In June 1992 Stuart Hall came to the University of East London to give the inaugural lecture for the Centre for New Ethnicities Research to which I had just been appointed director. I had been working for a number of years at the Institute of Education developing an approach to anti -racist work with young people based on ethnographic research in schools, playgrounds, housing estates and neighbourhoods in East London. The focus, then as now, was on trying to understand the impact of economic change on the livelihoods, life styles, and life stories of the people most directly affected and their families over a long period of time. East London, and especially the Isle of Dogs where much of this work took place was then a front line of racial tension between a long established working class community traumatised by the closure of the docks, and more recently arrived Bangladeshi and Vietnamese/Chinese communities[i].
Stuart had a long standing attachment to the University of East London, whose main campus was then in Barking, an area that was undergoing rapid transformation from a predominantly white working class area, dominated by Fords Dagenham to a much more diverse population, a change reflected in the composition of the UEL student body. Barking was itself to become a racial front line and his lecture, in which he developed his distinctive model of ethnicity, had a very definite local resonance[ii]. On this memorial occasion, when we are considering his intellectual and political legacy, it may be worth briefly revisiting that time and place, reflecting what was achieved, where we failed, and what bearing that whole initiative to re-think race and class has on the political circumstances in which we currently find ourselves[iii].
Race and the Other Scene
From an educational standpoint the CNER initiative was an attempt to uncouple legitimate grievances related to the process of de-industrialisation ( viz the closure of the docks) from the discourse of their racialization; in particular we wanted to devise a method to re-connect the existential predicaments of young people arising from the implosion of customary transitions from school to a framework of understanding that could address the more hidden wounds of class[iv]. This intervention was both required and hampered by the failure of the multi-cultural curriculum to say much positive about the heritage of working class struggle, unless it featured visible ethnic minorities, and also by a moral, symbolic and doctrinaire pedagogy of anti-racism which tended to press the mute button on the expression of grievances voiced by white working class youth for fear that they might be construed as giving support to racist beliefs [v]. The result was to even further alienate young people who already had little enough stake in the educational system or faith in its capacity to deliver on its meritocratic promises, and whose own collapsing narrative of aspiration in any case bypassed it[vi].
[expand title=”Read More”]
Against these tunnel visions, our work drew on concepts and methods from Cultural studies, using photography, art work, creative writing and visual ethnography to provide a space of representation in which young people’s anxieties related to rapid demographic and socio-economic change could be freely ventilated, examined, worked through and as far as possible de-racialised[vii].
I quickly came to the conclusion through this early work that to get to grips with racialized sentiment and belief it was necessary to take the notion of unconscious racism much more literally and seriously. It was not just about the unintended consequence of institutional processes of discrimination, or forms of prejudice of which the perpetrators were unaware or in denial, it was unconscious in the Freudian sense- a discourse of the Other within the self that involved a perverse way of holding bodies in mind. From a Lacanian perspective racial phantasies are linked to what Freud called the death drive. The racialised body is always an ancestral body, a dead body whose characteristics are supposedly inherited identically from generation to generation and so remains sealed up in itself and outside history and language. This is the body held in mind evoked by a code of inheritance that transmits a carbon copy of an original (a race) which does not exist. Racial genealogies however dynamic they look always imagine a state of social stasis as their support. Sexual relations between ‘ races’ are so forbidden and so thrilling because they dare to bring to life and give a libidinal charge to what is otherwise a dead relation between phantom bodies. It is not only because of the unspeakable genocidal crimes committed in its name, but because it represents unconsciously a remainder, and a reminder, of this death drive that racism is such a terrifying force, at once so fascinating and so hard to combat, the ultimate point of fixation and a floating signifier.
According to this view the endless repetitions of racist discourse, the reiterative slogans and stereotypes, are an attempt to master or contain the diffuse anxiety aroused by this Other Scene ; yet the anxiety continually leaks out as a principle of impending catastrophe represented by the always unforeseen, (but already long anticipated) irruption of the uncanny, the foreign or the alien. Immigrants and refugees, are rendered visible within this frame only to be made to embody concretely this otherwise unspeakable threat. Once caught within this racialized gaze, target populations are treated as representing everything that has to be got rid of from the body politic in order to maintain its equilibrium. The diffuse sense of dread evoked by the death drive is thereby transmuted into a named object of fear and loathing, whose exclusion – and at the limit extermination- alone promises deliverance[viii].
However interesting conceptually, the real test of this model is how far it helps illuminate the role of phantasy in everyday racist practices, whether this take the form of name calling, graffiti or bullying in the playground, racial violence on the streets, or indirect forms of race discrimination in the educational and employment system. My application of this model emphasised the re-structuring of primary processes of narcissistic identification centred of the problematics of self –origination: the nation, race, ethnicity, class, gender aboriginally giving birth to itself and reproducing itself from itself identically from generation to generation as if were an endogamous tribe [ix]. Within this symbolic order any form of social, cultural or biological mixing becomes taboo, and is considered a betrayal of filiation or a dilution of heritage. To have the ‘wrong’ body, live on the ‘wrong’ side of the tracks, to support the ‘wrong’ football team, like the ‘wrong’ kind of music, wear the ‘wrong’ clothes becomes a mark of pariah status, of belonging to a ‘race apart’. To call this a ‘narcissism of minor difference’ as Freud did in an attempt to cut anti-Semitism down to size through irony should not be to underestimate its power to infiltrate popular culture and become common sense. One implication of this model is that the primary process of the racist imaginary operates relatively independently of its forms of institutionalisation, it persists beneath threshold of public perception even, and especially when these power structures are modified, for example through the introduction of anti-discrimination legislation.
[/expand]
Tricks of the Trade
Stuart Hall was very supportive of this perspective, not least because of the influence of Fanon on his own thinking about race and his close personal connection with the world of psychoanalysis. In his inaugural lecture he argued that ethnicity is not necessarily ethnocentric, it does not have to be about autochthony, aboriginality, or auto-poesis, it is not inevitably racially fixated, or essentialised. [x]He detected the emergence of a new and more hopeful form of ethnicity which was de-centred, fluid, situational, variable in its articulation, hybridised, allo-poetic, and undergoing constant transformation. In other words post-modern. It became our research task to put this construct under empirical pressure, to investigate what the normative concept of ‘New Ethnicities’ corresponded to in the cultural practices, identity work, and coming of age stories, of young people growing up in a part of London which for over two centuries has been home to immigrants and refugees from all over the world as well as to a large English working class population drawn from different parts of the UK and Ireland.
[expand title=”Read More”]
One of our first projects was called Tricks of the Trade, and involved producing educational materials for 10- 14 year old children for the British Film Institute[xi]. We chose the theme of the trickster, inspired by Henry Louis Gates ‘The Signifying Monkey’ – his account of the role of trickster figures in Black diasporic culture, especially in its street vernaculars of sounding, signifying and talking the dozens, the rhetorical foundations of rap. Our idea was to twin Ananse, the black spiderman whose exploits in using his wits to turn the tables on the powers-that-be was a staple ingredient of Caribbean folklore, with his White American counterpart, the hero of the All American Dream as portrayed by Marvel Comics. Through this collision between hegemonic and subaltern cultures our aim was to explore issues of power, knowledge, and the colonial legacy n an imaginative way by getting the children to create stories about what happens when Ananse meets Spiderwoman. The story was adapted to local vernaculars, and for example, the Cockney was refigured as a mixed heritage shape shifter, part con artist, part ducker and diver, outwitting the Law to make a living in the East End’s hidden economy.
So on the occasion of Stuart’s s visit I seized the opportunity to interview him about Ananse. He reminisced about his childhood growing up in Jamaica and the Ananse stories he heard told. What I like about Ananse, he told me, is that he knew how to live on both sides of the line. In other words he knew how to fool the powerful into thinking he was on their side, he could be trusted as ‘their man’ to do their bidding and then used that privileged position to undermine their authority and get his own way. You can see why children love these stories!
Living on both sides of the line is what Stuart Hall did most of his life. He was a Rhodes scholar at Oxford, the founder of a new academic discipline, an internationally known cultural commentator, and, as such, a fully paid up member of the intellectual elite as currently castigated by the Daily Mail and the populist alt-right . But he was also an anti-establishment figure, a man of the New Left, a political activist, an organic black intellectual and part of to a dissident academy populated by artists and writers who held the world according to Mrs Thatcher in contempt. He turned up for the CNER lecture wearing a sober and extremely well cut suit as befitted the formality of the occasion but he also looked somewhat uncomfortable in it, as if he longed to take off the jacket, tear off the tie and let the dance of his mind become a more directly embodied performance. Talking on his feet, combining Benjaminesque subtle dialectic with Brechtian crude thought was, after all, his special forte.
Living on both sides of the line is also of course, what new ethnicities are supposed to be all about: the capacity to switch codes, negotiate multiple identities, feel at home in difference, and most definitely not feel torn between two cultures or conflicting value systems. Now one of the problems with this model of identity work is that in some hands it tends to set up a binary opposition in styles of identity work between healthy happy hybridity at one normative pole and pathological purity at the other in a way which, it could be argued, fails to grasp the lived complexities of race, class and gender in contemporary Britain.
Secondly it conjures up the exemplary figure of a nomadic subject in a way which conflates the privileged cosmopolitan life style of multi-cultural omnivores and globe trotters with the denizens of the gig economy, who from economic necessity have to engage in the just- in -time production of the self, and also with the situation of diasporic peoples who have been forcibly uprooted from their homelands as a result of famine, war or persecution. The precarious circumstances of such groups simply do not admit the luxury of living both sides of line, where the line in question is that drawn between survival or extinction.
[/expand]
Finding the Way Home
In the eight years of its existence CNER carried out a wide range of pedagogic /cultural action linked to its ethnographic research programme.[xii] In our biggest project, Finding the Way Home, we carried out a comparative study of young people’s sense of place, identity and belonging, related to issues of gender, ethnicity and class, in two ex- dockland areas of London (Deptford and the Isle of Dogs ) and two equally contrasting districts of Hamburg. We used a gamut of methods, from picture preference tests of youth fashions, to guided fantasy exercises, photo-story making, video walkabouts, and narrative interviews, to create a multi-layered representation of these young peoples’ coming of age stories and how these were influenced by different local histories and geographies of immigration and racism in each city [xiii].
[expand title=”Read More”]
I cannot possibly detail the findings here, but suffice to say that we found the crucial indicator for the style of identity work being pursued was the amount and type of cultural and social capital at these young peoples’ disposal, and this in turn was primarily a function of familial or communal not educational resources. The key distinction here was first defined by Robert Putnam in his theory of social capital, but can also be usefully applied to cultural, linguistic and biopolitical capital[xiv]. Access to bridging capital provides young people with the confidence to experiment with life style choices, to try out different gender roles, to reach out to make friendships and other partnerships with young people from very different social backgrounds based on shared cultural affinities, to rehearse imaginatively a new class and ethnic identity, and to generally embrace the stylistic mash ups and social conviviality offered by urban multi-culture[xv]. In other words to live both sides of the line. Bridging capital gave these young people the opportunity and disposition to see the world, if not as their oyster, then as a safe space for their encounter with the Other, albeit with a few dangerous or exciting ‘hot spots’. That’s the good news. The bad news is that those young people with less going for them in terms of social and cultural assets needed to create defensible spaces of identity work in order to maintain some sense of ontological security; these spaces were often strongly territorialised, and anchored to fixed positions of gender, ethnicity and class, relations of filiation which is some cases were also racialised. From the perspective of what Putnam calls bonding capital the world is seen a dangerous place, offering little prospect on the future, but with a few bolt holes, where the Other could be kept safely at bay. Bonders were more likely to draw the line under their own feet, to over-react to any kind of change and to feel most threatened by the arrival on the doorstep of new immigrants. We found that in both cities it was the young people who self identified as being working class and who had the least social and cultural capital who were the most likely to adopt the position of defended subjects and to bond only with those seen to be like them, in terms of real or fictive kinship rather than elective affinity. However we also found that the balance between ethnic bonding and bridging varied according to local circumstances, and that many young people toggled between positions according to the social context in which they found themselves. At one moment they would cheerfully be part of a diverse multitude, at another they reverted to their cultural tribe. There were also some who shifted decisively from one position to the other in the course of our research, as a result of contingent experiences and interventions in their lives. We concluded that ‘old’ ethnicities had not withered away but in some contexts had been re-invigorated, partly as a defensive response to loss, while new ethnicities were largely confined to those who could take advantage of the creative opportunities they offered for self advancement, especially in the creative industries and knowledge economy.
[/expand]
Hani’s Story
These different trajectories of identification, from building niches of roots radicalism based on race or religion, to exploring alternative sub-cultural routes to a mash up of social identity, could not be read off or predicted simply from initial class of ethnic categorisations. Family and peer cultures were decisive intervening variables. Just how complex and over- determined these processes of identity work were can be illustrated by the story of one of the children we got to know very well as he struggles to finding his way to somewhere he could call ‘ Home’. Hani was a 12 year old boy on the cusp of adolescence. He came to our attention because his teachers were in a quandary about how to deal with his often aggressive racial remarks. We began to work intensively with him, exploring his fears and phantasies in relation to his peers, but also encouraging him to make a portrait of his family life, bringing in photographs and objects from home to discuss and getting him to draw or paint figures or scenes, whether from his dreams, his day dreams, or his everyday life, that he found disturbing.
[expand title=”Read More”]
Hani’s statements were dominated by lurid images of sexual and racial threat. He didn’t like girls ‘because they had claws’ and he thought black girls ‘smelled bad and would claw your eyes out if you looked at them’. He admired and obsessively drew musclemen, and wanted to be one when he grew up so he could ‘punch the girls claws off’. He firmly believed in white superiority, and said he wanted ‘ to marry a sexy white girl who would look after him’. Although at one level he was articulating a generalised peer culture of racism and sexism in this school, and was a correspondingly popular figure, especially amongst the white boys, the fluency and vehemence of his statements also marked him out from the others.These ideas or phantasies seemed absolutely central to his self image; he had an ontological stake in racism and sexism in a way that some of the others who held similar if less extreme views, did not.
The first significant factor about Hani was that he was of dual nationality. His father was Egyptian, but had left the family to return to Cairo when Hani was quite little. On his not infrequent flying visits, there were often rows,with Hani taking his mother’s side. Many of his drawings depicted these fights through various avatars. But once his dad had left, Hani told us he longed for his return. He made up a series of tall stories about his father’s adventures abroad which he illustrated for us. His favourite one was that his father was charged with an important diplomatic mission for the Egyptian government which meant that he travelled around a lot visiting various trouble spots in the Middle East.This fable both served as a cover story to explain his father’s absence, expressed a desire about the mediating role which he secretly wished his father to play in the family conflict and functioned as an element within Hani’s family romance, allowing him to identify positively with his Egyptian origins, and indeed to construct a whole imaginary genealogy for himself centred on a highly romanticised version of his paternal roots: he came from a family of rich merchants who lived in a palace which he would one day inherit. In this way, we surmised, he was able to defend himself against the hatred he must have felt for a father who in reality had abandoned him.
At the same time, in the context of domestic disputes, Hani made it clear that he identified strongly with his mother,and with being, like her, both white and working class. But at another level, he also constructed for himself an imaginary father, a father whose Arabic name he proudly bore, and to whose linguistic and cultural inheritance he was actively apprenticing himself by attending a ‘supplementary’ school on Saturdays where he learnt Arabic. It appears that he kept these two ‘sides’ to his personality quite distinct. Yet such splitting, however necessary a defence, was not entirely successful in managing the tensions of his dual heritage.
According to the teacher who knew the family well, at home Hani was very much a mummy’s boys. Such a contrast from his school persona, she said. Yet perhaps his close identification with his mother’s place was the reason why he needed to adopt such an exaggeratedly macho stance and violently reject anything associated with a subordinate quasi-feminine position in his dealings with male elders or peers. But this solution only seems to have led to a return of the repressed in the shape of the ‘phallic mother’ whose ‘claws’ he will have to punch off if he is ever marry ‘a sexy white girl who will look after him’.
But what function did his racism play in this ? It seems to have enabled him to identify with his mother in racial terms, i.e. as white. Hani’s own skin colour was closer to his mother’s than his fathers in any case, but the identification was primarily symbolic. His favourite photograph of her showed her as a curiously asexual ‘English Rose’ posed against the artificial studio backdrop of a typically pastoral landscape. In terms of the psychoanalytic model, her white skin stood for a racial body immaculately conceived, ‘ its ‘inherent’ superiority came precisely from the fact that it did not depend on its sexuality, or gendered coupling to reproduce its ‘perfect features’. In that sense it was no longer simply the maternal body from which he had been born, and against which he had to establish his difference and distance. It was an ancestral anglo- saxon body he could possess as an absolute principle of self identity.And through that mediation possess his mother while keeping his father at a safe but exotic distance. For Hani to lay claim to such a body was perhaps the surest way he knew to maintain an omnipotent image of his own physicality in a way which did not put his masculinity in doubt. But what about his paternity ?
At one level Hani’s beliefs in white English superiority seem to have enabled him to gain a sense of revenge on a father who, in his mother’s eyes and perhaps even the son’s, was a monster who had abandoned them both in favour of another country and, by association another family and culture. Hani drew a picture of a Frankenstein like figure which bore a distinct resemblance to a photograph of his father, which he said he hated. In this way he could ‘whitewash ‘ his mother and denigrate his dad. But at another level it was necessary for him to hold on to a personal myth of origins which allowed him to feel proud of his Egyptian as well as his English roots, in other words to maintain an integral sense of dual heritage. He could not allow his racist body imagery to ‘blacken’ his father as well. In fact what he seems to have done is to have constructed a double standard in which the light skinned Arab is colour coded white, and opposed to the ‘black’ Arab – the dirty street Arab, the denigrated Arab of popular stereotype. This split perception may well have been influenced by the colour hierarchy within Egyptian society itself wherethe lighter your skin the higher your status. Thus his ideal father is whitened to invest him with a general social superiority. But in making such distinctions Hani’s personal agenda becomes overlaid with a wider, more public, set of references. For the way in which ‘Egypt’ has been constructed in the discourse of popular Orientalism and what it has come to represent within common sense ethnologies of prejudice mirrors many of the ambiguities felt by this Anglo-Egyptian boy.
Hani’s family romance, centred on a ‘white Arab’ father, allows him to despise and dissociate himself from ‘black’ people. In the same way a European intelligentsia invented themselves as the standard bearers of a superior cultural heritage by excising Egyptian ( and hence African) influences from Classical Greece. This operation helped create the conditions for the kind of popular Egyptology relayed by Indiana Jones movies which were then featuring strongly as source material for playground games in his school. This cultural backdrop presented Hani with an even more compelling motive for maintaining the split between an idealised image of his ‘fatherland’ and a derogatory view of blacks. This issue came to a head with the advent of the Gulf War, when the playground of this school echoed with jokes about Saddam, and chasing games took the form of crusades against Islam. Now, for once, the boot was literally on the other foot. His racist taunts about jungle bunnies were capped with jokes about Saddam Hussein’s toilet habits directed at him. The teachers did not know how to deal with the situation. Their anti-racist policy prescribed zero tolerance, but however effective that was in shutting up racism in the classroom, it was difficult to police the playground, let alone the neighbourhood,. At the same their committed multi-culturalism meant that they wanted to encourage Hani to celebrate his multiple heritage, and especially his Egyptian roots, yet as a Catholic school, they were somewhat less enthusiastic about his embracing Islam.
Partly as a result of these difficulties, his mother decided to remove him from the school and send him to an Islamic faith school instead. Hani himself was enthusiastic about the proposed move. But there was much more to it than swapping one faith school for another. His father, who in reality was a minor official in the Egyptian civil service, had returned over the Easter holiday, having become involved with the Shazilya sect, a Sufi brotherhood which had embraced a version of Islamic fundamentalism. There had been a family reconciliation and his mother had decided to convert to Islam. Symbolically the path was now clear for Hani to adopt Arabic as his mother tongue, as the voice of an ideal self which pointed him towards an ego ideal embodied in the patriarchal structure of Islamic culture. Consequently his body image no longer had to bear the full weight of primary narcissism. It could be deracialised. He started to talk about ‘everyone being the same colour under the skin’, whilst his new sense of belonging to the imagined community of Islamic faith gave him an oceanic feeling of identification with this cause. As he put it ’ I feel that now we are all part of the same thing, Allah has brought us all together again, its like coming home.’ However this new balance between ethnic bridging and bonding was fragile and came at a price. He started to develop a line in anti-Semitic rhetoric, no doubt partly influenced by his father who held to the view that the Gulf War was the result of an international Zionist Conspiracy. In other words one kind of racist discourse had been replaced by another. This is symptomatic of the fact that the actual tensions between the two mythologies of ethnic origin he had constructed in order to have the best of both worlds as a white Arab, had not actually been resolved by adopting a purified religious identity in place of a hybrid national one. Rather in the discourse of the Other Within, the ‘dirty street Arab’ had given way to the ‘dirty Jew’. What had been cancelled by this move is the dual voice which characterises the diaspora experience, where the language of origins always reverberates with echoes of other times and places, evoking separation and loss even as it affirms the continuity of historical traditions. All this is denied in Hani’s enthusiastic embrace of Islam in which the father’s name and the mother tongue are magically fused in a single figure of quasi Oedipal authority. But that may not yet be the end of the story. For what is repressed has a habit of returning.
[/expand]
New Times but not those ‘New Times’
Hani’s story evokes a scenario where the Other scenes of race, gender and class intersect to dramatic and even tragic effect at both a personal and political level. Stuart Hall would have recognised this process, for sure, but he would also, I think, have admitted that it is now time to revise some of the terms in which we understand what is at stake in such stories in the light of the present conjuncture. In 1992 we never thought that the anti-globalisation movement would come from the far Right, or that the radicalisation of youth would come to mean young Muslims in Britain running away from home to join ISIS. We are in a different conjuncture in which soft internal borders are being over- written by hard external ones, creating new topographies of exclusion, cutting across familiar lines of ideological division while at the same time re-territorialising old ones. Within the global city, we are seeing the social cleansing of many working class neighbourhoods and the forced migration/dispersal of long established communities to the outer suburbs. Nimbyism used to be reserved for affluent middle class residents who did not want their privileged amenities threated by public housing or infrastructure. Now it is a working class complaint against accelerated gentrification, including ethnic gentrification. While refugees and economic migrants from around the world sets their sights on Britain as a promised land of opportunity for many of its current inhabitants it has become a not very green and singularly unpleasant land of broken promises and declining life chances.
[expand title=”Read More”]
Contemporary right wing populism is a bonders charter; it summons into being a virtuous, homogeneous, aboriginal People polarised against a cosmopolitan elite who have imported alien cultural goods into the country. In the referendum campaign, UKIP portrayed the remain camp, who are de facto bridgers , with their mantra ‘stronger together’, as the new ’ enemy within’. The already fading internationalism of the labour movement was consigned to the dustbins of history. The counter demand to ‘take back control’, with its echo of working class syndicalism and popular sovereignty, reverberated both with the widespread desire for protection against the precarities of the labour and housing market, and the equally strong desire to rebuild a moral economy of community around less permissive styles of identity work, so that growing up working class can once again become an apprenticeship to a viable inheritance of skill whose acquisition can function as stable markers of maturity[xvi].
In addressing, rather than dismissing these existential concerns we have to ensure that that those who once upon a time were regarded by the Left, and who often regarded themselves, as the backbone of the nation, the true creators of its wealth and prosperity, are not now demonised, by that same Left, as a race apart, mired in false consciousness, as unfit for the purposes of international socialism as they are for global capitalism- just because they voted for Brexit.
It is useful, at this point to revisit Stuart Hall’s theses on authoritarian populism, precisely in order to grasp why we are NOT living through a rebirth of Thatcherism with Brexit and the emergence of the alt-right.[xvii] To start with, we have to distinguish, perhaps more clearly than was possible at the time, between the libertarian and authoritarian instances of Thatcherite populism in order to grasp their dialectical tension.[xviii] Thatcherism’s libertarian moment involved the de-regulation of the labour and housing markets and the mobilisation of the People, as consumers, against the ‘nanny ‘ socialist state, whose protective interventions were characterised as a bureaucratic interference into personal freedoms. In its authoritarian moment, Thatcherism intervened to re-regulate the moral economy of community : individualistic norms of reciprocity operating within a competitive meritocratic order were to be re-embedded within ‘Victorian family values’ associated with a ‘spirit of enterprise’ and hard work; at the same time the coercive and ideological apparatus of the State was mobilised against the People, as represented now by the organised working class whose own moral economy, centred on a culture of militancy and mutual aid was first to be hollowed out and then outlawed or dismantled.
The Left counter-punched against this double whammy : the key demand was to re-regulate the market economy through increased State intervention and control ( the authoritarian moment) whilst deregulating the moral economy through fluid forms of identity politics in support of women’s, LGTB and minority ethnic rights ( libertarian moment). In retrospect we can see that while each platform was valid on its own terms, it was not joined up into a counter-hegemonic project and only served deepen the divisions between the labour movement and the Left, the socially conservative working classes and radicalised sections of the new middle class.
The fall out from the splitting apart of long established configurations of State, market and civil society has created our present crisis of political representation; it made possible the emergence of a grass roots authoritarianism based around a national-popular identity politics counter-posed to both the libertarian Right ( free market economy) and the libertarian Left ( free moral economy ) now bracketed together as joint supporters of the free movement of labour. This formation found its perfect rallying point in the EU referendum which opened up a new narrative space for a triumphalist, post-imperial version of the Island Story, so brilliantly rehearsed by Danny Boyle in the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympics, and which could now be claimed by the Brexiteers as their own, proving that Britain could stand alone and still put on a show that wowed the world.
It is the Labour Party which has been left behind by these developments, not the working class. The ‘post-modernisation’ of the party, its transition from a machine for mass producing one- size- fits- all- policies aimed at a large working class base to the just -in -time marketing of an array of policy ‘brands’ with niche appeal was never fully achieved[xix]. The project was fatally compromised by the widely perceived abandonment of its de-industrialised heartlands during the Blairite Ascendency. In the process the culture of municipal socialism which once upon a time promoted so many agencies of bridging capital and sustained an inclusive, civic nationalism of the labourhood has been displaced by narrower, ethnicised and territorialised, prides of place, disconnected from, if not outright hostile to, mainstream politics. As a result the party is now faced with the impossible choice of dissolving itself into an extra-parliamentary opposition whose street cred is anchored to social movements and campaigns with limited demographic – and hence electoral- appeal or becoming a small subculture within a largely discredited metropolitan political class, a tail that wags a phantom dog.
The liberal commentariat have responded to the Brexit vote with a more or less adroit mixture of breast beating, finger pointing, tub thumping , head scratching and shoulder shrugging. But for lefties of my generation no amount of mea culpas, oy veys or hail Gramsci’s is likely to do the trick. Clearly the great moving right show has taken us into terra incognita opened up by major shifts in the tectonic plates of class identity[xx] . We need to find new concepts and new strategies to meet that challenge. Otherwise, as the man himself once put it, we are in for a bumpy ride.
[/expand]
[i] See Geoff Dench and Kate Gavron The New East End:kinship,race and conflict Profile 2006 and Phil Cohen On the Wrong Side of the Track pp 36 – 136 Lawrence and Wishart 2013
[ii] See Marc Isaacs film All White in Barking Icarus Films (2007)
[iii] The present text is a revised version of a talk to a seminar organised at the University of East London on ‘Migration, Politics and Representation’ in honour of the establishment of a PhD studentship by the Stuart Hall Foundation.
[iv] See Richard Sennett and Jonathon Cobb The Hidden injuries of Class Faber 1972 ; On the racialization of working class identities in Britain see Phil Cohen ‘Labouring Under Whiteness’ in Displacing Whiteness (edited Ruth Frankenberg ) Duke University Press 1997
[v] See Roger Hewitt White Backlash and the politics of multiculturalism Cambridge University Press 2005 and . Also Phil Cohen ‘Its Racism What Dunnit’- Hidden Narratives in Theories of Racism’ in Race, Culture and Difference (ed James Donald & Ali Rattansi) Sage 1992
[vi] See Gillian Evans Educational failure and white working class children Palgrave 2007
[vii] For an account of this work see Monstrous Images, Perverse Reasons: Cultural Studies in AntiRacist Education Centre for Multicultural Education ULIE Working Paper 11 1991
[viii]...n
[ix] This approach is discussed in ‘Psychoanalysis and Racism ‘ in John Solomos and David Goldberg (eds) Blackwell Companion to Race Oxford University Press 2002 and ‘Homing Devices – On racism and nationalism in everyday life ‘ in Resituating Identity (eds Valerie Amit-Talai and Caroline Knowles) Broadview Press Toronto 1996
[x] See Stuart Hall ‘New Ethnicities’ in David Morley and Kuan Chen (eds) Critical Dial;ogues in Cultural Studies Routledge 1996.Also John Solomos ‘Stuart Hall :articulations of race, class and ethnicity’ in Ethnic and Racial Studies Vol 37 Issue 10 2014
[xi] See Tricks of the Trade -Art Teaching and Multicultural Education in Teaching Popular Culture (edited David Buckingham) Taylor and Francis 1997 ; see also Phil Cohen and Linda Haddock Anansi meets Spiderwoman BFI Publications 1992. Tricks of the Trade, the film in which the interview with Stuart Hall is featured can be downloaded from www.philcohenworks.com, as can a companion piece, Playgrounds of Prejudice.
[xii] This work is collected in Phil Cohen (ed) New Ethnicities,Old Racisms Zed Books 1999. See also Bill Schwarz (ed) Front Lines, Back Yards New Formations Lawrence and Wishart 1998
[xiii] See Nora Rathzel (ed) Finding the Way Home- Young People’s Narratives of gender, class, ethnicity and place in Hamburg and London V&R Unipress Gottingen 2006
[xiv] Robert Putnam Bowling Alone . Putnam’s model of social capital refers to different principles of social cohesion operating through networks, whether embedded strongly (bonders) or weakly (bridgers) ; this model refers back to Durkeim’s classic distinction between mechanical and organic solidarity. Basil Bernstein’s work on the distribution of linguistic capital into restricted and elaborated codes also draws on Durkheim’s model . See Class,Codes and Control Vol 1 Routledge 1977. In The World, the Text and the Critic (Harvard 1983) Edward Said reworked these binaries in his model of cultural capital, making the distinction between bio-political filiation based on real or fictive kinship and elective affiliations based on ideological formation. A similar model is applied to a theory of community stake holding vis a vis the 2012 Olympics in On the Wrong Side of the Track pp 204-240.
[xv] See Les Back New Ethnicities and urban culture :racism and multi-culture in young lives UCL Press 1996 . Also John Eade et al New ethnicities among British Bangladeshi and mixed-heritage youth Report to the Leverhulme Trust 2006.
[xvi] See Jennifer M Silva Coming up Short :working class adulthood in an age of uncertainty Oxford University press 2016
[xvii] Stuart Hall ‘The Great Moving Right Show’ Marxism Today 1979
[xviii] For a critique of Stuart Hall’s Gramscian reading see Bob Jessop et al ‘Farewell to Thatcherism? Neo-Liberalism vs New Times’, New Left Review, 179, 1990
[xix] See Anthony Barnett Blimey its Brexit! Open Democracy 2016
[xx] See Justin Gest The New Minority :white working class politics in an Age of Immigration and Inequality Oxford University Press 2016