Empire strikes back: British struggle for Imperial identity
Stuart Hall catalogues his experiences that shaped his intellectual, political and theoretical work in his new book said: “ Sometimes I feel myself to have been the last colonial”. Stuart Hall an immigrant intellectual, one of the most prominent and influential scholars, and public intellectual of his generation, who is well placed as outsiders insiders, to highlight the contradictions and paradoxes of our colonial past, in the wake of Brexit. He is the co-founder of the New Left Review, an early theorist of Thatcherism and a guru of post-colonial studies. He taught at the University of Birmingham and the Open University.
Stuart Hall a mixed-race Jamaican, who experienced disenchantment and racism posthumously published memoir of his own struggles with identity with his efforts to come to terms with the British class system, Egalitarianism, racial inequality, and way of understanding the empire to bring a sense of peace in the world.
In 1951, he arrived in oxford to study English, to an England so rife with racism that it could barely recognise his humanity, and his view to becoming a famous novelist in the Jamesian mode, sifting the most grades of moral failure and betrayal. His mother a tiny tincture of Scottish blood fed and obsession with racial status in Jamaica’s “pigmentocracy” destroyer her daughter’s relationship with a black medical student, which led to girl’s incarceration in a mental asylum. Hall’s middle name “McPhail”, having escaped the toxic drama, he determined never to return.
In Oxford, Hall, experienced a dark, antiquarianism, with the worship of Hierarchical class culture, was de rigueur, not what he had imagined being the sunlit utopia of debate, free speech and liberal intellectualism? Isaiah Berlin, make a brief appearance in Hall’s book. Oxford of Rhodes scholars from North America, India, Africa, the Caribbean, the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, V.S. Naipaul, George Lamming, Raymond Williams and historian Raphael Samuel and literary scholar Gabriel Pearson founded the Precursor to the New Left Review. Full of passion and wisdom, Familiar Stranger is the intellectual memoir of one of our greatest minds,
Hall, in London, discovered the vibrant culture that post-imperial immigration was shaping as West Indian identity was created in London, which included elite working class immigrants from across the Caribbean. Hall’ s book mentions Ashis Nandy’s The Inmate Enemy, 1983, a study of colonialism that produces subaltern thinkers from Edward to Gandhi, who are both insiders by their educational achievements and outsiders because of the colour of their skin.
Hall stayed away from politics, but went into cultural theory, including writing about Significance of Reggae and the West Indian Literary renaissance of the late 19502, in shaping the Caribbean and black identities.
By 1956’s West imperialism and communism – the Suez invasion and the Hungarian uprising – Hall not hall with his own universities left Review with Marxist revolutionist historian EP Thompson to form the New Left Review in the 1960s, of which Hall was the first editor.
For Hall race and centrality of whiteness were crucial to post-imperial British identity as class was for Thompson’s 19th century. Hall points out the impact of the loss of empire on British identity, and even the efforts in the 1950s on both left and right to forget the imperial past as an embarrassing failure, to its resurrection as a justification for white racial superiority with Enoch Powell that Hall believed Thatcherism only perpetuated.
Familiar Stranger: A Life Between Two Islands by Stuart Hall with Bill Schwarz, Allen Lane £25. Duke University Press $29.95, 320 pages.