Page 26 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

14 DAVID MORLEY AND KUAN-HSING CHEN

revenge) in the destabilization of this category of ‘Englishness’, central to
the politics of Thatcherism, which Hall has spent so much of his recent
intellectual life fighting.
In the interview in Part II ‘On postmodernism and articulation’, Hall is
scathing about the vacuous (and implicitly imperialist) presumptions of
some versions of postmodernism (see the piece by Morley in Part IV for
more on this), characterizing it simply as ‘another version of that historical
amnesia, characteristic of American culture—the tyranny of the new’, or
even more simply as ‘how the world dreams itself to be American…’—an
instance of the ‘ideological effect’ and of the belief that ‘history stops with
us’(see Fukuyama, 1992). Hall’s critical point concerns precisely the failure
of certain theorists of postmodernism to reflexively take account of their
own (privileged) positions—(cf. West, 1991:5) ‘who is he (Lyotard) talking
about…he and his friends hanging out on the Left Bank?’ in a world in
which, as Hall puts it, the majority of the population have not yet properly
entered the modern era, let alone the postmodern. Indeed Hobsbawm
(1994) argues that for 80 per cent of humanity, the Middle Ages (defined in
European terms) only ended in the 1950s. Clearly, much postmodern
theory, from this perspective, amounts not only to a form of orientalism
(see Said, 1978) but to a form of ‘egology’ or ‘ontological imperialism’, in
Levinas’ terms (1983). The same point can, of course, be made in relation
to the concept of ‘postcolonialism’. As a very significant number of the
world’s population still live in (at best) neo-colonial conditions, it may well
be premature to speak of a ‘postcolonial era’ (see Chen, forthcoming).
However, as West (op. cit.) also argues, there is another way of
understanding postmodernism, as ‘a set of responses to the decentring of…
(that) European [or perhaps “western”—KHC/DM] hegemony that began
in 1492’ (op. cit.: 6). In his later work, this is precisely the perspective
which Hall has developed most effectively, in essays such as a The West
and the rest’ (1992b), The question of cultural identity’ (1992a) and
‘Cultural identity and diaspora’ (1990). In these essays, the
autobiographical experience of the migrant—the experience of dis-
location, dis-placement and hybridity—is treated as structurally central to
the ‘condition of postmodernity’. Thus, as Hall puts it in ‘Cultural identity
and diaspora’, the migrant can be seen as ‘the prototype of postmodern…
nomad, continually moving between centre and periphery’ (1990:234). As
he puts it, in the interview in Part V, ‘postcoloniality…prepared one to live
in a rather postmodern relationship through identity. I don’t feel that as a
typically western experience at all. Its a very diasporic experience. The
classic postmodern experience is the diasporic experience.’ Seen from this
point of view, in which the material relations of imperialism and
colonialism are reinscribed, the ‘postmodern’ is clearly then of considerably
greater interest than what Hall elsewhere has called ‘ideological
postmodernism’ or ‘what happens to ex-marxist French intellectuals when