Page 21 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

INTRODUCTION 9

commentary on the articles in that issue (for details of which, see our
‘Editors’ note’ to chapter 22) and their extensive notes and references to
work on ‘race’, ethnicity and representation throughout the 1980s, allows
it to be read retrospectively as a valuable overview of that body of work, at
a crucial turning-point in its development. Julien and Mercer note that they
are well aware that the editorial strategy and logic of a ‘Special Issue’ on
‘race’ can easily ‘reinforce rather than ameliorate, the perceived otherness
and marginality of the subject itself’ as yet one more instance of ‘expedient
inclusion, as a term for the legitimation of more general forms of
exclusionary practice’, in which ‘the subject of race and ethnicity is still
placed on the margins conceptually’. In the face of this difficulty, rather
than ‘attempt to compensate for the “structured absences” of previous
paradigms’, their strategy is to attempt to deconstruct and ‘undermine the
force of the binary relation that produces the marginal as a consequence of
the authority invested in the centre’.
Thus, not only do they pursue Hall’s arguments (in ‘New ethnicities’)
concerning, in their terms, the ‘acknowledgement of the diversity of black
experiences and subject-positions’ but they also extend the terms of his
argument there, that ‘we are all…ethnically located’ to examine the usually
‘naturalized’ (or ‘ex-nominated’) category of ‘Whiteness’ (see Richard
Dyer’s article in Screen 29, 4). Thus, Julien and Mercer note Coco Fusco’s
crucial point that the hegemony of white ethnicity is redoubled and
‘naturalized’ if it is, itself, ignored. As they argue, ‘a one-sided fixation with
ethnicity as something that “belongs” to the Other alone’, where ‘white
ethnicity is not under question and retains its “centred position”’,
necessarily means that, still, ‘the burden of representation falls on the
Other.’ This perhaps is part, at least of ‘the black person’s burden’ of
which Hall declares he wishes to absolve himself, in the introductory
passage of his address to the Illinois ‘Cultural Studies’ conference (see page
277 in Grossberg et al., 1992; page 262 in this volume). Hall’s own more
recent work in this field is represented by his (1992d) essay ‘What is this
“black” in black popular culture?’, in which he surveys recent debates
concerning the political need for the deployment of forms of ‘strategic
essentialism’, in counterbalance with the analytical need to develop modes
of analysis which are adequate to the hybrid, transitory and always
historically specific forms in which questions of ‘race’ and ethnicity are
articulated in popular cultural forms (see below, chapter 23).
Hall’s influence on the development of black cultural politics and black
film culture in Britain is also addressed in the interview with Isaac Julien,
by Mark Nash, in which a number of themes emerge. Firstly, the interview
traces the history of Hall’s practical involvement in the debates
over cultural policy and funding which were the basis of the emergence of
the innovative black film workshops, such as Sankofa and Black Audio
Film Collective, in the 1980s in Britain (see the details given in chapter 22).