Race entered Cultural Studies only through bitter internal struggle against unconscious silence

Evidence

Actually getting Cultural Studies to put on its own agenda the critical questions of race, the politics of race, the resistance to racism, the critical questions of cultural politics, was itself a profound theoretical struggle, a struggle of which Policing the Crisis , was, curiously, the first and very late example. It represented a decisive turn in my own theoretical and intellectual work, as well as in that of the Centre. Again, it was only accomplished as the result of a long, and sometimes bitter—certainly bitterly contested—internal struggle against a resounding but unconscious silence. A struggle which continued in what has since come to be known, but only in the rewritten history, as one of the great seminal books of the Centre for Cultural Studies, The Empire Strikes Back . In actuality, Paul Gilroy and the group of people who produced the book found it extremely difficult to create the necessary theoretical and political space in the Centre in which to work on the project. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 250

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: Contrasts the ‘rewritten history’ of The Empire Strikes Back with its actual difficult birth — a recurring Hall theme of contested institutional memory.

Related

• Adding race to an intellectual field’s agenda required bitter internal struggle against unconscious silence (similarity 0.88)
• Cultural Studies evolved through critical engagements with Marxism, feminism, and race. (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Cultural Studies advanced through external ruptures rather than internal evolution #corroborates (0.75) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 247
• Cultural Studies history is interrupted by exterior forces, not unfolded internally #corroborates (0.70)