Cultural Studies was born from the diasporic black subject’s self-discovery

Evidence

I left the Caribbean, in flight from the Caribbean; I felt I couldn’t fulfil my potential there, and I couldn’t work out my relationship to Jamaican culture. I just couldn’t. Because of my middle-class formation, because my parents are not only brown but thought the world would disappear with the departure of the British, etc., coming departure of the British. Okay, so I was in flight. Then I “discovered” my subject, or, rather, it discovered me. My subject was coming out of the station at Paddington. It was Caribbeans but over here; it was the Windrush journey to here. That has been my subject ever since: the diaspora. … That’s what has been, in a sense, my subject. So that is really where Cultural Studies began for me. It didn’t begin with Raymond Williams; it began with my struggle to come to terms with that experience, which is when I first discovered I was a black intellectual. I’d never called myself black ever in my life, nor did most Jamaican people. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 1062

Categorization

• XREF: African-Caribbean arrival in Britain parallels how Islamophobia studies treat Muslims in the West as constituted through their metropolitan experience, not their origin cultures.
• QUESTION: ‘Black’ as a political identity category only coalesced after the late 1960s — when did that shift happen and what triggered it?