Page 248 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

236 STUART HALL

The left should not be afraid of this surprising return of ethnicity.
Though ethnicity continues to be, in many places, a surprisingly resilient
and powerfully reactionary force, the new forms of ethnicity are
articulated, politically, in a different direction. By ‘ethnicity’ we mean the
astonishing return to the political agenda of all those points of
attachment which give the individual some sense of ‘place’ and position in
the world, whether these be in relation to particular communities, localities,
territories, languages, religions or cultures. These days, black writers and
film-makers refuse to be restricted to only addressing black subjects. But
they insist that others recognize that what they have to say comes out of
particular histories and cultures and that everyone speaks from positions
within the global distribution of power. Because these positions change and
alter, there is always an engagement with politics as a ‘war of position’.
This insistence on ‘positioning’ provides people with co-ordinates, which
are specially important in face of the enormous globalization and
transnational character of many of the processes which now shape their
lives. The New Times seem to have gone ‘global’ and ‘local’ at the same
moment. And the question of ethnicity reminds us that everybody comes
from some place—even if it is only an ‘imagined community’—and needs
some sense of identification and belonging. A politics which neglects that
moment of identity and identification—without, of course, thinking of it as
something permanent, fixed or essential—is not likely to be able to
command the New Times.
Could there be New Times without new subjects? Could the world be
transformed while its subjects stay exactly the same? Have the forces
remaking the modern world left the subjects of that process untouched? Is
change possible while we remain untransformed? It was always unlikely
and is certainly an untenable proposition now. This is another one of those
many ‘fixed and fast-frozen relationships, venerable ideas and opinions’
which, as Marx accurately predicted, New Times are quietly melting into
thin air.

REFERENCES

Baudrillard, J. (1977) The Mirror of Production, New York: Telos.
Berman, M. (1983) All That Is Solid Melts into Air, New York: Simon & Schuster.
Eagleton, T. (1987) ‘Identity’, in L.Appignanensi (ed.) The Real Me: Postmodernism
and the Question of Identity, London: Institute of Contemporary Arts.
Gramsci, A. (1971) The Prison Notebooks, London: Lawrence & Wishart.
Jameson, F. (1984) ‘The cultural logic of Capital’, New Left Review 146(July/
August).