A Sociography of Diaspora

This chapter offers an overview of Stuart Hall’s approach to diaspora, placing the emphasis on his conjunctural analysis of the “ethnic signifier” as it is articulated in different social formations, such as postindependence Jamaica and post-Empire Britain. It is argued that the cultural studies vocabulary is indispensable, since it introduced the analysis of hybridity, traveling culture, and cross-cultural translation into art criticism, but that with the institutionalization of such terms, it is all the more important for historical research, for instance, on the Caribbean Artists Movement, to go further than mere sociological context by employing Hall’s methods to examine art’s ability to intervene in public life by altering social realities of identity and ethnicity.