Black Theorists and Left Antagonists

Brennan 89 Timothy Brennan Black Theorists and Left Antagonists The revolution is just a T-shirt away. —Billy Bragg1 After Jean Baudrillard, the concept of "ideology" may seem to many rather old.: But nowhere has the ideology debate, even recently, been more lively than on the English Left, and nowhere have the French and AngloSaxon angles of vision on the subject been more vigorously crossed. This crossing, now occuring in the debates over postmarxism, has been played repeatedly in Britain—most memorably, perhaps, in the now decade-old exchange between Perry Anderson and E. P. Thompson over the uses of Althusser.' Yet today Britain's black intellectuals have all but been written out of the debate, inspite of the fact that so much about the problem of ideology is appreciable (and perhaps even ultimately solvable) within the domestic colonial situation evoked in the writing of black theory, in which, to a surprising extent, the blackness of Britain is still a blackness of shadows. When the Empire Windrush landed at Tilbury docks in 1948 as part of the first wave of postwar immigration into labor-scarce Britain, it did much more than transplant a culture. From South Asia and Africa, as well as from the Caribbean, "blacks" (to use the term in its sweeping British sense) had already been a presence for centuries before 1948—as Oxford and Cambridge exchange students from India in the nineteenth century, as African musicians in the court of Henry VII, as Indian servants or ayahs accompanying returning colonial nabobs, or as sea-going lascars settling in the port towns of Cardiff, Bristol, and Liverpool. So, following the War, when the British Hotel and Transport Industries started recruiting from England's labor-rich colonies, the domestic outlines of a distinctive belonging already had a history. Moreover, England had for over a century been the privileged meeting-place for anti-colonial intellectuals from all over the developing world—the site of the first gatherings of the Pan African Congress, the official launching-place of the Indian National Movement, the place where Paul Robeson fled American anti-communism and set the standard of the '80s black theatre scene. It was London where Cornelia Sorabji, the first woman solicitor to graduate from Oxford, began her legal and literary efforts on behalf of women's emancipation. It was the place where, in the nineteenth century, the great 90 the minnesota review abolitionist narratives of Ukawsaw Gronniasaw, Mary Seacole, and Gustavas Vassa were first written. This was the backdrop against which a version of poststructuralist theory entered British intellectual life, whose perspectives seemed, on the face of it, perfectly poised to address the multicultural character of the new Britain, under the now familiar names "Postmarxism" or simply "New Times." Writers like Ernesto Laclau, Homi Bhabha, Chantal Mouffe, and (in a rather more mixed way) Stuart Hall, went about extending the realm of a specifically "culturalist" politics—some as independent scholars, others as battling journalists for The Guardian and the popular Communist Party monthly, Marxism Today. The politics was "culturalist" because its sites of contestation were the microworlds of leisure, art, work and sport, each of which had, in Hall's words, "its own codes of behavior, its 'scenes' and 'economies. "M The sites of union hall and salon, of picket line and parliament chamber—with their clear attachments to social class and their obvious boundary lines—were considered irrelevant. There was no right to speak of ideology as "false consciousness" since ideology was an elaborate "chain of linked interpellations that constitutefd] the Imaginary." Culturalists, unlike the strawmen of "orthodoxy" they used as foils, argued the merits of having a better sense of identity-flux and shifting allegiances than those addicted to class analyses; they argued for the advancement of thinking beyond what they took to be the naive polarities between the possessors of truth on the one side, and the ideologically afflicted, on the other. For black Britain, this way of putting things was suggestive. Afterall, historically, the formation of a black British identity had depended heavily on openings in the cultural field. The leaders of the movements against police brutality and the so-called "suss" laws (which before being struck...