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which leads people to Stuart Hall s work. And when Hall engages with the left and when he comments on cultural studies as a radical intellec- tual project, there is also a performative dynamic in operation too. He brings these entities, the left, and cultural studies, into being, in this dis- tinctive, intertwined, often quite practical way. There is, however, a more marked theoretical shift in Hall s most recent work. Here we see his ear- lier focus on the politics of meaning become more decisively influenced by Derrida. While meaning remains the terrain upon which politics is so decisively conducted, Hall is now drawn towards the way in which mean- ing itself is always haunted by other layers and levels of meaning, there are deferrals from prior meanings, residues and traces hanging, like a cloud, above highly contested terms such as multi-culturalism. This is all the more so when the multi-cultural question poses some of the most important issues for contemporary politics. The multiplicity of uses to which the term is put, from the corporate multi-culturalism of global brands to the pluralist multi-culturalism which, however, requires a more communal or communitarian political order (Hall, 2000a: 210), marks out its contestedness. For Hall the import of the term lies in its addressing how, in non-homogenous societies, commonness in differ- ence might be imagined and constructed ? (Hall, 2000b). The essay The Multi-cultural Question provides Hall with an opportunity to rehearse, again in a way which takes the reader with him, Uses Cultural Studies 10/3/05 11:52 am Page 29 Stuart Hall and the Inventiveness of Cultural Studies 29 the reasons why multi-culturalism can posit a new kind of political logic by extending and enlarging the capacities for radical democracy. Hall sketches the conditions of emergence for contemporary multi- culturalism, which include the changing global world, the times of post-coloniality, the ruptures brought about by the end of Communism in Eastern Europe, the rampant free marketisation on a global basis, and the defensive new neo-nationalisms also brought into being. Globalisation produces unstable localisms, spaces of proliferating dif- ference, which in turn become the site for translations from below . Neither is there homogeneity within these groupings which emerge, nor is there some kind of intact tradition. There is instead (and in many of Britain s cities) communities in translation . (In the case of the UK, the national unity, so precious to Labour politicians like Jim Callaghan in the Panorama programme described above, was, as Hall then also indicated, a good deal less homogenous than was commonly perceived. It was cut across by differences of race and class, region and income, and, we might add, women were still excluded from most institutional aspects of national belonging .) Massive forms of pluralisation have in the intervening years foregrounded, once again, the question of national unity at a political level, and also Britishness or Englishness at a cultural level. If globalisation appears to be a force for cultural homogenisation (under the big brands it brings to diverse locations), it also produces as a counter-reaction a wide range of localisms or indigenisations; these in turn constitute the various forms of difference which more directly chal- lenge assumptions of unity. But difference is both critically related to the structure in dominance of globalisation, and it is also both fluid and without a fixed political inscription: sometimes it is progressive, sometimes it is emergent, sometimes it is critical, sometimes it is revolu- tionary (Hall, 2000a: 217). Alongside these processes ethnic minorities are, suggests Hall, making three claims, for genuinely universal racial justice, for equal outcomes to the major social and economic processes and . . . also . . . for the recognition of difference (ibid.: 225). This, argues Hall, is the political task which the multi-cultural question confronts . But the very act of [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ] |
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