Inside Out: A Diasporic Narrative

Tania Lewis

doi:10.5130/csr.v22i1.4918

Abstract

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Stuart Hall’s writing began to take a biographical turn. For readers such as myself, then a mature undergraduate pursuing an American Studies degree in New Zealand, this was somewhat of a revelation. The surprise was not so much Hall’s shift from the somewhat dry prose of structural Marxism to the rather more vital style of a postcolonially inflected poststructuralism, but the fact of Hall’s Caribbean background when I, along with no doubt many other geographically distant readers, had assumed him to be exworking class, British and white. Some seven years later, while wrestling with a PhD on the history of cultural studies at the University of Melbourne, I found myself writing an essay for Arena using the question of Hall’s diasporic identity to explore ‘the relations between knowledge production and cultural identity/location.

Highlights

In the essay ‘Minimal Selves’, and in two key interviews in the 1990s, one with Kuan-‐Hsing Chen and the other with Naoki Sakai, Hall recounted his experiences as a Jamaican who migrated to Britain in the fifties, emphasising an upbringing shaped by colonial and class tensions.[3]
Imperialist goals of the fledgling Jamaican independence movement.[4]. He was excelling in a traditional English-‐oriented education system where he notes that he ‘was very much formed like a member of the colonial intelligentsia’, gaining a scholarship to Oxford University where he moved as a young man in 1951.5
Hall’s time at Oxford was, rather like his upbringing, shaped by complex and contradictory elements and allegiances. While commentary on his time at Oxford has tended to focus primarily on his involvement in socialist politics, Hall has offered a rather different take on his first three years at Oxford as one of total saturation in postcolonial politics, living as he did in a milieu dominated by ‘first generation, black, anti-‐colonial or post-‐colonial intelligentsia’

Summary

Introduction

Using Hall’s own reflexive narrativisation of his intellectual biography as one profoundly framed by dis-‐ placement, the essay sought to reframe and recontexualise the concerns of the British New Left within the broader setting of a transnational politics of cultural identity, using Hall’s biography as a way of complicating a conventional class-‐based account of the formation of British cultural studies.

Results

Conclusion