- Displacing Stuart Hall
Stuart Hall
Bill Schwarz, ed.
Duke University Press
www.dukeupress.edu/familiar-stranger
320 Pages; Print, $29.95
Stuart Hall's Familiar Stranger is a compelling introduction—but to what? Despite appearances, it is not a memoir; it is not an autobiography. Hall admits that he "never wanted to write a memoir." It is not that long-awaited, single authored book by Stuart Hall, since it is actually the result of a conversation with his long-time friend and interlocutor Bill Schwarz, re-affirming Hall's commitment to collective and collaborative work. The book constantly displaces one's expectations, even as it provides a rewarding feast of history, sociology, theory, politics and—oh yes, biography. This is a book about relations—Hall has always been a leading advocate of the view that reality is relational—and displacements.
Hall had always argued that the relationality, complexity and unpredictability of the world meant that it could only be described through figures of creolization, syncretism, hybridity, entanglement, translation, articulation, all of which deny the reality of "pure," homogeneous identities. As matters not only of race but colonialism and postcoloniality became increasingly central to his project, the figure of diaspora became perhaps Hall's preferred trope of heterogeneity. But diaspora foregrounds, perhaps more than the other tropes, the fact of displacement. Diaspora is "the moment when the politics of class, race and gender came together, but in a new unstable, explosive articulation, displacing and at the same time complicating each other. It has transformed our understanding of the nature of social forces and of social movements. Accordingly, it does not provide us with ready-made answers or programmes but set us new questions, which proliferate across and disturb older frames of thought, social engagements and political practices: a new 'problem space' indeed." Diaspora potentially makes visible that which is negated, repressed, hidden and silenced. But the diasporic is itself ambivalent, offering no guaranteed consequences. It can be used to evade and repress the contingencies and displacements of the future by offering a fantasy of return to a unity that would erase differences, but it can also "maintain[s] an open horizon toward the future . . . spaces of emergence,"
As Hall puts it, "We grew up knowing the contingencies, the out-of-placeness, of history . . . In a suitably paradoxical formulation, displacement moved to the centre of things." This is a book about a life of displacements, life as displacements; a life displaced into questions of identity, identity displaced into questions of history, history displaced into questions of politics, and politics displaced into an intellectual project. This is a book about the relations between the life and thought of one of the most original, influential and charismatic political intellectuals of our times.
I remember getting into a black cab in London more than twenty-five years ago. When I mentioned I was going to see Stuart Hall, the driver began enthusiastically questioning me: what was he like? What did he think about the current government? Did I know any of the artists he was working with? Was he going to do any more work on television? A white working-class Brit was "a fan" of a black Anglo-Jamaican academic! How is that for displacement? Hall was a public intellectual not in its current, thin sense but in the richer, resonant sense of being a teacher and a mentor—speaking across audiences, institutions, and media—about the full range of cultural and political life. He struggled to engage with and put into conversation both common sense and ordinary languages, and Marxism and French cultural theory, assuming that people could—want to—understand both.
The image of the "familiar stranger" is all too familiar, a common trope for the subject position of critical intellectuals—as perpetual outsiders (e.g., among many emigre Jewish intellectuals) or double-consciousness (e.g., Du Bois). Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart, the other founding figures of British cultural studies, the intellectual project Hall helped shape, described their biographical experience of moving between two (class-defined) worlds, belonging to neither completely. Both suggested that this...