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POLITICS AS CULTURE: STUART HALL

essence of this historically created synthesis, if such a synthesis is
thought to exist at all? What are the historical forces which have shaped
it and continue to shape it today? The fact that black popular culture in
the West is a historical product hardly means that it is contentless, that it
is simply oppositional, that it has no constructive distinctive essence of
its own, born from its specific aspirations and struggles. As Hegel argued
long ago, essence is inherently historical and unfolds as the result of a
struggle of the spirit. Reliance on a semiotic view of cultural differences
carries the inherent danger of draining each culture of its distinctive, his-
torically determined specificity and reducing it to one in a series of oppo-
sitions which have only internal referents. Cultures then become one in
a system of arbitrary oppositions. In other words, such an approach leads
to the view of cultural difference as inherently without substance in the
objective socio-historical sense.
Moreover, Hall, although he affirms the complexity of the subject,
emphasizes one particular version of the historicity of black culture – a
truncated one which is familiarly held by many anthropologists as well as
by the upper middle class which controls the state and cultural life in
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the Caribbean. This is the idea of African-Caribbean culture as a ‘creole’
culture. The dominant strata of this brown-black upper middle class is
‘hybrid’ in the sense that it self-consciously presents itself as an amalgam
of ‘Africa’ and ‘Europe’ – but more the latter than the former. It likes to
think of itself as representing ‘the best of both worlds’ and therefore with
an inherent right to rule over the masses of the black population. 43 The
black working class and peasantry and increasingly the newer Caribbean
black middle class and bourgeoisie out of which Rastafarianism, Reggae
and Dancehall spring, however, perceive and present themselves quite dif-
ferently. They resolutely identify as ‘African’ or ‘true Jamaican’ (as distinct
from the brown-skinned, white, Chinese, Jewish and Lebanese elite).
Similarly vital class and colour distinctions in culture exist in the African-
Caribbean population in Britain, within the staunchly Pentecostal peasant
culture of the Windrush migrants as well as with respect to the far less
visible and tiny secular brown-black middle class. As often is the case in
discussions of black culture in the West, there is a strange silence on the
issue of class differences among black people and its consequences for
internal cultural difference. In other words, one needs to speak of black
popular cultures, not culture and delineate their class content and position
within a certain broad unity. One must, as Hegel may have put it, give all
the determinations of ‘black culture’ their due.
Alternative and far richer conceptions of black cultural historicity
exist, other than this simple two-segment static model in which, in any

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