Page 47 - Culture Society and Economy

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CULTURE, SOCIETY AND ECONOMY

blackness by itself is not enough, quoting Isaac Julien that ‘being black
isn’t really good enough for me: I want to know what your cultural
politics are’. 39
However, the alternative which Hall proposes to black essentialism is
problematic. His argument is that ‘black popular culture’ – clearly meaning
by this term only black popular culture in the West and not in Africa – is
a hybrid, not a pure entity. Black culture in the diaspora, because it
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is diasporic is a ‘recombination, hybridization and “cut-and-mix”’. This is
so because it was ‘over-determined from at least two directions … Selective
appropriation, incorporation, and rearticulation of European ideologies,
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cultures and institutions, alongside an African heritage’. In other words
what we are offered as an alternative to black essentialism is the rather
old-fashioned view of black syncretism. What are the problems with
such a view?
First, there is the obvious difficulty inherent in using the term ‘black’
to include people from South Asia as well as people with an African her-
itage. Often the problematic of this usage is presented as deriving from
its firm rejection by overwhelming majority South Asian populations in
Britain. This may well be so but there is a larger point. The effect of this
usage is curiously to detach blackness in Britain from blackness in Africa
and to constitute it simply as a ‘construction’ peculiar to the British con-
text. This detachment from Africa is extremely problematic. What about
the thousands of people in Britain who are of direct African heritage and
origin, from Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya and elsewhere – their rootedness in
Africa not mediated through the Caribbean? In most discussions of black-
ness and race in Britain, ironically, much is made of the Afro-Caribbean
as well as of the South Asian population. The people in Britain who are
directly from Africa herself somehow find themselves erased.
Further, borrowing is hardly a unique feature of black culture – one
would be hard-pressed to find a single example of any culture which was
not and does not continue to be ‘hybrid’ in that sense, the claims of cul-
tural nationalists notwithstanding. The fact that a culture has many dif-
ferent sources borrowing from far and wide – for example, Muslim
elements in Spanish culture or Swedish elements in Russian culture –
hardly means that such a culture has not combined these elements into
a new distinctive synthesis – that there is no such thing as Spanish,
Russian or Swedish culture. The point that black culture in the West is
‘impure’ is an irrelevant one, since the same applies to black culture in
Africa, indeed, in all cultures. The question is whether black culture
in the West has gelled into a new synthesis or simply consists of the
‘European’ alongside the ‘African’ – a pastiche. What constitutes the

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