Page 24 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

12 DAVID MORLEY AND KUAN-HSING CHEN

crime, which can be traced back to the wave of publicity given to the
conviction of three Birmingham teenagers (Paul Storey, James Duignan and
Mustafa Fuat) for the ‘mugging’ of a man, Robert Keenan, in the
Handsworth area of the city (later the site of the inner city ‘riots’ of 1981),
on 5 November 1972. The initial public concern with the phenomenon of
teenage street crime was rapidly transferred into a full-blown ‘moral panic’
about the threat of black street crime, and more generally, the threat posed
by black youths to ‘law and order’. Following their involvement in work
on the pamphlet ‘20 years’, published by the Support Committee set up by
relatives and friends of Storey, Duignan and Fuat, graduate students and
staff at the Cultural Studies Centre became involved in a much larger
project concerned with ‘race’, law and order and policing in Britain. This
was the genesis of the influential Policing the Crisis: ‘Mugging’, the State
and Law and Order, written by Stuart Hall, Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson,
John Clarke and Brian Roberts, and published in 1978, a year before Mrs
Thatcher came to power in Britain on a ‘law and order’ platform (see also
the slightly later collection The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in
70s Britain, CCCS, 1982), produced by the ‘Race and Politics’ subgroup at
the Cultural Studies Centre, which includes contributions by Hazel Carby,
Bob Findlay, Paul Gilroy, Simon Jones, Errol Lawrence, Pratibha Parmar
and John Solomos).
In this respect again, Hall’s work in this field is by no means of purely
theoretical concern; it is deeply rooted in the history and politics of the
international flow of labour and migration, and subsequently in the
reconfiguration of British society under and after Thatcherism. In this
sense, Hall’s recent formulations are continuous with his decade-long
struggle with Thatcherism. Thatcherite ‘new conservatism’ attempted to
incorporate, into its hegemonic project, a crucial element: the
reconstruction of national culture, in order to win the legitimacy of
governmentality. In the process of constructing this hegemonic politics, the
‘recovery’ of the British empire was used to mobilize different social
classes. Constructing a’racially’ unified image of ‘Britishness’, and
correspondingly attempting to erase class differences, became the
cornerstone of the neo-conservative strategy of ‘born-again’ nationalism.
The ‘new immigrants’ (from the West Indies, or Asia) were scapegoated as
the ‘Others’ responsible for the destruction of ‘law and order’ in British
society, which (it was implied) was what had led to the decline of Britain
and its empire. These ‘blacks’ were constructed in opposition to ‘pure’ or
‘real’ Englishmen, and thus symbolically excluded from the heartland of
‘British’ society. At the same time, in reality, numbers of immigrants, from
the 1950s on, have gradually established their own, semi-autonomous
living and cultural spaces in the United Kingdom; how to maintain their
autonomy, in relation to the rising tide of British nationalism and racism,
and how to redefine the very idea of a’national culture’, so that ethnic