The Cultural Identity Of The African American Community

The African American community has sat at the end of a discriminatory lens from the moment they set foot in the United States. For that reason, black communities have undergone the process of community building to ensure that all members feel a sense of belonging. Race, gender, nationality, ethnicity, poverty, and sexual orientation, all play a role in developing one’s identity and more often than not, these multiple identities intersect with blackness. Being that American society has deemed colored people and populations as minoritarian subjects, African diaspora people can be seen making safe spaces for themselves to survive as individuals and as a part of communities. Stuart Hall’s Cultural Identity and Diaspora focuses on the current issues of identity, cultural practices and cultural representations. He analyses the visual representations of Afro-Caribbean’s and challenges the notions of identity from African and European places. Hall then goes on to explain how Caribbean cinema has chosen to both, refute and embrace European influence. He presents two different forms of thinking about cultural identity. In the first position, Hall defines ‘cultural identity’ in terms of one, shared culture, which people with a shared history and ancestry hold in common. The first model uses â€Å"stable, unchanging and continuous frames of reference and meanings’ to present the idea of shared culture, history, and ancestry rooted beneath ‘more superficial imposed ‘selves’† (Hall, 223).Show MoreRelatedThe Importance Of Sexual Identity Development1243 Words   |  5 Pages The sexual orientation iden tity development is a theoretical model that conceptualized the resolution of internal conflict related to the formation of individual sexual identity. For sexual minority people, it is commonly known as the coming-out process (Bilodeau Renn 2005). There have been many different models elaborated to explain such process. 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