“Those who do not see themselves reflected in national heritage are excluded from it."
This quote from sociologist and cultural theorist Stuart Hall, one of the foremost left intellectuals of our times who was often referred to as “the Godfather of multiculturalism,” speaks to the way many black folks and people of color are often othered or alienated from progressive discourse. One can simply look at the lack of massive action by the left around conditions in Puerto Rico and other parts of the Caribbean to illustrate this ongoing problem.
At a time when the ruling right-wing governments of the United States and Great Britain are resisting multiculturalism and promoting xenophobia and racism, it becomes even more important for those of us who live and die under the boot to have allies who are on the same page. Those allies need to eschew their privilege and embrace a struggle that is inclusive and prioritizes race, ethnicity, and gender.
Here in the States many (mostly white) activists on the left have disparaged ‘identity politics,’ dismissing the work of Audre Lorde (daughter of Caribbean immigrants to the U.S.) and other members of the Combahee River Collective. They tend to define working-class as default white, spending far too much time pursuing mythical ‘not racist’ disenchanted Trump voters, and repeating over and over the mantra of ‘economic insecurity’ to avoid dealing with the virulent racism and sexism informing and underlying their voting behavior.
It’s interesting (and disheartening) that few left and self-defined progressive thinkers cite or reference Hall’s work, which spanned many decades.
It’s interesting but not surprising, since there is a long history of ignoring black analytical, theoretical, and political voices, many with roots from the Caribbean, no matter where they wound up in the black diaspora. The fallback ‘cite a black man’ position seems to always be some quote from the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., tailored for whatever argument is being espoused—even when a deeper study of King’s work often contradicts its contemporary usage.
It’s far better perhaps to cite a living leader like the Rev. Dr. William Barber Jr., currently spearheading The Poor People’s Campaign. Far too often the term “left,” as we use it here, is default “white.” There is the “left” and then there was/is “the civil rights movement," or Black Lives Matter, or DACA protestors. But I digress.
The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars—but in our curricula. Behind the deficient attention paid to black thinkers in our schools is the unconscious racism attached to defining intellect and who has it, and an almost complete ignorance of the Caribbean as a spawning ground of academic and theoretical achievement.
Too often excluded from the white left historical canon are the voices and thoughts of Hall, Audre Lorde, Eric Williams, C.L.R. James, Frantz Fanon and Walter Rodney—all leftists, and all of Caribbean ethnicity.
Debating and studying the intersections of race, class, and also gender is still a minefield for far too many of my white progressive brethren. These black theorists should, and actually must be read alongside thinkers like W.E.B. DuBois (whose black family roots were from the Bahamas and Haiti).
Since it is impossible to do due diligence on them all in one post, today’s story will focus on introducing Hall to those who may not know much—or even anything—of him and his work.
In the months ahead, I’ll continue this series.
Since so much of how we learn and experience race and racism is via the media, a good starting point for an introduction is this video from Media Theorised on Stuart Hall.
Known as the ‘Godfather of Multiculturalism’, Stuart Hall (1932-2014) gave us tools to understand how representation is always imbued with ideology - and how to resist. We approached Natalie Jeffers to narrate this video because of the inspiration she has taken from Hall’s work, especially in her current role as co-founder of Black Lives Matter UK.
Jamaican-British cultural historian Stuart Hall gives us the tools to understand how representation is always imbued with ideology - and how to subvert it.
Arun Kundnani wrote an article about Hall titled, “Journalism, identity and what Stuart Hall taught me.”
“Stuart Hall 'taught me how Britain was founded on race and class - and how the media were central to those structures'.”
Hall's starting point was Marxism. But he followed another African-Caribbean scholar, Frantz Fanon, in his recommendation that Marxist analysis be "slightly stretched" in dealing with questions of race and colonialism. To understand the Jamaican society in which he had grown up, Hall combined the Marxist categories of class and capitalism with insights into the role of culture in colonialism. When Hall settled in England in 1951, he used the same approach to understand how racism functioned there. To the columnists who supposed that Asian and black immigration to Britain was an alien cultural disruption that undermined a previously stable society, Hall's response was that Britain had not become multicultural because of postcolonial migration.
Multiculturalism had been there much longer as an integral part of Britain's imperial project. "It is in the sugar you stir; it is in the sinews of the famous British 'sweet tooth'; it is in the tea-leaves at the bottom of the 'British' cuppa," noted Hall. There was no British identity that did not include the sugar plantations of the Caribbean and the tea plantations of Asia, the slave and the coolie.
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In Hall's account, racism was not just a matter of individual attitudes and biases. Race was a key constituent of the social and economic structure, a "principal modality" by which class society was experienced and made sense of. Race, he said, was not a marginal concern but right at the centre of British life. At the same time, its significance was never self-contained or transparent; it was a screen on to which deep anxieties were projected and worked through. One way this happened was through the news media. The conventional approach to analysing the news is to ask whether journalists select and frame events objectively or with bias. Hall's argument focused instead on how news can have meaning to us only if it aligns with our unconscious "cultural maps" of the social world.
The main ideological function of the news, he argued, is not its alleged liberal or conservative bias but its fidelity to the deeper consensus within which party politics takes place. This happens because the news sources its meanings from the social and political institutions that underpin that consensus, such as the police, the courts, the university, and so on.
In this accessible introductory lecture, Hall focuses on the concept of "representation"-- one of the key ideas of cultural studies-- and shows how reality is never experienced directly, but always through the symbolic categories made available by society.
The parallels between social movements and racial politics in Britain and those here in the U.S. are of absorbing interest, especially after the formation of the British Black Panthers and the 1981 uprisings in Brixton, which I wrote about here.
This article by Jessica Loudis on Hall from The Nation was featured in Black Kos in September 2017. It’s titled “Why We Need Stuart Hall’s Imaginative Left.”
She describes the period in which heightened racism and xenophobia ushered in a right-wing government.
By the mid-‘60s, Hall had married Catherine Barrett, a British feminist historian whose work would deeply influence his own, and had co-written The Popular Arts, one of the first books to apply serious analysis to popular film. At that point, the couple was living in the industrial English city, which, as James Vernon observes in an excellent essay on Hall and race, was riven by racial tensions. The year they moved there, Vernon writes, a “Conservative Party candidate ran an election campaign on the slogan ‘If you want a nigger for a neighbour, vote Labour.’ ” Three years later, in 1968, conservative MP Enoch Powell would deliver his infamous “rivers of blood” speech in Birmingham, suggesting that a flood of immigrants would result in just that. That same year, Catherine gave birth to their daughter, the first of two children.
The late ‘60s and early ‘70s in England saw the rise of left-wing social movements, namely black power and feminism, which Catherine participated in by starting Birmingham’s first women’s liberation group. It was also the era of screaming headlines about crime and the so-called “Sus” laws, which gave police carte blanche to stop and harass “suspicious” young (black) men. This set the stage for Hall’s breakthrough work, which applied a zoom lens to the conflicted national mood. In Policing the Crisis, Hall and his co-authors examined the explosion of news reports about the rise of “muggings” in the UK, arguing that this trend captured a moral panic about outsiders and immigrants, and generally reflected a feeling of decline as England, struggling with unemployment and an inefficient welfare state, transitioned away from a social democratic order.
Hall’s analysis, which elaborated on his earlier media studies work, was among the first to identify journalistic fearmongering and openness to austerity as the factors that would bring radical conservatives to power. In the final sentence, he predicted the continued ascent of Margaret Thatcher. Unfortunately, he was right. In 1979, the year after Crisis was published, Thatcher was elected Prime Minister.
She links to James Vernon’s piece on Hall, “When Stuart Hall Was White” (the white author’s assumption when he was growing up), which has a section on the advent of black intellectuals of note to England:
Hall was hardly the first Afro-Caribbean intellectual to make the transatlantic voyage to Britain. We often forget that it was common for the black colonial elite to move across the Atlantic world from Africa and the Caribbean to Paris and London. Britain’s metropolis attracted students, artists, musicians, and writers from across the Black Atlantic. It became the center for a vibrant anticolonial, Pan-African, and black internationalist political culture before the Second World War. The litany of just the most famous names is remarkable: George Padmore, Marcus Garvey, and C. L. R. James from the Caribbean; Ladipo Solanke (Nigeria), Jomo Kenyatta (Kenya), and Kwame Nkrumah Ghana (Ghana) from British Africa. Afro-Caribbean women like the Jamaicans Amy Garvey and Una Marson provided black feminist perspectives on this predominantly homosocial world, where racially charged relationships with white women were not uncommon.
Oxford was not London. Nonetheless, moving to study there was also a familiar path to the aspiring black middle classes from the Caribbean. To again dwell on just the most well-known cases: 20 years before Hall made that journey, Eric Williams had arrived in Oxford from Trinidad to study history; his work at Oxford culminated with the PhD that brilliantly revealed the centrality of slavery to capitalism and Britain’s early industrialization. Norman Manley, who Hall remembered as a fellow pupil at the elite Jamaica College school in Kingston, studied law at Oxford. With the creation of the West Indies Federation in 1959 Manley became the premier of Jamaica, while Williams became the first prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago when it left the Federation in 1962 to become independent. The studies of all three were funded by scholarships designed to propagate a British-educated colonial elite. Manley and Hall were Rhodes Scholars, awards funded by the riches plundered from the mines of southern Africa by the archimperialist Cecil Rhodes.
It was no less difficult for Hall to think his way out of this colonial education than it was for Manley and Williams, or Kenyatta and Nkrumah, to build postcolonial nations. In a retrospective essay on the history of the New Left published in 1990, he remarked how, in the early 1950s, “there was no ‘black politics’ in Britain.” By this he did not mean it was not possible to think of “black” as a category of politics. He pointed, instead, to the fact that the migrations that accompanied late colonial rule and decolonization had only just begun.
Here is Hall interviewing C.L.R. James.
James talks of his childhood, his parents, coming to England and meeting George Padmore, Paul Robeson, and Trotsky, and his views on Lenin, Melville, and Shakespeare.
There is currently no transcript available.
Some of the writing about Hall may be difficult to approach for those not immersed in cultural and media studies theory. I suggest that you read his memoir Familiar Stranger: A Life Between Two Islands.
"Sometimes I feel myself to have been the last colonial." This, in his own words, is the extraordinary story of the life and career of Stuart Hall—how his experiences shaped his intellectual, political, and theoretical work and how he became one of his age's brightest intellectual lights.
Growing up in a middle-class family in 1930s Kingston, Jamaica, still then a British colony, the young Stuart Hall found himself uncomfortable in his own home. He lived among Kingston's stiflingly respectable brown middle class, who, in their habits and ambitions, measured themselves against the white elite. As colonial rule was challenged, things began to change in Kingston and across the world. In 1951 a Rhodes scholarship took Hall across the Atlantic to Oxford University, where he met young Jamaicans from all walks of life, as well as writers and thinkers from across the Caribbean, including V. S. Naipaul and George Lamming. While at Oxford he met Raymond Williams, Charles Taylor, and other leading intellectuals, with whom he helped found the intellectual and political movement known as the New Left. With the emotional aftershock of colonialism still pulsing through him, Hall faced a new struggle: that of building a home, a life, and an identity in a postwar England so rife with racism that it could barely recognize his humanity.
With great insight, compassion, and wit, Hall tells the story of his early life, taking readers on a journey through the sights, smells, and streets of 1930s Kingston while reflecting on the thorny politics of 1950s and 1960s Britain. Full of passion and wisdom, Familiar Stranger is the intellectual memoir of one of our greatest minds.
In a review of the book for Financial Times, modern history professor Maria Misra writes:
For Hall this “diasporic” perspective pushed him first not into politics but into cultural theory. The intersection of politics and popular culture was an abiding interest and Hall writes particularly well about the significance of reggae and the West Indian literary renaissance of the late 1950s in shaping Caribbean and black British identities. But galvanised by 1956’s twin crises of western imperialism and communism alike — the Suez invasion and the Hungarian uprising — Hall was drawn into the orbit of the Marxist revisionist historian EP Thompson. Hall tells the story of the not-entirely-happy marriage of his own Universities Left Review with Thompson’s Marxist New Reasoner to form the New Left Review in 1960 — of which Hall was the first editor. Thompson emerges as personally generous but intellectually dogmatic, with a visceral hatred of “cultural studies” — in his view merely a euphemism for corrupting “Americanization”. Hall, by contrast, always sensed the democratising potential of America’s raucous popular culture. Thompson was also, notoriously, blind to the importance of race, and at a conference on Hall’s path-breaking analysis of the race politics of Thatcherism, Policing the Crisis (1978), denounced the book with what Hall describes as wild, prophetic rage. We see echoes of both sides in the current divisions on the English left between “Blue Labour” nationalists and pro-immigrant defenders of multiculturalism. For Hall and other postcolonial thinkers, race and the centrality of whiteness were as crucial to post-imperial British identity as class was for Thompson’s 19th-century weavers. Indeed, Hall saw very early on the baleful impact of loss of empire on British identity, even though those effects changed radically over time: from the efforts in the 1950s, on both left and right, to forget the imperial past as an embarrassing failure, to its resurrection as a justification for white racial superiority with Enoch Powell, a tradition that Hall believed Thatcherism only perpetuated. Were he living today, he would probably have seen continuities with Powell and Thatcher in post-referendum talk of “Empire 2.0”. The irony, of course, is that Brexit may well mean Britain has fewer of those immigrant intellectuals who are so well-placed, as outsider-insiders, to point out the paradoxes and contradictions of our colonial romance.
If you have a chance, see the documentary on Hall by John Akomfrah, which premiered at Sundance in 2013.
Here is a review titled “John Akomfrah’s Dense, Intricate ‘The Stuart Hall Project’ – On The Life Of The Late Intellectual”:
The many parts help to map out a story that chronicles Hall’s career in tandem with the changing events in Great Britain and the world at large including the Suez crisis, youth counterculture and the Vietnam War, West Indian migration to the UK, and the advent of feminist theory. It may all sound very academic, but the film is clearly a very personal venture for Akomfrah, who has said that the project is one he feels he has “been preparing for a very long time… possibly all my working life.” His respect and admiration for his subject manifests itself in the way Hall is essentially allowed to tell his own story, narrating the documentary through archived audio interviews.
Some of the most moving and fascinating moments in the film come as Hall describes life in Kingston, Jamaica, being “three shades darker” than his family, and therefore an outcast – a victim of colorism and colonization.
There’s a truly cinematic quality to the imagery used, complemented beautifully by Hall’s running narration, as well as the music of Miles Davis,of which Hall has been a lifetime listener. The incredibly rich visual landscape of the film is engaging, if a bit overwhelming due to the sheer expanse of time and information being presented.
The Stuart Hall Project is not a history lesson, nor a biography in the traditional sense. It’s an abstract approach to storytelling, an attempt at connection with the past, and a reverent celebration of a profound and inspirational black leader.