Page 30 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

18 DAVID MORLEY AND KUAN-HSING CHEN

that ‘black’ is a‘politically and culturally constructed category, which
cannot be grounded in a set of fixed, trans-cultural or transcendental racial
categories, and which therefore has no guarantees in Nature’ (1988:28)—
just as, from a non-essentialist perspective, socialist politics can find no
‘guarantee’ in the economic sphere. It is for these very reasons, Hall argues
in ‘Old and new identities’ (1991b), that what he calls ‘Identity Politics
One’—the invocation of homogenized racial, ethnic or cultural categories as
(idealized) ‘natural communities’—had to be abandoned as inadequate.
And yet, even then, as indicated earlier, Hall is aware of the tensions
(historical and intellectual) inevitably in play, in this context: as he notes in
‘What is this “black” in black popular culture?’ (chapter 23), ‘historically,
nothing could have been done to intervene in the dominated field of
mainstream popular culture, to try to win some space there, without the
strategies through which those dimensions were condensed into the
signifier “black”…’ (page 471). As he then asks, not entirely rhetorically:
‘where would we be, as bell hooks once remarked, without a touch of
essentialism…or what Gayatri Spivak calls “strategic essentialism”, a
necessary moment?’ (page 472)—even if the question is now, as Hall avers,
‘whether we are any longer in that moment, whether it is still a sufficient
basis for the strategies of new interventions’ (page 472).
In ‘Cultural studies and the politics of internationalization’ (chapter 19),
Hall also returns to the question of class, and how that question appears
now, after the impact of feminism, psychoanalysis, anti-racism and identity
politics. Hall notes that, in relation to the previous, essentialist marxist
tendency to treat class as the ‘master category’ of social analysis, in recent
years the question of class has largely fallen off the agenda of cultural
studies. As he points out, it is not only that some address to the question of
class (even if in a more de-centred way) remains absolutely necessary, if we
are to understand the development of the contemporary global economy
and how that affects all our lives. Further, as he goes on to note, the
politics of experience and of subjectivity and the focus on questions of
personal identity (even if all of those developments have many positive
aspects) can also have, unless one is extremely careful, what he describes as
a regressive, socially ‘narrowing’ effect. As he puts it,
In the early stages, perhaps we spoke too much about the working
class, about subcultures. Now nobody talks about that at all. They
talk about myself, my mother, my father, my friends, and that is, of
course, a very selective experience, especially in relation to classes….
(402)

To be sure, Hall’s invocation of a possible ‘return of the question of class’
is made with reference to a ‘return’ in which the question itself would be
quite ‘decentred’ and transformed—but it is nonetheless characteristic of