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Stuart Hall: "Culture Is Always A Translation"
Stuart Hall: "Culture Is Always A Translation"
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My parents’ families were both middle-class, but from very different class
formations. My father belonged to the coloured lower middle class. His father
kept a drugstore in a poor village outside Kingston. The family was ethnically
very mixed — African, East Indian, Portuguese, Jewish. My mother’s family
was much fairer in colour; if you had seen her uncle, you would have thought
he was an English expatriate, nearly white, or what we would call “local white”.
She was adopted by an aunt and brought up in a beautiful house on the hill,
above a small estate where the family lived.
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or even in life. I wish they were still around so that I didn’t have to carry
them around, locked up somewhere in my head, from which there is no migration.
Everybody else comes from somewhere else: the French, the Spanish, the Portuguese,
the English, the Africans, the Lebanese, the Indians — you know, they’re all
from some other place, so this is first a diaspora. Although there is a black
diaspora in Britain, that is the diaspora of a diaspora, so I’ve been obliged
to think about the culture of the black diaspora in Britain and the diasporised
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culture that has settled down and grown up in the Caribbean in diasporic
terms.
So, I’ve never written about the Caribbean, though much of what I’ve done
has been inflected by the Caribbean. I was never part of the project of writing
the national Jamaican or Caribbean story. What’s more, more to my regret,
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I wasn’t part of the political events of the last 50 years that shaped Jamaican
independence. I know about them, I knew all the people involved, I went to
school with half of them, you know, I’ve come back every two or three years,
I’ve followed the story from the inside, but I have not been part of it, so
when asked if I wanted to think about being a Caribbean intellectual or coming
to Caribbean intellectual thought, well, this is an ambiguous thing.
What entered my mind was — these people have never really been interested
in your work, you know, they think it’s from over there, it’s from somewhere
else, you’re not part of us, and a certain resentment. Why didn’t you come
back? Why aren’t you part of us? And a certain — dare I — dare I call it provincialism?
What we’re preoccupied with is Jamaican things, because we’re affirming that
against the time when we couldn’t — we don’t have time to think about what
is happening in England, we’re too occupied. So while that national moment
— the moment of national independence — was supreme — governing people’s
lives, ambitions, taking up their energies, why should people be interested
in my work?
When I got an honorary degree, finally — which was only four or five years
ago at the University of the West Indies — they said “Stuart Hall has been
a well-kept secret”, and I felt this is quite true. But this invitation seemed
to me timely, because my suspicion is that that national moment is over. I
don’t mean that what happens in Jamaica is not important. But the moment when
everything can be defined in terms of the territorially bounded Jamaica is
finished — globalisation has finished it. The fate here is being decided elsewhere;
it’s being decided in Washington, and it’s going to be decided in Baghdad,
decided in the World Trade Organisation, etc.
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HIV — you know, millions of people are on the move inside Africa itself. Millions
of people are living in transit camps, not to speak of the millions of Palestinians,
millions of people on the borders between India and Pakistan that are displaced.
The world is defined by displaced people, migration, and domination of global
capital. So the idea of the nation state, which is going to winnow out this
little window for its people, and the world’s going to leave it alone to
prosper in its little backyard, is finished.
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