Stuart Hall claims that white and black are both culturally and
politically constructed categories
"If the black subject and black experience are not stabilised by Nature or
by some other essential guarantee, then it must be the case that they are
constructed historically, culturally, politically - and the concept which
refers to this is 'ethnicity'."
"We still have a great deal of work to do to decouple ethnicity, as it
functions in the dominant discourse, from its equivalence with nationalism,
imperialism, racism and the state, which are the points of attachment
around which a distinctive British or, more accurately, English ethnicity
have been constructed."
Catherine Hall and Stuart Hall reading The Caribbean Review
of
Books at
Hellshire Beach, Jamaica; June 2004.
Photo by Annie Paul
Catherine Hall is a social historian. Stuart Hall's work treats history as
central to sociology.
Mixed race family and different colonial class fractions
3.2.1932 Stuart Hall was born in Kingston, in the British colony of
Jamaica. He was the blackest child of a mixed race middle class
family who secured for him an elite education.
His mother (previously Hopwood) "was
brought up in a beautiful house on the hill, above a small estate". Her
relatives included a doctor and a lawyer trained in England. Her uncle was
"local white" (almost white) and that side of the family were fairer and of
a higher class than his father's side.
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Stuart Hall argues that his mother and her family identified with the
plantation class that had owned and run the sugar cane plantations where
slaves provided the labour.
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His father was a business executive with the
United Fruit Company.
His grandfather on his father's side
kept a drugstore in a poor village. His family was "ethnically very mixed-
African, East Indian, Portuguese, Jewish".
He locates his father as a member of the
Jamaican bourgeoisie. Both his parents identified with British colonial
rule and not with the movement for Jamaican independence.
Stuart Hall identified with the colour of his skin: The blackness was a
reminder of white slave owners having sex with black slaves somewhere in
the history of his family. Stuart identified with the slaves, not with the
slave owners.
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HALL, Stuart Henry McPhail. born 3 February 1932. Merton College, Oxford.
2nd Class English Language and Literature, Research for D. Phil.; L.T. for
Univ. Ed., New Left Review 1960-1961. Chelsea College of Science,
University of
London, Department of Humanities, Lecturer 1962-1964. Birmingham University
School of English: Research Fellow, Centre for Contemporary Cultural
Studies 1965; Assistant to Director 1966; Deputy Director 1968; Acting
Director. 1970; Director 1970. Pres. O.U.W. Soc. Teaching in London; Prof
of Sociology, Open University. [See
Register of Jamaican Rhodes Scholars
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Barthes at the barbers
Not many years after Stuart Hall settled into Oxford University to study
high culture,
Roland Barthes called at his local barber in Paris and was
given a popular magazine to read.
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What an irrelevance cries the highbrow scholar. What has that got to do
with literature?
Nothing in terms of the kind of literature that Oxford
scholars tended to study. Everything in terms of the popular culture that
Stuart Hall would study.
Here (in English) is what Barthes wrote later
about his perception of the magazine cover.
Oh dear, says the Oxford scholar, once we read books, now we just look at
magazine covers.
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Our imaginary Oxford scholar reads books and collects
German art
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"I am at the barber's, and copy of Paris-Match is offered to me. On the
cover, a young Negro in a French uniform is saluting, with his eyes
uplifted, probably fixed on a fold of the tricolour. All this is the
meaning of the picture. But whether naively or not, I see very well what it
signifies to me : that France is a great Empire, that all her sons, without
any colour discrimination, faithfully serve under the flag, and that there
is no better answer to the detractors of an alleged colonialism than the
zeal shown by this Negro in serving his so-called oppressors ..."
(Barthes: 1957 p.201)
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That is just Roland Barthe's imagination, says our Oxford scholar. The
cover is just one of
those French
niger boys in army uniform saluting. I served in the British
army after the first world war and I remember the French were keen on
having Africans in the army, almost as if they were Frenchman. It was all
about the
rights of man. It really upset Germans in the 1920s that black
soldier were occupying parts of the country.
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I think that was partly to
blame for the rise of Hitler. The Germans feared racial degeneration. I
bought some pretty lurid German
bronzes for my art collection.
The Watch on the Rhine. A bronze medal cast by
Karl Goetz in 1920
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"Liberte, Égalité, Fraternité" (Liberty,
Equality, Fraternity) under the image of a black French soldier.
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"Die Schwarze Schande" (The Black
Shame). Lorelei, the spirit of the Rhine, is tied to a penis shaped tree
capped by a French helmet. The broken lyre of the murmuring Rhine is
watched over by the eye of God.
Same cover - Different readings
This cover of Paris Match is not a book for our imaginary Oxford scholar to
read in the Bodleian library. But he is still reading something into it.
And he and Roland Barthes are reading this cover of Paris Match
differently.
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Film is one of the cultural media that shapes our perceptions of ourselves,
our identity. In the introduction to a 1980s conference featuring Stuart
Hall, the film critic Ray
Durgnat is quoted as describing film as
"that cultural arena in which
society reflects upon and adjusts its image of itself" (page
4).
That was
probably said at the time of
mass cinema audiences, but, the introduction
argues that
""British cinema is alive and well and living on television"
(page 6).
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But our imaginary Oxford scholar would not want to know about this.
In the 1950s he was coming to terms with an influx of working class
graduates who had an education in good classical literature.
Films and television were the concerns of another cultural class.
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Popular Culture
In 2010-2011 79.6% of pupils in their last year of compulsory education in
the UK achieved 5 or more GCSE grades A*-C or equivalent. In 2003-2004
39.2% of the relevant age group passed two or more A levels or equivalent.
Josephine Hope was one of the many innovative teachers who
taught in secondary schools
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Back in 1953-1954 10.7% of the relevant age group passed five or more GCE O
levels at schools in England and Wales. 5.5% of the relevant age group
passed one or more GCE A level
In the mid 1950s the majority of children (including me - standing left)
went to schools
designed to train us for undemanding jobs to fit our undemanding abilities.
A minority of children were selected for an elite education in schools that
could prepare them for university.
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Stuart Hall taught in schools for children who were not the cultural elite.
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In 1957, Richard Hoggart published The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of
working-class life, with special reference to publications and
entertainments and, in the same year, Roland Barthes published Mythologies,
analysing film images, wrestling, detergent advertisements and similar
items as items of culture.
Inaugurating the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham
University in 1963, Richard Hoggart, criticised the narrowness of the way
English literature was taught in schools and suggested a broadening to what
he "provisionally called Literature and Contemporary Cultural Studies"
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The cover design shows a vinyl record, a film reel, a symbol for a studio
microphone encircling a transistor radio and a 1960s television.
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What he is saying, thousands and hundreds of thousands are saying and
thinking ... in the areas that are already undergoing the total
transformation to which there is no parallel in a thousand years
of English history. In fifteen or twenty years, on present trends, there
will be in this country 3 and a half million Commonwealth immigrants and
their
descendants...
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Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad. We
must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow
of some 50,000 dependents, who are for the most part the material of the
future growth of the immigrant-descended population. It is like watching a
nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre."
...
the legislation proposed in the Race Relations Bill is the ... is the means
of showing that the immigrant communities can organise to consolidate their
members, to agitate and campaign against their fellow citizens, and to
overawe and dominate the rest with the legal weapons which the ignorant and
the ill-informed have provided. As I look ahead, I am filled with
foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see "the River Tiber foaming with
much blood."
White politics as creative a perfomance two:
Thatcherism
"The Great Moving Right Show" Marxism Today
January 1979
In "The Great Moving Right Show", Stuart Hall wrote:
"Gramsci insisted that we get the "organic" and "conjunctural"
aspects of
the crisis into a proper relationship. What defines the "conjunctural" -
the immediate terrains of struggle - is not simply the given economic
conditions, but precisely the "incessant and persistent" efforts which are
being made to defend and conserve the position.
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"If the crisis is deep -
"organic" - these
efforts cannot be merely defensive. They will be formative: a new balance
of forces, the emergence of new elements, the attempt to put together a new
"historical bloc", new political configurations and "philosophies", a
profound restructuring of the state and the ideological discourses which
construct the crisis and represent it as it is "lived" as a practical
reality; new programmes and policies, pointing to a new result, a new sort
of "settlement" - "within certain limits". These do not "emerge": they have
to be constructed.
"Political and ideological work is required to
disarticulate old formations, and to rework their elements into new
configurations.
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"The "swing to the Right" is not a reflection of the crisis:
it is itself a response to the crisis.
...
"Race constitutes another variant, since in recent months questions of
race,
racism and relations between the races, as well as immigration, have been
dominated by the dialectic between the radical - respectable and the
radical-rough forces of the Right. It was said about the 1960s and early
70s that, after all, Mr. Powell lost. This is true only if the shape of a
whole conjuncture is to be measured by the career of a single individual.
In another sense, there is an argument that
"Powellism" won: not only
because his official eclipse was followed by legislating into effect much
of what he proposed, but because of the magical connections and short-
circuits which Powellism was able to establish between the themes of race
and immigration control and the images of the nation,
the British people and the destruction of "our culture, our way of life". I
would be happier about the temporary decline in the fortunes of the Front
if so many of their themes had not been so swiftly reworked into a more
respectable discourse on race by Conservative politicians in the first
months of this year."
"New Ethnicities" is a paper that Stuart Hall wrote for a
conference in 1988 on
Black Film, British Cinema.
[See paper].
In it, Stuart Hall discusses
the development
of ethnic
identity in relation to recent films including
My Beautiful Launderette (1985) and
Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (1987) -
Handsworth
Songs (1987) - and Dreaming Rivers (1988) -
The Passion of Remembrance (1986).
Hall argues that the struggles
represented by and in these films had
moved from an older focus on "blacks", as a single entity, and
"white" culture, to more diverse issues and
identities. He suggests that
"a significant
shift has been
going on... in black cultural politics...".
This is not a
movement from one
to the other but
"two phases of one movement which constantly overlap and
interweave".
He identifies diversification as the second
"moment" in the
movement.
The first moment was the construction of blackness as a concept
of resistance:
See the
Bernie Grant Archive
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"Politically, this is the moment when the term 'black' was
coined as a way of referencing the common experience of racism in Britain
and came to provide the organising category of a new politics of
resistance, amongst groups and communities with, in fact, very different
histories, traditions and ethnic identities.... Culturally, this analysis
formulated itself in terms of a critique of the way blacks were positioned
as the unspoken and invisible 'other' of predominantly white aesthetic and
cultural discourses." (page 27)
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An example of the use of "black" to describe a primarily Asian group is
Southall Black Sisters, established in 1979 to meet the needs of
Black
(Asian and African-Caribbean) women. This group "aims to challenge all
forms gender related violence against women". It was not, therefore, formed
a resistance to white racism and illustrates both the use of the collective
term "black" and the diversification of issues that Stuard Hall sees as the
second phase.
Films and diversity
"a film that gives a mosaic impression of the different
generations of a Black experience... poses some important questions within
the drama: What emotions remain in the silences left by the unfinished
business of the 60/70s - the continuing business of sex and gender?"
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Handsworth
John Akomfrah: Were the riots acts of criminality beyond discourse? beyond
narrative?
Sound track of Handsworth Songs: The Home Secretary visiting the riot area
is heard to say to journalists:
"These are senseless occasions, completely without reason" Somebody said
behind him
"The higher monkey climb the more he will expose". Another voice: "You
don't see the
problem"
"The starting-point of critical elaboration is the consciousness of
what one really is, and is 'knowing thyself'as a product of the historical
processes to date, which has deposited in you an infinity of traces,
without leaving an inventory." - Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks
"there are no stories in the riots, only the ghosts of other stories".
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Seeking to know who is to blame for the riots we must trace the stories of
the experiences of those who came to Britain from Asia, the Caribbean and
Africa. In the traces of their hopes and experiences we may find an
explanation.
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Dreaming
Rivers -
(external link). Miss T., from the Caribbean,
dies alone in her one-room apartment. Her family and friends gather at her
wake. An "impressionist rendering" of "the past, present and future".
"Fragments of a life lived, but only partly remembered."
"Three young people discuss the loss of" their mother as a metaphor for
their Caribbean identity that is fragmented with the passing of each
generation." "..remarkable for its syncretic use of Afro-Caribbean rituals
and Christianity, the Creole language, and other Atlanticisms which
indicate that Britishness is no longer the terrain of whiteness and
Christianity." (Manthia Diawara, Black American Literature Forum)
(source)
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The creativity of representation
In his paper, Hall speaks of the idea that the film
"represents" a
reality outside of itself. He says this idea is grounded in the "mimetic
theory of representation": the idea that representations, like film, mime
or imitate an exterior reality. But representations, he argues, can also
form or shape reality.
"... events, relations, structures do have conditions of
existence and real effects, outside the sphere of the
discursive; but ...
it is only within the discursive"... [that they have] ... "meaning. Thus,
... how things are represented" ... [plays] ... "a constitutive, and not
merely a reflexive, after-the-event, role. This gives
questions of culture and ideology, and the scenarios of representation -
subjectivity,
identity,
politics - a formative, not merely an expressive,
place in the constitution of social and political life."
(Hall 1988 p.-)
Identity
Stuart Hall's analysis of
identity in contemporary societies
examines the effects of
migration and dispersal of
ethnic groups
within and between countries.
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Long Term International Migration, 1964 to 2012, into and out of the United
Kingdom.
(Office of National Statistics)
He argues that migration is the
archetypal
20th/21st century experience, and that this has profoundly destabilised
individual as
well as collective identities.
"Now that, in the postmodern age, you all feel so dispersed, I
become centred. What I've thought of as dispersed and fragmented comes,
paradoxiacally, to be the representative modern experience" (quoted
page 5)
On the issues of
race and
ethnicity, Hall has argued that there is no such thing
as a single, or unique black identity. On the contrary, just as the whole
idea of Britishness is now the subject of endless dispute, so also there
are endless debates about what it means, for example, to be black British.
Hall adopts a historical and sociological perspective in order to
understand of the global context in which individual and group identities
are fashioned:
"If the black subject and black experience are not stabilised
by Nature or by some other essential guarantee, then it must be the case
that they are constructed historically, culturally, politically - and the
term that refers to this is 'ethnicity'. The term ethnicity acknowledges
the place of history, language and culture in the construction of
subjectivity and identity..." (page 29)
British identity, he argues, was shaped, not by some essential quality
of Britishness, but by its
global network of trading and other relationships, especially with its
former colonies. British identity is, therefore, intrinsically related to
the historical structures and relations that underlie
migration.
Stuart Hall is therefore critical of those who argue that there is
- or ever has been - any such thing as a unified, national identity, such
as Britishness, or Englishness. The idea of a national culture or a
national identity is a
social construction, a device which allows something
as ethnically diverse and fragmented as, e.g. present day Britain, or USA,
to be represented as a unified entity - as one
nation.
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Headings
White and black subjects
History and sciology
Mixed race family and different colonial class fractions
Roland Barthes
Imaginary Oxford scholar - 1
- 2 -
3
Encoding and decoding
Popular Culture
White politics as creative a perfomance one:
Powellism
Two: Thatcherism
New Ethnicities
Black as reponse to white
New ethnicities:
The Passion of Remembrance
My Beautiful Laundrette
Sammy and Rosie Get Laid
Handsworth Songs
Dreaming Rivers
Theorising the issues:
The creativity of
representation
Identity and migration
Britishness
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