Date: Wed, 18 Oct 2000 15:31:03 +1000
Subject: The Guardian on Stuart Hall



The Guardian profile: Stuart Hall

http://www.guardianunlimited.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4038064,00.html

Prophet at the margins
He was born in Jamaica to a family whose aspirations to white Englishness 
contributed to his sister's breakdown. After Oxford he became a renowned 
leftist thinker on race, culture and Britain's postcolonial traumas. Maya 
Jaggi reports on the black icon who predicted the rise of Thatcher and now 
warns of hard times ahead
Maya Jaggi
Guardian
Saturday July 8, 2000
A decade ago, while Stuart Hall was teaching at the Open University, he 
began to be inundated with tempting offers of lucrative chairs at US 
universities. But the professor, a beacon of inspirational mentoring on TV 
in the small hours, chose to stay in Britain.
"From the Caribbean to England is one huge cultural gulf; did I really feel 
like crossing another?" he says. "America is an imperial culture now; it's 
what Rome must have felt like, or England in the 19th century. But I feel 
better taking a sighting on the world from the periphery than the centre."
Hall's sightings from the peripheries of colonial Jamaica, which he left 
almost 50 years ago, nascent black Britain and an England in post-imperial 
decline have not only helped to redefine the relationship of culture to 
power but to rewrite what he calls "the margins into the centre, the 
outside into the inside", in a "more global version of our island story".
He challenges others, as he did the culture secretary, Chris Smith, at an 
Arts Council discussion of "heritage" last November, to re-imagine 
Britishness or Englishness itself "in a more profoundly inclusive manner".
Harvard's head of African-American studies, Henry Louis Gates, named Hall 
in the New Yorker as "black Britain's leading theorist of black Britain". 
But Hall, an icon for black British artists and intellectuals over 35 
years, not only traces Britain's transformation by post-war migrants, but 
tilts at myths about the society into which they came.
Questioning both the idea of a single way of being black, and of a fixed, 
white "majority culture", he holds up a different mirror to that envisioned 
by many Britons, black and white.
"Britain is not homogeneous; it never was a society without conflict," he 
says. "The English fought tooth and nail over everything we know of as the 
English political virtues - rule of law, free speech, the franchise. The 
very notion of Great Britain's 'greatness' is bound up with empire. 
Euroscepticism and Little Englander nationalism could hardly survive if 
people understood whose sugar has flowed through English blood and rotted 
English teeth. They are us and we are them. This never was a tiny, 
self-sufficient island."
Retired from the Open University in 1997, and now an emeritus professor, 
Hall sits on the Runnymede Trust's commission on the future of multi-ethnic 
Britain, which reports this autumn. "One of the most important debates over 
the last 20 years has been what does it mean to be English, and the 
relationship to declining imperial power: what it is to have been master of 
the world, and now second-rate, underpins so many social events - from the 
Falklands to football hooliganism."
At 68, arthritis doesn't seem to have diminished Hall's energy, whether 
"conversing" with his grandson Noah, who is nearly two, or leading the way 
to his attic study in West Hampstead with the aid of a stick. His agile 
mental leaps and easy laughter reveal a love of conversation.
He receives a tribute later this month in a book of essays, Without 
Guarantees, edited by Paul Gilroy, Angela McRobbie - both former students - 
and Lawrence Grossberg. It is a mark of his influence that its contributors 
span the globe, from Australia and Italy to Mexico and Taiwan. While his 
own writings are diffuse - collaborative or found in copiously reprinted 
nuggets - Hall relishes his role as an "enabler" of others' work.
His interests in cultural identity, race and ethnicity have come 
increasingly to the fore, but he was a pioneer of both Britain's new left 
in the 50s and the pathbreaking academic field of cultural studies that 
grew from it and is now burgeoning yet beleaguered, mocked for its meld of 
high theory and "low" culture - "Gramsci meets Coronation Street", as one 
cynic put it.
Yet, today's "commonsense" recognition of the power of television and 
tabloids owes much to Hall. His lifelong insistence that institutions have 
their own cultures is enshrined in the notion of institutional racism in 
the Macpherson report, which came out of the inquiry into the killing of 
Stephen Lawrence.
Hall was born in 1932 in Kingston, Jamaica, the youngest of three children. 
His father, Herman, was a scholarship boy who joined the United Fruit 
Company and became chief accountant. Hall says, "His family were 
respectable 'brown Jamaicans' from a lower-middle-class village, and he was 
upwardly mobile."
In what Hall sees as "pre-independence recruitment of the cleverest local 
boys", Herman was the first "coloured" Jamaican to be promoted to every 
post he held. Hall's mother, Jessie, "was from a completely different class 
fraction; only two generations from some white forebears". Her family 
lacked "the money to go with their status" so she was adopted by a lawyer 
uncle and moved to a big house in Port Antonio (now owned by Eartha Kitt) 
with a "palm-fringed drive by the sea".
"This gave her peculiar airs and graces as the adopted daughter of a 
landowner, whereas my father was more an aspiring local boy. It was a 
continuous source of tension in our family. He could never earn enough to 
guarantee her the status she thought she deserved."
Hall remembers being a "depressed adolescent": "The family aspirations were 
oriented towards England; my mother felt she was all but white. We were to 
aspire upwards, and have little to do with brown - or certainly black - 
Jamaicans." But Hall was formed by a Jamaica already moving into independence.
He squirmed as his father was patronised by white people, and by brown 
people earning more than him, "and he didn't know it". He chose his own 
friends. "My mother was an extraordinarily powerful person; she devoured 
us. But she said she had most respect for me because I fought her."
Hall, the rebel, was also the "blackest member" of his family, greeted by 
his sister, Patricia, at birth as a "coolie baby".
"I would never have named colour but I was aware of it all my life; 
Jamaican society was finely graded by colour. I was different, an 
interloper, and I must have internalised this. I felt as if I were a kind 
of stranger in my own family."
When he was 17 his sister had a nervous breakdown after the family barred 
her incipient relationship with a medical student from Barbados who was 
"middle-class but black".
She was given electric shock treatment, from which Hall says she never 
recovered. It left him with a sense of helplessness and guilt. "My sister 
kept washing her hands; she's still like that in her 70s. The psychic guilt 
was transposed into a physical sensation. I pieced the story together: it's 
what the family's done to her, but I couldn't make her angry about it. She 
looked after our father and mother till they died, then my brother George, 
who went blind, till he died. She never left home, and never had another 
relationship."
Hall sees the trauma of witnessing colonial aspirations "break" his sister 
as seminal in his belief that social structures are lived through the 
psyche, through emotions and cultural identifications.
"Later, when I read RD Laing about psychological disorder as a cultural 
system - one person takes on the dysfunction of a whole society - it all 
fell into place. It crystallised my feelings about not fitting in. At that 
point I left home. I said, if you get drawn back into the family, you'll be 
eaten alive." In 1951 Hall voyaged with his mother to Bristol, clad in a 
"brown felt hat and overcoat", and thence to Oxford, "the motor that 
creates Englishness".
His first impression of the landscape he knew from literature was that "I'd 
seen it before in some other life". But it was three years after the Empire 
Windrush had disgorged its cargo of West Indian immigrants, and in the 
streets of Paddington that first "terribly grey and gloomy" August day, he 
remembers "groups of black men in hats, who weren't students but working 
people, and women in their finery, dressed up to travel".
A Rhodes scholar in English, he survived the shock of Oxford's medieval 
gloom by befriending Americans and other West Indians, "huddled together to 
make sense of England".
He played jazz piano with a group including two Jamaican bus drivers, and, 
as the Bajan writer George Lamming put it, "became West Indian" in Britain, 
saturating himself in anti-colonial politics with diverse islanders - 
though he recalls one aloof Trinidadian contemporary, VS Naipaul, who 
"wasn't interested in affirming a West Indian consciousness; he was on 
different tracks".
As a postgraduate scholar Hall became involved with an anti-Stalinist, 
independent left. He argued with orthodox Marxists for reducing culture to 
"a decorative addendum to the 'hard world' of production and things".
He says: "I was never attracted to join the Communist party. I had a debate 
with [the late historian] Raphael Samuel about class which we had for the 
rest of his life; the old class system no longer explained a time of 
modern, consumer-oriented capitalism."
In 1956, when Britain invaded Suez and Soviet tanks rolled into Hungary, 
"it crystallised what we were saying about imperialism not being finished, 
and the Soviet Union being a totalitarian power. We were against both." The 
pro-Soviet communists crumbled, and Hall became a founding editor of what 
would be New Left Review.
"It was the beginning of the new left, which was interested in rising 
consumerism, Britain looking more like the US, the coming of mass culture 
and television - and whether it was changing the working class. People 
identified it with classically English figures: Edward Thompson, Raymond 
Williams - though he was Welsh. But looking back, our orientation was 
driven by voices that didn't quite fit in: foreigners from Sudan, Syria, 
west Africa, the West Indies, Jewish or provincial, Scottish, Irish."
Hall had abandoned his thesis on Henry James, and worked as a supply 
teacher in Brixton, south London. Michael Rustin, who became his 
brother-in-law and co-edits Soundings magazine with him, recalls "an air of 
excitement with the coming together of the old left and a younger 
generation where everything was being connected up: there was cinema, with 
Lindsay Anderson and Karel Reisz, and radical theatre, with Arnold Wesker".
Hall says: "I'd always gone to the movies as a child; I saw every 40s 
melodrama, every Bogart and Bette Davis. I became interested in the impact 
of television, new mass magazines, teenage culture."
After editing New Left Review for two years, he left in 1961 to teach film 
and allied media ("no one would dare put television in the title") at 
Chelsea College, and remembers lecturing on westerns in Wandsworth prison 
("It was a riot, I loved it"). He did research for the British Film 
Institute on how to teach popular culture, co-writing the innovative book 
The Popular Arts (1964).
When Richard Hoggart founded the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies 
at Birmingham University in 1964, he invited Hall to be its research 
fellow. Hoggart describes Hall as one of the best lecturers in England and 
an extraordinarily charismatic personality - "he has a brilliant theoretic 
mind".
After Hoggart went to Unesco in 1968, Hall took over as director, staying 
till 1979, when he left to be sociology professor of the Open University. 
They were "heady days", Hall recalls. "We made the curriculum up. It was 
the inauguration of, not a discipline, but a field of inquiry that, unlike 
fine art, is interested in how culture organises everyday life.
It was a very creative moment." Noting the backlash from older disciplines, 
he concedes with a laugh: "There is a ferocious amount of crap written in 
any field." But he adds: "The way in which culture organises social 
practice has come to be seen as crucial."
Hoggart's Uses Of Literacy (1957) was a pillar, along with the work of 
Raymond Williams and EP Thompson. Yet relatively ignored by the founding 
triumvirate was mass migration - which Hall has called "the world 
historical event of late modernity".
Paul Gilroy, professor of African-American studies and sociology at Yale, 
says: "Stuart was the fourth figure; his postcolonial formation and 
experience of migrancy, and his attention to race, gave the critical 
understanding of the workings of England a very different slant."
Hall had met his wife-to-be, Catherine Barrett - now a social historian - 
on a CND march at Aldermaston: 13 years his junior, she was beginning a 
degree at Sussex. They married in 1964, and she transferred to Birmingham, 
where they went on to have two children: Rebecca, now doing a PhD on the 
"mulatto" in English fiction, and Jess, a cameraman. But the newly-weds 
arrived in the midst of the Smethwick by- election, when the Tory candidate 
unseated a minister with the slogan: "If you want a nigger neighbour vote 
Labour."
Hall says: "Catherine and I, a mixed-race couple, were looking for cheap 
accommodation; it was a very unpleasant experience. I was aware of the 
bubbling up of race into politics. There were problems of housing, racial 
discrimination, policing, the 'sus' laws; a second generation feeling they 
neither belonged in England nor anywhere else; the influence of reggae and 
Rastafarianism. It was impossible to be active and alive in Birmingham 
without being drawn into all that."
One seminal study arose from the "moral panic" over street crime, when 
three teenagers - one of whom was black - were given 10-year sentences for 
robbery. "It triggered and was fed by wider fears - the youth revolution of 
the 60s and that Britain was being fundamentally changed by the presence of 
black people. It tapped into a long-term sense of decline. That's where we 
discover the question of Englishness as the central problem underlying 
British politics.
I thought if some politician decided to speak to these unspoken fantasies 
and fears in a popular language, you'd have a major swing." It took until 
the late 70s for that politician to emerge. Policing The Crisis, co-written 
by Hall, was published in 1978, the year before Margaret Thatcher came to 
power. The book is widely seen as prescient about the drift into a "law and 
order society" and the advent of Thatcherism - what Hall came to call 
"authoritarian populism" - and its promise to put the "great" back into 
Britain.
He wrote: "Blacks become the bearers, the signifiers of the crisis of 
British society in the 1970s... the means by which the crisis is to be 
resolved - send it away." He feels the threat remains. "That's what Hague 
is searching for - the remaining shoots of that feeling, which feeds 
Euroscepticism and the fear of asylum-seekers."
Hall was accused of overplaying the ideological nature of Thatcherism. He 
responds: "Look at politics now. The left was restructured from below by a 
cultural shift; it wasn't just economics. I feel real aggression about 
political commentators who poured scorn on the notion of a cultural shift 
governing politics, who said Thatcherism was a blip. Most would accept now 
that Thatcherism, and its embrace of neo-liberalism, was a watershed."
New Times, the political movement Hall espoused with Martin Jacques and 
others in Marxism Today in the late 80s and early 90s, was attacked for 
learning too much from its opponents, not least in its embrace of 
consumerism. One of Hall's most per sistent critics, A Sivanandan of the 
Institute of Race Relations, called it "Thatcherism in drag".
Hall says: "It came out of impatience with the old left thinking it could 
take a stand on traditional working-class values when the right was making 
the running in its 'heartlands'. But it was a call to match the depth of 
ambition of change Thatcher tried to bring about, but from a different 
direction."
Hall, who sees the Blair government as "a historic opportunity lost", 
criticised New Labour on the eve of its election in 1997. "Tony Blair 
swallowed the message but forgot the tune," he says. Describing himself as 
an "egalitarian moderniser", he adds: "I've been a kind of socialist all my 
life, but not what people would call a revolutionary. I've always been 
suspicious of the dream of remaking society in an instant.
I'm interested in deep change, but I don't think intellectual work should 
be short-changed to prove a political point. To point towards complexity, 
ambiguity, unexpected consequences - that's intellectual vocation."
At Birmingham, teachers and postgraduates worked together in a "hothouse 
atmosphere", radically rethinking the field by taking into account feminism 
or race politics. Angela McRobbie, now professor of communications at 
Goldsmith's College, London, says: "Stuart was a figurehead who let you get 
on with it.
He challenged the relations of power in academic life." Hall, though, has 
cited successive "crises" with each intake of students, and feminists' 
"dawn raids", as among his reasons for leaving in 1979.
"I lived with a feminist," he says. "Catherine became involved in the new 
feminist movement, especially moving from active academic life to isolation 
at home with two children. We were anxious that feminist work be done at 
the centre, but that's different from rethinking cultural studies from a 
feminist viewpoint. We were three men - 'the bosses'.
It drove me wild to be placed in that false position." McRobbie says: "I 
was surprised Stuart seemed as hurt as he was. My memories were that 
everybody was in the firing line, but he felt he was being set up as a 
patriarch." The Open University seemed a natural home.
"My instincts were towards widening access to adult education. Birmingham 
was an intellectual elite, whereas the average age at the OU was 40, people 
who'd not been in a classroom since 16. It was an intellectual challenge."
A colleague, David Held, now politics professor at the LSE, says: "Stuart's 
an engaged public intellectual of a kind celebrated in Europe but of which 
the English are wrongly sceptical; a great communicator who shines on 
television and radio." Hall has not only taught media, but made astute use 
of it - from his BBC series on the Caribbean, Redemption Song, in the early 
90s, to his relaxed eloquence on Radio 4's Desert Island Discs in February.
He dissected how black people are represented on TV in It Ain't Half 
Racist, Mum - shown as a BBC 2 Open Door programme in 1979 - and Black And 
White In Colour, and his influence has grown on both sides of the Atlantic. 
Hall told a gathering of the Caribbean Artists Movement in 1968:
"The task of any intellectual and any writer in relation to [the next 
generations of West Indians in Britain] is to help them see, clarify, 
speak, understand and name the process that they're going through."
He believes that "cultural identity is not fixed, it's always hybrid [but] 
it comes out of a very specific historical formation", and he was possibly 
the first to appreciate the emerging hybrid identities of postwar Britain. 
He found a model in Caribbean culture: "Was it true West Indians had an 
identity crisis - neither European nor African in a 'pure' sense? I've 
written about the syncretism and creolisation of Caribbean culture all my 
life." For him, black communities are not some "ethnic minority culture" 
apart, but "in touch with their differences without being saturated by 
tradition; they are actively involved with every aspect of life around 
them, without the illusion of assimilation".
Gilane Tawadros, director of London's International Institute of Visual 
Arts (InIVA), which Hall chairs, says: "Stuart has an extraordinary ability 
to articulate the experiences of first, second and third-generation black 
Britons, their complexities and dynamism. He understood early on that you 
can't look at them as isolated in the 'margins' but part of a global 
diaspora, and that their presence was not just a challenge to Britain but 
created a new kind of Britishness that's internationally celebrated."
His ideas threw a lifeline to young artists. Tawadros adds: "At a time when 
art institutions were trying to bottle up what it meant to be black British 
or Asian British, when artists were frustrated at having to describe their 
work in terms of its 'Africanness' or 'Asianness', Stuart said that that 
experience, and its artistic expression, are more ambivalent; they draw on 
many things. He paved the way for the confidence of a new generation of 
artists, including Chris Ofili and Steve McQueen."
Hall took an early interest in diasporic artists in London, such as Ronald 
Moody, Aubrey Williams and Francis Souza, who he says have been "quietly 
written out of the record; not British enough for the Tate, not interna 
tional enough for Bankside". But he found growing affinities, and 
collaborated, with a younger generation, including the film makers Isaac 
Julien, John Akomfrah and Martina Attille; the visual artists Keith Piper 
and Sonia Boyce; and the photographers Mark Sealy, David A Bailey, Sunil 
Gupta and Ingrid Pollard.
"In the 80s black artists became preoccupied with identity, self-portraits, 
putting their own body in the frame," says Hall. "I was writing about 
identity and they were practising it. Racism is not just in the streets, 
it's written into how people recognise themselves. It made me more alert to 
the way artistic work is exploratory space in which ideas work themselves 
out. It brought me in touch with a huge creative explosion in literature, 
art, film."
In an influential talk at London's ICA in 1989, Hall insisted "blackness", 
far from being fixed in nature, was "politically and culturally 
constructed" - partly through unconscious desire, fantasy and memory. The 
same went for "whiteness": "We are all ethnically located." He was 
criticised for accepting the fracturing of a politically united black 
front. He says: "There is a danger of locking into ethnic enclaves, but 
also the possibility of making common cause. I'm interested in a politics 
that makes links without ignoring difference."
His stand is credited with freeing artists to speak from, but not for, 
black experiences, and giving crucial impetus to developing art criticism. 
Kobena Mercer, of New York University, says: "Stuart said films weren't 
good just because black people made them. It contributed to a culture of 
debate, not just celebration."
Hall is a voice cautioning against an "easy, celebratory spirit", warning 
instead of "hard, perhaps iron times to come". In his view, Britain is at a 
crossroads, marked by the 1998 Windrush celebrations and the pathologies 
exposed by the 1999 Macpherson report. What he calls multicultural drift - 
"the explosion of cultural diversity and difference which is our lived 
daily reality" - is no guarantee of peace or justice without the political 
will to see it through.
"Is Britain going to accept its diversity and become more humane? We don't 
yet know," he says. "Yes, things are better in some ways, but a lot of 
people feel left out. The five boys in the Stephen Lawrence case didn't 
have an O-level between them. People like them are not in the dot.com 
revolution. The only time they feel English is when they can kick shit out 
of the Dutch or the Belgians.
If you're serious about a multicultural society, you would address the 
sense of alienation of white working-class people, who have to be won to a 
new conception of themselves where Britain's not lording it from a 
gunboat." "I don't think identity's fixed, the real, true self," he 
reflects. "It's constructed from historical processes: I'm the sum of that 
boy called a 'coolie', the Rhodes scholar, the socialist from Jamaica. 
Every identity that feels so solid is the result of excluding things you 
could have been. I go back to Jamaica and adore it, but I couldn't be a 
Jamaican. I ache for a parallel life I could have lived. I also couldn't 
disappear into Englishness. I understand Britain; but I'm only British in a 
hyphenated way."
Hall feels a sense of homecoming - but never a settled one. "I never called 
myself black because no one in the Caribbean did then. I've come home to an 
identity I was never allowed to settle for; discovering I've become 
something I was all the time: a black intellectual, a migrant... People who 
are 68 should feel the ground solid under their feet. But I'm not surprised 
it feels shifting; it's the diasporic fate. More and more people feel life 
in this way."

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