Page 29 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

INTRODUCTION 17

the one through the other, without falling into psychoanalytic
readings of everything.
(1992c:291)

This tension is most clearly addressed in the interview ‘The formation of a
diasporic intellectual’ (chapter 25).

ESSENTIALISMS, POLITICS AND IDENTITIES

At the Illinois conference, Hall also referred to the way in which his
relation to marxism was necessarily inflected by his ‘not-yet completed
contestation with the profound Eurocentrism of marxist theory’
(chapter 13, 265). The major problem he identifies there concerns
traditional marxist theory’s basic stress on the internal dynamic of the
development of capitalism and its relative neglect of the question of
imperialism and colonialism. As he puts it in ‘Cultural identity and
diaspora’, the missing (‘third’) term is, in a sense, quite particularly his own
—the Caribbean, as the ‘Third… New World…the “empty” land…where
strangers from every other part of the globe collided’ (1990a: 234). In a
striking use of a psychoanalytic figure, he proposes that ‘The New World is
the third term—the primal scene—where the fateful/fatal encounter was
staged between Africa and the West’ (ibid.: 234; for the development of
these arguments, see, in particular, ‘The West and the rest’, 1992).
As noted earlier, Hall’s (1985) essay on ‘Gramsci’s relevance for the
study of race and ethnicity’ (chapter 20, here) can be seen as a turning-point
in the substantive focus of his work, as it moved towards its present central
concerns—with questions of ‘race’, ethnicity and cultural identity.
Nonetheless, the essay also contains a set of important theoretical
continuities, in its arguments concerning the need to develop modes of
analysis—whether to be applied to questions of class, ‘race’, gender or
ethnicity (or indeed, their intersections)—which are non-reductive and non-
essentialist. It is from Gramsci’s militantly conjunctural historical
perspective on class formations that Hall derives, in part, the conceptual
model for his later, non-essentialist analyses of race and ethnicity. It is, as it
were, in substantial part on the basis of the theoretical gains made in the
formative encounter with Gramsci that, in his influential essay on ‘New
ethnicities’ (1988; reprinted here as chapter 21), Hall declares the ‘end of
the innocent notion of the essential black subject’ (see the parallel debates
between Hall et al. and Coward, concerning ‘Class, culture and the social
formation’, 1977).
In the ‘New ethnicities’ essay, Hall insists that, rather than falling into
essentialist perspectives on the issues at stake (which would
replicate traditional marxism’s mistakes, concerning the nature of ‘pre-
given’ class subjects—(see Laclau and Mouffe, 1985) we must recognize