Page 22 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

10 DAVID MORLEY AND KUAN-HSING CHEN

Secondly, the question of generation begins to emerge, as a key site of
difference which must be addressed—for instance, in terms of the
differences between those of Hall’s generation, who came to Britain as
immigrants, and those such as Julien, who were born and grew up in the
United Kingdom, as ‘black British’. Thirdly, the interview also begins to
open up the connections between debates concerning racial and ethnic
identity and debates concerning sexuality—so that it is not only the secure/
essential black subject which can then be seen to be destabilized (in the
work of both Hall and Julien) but also the secure/essential masculine
subject. In this connection, the interview also brings out the important
contrast between British and American perspectives on ‘essentialism’ in
matters of ‘race’, and ‘identity’, by way of Julien’s critical comments on
some of Spike Lee’s work. This section is concluded with a further
interview with Hall, again conducted by Kuan-Hsing Chen in 1992, ‘The
formation of a diasporic intellectual’.

CULTURAL STUDIES AS A DIASPORIC STORY
In ‘The formation of a diasporic intellectual’, a number of historical and
critical issues are addressed. In recounting critical moments in his own
social biography, Hall theorizes how structural conditions (colonization
and decolonization) come to shape one’s subjectivity and, under such
circumstances, to limit how the colonial subject is able (and unable) to
resist. Through Hall’s traumatic historical narrative, we are reminded of
the necessity to go back to the history of colonialism, so as to understand
present neo-colonial structures. In fact, the necessity of this reminder
indicates the continuing existence of some deeply flawed political
scholarship in cultural studies, which fails to connect its own analyses
effectively to the global, historical structures of colonization,
decolonization and recolonization. Without careful historical work
focusing on this issue, cultural studies will never escape its complicity with
‘western centrism’. The glib announcement of a ‘postcolonial’ era can
easily hide its own enunciative position, within the centering location of
neo-colonial power. From the geopolitical position of the third world, the
traces of colonialism cannot be so easily erased, and the economic and
cultural forces of neo-colonialism can perhaps more readily be seen to be
alive and well. Cultural studies’ recent attempt to move out of the ‘local’,
to take into account the globalism of culture, thus has to address these
issues historically, structurally and politically (on these issues, see also
Ahmad, 1994).
In the ‘Introduction’ to his Blood and Belonging (1994), Michael
Ignatieff takes issue with the presumptions of what he describes as the
easy cosmopolitanism of the affluent West, arguing that ‘globalism in a
post-imperial age only permits a post-nationalist consciousness for those