Tradition and the Black Atlantic

by Henry Louis Gates

  Paul Gilroy’s germinal critique, in There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack (1987), is worth quoting at length because as a minority critique of the provincialism of the English left, it has become a standard point of reference in subsequent debates: “ Williams’s arguments effectively deny that blacks can share a significant ‘social identity’ with their white neighbours, who, in contrast to more recent arrivals, inhabit what Williams calls ‘rooted settlements’ articulated by ‘lived and formed identities.’ . . . Williams’s discussion of ‘race’ and nation . . . is notable for its refusal to examine the concept of racism which has its own historic relationship with ideologies of Englishness, Britishness, and national belonging.” That part of Gilroy’s arguments sticks in the knife. Let’s resume: “Quite apart from Williams’s apparent endorsement of the presuppositions of the new racism, the strategic silences in his work contribute directly to its strength and resilience. The image Williams has chosen to convey his grasp of ‘race’ and nation, that of a resentful English working man, intimidated by the alterity of his alien neighbors is . . . redolent of other aspects of modern Conservative racism and nationalism.”11

  This part of the argument twists the knife. It links Williams’s success as a public intellectual to his ideological failures; Williams’s discourse is seen as substantially continuous with Enoch Powell’s. And what Gilroy’s critique inaugurated was, in a sense, a changing of the guard, a theoretical realignment that would not be confined to the classroom.

  Not confined, either, to immediate concerns of minority critics. From Robert Young, editor of the Oxford Literary Review, we hear the charge that the usual notion of culture in contemporary theory is “a Burkean notion”—a phrase he uses, of course, in the conventionally pejorative sense—and the counsel todistance the concept of “culture” from its authenticating association with the work of Raymond Williams. It is important to recall that the idea of a cultural politics was in fact invented by non-Europeans, such as Fanon or Mao, as a means for resisting forms of colonial and neo-colonial political power; it was itself the product of a recognition of the inadequacy of the traditional categories invoked in the European arena to effect political change. Its adoption in Europe, however, has tended to be limited to an identification of cultural phenomena with pre-established political positions.12

  In the end, Young argues, this sort of cultural politics only repeats “the very same inside/outside structure of racism that is constitutive of English Literature itself.” Citing The Empire Strikes Back, Young asserts that “those working at the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies have already demonstrated the extent to which cultural study and neocolonialism are intertwined.”13 The irony of his proposal is arresting: Cultural studies must and will be dismantled—and where are the agents of this dismantlement to be found? Why, in the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, of course.

  Williams was, for his part, discomfited by the identity politics he associated with—and these are his words—“many minority liberals and socialists, and especially those who by the nature of their work or formation are themselves nationally and internally mobile.” In other words: not settled, not truly English, not truly part of the nation. He was uncomfortable with identity politics, but he was shrewd enough to note its emergence, to note that the “long memory” was now threatened by a post-essentialist politics of identity that exalted a vision of migrancy, hybridity, exile, creolization: all the elements of what would come to be celebrated as a “diaspora aesthetics.”14

  Fade to Black

  It would be reductive to figure this critique as a “generational shift”; the influence of many of the seminal figures—Dick Hebdige and Stuart Hall, for example—crosses over generations. But there is a rupture here. As Benita Parry has written about the development of Cultural Studies, “Just how far the study of the cultural situation in Britain has travelled from its beginnings in Anglocentric Cultural Studies concerned to recuperate the hidden histories of autochthonous subjected peoples . . . is marked by [Kobena] Mercer’s account of the contemporary aesthetic as a process of critically appropriating and ‘creolizing’ elements from the master codes of the dominant culture.”15 And in the process, the real vitality of Cultural Studies did not so much die as fade to black.

  Stuart Hall’s very liminality makes him an intriguing figure here, and in quite a number of ways. As a mentoring presence across successive generations, he provides the continuity between the hard-won insights of the British Cultural Studies represented by Williams and Hoggart, whom he succeeded as head of the Birmingham Centre, and the new black British cultural workers. (For reasons that I have never been able to ascertain, when I was a first-year student in English at Cambridge, stumbling my way through practical criticism and cultural theory, trying to work out a theory of race and superstructure, as it were, Williams never once mentioned to me that Hall was black, if he mentioned his work at all.) If Cultural Studies is notoriously a site of contestation rather than coalescence, Hall’s generosity of vision allows him to adopt a stand that is accommodative rather than antagonistic toward many of his compeers on the British left. I once wrote that the one defining feature of the true intellectual is that his primary animus is directed against other intellectuals. And one of the reasons you really have to admire Hall is that he’s an exception to that dismal rule. At the same time, the fact that he eschews grand theory for a vision of theory that is always local and provisional can make it easy for Americans to underestimate the value of his contributions, and I want to get to that in a bit.

  But I want to stress the departure entailed by his call to separate the concept of ethnicity from “an equivalence with nationalism, imperialism, racism, and the state.” This proves one of the enabling gestures for a post-essentialist recuperation of identity. The problem with the post-structuralist critiques of ethnic absolutism was that they quickly led to a sort of post-modern universalism that foreclosed the possibility of a politics of identity. Stuart Hall’s reinstatement of “ethnicity” is meant to counter-balance this tendency. It’s equally important to notice that the right hand of the Burkean equation by no means falls by the wayside.

  Here, again, is Paul Gilroy, describing the “traditions” that the blacks who have arrived in Britain since World War II have “ brought with them.” In the colonial state, he sees “the dying embers of the furnace in which their now-transplanted political consciousness was forged. They and their British born children have preserved organic links with it, in their kitchens and temples—in their communities.”

  Williams’s rhetoric of lineage, organicity, and community in blackface? Perhaps, but all blackface is not equal. Williams’s valorization of community and generational links was never jettisoned; it was merely pluralized. Gilroy wants to emphasize that the word “radical” contains the idea of rootedness. (I’ ll only remark, in passing, the point of departure here for those who do want to retreat from this rhetoric—Homi Bhabha, for example—and supplant it with the imagery of liminality, migrancy, monadic and nomadic dispersion. I’m inclined to downplay this split because in practice it seems largely to be a matter of accentuation. The currently privileged term “diaspora aesthetics” is meant, I think, to accommodate both monadic and communitarian rhetorics, 16 which is only to say that it preserves both sides of the Burkean equation, so that it’s the enabling tension that appears to run through all diasporic and postcolonial criticism.)

  And few people have negotiated between these two registers more nimbly than Hall. I mean, this is the dilemma of post-modern activism, and he acknowledges that. “ You tend to fall into a hole,” he writes. “Is it possible, acknowledging the discourse of self-reflexivity, to constitute a politics in the recognition of the necessarily fictional nature of the modern self, and necessary arbitrariness of the closure around the imaginary communities in relation to which we are constantly in the process of becoming ‘selves’?” An overemphasis on the contingency of culture can be a problem. As he
writes, “The politics of infinite dispersal is the politics of no action at all: and one can get into that from the best of all possible motives (i.e., from the highest of all possible intellectual abstractions.”)17 Following Ernesto Laclau’s revision of Antonio Gramsci, Hall’s response is to call for a “politics of articulation” in the stead of one based on integral selves, based on necessary correspondence between one thing and another.18 Hall wants us “not only to speak the language of dispersal, but also the language of, as it were, contingent closures of articulation.” And Stuart Hall’s promulgation of this, the new common sense, is always an act of balancing: “Ethnicity can be a constitutive element in the most viciously regressive kind of nationalism or national identity. But in our times, as in an imaginary community, it is also beginning to carry some other means, and to define a new space for identity. . . . But it is not necessarily armour plated against other identities. It is not tied to fixed, permanent, unalterable oppositions. It is not wholly defined by exclusion.”

  But there’s also a richer, more personal vein in Hall that deserves attention as well. The imperative to acknowledge one’s own positionality is no mere theoretical abstraction for him. Hall tells us that he left Jamaica for England “to get away from my mother.”19 Edmund Burke, as we know from his private correspondence, left Ireland to get away from his abusive father. In 1757 (he was in his late twenties, long before his Indian obsession), Burke met an expatriate Indian in London and introduced himself: “Edmund Burke, at your service. I am a runaway son from a father, as you are.”20 If his ostensible referent is to their respective nations, we know, too, that the ambivalence of familial exile, familial alienation, clings fast to that of geographical displacement, a fact that so many of our finest novelists of migrancy have explored. Sara Suleri’s memoir Meatless Days (1987) is a very moving example. (When Burke was sixteen, he wrote, “The only way to be safe is to be silent.” Only later were his “colonized” silences about his own sexuality, nationality, ethnicity, and religion transformed into a torrential flood of words on a colonized exteriority.)

  The act of self-positioning was obviously extremely important for Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams. What Hall is demonstrating is that this doesn’t need to be a purely celebratory act. Hall insists, rightly, on distinguishing between a conception of identity founded in an archaeology—in the sense of res gestae—and one produced by a narrative, even if an archaeological narrative. For him, that “partnership of past and present” is always an “imaginary reunification.”21 But he also insists—something forgotten too quickly in the post-modernist urge to exalt indeterminacy—that “cultural identities come from somewhere, have histories.” In one of his nicest aperçus, he writes that “identities are the names we give to the different ways we are positioned by, and position ourselves in, the narratives of the past.”

  I like that. It says that our social identities represent our sense of imbrications in an historical narrative. But I think Hall senses there’s a delicate balance to be struck, which is why in the essay I’m citing, he develops the point far beyond the simple requirements of propositional exposition, stating and restating his position.22 His analysis of the precariousness of identity is, of course, fully Burkean, even though his attitude toward that instability is insouciant where Burke was fearful. And his sense of difference within identity is a sense that lived experience, that personal history, has conferred on him as it did on Burke.

  Hall asserts that the history of the colonized is—as Burke feared—irretrievable. He proposes, as Burke could not, an imaginative reconstruction, and there’s a distinctly voluntarist strain in Hall at this point.23 I say this not by way of criticism but of praise. Because it’s really the voluntarist strain in a theorist like Hall that’s pointed a way from Cultural Studies to cultural politics in England and, in particular, the cultural renascence in black Britain, which began in the 1980s and has lasted far longer than either the Harlem Renaissance or the Black Arts Movement in the sixties (both of which lasted less than a decade) and has achieved in Rivington Place a form of institutionalization of cultural retrieval that neither movement could have imagined, let alone realized, for themselves.

  Only in England

  Stuart Hall gets in a London taxicab one day. The driver thinks he recognizes Hall from his lectures on television. They begin to chat. Hall had devoted considerable effort to raising matching funds in response to a grant of £5.9 million from the Arts Council England Lottery Capital 2 program. Despite valiant effort, he had not had much luck. He chats with the driver about this project, which he and his colleagues want to call “Rivington Place,” musing aloud about realizing his dream of building Britain’s “first permanent public space, dedicated to the education of the public in culturally diverse visual arts and photography in the UK ,” as the Web site will put it. He tells the driver that the Arts Council has given a generous grant but that the grant is dependent upon raising matching funds. The driver casually mentions that his daughter works for Barclays Bank’s corporate sponsorship department. The rest is history: Barclays contributes £1.1 million toward the project, becoming Rivington Place’s founding corporate partner. Two visual arts organizations that emerged out of the radical Black Arts Movement of the late 1980s, with a decidedly left-wing orientation, win a grant from the government lottery to build Britain’s first permanent, publicly funded gallery dedicated to the exhibition and preservation of the black and multicultural arts, and secure a matching grant of £1.1 million from one of the bastions of international corporate capitalism. To paraphrase Don King, that indefatigable champion of the American flag and our free markets, this outcome, abundant in irony, would be possible only in England.

  Rivington Place, located in London’s East End, is a magnificent art gallery and library, the latter named in honor of Stuart Hall, designed by David Adjaye. It is the home of Autograph ABP (founded in 1988 by David A . Bailey, Rotimi Fani-Kayode, and others) and Iniva, the Institute for International Visual Arts (founded in 1994, both funded by the Arts Council England). Its opening in October 2007 stood as visually eloquent testimony to one of the primary differences between the renaissance of the black arts in Harlem (primarily a literary movement) and the renaissance of black arts in Britain (primarily a movement based on the visual arts, including film, and cultural theory). Both were movements of cultural retrieval, but the latter benefited enormously from studying, and avoiding, certain wrong turns taken by its American antecedent, which it grounded itself against and sometimes even formally riffed or signified upon as a central part of its mission of cultural retrieval.

  For the practice of cultural retrieval—tempered with a sense of its lability, its contingency, its constructedness—has sponsored a remarkable time of black creativity in Britain, or as we are bidden to call it, “cultural production,” since the early 1980s. And in no genre has more astonishingly accomplished work been produced than in the work of recent black British film collectives, such as Akomfrah’s Black Audio Film Collective, which really can be seen to have deepened and expanded the critical insights of a Stuart Hall, a Paul Gilroy, or a Homi K . Bhabha in a refreshingly fecund and dialectic manner that simply did not occur in the Harlem Renaissance. This hasn’t been a relation of mirroring between theory and practice, but rather a rare relation of productive dialogue. Renaissance writers and critics reacted to each other, of course, but primarily in a relation of thesis to antithesis. In Britain, theory shaped the forms of practice, and practice, in turn, shaped theories of practice. We can see this clearly in the work of Isaac Julien, as one example among many.

  Looking for Modernism

  So I want to talk a little about one film in particular, which may be the best known of the genre in the States, Isaac Julien’s Looking for Langston, which is a Sankofa production, and the way it sets history, identity, and desire in very serious play. To me, it’s no accident that Looking for Langston is, in part, a meditation on the Harlem Renaissance. Distance and displacement have their be
nefits, as the literature of migrancy reminds us, so it isn’t altogether surprising that one of the most provocative and insightful reflections on the Harlem Renaissance and the cultural politics of black America should come from across the Atlantic. I want to take a look at black New York from the standpoint of black London. I want to examine the relationship between a New York–based cultural movement, such as it was, in the 1920s and one in London in the 1980s. Of course, the question of modernism has always also been one of a cultural vanguard or elite. And that means that the old “burden of representation” is always present. “The ordinary Negroes hadn’t heard of the Negro Renaissance,” Langston Hughes remarked ruefully. “And if they had, it hadn’t raised their wages any.”24 Always, there is the question, What have you done for us?

  But to see Looking for Langston as an act of historical reclamation, we might begin with the retheorizing of identity politics in black British Cultural Studies, among such critics and theorists as Hall, Gilroy, Hazel Carby, and Kobena Mercer. Again, in Hall’s conception, our social identities represent the way we participate in an historical narrative; our histories may be irretrievable, but they invite imaginative reconstruction. In this spirit, diasporic feminist critics such as Carby have made the call for a “usable past.” I’m talking, of course, about the work of the black British film collectives, which really can be seen to have deepened and expanded these arguments. Again, this has not been a relation of mirroring, but of productive dialogue.