Diasporic position resists the collective ‘we’ of a national movement
Evidence
I never felt defensive about the New Left, but in a broader political sense I remain identified with the project of the first New Left. I always had problems in that period about the pronoun “we.” I didn’t know quite who I meant when I said, “We should do X.” I have a funny relationship to the British working-class movement and the British institutions of the labor movement: the Labour Party, and the code unions, identified with it. I’m in it but not culturally of it. I was one of the people, as editor of Universities and Left Review, mainly negotiating that space, but I didn’t feel the continuity that people who were born in it did, or like people for whom it was an essential part of their “Englishness,” like Edward Thompson; I was still learning about it, in a way, as well as negotiating with it. I did have a diasporic “take” on my position in the New Left. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 780
Categorization
Category: Connection Points
- XREF: Connects to the Islamophobia module’s reading on colonial psychology and racialized selfhood — the diasporic vantage point refusing assimilation into the metropolitan ‘we’ recurs in postcolonial critique and in work like The Reluctant Fundamentalist.
- DEFINE: Offers a lived definition of diasporic ‘take’: being inside a movement’s structures but not culturally of them, learning to appropriate a culture rather than inheriting it.