Stuart Hall e a escrita estruturada como música

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Stuart Hall and Writing Structured like Music Liv Sovik

A note about conjuncture, personal and political: my contact with Stuart Hall’s work coincides in time with my life as a university professor. I bought Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural

Studies the year it was published, which happened to be the year I began teaching at the Universidade Federal da Bahia, in Salvador.1 “What Is This ‘Black’ in Black Popular Culture?,” contained in that volume, allowed me to argue, the first time I participated in an MA exam, that

a funk dance that was a regular event in a poor suburb of Salvador was a black cultural phenomenon, although it did not “name the name” and its participants did not make an issue of it.

It also helped me think about the racial and cultural politics of the city and state, governed by a white political and economic elite that constantly invoked black cultural heritage as its own.

This system of political and cultural power was headed by the state’s last traditional politi-

cal boss, Antônio Carlos Magalhães (1927–2007), a Bahian version of Marshal Tito of Yugo-

slavia. Magalhães was an authoritarian ruler of apparent complexity; esteemed by even his enemies as extremely shrewd, he threatened and protected people, uniting them around him.

A photograph of him wearing an official sash was often posted high on the wall of commercial

establishments. He promoted Bahia as a tourist destination for its lovely beaches and beautiful black people and culture, a project in which photographer and anthropologist Pierre Verger, novelist Jorge Amado, the drum band and art education project Olodum, and the interests of 1

David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen, eds., Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies (London: Routledge, 1996).

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tropicalista pop musicians Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, and Gal Costa could all play a part. Magalhães owned, through members of his family, six television stations, which were regional

affiliates to the dominant TV Globo network, as well as three radio stations and a newspaper. He co-opted and coerced popular cultural movements and artists: state subsidies sustained

cultural life, and funding became scarce for anyone who tried to realize their critical impulses in the political arena, by supporting an opposition candidate, for example.

It was in this context that, in 1999, as the only native English speaker on the organizing

committee of the biennial conference of the Brazilian Comparative Literature Association (ABRALIC), on the New World theme “Lands and Peoples,” I was responsible for writing let-

ters to convince Stuart to speak at the congress’s opening session on 25 July 2000. In the event, his presence and that of Paul Gilroy and, very briefly, Gayatri Spivak, had an impact on the local press and universities as well as on congress participants, all accustomed to seeing

only white people in positions of academic prestige. In his lecture to hundreds of academics, Hall jokingly began by saying he was going to make a foray into deconstructing the founda-

tional claims of Birmingham by reflecting on “the role of Bahia in the development of Cultural

Studies.”2 Bahia, along with the anthropological literature on African survivals he had read in

the 1950s, was the door he opened to discuss diaspora; his speech was titled “Diasporas, or The Logics of Cultural Translation.”

In it, he conceived colonization not as an effect of European hegemony but as a world his-

torical event, involving a process of “expansion, exploration, conquest, colonization, slavery, economic exploitation and imperial hegemony by which Europe remade itself.” As we know, this conception shifts the historical focus from modern Europe to the global peripheries. It

does not celebrate the cultural diversity of the periphery as the rich fruit of globalization but understands it as the product of the refusal and persistence of peoples far from the metro-

politan power centers. And it identifies Western modernity not with the “Universal Rule of Reason—a pretty slippery character at the best of times”—but with the “suturing character

of its power and the supplementary character of its effects.”3 At the same time, Hall identified in racism, as well as in discourses on gender and sexuality, the exception to the rule whereby

diversity is understood as cultural product. These more effectively naturalize difference and

were therefore crucial to colonization and postcolonial systems of power. With this, he returned

to a crucial issue at stake in Bahian (one could say Brazilian) politics: the durability of white domination under the flag of identity. In conclusion, he noted two choices:

Emerging cultures that feel threatened by the forces of globalization, diversity, and hybridization or that have failed (in the way the project of modernization is currently defined) may feel tempted to close down around their nationalist inscriptions and construct defensive walls against the outside. The alternative is not to cling to closed, unitary, homogeneous models of “cultural 2 3

Stuart Hall, “Diasporas, or The Logics of Cultural Translation” (keynote lecture, 7th Congress of the Associação Brasileira de Literatura Comparada, Salvador—Bahia, Brazil, 2000), 1. Ibid., 6.

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Hall shifted the focus from a general critique of domination to the achievements of

diasporic societies—cultural, political, social—as a vantage point from which to see alterna-

tives. He proposed a different kind of centrality for diasporic culture: historical, political, and epistemological, not a kind of cultural distraction from inequality. In Bahia, where one was caught between welcoming the recognition of black cultural repertories and the perception that racist business continued as usual, Hall provided critical purchase.

A major volume of his work that I edited for Editora UFMG, titled Da diáspora: Identidades

e mediações culturais, was a direct result of the ABRALIC conference.5 Launched in May 2003, the initial print run of two thousand sold out in four months, and the book has continued to sell

well since, to readers in a broad spectrum of disciplines, both in universities and outside. The

popularity of this book and that of his long chapter “The Question of Cultural Identity” from the Open University’s textbook Modernity (the chapter was published in 2000 as A identidade

cultural na pós-modernidade) speaks to Hall’s relevance in the Brazilian context.6 He explained

it in an interview in the following terms: “Maybe this success is owing to the fact that Brazil has a relationship to European cultures similar to that of the Caribbean. This is the issue that

underlies almost all of my work. It is what I am talking about when I write about hybridization, about creolization, about the diaspora. I think that in Brazil people feel very touched by this issue.”7 One of Hall’s contributions to Brazilian debates on these issues is to help move on

from comparisons of national cultures and race, initiated with the UNESCO studies of the 1950s, which had led to the examination of the particularities of Brazilian racial classificatory systems; at the level of common sense, it meant the promotion of the relative advantages of Brazil’s supposedly “softer” racism. The paradigm of the diaspora and its possibilities for

thinking about processes on both local and global scales, about the cultural production of the countries of the black Atlantic as something interlinked, mutually constituted—this is another of Hall’s major contributions to Brazilian intellectual debate, and it came precisely at a time when the popularity of diasporic cultural forms identified with poor neighborhoods, such as hip-hop, was headline news because of their selling power independent of the mainstream media.

Following the success of these books, though, some difficulties in understanding his

work have emerged, some controversies. It was surprising to hear that Stuart is an easy read 4 5 6 7

Ibid., 10. Stuart Hall, Da diáspora: Identidades e mediações culturais, trans. Adelaine La Guardia Resende, ed. Liv Sovik (Belo Horizonte: UFMG; Brasília: Representação da UNESCO no Brasil; 2003). Stuart Hall, David Held, Don Hubert, and Kenneth Thompson, eds., Modernity: An Introduction to Modern Societies (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996); Stuart Hall, A identidade cultural na pós-modernidade (Rio de Janeiro: Lamparina, 2014). Heloisa Buarque de Hollanda and Liv Sovik, “O papa negro dos estudos culturais: Entrevista de Stuart Hall,” Jornal do Brasil, 3 January 2004.

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in India, as Susie Tharu indicated at the plenary in his honor at the Hyderabad meeting of the International Association of Mass Communication Researchers in 2014: “What I want to do

is focus on his writing, tease out the structural reasons for its accessibility. What is the imme-

diacy? Why do we enter it so easily?” The first reason she gives is that unlike others, whom she jokingly refers to as “French theorists,” Hall “is able to present his ideas as grounded in

a history, a geography and a complexly structured social formation. Hall doesn’t speak to the

world from a nowhere position, we know where he’s coming from.”8 In Brazil, it is precisely where Hall is coming from that has sometimes been hard to apprehend: off-base critical read-

ings of his work demonstrate that the problem is with, or with understanding, what he was trying to do and his rootedness in a particular time and place.

A privileged viewpoint on this incomprehension can be obtained in communication stud-

ies, which, unlike sociology, anthropology or the field of literature, in Brazil is “race-blind”: issues of racial identities are rarely considered. The common standpoint is global and univer-

salizing rather than contextualized: Jean Baudrillard, Bruno Latour, Gilles Deleuze, and Michel Foucault are almost as Brazilian as French. This is a sign of the cosmopolitanism of Brazilian

academic culture, in which seminal, innovative, and up-to-date authors are read in transla-

tion or not, without much regard for national origin, though of course geopolitics plays a role and Asian and African texts do not abound, while European, North American, and some Latin

American ones are common. But these texts are often read within a tradition of high theory, where concepts are related to other concepts, not to a particular social formation.

Hall is difficult to read in this deterritorialized conceptual key for precisely the virtues

Tharu cites—his attachment to a particular time and place, the specific details that he expects

his audience to recognize and within this, his playfulness and irony. This difficulty emerges during the translation of his work. In “Thinking the Diaspora,” “freedom rides,” mentioned as a metaphoric narrative of liberation, hope, and redemption, are explained in a footnote, but

it would have been too much of a distraction to explain the Sankey and Moody hymnal and “Onward Christian Soldiers,” which Hall mentions in his description of how “Africa” lives on

in Caribbean Christianity.9 The reference to Robert Browning’s poem in the subtitle, “Home-

Thoughts from Abroad,” and therefore its postcolonial irony, escaped me for years, familiar

though I may be with the poem’s opening lines, “O, to be in England / Now that April’s there.”

But what is lost in translation is less important than what remains. In the same essay,

what can be done with the peoples of the Caribbean being of “ ‘African’ descent—but as

Shakespeare would have said, ‘North by Northwest’ ”?10 Again, the explanatory footnote was called on, but how much does it help to know that the original context is Hamlet saying “My

uncle-father and aunt-mother are deceived. . . . I am but mad north-north-west. When the 8

Susie Tharu, “IAMR 2014—Tribute to Stuart Hall,” www.youtube.com/watch?v=tr6KABAm93A (accessed 7 September 2014). 9 Stuart Hall, “Thinking the Diaspora: Home-Thoughts from Abroad,” Small Axe, no. 6 (September 1999): 1–18. 10 Ibid., 13.

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wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw”? Then there are the biblical metaphors,

theoretical work as wrestling with angels, the feminism that broke in like a thief in the night; and others still, like the “ghost of Hegel in the Marxist machine.”11 Although all of this is a

reason for delight to the translator, Stuart Hall’s groundedness in a language and culture that are the fruit of a “history, a geography and a complexly structured social formation” has had

the effect of making his texts more, not less, difficult in Brazil. In this context, the encounter

between Hall and Brazilian academia occurs mainly where abstractions hold sway: reception theory and the diagrams in “Encoding/Decoding” and Marxism, as well as the idea of identity, most often used in the analysis of subcultures rather than the cultural politics he favored.

Without an appreciation of Hall’s focus on conjuncture, his Marxism is read as that of

the wishful thinkers, political activists, and academics who thought they had “guarantees” but whose theories did not prevent them from being defeated by the military dictatorship of

1964–85. For some he is a theoretical lightweight, useful to those who would rather hold to their Marxism than recognize new times. For example, communications theorist Ciro Marcondes Filho is liberal in his scorn for Hall for turning to Louis Althusser just when he was

leaving the scene of theoretical debate, for continuing to use the term ideology when it has

been superseded, for giving language an oversized role in social control. Marcondes alleges that for Hall, Rastafarians “take a biblical text, invert its meaning and with this operation alone affect the group’s identity: they reconstruct themselves as blacks in the New World, becoming

‘what they really are.’ ”12 Here, what Hall actually wrote is lost not only in the translation of his cultural references or misreading of how he used theory and concepts, about which he spoke and wrote extensively, but in a certain ill will regarding the problems that underlie his work.

At other times, from the perspective of the old nationalist Left, Hall is seen as a political

lightweight, someone who lives in the luxury of distance from his original Jamaican scene. For Vera Follain de Figueiredo he is a diasporic intellectual far from “local political action and,

therefore, . . . a kind of activism that would put him to the test.”13 The fact of Brazil being a

diasporic society is not recognized here. Still, if that recognition remains to be made, in many milieus, the most common misreading of Hall rests on the theoretical face of the theory-

politics diptych. It reduces him to the conceptual world that he always distanced himself from, one in which the establishment of good concepts is the object of the exercise. That is

why in undergraduate courses his chapter in the Open University textbook Modernity, map-

ping out the ways identity has been conceived, and the ur-text “Encoding/Decoding” are

perennial favorites: they lend themselves to being quoted without reference to the whole web

11 Stuart Hall, “Signification, Representation, Ideology: Althusser and the Post-structuralist Debates,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 2, no. 2 (1985): 96. 12 Ciro Marcondes Filho, “Stuart Hall, cultural studies e a nostalgia da dominação hegemônica,” Communicare 8, no. 1 (2008): 33. 13 Vera Lúcia Follain de Figueiredo, “Exílios e diasporas,” in Isabel Margato e Renato Cordeiro Gomes, eds., O papel do intelectual hoje (Belo Horizonte: UFMG, 2004), 137.

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of Hall’s thinking and posture. Without straying too far from their intentions, they permit the establishment of concepts and principles to be applied somewhere.

I may not have found his cultural universe nearly as difficult, and the four years I had

lived in the United States as a teenager, in the politically important years of 1967 to 1971, and in London between 1977 and 1980, helped me understand the politics in which he was

immersed. But if I did not have the tendency toward abstraction that Brazilian higher education stimulates, I also did not know clearly, it seems to me in retrospect, how to draw the impact his writing had on me. I found revising the translations of his work for Da diáspora enjoyable,

not only because of the competence, patience, and good humor of the translator, with whom I sparred over words and expressions. Hall’s work spoke to me in a way that won me over as

only fiction writers had before. I joked with him that if he didn’t want disciples, I could be his

backup vocalist: that way there would be discipline without discipleship, and I would not have to struggle with him as if with an angel. I found I often asked myself what he would think, as I faced each new question or problem in my work. I was hooked.

The problem that I was thinking about, the same year Stuart and Catherine Hall visited

Bahia, was how in Brazil the violence of social inequality is papered over by discourses on

affect. I took as prime examples a satirical columnist’s refrain, “We suffers but we has fun” (“Nós sofre mas nós goza”); the popularity among the middle class of a rap video clip about

the 1991 massacre in the Carandiru jail in São Paulo, which won MTV’s audience award in 1998; and the myth of Brazil as the land of a happy and affectionate people. This very soon became a project on how racist hierarchies are naturalized in a country where it is said that everyone is of mixed race, by considering whiteness in that context. From the start, a sentence

from “What Is This ‘Black’ in Black Popular Culture?” helped me set a course that resulted in a book, published at the end of 2009, titled Aqui ninguém é branco (Here, No One Is White). A research project in a nutshell, Hall’s statement reads: “Dominant ethnicities are always

underpinned by a particular sexual economy, a particular figured masculinity, a particular class identity.”14 I wanted my book to stand up to the most subtle and knowledgeable arguments

coming from within the complexities of Brazilian culture and, as its main spokesman, I chose Caetano Veloso, the singer-composer, for his subtle, intimate, and comparative knowledge

of Brazilian culture and for the length of time he has been on the Brazilian cultural scene: since the 1960s. At the time, I had a problem that was both of appearance and substance: I

am a foreigner and foreigners’ views of delicate issues anywhere, but especially in countries

that suffer the condescension of Europeans and North Americans, are most often considered obtuse or ethnocentric. And they usually are.

While Caetano is my book’s Greek chorus or, to mix classical metaphors, a kind of vox

populi vox dei on race in Brazil, the place of Hall’s work is more various. I quote “The Spectacle 14 Stuart Hall, “What Is This ‘Black’ in Black Popular Culture?,” in Morley and Hsing-Chen, Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues, 473–74.

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of the ‘Other’ ” and particularly its conclusion, in which Hall compares two male nude photographs, one by Robert Mapplethorpe and the other by Rotimi Fani-Kayode, to illustrate his

idea of looking “through the eye of representation.”15 The highlighting of the second photo

seems to me a “challenge to think through the discourses of the media, in this case popular music, with special attention to the moments when freedom, fantasy and humor implode

expectations and contaminate stereotypes with other meanings, even ‘improper’ ones.”16 I

claim whiteness is a theoretical problem for me like ideology is for Hall: because it is political and strategic, not because it is an abstract conceptual one. I use the quotation on dominant

ethnicities from “What Is This ‘Black’?” as an epigraph for a discussion of the “Girl from

Ipanema” and the bossa nova as a project for white Brazilian middle-class cosmopolitanism.

I quote Hall saying that “ruling ideas are not guaranteed in their dominance by their already given coupling with ruling classes” and on the importance of “Africa” to the decolonization of minds in Brixton and Trench Town.17 I cite “Cultural Identity and Diaspora” to say that like

the emergent black British cinema, Caetano Veloso’s manifesto album on race, Noites do

Norte, released in 2001, might be considered an exploration of possible subject positions.18 I like Hall’s metaphor of delicately uprooting and transplanting Antonio Gramsci’s ideas “to

new soil with considerable care and patience” and write that I want to do the same with his.19 But the impact of Hall’s work and of the conversations I had with him in my head, by

e-mail, and when I visited him in London, is not reducible to the themes on which I quote him. If around me he was read as the theorist he said he was not, I was reading him without

an overview. As it did others, his affirmation that an intellectual life within academia could

be politically meaningful inspired me. Although I didn’t perceive it at the time of his keynote

speech in Bahia—I was too new to the discussion and too busy with arrangements—the way he thought of the diaspora as central because of its enormous productivity, turning away from the niceties and brutality of white schemes of power to simply focus on what interested him,

gave force to my desire to write about racism in a way that was not moved by indignation or denouncement but captured the attention of people by identifying existing cultural resources

that could point to “ways out.” I wrote about whiteness while in dialogue with black women activists. One, a friend who commented on and proofread what I published in Portuguese

at the time, helped me in my efforts to write for people outside the walls of academia: what he said about that made sense to me. The way he thought of the diaspora as a key sign of

the times, his concern for historical processes as determinants of present conditions and his 15 Stuart Hall, “The Spectacle of the ‘Other,’ ” in Stuart Hall, ed., Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (London: Sage, 1997), 274. 16 Liv Sovik, Aqui ninguém é branco (Rio de Janeiro: Aeroplano, 2009), 26–27. 17 Stuart Hall, “The Problem of Ideology: Marxism without Guarantees,” in Morley and Hsing-Chen, Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues, 44; and Hall, “Thinking the Diaspora,” 11. 18 See Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” in Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, eds., Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 401. 19 Stuart Hall, “Gramsci’s Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethniticy,” in Morley and Hsing-Chen, Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues, 413.

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willingness to theorize about even the lowest subjects, such as press coverage of a mugging or a black friend causing scandal by calling him “Negro” from the middle of the street: all of

this was helpful in breaking down preconceived ideas about what I could call “evidence” in

an argument that was, in the end, theoretical by Hall’s definition, if no other. It was political and strategic.

But these are still protocols for reading texts and, as such, are not able to explain what

became evident on Stuart’s death: the way his thought became, for his friends close and

distant, for his colleagues, students, and readers, a personal issue. Producing a concept is a kind of heroic act, according to the mythology that rules academia, but unlike that of French

theorists, Hall’s impact is not consubtantial with the validity of his concepts. Gathering his

work under a single heading according to the principle of authorship produces Stuart Hall as

a kind of romantic genius, but it does not reflect his intellectual impact. What is, after all, his particular gift?

If Hall is strangely not readable like other contemporary theorists, both quite like them and

yet radically not so, maybe it is because his ways of thinking and utopianism descend more

from culture than politics. He sometimes seemed something of a preacher, driven by Martin Luther King’s “fierce urgency of now.” Paying attention to metaphor, with a clear awareness

of the audience before him, real or imagined, he had a lesson to give. But this perhaps says more about the kinship of teaching to preaching than about his thought, because he always

insisted that salvation was not at hand. His respectful attention to people unlike himself

flowed into his writing—his appropriation of the insights provided by Mapplethorpe’s work is

a good example of this.20 But these metaphors of religious practice, of preaching and fraternal dialogue, still fall short.

In “What Is This ‘Black’ in Black Popular Culture?” Hall spoke of how “the people of the

black diaspora have, in opposition to all that [the centrality of writing to logocentric criticism],

found the deep form, the deep structure of their cultural life in music.”21 In this brief and inevi-

tably fictional discourse on Stuart Hall, what comes closest to describing why his thinking is

at the same time familiar, strange, and profoundly affecting is that it is like music. In his work he examined themes from several perspectives, as if he were producing variations in tension

with one another. He listened to other people, authors, and theories, treating them as if they were partners in improvisation, taking on their themes, making room for their solos, respecting their strengths. In all of this he seemed, to this listener, to make something enormously important, something keyed into the poetics of reggae and the complex freedoms of jazz.

20 Stuart Hall, in Gupta Sunil, “Stuart Hall: On Photography,” vimeo.com/51527926 (accessed 8 September 2014). 21 Hall, “What Is This ‘Black,’ ” 470.

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Above and page 77: Stuart Hall at the Partisan coffee house, Soho, London, circa 1958–59. Photograph by Roger Mayne. Courtesy Raphael Samuel Archive, Bishopsgate Institute, London

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