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In this program, we look at how social change affects our sense of who we are, what we feel entitled to, and what society makes available to us.
The Stuart Hall Project explores social change, identity, and cultural hybridity through Stuart Hall's life and Britain's evolving society.
Key Takeaways
- Social change deeply influences individual and collective identities beyond major historical events.
- Cultural hybridity is increasingly common, reflecting complex global migrations and histories.
- Stuart Hall's work provides critical insights into race, class, and cultural politics in Britain and beyond.
- The legacy of colonialism continues to affect personal and societal identities in post-colonial societies.
- Everyday experiences and family histories are vital to understanding broader social transformations.
Summary
- The program examines how social change shapes personal identity and societal expectations over time.
- It uses the experiences of two families to illustrate how everyday changes impact life and history perception in Britain.
- Stuart Hall, a leading British intellectual and cultural theorist, is central to the narrative, highlighting his influence on cultural studies and political thought.
- The documentary addresses the process of aging and the evolving identities across different life stages.
- It explores the persistence of minority identities, such as the Jewish community in Britain, despite social mobility.
- The Caribbean is presented as a case study for cultural hybridity and complex identities in a globalized world.
- Hall reflects on his own mixed heritage and the impact of colonialism and race on identity formation.
- The film discusses the decline of colonial-era values and the rise of post-colonial independence, particularly in Jamaica.
- Globalization is framed as a cultural interpenetration that challenges traditional national and regional identities.
- The narrative touches on family dynamics, social class, and racial attitudes within post-colonial and British contexts.
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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This program is a version of one made for an Open University Social Science course.
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And it shows how the everyday and mundane elements of our lives can affect the person we become and provide an accurate barometer of social change.
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I was about 19 or 20. Miles Davis put his finger on my soul. The various moods of Miles Davis matched the evolution of my own feelings.
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There continued to be a regret for the loss of a life which I might have lived but didn't live, and the uncertainty, the restlessness, and some of the nostalgia for what cannot be is in the sound of Miles Davis' trumpet.
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Through the experiences of two very different families, the program examines how the new replaces the old and gradually becomes the way of life we take for granted. The two families look back over the last 40 years and consider the impact on their lives
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of some of the social changes that have taken place in Britain since the war.
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For them, as for most people, it's the changes in the everyday and not the big events which they feel have shaped their lives and, indirectly, their sense of history.
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At one point in the day, I said, "Do you know any West Indians whom we might have to come on this program?" And he's going to be surprised now because he doesn't know this. But I said, yes, Stuart Hall's a splendid fellow because
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I worked with him once on Meeting Point and he seemed to me to be highly intelligent and he'd be a man. Now, this idea was thrown out because the objection of the program was that Stuart Hall was far too intelligent and it would
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appear, and perhaps rightly so, that we had in some way loaded. As we slide out of the 1980s and edge our way into a new decade, who's gonna define the cultural themes of the next 10 years? And who's gonna capitalize
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politically on the changing mood of the new age? No one on the British left thinks harder about this question than Stuart Hall, one-time director of the Center for Cultural Studies at Birmingham and now professor at the Open University.
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The program you're about to see deals with another aspect of change, the process of aging. It looks at the different stages of life through which we as individuals and generations pass on our way from youth to old age. The transitions from youth to
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age is not only a matter of our biological and genetic aging, it's also a question of changing identities. And the program looks at both these aspects.
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His editorship of Universities and New Left Review post the crises in Suez and Hungary in the 1950s, through his involvement in the rise of cultural studies, to his analyses in the 1980s of Thatcherism, Stuart Hall has a reasonable claim to be the foremost
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intellectual of the left in Britain. There are Jews to be found in every social class in Britain. Why then are we dealing with the Jews as a minority community? Well, the fact is that in spite of social mobility, the Jews do remain a large and well-defined group with a
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distinct and continuing sense of their own identity. Today, there are half a million Jews in Britain. Most of the community are descendants of penniless immigrants who came to Britain largely in the 1890s and settled in the poorer areas of our cities, especially in
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the East End of London. In spite of the many factors which seem conducive to the disappearance of the Jewish community, there are important elements which enable the community to survive as an entity. But to understand this, we need to go back to the
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roots of the present in the communities of the 1890s. One of the things that's happening at the moment is that you're doing a television history of the Caribbean. The Caribbean is a test case for me about this question of identity. Everybody who's there has come from somewhere else. So we
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are all hybrid. I'm part Scottish, part African, part Portuguese Jew. I feel archetypally 21st century man. Increasingly, people's social and cultural identities will be this complex hybridity and the Caribbean is the home of hybridity.
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I lived through the most exquisitely differentiated class and colour system in the world. I was three shades darker than my family and it's the first social fact I knew about myself. I was running away from that throughout my entire existence
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really before I came to England. I came to England with enormous positive feelings but then you discover something quite different.
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This is the house where my father was born. Our family was part English, part African, part Portuguese Jew, even some say a little East Indian.
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My Aunt Geri was a teacher then, and incredibly she's still a teacher today. I go back to the Caribbean because I think it's a kind of test bed of whether one can live without an origin to go back to. I can't go back
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to any one origin. I'd have to go back to five. And I think increasingly that is a world experience.
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I've heard this tension throughout my life between what I thought I was, young, bright, Jamaican and this refusal of my family really to live in that world at all.
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In Jamaica, the question of exactly what shade you were in colonial Jamaica was the most important question because you could read off class and education and status from that. I was aware and conscious of that from the very beginning.
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To think about the cultures as still very rooted in their national nation-state bases and then in their regions. And I think that's just finished. I think economic and cultural processes just mean the interpenetration of the first world with the third and the second
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with the first. That's what globalization means culturally. We know what it means economically in terms of the integration of financial markets and so on. Culturally, I think, it means that when I ask anybody where they're from, I expect nowadays
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to be told an extremely long story. They're from really five different places and their aunts are from Odessa and their brothers are in Pakistan, etc. Everybody seems to come from about five different places and in their heads, their sense of themselves to be
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juggling a kind of set of world identities as they were trying to find their place.
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This is the house where my mother was brought up as a girl. Her family was poor and her uncle who owned this place unofficially adopted her and taught her its ways. Now the singer Eartha Kitt owns it, though she's not been here for
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a while. I looked around it with mixed feelings. It seemed to sum up some of the faults, pointless aspirations of the past.
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My mother was brought up thinking that everything that belonged to England was good and nothing that belonged to the Caribbean was. I was brought up in that middle class to look down on everybody who was not as brown or as near to white
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as I am. On the other hand, I watched my father being patronized, well off and as respectable and as lauded by other people as she wanted to be. Constant lack of fulfillment, of ambition in this family situation. I was about 17.
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My sister fell in love with a black doctor. She was in her 20s. My mother said, absolutely not. Within about she'd had a serious nervous breakdown treated with electric shock therapy.
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She's never really ever recovered. In my mother's day, this house and all it stood for must have seemed so permanent. And yet just think of who's gone and who survived. Gone is the old colonial life and the Jamaicans were identified with it. The tropics have reclaimed
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the house, the estate and the illusions that went with them. My old school, Jamaica College, hasn't changed much. But here too, there's something different underneath.
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These are the children of independence. Unlike me, they've never lived under direct colonial rule.
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In those days, colonialism was ending and Jamaica was setting out on her own. Michael Manley was already a prominent figure. Now he's Prime Minister. For the first year I was here as a small boy, was your last year in the sixth form.
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You were among the
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It felt as kind of opening up a new world. that it was a world from the margins. It opened up the possibility of really experiencing modern life to the full. It formed in me the aspiration to go and get it wherever it was.
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I remember coming down here when I lived in Kingston. It was poor then, and it's poorer now. Colonialism has gone. Independence governments of right and left have had their turns in power, each with their own brand of solutions. And
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the whole process has passed the majority of the ordinary people by. Rastafarians would say that they're still suffering, still in captivity, and that this is Babylon.
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One of the moments in your life for which I have the most emotional sympathy is that moment when I see you as a young boy coming from Jamaica and you come to Oxford for the first time. Can you remember what that was like?
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What was that moment of encountering Britishness in England for the first time? I wanted to get to another city. I wanted to get to London and I wanted to get to New York. I wanted to get to the experiences that London
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represented. I was too black in my family. I was the outsider from the time I was born. So I couldn't rest on what I was given.
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decided without contacting one another we had to get out in order to do something to become writer, come intellectual. Somehow we had to get out.
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Throughout his history the West Indian has constantly been on the move. First there was transportation into slavery. In more recent times there's been the drift from countryside to town, from small island to the larger islands, from the Caribbean to other parts of the world. The West Indian
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immigrant looks upon coming to Britain rather as coming home and may not realize how great is the adjustment which is required of him. To the British, West Indians, like most foreigners, tend to look the same. My mother delivered me in a felt hat.
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a check overcoat and a steamer trunk. It was the apotheosis of everything she'd wanted for me and for her family.
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Franz Fanon is one of the most distinguished, best known Martinican writers and thinkers. Fanon was sent abroad to university in France. He became, among other things, a very distinguished psychiatrist. And one day, a French woman and a little girl passed him in
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the street, and the little girl pointed him out with her finger and exclaimed in a loud voice to her mother, Look, maman, a negro! In that moment, Fanon said, he felt as if he didn't exist as a person. He had been fixed in
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the glance of the Europeans as something entirely other, a person with a black skin but trapped in a white mask.
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What I realized the moment I got to Oxford was that someone like me could not really be part of it. It's the peak of the English education system.
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You have to remember where I'm coming from as well as where I'm coming to.
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I'm coming from a background which in those days was always caught between the question of identification. And one was coming also not just to England, but to the heartland of English, the pinnacle of the English class system, the
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high point of English education, elite experience at Oxford. That was a very profound shock.
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In 1952, I went with an American friend to Europe and I took only two books, The Odyssey and James Joyce's The Odysseys. They represented my escape from a certain kind of colonial provincialism, from all the forms of colonial deformation. They were my root out,
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my mental fantasy root out. from Africa, from India, from the Caribbean, people from Southeast Asia. And we formed a socialist society looking for some space between the two alternatives, either capitalism or some form of state communism.
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What we related to were all the struggles outside. Kenya, Indonesia, Burma, Terrible, terrible early post-colonial struggles. Some of them very vicious. They've been forgotten.
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I never had much direct experience of the colony. Suddenly, to think, this is my next door neighbor. This is the guy who's at the labor exchange coming for my job. He's going to be driving my bus. That is a huge impact. I just
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feel, especially in everyday life, as the English population thought, my God, we have a black population that is going to stay.
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This is when industry is of course swinging over from wartime to peacetime production and it leads in to the great productive boom of the mid-50s. Accommodation and adjustment between blacks and whites is on the agenda.
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The black population on the whole maintain a low profile. They draw the curtains both against the cold and against the outsiders. It's a period of muted optimism. and dream of long-term black and white assimilation.
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I read things that I wrote in the late 1950s and I find I still not only believe them but say similar sorts of things. You need to wait until you understand what the next conjuncture is and if it means overthrowing what you thought
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before, you better think again. Every new configuration contains masses of their own. I think of the new not as breaking completely with the past, always as reconfiguring the elements of the past with some elements that are new. Each time that comes, it does require a change
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of perspective, sometimes a change of paradigm. The kind of music? canal is a name familiar to everyone. It is in fact the greatest international waterway in the world. And what Colonel Nasser has just done is to seize it for his own effort.
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Nobody should be surprised that this has created a very grave situation. Increasingly, modern governments use the cultural tools at their disposal to mobilize popular support. Historically, we can learn much about what governments wanted their citizens to believe from the three examples we've used in this program. The same sort of analysis based
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on who says what, to whom, when, how, why, and with what effect can help us to understand governments in action today.
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is that it is not yet finally wrapped up. Another history is always possible. Another turning is waiting to happen.
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Two dramatic events took place simultaneously, Hungary and Suez. Suez shot some socialists out of apathy. Hungary drove some communists out of the party.
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1956 is the moment when, first of all, the British revert to an imperial role that everybody thought had disappeared forever. Gunboat diplomacy. And at the same time, the Hungarian Revolution, which was the first time a satellite East European communist state tried to break free of the Soviet yoke.
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This was the beginning of my New Left experience. For the New Left, what it meant for me was that space in politics which was defined by the Soviet invasion of Hungary and the invasion of Egypt. Somewhere in between there, the
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idea of a democratic, socialist, anti-imperial politics was born. In England in 56, This was really a cultural explosion. I mean, there was the new music and the new stars, but most important of all, there was this huge pent-up
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energy and feeling behind it all. Youth culture seems to me to be about several kinds of rebellion. and pop music is the sound of that rebellion in progress.
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After 56, we started a thing called Universities and Left Review, and that was very much edited by the Oxford group. Myself, Raphael Samuel, Charles Taylor, and Gabriel Pearson.
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We were sort of the spokespersons for this whole larger enclave would have been debating politics and also politics and culture.
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We were looking for an alternative, more humane, more just, more inclusive, less racially driven, less patriarchal in its forms than either of these two Cold War alternatives.
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We used to think of it as part of a very personal, private crisis. We used to think of adolescence as a secretive period in our lives. The difference is that these crises and tensions are now being lived out publicly on the stage. They're
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being dramatized in the music, in dress, and so on. Adolescence is also a period of idealism and addiction to great causes, when people express their rebellion against the misery, hypocrisy, violence, destructiveness of the world around them.
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The coffee bar has been opened by a small group of young people from Oxford who, having already successfully launched a magazine, now want a meeting place for the left and a source of income for their publication. The aim is to provide a place
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where people will sit and talk, and preferably talk politics. The first person I met was a secondary modern school teacher who had recently left Oxford. We're angry about a government that's been steadily eroding welfare state, in spite of what welfare state's done for a lot of people
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in the last, say, 15 years. We're very angry about a generation of young people that have grown up, I think, without any kind of real moral or political leadership.
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The murder of Kelso Cockro was almost the first time that there's a national black presence on the British streets around an issue.
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black man who'd been murdered at a street corner in Ludwig Grove by four or five white youths.
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That's when people become aware, not just that there are community black struggles going on, but that there's a national black politics emerging.
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The New Left Review, the magazine you edited for the book. Yes, we started in Oxford a small journal called the University of the Left Review, and then there was another journal started mainly by people who had left the Communist Party called the New
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Reasoner, and these two journals came together to form New Left Review. People who ought to have edited had really exhausted themselves in the struggles around to found these journals, and so me, in my early 20s, found myself editing these grand
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figures. My childhood was the experience of passing through a set of negative definitions. And my parents patrolled who I could and couldn't bring home. They had to be the right class and the right color and the right education. They had to have the right
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hair, the right background, the right name. They saw me as an aspiring young scholar who's going to go away, conquer the world, and come back and adorn their struggles to improve themselves. Well, that's what I decided not to do. So who am
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I? I'm the person who is refusing that identity. We're always trying to negotiate between notions of ourselves and of our cultural meanings and the values which enable us to live, which are not translatable from one to another. That's just the modern condition. Don't ask me whether it's going to
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go on being like that. That's how it is now, and I think it's been like that for some time, and I don't think it's just superficial confusion that makes us think that. I think it's a really new dynamic culturally across the globe, moving
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at different speeds across the globe which gives us that kind of experience of what it's like to be in the modern world.
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Panorama tonight is devoting the whole of its time to one subject, the H-bomb. various campaigns against the H-bomb will reach one climax at the coming weekend when protest marchers from many parts of the country will converge on a quiet Berkshire
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village. Aldermaster. It's a small figure for a political party, but for a demonstration, it's enormous. So is the figure of 800 people arrested for civil disobedience the other day.
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Stuart Hall sums up the hopes which people of the left have for the unilateralist policy. I think that Britain ought to give up the bomb unilaterally, renounce nuclear weapons and their manufacture and their use, and consider what more positive policies they
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can adopt in the future. I think it's very important that a country that's been right at the center of the military build-up should in fact confront the problems of nuclear weapons and take a new course. I don't think the effect in the world
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of seeing a major power do that would have a profound effect. I don't think that a great deal is going to come out of discussions between East and West, either where disarmament or disengagement is concerned. It's going to come out of the
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United Nations, and this is the point at which the neutral powers could use the increased and added influence per power like Britain in their support.
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to see the way in which the balance of power has changed in the last five years as a result of the emergence of African nation, Latin American countries into the world scene, their renewed effect on discussions in the United Nations and so on.
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Their impact on world affairs has doubled or trebled in the last two or three years.
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involved in CND, I was on platforms, you know, speaking, speaking, speaking. There's certainly a view that politics is a very separate thing from people's lives and that it ought to be managed by a party hierarchy or people whose trained job
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it is. Now this is my view, a really dangerous thing because it leaves a lot of people out. It makes a lot of people feel that they, if you like, have no control over their lives, over their environment, over the kind of things
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that they do and so on. up and down the country speaking at CND meetings for about three years. I spoke nearly every weekend. I'd go to Halifax and then there'd be a New Left Editorial Board meeting. I understood Oxford, I understood London, I understood the
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South, but Halifax is a completely different thing altogether. You still see the smoke coming out of the chimneys. There was still textile mills.
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We often think of England as an old country. It's been settled for a long time and it presents itself as a society in which there have been relatively little changes across history. But in fact, we know that successive
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historical changes have reshaped both the social and the physical landscape of England. Each of these economic and political transformations have brought a new class of persons into an ascendant position in the society And as a consequence of that, they've constructed for
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themselves images of their own power and influence and transformed the economic and political relationships around them.
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The former colonial peoples of Africa, Asia, South America are now insisting on self-government, at least in part because they are determined to be treated as equals.
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I wanted to question the very sharp opposition which you make between the concepts of liberty and equality. This is not only an ethnocentric way of looking at it, but a peculiarly British way of looking at it. I think it has been the idea
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of equality which has really mobilized people to support nationalist movements of one kind or another.
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What they were facing were in fact inequalities, whether they were economic or human or social or racial, they were essentially inequalities. I think they impinged on their lives as inequalities. Therefore, when they said we want to be free, what they meant was we
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want to be free not to be unequal. The perception of culture was always of something which is changing. I've never believed in the absolute moment to break.
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When I went to Cuba in 1960 for the new left, people said, this is year one. From here, socialist man begins. It's not true. Cuba went on being partly what it was before the revolution.
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So I don't believe in absolute breaks. politics have always been grounded on rather long-term universalistic sets of values.
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It's also been grounded on long-term historical descriptions of our society. We thought they would hold as political metaphors, and I just don't think they do, either for the right or the left. It means a politics which is much more
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self-reflexive, which is constantly inspecting the grounds of its own commitments, which can never hope to mobilize or inscribe support in an automatic way. Yes, there are no large collectivities which can always be whipped up in line.
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Professor Richard Hoggart is professor of English at the University. I'm the director of the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies. I'm Stuart Hall, and with a colleague from Birmingham University, Professor Richard Hoggart, I'll be talking in this program about English provincial working class life
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and people. old class society becoming a mass society. This is the period of the coming of television, it's the coming of youth culture, it's rock around the clock. It's the explosion of the 20th century in a sort of pre-20th century society.
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This is Salford in the north of England. And all too often, the people who live in the north are shown on the screen as simple innocents easy prey for the Metropolitan white boys.
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I met Catherine. We got married in December 64. I then encountered racism in a way in which I don't think I'd really encountered it before. I'd never experienced it very directly. But in 64, in Birmingham, racism was absolutely
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overt. The first time things were called out to us in the streets because we were a mixed couple. It was really a pretty traumatic experience.
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asking me how can people live without some sense that there's an ultimate truth some universal appeal that one can make beyond the flux of experience and I don't know but I don't any longer think that this is just a transitional phase and
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that we're moving on to some other more settled period I think you know we're in culturally we're in the kind of phase of permanent revolution when they have, in a sense, to accept themselves, not just what nationality they belong
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to and what colour they are, but what they are in themselves. The final question for young coloured people in Britain is the same question for young people anywhere. Who are they going to be? What are they going to be? What
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are their society encouraging them to be? Every child, whether white or coloured, wants to belong to the world. But the world must seem a completely different place when the price of belonging to it is that you want to change the
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color of your skin or the shape of your features in your face. The real problems seem to arise when the children themselves are beginning to become adults, when they enter adolescent and adult life, and then find awaiting them a very
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hostile world, a world where a vice of color seems to entwine with and override intelligence or aptitude or skill.
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were really inheritors of the Teddy Board period, whereas the mods were really Beatles kids.
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The cooler generation, the mods were bound to come out on top. But the rockers weren't going to give up the field of the mods without a fight. The public reaction to this was very strong indeed. Magistrates saying things about youth culture, which they'd
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probably always thought but never had the chance to say before, sent in reinforcements of police to guard the seaport towns on the weekends. These forces which were at play in the confrontation between the mods and the rockers really then comes right through and
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erupts into the pop scene itself. Young people are not only going into a world of their own, they're also in some ways trying to get out of somebody else's world. They're trying to shut that other world out.
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It seems to take about seven or eight years before you actually confess to yourself that you have chosen to live somewhere else. And then you and anybody who's been through that experience has this question of, who are you? Where do you belong? You
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feel at home in both cultures. You know a great deal about them both from the inside. You do find it difficult sometimes ever to say we or us about either of them. This is the multicultural experience.
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There was no teaching of film in universities. There was no formal study of film at all. Through the British Film Institute, we started to do lectures on both film as a series art form, but also on popular cinema.
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We got involved trying to write for teachers who wanted to teach this stuff in classrooms but didn't know how on earth to do it. We decided to write a How to Do It book, which was called The Popular Arts.
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These films are about characters who are on the move in some kind of social terms. These are either young people affected by new attitudes and therefore moving away from that background or young men on the make.
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There is a kind of submerged theme in these films, never radically questioned. The success and the top is a pretty flimsy kind of thing in the provinces. To get to the top You've got to get to London, you've got to get to the
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Metropolitan Center, you've got to get to the heart of power. When the immigrant comes to Britain, the streets are not paved with gold.
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Indians who come to Britain do so for three main reasons. The first group, like doctors, come for specialized training. The second group are students. The third and largest group are those who come in search of employment.
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It taught to me in a very special way. It taught to me as if it were a poem about how God was able to create the world.
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For a long time, I actually thought of the poem quite differently than what it actually is. I actually thought it was a kind of picture of a tiger. Then I've read it again and I've taught it. And every time I have to teach
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it in a different way or read it in a different way, and I see something that I've not seen before, celebrated the fall of the French in Vietnam in the 1950s. Little did I know that it's just the beginning of something, not the
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end of something. As our century draws to a close, It seems appropriate that we should pause to look back to its infancy. With hindsight, it's possible to see the 20th century as one of massive expansion in the role of the state and society.
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Many of the changes were chronicled by George Orwell. We'll be looking at the state and society through his eyes. From that moment when, as a young man, he returned to Europe from a post in the Burma police to become a writer, confront the
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depression. home once and my mother said to me I hope they don't think you're one of those immigrants and I thought to myself of course that is exactly what I am and she said England beautiful England full of those black people the best thing for
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all of them is they push a lot of them off the short end of a long pier and I thought to myself she's talking about me I often ask, where do I belong? And if I'm going to be honest, I
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don't belong anywhere any longer. I was born and brought up in Jamaica and lived there for 18 years, but I left it a long time ago. I was educated and grew up and have spent over 11 years in Britain, and Britain is my
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home, but I'm not English. We always suppose really something would give us a definition of who we really were, our class position or our national position, our geographic origins or where our grandparents came from. And I don't think any one thing any longer will tell us who we
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are. Secondly then is the question of contradiction. I think then there is a jarring of those different things. They're not commensurable with one another. I think we're always, you know, trying to negotiate between notions of ourselves and of
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our cultural meanings and the values which enable us to live, which are not sort of translatable from one to another.
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I don't think that identity is a kind of essence which exists inside all the other things. I think identity is always constructed in a conversation between who we are and the political ideologies out there. Though it feels as
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if it wells up from inside you by something which is absolutely yours, is not really like that at all. It's the product of an endlessly ongoing conversation with everybody around you. You are partly how they see you.
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It was not until the movement of decolonization and civil rights in the States that I recognized whatever is the actual color of my skin, socially, historically, culturally, politically, I made the identification with being black.
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I think identity is an endless, ever-unfinished conversation. We see now the beginning of a genuine underground with a real interest in pioneering new experiences, with a real interest in developing new artistic forms. People here are in some ways right outside of politics, they're outside of the ongoing way in which
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the society makes its money and produces things and so on. This kind of exploration and independence very quickly becomes forms of social protest. There is an implicit anti- establishment, anti-authority, anti-adult feel within the values being carried by this tradition.
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It's a new kind of cultural revolution, revolution of a whole generation. You could catch it in a metaphor by saying that the Paris revolution of May 1968 is a revolution of a dream, really.
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It is also a cataclysmic year in the US, in France, Italy, Germany, and Japan, and Czechoslovakia. It is the period of the growing protests against the Vietnam War, the year of the student revolutions, lack power, of the cultural underground, of
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hot summers followed by hot autumns. It inaugurates in Britain and elsewhere a period of profound social, cultural, political polarization.
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When the smoke and fire cleared, what was impressive were the slow or profound changes. Deep underlying things in the culture really were shifted by 68. But my acute sense in Britain is that if I might call it as if were
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the enemies of all of that, have never forgotten how much was unhinged in 68.
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You get two forms of protest, the militant marches and demonstrations. You also get the beginnings of a desire to drop out of politics altogether, to make your protest by finding your way around adult society instead of taking it on. And this is
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really the beginnings of the exploration of new experiences through drugs, through hallucination, through strange music, through the psychedelic.
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68 is also when the great consensus of the 50s and early 60s comes apart.
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When the politics of the center dissolves and reveals the contradictions and social antagonisms which are gathering beneath.
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A range of politicians and public spokesmen in the press and the media in this period are mesmerized by the spectacle of a society which is careering into a social crisis, a crisis of authority. The enemy is within the gates.
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He is nameless. He is protean. He is everywhere. This is not a crisis of race, but race punctuates and periodizes the crisis. race is the lens through which people come to perceive that a crisis is developing. It is the framework through which the crisis is
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experienced. Eight days ago, Enoch Powell hit the headlines with his views on immigrants and immigration, a problem which especially affects this part of the country with its high immigrant population.
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I was in Burmese at the time. talking to West Indians about it. They were genuinely frightened. They thought, if Powell can say that, then it is a kind of invitation to people who hold racist opinions anyway to act on them. It certainly was
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a call to mobilization. in the first place it would be put to the country that we want to make a grand gesture, we want to invite people from all over the world. What do you think about it? I think that would have been the time to do
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it, not now. There are people from all over the world. There are people from a very special part of the world that have had a very long relationship with you, who weren't asked to vote on whether they wanted to be taken to Africa
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or not. We've never had the opportunity to give an opinion on this subject. One of the striking things for me in the 60s was that the British looked in the faces of these black and brown people whom they have been ruling for 400
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years as if to say, well, I don't really know where you've come from or why you've come here or what we have to do with your future. It's amnesia about the empire which settled because, of course, of the paradox that these people came
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at the very moment when Britain was thinking it was drawing down the flag and was rid of them.
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tendency now to abstract questions of race from their internal social and political basis and context in British society. To deal with race as if it has nothing intrinsically to do with the present condition of England. It's viewed as
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an external problem which has been foisted to some extent on British society from the outside. Well I hope to persuade you that this view cannot possibly be true.
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The 70s is a period of profound alienation when young black folk could not think of themselves as British. Nobody wanted them to be. They didn't feel they were. They were completely alienated from the possibility of being British. That is the moment of
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what I would call the deepest crisis of identity. 1972 and October 73, Britain experienced a wave of muggings.
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And this mugging epidemic got widespread coverage in the press. But where did this label, mugging, come from? Here are two news stories, both about someone attacked in the open, one before August 1972, one after. One difference between them is clearly the size of the coverage. That's a
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front page and that's a lead story. Another difference is the use, but in the second story only, of the mugging label. It's the size of the sentence... The dream, the illusion, perhaps, on either side, that full assimilation was possible.
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That the people who came would, over two generations, really sort of disappear into the host community and become more or less indistinguishable from them.
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of assimilation was buried on both sides. In that moment of crisis, black people discover the complex things that make them black can never be traded away. That's the moment when the ideal of assimilation in Britain dies. People say, we are not going to stay
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on the terms of becoming just like you. was one of the most explosive impacts on cultural studies. Which in the early stages had been concerned with class questions, therefore concerned with male questions. I'm exposed to this on both fronts.
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I want to change the culture of the centre, which was very much a boys club.
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At home, we are renegotiating our marriage. It's a question of, will you shut up now? Can you keep quiet for the next six months, please? Don't tell me about the new left and Edward Thompson and Raymond Williams. Let me tell you about seeing
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marriage as a form of slavery. were two kind of heroes of mine. Raymond Williams was important for my thought, for my political engagement, but he couldn't be a role model.
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Neither of them could be role models. Feminism taught me the difference between a conviction in the head and a change in how you live. It was a very, very difficult moment, both intellectually in the center and domestically at home.
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So one's not trying to say that what's happening in Eastern Europe and here, Third World are all the same. But in every department, economic, political, cultural, you know, social, things are changing very fast and very profoundly. The changes are not just superficial.
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contingency and particularity have entered and undermined all our languages that stretch across time, that are true for all societies, etc. That's what I think has gone. That is, of course, what postmodernism sometimes means.
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The thing that has shifted for me is that you can't translate particular judgment all the other cases, all the other instances. And when one takes it to that level, I think it's pointing to something very profound philosophically.
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Every new configuration contains masses of the old. I think of the new not as breaking completely with the past, always as reconfiguring the elements of the past with some elements that are new. time that comes it does require a change
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of perspective. we looked at how the image of industrial conflict is shaped by the way strikes are presented on television news. As we saw, news tends to concentrate mainly on the most dramatic and violent aspects of confrontation, rather than on long-term causes or consequences.
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All strikers are militants, all strikes are irrational, every picket line is violent, whereas every settlement looks like a victory for common sense, because it's represented as in the national interest.
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Because I experienced the end point of colonialism inside my own family as a tragedy, I came not to be able to maintain the traditional distinction between what is subjective and what is objective.
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Once you open those gates, you speak, even if you're speaking about the political situation, you're speaking as it were, allowing something from the psychic energy to flow into the words.
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The summer riots of 1981 and the violence during the coal strike have increased fears of a crisis of governability. But rather than a breakdown of law and order, Hall argues that Britain is more threatened by a slow drift towards authoritarianism. The most
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important sense that I have here is that there was a kind of sense of what the political conversation was about from about 1945 onwards. And that lasted, I think, in spite of the different and so on. And I have the sense
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that in the 80s, that conversation has come to a stop. I've always written as a kind of intervention in an argument. I want to turn the argument in a particular kind of way. I want to... recover something which I
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think is being lost. It always has a kind of relation to the history of the present. I'm thinking, what does that mean now? How is it in the problem space we're inhabiting currently?
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We can now begin to identify a range of different processes which tend in our kinds of societies to deliver a significant number of people at the bottom of a number of different ladders. Some of them are technological. Some of them have to do
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with education. Some of them have to do with race and ethnicity. Some of them have to do with single parenthood. Although the causes are multiple, what seems to be important is that they deliver a certain number of people to a multiple series of
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disadvantages. And then the question of permanence comes in. How on earth do people like that get themselves out? Now, they don't get themselves out of being stuck in that way by being, you know, thrifty or getting on their bikes or any of those
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things. shifted a little bit in my understanding or analysis of Thatcherism. I think she missed the consequences of not taking care of what holds individuals together.
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The most profound thing she ever said is there is no such thing as society, there are only individual men and women. And if you go into the street or try to educate your children or try to look after yourself when you're ill, you
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suddenly realize there's not just individual men and women. They are the networks of relationships which somebody has to articulate, somebody has to take care of, somebody has to fund.
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The question of rethinking all those different elements that have gone into the making of oneself, the different roots, and by roots I mean R-O-U-T-E-S, not R-O-O-T-E-S, the different pathways by which one has come to where one is. And I've come
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via Oxford, via English literature, via Africa, via Kingston. I've come by many places and who I am are that thing.
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In Dominica's industries, sugar is the most important and has the longest history. Columbus brought a bundle of canes with him on his second voyage in 1493. And sugar was replacing honey as the traditional sweetener. In Europe, there was a huge demand, and Hispaniola
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couldn't produce enough. The problem was labor, and that was solved by the Spanish system of repartimento, rounding up the natives and making them work on the plantations.
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stay we are in the center of the creative and cultural life of the society and we require the jobs the training the opportunities the funding we want the path open especially for the young people of this society the young black
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people of this society who have created in their myriad art forms from writing poetry dance music right through to rap created a new culture a culture of which in its variety and power astonishes, astonishes now the eyes of young white people in the society, which is a mark, a sign
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that they are the people of the future. And that needs organization and funding. And we have to go out and get it because it's ours.
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I tried to think back to 58, to the things which I thought I knew and thought I could see. Some of them came off. One wasn't completely stupid about them, but certain things were completely unpredictable. I mean, sexual politics.
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The consequence of what has happened in the last two or three decades in this old domain has undoubtedly shaken the commitment of a lot of heterosexual people the old sexual norms without necessarily yet undermining them. People are driven into identifying themselves as a
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sexual minority when they confront a surrounding culture that gives a particular valorization to normality. Then if you want to contest that normality, you have to draw people together and one of the ways of doing that is to mobilize them around
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an identity. I would call sociological time change, which isn't the consequence of people organizing themselves or political programs. It's kind of how things settle in a society that is just different 20 years later. I think the position of women will never be the same
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again. I think the position of sexuality will never be the same again, which doesn't mean that there aren't horrendous periods yet to come. I just think that kind of slow glacial time overtake us on those kinds of questions and the ground is shifting.
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There is a common sense that Britain is being accepted as a multicultural society. I would describe this as a multicultural drift. We've just found ourselves in the situation where we're surrounded by people of different racial and ethnic backgrounds, and, well, that's what
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it looks like Britain is going to be. We haven't really confronted what then are the problems which that poses. Alongside that is a significant minority of British-born people who don't think that's the way in which Britain should go.
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Tell me why have they all come to this country? And some of them have come from five countries, six countries, all over the world. You asked me a question.
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Not long ago, you were, you know, bombing Kosovo. I didn't want any part of that. Nor did I, but that was a fact. Now this is the result of that situation, the long term result of that situation, in which Britain felt, rightly
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or wrongly, that it had to intervene. Well, as a consequence of that, people are fleeing from the situation in that part of the world, and one of the places they would come to is to this country. Now, they may not have a genuine
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case, but I don't know how on earth you could describe the people by simply looking at them, just a minute, I looking in their faces as bogus.
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I feel the world as stranger to me than I've ever felt it before. I feel out of time for the first time in my life.
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turned in the 1970s, fundamentally turned, the end of that post-war social democratic period in Britain, the end of Keynesianism, glimpsing the end of the welfare state. If you could persuade me that all the vital energies of contemporary life in its variety across the globe
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finds a place within the existing system of power, we're at the end of history. Until then, we are not. I think a certain underlying optimism is required. A pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will, Gramsci said.
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That means hard thought, hard graft, recognizing what the world is like, recognizing the way the terrain is set against you, and then remembering the openness of history and seeing whether one can intervene.
Topics:Stuart Hallsocial changecultural identityhybriditypost-colonialismBritish societyCaribbeancultural studiesrace and classglobalization
