by
Stuart Hall
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For a while the planters tried, unsuccessfully, to maintain the workforce supply with convicts and war captives. But they also quickly succumbed to the murderous labour regime and to disease. When in 1713 the British broke the Dutch monopoly of the African slave trade as a result of the Treaty of Utrecht – which gave Britain the right to sell slaves to the Spanish colonies – they established a dominance in the Atlantic slave trade. This signalled the making of the Atlantic world, a powerful element in the constitution of what we call modernity.
By the end of the seventeenth century the planters, as an emergent social stratum, had developed an intricate mercantile system linking Jamaica and London, establishing significant leverage in political and financial circles in the English capital. Their influence was evident in the decision by the metropolitan government – after heavy pressure from the free-traders – to abolish the Royal African Company’s monopoly on the slave trade, colossally increasing the number of slaves bound for Jamaica. The Jamaican Assembly introduced a comprehensive slave code, based on the model of Barbados, such that the management of the slave population came to be a public matter, affecting the very lifeblood of the island. Sugar promised many quick fortunes to the planters, although the vulnerabilities of the crop, and the costs of the human means required for its production, spurred the creation of elaborate networks of credit. By the early eighteenth century the slaves outnumbered their masters by a factor of eight to one. When the European powers signed the Treaty of Utrecht, Britain’s plantations in Jamaica were well advanced, forming the indispensable core of the island’s economic and social structure.
I shifted from thinking of theory as the search for the certainty of all-embracing totalities (which is how a generation of us originally encountered Marxism), to the necessity of recognizing the power of contingency in all historical processes and explanations (which is how we went on to understand it). Or, in other words, of recognizing that the dynamics of displacement underwrite all social relations.
[...] Unlike the racialized segregation in the slave states of the Deep South or in apartheid South Africa, racial difference in the Caribbean was not legally entrenched. Voting criteria were based not on race but on property. Race formed part of an informal system and a source of tacit social knowledge. Informal systems of meaning leave a good deal of room for ambiguity and negotiation. However, it mustn’t be assumed that because of this informality, infractions of the social rules had no social or psychic penalties. The situation in the Caribbean, though clear-cut and vindicated by common sense, was in practice fraught with exceptions, slippages and misreadings. The discursive negotiations which these slippages set in play were the stuff of the social transactions of everyday colonial life, animating anything from hushed opprobrium to full-volume public commentary.
At the same time I learned that my chances were not high of being a first-rate scholar of English literature with a potential Oxbridge academic future, remote as that had always been. It’s not that I wished for this, or that it was something I was planning or wanted. Not because I wasn’t clever enough or hadn’t read enough – which may or may not have been true – but because such a vocation seemed to depend on an innate, unreflective belongingness, knowing the social grammar of the place; an ability to feel instinctively the pulse of the culture behind a text, to inhabit what, years later, Raymond Williams called in his characteristically oxymoronic phrase its ‘structure of feeling’. Most of my English peers seemed to share something of this deep structure of affiliation, irrespective of their different class and regional backgrounds. I had read – and loved – Jane Austen too. But I couldn’t seem to get hold of what intricate resonances ‘Bath’ or ‘the parsonage’ stirred in the English imaginary. I found it difficult to call on, let alone to claim, an insider’s attentiveness to the subtle nuances of feeling and attitude which played across the text. My fellow students seemed to have unconsciously internalized what I would have self-consciously to learn.
By my unfamiliarity with the lived experience which informed the text, I don’t mean, literally, being unfamiliar with its location, geography or history. Rather, it meant that I was excluded from sharing a habitus – a way of life, forms of customary behaviour, a structure of common sense, taken-for-granted assumptions, affective identifications and presuppositions about the society, and how things work, below the conscious or purely cognitive level. These things were embedded as much in the minutiae of daily life, in facial expression or in body language, in what was left unsaid, as they were in what was spoken. They were evidence of the tacit knowledges which underpin cultural practices, the shared codes of meaning which those who belong unconsciously bring to bear to make sense of the world. This is what enables a culture’s members to ‘know’ and at the same time ‘not to know’ the unwritten cultural rules as to what can and can’t be said, what is and isn’t reasonable or appropriate to say or do, when and where things can and can’t be done. ‘Being English’ had everything to do with this deep structure of national cultural identity, an ‘imagined community’, in Benedict Anderson’s phrase; based not only on a set of institutions, but on a ‘lived imaginary relation to its real conditions of existence’, as Althusser has it: a fantasy of the nation, as well a gift of the gods, a state of grace.
‘How can you be interested in Henry James?’ Edward Thompson – the historian E. P. Thompson – once admonished me, with exasperation. ‘Ah!’ I thought to myself. But what about his sensitivity to the little deceptions and evasions of the English which one finds in his works, and the complex dialectic he weaves between innocence and experience, for which America and Europe came to be rich and interchangeable signifers? In The Portrait of a Lady he was alive to the tragic depths which accompany such things. He was brilliantly perceptive about how the fine sentiment and the exquisite good taste of his characters mask a crude, vulgar and venal self-interest. He intuitively grasped the moral vacuum at the centre of worldly wealth and aesthetic sophistication, the corruption secreted at the heart of a refined class self-confident in its own ethical superiority. He had an instinct for the fact that individual moral choice is always also cultural and social, and vice versa. He brought to bear on his unpromising material profound insights into the finely tuned distinctions between American and European versions of civilization.
Film was already one of my abiding passions. It seemed to me the most innovative of the modern arts. I had always had a passionate addiction to the movies, and as a youth in Kingston I saw on Saturday afternoon matinees at the Carib Theatre everything from Hollywood that found its way to Jamaica: westerns, melodramas, thrillers, musicals and film noir; Bogart and Bacall, Barbara Stanwyck, Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Gary Cooper, Cary Grant, Henry Fonda, John Garfield, the lot. This passion continued in Oxford. We went to the cinema two or three times a week. My first experiences of Continental cinema included Eisenstein and Pudovkin, Italian neo-realism and the French New Wave. They were a revelation. I realize now that this combination of arguing about literary criticism, reading modern literature, especially with the Americans, following the Caribbean novel and poetry, going to the movies, listening to and playing jazz meant that I began to construct a sort of intellectual counter-life to Oxford, more appropriate to my growing sense of being a radical outsider, a feeling which deepened as I came to the end of my time as an undergraduate.
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From 1956 until I made the move to Birmingham in 1964, ‘normal’ life was suspended by my political activity: by my editing ULR and, from 1960, New Left Review (NLR); by the larger attempts to build around these publications social movements, eventually organized by the creation of the New Left Clubs; by the long and arduous struggle to get the ideas we were generating mobilized, and by our attempt to activate them inside the Labour Party. At the same time, as we experienced what felt to us as a thaw in the Cold War, we invested great energies in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), which represented a strategic social movement in its own right. Suez and Hungary had fractured the old politics, and the carapace of the Cold War had been – temporarily, as it turned out – shattered. Out of this emerged our ‘between/against both camps’ position and the hope for the creation of an independent, popular Left politics.
I am in the middle of my discussion about politics and I’m having to explain my shifting relations to the concept of culture. I make no apology for this. This journey took me to an understanding of culture as the signifying dimension of human practice. In Althusser’s terms, culture exists as one of the founding instances of every social formation, without which societies cannot exist as such.
From the vantage of today, for a different generation, our investments in ULR and then the founding of the NLR might seem parochial. But it didn’t feel like that at the time. We laboured long and hard to seize the moment, as it were, and to recast the Left so that we weren’t left behind by history. We endeavoured to keep our eyes on the prize.
By then I knew the traditions of socialist politics in England. But I hadn’t been formed in them, like Raymond Williams or Edward Thompson. I was a neophyte among them. Can anyone imagine what it must have been like being alongside these luminaries? Editorial boards were a nightmare for me. I’d indicate the possible contents of the next issue and then hold up my hands before the storm broke and the fathers spoke!
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