Week 10 Questions (Davis)

In “The Global, the Local, and the Return of Ethnicity,” Hall emphasizes the “way identity and difference are inextricably articulated or knitted together in different identities, the one never wholly obliterating the other” (p. 633). What are the practical implications of this? As a tangential sidenote, the title of this essay reminds me of a line from the film Up in the Air, wherein one character offers the parody-esque portmanteau “glocal” – a synthesis of global and local. I would like to discuss in greater detail Hall’s description and use of “identification” in the introduction to Questions of Cultural Identity (p. 2). I had not considered that identity’s reliance on exclusion or relationship to the Other would (in what now seems obvious) interact so interestingly with Hall’s scholarship. This whole chapter is particularly fascinating and – at least in my opinion – features Hall attending to some other theoretical perspectives less common in his other work.