IdentiTEA
IdentiTEA is a sound piece commissioned as a creative response to the workshop ‘Sounds of Being and Belonging’ that was organised by a group of researchers, Dr. Deniz Sözen, Tina Hofman and Aurella Yussuf, at the University of Birmingham, in June 2024. The project formed part of a series of creative workshops engaging with Stuart Hall’s work, supported by the College of Arts and Law [CAL] Interdisciplinary incubator “Rethinking the Fateful Triangle in an Age of Democratic Decay: Race, Ethnicity, Nation”.
Facilitated by artist-curator Jaz Morrison, the workshop at Gap Arts Birmingham brought together different perspectives on being and belonging in the city. Departing from a text extract by Stuart Hall, discussions centred around tea as a metaphor for histories of migration, empire, colonialism, identity and diversity.
The multi-layered sound piece IdentiTEA features audio snippets from interviews with workshop participants, an excerpt from Stuart Hall’s essay "Old and New Identities, Old and New Ethnicities" (1991) read by Jaz Morrison, and ambient recordings of the workshop itself. It explores the lived experiences of a diverse group of people in Birmingham, and how their personal experiences of migration, racial inequality and minority have influenced what belonging and identity means to them.
Special thanks to Jaz Morrison, and all the workshop participants for their contributions to this track, including Sadie Bennett, Indy Hunjan, Lisa Kennedy, Danielle Krikorian, Regan McDonald, Azadeh Sarjoughian, Ugbad Yussuf and others.
In addition to the sound piece, you are invited to listen to 3 accompanying tracks that feature participants’ reflections on themes discussed in the workshop as well as the full unedited recording of Stuart Hall’s text:
Photography by Fernando
Extract from "Old and New Identities, Old and New Ethnicities" by Stuart Hall:
The notion that identity in that sense could be told as two histories, one over here, one over there, never having spoken to one another, never having anything to do with one another, when translated from the psychoanalytic to the historical terrain, is simply not tenable any longer in an increasingly globalized world. It is just not tenable any longer.
People like me who came to England in the 1950s have been there for centuries; symbolically, we have been there for centuries. I was coming home. I am the sugar at the bottom of the English cup of tea.
I am the sweet tooth, the sugar plantations that rotted generations of English children's teeth. There are thousands of others beside me that are, you know, the cup of tea itself. Because they don't grow it in Lancashire, you know. Not a single tea plantation exists within the United Kingdom. This is the symbolization of English identity mean, what does anybody in the world know about an English person except that they can't get through the day without a cup of tea?
Where does it come from? Ceylon - Sri Lanka, India. That is the outside history that is inside the history of the English. There is no English history without that other history. The notion that identity has to do with people that look the same, feel the same, call themselves the same, is nonsense. As a process, as a narrative, as a discourse, it is always told from the position of the Other.
What is more is that identity is always in part a narrative, always in part a kind of representation. It is always within representation. Identity is not something which is formed outside and then we tell stories about it. It is that which is narrated in one's own self.