Stuart Hall's (1997) random thoughts provoked by the conference “Identities, Democracy, Culture and Communication in Southern Africa”, Critical Arts, 11(1/2), 1–16

Abstract

SOCIAL CHANGE IN South Africa, particularly since the country's first democratic elections in 1994, has triggered various conferences which had been designed to deal with one or other crucial aspect of a society in transition (from oppressive power relations to more democratic and humanizing social practices). It is against this background of dynamic social change that Stuart Hall's (1997) oral presentation, Random Thoughts Provoked by the Conference `Identities, Democracy, Culture and Communication in Southern Africa' (1) should be viewed. The title of Hall's summing up was also the title of the Conference held in February 1997, at the University of Natal, to reflect on the `state of culture' in Southern Africa. The implicit aim of the Conference, was at least in part, to counter the hegemony of Western-centred notions of cultural forms, relations and practices (its corollary being Eurocentricism) in the emerging democracy on the African subcontinent. This implicit goal is, indeed, made quite explicit in Tomaselli's article in this volume. Here, Tomaselli (1999) highlights, amongst others, the excessive `culturalism' (ie. culture defined outside the historically-grounded practices of Capitalist Political Economy) characterizing `intellectual products'--such as Stuart Hall and Edward Said--of the former colonies. Hall (1997:2) identifies four main themes covered by the speakers at the Conference, viz: democratization and the media, identity, negotiating cultural identities in Southern Africa, and the relationship between cultural identity and democratic development in Southern Africa. Hall's description of the various ideas, what he calls thoughtlines (p.2), informing the major Conference themes is strikingly heuristic (where the narration of the detail is simultaneously subjected to some form of questioning), open-ended, yet anticipatory. For example, he raises the question of `gender', and then remarks in an open-ended manner: [W]e can't just swim into [those old things we used to talk about] with `identities' as our banner as if everybody is agreed. Yet, he remarks, in anticipatory mode, I think we are talking about the same thing (original emphasis, p.3). Hall's textual `inclusiveness' however, conceals his analytical silences. For example, in his reflections on the above themes, Hall, eschews the socio-economic-political relations of power that inform, structure, situate and, largely direct/orient, both the `roots' and `routes' (cf. pp. 4-5) of cultural practices in South and Southern Africa. His reference to `globalisation' (pp. 8-11) largely functions as a descriptive device, signposting the world-wide networking of reproductive relations of power (commercially and ideologically), as opposed being also an ensemble of productive relations of power signifying the political obsolescence of the Nation/State within an increasingly economically integrated global reality. Accenting this structural elision in Hall's essay, however, is not to suggest that one should be logocentric or reductionistic in outlining and describing the form, substance and overall dimensions of specific cultural practices, but surely, when one deals with culture at national and sub-continental level, the prior question that should be asked is: What is the Nation/State or nation-state and how and by whom is it constituted? How are the relations of power institutionally, organically inscribed (not merely conjuncturally reflected! [cf. eg. Hall, 1997:5]). And, in terms of the prevailing configuration and alignment of power relations, how do identities (ethnic, racial, class, linguistic, religious and so forth) arise, adapt, evolve, change in the midst of the tensions, contradictions, struggles underlying the prevailing geo-political order? (I introduce the concept `geo-political order' as the geo-politics of the Western Cape and Kwazulu/Natal renders the South African State profoundly problematic--here one also has to bear in mind the `Third Force' [ie. …