Stuart Hall - Selected Writings on Race and Difference

The biography of Stuart Hall is well known. It need not be rehearsed again here. His valuable writings have circulated around the world over a very long period of time, drawing responses from all directions and disciplines. The work has been reexamined in detail since his death by readers eager to learn from him and to absorb his many insights into the complexities of our present crisis. Yet I have occasionally overheard very sophisticated academics amusing each other with stories of their surprise at finding out Stuart Hall was a black man who had been born in Jamaica. Those pretended epiphanies unsettled me. It would be unwise to overinterpret casual comments of that sort, but discovering Halls Caribbean origins or migrant identity could be a shock only in a world where the mission of black intellectuals remains impossible, where being a black intellectual is unimaginable: a freakish possibility. Not only were those silly, shameless remarks premised on an extraordinary ignorance of the breadth of Halls concerns, commitments, and interests; they were also symptoms of a more widespread and telling failure to understand his political formation and trajectory.

This anthology is intended to encourage an entirely different approach. It begins from the provocative possibility that reckoning with the place of race and racism in Halls thought is indispensable for coming to terms with the meaning and the politics of his intellectual work as a whole. Since his passing, the resurgence of authoritarian and ultranationalist populisms, to which racism remains integral, confirms that the dynamic, potent effect of appeals to race, and the mobilization of racist discourses, needs to be better understood. Race is, as Hall memorably puts it, a floating signifier. It is also the highly charged matter of political ontology, located at the epicenter of our volatile environment bounded by nationalism and civilizationism.

The question of how analysis of racial formations might be lodged within the larger architecture of Halls perspectives on critical and cultural theory has acquired greater importance as his intellectual legacies have congealed. Clarification of the difficult conceptual and interpretative issues raised by racism and the politics of race promises more than just a better grasp of the course of Halls own thought and the critiques of liberal piety on racial matters that he delivered so inspiringly and energetically from the Left. It can illuminate his shifting relationship with the spectrum of socialist politics, with the New Left, Marxism, and feminism, as well as the international Black Power movement and the ongoing processes of decolonization that were unfolding in Africa, the Caribbean, and elsewhere. These pieces can be read first for the way that they reveal him acquiring a sense of the historical and epistemological significance of racism and race, and then for his eloquent attempts to persuade his readers of their signal political importance.

That way of proceeding affirms the wisdom in not approaching race as a separate, freestanding topic but focusing instead on the racism that animates and mobilizes races dynamically, and almost always violently. The problems that converge under those vexed headings can then be used to assemble an apparatus for thinking critically about a number of interrelated issues: culture, power, democracy, and the partial, abbreviated forms of justice and freedom that race-friendly capitalism allows. For Hall, analyzing racism and race in that way helps to identify the seams that separate critical knowledge from traditional knowledge. It can foster an expansive politics of intellectual work, inside and outside universities. Racism is not another layer of misery to be logged and added to the dismal effects of other social processes. It has a constitutive power. It shapes and determines economic and political relations. We can learn to look at history, culture, economic and social relations through the frame it affords us.

Hall discovers and then repeats his enthusiasm for the idea that race has provided a prism through which (British) people are called upon to live through to understand, and then to deal with crisis conditions.

As far as British history is concerned, these texts help to trace the evolution of Halls concern with racism and the effects of racialized inequality from the era of Suez and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, through Enoch Powells cataclysmic Rivers of Blood and beyond to the righteous riots of the 1980s, into the artistic bloom of Britains Black Arts movement during the 1990s, the multiculture debates of the Tony Blair years and the crisis of neoliberal culture and society that followed. If that provincial genealogy supplies an immediate context for Halls serial commentaries and critiques, it should also be clear that his thinking evolved in a transnational, diasporic conversation with the work of other black writers drawn from various languages, locations, and generations. Caribbean travelers, in but not of Europe, like C. L. R. James, Frantz Fanon, George Lamming, Kamau Brathwaite, Sylvia Wynter, Andrew Salkey, Marion OCallaghan, and John LaRose, are only the most obvious figures whose journeys into, through, and beyond European thought in general and Marxism in particular might now help to illuminate and explain Halls own path. Their achievements, creative and radical, supply constant points of reference in the dialogical motion of his voice as it drifts in and out of its teacherly register.