Text of an address at the memorial for Stuart Hall, London, 2014. It reflects briefly on Hall's relation to Jamaica.
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David Scott teaches in the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University. He is the author, most recently, of Omens of Adversity: Tragedy, Time, Memory, Justice(2014) and is now completing a book titled “Stuart Hall's Voice: An Ethics of Receptive Generosity,” based on lectures given at the University of the Western Cape in 2013.
This essay engages the broad question of the relation between the French Enlightenment and colonial racial slavery by exploring the literature of planters and slavetraders in the French Caribbean and showing how the ideals of French Enlightenment philosophy were not always framed as antithetical to practices of black enslavement. Abolitionists such as Condorcet, Brissot, and Grégoire may have considered themselves the inheritors of the Age of Reason. In the eyes of slave apologists, however, they were radicals who were trying to put into practice the impracticable, subversive thinkers who were betraying the intentions of Rousseau, Montesquieu, and the other great philosophes of the eighteenth century.
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Fayçal Falakyis an associate professor of French at Tulane University, where he specializes in eighteenth-century French literature, culture, and politics. He has published articles in journals such as Forum for Modern Language Studies, Journal of Eighteenth-Century Studies, and European Journal of Political Theory. He is the author of Social Contract, Masochist Contract: Aesthetics of Freedom and Submission in Rousseau (2014).
In the early 1990s, chaos theory captured the imagination of Caribbean writers by offering a new approach to interpreting scientific data. In its analysis of Edouard Glissant's Poétique de la Relation alongside Antonio Benítez-Rojo's introduction to The Repeating Island and essays by Wilson Harris, this essay proposes that Caribbean thinkers are drawn to chaos theory because it articulates how they already envision and describe the complexity of Caribbean cultures. For these three thinkers, chaos theory makes possible a radical rereading of the diminutives of Caribbean space and offers them a methodology for destabilizing the world's (post)colonial orders.
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Jeannine Murray-Román is a visiting assistant professor of French at Reed College. Her fields of interest include francophone, Latin American, and performance studies. Her first book manuscript, “Corporeal Epistemologies: Performance in Contemporary Caribbean Literature,” is currently under review with the University of Virginia Press.
Part of the larger book project “Empire, Nation, Diaspora: Cape Town and Constituting a Black Archive,” this essay explores two Caribbean intellectuals, Eric Walrond and Henry Sylvester Williams, who included the South African Cape in their mappings of the Caribbean in the short story collection Tropic Death and the pamphlet The British Negro, respectively. The essay demonstrates how and why South Africa proved significant to an emergent radical consciousness in the Caribbean and the vicissitudes of turning to south(ern), not only West, Africa to think through Africa as a conceptual frame in Caribbean theory and literature. This essay pushes for a New World African diasporic rethinking of Cape Town as an alternative city-space within such imaginaries—alternative to that for which Harlem has become metonymic: the New Negro and the Renaissance in black literary and cultural production of the 1920s and 1930s.
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Victoria J. Collis-Buthelezi is a lecturer in English at the University of Cape Town. She cofounded the Diaspora Working Group, a research platform for scholars of African diaspora studies from the Southern Hemisphere. Her book project, “Empire, Nation, Diaspora: Cape Town and Constituting a Black Archive,” asks us to refigure the “black archive” through discarded imagined futures, one of which centers around Cape Town and the British Empire.
In 1968, Nicolás Guillén Landrián, Afro-Cuban filmmaker and nephew of poet Nicolás Guillén, was commissioned by the Cuban Film Institute to make a didactic documentary on the Havana Greenbelt agricultural campaign. Instead, Guillén Landrián used this film, Coffea arábiga, to argue that the exploitation of black labor from Cuba's colonial legacy was perpetuated under the revolutionary state's agricultural policies. Through appropriating a highly politicized filmic aesthetic used by the Castro government to critique racial discrimination abroad, Coffea arábiga ironizes the Cuban Revolution's racial politics, speaking brazenly into a period that produced a general textual silence on post-1959 racial inequalities and providing an enduring Afro-Cuban counterargument to Cuba's myth of racial democracy.
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Anne Garland Mahler is an assistant professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and affiliated faculty in Africana studies and Latin American studies at the University of Arizona. Her research interests include global South studies, critical race theory, Cold War politics, and Afro-Caribbean and Afro-Latino cultural studies. Her previous work has appeared in journals such as Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies and Latin American Research Review and in the volume US Latino/a Writing(2013), edited by A. Robert Lee.
Contrary to the view that Stuart Hall's involvement in the visual arts was a supplement to his work in cultural studies and political analysis, this reflection addresses key continuities that connect his 1970s writings on racism and the media with the enlivening impact that the hybrid aesthetics put forward by black British artists, photographers, and filmmakers from the 1980s onward had on Hall's theoretically distinctive approach to diasporic questions of identity and ethnicity.
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Kobena Mercer is a professor in history of art and African-American studies at Yale University. He teaches modern and contemporary art in the black Atlantic diaspora and is an inaugural recipient of the 2006 Clark Prize for Excellence in Arts Writing. His recent publications include “Art History after Globalization,” in Colonial Modern: Aesthetics of the Past, Rebellions of the Future (2010); “The Cross-Cultural and the Contemporary,” in Twenty-First Century: Art of the First Decade (2011); and “Art History and the Dialogics of Diaspora,” in Small Axe (2012).
This tribute assesses the importance of Stuart Hall's work both personally, for the author, and in relation to a broader scholarly conversation about blackness that shapes the latter half of the twentieth century and spans the United States, the Caribbean, and the United Kingdom. Themes from this conversation include the roles of black subjects in English and American popular culture, the emergence of a new black aesthetic and poetics, and the centrality of the idea of difference to Hall's late-twentieth-century understanding of black identity and culture. The essay also discusses the significance of Hall's Caribbean origins and diaspora identity for his later intellectual and theoretical work.
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Michelle Stephens is an associate professor in English and Latino and Hispanic Caribbean studies at Rutgers University and the author of Black Empire: The Masculine Global Imaginary of Caribbean Intellectuals in the United States, 1914 to 1962 (2005) and Skin Acts: Race, Psychoanalysis, and the Black Male Performer(2014). She is coediting (with Brian Russell Roberts) a collection of essays titled “Archipelagic American Studies.”
The singular position that Stuart Hall occupied in the intellectual life of the British Left can probably be explained by the nature of the scholarly project that was his, marked by the demand of the present and critical impatience. But beyond Hall's critical stance, this singular capacity that was his to incarnate different phases and options of critique resides in his institutional practice. This essay evokes this particular aspect of Hall's work in order to cast a decentered glance on the French university. Understanding the relation between critique and the university institution in the French context allows us to offer some clues to Hall's difficult reception in this intellectual landscape.
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Maxime Cervelle is a lecturer in media and cultural studies at the University of Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis and researcher at the Centre d'études sur les médias, les technologies et l'internationalisation. He is the author of Dans le blanc des yeux: Diversité, racisme et medias (2013) and the coauthor (with N. Rees-Roberts) of Homo exoticus: Race, classe et critique queer (2010) and (with N. Quemener) Cultural studies: Théories et méthodes (forthcoming).
Stuart Hall's work was known in Brazil before the year 2000, but it was after his visit that year and the 2003 publication of a major collection of his work in Portuguese, Da diáspora, that its impact was strongly felt. After a description of that visit and the general influence of his work, this essay raises some of the difficulties posed to the Brazilian reader by Hall's texts and their deep roots in English-speaking cultures, as well as how his understanding of theory and concepts is sometimes misread. It then presents some of the ways Hall was important to the author's work on Brazilian racial identities and cultural politics. In conclusion, it proposes that Hall was a thinker whose occasionally preacherlike style indicated an openness to his audience and whose writing was structured like music.
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Liv Sovik is a professor of communications at the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro. She holds a doctorate from the Universidade de São Paulo (1994), where she wrote her dissertation on postmodern theory and tropicalismo, the 1960s pop music movement. She is editor of Stuart Hall's Da diáspora: Identidades e mediações culturais (2003) and author of Aqui ninguém é branco (2009), a book on Brazilian racial hierarchies. She is coeditor of a new collection that will include Hall's “The Spectacle of the ‘Other.’”
This essay, in discussion of Citizenship From Below: Erotic Agency and Caribbean Freedom by Mimi Sheller, underscores the need to historicize Caribbean sociocultures as complex ensembles of heterogeneous practices. It lauds efforts to sustain the investigation of the gendered agential capacities of Caribbean working people in their relation with various manifestations of modern cultures of power. The essay questions the liberatory potential of erotic agency or power, arguing for it to be theorized beyond sexually active bodies, particularistic identities and the social and hegemonic landscapes of sexual politics. Erotic agency, it posits, should be situated and historicized in a broader web of social relations, especially given the potentially contradictory effects of its exercise.
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Michaeline A. Crichlow is a historical sociologist in the Departments of African and African American Studies and Sociology at Duke University. She serves as the chief editor of the Sage journal Cultural Dynamics: Insurgent Scholarship on Culture, Politics, and Power. She is currently coediting a special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly on Aimé Césaire and completing a book on governmentalities and development in the Dominican Republic.
This short appreciation of Citizenship from Below: Erotic Agency and Caribbean Freedom by Mimi Sheller—one of the leading theorists of mobility studies and the author of numerous works that have expanded our understanding of transits to and around the Caribbean—emphasizes the theoretical and ethical/political traditions out of which this synthetic work emerges. Here we push gently, yet steadily, toward continuing the process of historicizing and contextualizing the important turn toward “erotics” and “theorizing from below” in Caribbean studies (and in the region) apropos not only Sheller's work but also our responsibility to maintain appropriate and generative critical demeanor relative to the archives and the circulation of previously submerged or deep (bottom) knowledges.
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Jafari S. Allen is an associate professor of African American studies and anthropology and director of graduate studies of the Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at Yale University. He is the author of ¡Venceremos? The Erotics of Black Self-Making in Cuba (2011) and editor of “Black/Queer/Diaspora,” a special issue of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies. He is currently completing a new book, “Black/Queer Here and There: Ethnography of an Idea.”
Poised between violent repetitions of state power and hopes for poststate alternative futures, in our dual role as historical actors and historical narrators, what do we do with the past today, with which past(s) and for whom? This essay asks about the ethical/political stakes in reflecting on where we are speaking from, but also when we are speaking from, as a question of temporality and generational positioning. Caribbean theorists, writers, artists, and activists offer us productive theoretical interrogations of the convergent and divergent crossroads that constitute “now.” Imagining other times and possible futures, juxtaposing temporalities and ways of timekeeping, marking temporal breaks, returns, and ruptures, this work helps us ask, What time is it? Whose time is it?
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Mimi Sheller is a professor of sociology and the founding director of the Center for Mobilities Research and Policy at Drexel University. She is author of Democracy after Slavery: Black Publics and Peasant Radicalism in Haiti and Jamaica (2000), Consuming the Caribbean: From Arawaks to Zombies (2003), Citizenship from Below: Erotic Agency and Caribbean Freedom (2012), and Aluminum Dreams: The Making of Light Modernity (2014). She is also founding coeditor of the journal Mobilities and coeditor of Uprootings/Regroundings: Questions of Home and Migration (2003), Tourism Mobilities: Places to Play, Places in Play (2004), Mobile Technologies of the City (2006), and Mobility and Locative Media: Mobile Communication in Hybrid Spaces(2014).
