Tributes

STUART HALL 1932 –2014

One of the greatest left theoreticians of our time, Stuart Hall, died in February at the age of 82. Among a breathtakingly wide range of interests, the politics and culture of race was always a central theme of Stuart’s work and thinking.

When, in the days since his death, Stuart Hall was described as the ‘pioneer’ or – less fortunately – the ‘godfather’ of multiculturalism, it seemed like a convenient journalistic label for a man whose huge importance was hard to explain to the general public. But in an important sense it was true. Stuart represented multiculturalism, of course, because he thought and wrote about it as a government policy. But he also was it. He migrated to Britain in 1951 from Jamaica. As a Rhodes scholar at Oxford, he became quickly aware that he would never be ‘English’ in the sense implied by his surroundings. But, beyond those surroundings, he quickly learnt what being a young Jamaican man in post-Windrush Britain was like. The darkest person in a mixed race family, now an Oxford student, about to become a scholar, editor and activist, he was hybrid from the start. He frequently made the point that, in the contemporary world, if you ask someone where they come from, the answer gets longer and longer.

Stuart makes that argument in John Akomfrah’s remarkable film The Stuart Hall Project, which could perhaps be titled The Stuart Hall Projects. As founding editor of the New Left Review, Stuart brought together the northern English radical traditionalists of the New Reasoner with the metropolitan intellectuals of the Universities and Left Review (formed by the twin ’56 crises of British imperialism and Soviet oppression in Suez and Hungary). With Raymond Williams and E. P. Thompson, he coedited the 1967 May Day Manifesto, a searing critique of the new managerial capitalism and the then Labour government’s refusal to challenge it. Invited to be part of – and later to lead – Birmingham University’s Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in the ‘60s, he recast the department and the discipline in both a more collective and more activist mode, seeking not to analyse popular culture from on high, but to decode its hidden, often rebellious, meanings. Leaving Birmingham for the Open University in 1979, he built on his pioneering reading of Thatcherism as a political paradigm shift, through the pages of Marxism Today and elsewhere, through the ‘80s. After his retirement in 1998, he continued to think, talk and write: last year he co-authored the Kilburn Manifesto, a typically global analysis of the crisis of neoliberalism and the need for a much more profound response to it on the Left.

The many colours of Stuart’s coat can mask the running threads. He came to England as an anti-colonial and quickly came to understand how fundamentally Britishness was defined by its imperial past (‘Euro-scepticism and Little Englander nationalism could hardly survive if people understood whose sugar flowed through English blood and rotted English teeth’). The collective ferment of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies was formed by what was happening all around it in Birmingham: the 1964 Smethwick election campaign; Enoch Powell’s 1968 Rivers of Blood speech; the 1974 Birmingham pub bombings; and the 1977 anti-National Front demonstrations in Handsworth. The Centre’s most famous publication – the 1978 Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order – analysed, in prescient detail, the way in which a non-problem was formatted racially in a way which anticipates the treatment of Muslims and indeed Romanians today. In addition to coining the term Thatcherism in the 1979 essay ‘The Great Moving Right Show’, he was the first to identify Thatcher’s cocktail of free market liberalism and social authoritarianism as an update of Powellism.

As a campaigner, he supported and contributed to the community report into the shooting of Colin Roach in Stoke Newington police station in 1983 (Policing in Hackney 1945-1984). Later he served on the Parekh commission into multi-ethnic Britain, whose report was briskly rejected by then Home Secretary Jack Straw. After retirement, his interest in and commitment to black culture led him to establish Rivington Place, a centre for black and ethnic minority culture in Hoxton. Film-maker John Akomfrah was one of many young black artists inspired by Stuart in his latter years; one of the striking things about a Birmingham discussion of Akomfrah’s film – led by Centre veterans, mourning its closure – was the number of young black activists for whom Stuart was clearly still an inspiration.

Stuart joined the Board of the Institute of Race Relations in the ’80s, but his membership was short-lasting. I was among those who thought that Stuart’s thinking about the new conditions ushered in by globalisation was closer to A. Sivandandan’s concept of an emerging ‘silicon age’ than was generally credited. Stuart accepted that there was a ‘kernel of truth’ in the idea that Marxism Today invented New Labour, but he himself excoriated Blair’s appropriation of neo-liberalism (his article ‘Tony Blair: the greatest Tory since Margaret Thatcher?’ was co-written with Marxism Today editor Martin Jacques before the 1997 election).

Despite his commitment to Gramsci’s ‘optimism of the will’, Stuart Hall ended his life in pessimism about the left projects to which he contributed so much. However, as he himself said in a 2011 radio interview, one should not confuse outcome with impact. He was talking about the (literal) failure of the May ’68 uprising in Paris, compared with its immense influence later. His own impact on our understanding of contemporary politics and culture is immeasurable.

Institute of Race Relations board member     DAVID EDGAR

BUZZ JOHNSON 1951-2014

Two giants of the Caribbean diaspora died this week - Stuart Hall, academic and cultural theorist; Buzz Johnson, publisher and people’s educator. They represented two ends of a black left spectrum of politics – the one an acclaimed theoretician and eminent wordsmith who influenced a phalanx of students with his ideas, the other a practical man who single-handedly ran a black publishing venture, Karia Press, which uncovered/discovered and publicised a whole range of Caribbean writers and thinkers. Stuart Hall has been rightly claimed and acclaimed for his massive contribution. But Buzz, in the shadows till the last, has never had his due recognition.

Born in Buccoo, a small fishing village in Tobago, Buzz came to London, where he campaigned with groups such as Liberation (especially over Desmond Trotter, facing the death penalty in Dominica) and Caribbean Labour Solidarity and later set up the Karia Press in the early 1980s. Despite being dogged by constant financial problems and having frequently to move base he managed, as a one-man band, to publish an amazing array of over fifty books. And they were important ones. Many of the Caribbean poets who are now household names, were first published by Buzz – Elean Thomas, Merle Collins, Brother Resistance. He published key Caribbean writers on language, such as Hubert Devonish writing on Creole and Dr Morgan Delphinis on language and memory. He kept in the public eye the works of veteran Caribbean stalwarts such as George Lamming and Richard Hart.

But more than that, Buzz was an innovator and excavator. It was he who researched, authored and published the first book on then-forgotten Claudia Jones, I think of my mother in 1984. He commissioned and published Amos A. Ford’s book on the obscure British Honduran Forestry Commission’s work in Scotland 1941-44. Steeped as Karia was in Caribbean history and thought, Buzz was to use the press, too, as a tool in UK-based struggles. He published the report of the independent inquiry into the Broadwater Farm riots of 1985, chaired by Lord Gifford and followed it up with Broadwater Farm Revisited in 1989. He pulished too the independent inquiry report into the fatal shooting in Stoke Newington Police Station of Colin Roach in 1983 and in 1989 Loosen the shackles, the report of the Liverpool 8 Inquiry into race relations.

For Buzz, publishing was never about fame or fortune; it was part of struggle, educational struggle. He pioneered the publishing of many books in London so as to then ship them back to small Caribbean islands that had no presses of their own. And he would also superintend the shipments of remaindered and used books to schools in Trinidad and Tobago that could not afford their own text books.

A fighter in his own right, a pioneer and risk-taker, he was also a great friend, giving of himself – his smile shy and rueful, his manner gentle and self-effacing. He will be sorely missed.

February 2014     JENNY BOURNE