Stuart Hall - Black Diaspora Artists in Britain - Three 'Moments' in Post-War History.pdf

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FEATURE: BLACK ARTS
Editorial Introduction
In November 2004 Stuart Hall delivered the Raphael Samuel Memorial
Lecture to a packed audience at London’s Conway Hall. The lecture was
the culmination of a day devoted to ‘Black Diaspora Artists in Britain,
Past and Present’, organized by the Raphael Samuel History Centre at the
University of East London, which had also featured multimedia presenta-
tions by three artists based at the University of East London – Roshini
Kempadoo, Keith Piper and Faisal Abdu’allah – and a showing of Horace
Ove’s film, A Dream to Change the World. We here publish an edited
transcript of Stuart Hall’s lecture, accompanied by reproductions of some
of the major artworks to which he refers.
The ‘Black Diaspora Artists’ event was co-sponsored by the Institute
of International Visual Arts, which has recently published an important
collection of essays, Shades of Black: Assembling Black Arts in 1980s
Britain, reviewed below by Sandy Nairne, director of the National Portrait
Gallery and a participant in the 2001 conference on which the volume is
based.
Black Diaspora Artists in Britain:
Three ‘Moments’ in Post-war History
by Stuart Hall
I am delighted to take up the invitation from the University of East
London’s Raphael Samuel History Centre to give the 2004 Memorial
Lecture for my friend Raphael Samuel. I first met Raphael at Oxford in
1952 and our paths – personal, intellectual, political – closely intersected
thereafter until his untimely death in 1996. In the deep-freeze days of the
Cold War, we were beleaguered members of different fractions of the
Oxford student left: he, already a gifted historian and leading light of
the small but influential Communist Party group; me a member of a more
dispersed, independent and diasporic left. With others, we founded
Universities and Left Review in 1956, in the aftermath of the invasions of
Suez and Hungary, and then New Left Review – projects which would
never have happened without Raphael’s unquenchable political energy,
which brooked no empirical obstacle. Not being a historian, I was not
History Workshop Journal Issue 61 doi:10.1093/hwj/dbi074
The Author 2006. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of History Workshop Journal, all rights reserved.
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directly involved in the founding of History Workshop Journal, but remained
engaged with its wider project – including the recovery of neglected, hidden
and subaltern histories. I have thought of this lecture as a contribution,
perhaps from an unexpected direction, to that initial inspiration.
The lecture also aspires to add another kind of chapter to those
collected and edited posthumously by Alison Light, Sally Alexander and
Gareth Stedman Jones in Island Stories (Verso, 1998), the second volume of
Raphael’s richly-textured and ever-evolving work, Theatres Of Memory,
which focused on what he called ‘the wildly different versions of the
national past on offer at any point in time’, depending on the optic adopted.
In part, that project disturbed the master-narrative of ‘the nation’ by seeing
it from the perspective of its four constituent parts. Mine tries to de-centre
this re-writing still further by adopting a diasporic perspective.
In doing so, I borrow the spirit of Raphael’s method. As Alison Light
observed in her Biographical Note to Island Stories, ‘the incompleteness
of some of the essays ...is as much a measure of Raphael Samuel’s constant,
even obsessive, revising and recreating of every project he was involved
in ...’: his work – I know, sometimes to my cost – was always in a state
of fissiparously disseminating before completion into multiple further
projects. Further, apart from a short chapter, left in provisional draft
form, entitled ‘Empire Stories: the Imperial and The Domestic’, and the
plan of a final but unwritten chapter on ‘post-colonial history’, Raphael
did not really address the impact of the post-war, post-colonial, diaspora
cultures on the national culture or the subversive effect of racial difference
on the ‘un-writing’ of ‘our island story’. And since our friendship was
marked by intense argument and discussion, I should add that Raphael and
I did not really agree about this matter and, alas, it remained unresolved at
his death. So this is also a continuation of the debate by other means.
I want to identify and roughly characterize three contrasting
‘moments’ in the history of the black diaspora visual arts in post-war
Britain. 1 The aim is not only to continue the project of inserting this
‘constitutive outside’ into the centre of ‘our island story’, but – in choosing
the visual arts as my point of departure – to do so from an unexpected angle.
But first, some words of warning. ‘Black’ is used here with a deliberate
imprecision deriving from the ’70s, when the term encompassed all
the minority migrant communities without the careful discrimination of
ethnic, racial, regional, national and religious distinctions which has
since emerged. It is used here not as the sign of an ineradicable genetic
imprint but as a signifier of difference: a difference which, being historical,
is therefore always changing, always located, always articulated with other
signifying elements: but which, nevertheless, continues – persistently – to
register its disturbing effects.
As to ‘the arts’: being neither an artist, art critic nor art historian,
I cannot discuss individual works of art or artists in the aesthetic and critical
depth they deserve. My focus here is on historical moments and their
Black Diaspora Artists in Britain
3
periodization. I discuss ‘the work’ as part of a cultural/political formation,
a constitutive element in a field of ideas, practices, social movements and
political events – though I do also want to insist that it offers a privileged
vantage point on to that world.
The approach, then, is ‘historical’. Or, since I have already confessed to
not being a historian, I had better settle for ‘genealogical’. I want to begin
to construct an outline ‘genealogy’ of the post-war Black British diaspora
arts. This means marking their distinct ‘moments’; noting certain striking
convergences between very different kinds of work; but, more significantly,
identifying the breaks and ruptures between moments as they unravel
and disseminate, their elements evolving in radically different directions.
I am concerned with shifts in thematic concerns, in ‘ways of seeing’, in what
we might call the construction of different ‘fields of vision’ and what
they tell us, symptomatically, about changes in what Raymond Williams
(in The Long Revolution, 1961) called ‘structures of feeling’. I try to think of
such moments as conjunctures. Thinking conjuncturally involves ‘clustering’
or assembling elements into a formation. However, there is no simple unity,
no single ‘movement’ here, evolving teleologically, to which, say, all
the artists of any moment can be said to belong. I try to assemble these
three ‘moments’ in their fused but contradictory dispersion. As I will
try to show, the late 1980s, a moment of explosive creativity in the black
arts, is characterized by deep fissures which in turn set in train new
trajectories that diverge rather than ‘adding up’. That is why the 1980s
remain so contested, a focus of unfulfilled desire. They can be ‘mapped’
only as the ‘condensation’ of a series of overlapping, interlocking but
non-corresponding ‘histories’.
Does this undermine the genealogical enterprise? Not necessarily.
It depends on how a ‘moment’ is defined. Neither decade, accident of
shared date of birth or location will do. Artists of the same generation do
different kinds of work. They go on working, across different moments,
often in radically different ways from how they began. Or they continue to
follow a trajectory long after its ‘moment’ has passed. They appear here,
not in their radically-creative individuality, but as the ‘bearers’ – ‘subjects’,
in a displaced Foucauldean sense – of their artistic practices. 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,
the ruptural fusion of an accumulation of contradictions’ whose ‘unity’
is necessarily over-determined. 2
***
David Scott, in his challenging new book, Conscripts of Modernity, calls
such a moment a problem space.
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[A] problem space is first of all a conjunctural space, a historically
constituted discursive space. This discursive conjuncture is defined by
a complex of questions and answers – or better, a complex of statements,
propositions, resolutions and arguments offered in answer to largely
implicit questions or problems. Or ...these statements ...are moves
in a field or space of arguments and to understand them requires
reconstructing that space of problems that elicited them. 3
Evoking a ‘problem space’, then, is to think of a conjuncture epistemol-
ogically. It is as if every historical moment poses a set of cognitive, political –
and I would add, artistic – questions which together create a ‘horizon’ of
possible futures within which we ‘think the present’, and to which our
practices constitute a reply; a moment defined as much by the questions
posed as by the ‘answers’ we seem constrained or ‘conscripted’ to give.
When the historical conjuncture changes – as it did significantly between
the 1960s and the 1980s and again, between the 1990s and the present – the
problem space, and thus the practices, also change since, as David Scott
puts it, what was a ‘horizon of the future’ for them has become our ‘futures
past’ – a horizon which we can ‘no longer imagine, seek after, inhabit’,
or indeed create in, see or represent in the same way.
***
We can usefully divide the post-war Black British diaspora artists into
three distinct ‘waves’. The first generation was born in the 1920s and 1930s
in the far-flung corners of the British Empire. They came to Britain, as the
last ‘colonials’, in the 1950s and 1960s, immediately after the Second
World War, on the eve of decolonization – following, in the Caribbean case,
the political upheavals of the 1930s, or in India and Africa the rise of the
independence movements – to fulfil their ambitions to become practising
artists. The pioneer figure, Ronald Moody, a major sculptor of the black
body, whose work sadly awaits a retrospective, was born in Jamaica around
1900 and lived and worked in London and Paris before the war. He returned
to London in 1941. Between the mid 1940s and the mid ’60s, F. N. Souza,
Avinash Chandra, Frank Bowling, Aubrey Williams, Donald Locke,
Ahmed Parvez, Anwar Schemza, Balraj Khanna, Iqbal Geoffrey,
Ivan Peiris, Uzo Egonu, Li Yuan Chia, David Medalla, among others,
arrived in Britain. Rasheed Araeen – painter, and sculptor, born in
Karachi – came to London in the 1960s. He became a major cultural
animator, curator of the famous The Other Story Hayward exhibition,
founder-editor of Third Text and tireless champion of what he described as
‘the unique story ...of those men and women who defied their ‘‘otherness’’
and entered the modern space that was forbidden to them, not only to
declare their historic claim on it but also to challenge the framework which
defined and protected its boundaries’. He and Avtarjeet Dhanjal,
Black Diaspora Artists in Britain
5
the modern sculptor from India who arrived in 1974 via East Africa, are
manifestly transitional figures who span the two moments. Whereas the
leading early figures of the second ‘wave’ – people like Eddie Chambers,
Keith Piper, Donald Rodney, Sonia Boyce, Lubaina Himid, Claudette
Johnson, Mona Hatoum, Maud Sulter, Gavin Jantjes and others – were not
born until the 1950s or 1960s and did not exhibit work until two decades
later.
One immediate contrast between these two ‘waves’ lies in their attitude
to Modernism. Broadly speaking, the artists of the first wave came to
London in a spirit not altogether different from that in which Picasso
and others went to Paris: to fulfil their artistic ambitions and to participate
in the heady atmosphere of the most advanced centres of artistic innovation
at that time. As colonials, they had been – and are still thought of as –
marginalized from such developments. In fact, they came to Britain feeling
that they naturally belonged to the modern movement and, in a way,
it belonged to them. The promise of decolonization fired their ambition,
their sense of themselves as already ‘modern persons’. It liberated them
from any lingering sense of inferiority. Their aim was to engage the modern
world as equals on its own terrain. In that sense, they shared, and were
clearly part of, the rising optimism of the first ‘Windrush’ generation of
West Indian migrants, who came in the 1950s and 1960s in search of a better
life, and whose jaunty self-confidence is so palpable in the images of their
arrival produced at the time. 4
They – we – came, of course, because of the colonial connection,
following linkages forged by imperialism. An ambiguous journey, since
they/we knew ‘Britain’ intimately but from afar, as both ‘the mother
country’ and ‘the mother of all their troubles’. They came to see for
themselves, to look it in the eye – and, if possible, to conquer it.
Artists were not alone in this. In the 1950s and 1960s London became
the Mecca for a group of Caribbean writers and intellectuals who felt
that they had to migrate to fulfil their ambitions. George Lamming has
written poignantly in The Pleasures Of Exile (1960) about how a whole
generation of West Indian writers – Lamming himself, Edgar Mittelholzer,
Vic Reid, Roger Mais, Sam Selvon, John Hearne, Jan Carew, V. S. Naipaul,
Andrew Salkey, Neville Dawes – all ‘felt the need to get out’. 5 As Lamming
says, referring to their colonial education, ‘How in the name of Heavens
could a colonial native taught by an English native within a strict
curriculum diligently guarded over by yet another English native ...ever
get out from under the ancient mausoleum of this historic achievement?’ 6
The West Indian novel is the product of this migratory movement
because, as Lamming observed, ‘in this sense, most West Indians
of my generation were born in England’. 7 The intellectual and artistic
ferment created in these years of exile is finely documented in Ann
Walmsly’s history of The Caribbean Artists Movement (1992), to which they
all belonged.

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