Page 165 - Contemporary Cultural Theory 3rd edition

ContCultural Theory Text Pages 4/4/03 1:42 PM Page 156

Contemporary Cultural Theory

supposed racism. He had argued that liberal and radical intel-
lectuals, especially the ‘nationally and internationally mobile’,
were often so in thrall to ‘market and exchange relations’ as to
prefer legal solutions to problems of relationship, which would
be best resolved only from the lived experience of the ‘rooted
settlements’ in which most people, black and white, derive their
‘communal identities’ (pp. 195–6). This, surely, is the heart of the
difference between Williams, Gilroy and Hall: their opposed valu-
ations of ‘rooted settlement’ as against ‘diasporic hybridity’.
Hence their quite different evaluations of ‘socialism’ as against
‘liberalism’: Hall’s hybrid subjects, who ‘produce themselves anew
and differently’ (Hall, 1993, p. 362), are able to do so, in practice,
only by way of ‘market and exchange relations’. For Gilroy and
Hall, rooted settlement and diasporic hybridity are coded
racially as, respectively, white and black. But there is no reason
to believe either that Williams intended it thus or that they need
be imagined thus.
In Australia, for example, immigrants are disproportionately
white, black people typically not immigrants at all, but rather the
native first peoples, many of whom live in settlements far more
‘rooted’ than anything Williams imagined. Multiculturalism’s
aspiration to relativise all positions and claims tends to trivialise
the status of exactly these peoples, whose historical trajectories
have typically been much more painful than those of more
recently arrived minority groups. Such indigenous cultures suffer
from a double misrecognition. As the original inhabitants of the
land, they have reason to resent the subordination of their
customs, law and social organisation to an externally imposed
dominant culture. As the inheritors of a particular tribal history
and cultural context, they have reason to resist their absorption
into a pan-indigenous identity fabricated largely by the dominant
national ethnicities. Whatever the pleasures of the diaspora, social
justice sooner or later requires recognition of the human value
of these most deeply settled of cultures. Such recognition seems
unlikely to be forthcoming from dominant cultures determined
to transcend even their own limited histories of rooted settlement.
Commodity culture invites us to produce ourselves anew and
differently, on a daily basis, whenever it insists that we consume.

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