Page 20 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

8 DAVID MORLEY AND KUAN-HSING CHEN

This section concludes with an interview conducted with Hall by Kuan-
Hsing Chen in 1992, ‘Cultural studies and the politics of
internationalization’, in which he directly addresses the questions of the
historical Eurocentrism (and, indeed, Anglocentrism) of much work in this
field, in relation to current developments in postcolonial theory and
debates concerning transnationalism and globalization in cultural studies.
The final Part (‘Diasporic questions: “race”, ethnicity and identity’),
focuses on the debates in cultural studies which, over the last few years,
have moved these questions centre-stage. The section begins with Hall’s
(1985) essay on ‘Gramsci’s relevance for the study of race and ethnicity’,
originally written under the auspices of UNESCO’s Division of Human
Rights and Peace. In this paper we see a crucial link in the development of
Hall’s work, as he mobilizes the theoretical resources developed in the
attempt to formulate a non-essentialist analysis of questions of class to
produce a similarly non-essentialist analysis of questions of ‘race’ and
ethnicity. This is followed by Hall’s path-breaking (1988) essay on ‘New
ethnicities’, in which he articulates what he describes as a crucial shift
between two phases of black cultural politics—‘from a struggle over the
relations of representation to a politics of representation itself’, which, he
argues, marks ‘the end of the innocent notion of the essential black subject’
and the recognition that the ‘black subject cannot be represented without
reference to the divisions of class, gender, sexuality and ethnicity.’ This
involves not only ‘crossing the questions of racism irrevocably with
questions of sexuality’, destabilizing ‘particular conceptions of black
masculinity’ and overcoming black politics’ ‘evasive silence with reference
to class’, but more generally, ‘re-theorizing the concept of difference’, so as
to develop a ‘non-coercive and more diverse concept of ethnicity’.
‘New ethnicities’ was originally delivered as an address to a conference
‘Black Film, British Cinema’ held at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in
London in February 1988 (and published in a collection of conference
papers under the same title, edited by Kobena Mercer; see Mercer, 1988).
The conference brought together film practitioners, theorists and critics
concerned both with the politics and aesthetics of contemporary film
production (especially in the independent sector) and a wider audience of
those concerned with how to address and make sense of the relation
between the categories ‘black’ and ‘British’. The particular ‘critical
dialogue’ that emerged from that conference (foreshadowed by the ‘Third
Cinema’ conference, held at Edinburgh in 1986—see Pines and Willemen
(eds), 1989) can also be traced through the following chapter, Isaac Julien
and Kobena Mercer’s ‘De Margin and De Centre’, initially published in late
1988 as the Introduction to the ‘Last Special Issue on Race’ of the film studies
journal, Screen (vol. 29, no. 4), edited by Julien and Mercer, some months
after the ICA conference. While this essay was initially conceived as an
‘Introduction’ to a particular edition of Screen, the authors’ careful