Page 162 - Contemporary Cultural Theory 3rd edition

ContCultural Theory Text Pages 4/4/03 1:42 PM Page 153

The cultural politics of difference

and sexuality—was a necessary corrective, Hall would later
claim, to an economic reductionism that gave all social antag-
onisms the master signifier of ‘class’. Black politics, he
explained, ‘give priority to political issues which are not the
same as [those that concern] the white working class’ (Mullan,
1996, p. 273). We have observed how Hall’s recent work has
focused on the politics of representation, especially the stereo-
typing of the ‘racialised Other’ (Hall, 1997). Looking back on
the development of black cultural studies, he has identified
two key moments: the first, when ‘black’ came to stand for
the ‘common experience of racism and marginalization and
...provide the organizing category of a new politics of resist-
ance’ (Hall, 1996, p. 441); the second, when ‘black’ was itself
recognised as a ‘politically and culturally constructed category’,
referring to an ‘immense diversity and differentiation of
. . . historical and cultural experience’ (Hall, 1996, pp. 441, 443).
For Hall, as for Gilroy, such diversity would be approached
through the idea of ‘a diaspora experience...of unsettling,
recombination, hybridization’ (p. 445).
Gilroy has worked on both sides of the Atlantic, as Professor
of Sociology at Goldsmiths College, University of London, and
at Yale University. His first major work, There Ain’t No Black in
the Union Jack, analysed the intersection of race, nation and class
in post-industrial Britain, calling particular attention to what he
perceived to be the blind spot of ‘race’ in British cultural studies.
Intended as a ‘corrective’ to the more ‘ethnocentric dimensions’
of cultural studies, it argued that the new discipline ‘tends
towards a morbid celebration of England and Englishness from
which blacks are systematically excluded’, and that this was true
‘even when cultural studies have identified themselves with
socialist and feminist political aspirations’ (Gilroy, 1992, p. 12).
For Gilroy, such Left nationalism was a consequence of an
imagined ‘imperative’ to ‘construct national interests and roads
to socialism’ from out of a political language already necessarily
‘saturated with racial connotations’ (pp. 12–13). Even the
founding fathers of cultural studies, Williams and Thompson,
were singled out for special mention in the indictment. To
Williams’ stress on social identity as a product of ‘long experience’,

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