Improbable grounds: The emergence of the black British intellectual

South Atlantic Quarterly

Volumn 109, Issue 2, 2010, Pages 369-389

  Carrington, Ben ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 77950835767     PISSN: 00382876     EISSN: 15278026     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/00382876-2009-039     Document Type: Article

References (34)

1. Stuart Hall, "Black Britons," Community: Quarterly Journal of the Community Relations Commission 1.2 (April 1970): 3-5
2. My use of the virgule is deliberate and meant to signal that the current conjuncture is caught in ambivalent tension between, on the one hand, the surpassing of colonialism and, on the other, the continuance of neocolonial relations. The virgule can mean or as in a divide between two diferent words. It can also be used to mean and, implying a strong association. The use of the virgule also reminds us that the meaning of the neocolonial (same/continue) or postcolonial (diferent/after) may itself shift depending on the specifc geographical location and historical moment under discussion, just as the virgule's formal linguistic usage implies that either side of the division can be chosen to complete the meaning of the sentence, depending on the context. In short, the post/colonial is simply a way to mark the interregnum condition of coloniality, that is, "a moment that symbolizes neither a complete historical separation nor an unproblematic connection, but a complicated mix of the two-that moment where the old (colonial) is dying all too slowly and the new (postcolonial) bears all too many traces of the old. Grant Farred, What's My Name? Black Vernacular Intellectuals (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 178; hereafter cited parenthetically by page number as What's My Name?
3. Houston A. Baker Jr., Betrayal: How Black Intellectuals Have Abandoned the Ideals of the Civil Rights Era (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008)
4. Alain Locke, ed., The New Negro: An Interpretation (New York: Albert and Charles Boni, 1925)
5. and Hortense J. Spillers, "The Crisis of the Black Intellectual," in A Companion to African-American Philosophy, ed. Tommy L. Lott and John P. Pittman (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003), 87-104
6. Joy James, "The Dead Zone: Stumbling at the Crossroads of Party Politics, Genocide, and Postracial Racism," South Atlantic Quarterly 108.3 (Summer 2009): 461
7. Barnor Hesse, "Diasporicity: Black Britain's Post-Colonial Formations," in Un/settled Multi- culturalisms: Diasporas, Entanglements, "Transruptions," ed. Barnor Hesse (London: Zed Press, 2000), 96-120; hereafter cited parenthetically by page number as "Diasporicity."
8. As the British historian Peter Fryer points out in the opening lines of his much cited historical study on the black presence in Britain, "There were Africans in Britain before the English came here. They were soldiers in the Roman imperial army that occupied the southern part of our island for three and a half centuries." Peter Fryer, Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (London: Pluto Press, 1984), 1
9. See Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 260-70
10. and C. L. R. James, "Black Intellectuals in Britain," in Colour, Culture, and Consciousness: Immigrant Intellectuals in Britain, ed. Bhikhu Parekh (London: Allen and Unwin, 1974), 154-163
11. W. E. B. Du Bois quoted in Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 1
12. Paul Edwards and David Dabydeen, eds., Black Writers in Britain, 1760-1890: An Anthology (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991)
13. and Bill Schwarz, West Indian Intellectuals in Britain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003)
14. Schwarz, West Indian Intellectuals, 255
15. For an account of the role Stuart Hall played in the formation of black British cultural studies and the development of black British identity more generally, see Kwesi Owusu, "Introduction: Charting the Genealogy of Black British Cultural Studies," in Black British Culture and Society: A Text-Reader, ed. Kwesi Owusu (London: Routledge, 2000), 1-18
16. Stuart Hall and Les Back, "At Home and Not Home: Stuart Hall in Conversation with Les Back," Cultural Studies 23.4 (July 2009): 658-687
17. Hall has acknowledged that he has always been "out of place," even in relation to aspects of black culture. Due to his social location(s)-as a light-skinned middle-class black in Jamaica and then an Oxford-educated "West Indian" intellectual in Britain-he has not had an intimate relationship to working-class black populations: "In relation to black culture and the life of ordinary black people, I really didn't know what it was about in any depth and I couldn't get to it. I was a middle-class brown schoolboy with middle-class parents, I couldn't reach it. I could sort of imagine it and relate to it by empathy, but I couldn't be of it. I was never a Kingston street boy. I can't pretend to have been, because I wasn't. So even out of place in relation then to what became black in England." Hall and Back, "At Home and Not Home," 676
18. For example, see Paul Gilroy, Lawrence Grossberg, and Angela McRobbie, eds., Without Guarantees: In Honour of Stuart Hall (London: Verso, 2000)
19. Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS), The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in 70s Britain (1982; London: Routledge, 1994)
20. Kobena Mercer makes the important point that The Empire Strikes Back was also significant in terms of opening up a dialogue and exchange among different types of black British intellectuals and cultural workers, and not just academics: "The Empire Strikes Back (CCCS, 1982)
21. was a highly influential text... because, in opening new directions for thinking through such struggles, it helped to effect a major paradigm shift from race-relations sociology to cultural studies, which, in turn, actively contributed to the new forms of artistic practice in film, art and photography. The new generation of black intellectuals who were writing, such as Pratibha Parmar, Paul Gilroy, Hazel Carby and Errol Lawrence, helped displace the theory/practice dichotomy by bringing activist experience to bear on the production of 'really useful knowledge' within the academic world, creating a toolbox of resources capable of all sorts of uses." Kobena Mercer, Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies (London: Routledge, 1994), 13
22. CCCS, The Empire Strikes Back, 7
23. Hazel Carby, "White Woman Listen! Black Feminism and the Boundaries of Sisterhood," in The Empire Strikes Back, 232
24. See also Heidi Safia Mirza, ed., Black British Feminism: A Reader (London: Routledge, 1997)
25. Houston A. Baker Jr., Stephen Best, and Ruth H. Lindeborg, "Introduction: Representing Blackness/Representing Britain: Cultural Studies and the Politics of Knowledge," in Black British Cultural Studies: A Reader, ed. Houston A. Baker Jr., Manthia Diawara, and Ruth H. Lindeborg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 2; hereafter cited parenthetically by page number as "Representing."
26. Stuart Hall, "What Is This 'Black' in Black Popular Culture?" in Black Popular Culture, ed. Gina Dent (Seattle: Bay Press, 1992), 32
27. As an example of Hall's impact on American scholarship at this time, Claire Alexander relates the following story. While attending the 1994 "Race Matters" conference, held at Princeton to honor Cornel West, Alexander recalls a panel discussion on West's work that included many of the leading African American scholars: "At the end of the opening panel, the floor was opened to questions and comments. The first speaker moved through the crowded audience to the microphone and quietly introduced himself-'Stuart Hall, the Open University.' The room exploded into applause. It was the only time I have ever witnessed someone getting a standing ovation for simply saying their name. When I remarked on this later to Cornel West, he told me-'The thing you have to understand, Claire, is that we all grew up reading Stuart. We wouldn't be here without him. We all stand on his shoulders.'" Claire Alexander, "Introduction: Stuart Hall and 'Race,'" Cultural Studies 23.4 (July 2009): 457-82, 457
28. The journalist Gary Younge, whom Angela McRobbie correctly describes as "one of the few voices [in Britain] as forceful and attentive to the dynamics of racial politics as Gilroy" (Angela McRobbie, The Uses of Cultural Studies: A Textbook [London: Sage, 2005], 59)
29. has written eloquently on how U.S. politics, and the racial politics of the South in particular, helped to shape his sense of black Britishness and his general political outlook, even though his parents were from Barbados: "So when I came to examine the building blocks of my identity, I found them not in Barbados but in America's Deep South, a place I was related to only by skin color but which had spoken to me in fact and fiction, film, literature and music, of unbending resistance, uncompromising dignity and passionate faith all set against a backdrop of magnolia fields." Gary Younge, "Are My Roots Showing?" Observer Review, September 12, 1999
30. See also Gary Younge, No Place Like Home: A Black Briton's Journey through the American South (London: Picador, 1999)
31. See Stephen Phillips, "Black Intellectual Seems an Oxymoron in England," Times Higher Education, October 29, 2004
32. Theodor Adorno, "Questions on Intellectual Emigration," Social Text 27.2 (Summer 2009): 159-164
33. Paul Gilroy, After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture? (London: Routledge, 2004), x
34. Caryl Phillips, The European Tribe (London: Pan Books, 1993), 1