The Real Me PDF

1111 2 3 6 4 5 6 7 THE REAL ME 8 9 10 11 2 3 4 5 6 In the previous chapter we saw Hall considering the implications of 7111 the new times for an alternative politics of identity e...

1111 2 3 6 4 5 6 7 THE REAL ME 8 9 10 11 2 3 4 5 6 In the previous chapter we saw Hall considering the implications of 7111 the new times for an alternative politics of identity emphasising differ- 8111 ence over homogeneity, the local and transnational over the national, 9 contingent ‘positions’ over pure, fixed origins. These issues of iden- 20 tity became the linchpins of Hall’s research during the late 1980s and 1 1990s when he published around a dozen articles on the subject. In 2 these essays Hall moves away from the more specific concerns raised 3 in response to Thatcherism to pursue the metaphors of ethnicity 4 (already flagged up at the end of Hall’s ‘New Times’ essay) and dias- 5 pora within a broader post-colonial and multicultural context. 6 Ethnicity, diaspora, the post-colonial and the multicultural: these 7 intersecting concepts are explored, in turn, below in terms of a range 8 of Hall’s essays including ‘New ethnicities’ (1988), ‘Minimal selves’ 9 (1987) and ‘When was the “post-colonial”?’ (1996). First, though, we 30111 need to consider further a fifth concept introduced in the previous 1 chapter that is central to the first four: identity. 2 3 IDENTITY POLITICS AND THE POLITICS 4 OF IDENTITY 5 6 The position on identity that Hall takes at the end of ‘The meaning 7111 of New Times’ is not simply a political alternative to that embraced 118 KEY IDEAS by Thatcherism. It is also part of a more radical attempt to think beyond the structures associated with traditional ‘identity politics’. The notion of ‘identity politics’ emerges in the late 1960s and 1970s and is associated with new social movements in North America and Western Europe such as the women’s liberation movement and the rise of black consciousness. A traditional identity politics defines itself in terms of an absolute, undivided commitment to, and identi- fication with, a particular community; a group which presents a united front through the exclusion of all others. Phrases such as ‘it’s a black thing’, ‘it’s a gay thing’, ‘it’s a women’s thing’, carry the traces of a traditional identity politics in that they imply a group identity that is unified through exclusion. This kind of identity politics, based on an unbending solidarity, has many strengths and was particularly successful in placing black, women’s and gay rights on the political agenda. Nevertheless, such an identity politics also has built into it certain problems. Take, for example, the women’s liberation move- ment and the feminist politics associated with it. In the early 1980s, black feminists began to challenge this politics which relied upon the implicit assumption that all women were the same while either suppressing internal differences, or presenting them as Other. Within this context white feminists (they were no longer simply ‘feminists’) were accused of using ‘woman’ as a universal category, a process which involved forgetting the cultural specificity of their own speaking positions as white Western women. Essays such as Hazel Carby’s ‘White woman listen! Black feminism and the boundaries of sisterhood’ (1982), or the special issue of Feminist Review ‘Many voices, one chant: black feminist perspectives’ (Amos et al. 1984) boldly register the differences silenced within earlier feminist discourse. On one level, Hall’s work of the late 1980s and 1990s needs to be read as an attempt to rethink (not reject) this older notion of identity politics. In a sense, Hall’s work has always displayed a certain scepti- cism about politics committed to singular, homogeneous, unified identities such as ‘the’ working class, or ‘the’ black community. However, it is only in the late 1980s – and in line with the theoret- ical developments on subjectivity outlined in the previous chapter, that he seeks explicitly to define a new politics of identity: 1111 [The] recognition... of the impossibility of ‘identity’ in its fully unified 2 meaning, does, of course, transform our sense of what identity politics is 3 about. It transforms the nature of political commitment. Hundred-and-one 4 percent commitment is no longer possible... Looking at new conceptions of 5 identity requires us also to look at redefinitions of the forms of politics which 6 follow that: the politics of difference, the politics of self-reflexivity, a politics 7 that is open to contingency but still able to act. The politics of infinite 8 dispersal is no politics at all. 9 (MS: 117) 10 11 Hall’s politics of identity centres on three specific terms to which 2 he repeatedly returns in essays of this period: difference, self-reflexivity 3 and contingency. The politics of difference involves a recognition of the 4 ‘many’ within the ‘one’ and a rejection of clear-cut binary oppositions 5 that rigidly divide diverse communities into discrete unities: black/ 6 white, straight/gay, male/female. Differences are no longer external- 7111 ised, but internal to identities (both group and ‘individual’). Self- 8111 reflexivity involves foregrounding the specificity of the position from 9 which we speak: we can no longer assume a natural, universal speak- 20 ing position in this context. Contingency involves a sense of dependency 1 on other events or contexts, of recognising the political positions we 2 take up are not set in stone, that we may need to re-position ourselves 3 over time and in different circumstances. If the women’s liberation 4 movement was a progressive movement within one set of circum- 5 stances (see above), it was also a regressive movement within another. 6 These three terms – difference, self-reflexivity, contingency – are 7 central to an understanding of Hall’s alternative politics of identity 8 and will be fleshed out in relation to specific examples below. First, 9 though, it is crucial to recognise Hall’s final point in the quotation 30111 above that alone they are insufficient. ‘A politics of difference’, he 1 insists must be still able to act, the ‘politics of infinite dispersal is no 2 politics at all’. 3 4 DIFFERENCE THAT MAKES A DIFFERENCE 5 6 Difference, self-reflexivity and contingency are no innocent terms, 7111 but are derived from postmodern and poststructuralist theory which THE REAL ME 119 120 KEY IDEAS DIFFERENCE AND DIFFÉRANCE Difference is the key concept in Hall’s work on identity. His use of the term is carefully positioned in relation to, and derives much of its significance from, Jacques Derrida’s (non)concept of différance. In terms of structural- ism we have seen that language is a system of differences with no positive terms. The meaning of the signifier ‘hot’ is secured and made distinctive in terms of what it is not: cold. Derrida’s notion of différance exploits the ‘play’ of meaning in the French original which means both ‘to differ’ and ‘to defer’. Derrida’s différance underpins the logic of poststructuralism. Because meaning is not entirely present in the signifier ‘hot’, which derives its meaning from elsewhere in the chain of signification (‘cold’) language creates an endless deferral of meaning. Where structuralism allowed meaning to be fixed through a series of oppositions, meaning is always somewhere else for Derrida. We never arrive at the final signified which is perpetually postponed, deferred, slipping beyond our grasp. is, in turn, associated (particularly by Marxist critics) with the aban- donment of politics. This helps explain Hall’s qualifying remark above. Difference, Hall has insisted on more than one occasion, must be capable of making a difference. In his writings on identity, Hall is careful to distance himself from those poststructuralists (not Derrida, necessarily) who have used différance to mean the ‘infinite postponement of meaning’ (CID: 397) or to celebrate the ‘formal playfulness’ of texts at the expense of their political positions. Hall has spoken of ‘loosening the moorings’ (CP: 33) in this context, a metaphor which neatly captures his sense that identities are not firmly anchored or fixed to the spot, but are not entirely free-floating either. In his essay ‘Minimal selves’, Hall uses the grammatical image of the sentence in an extended metaphor that indicates his différance, that is his difference from and dependence on Derrida (for whom language is always primary): Is it possible for there to be action or identity in the world without arbitrary closure – what one might call the necessity to meaning of the end of the 1111 sentence? Potentially, discourse is endless: the infinite semiosis of meaning. 2 But to say anything in particular, you do have to stop talking. Of course every 3 full stop is provisional... It’s not forever, not totally universally true. It’s not 4 underpinned by infinite guarantees. But just now this is what I mean; this is 5 who I am... Full stop. OK. 6 (MS: 45) 7 8 Where a certain brand of postmodernism might emphasise the 9 endless deferral (‘infinite semiosis’) of meaning as it moves from posi- 10 tion to position, sentence to sentence, for Hall it is crucial to 11 remember that meaning is generated when it ‘stops’. This (full) stop 2 is never final or fixed, always arbitrary and contingent, but such posi- 3 tionings remain necessary to any politics of identity. This is why 4 self-reflexivity, contingency and difference alone are not enough for 5 Hall: ‘there has to be a politics of articulation’, a means of linking or 6 bringing together individuals to form new alliances. (Hall’s theory 7111 of identity is also based on an articulation, a bringing together of 8111 Derridean deconstruction, Gramscian hegemony and the work of 9 Laclau and Mouffe.) 20 Where in traditional identity politics such alliances were formed 1 through an emphasis on unity and the suppression of difference, Hall 2 prefers the idea of ‘ “unities”-in-difference’ (MS: 45). In this context, 3 identity is not nomadic, endlessly wandering or deferred; on the 4 contrary it recognises that: 5 every identity is placed, positioned, in a culture, a language, a history... It 6 insists on specificity, on conjuncture. But it is not necessarily armour-plated 7 against other identities. It is not tied to fixed, permanent, unalterable 8 oppositions. It is not wholly defined by exclusion. 9 (MS: 46) 30111 1 In short then, while the vocabulary of difference/différance that 2 Hall uses to rethink identity would seem to locate his work within a 3 broader developing theoretical debate over postmodern subjectivity 4 in the 1980s and 1990s, this would be to neglect its conjunctural char- 5 acter. Hall’s primary concern within his essays on identity is not with 6 keeping abreast of the latest theoretical trends, but with identifying 7111 and trying to explain certain historical shifts he sees taking place THE REAL ME 121 122 KEY IDEAS within the culture of the Caribbean and black British diaspora. In order to demonstrate Hall’s theories in practice now, we will con- sider one of Hall’s most influential statements on identity, ethnicity and diaspora: ‘New ethnicities’ (1988). NEW ETHNICITIES Where the term ‘race’ is usually associated with physical, or biolog- ical differences in such things as skin and eye colour, ‘ethnicity’ describes social or cultural differences that are not necessarily visible or grounded in nature. As it is used in ‘New ethnicities’, ethnicity is an anti-essentialist term, an attempt to understand the cultural construction of difference, rather than difference as a biological or racial marker that is fixed in our genes. ‘The term ethnicity acknowl- edges the place of history, language and culture in the construction of subjectivity as well as the fact that all discourse is placed, posi- tioned, situated, and all knowledge contextual’ (NE: 446). It is this understanding of ethnicity that allows Hall to offer a re-reading of a major category of difference – ‘black’ – not as a racial marker, a matter of pigmentation or skin colour, but as an historical and discur- sive ‘positioning’ that has shifted (and is therefore contingent) over history. More particularly, it allows him to locate ‘black’ within the British context at a significant historical conjuncture as an identity formation that is presently shifting from one position or context to another. ‘New ethnicities’ begins by tentatively describing this shift in terms of two moments that are overlapping rather than consecu- tive, but which viewed together indicate the re-positioning ‘black’ as a label of identification. The first moment saw the emergence of the term ‘black’ in Britain as: the organising category of a new politics of resistance, amongst groups and communities with, in fact, very different histories, traditions and ethnic iden- tities. In this moment, politically speaking, ‘The black experience’, as a singular and unifying framework based on the building up of identity across ethnic and cultural difference between different communities, became ‘hegemonic’ over other ethnic/racial identities. (NE: 441) 1111 In order to understand this first moment it is necessary to know that 2 while the label ‘black’ was imported from the US and shared many 3 of its American connotations, it also has a quite specific context (posi- 4 tion) and meaning in Britain where it has historically referred to 5 African, Caribbean and South Asian communities. These different 6 communities articulated themselves through the singular term black, 7 a positive identification (particularly apparent in 1970s’ slogans like 8 ‘black is beautiful’ and ‘black power’) that displaced earlier ones such 9 as ‘immigrants’ and ‘coloureds’. This investment in a unified black 10 community is a concrete example of the traditional identity politics 11 outlined earlier. It places an emphasis on unity rather than difference, 2 while reversing the oppositional logic of racism through the construc- 3 tion of an essentially good black subject and an essentially bad white 4 subject. Hall is not dismissive of this politics; on the contrary, he 5 argues that historically it has been, and continues to be, a necessary 6 fiction in the struggle against racism in postwar Britain. Nevertheless, 7111 it remains a fiction, and one that, rather than deconstructing the polar 8111 structures of racism, reproduces them by inverting their logic. 9 Because black tends to operate as a universal, racial signifier in this 20 moment, it fails to see its own constructedness (it is not self-reflexive), 1 the positions out of which it emerges and from which it speaks. 2 The second moment (which emerges roughly from the mid-1980s) 3 Hall describes as ‘the end of the innocent notion of the essential black 4 subject’: 5 6 What is at issue here is the recognition of the extraordinary diversity of 7 subjective positions, social experiences and cultural identities which 8 compose the category ‘black’; that is, the recognition that ‘black’ is essen- 9 tially a politically and culturally constructed category which cannot be 30111 grounded in a set of fixed trans-cultural or transcendental categories and 1 which therefore has no guarantees in nature. 2 (NE: 443) 3 4 This second moment suggests a shift in the positioning of ‘black’ from 5 a traditional identity politics predicated on unity to one that is closer 6 to the second politics of identity outlined earlier by Hall and which 7111 is predicated on difference. This is a politics of identity that is both THE REAL ME 123 124 KEY IDEAS self-reflexive (in that it is founded on the recognition that ‘black’ is essen- tially constructed) and contingent (in that it cannot be grounded in a set of fixed categories). In the first moment black was a ‘hegemonic’ term. That is, it operated through, while concealing a set of power relations between certain identities: it saw particular ethnicities become dominant over others. To put this in concrete terms, ‘black’ as it was used in the 1970s and early 1980s tended to privilege African-Caribbean over South Asian ethnicities, male and masculinist gender positions over female and feminist ones and ‘straight’ over queer sexualities. ‘Black’ in this first moment depended on the subordination of certain speaking posi- tions in order to forge a positive and coherent identity politics. The work of reggae musician and poet, Linton Kwesi Johnson is closely associated with this first moment in Britain. His poems were often performed at black demonstrations and protests and work to provide a communal, ‘representative’ black voice that is united in opposition to a wider white racist culture. For example, ‘It dread inna Inglan’ was a poem first performed in Bradford at a protest to free George Lindo, a Jamaican wrongly convicted of armed robbery in the 1970s. It speaks of the solidarity of the black community in the face of white hostility: rite now, African Asian West Indian an Black British stan firm inna Inglan (Johnson 2002: 25) The poem was part of a larger body of cultural production articu- lating positive black identification across a range of ethnicities in the 1970s. Nevertheless, and without wanting to dispute the radical polit- ical importance of the hegemonic, collective black identity mobilised through such work, this was often at the expense of other speaking positions. For example, Johnson’s poem was eventually published in the collection Inglan is a Bitch, a title that adopts an empowering, 1111 racially oppositional rhetoric that simultaneously denigrates women, 2 white and black. It speaks in an aggressively male, masculinist register 3 that relies upon the suppression of alterity. 4 From the mid-1980s we find an increasing proliferation and recog- 5 nition of these subordinate identities and the erosion of ‘black’ as a 6 natural, fixed identification. It is no coincidence then that ‘New 7 ethnicities’ cites the work of Hanif Kureishi – a British-born South 8 Asian artist of dual heritage (Pakistani father, English mother) famous 9 for his foregrounding of queer sexualities – as exemplary in terms 10 of this shift. Before we consider Kureishi’s work and its relation- 11 ship to the shifting identity politics outlined above, we first need to 2 consider the debates around representation in relation to which Hall’s 3 two moments are (discursively) positioned. 4 5 THE BURDEN OF REPRESENTATION 6 7111 Hall’s thoughts on the shifting politics of identity in ‘New ethnicities’ 8111 are not based on anthropological studies of actual ‘flesh-and-blood’ 9 people but arise out of a consideration of black British film in the 20 1980s. First and foremost then, his is an account of ethnicity as it is 1 produced within representation. This does not make his account of iden- 2 tity any less ‘real’. For Hall there is no understanding of identity 3 outside of culture and representation, a fact he sometimes makes 4 explicit through his use of the phrase ‘cultural identity’. 5 ‘New ethnicities’ describes representation as a ‘slippery character’ 6 and the essay puts into operation various meanings of the word. For 7 example, it distinguishes between the more conventional, ‘mimetic’ 8 notion of representation and a more radical postmodern version. In 9 the first, books, films and so on are understood as re-presentations, that 30111 is, reflections or reproductions of the real world ‘outside’ them. In 1 the second, there is nothing outside discourse. At stake here is the 2 end of representation as such: there is nothing beyond discourse which 3 books and films might be said to represent. Hall offers an alternative 4 to these two extremes: there is a real world outside representation 5 but we can only make it signify and ‘mean’ through representation. 6 Moreover, representations are not reflexive but constitutive and there- 7111 fore have a real, material impact. So, for Hall, it is not by chance that THE REAL ME 125 126 KEY IDEAS historically black culture in Britain has appeared marginal and infe- rior. It has been constituted or constructed as such through the dominant regimes of representation adopted and ‘normalized’ by institutions such as the media (NE: 441). Within these representa- tions the black experience is either absent or, when it does appear, stereotypical in character (e.g. The Black and White Minstrel Show). Blacks tend to be the objects (produced by) rather than subjects (the producers) of representation in this period. The major contribution of Hall’s essay is the connection it estab- lishes between these dominant modes of representation and the first and second moments of identification outlined above. ‘Culturally’, he argues, the construction of a hegemonic, or unified black identity ‘formulated itself in terms of a critique of the way blacks were posi- tioned as the unspoken and invisible “other” of predominantly white aesthetic and cultural discourses’ (NE: 441). Hall is making a link here between the marginal status of blacks to the dominant modes of repre- sentation and the construction of a representative black experience. ‘New ethnicities’ might be read as an exploration of the tension between representation as a process of artistic depiction (e.g. making a film) and representation as a form of delegation (speaking for the entire black community as a ‘representative’). Because the oppor- tunities ‘to come into representation’ were so few and far between, there was a certain burden placed on black artists to be representa- tive and speak for the whole black community. Equally, there was a pressure to counter the ‘negative’ representations of blacks within mainstream culture with ‘positive’ black representations. These burdens of representation – very much in evidence in the work of Linton Kwesi Johnson – are entangled with a traditional identity poli- tics in terms of their emphasis on black unity rather than difference and on the empowering, positive aspects of that identity. The second moment involves a shift from the ‘struggle over the relations of representation to a politics of representation itself’ (NE: 442). This shift involves a move from the mimetic view of represen- tation to the view that representation plays a constitutive role in the construction of ‘black’ identity. There is a tendency in the represen- tations of the first moment to try to ‘tell it how it really is’. This is evident in the desire to ‘document’ the plight of the black community 1111 witnessed already in Johnson’s work. In a similar context, black 2 British film critic Kobena Mercer has noted how realism was the 3 dominant genre of the first black film makers of the 1970s, who used 4 the documentary tradition to ‘correct’ black stereotypes circulated 5 within the mainstream media (Mercer 1988, 1994; Mercer and Julien 6 1988). These realist forms of representation implicitly assume there 7 is an authentic, ‘true’ black subject ‘out there’ to be rescued from the 8 lies and fictions of racist society. 9 A politics of representation, on the other hand, proceeds with the 10 recognition that ‘black’ is a discursively produced category con- 11 structed through representation, not something that is outside it, and 2 that it is the duty of representation to render as authentically as 3 possible. Black films of the 1980s such as Handsworth Songs (1987) and 4 Territories (1984), which are both cited in ‘New ethnicities’, exem- 5 plify this shift. Both take documentary footage circulated within the 6 white mainstream media and, rather than replace it with a more 7111 authentic documentary as happened in the earlier tradition, decon- 8111 struct it by ‘cutting-and-pasting’ the footage to produce fragmentary 9 narratives, or juxtaposing it with dissonant music. The effect is to 20 denaturalise the footage in order to expose the limits of the white 1 documentary tradition. At stake here is a mode of representation that 2 privileges quotation, pastiche and fragmentation in order to draw into 3 question the very idea of ‘the real’, to reveal the constructedness of 4 ‘black’ and the differences dominant representations of blackness have 5 concealed. In doing this such films display a recognition of the rela- 6 tionship between representation and power while seeking to contest 7 those powers by revealing the fictions on which they are based. 8 Where the struggle in the first moment involved a reversal of oppo- 9 sitional differences, ‘putting in the place of the bad old essential white 30111 subject, the new essentially good black subject’ (NE: 444), the sec- 1 ond moment emphasises the internal differences that cross and com- 2 plicate the supposedly unified category ‘black’ and recognises as 3 fictional the idea that all blacks are ‘good’ or all the ‘same’. Here, the 4 oppositional logic of the first moment unwittingly repeats the binary 5 them-and-us logic of racism, showing complicity with the racist 6 stereotype that ‘they all look the same’. The second moment seeks to 7111 deconstruct the logic of racism by exposing its basis in representation THE REAL ME 127 128 KEY IDEAS and therefore the position from which it speaks. This reveals the uni- versalising, transcendental tendencies of dominant Western dis- courses (such as the documentary tradition) which claim to speak for all while emerging from specific contexts. Ethnicity does not just refer to black people in this context. If ‘white’ or ‘English’ have tradition- ally been transcendental categories they now must recognise them- selves as ethnically marked (see Dyer 1997). CHEERING FICTIONS: MY BEAUTIFUL LAUNDRETTE In its closing paragraph, Hall’s essay cites Hanif Kureishi’s film My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) as exemplary of the shift in the politics of black representation taking place in the mid-to-late 1980s: My Beautiful Laundrette is one of the most riveting and important films produced by a black writer in recent years... precisely for the reason that made it so controversial: its refusal to represent the black experience as monolithic, self-contained, sexually stabilised and always ‘right on’ – in a word, always and only positive. (NE: 449) The film tells the story of a gay relationship between the white working-class Johnny and the budding Asian entrepreneur Omar within the context of the homophobic and racially intolerant culture associated with Thatcherism in the mid-1980s. What is radical about My Beautiful Laundrette is its refusal to take sides, the way it disrupts the conventional binarisms associated with the first moment of repre- sentation by refusing to subscribe to the orthodox equation between good black/bad white subjects. For instance, by presenting some Asians as chauvinistic, materialistic businessmen capitalising on an exploitative enterprise culture, as ‘drug dealers, sodomites and mad landlords’, the film refuses a positive, ‘right on’ version of black cul- ture. For example, it confidently shatters the ‘expected’ narrative of Asians as the victims of an uncaring Thatcherism. More generally the film’s handling of South Asian ethnicities, of queer sexualities and of aspirational middle-class culture all disrupt the hegemonic represen- 1111 tation of ‘black’ in the first moment as African-Caribbean, as male and 2 masculinist and as working class. In an essay tellingly entitled ‘Dirty 3 washing’ (quoted in ‘New ethnicities’), Kureishi speaks of the need 4 to move beyond the ‘cheering fictions’ associated with the first 5 moment: ‘the writer as public relations officer, as hired liar... a seri- 6 ous attempt to understand Britain today... can’t apologise or ideal- 7 ize. It can’t sentimentalize and it can’t represent only one group as 8 having a monopoly on virtue’ (NE: 449). The second moment of rep- 9 resentation provocatively evoked here by Kureishi in the mid-1980s 10 has become increasingly popular within contemporary British Asian 11 film and television. Meera Syal et al.’s Goodness Gracious Me! (1996) 2 and Anita and Me (2002), Gurinder Chadha’s Bhaji on the Beach (1993) 3 and Bend it Like Beckham (2002), and Ayub Khan’s East is East (2000), 4 all prefer to satirise British Asian culture rather than defend or ide- 5 alise it. In different ways each of these films also embraces the new 6 politics of identity signalled in Hall’s ‘New ethnicities’, highlighting 7111 the internal differences and contingent positions of a community 8111 which is no longer self-contained or monolithic. 9 This is not to say the artists of this second moment are somehow 20 ‘better’, or more complex. The burden of representation has, in some 1 ways, become lighter for this new generation of artists, who through 2 the advent of institutions like Channel 4 have gained increasing access 3 to the dominant modes of cultural expression. Hall’s work of the 4 1980s and 1990s has been quick to register this shift, which also helps 5 to explain a shift in his own thinking. Where previously Hall’s work 6 on ‘race’ had tended to focus on the issue of blacks as the product, 7 or object of media discourses (as in Policing the Crisis), from the mid- 8 1980s it tends to focus more specifically on the aesthetics of black 9 cultural production itself, particularly photography and film (see Hall 30111 1984 and 1993, and Hall and Bailey 1992, for example). 1 2 DIASPORA AESTHETICS 3 4 Hall’s recent focus on the aesthetics of black cultural production 5 does not indicate a retreat from politics. As the account of Hall’s work 6 on the politics of representation above should indicate, aesthetics 7111 and politics are interdependent issues. Among other things ‘New THE REAL ME 129 130 KEY IDEAS ethnicities’ proposes two moments in the politics of identity and both are bound up with issues of representation. The first moment (iden- tity politics) is characterised by a realist aesthetic and the second (the politics of identity) by a postmodern aesthetic. As we have seen in this chapter, though, Hall is suspicious of the totalising claims of post- modernism and ‘New ethnicities’ ultimately signals the difference and cultural specificity of the forms in which it is interested through the concept of diaspora. In ‘New ethnicities’, Hall uses diaspora as a metaphorical rather than a literal concept to foreground an anti-essentialist notion of iden- tity and representation that privileges journey over arrival, mobility over fixity, routes rather than roots. As he puts it elsewhere: ‘dias- pora does not refer us to those scattered tribes whose identity can only be secured in relation to some sacred homeland to which they must at all cost return, even if it means pushing other people into the sea’ (CID: 401). Rather, Hall uses diaspora to signal an aesthetic that BLACK BRITISH FILM Hall’s most recent thinking on identity, diaspora and the new politics of representation in black British cultural production has been highly influential in relation to a new generation of young black photographers and film makers during the 1980s and 1990s. Hall was involved with film workshops such as Sankofa in the 1980s, a collective that brought together Isaac Julien, Martina Attille and Maureen Blackwood, among others. As Isaac Julien recalls, ‘Stuart was an active supporter of the Ethnic Minority Arts Committee of the Greater London Council, who funded Sankofa originally. In particular he had argued for the support of the black arts in London’. Hall’s thinking had an impact on the making of Sankofa’s The Passion of Remembrance, a film Hall discusses in ‘New ethnicities’. Later films like Looking for Langston incorporate voice-overs by Hall, while in The Attendant, Hall makes a cameo appearance. Hall’s impact on the black arts in Britain is not limited to the 1980s however, but dates back at least as far as his involvement with the London-based Caribbean Artists Movement (CAM) in the late 1960s and 1970s. 1111 DIASPORA 2 3 ‘Diaspora’ has its roots in the Greek word ‘diaspeiran’, ‘dia’ meaning over 4 or through and ‘speiren’ meaning sow or scatter. As this etymology 5 suggests, diaspora places an emphasis on movement and migration over 6 soil and settlement. While until relatively recently diaspora was used 7 quite specifically to refer to the dispersal of the Jews, it has become an 8 increasingly diasporic concept, referring to a range of global migrations 9 (black, Asian, Caribbean, Irish, African, etc.) and travelling concepts 10 (routes, crossings, borders). Hall uses it both literally (e.g. to refer to the 11 specific composition of the Caribbean diaspora community (see Hall 1975 2 and 1978)) and metaphorically (e.g to refer to the radical impurity of black 3 cinematic forms). Either way, his use of the term tends to evoke a tension 4 with the notion of nation and national identity as something pure, self- 5 contained and unified. When he says ‘The Caribbean is the first, the 6 original and the purest diaspora’ (Hall 1995: 6), he is registering the exem- 7111 plary character of the Caribbean as a diaspora community born out of 8111 global migrations from elsewhere, through the ironic use of a nationalist 9 rhetoric of origins and purity. 20 1 2 3 he sees as increasingly prominent in cinematic representations by 4 Caribbean and black British artists, an aesthetic that foregrounds 5 difference, hybridity, blends and cross-overs. At the same time, Hall 6 has put clear water between his use of the term and the celebratory 7 reading of diaspora offered within some accounts of postmodernism 8 and post-colonialism where the migrant is a cosmopolitan nomad. In 9 contrast to the rootless nomadic subject, Hall qualifies his position by 30111 noting that even diaspora discourse is placed and, as we have already 1 seen, his notion of new ethnicity foregrounds the positionality and 2 contextuality of diaspora identities rather than a ‘free-floating’ 3 subject. Equally significant is the political context in which he uses 4 diaspora vocabularies in ‘New ethnicities’ as an alternative to the 5 nation-centred ‘hegemonic concept of “Englishness” which, under 6 Thatcherism, stabilizes so much of the dominant political and cultural 7111 discourses’ (NE: 447). THE REAL ME 131 132 KEY IDEAS THE POST-COLONIAL AND THE MULTICULTURAL This chapter closes with a brief account of some of the main devel- opments in Hall’s thinking since the mid-1990s. Published in 1996, ‘When was “the post-colonial”?: thinking at the limit’ appears in many ways a logical direction for Hall’s work to take. Not only do his writ- ings on diaspora and identity discussed above refer us to some of the key figures (from Frantz Fanon and Aimé Cesairé to Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak) associated with ‘the post-colonial’, it is within post-colonial studies that this work on identity has perhaps been most influential. However, the essay is ultimately less a post-colonial analysis then it is an attempt to analyse ‘the post-colonial’ as a concept. At its most literal, the post-colonial seems to refer to the period after formal colonisation has ended. For example, India went from being a colonial to a post-colonial country in 1947, following inde- pendence from the British empire. However, as Hall explains, the problem is that more often than not the term ‘doesn’t mean what it obviously means’ (Hall 1999: 1). If we live in a period after colonial- ism, then what about neocolonialism? Why do so many post-colonial critics rarely stray from colonial discourse? Is the US post-colonial? In short, where and when (note the tense of Hall’s title) exactly, is/was ‘post-colonial’? It is within this context that Hall works, not to define the term, but to explore and ‘clarify’ what it has meant and what it might mean in future. ‘The post-colonial’ is placed in inverted commas, both to register a broader sense of the term’s indeterminacy within the academy and to signal his use of it as a concept ‘under erasure’. This is a deconstructive, Derridean move that allows Hall both to indicate the limits, silences and problems with the concept, and suggest there is no other better term available. Hall’s intervention comes at a specific moment within the history of post-colonial studies, a fact that is only acknowledged obliquely in the essay but which is helpful to an understanding of it. It appears following the rapid institutionalisation of the field during the early 1990s (a trajectory paralleled by cultural studies) which provoked a critical backlash against many of the concepts and theories of its main 1111 practitioners. One of the main accusations was that post-colonial 2 studies lacks political foundation, preferring instead a celebratory 3 aesthetics of hybridity and diaspora. ‘When was the “post-colonial”?’ 4 might be read on one level as a defence of the political possibilities 5 of ‘post-colonial’. More generally, though, the essay seeks to clarify 6 the meaning of the post-colonial concept to consider what are the 7 term’s historical and geographical ‘limits’ (where does it begin and 8 end?) and, more importantly, how the field delimits or divides up 9 the world. 10 For example, the essay begins by recapping the ‘case against’ the 11 post-colonial via the work of three prominent critics in the field. Ella 2 Shohat and Anne McClintock criticise the term for its imprecision, its 3 blurring of the boundaries between coloniser/colonised and colonial/ 4 post-colonial, for instance. The effect of this, they suggest, is that the 5 term loses its specificity and becomes universalised. In addition to 6 these criticisms, Arif Dirlik accuses post-colonialism of being a ‘cele- 7111 bratory’, poststructuralist discourse that neglects the workings of 8111 capital and relies upon a discursive understanding of identity. 9 Meanwhile, all three criticise the field for marketing the margins 20 in a way that makes them complicit with, rather than critical of, the 1 ‘centre’. 2 Hall responds by arguing that while such criticism needs to be 3 taken seriously, it nevertheless relies upon a nostalgic call for a return 4 to ‘real’ politics, ‘hard’ facts and a clear division between ‘us’ and 5 ‘them’. What is useful about the ‘post-colonial’ concept, Hall 6 suggests, is the way it moves away from a binaristic understanding of 7 difference to a sense of différance that disrupts oppositional limits like 8 here/there, then/now. The difference between anti-colonial and 9 post-colonial struggle involves a shift from ‘one conception of differ- 30111 ence to another’ (WWP: 247). If the terms of Hall’s analysis here 1 seem to embrace poststructuralism at the expense of Marxism, it is 2 worth noting that he also couches his argument in Gramscian terms, 3 suggesting that Shohat et al. risk retreating from a ‘war of position’ 4 to a ‘war of manoeuvre’ (WWP: 244) by exchanging contingent posi- 5 tionalities for a fixed and final position. This retreat, Hall suggests, 6 fails to learn from the lessons of the recent past, which has shown the 7111 folly of binaristic thinking. Responding to Shohat’s call for ‘clear “lines THE REAL ME 133 134 KEY IDEAS in the sand” between (post-colonial) goodies and (Western) baddies’ within the context of the Gulf War in 1993, Hall argues the war actually represented a ‘classic’ post-colonial event, precisely because it eroded such lines. The Gulf War demanded a recognition of the atrocities of the US against the Iraqi people in defence of oil and Saddam Hussein’s atrocities against his own people. This is not the same as arguing that the post-colonial is any time or any place and Hall concedes the point that there is a universalising tendency in the concept and a need to discriminate and delimit: clearly if the US, Britain and Jamaica are all ‘post-colonial’ then they are not so in the same way. In this sense, we need to attend to the unevenness of the term and be explicit about the level of abstraction we intend when using it (WWP: 245). Discrimination in the use of the term ‘post-colonial’ should be descriptive rather than evaluative. This involves recognising that colonisation, like decolonisation, is a global process, rather than something that simply unfolds overseas. In this context, Hall provocatively challenges current trends in the field by suggesting the concept should be universalising (which is not to say universal), that is, capable of abstraction. The post-colonial allows us to re-think colonialism ‘as part of an essentially transnational, tran- scultural “global” process [that] produces a decentred, diasporic or global re-writing of earlier nation-centred imperial narratives. “Global” here does not mean universal, but it is not nation – or society – specific either’ (WWP: 247). The intricate theoretical arguments of ‘When was the “post- colonial”?’ have been taken in a more obviously pragmatic direction in Hall’s most recent work as a member of the Runnymede Commission on ‘The future of multi-ethnic Britain’ (see The Future of Multi-ethnic Britain: The Parekh Report (2000)). The Parekh Report was part of a broader body of research conducted by Hall between 1998 and 2000 on what he has termed ‘the multicultural question’. Hall argues that while multiculturalism seems a tired, overused category, rethought, it ‘contain[s] the seeds of a major disruption in our normal common sense political assumptions’ (TMQ: 1). Hall points to the conjunctural significance of multicultural debates in terms of, for instance, the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry, the rise of racial tensions in the UK and Europe and the celebrations surrounding the Windrush 1111 anniversary in 1998. In doing so, he reveals that the multicultural 2 remains an unresolved, contradictory question. On the one hand, 3 there is what Hall terms a ‘multicultural drift’ as Britain’s black and 4 Asian communities become an increasingly visible feature of national 5 life, imagined in transient New Labour slogans like ‘Cool Britannia’. 6 On the other hand, Hall refers to the return of the kind of ‘common 7 sense policing’ that he associated with Thatcherism: tough on crime, 8 tough on the causes of crime. 9 Hall proceeds, as he does with ‘post-colonial’, by placing multi- 10 culturalism ‘under erasure’. He uses the word ‘adjectivally’ in order 11 to describe the cultural formations and political dilemmas that are a 2 consequence of the emergence of heterogeneous societies. In doing 3 so, he distances himself from the ‘substantive’ use of the term (multi- 4 culturalism) to refer to the various postwar policies developed to 5 ‘manage’ multicultural societies. Returning to the debates on global- 6 isation he first raised a decade earlier (see Chapter 5), Hall argues that 7111 difference, as much as homogeneity, is what characterises contem- 8111 porary society. The multicultural is not a policy decision, a life-style 9 choice, or a version of hybridity ‘where life is nothing so much as a 20 Scandinavian smorgasbord (help yourself)’, but an ‘inevitable process 1 of cultural translation’ (TMQ: 6). 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7111 THE REAL ME 135 136 KEY IDEAS SUMMARY In this chapter we have considered Hall’s move beyond traditional ‘identity politics’ in order to address an alternative ‘politics of identity’. Where traditional identity politics involves 100 per cent commitment to, and identification with, a particular cultural group or collective, Hall’s politics of identity stresses difference, self-reflexivity and contingency. Focusing on Hall’s ‘New ethnicities’ essay, this chapter has illustrated how these different notions of identity have been articulated within a black British context. Hall’s essay identifies a shifting burden of repre- sentation within black cultural production across the postwar period, from a mimetic realism privileging ‘authenticity’ to a more self-reflexive mode of representation that foregrounds the constructedness of identity. Through a consideration of the work of Linton Kwesi Johnson and Hanif Kureishi, we pursued the correspondence between a shift in the politics of identity and a shift in the politics of representation. Finally, this chapter considered some of Hall’s most recent contributions to debates on post-colonialism and multiculturalism.