Thinking “Diaspora” with Stuart Hall

Abstract

AbstractThis article revisits Stuart Hall’s writing on “diaspora” to highlight its potential for future work on the topic. Although Hall has been faulted for excluding modern Africa, his historical and geographic approach to black cultural identities introduces the possibility for an inclusion. Since his “diaspora aesthetics” is based on black British films, photography, and visual art, this reassessment of his work concludes with a consideration of the Beninese artist Romuald Hazoumè’s La Bouche du Roi. This room-size multimedia slave ship installation brings a history of transatlantic slavery together with that of colonialism and globalization to make a statement about African identities, both in the past and in the present. Hazoumè’s artwork provides a visualization of Hall’s mobile model of “diaspora,” with its shifting perspectives, geographically dispersed centers, and unsynchronized temporalities.