The diaspora blues: reading Stuart Hall

What? A blog about Stuart Hall and music? Yes, a little odd, but having just ploughed through Hall's Familiar Stranger: A Life Between Two Islands memoir, there are a couple of music things in it I thought worth sticking in my blog. Yep, I'm sticking them in. Hall, the "godfather of cultural studies", deserves better than this of course - but hey, this a music blog, I'm the blogger (the blog godfather), and I make the rules. To be clear, Hall's enjoyable look-back over his early life in Jamaica, his move to Britain in 1951, his years at Oxford University and his part in founding the mighty New Left Review journal, only fleetingly touches on music. Which is fine. All of the other stuff - especially the latter stages where he's discussing his dealings with EP Thompson (fractious), Raymond Williams (non-fractious) and others - is engaging enough.

Stuart Hall on the mic

But the multi-talented Hall also liked his music. Disaffected with the snobbery and old-world (colonial?) airs of the Oxford dons when he was searching for his own intellectual/behavioural way in the early fifties, he mentions how he "retreated" into playing piano in an amateur jazz band. His bandmates were "a Barbadian bass player and two Jamaicans who worked on the buses".

"On the buses. What a resonant phrase. A whole generation of British people grew up with bus conductors from the Caribbean or India on their local buses. It was a sort of "frontline" in the new race-conscious Britain - the place where white British kids played out their near-habitual racism and - grudgingly - learned to adjust to the new multicultural reality"

Hall's memoir dwells at length on his own - quite tortured - mental adjustments after leaving the colonised "margins" (Kingston) and coming to the place that had dominated/haunted his and so many other Jamaicans' minds. London, the "metropole", the centre, the heart of darkness. It's the troubled passage of the post-colonial diaspora. An easy journey it ... wasn't. And, pleasingly, music was one route through the poisonous, nettle-ridden undergrowth of British life in the 1950s.

The Windrush generation staring British racism directly in the face

Also sport. At one point Hall mentions the notorious Tebbit loyalty test from 1990, where Thatcher's political enforcer tried to undermine the Britishness of people of Asian or Caribbean descent. Hall's rejoinder is excellent. He remembers the West Indian cricket team's famous win in England in 1950, in particular the music-infused celebrations by the Windrush-era crowd:

"The West Indies victory in the 1950s series, on the home territory of cricket, showed that the most English of games could be creolised. The match played in the presence of a noisy crowd of black people was a historic fulfilment, properly a 'jubilee', a real bacchanalia. The march through London which followed, led by the calypsonians, was the first, but not by any means the last, occasion when a Caribbean carnival has taken openly to the London streets. It not only anticipated the annual Notting Hill Carnival, but reminded us of the centuries-long practice of colonial mimicry and masquerade through which slavery has been challenged."

Owzat! Yes, it's always nice when England lose. Hall is such an urbane author (his writing oozes reason, calm, thoughtfulness) that you can almost forget how angry he must have been some of the time and how radical his thinking and attitude actually was. In a throwaway moment, he calls the 1981 race riots "insurrections" (this town, is coming like an insurrectionary town), something I've never heard them called before. Maybe he thought the same of the 2011 riots? Married to a younger white British woman and with two mixed-race children, Hall's life in 1960s Britain must have been awash with racism. His memoir ends in the mid-60s when he's about to leave London and transfer to Richard Hoggart's Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham. But you get a sneak preview of Brummie racism on the second-last page of the book:

"When Catherine and I move to Birmingham ... men would shout abusive remarks in the streets and on the buses, especially obscenities about mixed-race couples, whose polluting nature infuriated them. Passengers in railway compartments and on buses would voice openly racist things ..."

We're back on the buses again - fares please. And, yes, we're approaching my stop and it's also time for me to get off. The Stuart Hall cultural studies bus still has a lot of miles to do but it's been a pleasure to take a short trip on it via Familiar Stranger. Having spent most of my own miserable life living on just one of Hall's two islands, I must confess to a long-held interest in Jamaica, the other pole in his metropole-colony conjuncture. For me, it's got a lot to do with the music (well, it's nearly all about the music). How could you not be interested in Jamaica? - a small island-nation responsible for some of the greatest music the world has ever heard. Ideally, Hall's memoir would have had a whole chapter on this, picking apart reggae as a socio-cultural formation, a music of resistance (though I imagine some of the Birmingham CCCS alumni have done this). Instead, there's this dense passage on what he call the "symbolic cosmos" of popular Jamaican life, saturated in restrictive colonial biblical codes but bursting with pre-slavery African energy:

"This symbolic cosmos included elements from Ethiopianism, the religious movement focused on the liberation and Christianising of Africa; Revivalism and its many sects and breakaway churches of the 'witness-to-God' variety, which swept Jamaica in the early twentieth century; and Zionism, which specialised in making sense of historical events in terms of matching texts from Biblical sources ... Other components included traditional African folk religious practices, nature-worship, speaking in tongues, spiritual healing and communal dancing to induce trance and body possession."

At one point in Familiar Stranger, Hall recounts falling out with EP Thompson who apparently couldn't accept Hall's abiding interest in race and politics. The austere Thompson, ruminating on the making of the English working class from his house in Halifax, just didn't get it. He should have let his famous wiry white hair down a bit. A blast of calypso or reggae would have helped.