Stuart Hall in This Moment

At the panel discussion “The Black Intellectual in the African Diaspora: The Example of Stuart Hall,” Hortense Spillers presented these remarks.

I want to start by congratulating Charles Rowell for forty years of commitment to an idea and for providing us with numerous occasions that make Callaloo a celebration, that make it a living project rather than a museum of affects. It is a project that sometimes happens when we are lucky. It appears when we need it. As Kenneth Burke put it in one of his texts, it is one of those things that appeared when we needed a strategy, when we needed a word for something. Callaloo appears. We find ourselves in a circumstance, in a moment, in a crux that is not unlike that one in which Callaloo appeared, that one in which Stuart Hall appeared, and so many others that I consider a part of my repertoire of the heroic. Those names and deeds that keep me thinking and going and growing. We find ourselves at the close of an era in the beginning of something that we don’t have a name for yet. Though it sounds like Brexit in part, though it sounds like Revanchist movements across the Western world, though it sounds like a name I will not evoke in this forum but you will know precisely what I mean when I remember November 8th in the United States. This year all of that would suggest to my mind a watershed. A before and after. We find ourselves someplace else. So in this moment we find ourselves trying to protect creative impulses once again. Those creative impulses released by various projects like Callaloo and Stuart Hall and John Akomfrah and Miles Davis. I wrote my remarks with that film in mind. With Miles Davis on the soundtrack. And before that moment, I had never quite put together Miles Davis and Stuart Hall. I had never quite seen them in that kind of historical juncture. It’s a beautiful film as well as highly suggestive.

These Revanchist movements—an odd word that we get from the French. I have never had occasion to use it but seems to be precisely the word we need for this day in time—I think of as little atavisms or throwbacks. And in that sense, they are very primitive. There was a white nationalist neo-Nazi whatever s you want to call it rally in Washington, DC, the nation’s capital, on the day before I came over to the conference. I don’t know if you want to say interesting things were said, but things were said again about white supremacy and so forth. This moment reminds us of a monstrous growth that we always knew was there as it’s been battening and fattening on its resentments since at least the 1960s and sluffing toward major cities of the world to be born and emboldened by the outcome of the 2016 presidential election in the United States. So what does this moment look like?

Other historical occasions have called this forth. Post-World War II in Britain and the United States. Stuart Hall enters the picture in one of these cruxes. I have to get used to the fact that I am quickly becoming one of the oldest cats in any room. I remember in 1968, I lived briefly in London about six months and it was a period of very great ferment. And I was just thinking how young John Akomfrah must be if he was only eight or nine years old in 1968. I remember 1968 as a grown person! So I was just thinking, my goodness. I remember the Caribbean Artists Movement and my own little attempt as a graduate student at Brandeis University in those days to launch a practice of diaspora even in the late-1960s as I attempted to get members of the Caribbean Artists Movement over to Boston. We were not able to pull that off in those days, but the idea of the practice of diaspora has never failed. We have not always had a name for...