From the Last Dancer

Abstract

From the Last Dancer Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (bio) Edward W. Said died in 2003. Jacques Derrida died in 2004. Kofi Awoonor was killed in Westgate Mall last year. Now Stuart Hall is gone. And then Ernesto Laclau. A generation of intellectuals and activists, intellectual/activists, is disappearing. Academics worldwide could not think “Black Britain” before Stuart Hall. And, in Britain, the impact of cultural studies went beyond the confines of the academy. That quiet, gentle, witty, tenacious, learned, original political thinker inspired generations of students into intellectual and cultural production that spilled over into hands-on activism. Paul Gilroy, Angela McRobbie, Isaac Julien, Michelle Barrett, John Akomfrah, the list goes on. It was my good fortune to meet Stuart Hall with an opportunity of spending quality time with him in discussion at the Marxist Cultural Interpretation Institute in Champaign-Urbana in 1983, under the shadow of Shabra and Shatila. Stuart Hall recounted the days of the saving of the New Left Review when the Russell Foundation no longer supported it, in, if memory serves, 1963. (I was in Britain that year, a young Bengali woman tyrannized by a prefeminist white alpha-male financially dependent resentful companion, a transient research student at Girton, two years out of India, not part of the radical mainstream.) Hall was among the founders in the fifties of the New Left Review. I cannot museumize Stuart in the widely claimed Euro-U.S. protest scene of the sixties, as widely claimed as the Naxalbari movement at home. He surely belonged to it as a passionate participant, even a charismatic leader, but mourning takes me elsewhere. Today, I remember that it was also the moment of the death of Lumumba, Fanon, Du Bois. In other words, Hall came in and participated without epistemic recognition in the inauguration of a new [End Page 129] way of thinking about the world in the long-haul, not just immediate protest or resistance. I cannot confine him to British cultural studies alone, even as it preserves its political difference from U.S. cultural studies’ identitarianism, betraying the austere hospitality of democracy; I read him rather in the world that worked for social justice in the diversified field of the struggle for citizenship in the metropolis after the waning of territorial imperialisms, and after the passing of the initial dreams of negritude and Pan-Africanism. It was Awoonor who made me imagine the early 1960s in this worldly way. Awoonor came back to Accra with a good Brit Lit degree from Leeds even as the New Left was consolidating itself at Oxford. Smart boy from Africa, not in the radical British mainstream. Awoonor became Du Bois’s minder. He remembers the move against Du Bois’s sympathies with a peculiar communism, which meant passport denial in the United States, but might mean going with the Eastern bloc in newly fledged Ghana. (Remember Padmore’s Pan-Africanism or Communism? [1956], and that Marcus Garvey was still taken seriously as an alternative?) More important, he remembered the 1959 Pan-African Congress, with both Lumumba and Fanon (“the tall one and the short one”) in attendance. I want to place Hall, young man lately arrived from Jamaica, in this broad world, for the philosophers of the future, rather than keep him local. I wish he were here for me to be having this discussion about global connectivities. You listened, Stuart Hall, contradicted, but also, sometimes, agreed. I can sense the shadow of this constellation in “When Was the Postcolonial?” Although the essay apparently relates to a debate by now forgotten (between “postcolonial critics” Robert Young, and Homi Bhabha, and Arif Dirlik, Ella Shohat, Anne McClintock, Lata Mani, Ruth Frankenburg, Mary Louise Pratt), “Larger issues are ‘at stake’ in these debates than the criticisms which have been widely signalled sometimes suggest” (Hall 1996, 256). Paragraph after paragraph describes—without mentioning Africa—the predicament of postcolonial nation-states in Africa, a predicament that clearly signals Africa’s nationalism, division into regionalism, un-examined culturalism. As we are today reeling under the dismissal of a good governor of Nigeria’s Central Bank, or looking at an aging FLN member running again for president in Algeria, along with witnessing...