Three Moments of Stuart Hall in South Africa: Postcolonial-Postsocialist Marxisms of the Future

Introduction: Reading Hall from South Africa

On 14 August 2014, Irvin Jim, the General Secretary of the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA), gave the Ruth First Memorial Lecture in the Great Hall of the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. As he took hold of his oratory, he pleaded, ‘What will it take for us to rise from our slumbers? What will it take for us to see the rot?’ Let us pause to consider the elements of this situation. The University of the Witwatersrand is built on mining capital and it sits on a ridge overlooking the remains of mining reefs, working-class neighborhoods and the erstwhile gleaming city of capital. The university represents a crowning moment at which the late 19th-century discovery of minerals was imagined to fuel late-Victorian progressivism in one of a network of ‘white men’s countries’. ¹ The University of the Witwatersrand, built on intertwined spatial histories of industrialization and racial segregation, has periodically made space for those who call attention to the broader fissures in the national project of which it is a part.

Enter Irvin Jim, firebrand leader of the metalworkers union which has upheld a democratic socialist tradition in the Black trade union movement emerging from apartheid, and which has taken on the conservatism of its main rival within the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM). COSATU has been a key element of the dominant political alliance of the African National Congress (ANC), the South African Communist Party (SACP), and its presence within the hegemonic formation allows the alliance to claim that it speaks for the working class while also, obviously, for a new political and economic elite. After the Marikana massacre of 2012 and in the lead-up to the 2014 national elections, NUMSA briefly pulled out of COSATU and threatened the leading alliance of the ANC and COSATU with the numbers of its mass following. ² At this point, NUMSA began a long-term process of consultation with civil society organizations in order to engage with issues of what it calls ‘the solidarity economy’ – forms of mutuality, self-provisioning and informal economy widespread in our time of ‘wageless life’ (Denning, 2010) – as well as gender-based violence, LGBT rights and other issues germane to life in contemporary South Africa. In other words, it had begun a process of education necessary for a Gramscian war of position.

Jim’s speech echoed these wider contradictions in contemporary South Africa, and it was also delivered as an homage to a firebrand activist-intellectual of an earlier era, Ruth First. A fiercely free thinker, First had chosen to participate in the Mozambican revolution by working at the Centro de Estudos Africanos at Universidade Eduardo Modlande in Maputo in the 1980s, until she was assassinated by a parcel bomb from the South African security police. First was an open and voluble critic of the Stalinism of her husband Joe Slovo, head of the SACP, and she continues to signify autonomous, non-nationalist, antiracist, antisexist Marxist political thought in Africa today. Jim’s citations to First and to the Freedom Charter, the liberation struggle’s Magna Carta, were complex, and I cannot do justice to unpacking this rhetorical balancing act. I use this event to make a simple but vital point for this special issue: that postcolonial Marxisms are alive and well, as borne out in the praxis of these activist intellectuals. Indeed, they stand in for a broader world of circulation in which Marxism remains inseparable from a critique of the legacies of colonialism including authoritarianism and state-sanctioned racism.

With these broader circuits of struggle in mind, I turn to Stuart Hall’s body of work as one necessary synthesis of Marxist, postsocialist and postcolonial thought. I will not dissect the vast and discordant family tree that is Marxism, let alone stake the fortunes of this article on one small branch. Indeed, my interest here is in thinking with both postsocialist and postcolonial traditions of critique. As Chari and Verdery (2009) argue, the term ‘postsocialist’ need not mark a retreat from Marxism and its hopes of a socialist alternative to capitalism, but rather a critical position with respect to actually-existing and recent socialisms. Just as ‘postcolonialism’ marks an internal critique of anticolonialisms past, ‘postsocialism’ might be seen as a similar critique of the vanguardism, masculinism, racism, homophobia, and nationalism that has pervaded actually-existing socialist movements inspired by Marxism in the 20th century. This is a particularly important point to make with respect to South Africa, as the end of apartheid coincided with the end of the Soviet socialist alternative. As Chari and Verdery (2009: 22) argue:

In the same brief period – 1990 and 1991 – in which Gorbachev became the first and last President of the Soviet Union, stripping the CPSU of considerable power and launching revolts from within the party into the streets of Moscow, South Africa’s white-supremacist National Party lifted the ban on the ANC and SACP, released Nelson Mandela, and negotiated Apartheid’s end. Simultaneously, the US government transformed its view of the ANC and began to treat it as a legitimate political entity rather than a terrorist organization.

Whatever we make of these political exigencies 25 years later, it is clear that the end of the Soviet Union did not mean the end of either Marxism or socialist politics.

Indeed, the aftermath of 1990–1 helps clarify the challenge of a postsocialist-postcolonial perspective exemplified by the praxis of Ruth First and NUMSA’s turn to re-education. ‘What’s left of the debate’, as the editors ask of this special issue, is much more than a battle between Marxism and postcolonialism as compartmentalized scholarly fields. Rather, the conceptual challenge for postcolonial Marxism lies in thinking with both postsocialist and postcolonial tools to imagine futures beyond capitalism, colonialism, and racism in its multiple forms. In other words, I make the case for thinking of postcolonialism and postsocialism as similar and intertwined politico-epistemic projects. For both, the task at hand does not quite depend on defensive readings of chapter and verse of anti-colonial or Marxist texts, but rather of the use of these analytics, with relentless critique of their limitations, to think beyond the colonial and capitalist present. I read Stuart Hall’s life’s work as fundamentally committed to this project. However, Hall was never a self-described ‘postsocialist’ or ‘postcolonial’ thinker; he is rarely seen as canonical in postcolonial studies, nor was he a self-identified ‘Black Marxist’ or member of the ‘Black Radical Tradition’. While not ‘of’ these schools, his work is legible precisely at their intersection. I have found thinking with various ‘moments’ in his work (moments in conjuncture rather than in sequence) absolutely vital for understanding past and present South Africa. In this sense, Hall is not just a cipher of my expectations, but rather an opportunity for a more relentlessly profane reading of his work, to stretch it in new and unexpected ways. ³

What does it mean, then, to read Hall from South Africa, in relation to South Africa, and with South Africa in mind? What would it mean to think Hall’s work and South Africa’s changing predicament dialectically, through Hall’s conception of dialectics? I engage these questions by thinking with three moments in Hall’s work and by drawing on research I have been doing on the Indian Ocean city of Durban for a book project called Apartheid Remains. Briefly, this research attends to the ways in which the remains of various moments of the past persist as limits to struggle today, as witnessed by neighbors of oil refineries in Durban. I have been tracing the past and present struggles of people in the South Durban Industrial Basin, which traps pollution and foists the burden of ill-health on particular racialized populations of ‘Indians’ and ‘Coloureds’, many of whom took on the political category Black in the 1970s. The analytic of ‘remains’ helps me sort through the material infrastructure of racial capitalism forged at various moments, and also what remains of various currents of anti-apartheid politics today.

In this larger project, which I can only refer to in this paper, I think with Walter Benjamin, CLR James, Antonio Gramsci, Stuart Hall, Ruth Wilson Gilmore and others to engage the ways in which people living within the ruins of racial segregation in a toxic industrial valley have found ways to refuse their social and spatial subjection, not least in the revolutionary 1970s and 1980s when Durban became a laboratory for a variety of political futures. ⁴ Hall is an important cipher of these thinkers precisely because he brings together Benjamin, Gramsci and James, and has inspired thinkers in the Black Radical Tradition like Gilmore. This paper focuses on Hall’s work with some reflections from my research from one corner of South Africa’s turbulent 20th-century history, through a postcolonial-postsocialist politico-epistemic perspective.

Indeed, a truism that circulates in particular in the ‘global’ (Anglo-American) left is that contemporary South Africa represents an outcome of an ‘elite pact’, a putsch in which a grassroots struggle was hijacked by opportunistic forces from on high. As the South African President continues to defend his right to loot the public coffers for home improvement, there is certainly an outline of truth to this formulation, but it does not do justice to the range of forms of praxis that forms a movement for regime change, if not quite revolution, and how we are to understand those left in its wake. ⁵ From a feminist, antiracist and Marxist perspective, that is with an eye to actual struggles on the ground, the notion of a putsch does not explain the changing contours of struggle, or the stakes that many have made in attempting to alter the course of change.

When I started writing Apartheid Remains, I expected to write something that showed how the subjects of a regime of biopolitical territoriality had found ways to refuse the unjust racial geographies of segregation and apartheid, like the injustice of residence right up against oil refineries. In other words, I imagined writing a book inspired by CLR James’s (2001 [1938]) Black Jacobins. I imagined how James might critique the concept of ‘biopolitics’ by showing how biopolitical expertise used to build racial segregation was repurposed by rank-and-file activists towards revolutionary ends, particularly with the vanguardist liberation movement leadership banned, jailed and exiled. The Hegelianism that permeates James’s dialectical method in this text is powerful and in important ways true, but as he began to see, it was also woefully inadequate. Part of what I draw from Hall and his associates in this paper are ways of rethinking Marxist dialectics in the shadow of Hegelian hopes, and also more specifically by thinking beyond the limits of progressive experts, including academics, in accounting for the damaged present. ⁶

The three key moments in Hall’s work I draw on in recasting his postcolonial Marxism in relation to South Africa are, first, his foundational essay for the apartheid predicament, ‘Race, Articulation and Societies Structured in Dominance’, which attends specifically to South Africa’s hegemonic formation in the transition to apartheid; second, the collectively written Policing the Crisis and particularly its remarkable conclusion, which speaks to the criminalization of poor people’s struggles in various places; and, third, his thoughts on what he calls ‘the end of innocence’ with respect to a coalitional Black politics. I conclude with the question of how a postcolonial Marxism might draw from what Paul Gilroy (1993) calls the radical cultural and political traditions of the Black Atlantic or what Cedric Robinson (2000 [1983]) calls the Black Radical Tradition, in relation to the dormant and emergent cultural-political formations of the Indian Ocean world. Durban, poised between oceanic epistemes, provides an ideal site from which to contemplate the possible postcolonial Marxisms of the future.

I hope to show how thinking with these three very different moments in Hall’s work provides necessary lessons for South African society as well as for many other situations structured by changing forms of state-racism, colonialism and capitalist social domination: that is, to most places. I also read Hall through attention to the dialectics of space and time, considered as David Harvey (2008) suggests, as separable spaces and times, in hyphenation space-times of routine circuits or practices, and as collapsed spacetimes which hold the possibility of breaking with fatal repetitions of racial space. This last point is central to the normative project of articulating post-apartheid scholarly, artistic and political praxis, which is to say that it makes a postsocialist-postcolonial project necessary everywhere.

I also take from Hall (2006: 3) the notion of ‘moments’ in a dialectical spatio-temporal configuration precisely not as singular unities moving through teleological forces, but rather as a product of ‘thinking conjuncturally [by] “clustering” or assembling elements into a formation’. Hall argues that the determination of dialectical moments in this sense can be consistent with the genealogical work of the writer, curator, artist, or political activist, and that it requires a particular acuity to grasp and convey a contradictory socio-cultural configuration. As Hall (2006: 3) puts it:

By ‘moment’ then, I mean the coming together or convergence of certain elements to constitute, for a time, a distinct discursive formation, a ‘conjuncture,’ in a Gramscian sense. This is always ‘a fusion of contradictory forces;’ or as Althusser once put it, a ‘condensation of dissimilar currents, their ruptural fusion of an accumulation of contradictions’ whose ‘unity’ is necessarily over-determined.

What, then, are the moments in Hall’s thought that speak in particular ways to South Africa’s recent past, and how does thinking of Hall’s thought in dialectical relation to South Africa, and specifically to a particular set of neighborhoods next to oil refineries in South Durban, illuminate something for a broader and conjoined postcolonial-postsocialist project?

Moment 1: The Problem of Articulation

Hall (1980) played a vital historical role within anti-apartheid critique by reinterpreting the ‘articulation’ of racism and capitalism as foundational to apartheid. I will argue that reading this text today requires more than asking just how post-apartheid racism articulates with a type of capitalism that consigns a large share of the population to ‘wageless life’ (Denning, 2010). In brief, Hall (1980: 306–7) begins by juxtaposing what he calls economic as opposed to sociological critiques of ‘racially-structured social formations’, and he very quickly reads this debate as symptomatic of broader and dualized debates of the time between political economic and socio-cultural forms of explanation. Hall (1980: 308) suggests that South Africa is a ‘“limit case” in the theoretical sense and a “test case” in the political sense’, a place in which both racism and capitalism were undeniably central to the dominant mode of production.

Hall was in conversation with South African exiles living and circulating through Muswell Hill and other parts of North London, among whom was a key intellectual of the South African Communist Party. Harold Wolpe was of the generation of South African activists tried and jailed in the Rivonia Trial, and he had been part of a spectacular jail escape before becoming an exiled intellectual. In a seminal essay, Wolpe (1972) poses apartheid as a social, and we might add spatial, formation that attempted to enforce what was enabled through the migrant labor system in an earlier period: the steady provision of cheap labor for the mines and capitalist farms. The political economy of the early 20th-century migrant labor system depended upon the ability of kin of male migrant laborers to subsidize the mines, enabling them to pay miners the bare minimum for survival. This social remittance structure essentially collapsed along with the ability of families of miners to eke out a living on marginal lands to which they had been consigned through a series of processes of dispossession. When this pervasive system of subsidy to the migrant wage collapsed, Wolpe (1972) argues that the state stepped in to forge a legislated form of segregation, and thus was born ‘apartheid’. The political significance of this for this SACP intellectual was that the critique of capitalism was inseparable from anti-apartheid politics, and that a post-apartheid future would have to also be premised on a Marxist critique of capital as embodied in the Party. This is not to say that Wolpe merely towed the line; in fact, as Hart (2007) argues, he was critical of the notion of internal colonialism in the official ideology of the ANC-SACP alliance, and, like Ruth First, he appears to have become increasingly critical of it in the 1980s. ⁷

This is the socio-political ‘moment’ that Hall intervenes in, and one can think of various analogous projects across late 20th-century social formations shaped by the Cold War and the late Soviet imperium. Hall (1980) poses Wolpe’s argument above in counterpoint to John Rex’s ‘sociological’ critique of apartheid South Africa, which distinguishes a ‘classical Marxism’ which presumes free labor and the economic rationality of markets from what he poses as the distortions of colonial societies. Refusing this Eurocentric presumption of an ideal (English) capitalism held up against colonial distortions, Hall (1980: 325) reads Wolpe (1972) as posing apartheid as a problem of articulation, ‘in Althusser’s cryptic phrase “a complex unity structured in dominance”’. Hall (1980: 328) pushes through this ‘cryptic phrase’ to consider various ways of attending to articulation as both ‘joining up’ and ‘giving expression to’. The precise relation between these two aspects of articulation is central to Hall’s understanding of ‘post-Colonial or post-conquest societies’, where a multiplicity of modes of production persist, of course unequally. What Hall accomplishes is a non-Eurocentric understanding of capitalism that does not distinguish ‘distortions’ from an English ideal, but rather shows how all capitalisms articulate differently through multiplicity and inequality. This line of thought leads him to Gramsci’s ‘rigorously non-reductionist Marxism’ as essential to the fundamental multiplicity of postcolonial capitalist societies (1980: 331).

As he turns this analytic back towards South Africa, Hall (1980: 337–8) argues that ‘one cannot understand racism in abstraction from other social relations’ but ‘one cannot understand it by reducing it to those relations’ either; rather,

one must start … from the concrete historical ‘work’ which racism accomplishes under specific historical conditions – as a set of economic, political and ideological practices in a social formation … In short, they are practices that secure the hegemony of a dominant group over a series of subordinate ones, in such a way as to dominate the whole social formation in a form favourable to the long-term development of the economic productive base.

There are three things I would like to call attention to in this Gramscian turn in Hall’s argument. The first is his attention to lived experience, and in the articulations of racism in particular, to his formulation of race as ‘the modality in which class is “lived,” the medium through which class relations are experienced, the form in which it is appropriated and “fought through”’ (p. 341). ⁸ What this meant for Wolpe, at this point at odds with the Communist Party, was precisely the importance of translating between Marxism and languages of various social classes as another aspect of the problem of articulation. ⁹ The question of translation was key to the social research that Ruth First championed, and which led her to near expulsion from the Party, prevented by Joe Slovo. At this moment in his work, Hall does not follow through with taking questions of common sense, language or translation seriously, perhaps because he never actually set foot in apartheid South Africa, but this concern returns in what I pose as the second moment in his thought, with particular importance to the question not just of the formation of apartheid but for the re-articulation of racism and capitalism after its formal end.

The second thing I draw from Hall (1980) is something he does not explore except metaphorically when he poses racism as a ‘cementing ideology’, which is that he makes nothing of the massive investment in the built environment of apartheid. Cementing, indeed: apartheid was also a massive investment in the production of space. I draw this insight from the exceptionally insightful doctoral dissertation of Andrea Gibbons, who shows through a geographical reading of Hall’s argument how changing social and spatial articulations of white privilege and real-estate capital in Los Angeles produce contemporary spatial forms read as neoliberal rather than as built on systematic Black exclusion and struggle (Gibbons, 2014). Indeed, if the spatial was too obvious to bring into the domain of analysis of the articulation of apartheid, spatial re-articulations after apartheid take us to the endless replication of spatial archetypes in a global frame, of prisons, malls, airports, Business Improvement Districts and new towns that connect the new South Africa to similar formations elsewhere.

Third, despite his insightful reworking of Wolpe, Hall (1980) could look at the mid-century transition from segregation to apartheid in South Africa without bringing the question of transition itself into the realm of critique. In other words, both thinkers presume that ‘apartheid’ named a transition in processes of rural and urban segregation between defined periods, within a set of wider processes of social change. This notion of transition between clearly defined periods is harder to grasp, just as the notion of ‘post-apartheid’ appears less as a fact than a problem, a claim to transcendence that contradicts continuities in privilege and deprivation, as our student movement has powerfully argued in the Rhodes Must Fall movement as well as, more recently, in its re-articulation as Fees Must Fall (Rhodes Must Fall Writing and Education Subcommittees, 2015).

The task we face in and on South Africa today is to think about the question of the re-articulation of this particular ‘society structured in dominance’ in both spatial and temporal terms, so as to arrive at a differentiated understanding of capacities for life in relation to the visceral, material and spatial presence of the racial past. In various ways, circuiting through the genealogical is necessary for conceptualizing Hall’s question of the changing articulation of racism and capitalism in our time, particularly with an attentiveness to emergent forms of life after apartheid. ¹⁰ In my research on neighborhoods adjacent to oil refineries in Durban, this has meant engaging the limits to progressive change in relation to processes of ruination emerging from various pasts that continue to structure the terrain of the possible. In this formulation, it is impossible to engage the articulation of elements of the social formation without attention to the remains of multiple pasts. Indeed, the Althusserian tradition suffers from a sedentary and territorial metaphysics that is fundamentally challenged by such a notion of ruination. Ruination as a process calls attention to that which the concept of articulation has not typically attended to, the slow decay and protracted violence that is often as hard to pin down as it is to name, to paraphrase Stoler (2013). The undoing of apartheid’s articulations is itself a slow process that we are only beginning to come to understand in material and representational terms. Hall’s (1985) response to the widespread turn to poststructuralism is important here, as he cautions the turn to discourse for its neglect of ideology and of determination, both central to his essay on articulation. Any analysis of the re-articulation of racism and capitalism after apartheid neglects this critique to its detriment.

Moment 2: From Crime Fear to the Cultural Politics of Hustling

In turning to the second moment I draw from Hall’s thought, I gesture to two prolonged public spectacles that besieged South Africa in the recent past. On the one hand, the protracted trial of celebrity Para-Olympian Oscar Pistorius made an international spectacle of his fear of crime. Whatever one makes of the legal twists and turns in the case and its outcome, one of the ideological underpinnings remains the idea that a bourgeois resident in a secured housing complex has the right to kill a hypothetical Black male intruder. The Pistorius trial articulates a strange brew of white privilege, crime fear, class power, steroidal masculinity, domestic violence, and the political economy of justice in the new South Africa. On the other hand, a second spectacle centers on why and how over R246 million in public funds were sanctioned and spent on ‘security upgrades’ to President Jacob Zuma’s rural homestead in Nkandla, and how he has managed to evade charges from the courageous Public Protector, Thuli Madonsela. ‘Nkandlagate’ concretizes the way in which the powerful legacies of the anti-apartheid movement centered on the ANC have been hijacked by a political elite more concerned with accumulation and conspicuous consumption than with anything that resembles Black Liberation.

The rise of the security industry in parallel with the transformation of the ANC accumulation machine as a path to mobility for an aspiring Black middle class are central to hegemony today. Gillian Hart (2013) has argued that the re-articulation of hegemony has been enabled also by what she calls the de-nationalization of capital liberated from the boundaries of national territory after apartheid, and the re-nationalization of political forces seeking to reconstitute a territorial hegemonic project. Whichever way this project shifts, Hart (2013) argues, this is clearly a hegemonic formation in crisis, and we have seen the lengths the political elite will go to in ‘policing the crisis’, particularly in the massacre of mineworkers at Marikana in 2012. The emergence of diverse critiques of the ANC-led political alliance, from the Economic Freedom Fighters to NUMSA leading the formation of a left alliance called United Front, to the vibrant alliance of students and precarious workers across South African universities, point to varieties of ways in which South African society might change over the next few decades. However, despite the ANC leadership’s occasional rhetoric of shifting to the ‘China Model’ of massive infrastructural development, the question remains whether the political economy of South Africa is still rooted in what Fine and Rustomjee (1996) call the ‘minerals industrial complex’, and whether the ‘limits to change’ analyzed powerfully in Marais (1998, 2011) have shifted in any foundational sense. A large share of the population experiences prolonged crisis through a combination of widespread unemployment, shack eviction, mounting consumer debt, ongoing violence against women, everyday racism and sporadic attack against foreigners. As this paper goes to publication, student-led struggles in the Fees Must Fall movement continue to link the fight against unsustainable fee increases to free education, insourcing of university workers, and decolonization of curricula in an actually post-apartheid university of the future.

The political sociology of South Africa’s contemporary crisis speaks to a second moment in Hall’s work, culminating in Hall et al. (1978), the magisterial Policing the Crisis written with Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke and Brian Roberts. This text exemplifies what later scholars call global ethnography, thinking across space and scale about racialized class fear and loathing within a nested set of crises of the global economy, of British society and of particular areas in British cities. Beginning with a critique of the media circulation of hype about ‘the mugger’, then a recent import to England from the United States, the narrative turns to the political economy and politics of crisis, and to the ways in which these dynamics play out in specifically racialized neighborhoods, from Handsworth in Birmingham to Southall and Brixton in London. In other words, the analysis of the articulation of crisis takes Hall et al. (1978: 338) to an argument about what they call ‘the “localizing” of the problem’ of mugging as a specific socio-spatial articulation of Black bodies and urban spaces as sites of convergence of processes of alienation, wagelessness, and vulnerability in the face of austerity.

There are traces of what I call Hall’s first moment in the way in which Hall et al. (1978: 339) locates ‘where the costs of crisis management are borne’ and therefore ‘have to be policed’. Yet, the text quickly turns this into a point of departure to ask how Black youth participate in their production as unskilled and increasingly vulnerable workers, following Paul Willis’s (1981 [1977]) work on youth cultures of resistance as moments in a hegemonic process. Hall et al. (1978: 343) also argue that Black labor inhabits a temporality not unlike the migrant workers of John Berger and Jean Mohr’s (2010 [1975]) portrayal of migrant workers in Europe, and that racism enables the use of Black workers ‘as a fluid and endlessly “variable” factor in British industry’. Hall et al. (1978: 345) argue that the convergence of crisis on Black youth forces them out of decent accommodation, to homelessness and ‘sleeping rough’. In echoes of Hall (1980), Hall et al. (1978: 347) argue that race is the ‘modality’ through which Black youth experience their exploitation, exclusion, and subordination.

The text then takes a surprising turn, as the diagnosis of crisis turns into a reading of ‘hustling’ as it has emerged in the ‘colonies’ of Black Britain. The authors argue that violent forms of ‘mugging’ are a small part of this wider praxis which has become pervasive in Black social and cultural life. While conventional Marxists ignore this kind of activity as easily as Marx himself wrote off the lumpenproletariat, they argue in parallel with Marxist feminist critiques of the analytical neglect of reproductive work in Marxist theory that these forms of praxis have become more important under conditions of austerity. Moreover, they argue, such forms of praxis ought to be seen in parallel with the kinds of criminalized activity that anthropologist Keith Hart had found in the urban interstices of Accra, Ghana, to lead him to coin the term ‘informal’, and that political inclinations of these classes might be legible through what we might now call the postcolonial Marxism of Frantz Fanon and Amilcar Cabral. However, for their key insight, the authors turn to attempts within the Black Panther Party in the USA to turn ‘hustling’ into a site for revolutionary politics, as personified in the lives of George Jackson, Malcolm X and many other militants transgressing the boundaries of crime and politics.

The text carefully recognizes the repression of the Black Panthers, and the ‘failure’ in Britain of the forces that might have radically re-articulated the nascent politics of ‘hustling’ into something like a sustainable movement against racism and capitalism. While ‘the mugger’ might point to something like a strike, in other words, it can only be effective politically in the long term through the formation of what Gramsci calls a critical and collective political will, and this is the political project that Hall et al. (1978) point to.

Reading Hall et al. (1978) back through the multiple strands of anti-apartheid Durban in the revolutionary 1970s and 1980s, it is remarkable how presciently the analysis travels. I can only sketch my argument about the multiple moments of struggle in Durban in this period. In brief, I dissect the complexity of struggle in Durban in this period into four moments, in Hall’s sense. The first, I call a ‘politico-theological moment’ in which worker struggles emerging from the port and spreading across the industrial city connected with currents of Black Theology, New Left Marxism, student activism, the Black Consciousness Movement centered on the charismatic Steve Biko, and a radicalization of the Natal Indian Congress founded by M.K. Gandhi early in the century. Second, an ‘insurrectionist moment’ fuelled by a wider romance of guerrilla warfare slowly met its militarist end in the face of various fronts of counterinsurgency and also in relation to its deep internal gendered and raced contradictions. Third, an attempt to bridge the first two moments in what I call the ‘moment of urban revolution’ afforded a vanguard group the opportunity to connect a groundswell of urban civic, housing, and labor struggles to the underground and exiled movement, providing a platform for the exiled ANC and SACP to imagine a return to the country as a hegemonic force. Through a complicated process of ‘negotiated settlement’ with the apartheid state, the third moment has been transformed into the current hegemonic formation which I suggest conjoins the ANC accumulation machine with the security industry, linking Oscar Pistorius and Jacob Zuma as strange bedfellows.

Fourth and finally, what I call the ‘moment of the disqualified’ turns to outlaw cultures that were, and remain, too undisciplined to be ‘organized’ by the vanguardists. When they sought to take matters into their own hands in various ways, as a group from South Durban did in a notorious car bombing of a beachfront café, the incident brought infamy to a group who could never fully transition from terrorists to struggle heroes, or to resolve the boundary between crime and politics. This is where the concluding section of Hall et al. (1978) speaks so powerfully to the lives of those racialized subjects whose praxis remains just beyond the boundary of a proper politics. ¹¹

If these were the forgotten lives of people damaged by racial capitalism, whose forms of political agency did not make the canonical histories of anti-apartheid activism, they find strange echoes in the uncertain decades after apartheid. Indeed, several parallel questions concerning populations disqualified from dominant forms of left politics who strike in other ways and whose forms of protest, whether in the so-called ‘service delivery protests’ that have peppered the past decade or in the new militant student movement calling for ‘decolonization’ across our universities, remain at some odds with mainstream politics. In South Durban, I try to make sense of particularly visual forms of Black cultural production for what Clyde Woods (1998) calls their ‘blues epistemology’ or their ironic, sentimental and, for those who can hear them, sharply critical forms of political imagination. Lewis Gordon (2014: 17) writes with poetic insight about the modernity of the blues:

[T]he blues emerged when these worlds, African and European, converged in the new world in conditions of misery whose reverberations echo to the present. This adds a dimension, perhaps psychoanalytical, to the European premise of drunken after effect: the high of modern exploitation and profit wreaked the low of the morning hangover; reality always has its price.

The morning hangover is the aftermath of apartheid, when the wagers have been made and the casualties counted. The blues are a melancholic return to the promise of Atlantic Blackness as a site of political renewal. But how does this act of political faith work alongside the long commodification of ‘American’ and trans-Atlantic Blackness, with its laced desires and latent violence? These questions of power and representation take us to a third line of thought from Hall.

Moment 3: The Futures of Political Blackness in the Prolonged War of Position

This third line of thought comes from Hall’s (1996) essay, ‘New Ethnicities’, the debate he was in with Salman Rushdie and others over a set of films rooted in the cultural politics of Black Britain, such as Handsworth Songs and Hanif Kureishi’s My Beautiful Laundrette. Hall (1996: 165) is concerned primarily with a shift in Black British cultural politics from struggles over the ‘relations of representation’ – the imperative to undo racial stereotypes in British film and to make possible the emergence of Black filmmakers like Horace Ové, who sought to change the script – to ‘a politics of representation itself’, where ‘regimes of representation’ play ‘a formative, and not merely an expressive, place in the constitution of social and political life’.

I read this shift as a third moment in Hall’s work that takes more seriously the interplay of aesthetics and politics, and that shifts far beyond ascribed stereotypes like ‘the mugger’ to call the affirmative hope of coalitional Black subjectivity itself into question. Indeed, Hall (1996) fundamentally questions the coalitional Black political subject that was and remains key to a generation of activists across the slowly transforming white supremacies of Britain, the USA and South Africa, including many associated with the Black Panther Party or shaped by Black community and labor movements in Britain and South Africa in the 1970s and 1980s. My capitalization of Black in this essay offers a distanced affinity with the actual victories and potentials of these currents, but it opens up a broader question of whether an actually post-racial and post-capitalist humanity to come must necessarily circuit through the Black radical imagination.

Hall (1996: 165–6) takes a somewhat different tack in attending to this question by arguing that the 1990s mark ‘what I can only call “the end of innocence” or the end of the innocent notion of the essential black subject’. He poses this as a necessary moment of recognition of the undeniable diversity of histories of oppression and forms of expression that the category Black sought to unify, and also to question the terms of unification through a particular kind of Black masculine subject. As Black women and queers have long argued, the wager of this unity has been epistemic and social violence that cannot be sustained. Indeed, these questions may have been latent in the excavation of the cultural politics of ‘hustling’ in Hall et al. (1978), but even in the wake of the repression of Black Power in the USA, the analysis was still rooted powerfully in its promise.

What might replace these ultimately false hopes, Hall (1996) suggests, is a notion of ethnicity de-coupled from race and nation and re-valued for its attention to difference, to the emergent, and to the diasporic. This is where Hall suggests that Kureishi’s My Beautiful Laundrette is daring in dismantling all manner of shibboleths, presenting British society as it is actually shaped by racism, sexism, and homophobia, which is also productive of the possibility of inter-racial, queer love and solidarity through struggles that are both material and representational. If the narrative in Laundrette represents hope at the personal level, however, the film refuses to project Black cultural production that answers the political question that Hall et al. (1978) ask: is this a cultural-political project adequate to the needs of the damaged many? This is where perhaps Hall (1996) does not see the possibility that the protagonists are men who can become an entrepreneurial gay couple to survive Thatcherite times.

But we might cast the end of the essential Black subject differently, as Roderick Ferguson does, as the outcome of Black feminist and queer critical and artistic production (Ferguson, 2011: 118). Without the possibility of ‘taking cover’ in either nationalism or diaspora, Ferguson argues that we have no choice but to reconceive the racial, class, gender and sexual articulations of Black migration through what he calls ‘lateral moves’. This suggestive point repeats Ferguson’s (1999: 233) thoughtful reading of ‘the parvenu Baldwin, suffering an impossibility of staying put and the crampedness of segregation, [who] leaves New York to write – to write against the racial and sexual definitions that “tried to put him in his place”.’ What this raises is the self-conscious necessity for what Barnor Hesse (2000b: 16) calls ‘transruption’ or the systematic and precise exposure of historical antagonisms and inequalities repressed by dominant discourses. Hesse is concerned in particular with the repression and disavowal of the modernity of African diasporic cultural and intellectual production (Hesse, 2000a: 118). But as he revisits this theme in his later work, Hesse (2011: 58) conceptualizes Black politics as ‘the symptom of creolization repressed in the modern institution and representation of the political’ or, more precisely, I would add, the political-economic. I return to these themes in my conclusion, along with the question of what it means for a postcolonial-postsocialist imagination to circuit through the Black Radical Tradition.

The third moment in Hall’s thinking speaks very directly to the contradictory realities faced by people in South Durban, and in many parts of South Africa. Most people resident in the neighborhoods surrounded by oil refineries that I research self-identify as Indian or Coloured, not Black, despite the fact that Steve Biko lived in this area when he and others formed what would be called the Black Consciousness Movement. The idea of ‘Black Consciousness’ rested on ‘conscientized’ people refusing racial classifications such as ‘Indian’ and ‘Coloured’ for a unified political conception of Blackness. On the face of it, ‘conscientization’ into political Blackness was not quite a success, as these neighborhoods today wrestle with race and ethnicity in ways that seem easily, and incorrectly, identifiable as racist. These neighbors of oil refineries and other polluting industries, who know the lethal costs of long term ill-health in this unjust patchwork landscape of industry and residence, also refuse to be moved from their proximity to the city center and to industrial employment. They often use the metaphor of apartheid’s forced removals to refuse a replay of the past, but they also know all too well that if they agree to relocation they will not inherit the beautiful bourgeois (formerly) white city but will be shipped out into the periphery, with the majority of other Black people. The fear of losing access to urban amenities close to the city center is also wrapped up with the possibilities of re-racialization in ways that could harden their experience of social domination. This is a précis of some of the dynamics that produce a particular kind of racial fear rather than affirmation of political Blackness.

If this is a cautionary tale about presuming political subjectivity, it is also a call to think more carefully about new articulations of race, space, and bodies, not as an act of rescue but because, as Katherine McKittrick (2006: xii, xvi) puts it, ‘Black matters are spatial matters’ and ‘the spatialization of the racial-sexual black subject … makes visible new, or unacknowledged, strategies of social struggle’. The intellectuals most carefully engaged with the lived dilemmas in these neighborhoods I have studied have been self-identified Black political photographers whose work diagnoses these dilemmas without effacing them, and who record the painful, embodied, often strongly masculinist and public expression of the elusive promise of Black Power (Chari, 2013). What their photography marks is precisely the haunting of the present by the ‘failure’ of Black Liberation, and also the persistent universality of the blues as a Black cultural and philosophical form with the ability to mark widespread struggles for dignity in our time.

Conclusion: Black Atlantic Legacies, Indian Ocean Futures

This special issue has sought to think beyond what are often sterile debates about Marxism as separable from and in opposition to postcolonial theory, or postcoloniality as separable from Marxism and from its normative hopes of a socialist and humane future. Rehearsed neurotically in the Anglo-American academy, often with the usual suspects reeling out the same cards (the names have been erased to lower their citation count), and with younger, often immigrant, Black, queer, and scholars of color forced to present their positions as if as aspects of their presumed identity. I have dispensed with this kind of morality play to turn to one figure for whom Marxism and postcoloniality have been intertwined in practice. Indeed, Stuart Hall is interesting precisely because he offers few consolations on the basis of a fetish of ‘identity’. For much of his career he identified more as an Althusserian and rarely, if ever, as a ‘Black Marxist’. Rather than thinking of stages in his work, or the way in which his biography intersects with his changing imagination, my reading of Hall has been conjunctural and resolutely ‘from elsewhere’, an elsewhere that interested him politically in significant ways, and to which his thought has much yet to offer.

I have sought to draw insights from three moments in Stuart Hall’s work – on articulation, on policing hegemony and its disqualified forms of life, and on emergent politics of representation that might be formative of new idioms of struggle. I return to the question I asked through Hall in the last section: how and in what sense might circuiting through the Black radical imagination bequeathed by Atlantic globalism matter here, now? Certainly, the Black Atlantic as a social and epistemic space has bequeathed a powerful set of political and cultural legacies for anti-colonial and anti-capitalist solidarities. Durban lies symbolically between these powerful legacies and the dormant and emergent formations of the Indian Ocean world. While the Indian Ocean is actually connected through circuits of empire, labor, migration, and cultural and political imagination to the Black Atlantic, it also stands for lost, submerged and painful histories of forced labor, sexual violence, and subaltern Islam that remain difficult to affirm in South Africa (Baderoon, 2014). Oceans are powerful spaces of articulation and disarticulation that call attention to fast-moving circuits as well as to the stranded, shoaled or marooned; to the fleeting, floating and emergent as well as to the submerged and drowned. Oceans are also vast scholarly domains, and to bring them up here might confound the hopes of a conclusion. The emergent dynamics of the Indian Ocean with its strange brew of American, Chinese and Indian imperial power, resource extraction, piracy, Islam and oceanic creolization, point to a multiplication of futures that will only be explicable through more creative renovation of our intellectual tools and creative faculties. In other words, this is work yet to be done. And we should expect this creative work to bend the Black Radical Tradition in new ways, to forge solidarities of the future with names we cannot yet know.

Not least, the Indian Ocean points to new ways in which South Africa after apartheid connects to the wider world to both rework the past and point to the new. This emergent episteme reminds us that the tools of a postsocialist-postcolonial perspective need not be backward looking, endlessly ruing the end of state socialism, or of anticolonial or anti-apartheid movements past. Rather, the Indian Ocean calls for a postsocialist-postcolonialism that relentlessly uses the critique of actually existing Marxisms, socialisms and anticolonialisms, to the ‘end of innocence’ with respect to all the actually masculinist and power-hungry moments in these projects, to make space for ever new forms of critique of capital and imperial power. All signs are that the Indian Ocean is the space in which such a postsocialist-postcolonial clearing of the imagination is not just possible but necessary. And we will find Stuart Hall again in these uncharted waters.