Page 23 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

INTRODUCTION 11

cosmopolitans who are lucky enough to live in the wealthy West…(for)…
cosmopolitanism is the privilege of those who can take a secure nation-
state for granted’ (9). As he goes on to put it, more polemically, from this
perspective ‘if patriotism, [as] Samuel Johnson remarked, is the last refuge
of a scoundrel, so post-nationalism and its accompanying disdain for the
nationalist emotions of others, may be the last refuge of the cosmopolitan’
(ibid.: 11).
The continuing relevance of colonial histories is further emphasized in
Hall’s narrative of the formation of the British ‘New Left’, as a precursor
of cultural studies. According to the accepted history, the development of
the New Left is usually understood as a peculiarly ‘British’ response to the
events of 1956. Certainly, without the New Left, the shape of cultural
studies would have been very different. But in Hall’s account of this story,
a key role in the formation of the New Left was played by various (then
student) colonial intellectuals, who came from outside Britain, and who
were connected to, but never part of the dominant institutions of the
British left. Perhaps it was precisely the impossibility, for these non-English
intellectuals, of ever ‘breaking into’ the established and traditional bases of
the British left that produced the conditions of possibility of the New Left.
This is a critical point in understanding (and rethinking) the history of both
the New Left and ‘British’ cultural studies. It not only decentres its
‘Britishness’, but also stresses the ‘outside’ forces which these colonial
intellectuals represented. Without the history of colonial relations, these
‘outsiders’ would not have been there, to begin with (why study in
England?); without the ‘outside’ ideological forces and voices (which were,
of course, still deeply connected to the culture and society of the colonial
‘homeland’), from which to form different positions in dialogue with the
traditional left, there would perhaps have been no Socialist Club, no
Universities and Left Review, and no British New Left. Of course, these
tentative speculations would need much more thorough historical research,
to validate them (see Schwarz, 1994, for a preliminary explanation of these
issues). However, Hall’s story does open up a quite new and different
perspective on the history of the New Left, as well as the history of cultural
studies—a perspective from which it is much less simply a ‘British’ story
and rather more an international(ist) one, from its very beginnings.
What also emerges in the interview, is the central figure of the ‘diaspora’
in the context of the problematics of race and ethnicity. Hall’s recent work
on these issues can be seen as continuous with a long thread of concern
with the politics of ‘race’, and with the mobilization of racial tropes and
imagery, as central to the emergence of the authoritarian forms of populism,
promulgated by Conservative ‘law and order’ campaigns, from the
mid-1970s onwards, in Britain. Graduate students and staff at the Centre
for Contemporary Cultural Studies initially became involved in these issues
in the wake of the mobilization of a moral panic concerning teenage street