Wrestling with Angels

Abstract

It has been disconcerting and salutary to keep discovering that whatever I may have thought—or at any given moment think—that I might say about Familiar Stranger: A Life between Two Islands has already been said and written (transcribed?) and published (even before the book itself), if not by Hall himself, then by one of his many and prolific interlocutors in the course of multiple expansive, engrossing, and ongoing conversations that I have been overhearing in fragments since I started graduate school in 1986. Reading and working through a book that had originated as a dialogue between Hall and Bill Schwarz and was, on the latter’s account in his preface, made possible—as Hall’s physical capacities to read and write deteriorated—through collective efforts echoes the dissonances implicit in the text’s title, further amplifying the sense of “déjà vu all over again”1 that Familiar Stranger precipitated for me.I never met or otherwise encountered Stuart Hall in “real time.” My engagements with his work were always mediated: informed by—and constitutive of—a historical practice (in “the archives,” at the computer, in the classroom) more fragmentary and kaleidoscopic than strictly disciplined. From the outset, I found myself surprised and grateful for the resonances between the formative personal, political, and intellectual genealogies of his interventions’ production, on the one hand, and those of at least some of the structuring conditions of my reception of them, on the other (although I wouldn’t necessarily have been always able to put it this way). Under the circumstances, and given all the sedimented and overlapping layers of citation, invocation, and recollection that also structure Familiar Stranger, I thought that I would return, as best my own memory served, to the site/cite of my first, disruptive encounter with his work: the massive collected proceedings of the conference at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign published in 1992 under the title Cultural Studies. Hall observes in that piece that, “paradoxically [and] in order not to be authoritative,” he found himself compelled “to speak autobiographically” (Hall, “Cultural Studies” 277) in reflecting on the genealogies and receptions of the complex of critical analytical and methodological interventions associated with his work with the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at the University of Birmingham in the 1970s. I take license from this maneuver to do a bit of the same here. Admittedly, all that Hall engages in this article happened well after the period covered in Hall’s posthumously published book. However, I take further license from its recursive structure to do a bit of that, too, in these scattered speculations (to borrow from Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak) on Familiar Stranger.A memorable moment in “Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies” is Hall’s account of feminism’s disruptive and decisive effect on the theoretical deliberations (“more appropriately called theoretical noise”) at the CCCS, habitually “accompanied by a great deal of bad feeling, argument, unstable anxieties, and angry silences” (280–82). Under the circumstances, Hall wrote (in this paper and elsewhere), “the intervention of feminism was specific and decisive. It was ruptural. It reorganized the field in quite concrete ways.” Seeming to marvel, he recalls that “as the thief in the night, it broke in; interrupted, made an unseemly noise, seized the time, crapped on the table of cultural studies.” About the conditions of its eruption he added that Many of us in the Centre—mainly, of course, men—thought it was time there was good feminist work in cultural studies. And we indeed tried to buy it in, to import it, to attract good feminist scholars. As you might expect, many of the women in cultural studies weren’t terribly interested in this benign project. We were opening the door to feminist studies, being good, transformed men. And yet, when it broke in through the window, every single unsuspected resistance rose to the surface—fully installed patriarchal power, which believed it had disavowed itself . . . feminism broke, and broke into, cultural studies. (Hall, “Cultural Studies” 283; emphasis added)If direct engagement with this particular moment or with feminism (or even gender) is absent from the sweep of Familiar Stranger (which chronologically ends before this Birmingham phase of his life and career), its effects ripple back to animate Hall’s account in it of “an angry but splendid exchange of fire” (Hall, Familiar Stranger 58) on the occasion of a young Catherine’s refusal to countenance his mother’s grande dame pronouncement on the difficulties of finding reliable household help in the presence of the people serving the family’s dinner.Whether this appreciative awareness struck then or later, what he writes of himself in that moment must be informed by the lifelong immersion in feminism as an activist and historian with which his young bride’s career would subsequently be closely associated, and with recognition and acknowledgment of his own historically informed masculine and late colonial bourgeois subjectivity. “What I lacked,” he writes of that specific conjuncture in his life, “was the perspective to understand the psychic costs of being brought up, at a moment of momentous historical change, in a family devoted to these anachronistic, deeply contradictory aspirations and identifications. Looking back, it seems to me that the larger social tensions of the nation were placed onto, and re-enacted in, the `little theatre’ of family life” (Hall, Familiar Stranger 59). It seems notable, under the circumstances, that while most of the structuring “historical” events of his early intellectual formation between the two islands signaled by his subtitle feature the men with whom he collaborated at Oxford and in London in the New Left and on the New Left Review, his account of his memories and apprehensions of his own marked subjectivity (on and straddling both islands) oscillates between the poles of his acutely complexion-conscious Jamaican mother and his English wife.The inculcation in him of metropolitan literature, history, and cultural capital engendered (on his telling) by his mother’s ambition (and his own determination to flee both it and Jamaica) was so deeply ingrained in and so illegible to him that he observes pointedly in Familiar Stranger that it had been Catherine who had “recently pointed out to me that although close friends and political colleagues in the New Left during the 1950s and 1960s were committed anti-imperialists, well tutored in anti-colonial thinking, they never perceived me as a raced subject at all” (11). He then recounts having responded “with disproportionate rage to one of my earliest reviewers, an intelligent and broadly sympathetic English sociologist, who said he didn’t understand why I kept banging on about being coloured . . . since I was from a well-to-do middle-class family, had been educated at a good English-type school and studied abroad at Oxford. As if to say, what had he to complain about?” (12–13). In relating these memories of others’ misrecognition (refusal?) as well as his own, Hall comes as close as he ever has in writing to admitting to the kind of indignation that animated Catherine’s challenge to her mother-in-law, and the fury that propelled feminists at Birmingham to reject the door grudgingly opened to decorous entry, and instead break through the window of prevailing Cultural Studies practice like thieves in the night. It was such memories, of such incidents, Hall recounts, that persuaded him to undertake the project that resulted in Familiar Stranger. “I realized that I should try to use this time to track how I see the organic connections and dissonances between the two worlds: the colonial and the post-colonial . . . how they constantly displaced one another, repeated themselves but always with a difference, simultaneously resonated off, jarred against, mirrored and disrupted one another. . . . I hoped the book might constitute an insight into the contradictory transition points in that old story—the long, tortuous, tortured and never-concluded route out of colonial subalternhood” (13).Given Familiar Stranger’s ambiguous authorship, I can’t help but wonder: To whose memory—of what, and when—does the memory of the “splendid” dining-table battle between his reportedly formidable mother (Sycorax?) and his very young wife (Ariel?), and that of Catherine’s much later reminder to him (Prospero, Caliban, chimera engendered of both?) of New Left male comrades’ apparent apprehensions of him as a racially unmarked subject “belong”? What do they signify in the context of a meditation on a life recalled as lived, “metaphorically speaking, on the hinge between the colonial and post-colonial worlds,” in the “interior life and spaces of [which] colonial formation . . . its antinomies were formed”? (11) The ambiguity and/or shifting axes of the “constitutive outside” engendering both the subject and the method of Familiar Stranger are implicit in the book’s title, invoking both the habituated and the alien (the internal and the external, home and away, masculinity/femininity) but also, to the extent that the first is framed as a noun, not only kinship, subordinate status, and an agent of the Inquisition (!), but also the spectral: “A spirit, often taking the form of an animal, which obeys and assists a witch or other person” according to the OED.2 Indeed, ghosts and shadows abound in Familiar Stranger, materialized in a sentence like “The present carries the spectres of the past hiding in it” (24) or in the description of the damaging effects that the “psychic imperative” engendered by colonial subjecthood: The silences, unconscious evasions and disavowals, the self-deceiving double-talk of colonial discourse itself, which so often masks its hidden presences with absences, gaps and silences, making them simultaneously both knowable and unspeakable for those living them.Even today I do not understand the full meaning of the feelings of displacement which gradually came to shadow and transform my life. (21–22)The Tempest, Shakespeare’s 1610–11 conjuring about power, inheritance, domesticity, exile (race/class/gender/sexuality/otherness), wafts and rumbles through the pages of Familiar Stranger, alongside and interpellated with Aimé Césaire’s 1969 rereading and reimagining of it in A Tempest, and with the unstated but palpable intimations of Hall’s own deep familiarity with both authors, both plays, and with the real and imagined islands and historical conjunctures that structured their myriad, overlapping conditions of production, reception, and historical imagination.The book ends with a chapter entitled “Politics” and with a recollection affirming not only that the political and intellectual were mutually constitutive of his sense of himself, but also that embracing the mutual constitution of the personal and the political-intellectual comprised his strategy for making his way in the England he inhabited, as one half of an interracial couple with mixed-race children who encountered blatantly racist hostility on the streets and in the parks of Birmingham. “I had to find a modus vivendi with the world I had entered and indeed with myself,” he writes. “Surprisingly, this turned out to be partly through politics. Establishing, as I had, a foothold in British radicalism and inhabiting a necessary distance from England and its values meant that I never came to be seduced by the old imperial metropole. It allowed me to maintain a space I felt I needed. I wanted to change British society, not adopt it. . . . I found an outlet for my energies, interest and commitments without giving my soul away.” He concludes with an ambiguous flourish: “And I had found a new family” (270).In 1993, Hall had argued that there was something uniquely “at stake in cultural studies . . . [a] tension between a refusal to close the field, to police it, and, at the same time, a determination to stake out some positions within it and argue for them . . . [a] dialogical approach to theory. . . . It is a question of positionalities [that are themselves] never final . . . never absolute” (Hall, “Cultural Studies” 278). He returns to this point in describing his reasons for embarking on the project that became Familiar Stranger. What was staked, then, in the staging of the roundtable on Familiar Stranger at the AHA in January 2019, for the organizers, for those of us participating in it, for the 2019 conference Program committee? What does Familiar Stranger specifically and Stuart Hall’s work in general signify for the discipline and for “the political challenges of the present”? One framework for pondering this question arrived in my mailbox in May.To participate in an AHA conference event, one must not only register for it, but also join the sponsoring body itself, which brings among other benefits the dubious one of receiving Perspectives on History, its monthly newsletter. Interrupting its journey from mailbox to recycling bin, I glanced at the May issue’s contents, which confirmed for me how urgently the AHA as the institutional embodiment of professional History needs again to confront its complicity in the condensing conjuncture in and with which Stuart Hall has grappled politically, intellectually, personally during his long career critically analyzing the shifting registers of (to invoke the title of a 1979 essay) “the great moving right show.” In the global historical conjuncture characterized by truculent hostility to “strangers” and ongoing, accumulating evidence of its deadly consequences, the lead article in Perspectives, by the AHA president John R. McNeill, appeared under the title “Jargon in History Writing Shuts out the Public.”Gesturing toward both the pedagogical and the epistemological, its opening sentence (epigraph? pretext? salvo? conceit?) is purportedly a quotation from a student’s writing and McNeill’s reaction to it: “‘Discursively imbricated ontologies’ . . . Hunh? The student who wrote this phrase is set to graduate this month. . . . I suspect he has no more idea what his words mean than I do—and I haven’t the vaguest” (5). From his aerie in the pages of this Perspectives, McNeill proceeds to bemoan the decline in the quality of history writing, infected by infelicitous neologisms and abstruse deferrals from fields like literary criticism or, presumably, cultural studies. Willfully ignoring crucial conditions of a text’s (or utterance’s) production and reception (including audience), McNeill commends the sagacity of a Nobel laureate from New Zealand in a STEM field—predictably enough for our times—that we should be able to explain our research to that apparently universally acknowledged stand-in for “the public”: a bartender.In “Cultural Studies,” Hall reminds his audience that “the question of pedagogy as a form of intellectual production is crucial. . . the ongoing work of an intellectual practice for most of us, insofar as we get our material sustenance, our modes of reproduction, from doing our academic work, is indeed to teach” (290). His work and example have crucially structured how in and since that conjuncture, many students and scholars of gender, race, sexuality, class—and their complex mutual interpellations—have pursued both our research and our teaching. We try to teach our students, some of whom work as bartenders, to read: to struggle with concepts, terms, perspectives that are decidedly not familiar and possibly even strange to them. On encountering the fragment cited, many of our students (who may not only be bartenders but also, variously, LGBTQ, migrants—of more or less precarious legal status—in short, complex social beings) might venture to suggest to the author that his student may have merely been noting in his exam that the subject on or about which or whom he was writing was and is historically constituted. They would in any case recognize (perhaps with indignation) that McNeill erases them from “the public” for whom he professes to speak in his barnacle-encrusted call for “clear prose,” and be bemused to see that, declining for his own part to engage with the unfamiliar (and difficult?), what McNeill hopes for his hapless student is that “if he learned nothing else in my class, he learned that it doesn’t make anyone sound smart to write strings of fancy words” (6). Were they to read Familiar Stranger, they might quote from it that “it’s necessary to grasp the multiplicity of social determinations in play—and the fact that they work in combination, as an articulation of different forces. . . in other words, overdetermined. . . suggest[ing], too, the constant misalignments of these determinations: one can never be matched to another, or read from another in a neat, stylized choreography. Displacement . . . is primary” (91).I remain deeply ambivalent about my place vis-à-vis the AHA, ostensibly my disciplinary “home,” its May 2019 Perspectives confirming my now decades-long sense that, along with my “diasporic” formations (personal, intellectual, pedagogical, methodological, and so on), I am still (like Hall, like the window-crashing feminists who disrupted and changed everything utterly for business as usual at the CCCS in the 1970s, and like so many others) situated outside its circled wagons—but/and in the very good company of familiar strangers. ■