The late Stuart Hall on Obama

[malaise]

[frazzled]

1. Very good and interesting

It's true that the American system prevents any kind of radical change, that Obama was never a radical to begin with, and that the government would be like a "steam roller rolling over him."

What I think Stuart Hall is factually wrong about is that Obama didn't understand how hard change would be, or that he didn't tell the people that change wouldn't come overnight. I stood in Grant Park on election night 2008 and listened to his speech: its main message was that we should not think that change would be easy or that it would come quickly. Au contraire, he spent a good portion of his remarks that night talking about how difficult it would be, and that there would be sure to be failures. And that it was the people who had to keep pressing. He was completely transparent about how hard it would be to do any of the things that had been talked about during the election.

I can forgive Hall for not being aware or remembering this: he was a Brit, after all. I can't forgive people here for not remembering it, though.

[lovemydog]

2. And in his first inauguration speech.

President Obama was even more realistic about the enormous difficulty of change, and how it must come from the people, in his first inauguration speech. Thank you for reminding us. I've never wavered in my support for the President. I've often wondered what people expect of him, considering that nearly half the country votes for Republicans whose pretty much sole mission is to make the rich richer and the rest of us consider ourselves not worthy of anything more than minimum wage with zero health care.

[malaise]

3. He was a Jamaican not a Brit

[frazzled]

4. He lived and worked in Britain for more than 60 years

That pretty much makes you a Jamaican-born Brit.

An acquaintance of mine, the lovely Ghana-born British filmmaker John Akomfrah, recently made a film about Hall (The Stuart Hall Project). It shows that Hall's provenance was even more hybrid than "Jamaican and British":

Born into a middle-class family of African, Scottish and Portuguese-Jewish descent in colonial Jamaica, Hall describes his origins in the film as “the home of hybridity”. He moved to England as part of the Windrush generation in 1951, just as Britain was nearing the end of its colonial power.

Charting the Suez Crisis, the civil rights movement and the rise of feminism to the Cold War arms race and the Vietnam War, Akomfrah’s film offers an unusually intimate account of the shaping of Hall’s thought, from his days as a bright young Rhodes scholar and co-founder of the New Left Review at Oxford, to his very public presence as one of Britain’s leading intellectuals over the decades.

Hall’s commitment to educational opportunities, social justice and he creative saw him become instrumental in the establishment of the first Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham and, later, the Open University and Institute of International Visual Arts.

For Ghanaian-born Akomfrah growing up in West London in the 1970s, Hall was an icon, inspiring him to ask vital questions about his own identity, about what he was and what he could become.

http://hackneycitizen.co.uk/2013/09/24/john-akomfrah-stuart-hall-project/

[malaise]

5. Nope - he kept his citizenship and returned home regularly

He attended Jamaica College (high school) right here in 'the Yard'.

[frazzled]

6. One cannot fix his cultural identity so easily

without being completely untrue to who he was and what he was trying to say.

Stuart Hall, who was born and raised in Jamaica, touched on this when he spoke about ‘English’ identity. As he commented, ‘people like me who came to England in the 1950s have been there for centuries …. I am the sugar at the bottom of the English cup of tea. I am the sweet tooth, the sugar plantations that rotted generations of English children’s teeth’ (Hall 1991; quoted in Mitchell 2000: page 274).

http://www.rgs.org/OurWork/Schools/Geography+in+the+News/Ask+the+experts/Identity+and+citizenship.htm

Stuart hall was neither British nor Jamaican, and he was both British and Jamaican. As Hall himself says in this film clip, "Our identities are an endless ever-unfinished conversation."

http://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/bfi-film-releases/stuart-hall-project

Hall was born in Jamaica, and established his intellectual career over a half-century in the UK. One thing is for sure: he was not an American, and thus his perspective on the issue in question--Obama and the American system--was not that of an American engaged in the process. And that was my only point.