Ever since the late 1960s, when Fredrik Barth urged us to move away from the idea that ethnicity is constituted by “cultural stufT and to focus instead on the boundary that demarcates groups, anthropologists (and their perhaps more radical half-siblings in cultural studies) have cast into doubt the primordial or essentialist nature of ethnic groups, to say nothing of ethnic identity. Earlier studies focused on the groups themselves—how they display and are constrained by their identity as immigrants, minorities, ethnics, “persistent peoples,” and even “marginal men” (sic)—while more recent investigations have taken up the “borderlands” where groups meet, confront each other (Rosaldo; Rouse), and become zones of hybridized cultural production (Bhabha). In a related vein, ethnicity is also explored as one of many possible intersections of power and culture, and ethnic identity becomes a crazy-quilt of namings and “being-called” (Probyn 25). Indeed, Stuart Hall informs us that “identities are never unified, and in late modem times, increasingly fragmented and fractured, never singular but multiply constructed across different, often intersecting and antagonistic discourses, practices and positions” (4, emphasis added).
Stuart Hall and Cultural Studies, circa 1983