Stuart Hall: Island Boy (1 of 1) by Keesha Wallace
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The following paper was written by Keesha Wallace, a student in my seminar this term, exploring the roots of the Cultural Studies Tradition. Her own "island" background led her to interesting insights about Stuart Hall, a key figure running across the class, resulting in a memorable paper that I wanted to share with my readers.
Stuart Hall: Island Boy
By Keesha Wallace
“The idea that, because I moved, from colony to metropole, there were no connections between them, has always seemed inconceivable to me. But others have tended to see these worlds as much more compartmentalized. And to someone who doesn’t know the interior life and spaces of the colonial formation, and how its antinomies were forged, the connections may not appear to be evident, or as evident to them as to me. To me, their interdependence is what defines their respective specificities; in everything they reverberate through each other”—Stuart Hall (2017, 11)
Stuart Hall and his mother Jessie Hall on the boat to England, 1951
As a Jamaican, there is something slightly amusing and a little insulting in the way academics speak of Stuart Hall’s Jamaican identity. “Born in Jamaica” is a throwaway line. Perhaps it is because they are speaking about the work and not so much the man, but I don’t think it can be separated. Hall might agree.
“I’ve never been persuaded by the orthodox social science division between the ‘objective’ and the ‘subjective’. It’s always seemed to me that even the most abstract theories are, to varying degrees, informed by their subjective conditions of existence: by, that ism the inner psychic dynamics of the theorist. I’ve felt this to be true of my own life….We need to consider how we are inserted into the social processes of history and simultaneously think about the mental means we, as subjects, employ to explain to ourselves where, in history, we find ourselves” (Hall 2017, 63).
In the first paragraph of the New Yorker article marking his death, they noted Hall was “born in colonial Jamaica to mix raced parents who worried that his dark complexion would be an impediment to ascending the island pigmentography, he went to Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship to study literature when he was 19” (Hsu, Hua 2017, July 17).
It's not directly stated but there is a slightly odd implication that he was fleeing a Jamaican bias as if England had evolved beyond pigmentation in 1954 when we know it still hasn’t done so today. (Smith 2019).
And, this isn’t an isolated incident. His “brown” or mixed-race parents are often mentioned immediately followed by discussions of his not feeling accepted by “Black Jamaica.” Another repeatedly mentioned anecdote – “as a child, his skin was darker than the rest of his family’s, prompting his sister to tease, ‘Where did you get this coolie baby from?’ It became a family joke—one he would revisit often.” (Hsu, Hua 2017, July 17).
It is worth noting that “Black Jamaica” wasn’t and still isn’t the only Jamaica. There was definitely a space in Jamaican society for the Halls of the world. In fact, there was a space in all of the Caribbean for them, the West Indian intellectual expats he’d eventually find and develop life-long bonds with once he got to Oxford.
It’s also important to know that in terms of literal meaning, brown and mixed raced are often one in the same in Jamaica. Brown is generally used to signify a lighter complexion and mixed race is rarely as clearly delineated as black and white. Both are extremely common. On small islands when the moral policing of the colonizers is removed there are offspring of many shades. I am the last of four and was often called coolie by my siblings. Coolie is a derogatory term used to describe the Indian popular that had migrated to Jamaica as indentured servants. It’s not as withering an attack as suggested. Not as alienating as presented.
There was nothing particularly radical or unusual about Stuart Hall’s ethnicity in a Jamaican setting. Malcolm Gladwell’s mother is Jamaican. Zadie Smith’s mother is Jamaican. Both authors discuss their inherited ideas on colorism at length. Shades of black and brown definitely make a difference and are mentally noted on the island but should be kept in perspective. He might not have felt a part of “Black Jamaica” but it was about much more than race.
Wide colour variations are a common feature within families across Jamaica’s uncertain color spectrum. My grandmother on my mother’s side, the notably fair-skinned part of the family, was an expert in racial classifications, as that master of structural anthropology, Claude Levi-Strauss, would have appreciated.
It’s highly doubtful that Hall’s journey to England, as a Rhodes scholar no less, was any different from other brilliant Third World immigrants looking for opportunity in the First World. The only difference might have been his initial inability to realize that although he was born under the crown, it was never attempting to be his home. If that was his view, he was quickly disabused of such notions.
Caribbean migrants journey to England
“What I realized the moment I got to Oxford was that someone like me could not really be part of it. I mean I could make a success there, I could even be perhaps accepted into it, but I would never feel it was my place. It’s the summit of something else. It’s distilled Englishness.”
Hall was part of the Windrush Generation, a time of mass migration of nearly half a million people moved to Britain from the Caribbean between 1948 and 1970.[†]While other intellectuals from the colonies studied hard sciences, Hall looked to culture. I’m interested in the ways his Jamaican heritage influenced this area of study. Hall never claimed Jamaica as the place where he belonged. But I hear it in his voice and I know there is nothing more island intellectual and Jamaica College alumnus than his entire perspective.
I can imagine that when Hall first read Williams and Hoggart he must have seen similarities. Hoggart’s working-class neighborhood in Leeds, William’s Welsh border town might have been equally as foreign to Oxford tea shops as Hall’s childhood home in Kingston, Jamaica. When Hall wrote of a “ subjective rupture” in Hoggart and Williams. “The contrast between these two cultural experiences and their inevitable impact on one another is not unlike the experience of migration – from one class to another, from one town to another, from the country to the city, or from the periphery to the center. It makes you instantly alive to the forms and patterns which have shaped you and which you have left behind, intellectually at the very least, for good.” He could have been talking about himself (Hall 2016, 57).
Yet there is no Caribbean equivalent to Shakespeare. Hall understood he was from a different space. We are an imported people, purposefully fragmented stripped of a collective consciousness of any culture high or low brow. If the Arawak and Taino natives had scholars, they were killed before anyone thought about classifying them as such. We don’t have a past to draw on. I believe that was one of the reasons the colonial education system was so important. It was the only way “natives” made themselves worthy of heading back to the colonizer, becoming civilized.
In an interview between Hall and Trinidadian scholar CLR James[6] you feel the kinship of that unwritten agreement. They bond over their uniquely English educations that took place against tropical backgrounds. They laugh as they remember the shock in metropole elite inner circles when they knew the work of historical scholars better than British or French born. They laugh as if they had both over-prepared for a test, a test they soon realized they didn’t care to pass or fail.
In contrast to Hoggart and Williams, Hall’s perspective might have been more complicated. When Mary Louise Pratt talks about contact zones as “ Social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in context of highly asymmetrical relations of power (Pratt, Mary Louise,(1991)p34)” It is applicable to Hall’s life on many levels but it’s not immediately clear to me where England would fall in its relation to his Jamaica.
Hall writes":“Privately it must be said, the English aroused ambivalent feelings. They were deferred to because of their power, colour, wealth and exalted social position and due to their leadership of every aspect of our lives. At the same time they constituted for us ‘natives’ a sort of running joke, a constant source of casual humour, even ridicule, which made us feel superior. They appeared to us so foreign in their dress, manner and behavior, so uptight, so profoundly in the wrong place!” (Hall 2017, 20).
He knew that even if we weren’t publicly acknowledged England appreciated the differences of the West Indies. Clearly the islands had something, because if we didn’t so many wouldn’t have stayed so long.
There is an ego involved in being a colonizer. An ego Hall saw and questioned, “That was what was so baffling about the English when I first arrived: the contrast between the ordinariness – dreariness, even – of much everyday life and the certainty possessed by the English of their exalted place in the world (214).
Hall’s position as a native elite child of the commonwealth left him with so much to grapple with. At home and abroad. “Jamaica’s intricately articulated social hierarchies were characteristic of what Mary Louis Pratt calls the colonial ‘contact-zone’, in which different national, social, economic, ethnic, gendered and racially defined groups were obliged by the imperial system to inhabit the same space.”
There is something about being of two worlds that forces an examination of culture. As a product of colonial Jamaica on the brink of demands for independence, his identity was a constant negotiation. A position that made him uniquely qualified to look at everything a little differently. He took his place amongst outsiders but with a slightly different gaze.
This post serves as a call for the repatriation of Stuart Hall. My unscientific polling of Jamaicans’ knowledge of Hall was terribly disappointing. The island doesn’t know about his work. We all know of CLR James. We know Franz Fanon was from Martinique not France. That as problematic as he might have been in his views, VS Naipaul was a child of Trinidad and Derek Walcott a St. Lucian. The world needs to know Stuart Hall was Jamaican, and I think, if the discussions of Hall happened a little differently, they would.
His heritage isn’t a footnote, it’s the whole thing. An instinct I had from my first discovery of Hall that was confirmed after reading his work I’ve heavily quoted “Familiar Stranger – A Life Between Two Islands.”
From the beginning of the book he gives a nod to the erasure of his Jamaican-ness, deliberate or not.
“Jamaican graduate students studying in North America in the 1980s discovered Cultural Studies, with which I had become identified, as a product of an English university, the University of Birmingham – only to find, when I turned up to lecture, that a black Jamaican had somehow been involved with the enterprise form the beginning!” (Hall 2017, 11).
He acknowledged the erasure of his blackness a subject that he would write about later in his career but was aware of the entire time. “I remember reacting with disproportionate rage to one of my earliest reviews, an intelligent and broadly sympathetic English sociologist, who had said he didn’t understand why I kept banging on about being colored, since I was from a well-to-do middle-class family, had been educated at a good, English-type school and studied abroad at Oxford” (12).
People tire of calls for diversity, but what has been lost through interviews of brilliant minds of color by members of the establishment that never understood basic points of entry cannot be overstated. It was so amazing to see Jamaican food discussed in such detail by a man who is studied at universities. I had to pause to smile when I found out Hall’s cousin was my old headmistress from high school . It made me so happy.
We need to see ourselves in new spaces, we need to know we belong. We need to make sure everyone in a position to cover our subjects ask the right questions.
There is a sad but weirdly funny recent example I think of often. During an interview with Quincy Jones, a young white male reporter from GQ Magazine had a moment of disbelief when he found out Quincy’s grandmother was biracial. Quincy waited a beat to then explain that no, it wasn’t something that had been discussed. No, it hadn’t been some unspoken love across the forbidden racial lines. His grandmother had been a slave who was raped by her master with little choice but to birth the result.
——
Appendix
‘Colonization in Reverse’ By Louise Bennett written in 1966
Wat a joyful news, Miss Mattie,
I feel like me heart gwine burs’
Jamaica people colonizin
Englan in reverse.
By de hundred, by de t’ousan
From country and from town,
By de ship load, by de plane-load
Jamaica is Englan boun.
Dem a-pour out o’Jamaica,
Everybody future plan
Is fe get a big-time job
An settle in de mother lan.
CLR James Talking to Stuart Hall
Hall, Stuart. 2017. Familiar Story: A Life between Two Islands. Duke University Press.
Hall, Stuart. 2016. Cultural Studies 1983 A Theoretical History. Duke University Press
King, Anthony D. 1997. Culture, Globalization, and the World-System: Contemporary Conditions for the Representation of Identity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Pratt, Mary Louise. (1991) Arts of the Contact Zone.Modern Language Association.
Smith, F. 2019. BBC puts focus on Windrush scandal. Shropshire Star.
Yardley, W. (2014, Feb 18). Stuart hall, trailblazing British scholar of multicultural influences, is dead at 82. New York Times (1923-Current File) Retrieved from http://libproxy.usc.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-com.libproxy1.usc.edu/docview/1941469117?accountid=14749
Biography
Writer. Publicist. Creative. After 10+ years in NYC, Keesha Wallace recently relocated to LA to continue her work in the entertainment industry amplifying marginalized voices and making sure Caribbean culture is getting the love it deserves. She’s currently pursuing a MA in Strategic PR at USC Annenberg School of Communication and plans to continue on to a PhD.
