Identity is “not an essence” but “a process” (543). “In this view, identity is not a stable signified that a single signifier passively represents. Instead, identity is a continuous process of multiple signifiers and signifieds circulating through each other, producing identities, not merely labelling identities that are already statically there” (544).
Cultural identity “is a matter of ‘becoming’ as well as of ‘being.’ It belongs to the future as much as to the past. It is not something which already exists, transcending place, time, history and culture […] Far from being eternally fixed in some essentialized past, they are subject to the continuous ‘play’ of history, culture and power” (546).
“Cultural identities are the points of identification, the unstable points of identification or suture, which are made, within the discourses of history and culture. Not an essence but as positioning” (546).
Fanon: “A national culture is not a folk-lore, nor an abstract populism that believes it can discover a people’s true nature. A national culture is the whole body of efforts made by a people in the sphere of thought to describe, justify and praise the action through which that people has created itself and keeps itself in existence” (553).