The Beginning of a Perfect Decolonial Moment

ARTWORKS BY SHELLYNE RODRIGUEZ

In this transcript of an episode of The Funambulist’s podcast “A Moment of True Decolonization” originally published in April 2020, Ruth Wilson Gilmore guides us through the particular experience of a late 1980s reading group in southern California that engaged with Stuart Hall’s work. Understanding the practice of reading for the purpose not of reciting but rather as rehearsal—and what that might entail—is what she offers us as the beginning of a perfect decolonial moment. 

In the late 1980s, Hazel Carby’s Reconstructing Womanhood introduced a Southern California reading group to the Birmingham Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS). We had never doubted the continuity and interplay among campaigns for justice, community-generated inquiry, and informal and organized education—including university training. But craving fresh insights, we read newer texts in areas such as Black feminist theory to challenge what we thought we already knew. Keen interest in pedagogy sparked by encounters with Paolo Freire, and admiration for Carby’s militant learning, made us curious about Stuart Hall, the person she called her best teacher at CCCS. It wasn’t easy to find Hall’s publications in the USA in the late 1980s. One of our cadre, a bookseller, came up with a few titles: Race, Articulation and Societies Structured in Dominance; later The Hard Road to Renewal; and soon thereafter, Hall’s lecture in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. 

So that’s where we began. At first, we had a hard time saying what excited us so much. Hall’s writing combines patient grounding with radiant analysis, and recapitulates objectively and subjectively a project’s layered setting. That is, attentive to the conditions of production and use of its constituent elements, each intervention’s topics, methods, evidence, and explanatory procedures add up to an achievement that is stubbornly concrete, yet exceeds its immediate design. The actions that cohere in and as Hall’s compositions suggest to readers how to do something else.

Capturing our imaginations, these qualities also in the short run thickened our tongues with awe. We could not say what we thought. Much later, we realized our insight turned out to be a (if not the) central lesson. Stuart Hall’s work models social theory as action. It is a guide for thinking about, analyzing, understanding, and organizing to change distinct, but densely interconnected geographies of what he described as the global maldistribution of material and symbolic resources. Therefore, against any flat insistence that specificity arises from fractures and partitions that are necessitated to achieve justice, the particular tendencies that we encountered over and over again in reading Stuart Hall underlie the ongoing urgency of expansive politics, including what, perhaps for want of a better word, we persist in calling “internationalism.”

Although full of questions, we had not been idle. While Nelson Mandela was still in prison, militant intellectuals gathered from all over the planet, including delegates from COSATU, the ANC and the Communist Party of South Africa, to debate the trajectories and challenges of anti-capitalist, anti-racist solidarity under the rubric Pan-Africanism Revisited Liberation Movements in Africa and the Diaspora. Meanwhile, others researched and drafted text for writers and readers of documentary comics about Anglophone North American and Caribbean Black writing—mostly fiction. That project, 400 Years Of Attitude, Black Literature For Beginners, explored the structures of feeling through and against which writers crafted stories about becoming and remaining free.

We held popular education sessions. People in solidarity with the people of El Salvador. We had sessions with the Los Angeles Eight—seven Palestinians and one Kenyan—who had been accused under the McCarran–Walter Act, a law designed to identify and deport communists from post-World War II USA. And no matter what, we fought tirelessly in local and broader campaigns while always trying to learn more.

Internationalism and a good deal of anti-capitalist, decolonial, regionalism weakened as the Soviet Union lurched to its end. Structural adjustment undermines self-determination and mutual assistance for newly independent as well as newly industrializing states. In short, in the late 1980s, politics was a mess, and we were busy trying to organize, promote ideas, and bargain in every possible arena. We could not agitate around race and difference without agitating against capitalism and its institutional infrastructures, the sorting and stacking machines that all kinds of organizers sought to slow down and rework or dismantle and use as scrap for new things. We feared patience might be the enemy of resistance, and at the same time we learned from Barbara Harlow that resistance could become part of the repertoire it was supposed to interrupt. In our daily efforts to incite people to campaign readiness, our default had become to repeat terrible details about any given site of struggle, and enumerate the details’ horrifying antecedents. These eloquent harangues, presented as analyses of causes, actually focused on the effects of social, ideological, economic, cultural, and environmental upheaval. Further, our practice ignored an organizing principle at the heart of CLR James’ reminder that revolutions happen because people “wait and wait and try every little thing.” Having broken James’ teaching into two pieces, we got stuck on “wait,” and figured that slinging fatal facts and inflammatory slogans would make people feel our impatience and end anybody’s satisfaction with little things. The approach, in retrospect, was panic-driven disregard for distinctions between facts and values, and inattention to the constant interplay among categories, experience, common sense, and consciousness. As a result, we were busy, but where we’d broken James obscured two key words: try every. 

Reading Stuart Hall enlarged our capacity to notice and follow strands of already existing activity in practice, to see what was going on when it might seem like nothing was going on, what “try every” meant without valorizing all efforts. That is, we looked with greater care at Hall’s analytical actions, and then extended that attentiveness to the actions of the people we worked with—including within our own cadre—or against, the materials available, the discourses employed, and the historical geographies in which the struggles emerged, developed and resolved, displaced or dissipated. With care but not prejudice, we traced out contradictions to focus on dynamics and processes in relation to these strands.

Contradiction contours struggles, makes them specific, within interdependent, politically unequal relationships. A contour can seem to be a natural or socially absolute barrier, an edge so dramatic that the remedy for a problem appears defined before a fight even begins. Fresh questions can open consciousness by suggesting unexpected fragilities or openings that might be politically near to hand. The point of action is to stretch the familiar in delightful and disturbing ways, and thereby unsettle subjectivity—if only for a moment. At the same time, experiments with theoretical and categorical tools refocus objectivity by revealing context-specific elements of categories that seem self-evident, such as crime, race, nation, hunger.

If Hall’s vivid compositions as social theory serve as guides to action, they also model methodologies. Methodology is a sequence of actions that produce evidence, shape evidence into arguments, and arrange arguments into answers to the questions we ask. In the social world actions frequently belie themselves, because to “wait and try” is useful, meaningful, even purposeful, without being necessarily instrumental, measurable or defined. Organizers and researchers also wait and try. Following from Hall, our group became productively aware of the opportunity to notice inconsistencies between experience and consciousness, scale and struggle. This awareness compelled us to rework questions and renew sequences of actions. Lifting a veil from theory and method freed us of a debilitating burden, which was our tendency, in spite of ourselves, to conform to a sound and style of political engagement bombarded by poisons and sweets, mostly resolving as rage.

That was not our first takeaway from reading Stuart Hall. When it came to political writing and social theory, many of us had become bad readers. On the one hand, as our pursuit of Carby and Hall suggests, we avidly searched for guidance in a constellation of thinkers and writers who could show us how to make sense of late modernity’s cumulative catastrophes and onrushing displacements. But in doing so, we tended to extract from the texts names, facts or trends that could command our loyalty and, we imagined, the undivided attention of others. The quest to become members of something, however much it is drenched in sorry sectarian histories, highlights the felt need to organize imaginative and associative energies into appealing, durable, and extendable social forms. If the patterns we’d learned to rely on had become inadequate to requirements, then how should we fight? Political, intellectual collectivities bubbled and cracked with controversies over culture and theory, belonging and partition. It was time to step down from the heights and look more closely at what was to hand. There was a lot. We could read it if we would read it.

We’d stopped noticing thought in its context and therefore failed to understand the action that inheres in non-fictional narrative. Or perhaps I should say, in not-fictional narrative.

This sliver of awareness disturbed us enough to keep at it. Since we were organizers, and few of us in those days in the late 1980s had steady day jobs that paid us to think and write, we were neither timid nor rigid. Avid readers of imaginative literature, we thought and fought about emplotment—the geographic ordering of space and the narrative ordering of time: entwined like a double helix, or twisted from multiple dimensions into a continuous single surface like a mobius strip. Art compelled our contemplative energies, both to dwell in a work and to be inhabited by its interiority, atmosphere, action. In other words, when it came to genre we were sluts. By contrast, we read political prose as though it were a cudgel. What stood out then were the sharp edges or flaws, as though the selection of themes, of findings, or assembly of theorists determined whether the blunt instrument would either inflict pain or shatter. As much as we generally aspired to fluency in admired authors, we didn’t dwell in their emplotments, to understand how story and discourse revised our ability to wield subtler weapons. 

As I said, we read for allegiance, which seemed to demand either making or withholding a pledge. Another way to put this is, we read in order to recite, writing down and tightening our throats around data and phrases that stoked or deflected our rage. We didn’t find ourselves any better at everyday tasks, much less able to rework what we were doing. And plus, we really sounded like cops with mid 1960s sociology degrees. The image “sounding like cops” wasn’t altogether off, since reading to recite made us seem to be barking terms of deferential loyalty or shadowy threat. We expected the words magically to do their work. 

Magical words. We blasted meetings with declarations of this and that, and we were rather amazed that even when people listened to the opaque or poetic detailed facts and curlicules, nobody—including us—stopped in their tracks, changed course, and did something else. For example, one magical word we had to work through was “specificity,” and figure out how it meant to anchor an analysis close to an actual set of relations, events, crises, and demonstrate how a theoretical guide through concrete puzzles models approaches to dynamics in motion. What does an example do to strengthen our ability to grasp what’s immediately before us in the lecture or a text, in a problem that we confront, and to use the generative excitement of muscle and brain to think about how we see and show terror, vulnerability, endurance, beauty, strength, in general, even though it’s changing while we organize and write? What work did we think we’d done and could we do with the work before us? We knew better than to confuse vocabulary words with insight. Yet we always hoped some word might signal new clarity that we could then share around.

Busy to beguile by reciting, we didn’t fight the angels of theory that roamed and swarmed everywhere. Warily, we switched gears and tried to read as engineers—to understand the inter-workings of system and structure, premise, form, tone, example, style, and the contextual questions. Where did each work arise? Why? What’s different now as we read in time in place? We dismantled the blunt instrument to see not only what it was made of, but also how it was made. The nesting of place making energies, concentrated in print. Engineers, doing and doing again, not practice makes perfect but rather repetition differentiates, and stops being repetition at some point if it’s not recital but rather rehearsal.

Listing the processes in the texts as we came to understand them pushed us to a fresh appreciation of the sort of thing we had in front of us: the entirety of history, as the Aymara teach us. At the end of each reading episode, we realized we had to try things on to try them out. This insight had everything to do with our group dynamic that oscillated between speaking and waiting—ending that group dynamic and learning to speak and listen. We could suddenly see, by thinking about speaking and listening, the conviviality in Hall’s writing and feel welcomed by it. Stuart Hall explains how he’s found his way to and through each puzzle explored in a lecture or essay, broadcast, or interview. His curiosity models patiently connecting and expressing—articulating, to use one of his words—specific ways that the historical geographies of the present emerge, co-constituting human-environmental interactions, experience, ecologies, thought, and consciousness. There are no guarantees. The work persistently inclines through syncretic rather than purified interdisciplinary imperatives. That’s a hard thing to do, especially in the contemporary context of relentless claims that difference distinguishes so thoroughly that the only way to describe unity in struggle is through military analogy: ally. Ally. It makes perfect sense people would have thought this because the war is real. But if it is real, then we should plan to win. But, what would winning look like for people absorbed by rage as the shield against despair?

Hall said we ought to work on what bites into our existence. He might have meant what’s scary, or perhaps what hurt us so much it made us angry. The things whose penetrating venom enraged our moods. It dawned on us then to stop reciting—really stop reciting, and start rehearsing. Rage, like stage fright, lays waste unless it’s used. We decided to read Stuart Hall’s texts as though we were actors. We had experience in agit-prop, avant garde theater, dance, performance art, and all of us were organizers.

Rehearsal is persistence in every little thing, while also the opposite of static. Rehearsal is the material symbolic substance for change, criticism of habits, inconsistencies, nightly notes, written, but not scripted. Interpretive practice gave us courage to improvise and enabled us to be vulnerable in our skin to a wide variety of discourses and registers, materialities and directions. This is not a metaphor, because to act requires detailed observation, which we might call “hearing,” although it need not be through the ears. Plot and place turn out not to be unities, which means action is not either.

In the texts that Hall shared with us, thinkers gather to talk over specific problems, not to prove points already confirmed. It’s fantastic how the topic that prompts each of Stuart Hall’s inquiries inspired us to notice aspects of it we otherwise might ignore because we’re thinking categories together differently, stretching, even in the analytical project, geometrically discontinuous politically connectable places. That is, actually existing activity is both the object of analysis—this article or lecture is about the activity x—and also the occasion to assemble activity, to coordinate thinkers whose topics might differ but whose commitments also have developed in the dynamic context of capitalism, saving capitalism from capitalism. The through line, perhaps unsurprising in a recovering student of Henry James—as Hall was, as was I—explored consciousness as firm and tentative habits of becoming, rather than aggregated effects of experience. The writers Hall talks with aren’t random, while their analytical approach is sometimes distracting, though steadied by resolute anti-sectarianism. Their presence gently destroys any implication that specificity might be a tidily self-contained unity of time, place, and action. Instead, the object of analysis is prised open by practitioners like you and me, whose own development and movement through the grand oppositional epic of capitalist modernity—of racial capitalism in short—demonstrates how specificity perpetually opens rather than partitions thought about the world by making the familiar strange, which is to say productively alien. And that was the beginning to a perfect decolonial moment. ■