Page 25 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

INTRODUCTION 13

minorities can find legitimate positions from which to speak within it, now
became urgent political issues (for a more detailed discussion of Hall’s
work on ‘race’ and ethnicity, see Chen, 1993).
It is within this historical conjuncture that Hall’s interventions must be
seen as strategically and politically motivated. It could be argued that this
engagement, with questions of race and ethnicity, in relation to the politics
of national culture, within the newer movement of globalization, might
well constitute the next key challenge that cultural studies has to face. In this
connection, the interview in Part IV, ‘Cultural studies and the politics of
internationalization’, takes the 1992 Trajectories: Towards a New
Internationalist Cultural Studies’ conference, organized by the Institute of
Literature, National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan, as a reference point, in
order to address current problems in the ‘internationalizing’ trend of
cultural studies. We hope this interview, in particular, will generate further
discussions in ‘internationalist’ cultural studies circles.

A POSTMODERN AUTOBIOGRAPHY?
At one point, in his presentation to the Illinois ‘Cultural Studies’
conference, in 1990, Hall spoke autobiographically of his own experience
of the tensions and difficulties of the development of cultural studies work
at CCCS during the 1970s. In doing so, he was at pains to stress that he
spoke autobiographically, on this particular occasion, not in order to
‘(seize) the authority of authenticity’, but in order not to be authoritative.
In the interviews in this collection, Hall again speaks autobiographically, of
his family and his upbringing in Jamaica—of being the ‘blackest’ in his
family, the ‘one from the outside’, who didn’t ‘fit’ and who found that
experience of marginality both replicated and amplified, on coming to
England to study: finding that he ‘knew both places intimately’ but ‘was not
wholly of either’. The Irish poet, Patrick Kavanagh once remarked that ‘the
self is only interesting as an illustration’. What Hall does here is to offer
parts of his ‘story’ as, among other things, a way of illuminating not simply
his own autobiography, but also the diasporic experience itself: precisely the
awareness he refers to, of being (often doubly) peripheral, displaced or
marginalized. The experiential account is rendered in tandem with its own
theorization. The moral of the story, which Hall tells in ‘The local and the
global’ (1991a)—the story of how ‘in the very moment when finally Britain
convinced itself it had to decolonize…we all came back home. As they
hauled down the flag, we got on the banana boat and sailed right into
London’—is also the story ‘theorized’ in the CCCS collection, The Empire
Strikes Back (1982). When, in ‘Old and new identities’ (1991b), Hall
‘figures’ himself as ‘the sugar at the bottom of the English cup of tea…the
sweet tooth, the sugar plantation that rotted generations of English
children’s teeth’ (48), there is a sense of wicked delight (if not sweet