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BLACK BRITISH, BROWN BRITISH AND BRITISH CULTURAL STUDIES

2009; Routledge; Volume: 23; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/09502380902950971

1466-4348

Roxy Harris,

Migration, Ethnicity, and Economy

Abstract Caryl Phillips has queried the absence, in British fiction of the 1950s and 1960s, of black and brown people from the British Commonwealth who had migrated to the UK in highly significant numbers in this period. His lament echoes earlier observations by Paul Gilroy critiquing similar 'strategic silences' in the work of the widely recognized major figures in British Cultural Studies – Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams and E.P. Thompson. However, puzzlingly, Gilroy appears to exempt Stuart Hall from this critique, despite Hall's exceptionally close connections to the three others. This article argues that, rather than being a matter for recriminations against individuals, the 'strategic silences' are part of a long and deep tradition in the serious analysis of Anglo-British culture. It is further claimed that this tradition continued in a different way even after the entry of 'race' and ethnicity into British Cultural Studies, and even after its later anti-essentialist manifestation. It is suggested that, throughout, a marked reluctance to engage with ordinary black and brown Britons as agentive speaking subjects is discernible. There has been some progress in resolving these problems by aligning the rich theoretical legacy of Hall, Gilroy and others on 'race' and ethnicity, with careful empirical work centring black and brown people as thinking social actors. However, these developments have been limited and slow to appear. Keywords: Stuart HallraceethnicityBritish Cultural StudiesBlack British'new ethnicities' Notes 1 A leading Conservative Party politician who rose to notoriety in the 1960s and 1970s as the hero of right wing racist currents who admired him for his outspoken opposition to the presence and continuing inward migration of black and Asian people. 2 Veteran journalist (b. 1923) who was once editor of the British national broadsheet newspaper The Sunday Telegraph. 3 Hall, himself has strongly hinted that the difficulties were personal and psychic as well as intellectual and political: 'It has taken a very long time, really, to be able to write in that way, personally. Previously, I was only able to write about it analytically. In that sense, it has taken me fifty years to come home. It wasn't so much that I had anything to conceal. It was the space I couldn't occupy, a space I had to learn to occupy' (reprinted in Morley & Chen 1996 Morley , D. Chen , K.-H. 1996 Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies , Routledge , London . [Google Scholar], p. 489). 4 The deliberations of all these individuals on English culture are dominated by deep anxieties about class relations and the potential displacement of bourgeois 'high' culture by working class 'low' culture and by extension a reduction in the quality and worldwide influence of English culture. The argument here is that these individuals completed their meditations on the nature of English culture at a time when Britain administered a worldwide empire whose black and brown people could travel only with documents marking them as British colonial subjects and as such must have been worthy of note in relation to these definitions of culture; it is not claimed that those named earlier are representatives of reactionary circles in England. On the contrary, in the context of their time they could be seen as, for the most part, cultural commentators with serious humane impulses. What is being suggested here is that with regard to the colonized peoples of Africa, Asia and the Caribbean they typically deployed discursive strategies of ignoring or belittling. For some exemplification see Arnold's 'Sweetness and Light' (1869) cited in Munns and Rajan (1995 Munns , J. & Rajan , G. 1995 A Cultural Studies Reader: History, Theory, Practice , London , Longman , 19 32 . [Google Scholar]), p. 26), Leavis (1943 Leavis , F. 1943 'Mass civilization and minority culture' Education and the University: A Sketch for an 'English School' , Cambridge , Cambridge University Press , appendix III , 141 171 . [Google Scholar], p. 143), Reith cited in Scannell and Cardiff (1991 Scannell , P. Cardiff , D. 1991 A Social History of British Broadcasting: Vol. 1. 1922–1939: Serving the Nation , Oxford : Basil Blackwell . [Google Scholar], pp. 7, 10), Briggs (1985 Briggs, A. 1985. The BBC: The First Fifty Years, Oxford: Oxford University Press. [Google Scholar], p. 138) and Eliot (1948 Eliot, T. S. 1948. Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, London: Faber and Faber. [Google Scholar], pp. 13, 63, 91). 5 Overwhelmingly Orwell's writing on the subject is labelled as being about the English, rather than the British, and would lead the reader to infer that he conflates the terms. 6 Interestingly, Orwell, unlike the others displayed a sharp reflexivity in his writing on the particularities of English culture (Orwell [1943]/1944] 1970 Orwell , G. 1970 'The English people' The Collected Essays Journalism and Letters of George Orwell. Vol. 3: As I Please. 1943–1945 , Harmondsworth , Penguin , 15 62 . (Originally published in 1943/1944. ) [Google Scholar], Orwell [1942] 1970b Orwell , G. 1970b 'The lion and the unicorn: Socialism and the English genius' The Collected Essays Journalism and Letters of George Orwell. Vol. 2: My Country Right or Left. 1940–1943 , Harmondsworth , Penguin , 74 134 . (Originally published in 1942. ) [Google Scholar]). Specifically, he was brutal and clear eyed about the basis of English imperial culture, 'What we always forget is that the overwhelming bulk of the British proletariat does not live in Britain, but in Asia and Africa … One gets some idea of the real relationship of England and India when one reflects that the per capita annual income in England is something over £80, and in India about £7. It is quite common for an Indian coolie's leg to be thinner than the average Englishman's arm. And there is nothing racial in this, for well-fed members of the same races are of normal physique; it is due to simple starvation. This is the system we all live on and which we denounce when there seems to be no danger of its being altered' (Orwell [1939] 1970 Orwell , G. 1970 'Not counting niggers' The Collected Essays Journalism and Letters of George Orwell. Vol. 1: An Age Like This. 1920–1940 , Harmondsworth , Penguin , 434 438 . (Originally published in 1939.) [Google Scholar], p. 437). 7 Theoretically it is very important in the twenty-first century not to underplay the extent to which, in the latter half of the twentieth century, a politics based on racial and ethnic particularism was seen by people on the left as inimical to liberation and progress for subordinate groups. In this conceptualization, the emphasis of the left on class perspectives was seen as the foundation of a progressive universalism, whereas an emphasis on race/ethnicity was characterized as divisive and potentially regressive. Hobsbawm (1996 Hobsbawm , E. 1996 'Identity politics and the Left' , New Left Review 217 , May/June 38 47 . [Google Scholar]) provides a particularly trenchant summation of this position. 8 Desert Island Discs is a famous and long-running programme on the BBC's national radio station Radio 4. Guests on the programme are invited to choose the eight records they would take with them to a desert island. In between the playing of their choices guests review their lives in conversation with the presenter. Stuart Hall appeared on the programme on Sunday 13 February 2000. 9 Unusually for such a formidable and influential theorist, Stuart Hall has produced no monograph encapsulating his arguments and positions. His oeuvre is scattered across a multitude of interviews, discussions, conference speeches and papers as well as co-authored book chapters. The text cited here is a major contribution to a text book for an Open University course 'Understanding Modern Societies'. 10 Ali (2003 Ali, S. 2003. Mixed-race, Post-race: Gender, New Ethnicities and Cultural Practices, Oxford: Berg. [Google Scholar]) and Harris (2006 Harris, R. 2006. New Ethnicities and Language Use, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) represent other examples. Hall's 'New Ethnicities' theoretical formulation remains one of the most influential anti-essentialist formulations on 'race' and ethnicity to have emerged from the British Cultural Studies tradition and its reach has extended far beyond this sphere. Also Hewitt's (1986 Hewitt, R. 1986. White Talk Black Talk: Inter-Racial Friendship and Communication among Adolescents, London: Cambridge University Press. [Google Scholar]) White Talk Black Talk while predating 'new ethnicities' seems to me an exemplary instance of what an ethnographically informed study in this tradition should be like. Ifekwunigwe (1999 Ifekwunigwe, J. 1999. Scattered Belongings: Cultural Paradoxes of Race, Nation and Gender, London: Routledge. [Google Scholar]) is another text outside an explicit 'new ethnicities' framework which might be added to a collection building a new tradition. 11 In this refashioned British Cultural Studies tradition the work of scholars nurtured by Hall, especially the scholarship of Paul Gilroy and Kobena Mercer, has also been very important. 12 This focus, incidentally, contradicted the critique that Hall's theorizations were limited to matters of concern to 'Black' rather than 'Asian' Britons. In the British context 'South Asian' refers to people who have migrated from former colonies in the Indian subcontinent (e.g. India, Pakistan, Bangladesh), and others in their global diaspora.