Stuart Hall on racism and the importance of diasporic thinking

Abstract

In this article, I want to show how my initial encounter with the work of Stuart Hall was grounded in my reading of the later philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, and was shaped by my interest in understanding the nature of racism across the three countries in which I had lived. Over the years, Hall's various writings have helped me to make sense of the shifting logics of racism, especially his insistence that racism cannot be understood in its own terms, but requires a conjunctural analysis of the contested processes of historical and political formation. I argue moreover that Hall does not so much as write about racism in or from diaspora, but rather he thinks diasporically, a notion that has significant implications for public pedagogy.I first encountered the work of Stuart Hall in 1981 through a short article that Hall had written a few years earlier on the politics of racism and reaction in Britain. I had been thinking tentatively about issues of race and racism for a number of years, though never in any sustained and systematic way. Born in India, I was conscious of the diverse and complex ways in which minorities were subjected to racism while negotiating their lives and, also in Australia, a country to which my family had immigrated while I was still a teenager. However, it was as a graduate student in England that I first confronted racism in its more explicit forms, forcing me to think more seriously about its various configurations, its origins, and its social consequences. I read widely on the then popular theories of racism, most of which seemed located within the empiricist traditions of social psychology. These theories viewed racism as an expression of prejudice that some individuals harbored toward those they regarded as culturally different and inferior. While there were clearly many elements of truth in these theories, I found them inadequate, incapable of accounting for the complexities of racial formation and racism that I had experienced and which were clearly evident in British society.Stuart Hall's article (1978) therefore 'spoke' to me instantly and in a manner that was most profound at so many different levels. To begin with, in Stuart Hall, I found a theorist who wrote about some of the most difficult issues of race and racism in a manner that was not only astute, but also accessible. In the tradition of Raymond Williams (1958), he focused on the ordinariness of cultural practices, and the ways in which they were shaped by the complex configurations of social, political, and economic formation, constantly contested and evolving. He used language in ways that were driven by pedagogic and political motivations -not to impress the Oxford Senior Common Room, but to provide *