The 1956 New Left emerged from a third-position third-world student milieu

Evidence

I was part of an organization which was then called the Socialist Club. The Socialist Club was a club which refused to join the Communist Party because we were opposed to Stalinism, and refused to just hook up with the Labour Party, which was in a very anticommunist mood. In this group there were a lot of Third World students, a lot of students from outside of Britain. And also people who went on to make the New Left Review. People from Surinam, from Egypt, the Sudan, and so on. [The year] 1956 is a double whammy. Because it’s Suez and Hungary. And then the New Left emerges at that moment as a wedge. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 930

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘wedge’ structural position — refusing both Stalinist communism and Labour anticommunism — is formative for cultural-studies theory. Suez 1956 is also a pivotal anti-colonial event in postcolonial theory (echoed in Home Boy’s and Reluctant Fundamentalist’s postcolonial sensibility). — connects to: French New Left students remained Leninists oriented toward Third World revolution — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 90; The draft radicalized college students into the New Left — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the…, 691; The pre-1950 Frankfurt School’s dilemmas anticipated and fueled the postwar New Left — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 76 (+2 more)
• QUESTION: The makeup of the Socialist Club — Third World students from Surinam, Egypt, Sudan — is a concrete demographic fact about where the New Left’s anticolonial consciousness came from; worth verifying how much of the early CC CS sensibility traces to this particular milieu.