Abstract
In Familiar Stranger: A Life Between Two Islands, Stuart Hall (2017) traces his memories and lived experiences through the historical, cultural and political landscapes of colonial and ‘post-’colonial Jamaica and Britain. Although Hall resisted the description of memoir, the book can perhaps be described as a model of how to think one’s life, generally, and diasporic migrant experiences, specifically, through a cultural studies framework. Hall describes having an instinctive ‘anti-colonial’ (p. 239) and ‘diasporic conception of the world’ (p. 173) even before migrating to Britain. As he tells it, these instincts led him to find and create a West Indian community identity forged among fellow Caribbean migrants and ultimately led to his development of cultural studies. After briefly summarizing each section of Familiar Stranger, I turn to Hall’s theorizing around (‘post-’)coloniality, migration, diaspora and diasporic identity, incorporating some of Hall’s other writings and lectures on diaspora to clarify, extend and connect his arguments throughout Familiar Stranger.
In part I, ‘Jamaica’, Hall situates himself and his family within the colonial landscape of Jamaica in the 1900s. Chapter 1, ‘Colonial Landscapes, Colonial Subjects’, discusses the interdependence between Britain, the colonizing empire and metropole, and Jamaica, its colony, as constituted by colonialism and constitutive of the dialectical and diasporic identifications of Jamaicans. Chapter 2, ‘The Two Jamaicas’, takes up the roots of the labor rebellions and increasing anti-colonial sentiment in Jamaica, as well as the cultural revolution set in motion by Jamaica’s political independence from colonialism. Here, Hall discusses the resulting Black consciousness that was viewed as threatening by many middle-class (Black and Brown) Jamaicans, including Hall’s family, leading to his sense of being ‘out of place’ (p. 34) and beginning to consider his own migration ‘out’ (p. 57). Chapter 3, ‘Thinking the Caribbean: Creolizing Thinking’, engages questions of ‘how we think “where we are from”’ (p. 63) as a historical and conceptual issue through which the legacies of colonialism continue to organize our systems of social memory. Hall notes the resistant potential of creolization, which plays out through appropriated performance of social norms by the subordinate classes (p. 74). Chapter 4, ‘Race and Its Disavowal’, begins with Fanon’s discussion of colonial societies’ functioning through constructions of race and racism, while also discussing the creolization of culture – and thus articulations of race, class and color – through the ‘contact zone[s]’ or ‘third space[s]’ of diasporic migration (p. 98).
In part II, ‘Leaving Jamaica’, Hall positions his upbringing and decision to migrate from Jamaica to England within the colonial education system, which he asserts conscripted him into modernity (p. 109). Chapter 5, ‘Conscripts of Modernity’, explores schools as a site of production of not only the colonial subject and subjectivity but also, unintentionally, disruptions of the same. For Hall and many others, his engagement in music and literature inspired his desire to encounter the world beyond the ‘provincial colonial metropole’ (p. 132). Here, Hall theorizes the contemporary ‘post-’colonial diaspora and takes up creolization and Du Bois’ double consciousness to understand the diasporic impact on cultural and political identities.
In part III, ‘Journey to an Illusion’, Hall delves into his ‘diasporic conception of the world’ (p. 173), informed by his own diasporic migration and his experiences creating a diasporic community abroad that profoundly impacted his own identity and identification. Chapter 6, ‘Encountering Oxford: The Makings of a Diasporic Self’, details Hall’s early experiences in England attending Oxford University, connecting with other Caribbean migrants and beginning to ‘practice a diasporic West Indian identity’ (p. 164). Chapter 7, ‘Caribbean Migration: The Windrush Generation’ continues Hall’s reflections on diaspora, difference and migration as he experiences a new wave of Black Caribbean diasporic migration to Britain. Hall continues his theorizing of the diasporic through his burgeoning commitment to practice a diasporic identity and his recognition of the rupture with the past wrought by diasporic migration.
In part IV, ‘Transition Zone’, Hall reflects on his journey to cultural studies not only to make sense of his personal identity but also to better understand the political, cultural and historical formations of the ‘post-’colonial nation. Chapter 8, ‘England at Home’, addresses Hall’s continued feelings of dislocation and exclusion from English culture. For Hall, cultural studies emerged as a way to deconstruct meaning at the ideological level to examine how language and power are articulated (p. 208). Chapter 9, ‘Politics’, concludes the book with an overview of Hall’s career trajectory, continually returning to culture as the signifying dimension of human society and diaspora and migration as the undercurrent to Hall’s explorations of coloniality and modernity. He concludes with a reflection on the influence of his wife, Catherine, on his internal journey from colonial subjugation (p. 267), ultimately crediting not only cultural studies and the political but also his ‘new family’ for the space he inhabited as a diasporic migrant in British society (p. 271).
Throughout Familiar Stranger, Hall traces his mobility and diasporic identity through the landscape of coloniality in which he lived, noting that he was ‘framed by and against “the colonial”’ (p. 22). Born in 1932, Hall migrated to the United Kingdom in 1951 (p. 3), rendering him an early member of the so-called Windrush generation. While Jamaica did not formally achieve independence from Britain until 1962 (p. 40), Hall notes the growing Black consciousness in Jamaica beginning decades prior. Hall therefore situates his young self within colonial Jamaica and subsequently as a colonial subject in the British metropole, with careful attention to educational and other cultural institutions that served to produce his colonial subjectivity and conscript him into modernity, while simultaneously disrupting these very constructs (p. 117). Hall thus describes the colonial world as his ‘conditions of existence’ (p. 10).
Yet crucially, for Hall, the colonial landscape that structured his diasporic identity and experiences did not cease influence with Jamaica’s formal political independence. Hall thereby engages the term ‘post-colonial’ quite carefully: ‘Post-’ is not just a matter of the passage of time. It refers to the way one configuration of power, institutions and discourses, which once defined the social field, has been replaced by another. The old has indeed radically changed its form. However, the old has not been transcended. We continue to stand in its shadow. In the case of the colonial and the post-colonial, what we are dealing with is not two successive regimes but the simultaneous presence of a regime and its after-effects. Colonialism persists, despite the cluster of illusory appearances to the contrary. (p. 24; emphasis in original)
Hall thus acknowledges that the ‘particular phase of direct colonial rule’ that constitutes colonialism is over (p. 23) while emphasizing that colonialism still very much shapes the ‘post-colonial’ world. Crucially, for Hall, the ‘sensibilities of colonialism’ (p. 21) dominate the present and continue to ‘organize our contemporary post-colonial world’ (p. 65).
Hall therefore perceives his diasporic identity as forged through colonialism. Hall argues that every Jamaican is originally from elsewhere and thereby the ‘product of a migration, forced or free’ (p. 4), an argument that ostensibly extends to inhabitants and descendants of formerly colonized regions across the globe, and notes his identification with two diasporas: the African diaspora and the Jamaican diaspora (p. 4). Hall’s basic definition of diaspora is broad: Diasporas have been created whenever – and for whatever reasons – settled societies have established significantly sized communities of their own people elsewhere which have survived for a considerable period of time, maintain a close connection with the place and cultures of their ancestry, and shaped their practices according to what they imagine are the social codes, customs and beliefs of their ancestors. (p. 140)
Hall also argues that ‘all cultures are to some extent diasporic, decentered’, in that people are always in motion, which leads to some cultural change but never an absolute cultural break (Jaggi, 2009: 28). However, Hall (2017) warns that the concept of diaspora is ‘not theoretically innocent’ and must be thought contextually (p. 143). In Familiar Stranger, Hall focuses specifically on what he terms ‘contemporary diasporas’, which take place ‘“post-”colonization’ and which ‘arise from the transformations of the power relations between “the West” and “the rest”’ (p. 143). Hall thus defines contemporary, or post-colonial, diaspora as ‘the process by which societies and communities in the poor two-thirds of the world have been exposed to the power and subordinated to the interests of the rich one-third’ (p. 143).
For Hall, any notion of ‘a return to a reconstituted “one-ness” and to the elimination of difference’ can only ever be a fantasy, for ‘the diasporic “dissemination” is, in any realistic or literal sense, irreversible’ (p. 199). He describes post-colonial diaspora elsewhere as ‘translated societies . . . societies of dislocation and disjuncture, temporally and spatially separated from anything that might stand, or be constructed, decisively as their places of origin’ (Hall, 2016: 48). Put another way, critical to Hall’s (2017) conceptualization of diasporic identity is his emphasis on diasporic migration as a rupture – with one’s past, one’s home culture, one’s identity. Hall’s theorizing of migration as a ‘Humpty Dumpty phenomenon’ informs his understanding of both culture and identity as non-essentialist: Once shattered, the past can never be put back together again as it once was, in all its essential identity. This is because the past has not been stranded there all the time, preserved and unchanged, waiting for us to come home. (p. 199)
Just as colonial histories are marked by ‘violent, abrupt, ruptural breaks’ (Hall, 2016: 49), so too is ‘post-’colonial diaspora marked by the same.
In fact, it is precisely Hall’s (2017) understanding of colonial power; the interdependence between the empire, metropole, and colony; and his positionality as a ‘subject of’ and therefore ‘subject to’ the British empire (p. 14) that drive his insistence on the non-essentialist nature of identity. For Hall, identity is a ‘constantly shifting process of positioning . . . a never-completed process of becoming’ rather than ‘a set of fixed attributes . . . a singular, complete, finished state of being’ (p. 16). Furthermore, Hall asserts that ‘no identities survive the diasporic process intact and unchanged, or maintain their connections with their past undisturbed’ (p. 144); the diasporic itself thereby challenges any notion of stable or static cultural identities. This understanding enables Hall to trace the formation of his identity through the complexities, temporalities and conditions of colonialism in which he was raised and to which he was always already subjected.
Hall (2016) further reminds us that creolization and cultural translation must always be read as central to the internal logics of colonization, slavery, racialization and modernity (p. 52). Specifically, Hall describes migration as the ‘dark side of globalization’, in that under global colonial power structures, culture and commodities can move but cheap labor – people – are either compelled to remain in place, exploited for the capitalist economy, or displaced, forced from their homes to enable further colonization of their homelands (Jaggi, 2009: 54–55). Regarding the latter, Hall (2007) notes that ‘under globalization, everywhere is becoming more “diasporic”’ as a result of the political-economic conditions of ‘post-’colonial globalization (p. 287). For Hall (1999), this increasing globalization decenters the cultural centers of the colonial model (p. 10). He argues an increasingly diasporic world, and thus a diasporic perspective on culture, subverts ‘traditional nation-oriented cultural models’ (Hall, 1999: 10). This subversion is significant for Hall’s theorizing of the revolutionary potential of diaspora.
Crucially, for Hall (2017), the diaspora is not only a departure or a rupture but also an encounter and thus a ‘space of emergence’ (p. 198). Hall locates a version of Du Bois’ double consciousness at the core of diasporic experience; that is, the experience of belonging to more than one culture and ‘being “at home” – but never wholly – in both places’ (p. 140). Hall describes arriving at a diasporic identity as a ‘third space’ opening up among ‘a binary choice between impossible alternatives’ (p. 198). Furthermore, for Hall, diasporic thought gives space to the very displacements that don’t fit neatly in a modern binary or narrative, bringing ‘dysfunctions’ to the forefront (p. 171). For Hall, it is this ‘out of place’-ness that characterizes diasporic migration, along the same vein as not only Du Bois but also Simmel’s ‘stranger’, Bhabha’s ‘in-between’ or ‘third space’, Nandy’s ‘intimate enemies’ and Said’s ‘out of place’ (p. 172) as well as Gilroy’s ‘the changing same’ (pp. 140–141). Taking up all of these concepts, Hall defines the diasporic as ‘the moment of double inscription, of creolization and multiple belongings’ (p. 144) and argues diasporic migration as a ‘contact zone’, a site of multi-cultural cohabitation compelled by coloniality, that constitutes ‘a compelling and influential site of change’ (p. 98).
The diasporic as space of cultural contact offers revolutionary potential for Hall. He elaborates on the diasporic as a ‘third space’ (p. 98), an ‘emergent space of inquiry’ (p. 143) and ‘a component in the contested process of decolonization’ (p. 176), describing the implications of this cultural and political contact: The new conceptions of diaspora provided the contexts in which it became clear that no single social division is able to explain or account for all the structures and power relations in a social totality. The diasporic proved to be the moment when the politics of class, race and gender came together, but in a new, unstable, unstoppable, explosive articulation, displacing and at the same time complicating each other. (p. 144)
Here, we can see how Hall (2016) understands power and culture as an articulation, open to historical, specific and shifting links continually ‘forged and forged again in a way that always leaves something behind . . . and is therefore always open to contingency, struggle and change’ (p. 55). Ultimately, for Hall, a cultural studies approach to diaspora enables a ‘re-grounding’ (Jaggi, 2009: 10), a deeper understanding of the colonial structures that alienated him from his family and home, compelled his migration to the metropole, and inspired his political commitment to forging a diasporic identity (Hall, 2017). Like his personal journey, Hall (2017) suggests that the diasporic offers us a way ‘out’ (p. 57), but also a way into a ‘third space’ (p. 98), one that offers revolutionary possibilities for anti-colonial cultural change.
Familiar Stranger offers a number of valuable contributions to cultural studies. Hall’s tracing of the political through the personal offers a useful example for cultural studies scholars committed to radical contextualism in studying global structures of power. Hall’s personal journey continually informed and was informed by the social and political outcomes of cultural institutions, movements and encounters; his rich analysis serves as a model for scholars conducting similar analyses of local and particular experiences of culture. The book also positions the field of cultural studies as emerging from the particular context of diasporic migration and encounter in ‘post-’colonial Britain, suggesting cultural studies analyses of ideology and power offer insight into anti-colonial ways of being. Regarding the latter, Hall’s theoretical contribution in Familiar Stranger is profound; he advances an argument of the theory and praxis of diaspora as an entry point into analyses of coloniality and anti-colonial resistance. Hall understands the new cultural space created through diasporic migration alongside myriad other scholars’ concepts of anti-colonial space, in doing so pointing cultural studies scholars toward a space where culture, politics, society, ideology and power combine – the diasporic.
