The_multicultural_question - Stuart Hall.pdf - Culture - lady_kitty

Stuart Hall - The Multicultural Question

The Political Economy Research Centre Annual Lecture

Delivered on 4th May 2000 in Firth Hall Sheffield

My choice of theme and topic for this occasion is designed really to register two

things. First, the urgency of putting questions of race, ethnicity and multiculturalism

centre stage to the broader political agenda. Secondly, my conviction that far from

being an obvious, overused, platitude, questions of multiculturalism, properly

understood contain the seeds of a major disruption of our normal common sense

political assumptions and is calculated to have disruptive effects on all sides.

Multiculturalism, I want to argue, can't just happen. It has to be seriously, actively,

put in place and interrogated. Thirdly, I want to suggest that this a propitious moment

for political intervention of this kind: the public trauma of the Stephen Lawrence

Enquiry and the Macpherson Report, the dramatic rise in racial incidents, coupled

more generally with the return of ethnic cleansing to the centre of Europe; the crisis of

national identity, which devolution and the new constitutional settlements have put in

place; the challenges of Europe and Globalisation; all these factors have precipitated a

sort of propitious moment; they have created what I think is an important political

opening; but I want to argue it is a political opening of an ambiguous kind, both

opportune and dangerous.

At some point in about 1998, the precise moment is still open for questioning, Britain

is said to have become a multicultural society. It is commonly assumed that, since

Afro Caribbean, Asian and other assorted ethnic people are now visually evident as an

inevitable part of the British scene in every walk of urban life, things must be getting

presumably better on the race relations front. And society must have somehow

slipped almost unobtrusively into a multicultural state. You won't be surprised to

learn that I think this is a highly dubious proposition. Undoubtedly, things in this area

are changing. Undoubtedly, some things are even getting better, but I think it is more

accurate to see this period as framed by two events which stubbornly refuse to be

conjugated together. In 1998 Britain celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the arrival

of the SS Empire Windrush, the troopship which brought people from the Caribbean

to Britain, which is taken as conveniently signifying the beginning of the post war

black migration to Britain. The Windrush anniversary was an occasion for

widespread self congratulation. The authors of an important volume that

accompanied their excellent television series Mike and Trevor Phillips subtitled it The

Irresistible Rise of Multi Racial Britain . A year later, however, the Macpherson

enquiry into the murder of teenager Stephen Lawrence at a bus stop on Well Hall

Road, Eltham, delivered the verdict that the handling of this brutal affair by the

Metropolitan Police "was marred by professional incompetence, institutional racism

and a failure of leadership by senior officers".

Now these two events together seem to me to be paradigmatic of the state of play

about race in Britain today. The first speaks to, what I want to call multicultural drift ,

that is to say the unplanned, increasing involvement of Britain's black and brown

populations visibly registering a play of difference right across the face of British

society. However, this creeping multiculturalism remains deeply uneven. Large areas

of the country, most significant centres of power, substantial areas of racially

differentiated disadvantage, are largely untouched by it. Outside its radius racialised

exclusion compounded by household poverty, unemployment and educational

underachievement persist, indeed multiply. Some Brits welcome the new

multicultural mix, which is in my view of the source of the Cool in that new Labour

fantasy once labelled Cool Britannia . I think it's us they were talking about. Many

Brits grudgingly accept, or tolerate, this new drift to multiculturalism as another

perhaps inevitable step in the slow passing of the good old days. Still others are

viscerally threatened by it and violently resistant to it. This is where the Stephen

Lawrence murder, and those of Ricky Reel and Michael Menson and the McGowan

brothers come in. Those events have been compounded by a determined effort

institutionally to revert to what one can only call common sense policing, that is to say

to normalise the state of violence on the streets, rendering much of it invisible. This

suggests to me the deeply unresolved character of British multiculturalism. And that

brings me to the main focus of my talk.

This is what I want to call the complex relationship between on the one hand the

unremitting struggle for a more socially equal, racially just society. What we might

call the old antiracist or race equality and justice agenda, and on the other hand the

question of whether and how people's of very different cultural, ethnic, racial and

religious belonging can cohabit together in British society and build a common life in

a way which recognises rather than abolishing their differences. One could put this

dilemma in the terms of the relationship between the struggle for equality and social

justice, and, on the other hand what has come to be called the politics of recognition

between for shorthand purposes anitracism and multiculturalism . As far as the

politics of recognition is concerned, I have in mind Charles Taylor's famous

formulation in the volume on multiculturalism when he says

The thesis is that our identity is partly shaped by recognition or its absence.

Often by the misrecognition of others. Non recognition or misrecgonition can

inflict harm can be a form of oppression imprisoning someone in a false

distorted and reduced mode of being.

One can hear the voices of Amilcar Cabral and Frantz Fanon eloquently audible in

Charles Taylor's formulation. For many years in Britain antiracism and

multiculturalism were seen as mutually exclusive strategies. Multiculturalism with its

focus on cultural identity being understood by many, especially many on the Left, as a

way of evading the difficult structural, economic and political questions, posed by

racism. I believe this distinction to be no longer valid and that our incapacity to

evolve a timely and strategic response to what Michel Foucault called the history of

the present lies partly in our difficulty in thinking strategically beyond those barriers.

Multiculturalism is like race itself or identity or ethnicity or diaspora, a much

contested term which can only be deployed as Derrida would say "under erasia". I

have to say its no longer effectively operating innocently in the original paradigm

which it was developed, but nevertheless it is a term without which we cannot think

the relations around this question at all. The term multiculturalism is contested by the

conservative right in the name of the puritan integrity of the nation, by liberals in

defence of individual liberty and formal equality, by modernisers of all stripes, and

there are many, for whom the triumph of western universalism, enlightenment reason

and modernity, over cultural particularism and tradition and racialised belonging, is

seen as an irreversible transition to the modern which any of us would desert at our

peril. It is contested by the left for substituting what might be thought of as soft issues

of cultural identity in place of the hard issues of structure and economics, and for

dividing the progressive forces along ethnically particularistic lines.

There are indeed many multiculturalists. In pluralist multiculturalism, as I call it,

prevalent for example in the United States, non-wasp non-European minorities are

treated as strongly bound unicultures, hierarchically arranged in an ethnic pecking

order. In corporate multiculturalism, cultural differences it is assumed, dissolved by

the market with no significant redistribution of resources required. In multicultural

managerialism, difference is managed by and in relation to the centre and increasingly

functions in terms of fixed cultural distinctions and ethnic demarcations, this is what

my friend Farand Maharaj has called sometimes "a spook lookalike apartheid logic":

apartheid coming back to meet you from the other side. I agree with a remark passed

by Peter Caws in Goldberg's collection on multiculturalism when he emphasises that

multiculturalism, with the emphasis on ism "Stands for a wide range of social

articulations, ideas and practices, and that the problem with the ism is that it reduces it

to a formal singularity, fixing it into a cemented condition (sort of ideology of

political correctness) and reduces the heterogeneity which is characteristic of all

multicultural conditions.

What concerns me in what follows is, as Goldberg states

Rather the theoretical, philosophical and political presuppositions and

implications of multiculturalism, with different relations they encompass

between what it calls history and multiple histories , between Reason (with a

capital R) and many rationalities , between culture , domination and self

assertion , between heterogeneity and homogeneity.

In what follows then, I use the term multicultural adjectivally, not substantially. I use

it to describe the very different societies in which people of different ethnic, cultural,

racial, religious backgrounds live together provided they are attempting to build a

common life, and are not formally segregated into distinct separate segments.

Historically there have been many such societies but their visibility has greatly

increased in recent years. That is I think as a result of several factors which I want

quickly to identify but which I can't explore further in this lecture. So those forces

are, first of all, the process of postwar decolonisation and the formation in its wake of

the plurality of postcolonial states, many of which are multi ethnic and multi

religious, where often the problems of governance assume the character of interethnic

conflict. Another factor is obviously the break-up of the Soviet Union and its sphere

of influence, which has precipitated another wave of small societies seeking

independent nationhood. Some, like Serbia, using the invention of tradition to

construct a past which would legitimate their contemporary ambitions for an

ethnically cleansed nation-state. Thirdly, that visibility has been heightened by the

process of globalisation itself which has weakened and undermined, without

destroying, the reach and stability of the modern western nation-state, setting in play

global cross-lateral processes above and below the level of the state. And playing

across these three precipitating conditions is the remorseless process of planned and

unplanned migrations and movements of people whether driven by poverty,

underdevelopment, labour exploitation, structural adjustment programmes, civil wars

and natural disasters. All of them taking place in the conditions of deepening global

inequality. This has precipitated the breakdown and the break-up of traditionally well

founded communities and societies. The mixing and mingling of cultures, languages,

religions and traditions which is the consequence of what Appadurai calls "these new

global flows". As Aziz Ahmad, who is no natural ally of the hybridising

intelligentsia, has argued

The cross-fertilization of cultures has been endemic to all movements of

people and all such movements in history have involved travel, contact,

transmutation, hybridization of ideas, values and behavioural norms.

What this has done above all is to challenge the assumption of a universal cultural

homogeneity, a society which is culturally and socially homogeneous, an idea which

has underpinned the western nation state since the Enlightenment and introduced in its

place the principle of a radical social heterogeneity.

My argument is that the emergence of the multicultural question in its many forms has

not only presented a ramified range of practical problems for the governance of such

diverse societies, it has also disrupted and transformed many of our classical and

common sense categories, theories and assumptions. Take for example globalisation.

The assumption of what David Held calls the hyperglobalisers is that contemporary

forms of globalisation, deregulated markets, gigantic capital and currency flows,

transnational production and consumption, the technologies of the so-called new

economy , these are all driven essentially by the developed and industrialised West,

including of course, paradoxically, some other countries like Japan which are not in

the west. Since the world, according to this view is divided between the advanced

liberal modernity of the West and the tradition bound developing worlds of east and

south, globalisation in this account must involve the simple imposition of the forms of

life, socio-economic organisation and culture of the former, that is to say the

developed west, in a wholesale takeover of the culture and organisation of the latter,

that is to say the tradition bound underdeveloped world. Now there is no point in

denying that this is indeed one of globalisations fundamental tendencies. But cultural

homogenisation is not globalisation's only impact. For alongside this hegemonising

tendency are some other important unintended consequences, including its extensive

and intensifying differentiating effects. What I want to call the subaltern proliferation

of difference. I want to argue that the globalising world is as marked by the subaltern

proliferation of difference as it is by, as it were, the universal takeover of a hegemonic

western culture. In part this is in my view because the system is global in two senses.

It is global because its operations are increasingly planetary in scope. There are very

few places which are completely beyond its destabilising interdependencies. But it is

also global in the sense of its very uneveness. That is to say, its close to what Marx,

who was much more clear sighted in my view about the world markets than he was

about the class struggle, used to call combined and uneven development. That is to

say, its processes are not uniform in character, they do not impact everywhere the

same, they do not produce equal outcomes and cannot operate without contradictory

effects. This subaltern proliferation of difference cannot certainly frontally stem the

tide of western late modernity but it represents the emergence what we may call a new

kind of local, indeed something which is related to, but is not fully subscribed, in the

global and this local still significantly inflects, deflects and translates western

imperatives from below.

These counter tendencies are not outside the global because since inauguration of the

project of western expansion and colonalisation, for which a convenient date is 1492,

most of the world has been convened, or attempted to be convened, within the empty

homogenous time of western modernity. But the fact is, as we now know about that

history, this was never done by successfully obliterating the specific disjunctures of

difference, of time, history and culture in those societies. Its not wholly a simulacrum

of western culture either. The binary difference of the absolutely other, which is

represented by that opposition which continues to haunt our political discourse

between modernity on the one side and tradition on the other. That binary difference

is progressively retained by an astonishing variety of systems of difference and

similarity which constitute what Arish Marinyar once called in an important essay

"together in difference" or what I want to call "vernacular modernities". These are

differences which are not fixed but which are positional along a spectrum. They obey

what Derrida would call the logic of differance rather than the logic of difference

(with an anomalous "a") to signal the continuous sliding and deferred movement

which they represent. Now, in our world, differance is not able to inaugurate totally

different forms of life, it cannot preserve older traditional ways of life wholly intact, it

operates in what Homey Barbar has called the borderline time of modernities, but it

does prevent the global system from stabilising itself as a fully sutured or stitched up

totality and it continues to explore it at a level often below the visibility of the global

media, the interstices, the gaps, the discontinuities as potential sites of resistence and

intervention. Here we find the return of the specific and different, of what is

specifically different, at the very centre of globalisation's panoptic aspirations to

world closure. It confronts universalism's empty western time with different

conjunctural times. It is what accounts for the paradox that the very moment of the so

called apotheosis of globalisation's universal mission to closure, is at the very same

time also the moment of the slow, uneven, decentering of the west.

The bearers of this complex process in Britain are the so-called ethnic minority

populations. Which, since the large scale migrations of the 1960s have been

subjected to the process of economic social exclusion, racialised disadvantage,

informal and institutional racism and cultural differentialism. These factors are now

typical across Western Europe today. Arabs in France, North Africans in Italy, Turks

in Germany, Muslims in Spain and Portugal. Assimilation and pluralist segmentation

have been the two preferred strategies applied to this mixing of populations and

cultures. But assimilation, which implies the total absorption into the majority culture

of all traces of cultural particularity, by the death in Britain in the 1960s, thank

goodness, the price of assimilation was too high for most of us to pay. And pluralist

segmentation runs right against the liberal political culture and in any case does not

actually correspond with the reality we have in force. The key point from a

multicultural point of view is as follows: the ethnic minorities have tended to form

distinct communities which are culturally marked containing many contacts with their

countries of origin and retaining connections with linguistic social religious and

cultural traditions especially in the context of personal life, of the family and of the

domestic scene. In terms of actual social practices however these communities reveal

extraordinary variations produced by such cross cutting factors as social class, gender,

nationality, region, religion and, above all, generation. The idea of some common

Asian or Afro Caribbean undifferentiated community way of life is a fantasy. In fact

the groups have never formed racially or ethnically segregated communities, even in

the areas of the densest settlement. In the most traditional of these communities

The_multicultural_question - Stuart Hall.pdf

Plik z chomika:

Inne pliki z tego folderu:

Inne foldery tego chomika: