Académique Documents
Professionnel Documents
Culture Documents
To Be and Not to Be
the twentieth century. And, given the political tenor of Akomfrahs career
(his commitment to the black immigrant experience in postimperial Brit-
ain), it is easy to imagine that there was something even more significant at
stake for Akomfrah in making The Stuart Hall Project.
After all, the Accra-born Akomfrah is not simply the son of Ghanaian
immigrants but the son of one of Kwame Nkrumahs ministersand, it
should be added, the son of a mother who believed her life in danger after
the military coup in 1966 that overthrew Nkrumah. (Akomfrah moved to
England at the age of four. He attributes his fathers death to the 1966 coup.)
For Akomfrah, then, making a documentary on the Jamaican-born Stuart
McPhail Hall (February 1932February 2014) must have been from the very
beginning an especially critical undertaking. After all, he was trying to cap-
ture, for a posterity that was imminent, the life of one of the preeminent black
voices of the past sixty years, a voice molded by the struggle against colonial-
ism and its metropolitan afterlife, a voice that contributed to key debates on
the left in Britain, the United States, and many newly sovereign sites, from
his native Caribbean to sub-Saharan Africa and the Asian subcontinent.
Operating under the sign of (impending) death, Akomfrah under-
stood, following Marxs spirit in the Eighteenth Brumaire, that he was not
free to make history just as he pleased. Recognizing the difficulty of trying
to capture an ailing thinker, Akomfrah turnedhe had no other choice, in
truthto Hall in his pomp (if such a phrasing might be indulged, because
the word pomp seems plainly wrong when used in relation to Hall, a thinker
who eschewed any kind of grandiosity). What The Stuart Hall Project cap-
tures is an intellectual holding forth on national television (the BBC) from
what seems like the 1950s, shortly after Hall arrived to study at Merton Col-
lege, Oxford, to fin de sicle Britain. The Stuart Hall Project traces the think-
ers life from his earliest years in colonial Kingston, Jamaicathere are
images of Hall as an infant, Hall as a schoolboy at elite Jamaica College, and,
the most salient, Hall in an exchange with Michael Manley, the former
prime minister of Jamaica1to his final, declining years in postimperial
Britain. The last images are of Hall visibly ill but still delivering eloquent cri-
tiques on race, politics, and culture, critiques that are, as Jeffrey T. Nealon
argues in this special issue on Halls work, always routedespecially in the
1980s and 1990sthrough theory in an effort to think the politics of every-
day life, a critical part of Halls commitment to cultural studies, that politi-
cal project with which Hall is most closely associated. Cultural studies is
also a project that Hall, who numbers among the fields founders, was always
rethinking, always in the business of renewing; Hall was always considering
Farred To Be and Not to Be 653
what its optimal articulation(s) might be. The commitment to cultural stud-
ies emanates clearly in the footage Akomfrah has assembled and Hall
addresses, especially as it pertains to the issues of diasporization and the
ways that racialized communities struggle to make a place for themselves in
the metropolis.
As Hall remarks in The Stuart Hall Project (2013), When I ask some-
one where theyre from, nowadays I expect a very long answer. Identifying
exactly where it is someone is from is a difficulty David Bell addresses in
this issue. In I Persevered in My Geography, Bell explicates Halls impor-
tance (and that of cultural studies) to a generation of human geographers
who were interested in routes, or the ways by which people arrived in a par-
ticular place and the various reasons why people relocated, rather than in
roots, or how people understood their own, shall we say, autochthony. To
the very end, Hall theorizes (Marx, Antonio Gramsci, Thatcherism, and so
on), and he informs disciplines far beyond (or perhaps not so far beyond) cul-
tural studies with enthusiasm and his customary commanding intellectual
presence. In so many of the interviews from which Akomfrahs project is
culled, Halls eyes are twinkling with that wonderful intelligence, his face
almost always, it seems, on the verge of a captivating smile, even as he is
making the most incisive and sometimes damning political point.
The initial conception of the project, I have been told by Akomfrah,
was to conduct a series of interviews with Hall. This method would have
allowed Akomfrah to film Hall reflecting, in what Hall must surely have
known were his final days, on his own life. Instead, history intervenedor
to amend and reconceive John Lennons famous phrase, Life and death are
what happen while youre making other plans. In retrospect, this conversa-
tion, which did not happen because Halls health would not permit it,
emerges as a ghostly presence. It is not so much the cinematic and political
road not taken, although it is that too. It is, rather, that the impossibility of
that conversation leaves us nostalgic for what never was; it is nothing other
than our wishing for one more close-up of the contemporary Hall. Not
because the historican earlierHall will not do, but because we want
to hear Hall thinking, for us, in a moment closer to us; if only there were one
more opportunity to witness his mind at work. Alas.
However, if we pause for a moment, we recognize not just what a fig-
ure the historic Hall is but that this historic recapturing introduces us to a
Hall with whom we were familiar only in passing. It could be argued that the
historic Hall is, indeed, known to only a fewhis early New Left contempo-
raries, a few friends, political intimates and comrades with whom he worked
654 The South Atlantic Quarterly October 2016
in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, and family members such as his wife, Cath-
erine Hall. What a thing it is, then, that Akomfrah was compelled into the
archives by a history of the present (an ailing subject) and left with nothing
to do but cast Hall in this borrowed language. The Stuart Hall Project is, of
course, properly speaking, not a borrowed language because it is, after all,
still Hall speaking, albeit a Hall with whom many are making acquaintance
for the very first time.
And yet, it is not. The Stuart Hall Project does more than simply make
the historic Hall available to us. The Stuart Hall Project recovers Hall both
for us and, I suggest, for Hall himself. The Stuart Hall Project retrieves from
the visual archive a Hall who, it seems, addresses race from the very first
moment of his entry into British political life, so that Akomfrahs documen-
tary editsthe process and the politics of selection (what to include, what to
leave out)the making of Hall as a black anti- and postcolonial intellectual.
The Stuart Hall Project shows its subject speaking to issues of race through
the prisms of, among others, violence against black bodies (such as that
against Kelso Cochrane in May 1959, in Notting Hill, London, which sparked
a series of race riots) and culture (Halls ongoing recognition of the contribu-
tion migrant black communities made to metropolitan life, from music
reggae, hip-hop, soul, and funkto film, especially under the auspices of
the British Film Institute, to lifestyle, including fashion, hairstyles, and
modes of self-representation).
The subject of The Stuart Hall Project stands in contrast to Halls writ-
ten work in which the issue of race does not find its voice until 1978 in
Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order (Hall et al. 1978).
Policing the Crisis is based on a 1972 event in the Handsworth neighborhood
of Birmingham in which three teenage boys, two with immigrant profiles
(Paul Storey was the son of a West Indian father; Mustafa Fuats family had
Cypriot connections; and James Duignan lived on a street deemed a mini
United Nations), attacked an elderly white man, Robert Keenan. (Hands
worth, of course, provided the title for Akomfrahs film Handsworth Songs.)
Hall, who was then director of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Stud-
ies (CCCS) at the University of Birmingham, and his fellow editors (Chas
Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke, and Brian Roberts) followed this event
for a biopolitically important reason. The fate of Handsworth teenagers mat-
tered because of the ways the British state, importing the term mugging in its
full racial articulation from the United States, brought to bear an unusually
harsh sentence against the immigrant youth from one of the poorer sections
of what was then still known as Britains second city.
Farred To Be and Not to Be 655
Most salient here is the way Hall acknowledges the frustration and courage
of black British communities (a people who, in the teeth of relentless
oppression, spontaneously resist) while capturing the ominousness of
Thatchers law and order strategythe inevitability that the frontline
troops will take their revenge for Tottenham. In a word, this is the crisis
for the black community in Britain: How does a community vulnerable to
state-orchestrated violence resist? Much of Halls career, it could be argued,
is a commitment to addressing this dilemma, a dilemma that Hall first con-
fronted with the murder of the Antiguan-born Cochrane in 1959.
In conjuring up the spirit of the past, The Stuart Hall Project per-
forms the important and, indeed, the ironic historical task of allowing Hall
to borrow from himself. In The Stuart Hall Project Hall is sutured to him-
self (that jagged act of self-restoration), and we are able to see him almost
address himself across the decades. The many iterations of Hall are accompa-
nied this time by the haunting soundtrack of Miles Davis, by the many moods
of Davis. The Davis tunes are by turns mournful, contemplative, boppy, soul-
ful, uplifting, swinging, but always innovative and thought provoking;
mainly, however, Davis forms a moving sound track to The Stuart Hall Proj-
ect. From the very beginning of Akomfrahs project, Hall articulates what can
only be described as a profound debt to Davis. The first time we hear Hall on
the voice-over, it is Davis whom he invokes in deeply metaphysicaland
poeticterms: When I was about nineteen or twenty, Hall remarks, Miles
Davis put his finger on my soul. The various moods of Miles Davis matched
the evolution of my own feelings. There is something moving, and almost
melancholy, about Halls reflection so that it leaves us with a real apprecia-
tion for Halls familiarity with Daviss oeuvre. (The temptation is to get out
your Davis CDs and listen along to the various Davis titlesSummertime,
Miles Ahead, Moodthat punctuate every segment of Akomfrahs docu-
mentary. At other times Daviss pathos is so overwhelming that one almost
yearns for the obdurate abstraction of a Keith Jarrett, particularly as ren-
dered by Jarrett in his concert series in Europe [Bremen, Lausanne] and
Japan [Tokyo, Osaka].)3 Yet, most striking, is how Halls regard for Davis
betrays a tone of wistful sadness, the black intellectual finding solace in the
black artistic genius, each of them in the business of securing, against con-
siderable odds, their souls.
Halls affinity for like-minded souls is elucidated by David Faflik in
this issue, as he tracesthrough, of all literary devices, the metaphor
Halls thinking through C. L. R. Jamess Mariners, Renegades, and Cast-
aways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In. The Trinida-
Farred To Be and Not to Be 657
environs of Merton College, Oxford, and made to confront the racism of life
in Birmingham. (Hospitality signifies here in Derridas sense: it contains
within it the possibilityfor the immigrantof finding both a place and
hostilitybeing figured as other and vulnerable to the violence of the
declining imperial center.) Because of Halls conflict, he is not so much a sub-
ject trapped (as Sam Selvons [1956] lonely Londoners are by their lack of
material resources) in the metropolis but an intellectual vital in giving politi-
cal and intellectual shape to the discourse of the challenges facing postwar
and postimperial Britain. Halls, then, is a positioning of the self that does not
quite fulfill the definition of an exile, but neither is he fully something else,
something sui generis, either.
To be or not to be. That, it would seem, is the question for Halls condi-
tiona condition shared by many, many others like him. Let us delineate, if
we can, the contorted topography of this condition. In the impossibility of
either declaring an affinity with the metropolis or forswearing it, the impos-
sibility of being either English or not English, there is only one possibility
for Hall to ground himself in England: the narrowly familialto make
England a sustainable home with Catherine and their children, Rebecca and
Jesse, and their grandchildren that is at once insistently domestic (local, if
not national, but such a disarticulation is precarious, at best)and reso-
lutely internationalist, to take ones political cues from all over the globe.
This Hall did, from the moment he became involved in the then incipient
New Lefts campaign against British, French, and Israeli aggression that was
the event of Suez and in his opposition to the Soviet tanks rolling into Hun-
gary in 1956, a commitment that wended its way through the promise (and
subsequent disillusionment) of Ghanaian independence in 1957 and the
Algerian war of independence in 195462, two very different paths toward
national sovereignty in Africa, of course; he was fully involved in the protest
that erupted after Cochranes murder in Notting Hill in 1959; and the events
of Paris, Chicago, and Czechoslovakia in 1968 coincided almost exactly with
the moment when he took up the reigns at CCCS from Hoggart.
For an intellectual such as Hall, the constant struggle to understand
the thinkers displacement is what it means to be at home and in an ongoing
conflict (conversation, he might correct me) with this place that enables his
work and is at the core of his work. Still, this place is not his. This is what it
means to make a life that is affectively rooted (by family, friends, and politi-
cal and intellectual associates) but philosophically always on the verge of
being unmoored (drawn to other places and recognizing resonances in other
struggles taking place far from Birmingham or London).
No wonder Hamlets phrase, with a small grammatical adjustment
(with one conjunction, and, replacing another, the historic or), comes so eas-
ily to mind: To be and not to be. That is the life that Hall made with his
wife, his political collaborators, and his writing partners (the many of them,
from Whannel to Martin Jacques, and the several in between, most espe-
cially those with whom he worked on Policing the Crisis), now captured and
made available as never before by The Stuart Hall Project.
It is in the tension between home and the negation Im not English
that it becomes possible to discern why, as Hall suggests in The Stuart Hall
Project, he is in solidarity with the position of that generation of immigrant
youth who came of age under Thatchers regime. Out of the struggle between
Farred To Be and Not to Be 663
them and their British antagonists, says Hall, emerged a critical recognition:
the dream of assimilation buried on both sides. More to the point, how-
ever, is the paraphrasing of the immigrant youths position that Hall offers
next: We are not going to stay on the terms of becoming just like you. To be
at home will, then, never translate into a national identity. Articulated
through this rejection, We are not going to become like you, is the ten-
sion that has shaped Hall as a thinker: to make a home here, which is not
the there from which he fled (the subject who fled the colonial violence
that so brutally affected his family), does not mean that heor subsequent
generationswill submit (fully) to the metropoles terms. The struggle, the
constitutive center of that ongoing conversation, is for Hall to understand
how he can be here without acceding to [their] terms. They are recogniz-
able, [their] terms, but they will never completely be his. They will not,
their terms, overwhelm Hall into Englishness. The only way to be at home
without a national identification is to be in tension, is to be shaped, mis-
shapen, sometimes torn asunder, by that tension.
In order to be, Hall must commit himself to making his own history
under circumstances found, given and transmitted from the past. In order to
be, he must, before all else, turn to face himself as he does with such insight,
a gentleness of spirit, and critical acumen in The Stuart Hall Project. Above all
else, then, what Akomfrahs documentary recapitulation of Halls provides, in
the context of this SAQ special issue and beyond, is not only the opportunity to
achieve a more historic sense of Halls trajectorya cinematic biography
of sortsbut also an occasion to once again think about Halls life and his
work and how they continue to resonate in our moment. The Stuart Hall Proj-
ect allows Hall to pose the questions, about race, diaspora, Marx, Gramsci,
theory, the Left, politics, culture (cultural production), identity, gender, sexual-
ity, and the everyday, directly to us, which makes Akomfrahs rendering noth-
ing other than an invitation to engage with the inspiring body of thoughtthe
corpus, even as we remember the corpsethat is the Hall oeuvre.
Notes
1 In a wonderfully touching moment, Hall and Manley exchange pleasantries, and Hall,
breaking into a laugh, remarks on being in a lower form [grade] at Jamaica College
than Manley was: You sixth formers, when giants walked the earth. There is some-
thing like awe, and no small amount of affection, in Halls voice as he says this.
2 In Whats My Name? Black Vernacular Intellectuals (Farred 2003), I offer a critique of
the extended silence on race that marks Halls work. The Stuart Hall Project demon-
strates the need for a revision of my earlier position.
664 The South Atlantic Quarterly October 2016
3 Or perhaps I should simply acknowledge that the sound track to The Stuart Hall Project
put me, at once, in a Davis and a Jarrett mood.
4 Hall was Hoggarts assistant director when CCCS was founded in 1964. It is also telling
that Hall, when discussing how he fashioned himself as an intellectual, insists that,
much as he regarded Hoggart and Raymond Williams highly, they could not serve as
intellectual models for him. This impossibility, he suggests, was wrought by the effects
of growing up in the Caribbeanand the consequence of being a black intellectual and
not a product of the Yorkshire working class (Hoggart) or the Welsh lower-middle class
(Williams). See, in this regard, Hall 1988 (on the cultural politics of the Greater London
Council) and Hall and Jacques 1990 (on the politics of aid as a radicalizing possibility).
References
Farred, Grant. 2003. Whats My Name? Black Vernacular Intellectuals. Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press.
Hall, Stuart. 1988. Face the Future. In Hall, Hard Road to Renewal, 23338.
Hall, Stuart. 1990a. Cold Comfort Farm. In Hall, Hard Road to Renewal, 7579.
Hall, Stuart. 1990b. The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left. New
York: Verso.
Hall, Stuart, et al. 1978. Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order. Basingstoke:
Macmillan.
Hall, Stuart, and Martin Jacques. 1990. People Aida New Politics Sweeps the Land. In
Hall, Hard Road to Renewal, 25158.
Hall, Stuart, and Paddy Whannel. 1964. The Popular Arts. New York: Beacon.
Handsworth Songs. 1986. Directed by John Akomfrah. London: Black Audio Film Collective.
Hoggart, Richard. 1961. The Uses of Literacy: Changing Patterns in English Mass Culture. Boston:
Beacon.
Naipaul, V. S. 1961. A House for Mr. Biswas. New York: Penguin.
Selvon, Sam. 1956. The Lonely Londoners. London: Longman Group.
The Stuart Hall Project. 2013. Directed by John Akomfrah. London: British Film Institute.
Angela McRobbie
Stuart Hall:
Art and the Politics of Black Cultural Production
many years) and, retrieving its meaning as bringing together both hybridity
and capacity, I repurpose it as a way of understanding the importance and
lasting impact of Halls work on British cultural studies and postcolonial
pedagogy. 1 This is a space that Hall establishes in order to conjoin an activist
engagement on various projects throughout his life, with his work as an aca-
demic in the UK university system. Indeed, in keeping with his implicit and
sometimes explicit critique of the Oxford and Cambridge system to which
he was first exposed on arriving in the United Kingdom (and then again on
many subsequent occasions) the space of pedagogy was also a subaltern
space, a radical position to happily occupy in an academic context where the
cloisters and the primacy of research were, and remain, the standard mark-
ers of status and success. How marvelous then that Hall was able to engi-
neer this academic subalternality to such effect. It was a high-risk strategy,
but one that saw Hall constantly champion a teaching mode in lesser institu-
tions, such as the new universities. Second, I address Halls close working
relationships with a group of young black and Asian artists dating back to
the mid- to late 1980s, which became the defining feature of the later stages
of his career. Third, I consider the way in which aspects of the rise of neolib-
eralism across the landscape of British society (what Hall originally called
the great moving right show) have impacted deleteriously on the social
conditions of both emergence and reproduction of this flowering of black
and Asian arts.
In relation to the group of artists I will be discussing, I use the word
British here reservedly, not to confirm some sort of movement, and certainly
not to echo the nationalist-populist rhetoric of Cool Britannia that came
into being around the self-promotional and brashly commercial strategies of
the Young British Artists (YBAs) of the 1990s, including the now world-
famous Damien Hirst. Deploying irony and ostensible humor, this YBA
group was a right-wing counter to the serious and theoretically informed art-
work (left, feminist, and antiracist) that preceded it.2 In what follows, I will
show how the art practices of the British black and Asian group, both in
terms of a diasporic emplacement in the United Kingdominside and out-
side the established arts worldand as regards an abiding concern with the
politics of race and ethnicity, echoed Halls style of open pedagogy. Halls
earlier influence in shaping the field of cultural studies extended into the
field of postcolonial art practice by means of a consistently anti-elitist rheto-
ric, one which confounded the division between high and low culture and
refuted the centrality of the lifted-out and gilded cosmopolitan capital cities.
Hall often had Birmingham on his mind. To go further, it could be argued
McRobbie Art and the Politics of Black Cultural Production 667
gies adopted by New Labour when it came to office in 1997, through its vocal
disavowal of left, feminist, and antiracist work as no longer relevant while
also asserting that this kind of work was being taken into account (McRob-
bie 2008). Through the joint forces of the popular press and the offices of
New Labour and its favored think tanks, there was an attempt to engineer a
disconnect, a disavowal of history through discounting the previous work of
antiracist groups and alliances that had fought for equal opportunities and
an end to workplace discrimination. Years of struggle and campaigning
came to be trivialized and undermined, associated with the kind of out-of-
date left-wing politics that made the party, or so it was argued, unelectable.
As an alternative, by the early 2000s, New Labour was championing a new
kind of black or Asian high achiever, the top girls/boys who would put the
meritocracy to good use and make their way into the boardroom or legal
chambers or, indeed, even the House of Commons. Given Halls previous
proximity to many of the people around Blair (as regular contributors to the
magazine Marxism Today), one could almost argue that it was his radicalism
that was being refuted, albeit with his presence continuing to haunt the
edges of the New Labour vocabularies. In The Aftermath of Feminism (2008)
I refer to this process as a complexification of backlash.6 What the public
relations machinery around New Labour sought were feel good stories
about successes in black and Asian business, not a radicalism that drew
attention to racial violence, black urban poverty, and unemploymentthat
all belonged to the past. Words such as poverty and unemployment virtually
disappeared from the vocabulary of issues to be tackled by New Labour in
office. Instead they were redesignated as words of insult, used in a pejorative
way to further stigmatize those locked into dependency culture and wel-
fare benefits. The repetitive power of single words and phrases, and therefore
the politics of language, played a key role in the securing of consent, in this
case, to a new form of corporate-political managerialism which had the de-
democratizing effect of discouraging people from everyday engagement in
politics, including local politics. Gilroy (2013) has also bemoaned this de-
politicizing effect during and after the New Labour years. These were the
sociocultural contours within which New Labour and the general population
reviled both the antiracist movements of the 1970s and 1980s and the legiti-
macy of black anger in regard to policing in the inner cities, favoring, rather,
notions of achievement, aspiration, and success. As Sarat Maharaj (1999) has
argued, this New Labour pathway replaced ideas of social justice with multi-
cultural managerialism, which with the growth of the creative economy
also led to various high profile programs in cultural leadership (Maharaj
672 The South Atlantic Quarterly October 2016
1999).7 By the time Hall had retired from the Open University and was dedi-
cating a good deal of time to the new black arts venue INIVA, he was also
entangled in these changes to the landscape, which could be defined as the
undoing of antiracism and the dismantling of multiculturalism. This
moment also brought Hall directly into the fraught terrain of arts and cul-
tural policy making, where, with the support of Gilane Tawadros and Lola
Young (now Baroness Young of Hornsey), he played a key role in bringing
the past, present, and future work of the black and Asian British artists into
a more formalized institutionalized space at just that point in time when the
arts and cultural fields were being restructured under the rubric of the new
managerialism endorsed by New Labour and presided over by Minister of
Culture Chris Smith at the Department for Culture, Media, and Sport. There
was already a new vocabulary of leadership, enterprise, and sponsorship in
the air that opposed previous ideas of support and subsidy for the arts.8 And
yet, Hall found this immersion in the INIVA project deeply rewarding; he
was working in a collective and talking endlessly with architect David Adjaye
and photographer Mark Sealy, while trying to fend off various ambitious
New Labour figures.
Conditions of Emergence:
From Arts Cooperatives to the Talent-Led Economy
Throughout his lifetime, Hall maintained an interest in the archival photog-
raphy of Caribbean immigration to the United Kingdom in the 1950s. In the
journal Ten 8 he wrote movingly about what a certain kind of genre of photo-
graphs said about the new life as it was to be seen by the folks back home.
The eagerness and sense of expectation was simultaneously undercut by
what Hall also described as the psychic ambivalence of fear and desire,
which underpinned the intensity of the host populations racial prejudice
and hatred, which, in turn, rendered this portraiture as anxious as it was
optimistic (Bailey and Hall 1992a, 1992b). The flow in Halls engagement
with visual culture moved from photography to film and then to art. This
flow was accompanied by Halls emphasis on understanding the dynamics
of sociopolitical change, understood in terms of conjunctural moments. As
mentioned above, a key conjunctural moment in the United Kingdom by the
mid- to late 1980s and early 1990s was what Hall labeled the time of new
ethnicities. Three seminal films at least partly triggered these consider-
ations of Britains new multiculturalism: My Beautiful Laundrette (Frears
1985), Looking for Langston (Julien 1989), and Young Soul Rebels (Julien 1991),
McRobbie Art and the Politics of Black Cultural Production 673
all of which opened up questions about visual culture and the act of looking,
youth culture/subculture, the black body, masculinity, gay sexual desire
against a backdrop of economic hardship, homophobia, and urban racism.
Two defining features of these works are that they defy the stable boundaries
of high and low culture and that they are inflected by the idea of subculture.9
The joyful moments in all three works also convey something of what Hall
was striving to verbalize, which was a sense of black and Asian desiring
agency, a sense of new subjects coming into being, new ethnicities, albeit
against a backdrop of racial violence and social exclusion. Thus, we could say
Halls writing touched on the paradoxes of black cultural production, of
being outside and inside (bearing in mind Ernesto Laclaus notion of the
constitutive outside). Meanwhile, black cultural production found itself sud-
denly undergoing a shift from the margins to the center at that point at
which the art establishment woke up and began to engage (albeit in a critical
vein, as witnessed in the exchange between Salman Rushdie and Hall fol-
lowing Rushdies hostile review of Akomfrahs 1987 film, Handsworth
Songs). The third space of black cultural production, including the early
films of both Akomfrah and Julien and echoing Halls own pedagogic style,
announced a presence that was other than modernity, distancing itself from
the avant-garde while also refusing the playful shiny surfaces of the post-
modern. History here was reduced neither to pastiche nor to costume
drama.10 Instead, it was urgently disputatious, a matter of nonchronological
questions about temporality, confronting what Bhabha (1994: 19192) called
the time lag of modernity. With original footage, Julien had Langston
Hughes dance forward with his poetry-rap of the Harlem Renaissance inter-
rupting the slower and carefully composed images of black gay desire as
played out in the spaces of contemporary club scenes.
To understand the coming together of the third space of black cultural
production, we need to consider the sociohistorical conditions of its emer-
gence. The latter-day legitimation of and awarding of prizes to these works
by painters, photographers, filmmakers, and sculptors from Bailey, Sonia
Boyce, Chila Burman, Julien, Akomfrah, and Yinka Shonibare to Chris Ofili
and Steve McQueen took place after the event of their being present. The
1989 show at the Hayward Gallery, The Other Story, curated by Rasheed
Araeen, which showed works mostly from an older generation of artists (but
did include Eddie Chambers, Keith Piper, and Boyce), was, as Jean Fisher
(2009) reminded her readers in her Tate essay from 2009, met with hostility
and undisguised racial prejudice on the part of establishment arts writers.
For example, Brian Sewell (quoted in Fisher 2009: 5) wrote that these artists
674 The South Atlantic Quarterly October 2016
parroted Western visual idioms they dont understand as third rate imita-
tions of the white mans clich. Nevertheless, what created and sustained
these younger artists in their practice were a set of conditions, the outcome
of education and cultural policies pursued by social democratic and left-
wing municipal local authorities from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s,
albeit in circumstances of constraint and with decreasing budgets until that
point in 1997 when the power of local government was curtailed and virtu-
ally halted by the incoming New Labour government. (This too was part of
the anti-municipalism of New Labour, for the reasons of local governments
capacity to foster new and rekindle old forms of radical democracy.) There
was a direct line of connection between this educational-cultural appara-
tus and the pedagogic third space of cultural studies. Julien, as a boy grow-
ing up in Bow in east London and attending a local comprehensive, was
encouraged to apply through an access route to Central Saint Martins Col-
lege of Art and Design thanks to a Hackney youth arts program run along
youth club lines. Burman, whose father was an immigrant from the Punjab
and was forced to make his living with an ice cream van, grew up in working-
class Liverpool and got a first from Leeds Metropolitan University and then
completed a masters degree from the prestigious Slade School in London.
Shonibare, the British-African artist whose work won the preeminent place
on Londons Trafalgar Square plinth in 2011, worked in the early days for
Southwark Council in arts administration, and he too benefited from free
higher education in the anti-elitist art-school sector. Likewise, though from
a younger generation, McQueen has talked a lot about his time in a White
City (west London) comprehensive in a period where black boys almost
automatically found themselves put into the lowest nonacademic streams
(Aikenhead 2014). Nevertheless, thanks to a few inner-city radical teachers
he found his way into the Chelsea College of Arts and from there to Gold-
smiths, University of London. So it was not that these institutions offered
some sort of antiracist utopia (far from it), but they did provide publicly
funded avenues that have since been more or less closed down. For each of
these artists, growing up in times of harsh racial violence and inequality,
there were still routes for disadvantaged students made available through
local democracy in the form of studentships, part-time jobs, and even the
possibility of subsidized shared housing for artists under the remit of the
Greater London Council. Secondary-school teachers and youth workers also
played a key role in supporting black and ethnic-minority young people as
part of various urban antiracist initiatives. The removal of such provision
and the rise of the commercial market and private sponsorship in the arts in
McRobbie Art and the Politics of Black Cultural Production 675
the last fifteen years has arguably had dire consequences for the reproduc-
tion of this generation of black and Asian artists, insofar as the tropes of
excessive competition and the high personal costs that have to be borne in
order to get this far in the new talent led economy already excludes so
many, while also stopping in its tracks a more collective ethos. These munic-
ipal environments were also the very spaces that Hall chose to associate
with, for example, arts organizations and photography workshops existing in
a kind of extramural relationship with the bigger former polytechnics (now
new universities). In this sense, we can see continuities in the cultural stud-
ies tradition stretching from Raymond Williamss involvement in adult edu-
cation through to the involvement of Hall and others around him in regional
and London-based arts projects. These conditions of emergence depended
then on a set of openings that decades of radical, often grass-roots activism,
had made possible. What Hall did was to pitch in with the kind of debates
and arguments that moved things forward, and this was most apparent in
the New Ethnicities and other articles that stressed the need for impurity
and nonidentity, for difference and differance for the necessary lack of fix-
ity around the category of black or Asian.
Hall offers one of the most succinct accounts of his engagement with
the black and Asian British artists in his lecture at the University of East
London titled Black Diaspora Artists in Britain: Three Moments in Post-
War History (2006). Here, he offers a wider and more historical account of
what I have called the conditions of emergence, that is, a conjunctural anal-
ysis which allows him to pay particular attention to two specific groups, what
he calls the last colonials who arrived typically from the Caribbean in the
UK (and also Paris) in the 1950s and for whom at least initially the space of
international modernism and abstractionism permitted a sense of possibil-
ity even if for some, a few years later, such optimism came to be retracted.
Hall cites the emergence of the second group, the postcolonials as a discur-
sive formation whose coming together takes the form of a kind of clustering
in what, as Hall quoting David Scott (2004) describes, could be seen as a
problem space. This work (and he mentions a range of visual artists from
Keith Piper and Boyce to Julien and Burman), argues Hall, takes the form of
a constitutive outside to our island story. In the work itself, the interroga-
tive is entwined with the aesthetic. These practices take shape in the context
of the presence of race as a key political signifier in postwar British urban
life, and they find expression in the context of the popular antiracist politics
from the late 1970s and the rising tide of black anger in a social context of
being pushed around by the police with the consequences that nothing
676 The South Atlantic Quarterly October 2016
can protect the black body. Hall then goes on to herald this emergence of
the new black and Asian arts movement as a kind of coming out. He points
to the polemical and politicised art that broke down the space between
image and language, which borrowed from urban forms such as graffiti and
the music of marginalized youth subcultures. This intermingling contested
the divisions between high culture and popular or vernacular culture, and it
defined the work as a whole as hybridic, at odds with, or holding at a distance
from, the need for recognition from the mainstream art world, which from
the start could be perceived as hostile. This self-positioning as extraneous to
the mainstream of the arts is also what brings the work close together with
Halls own preferred third space of cultural studies pedagogy.
The question is then raised as to what the future had in store for this
group of subaltern artists with whom Hall formed such a close bond? We
could summarize some of the socioeconomic transformations to which they
became subject under the label of the creative economy, which was spear-
headed by the New Labour government with a remit given to the Department
of Culture, Media, and Sport to encourage growth within the sector that
included artists, fashion designers, musicians, graphic designers, and so
on.11 The new focus on creativity was announced with great fanfare, but the
underlying emphasis was on encouraging overall a more highly individual-
ized and entrepreneurial outlook across this sector of young people, while
also advocating self-employment and thus self-reliance. With the United
Kingdom then priding itself on expanding its talent-led economy the so-
called Young British Artists (with Hirst as a figurehead) gladly occupied this
space, singing the praises of the union of art and business.12 A new vocabu-
lary came into being, led by a political rationality of competitive individual-
ism and enterprise culture. Indeed, in the United Kingdom under the aus-
pices of the new creative economy artists came to occupy a kind of pioneer
role: the artist as human capital (McRobbie 2015). This ethos of personal
ambition, the requirement to become an entrepreneur of the self, the need to
multitask (to spread the risk, as the advocates of this ethos would advise), the
need to search for sponsors and self-promote at every possible opportunity,
clearly had consequences for the pedagogic, self-effacing, third space.13 The
repercussions that this shift away from locally funded and regionally based
arts provision toward a more fully market-driven and sponsorship-led model
have had for the artists I have been referring to are as yet unclear. We would
need to look closely at the artists curriculum vitae one at a time to determine
such repercussions. We would also have to take into account the kinds of
McRobbie Art and the Politics of Black Cultural Production 677
generic factors that Bourdieu (1993) alluded to in his analysis of the art
field, such as early youthful days being devoted to joint projects, where there
is strength in numbers, giving way later on to more individualized profes-
sional careers. However, in Bourdieus time, the category of artist was also
something of a professional rarity, which allowed Bourdieu to develop the
argument that the long period of waiting for recognition while living on a pit-
tance was something only possible for those with access to private means.
Now that hundreds of thousands of young people are being trained to gradu-
ate level in the diverse field of creative arts, the question of how they can
make a living becomes one of much wider concern. The artists we are refer-
ring to here would have been exposed to both the earlier social democratic
period of relative munificence and the last fifteen years of neoliberal individ-
ualism as it came to be translated into an ethos for artists and creative types.
How then will a younger generation of black and Asian artists emerge
given the sweeping changes across the landscape of the British universities
and the gradual replacement of cultural studies with a more business-
focused curriculum (McRobbie 2015)? The entrepreneurial university not
only champions a more competitive ethos but also requires students to take
out loans to cover the cost of fees. How this has impacted the ability of black
and Asian students to train in fine arts, film, photography, and so on is yet to
be fully investigated. The influence of creative entrepreneurship pedagogy,
cluttered as it is with a fine array of tool kits and modules as to how to com-
mercialize the work, will surely diminish the generous, gift-giving dimen-
sions of the third space, which I have attributed to Halls academic oeuvre.
Within the audit culture of the new university regime, or bedded down inside
the spaces of the art school today, there is an ethos that weighs against the
giving of time where there is not, as Wendy Brown (2015) puts it, a return on
investment. In effect, both the breadth and range of the curriculum and the
teacherly style of its delivery is truncated or compromised when enterprise
culture steps in. This does not augur well for future generations of artists
from backgrounds similar to the group of artists we are currently discussing.
Through the years the artists who gathered around Hall had to negotiate
pathways through these now standard requirements which emphasize not
just self-promotion but also the seeking of prizes, the search for sponsors,
the relentless application for grants, and the whole business of making a liv-
ing in already difficult circumstances. In such a highly competitive sphere, if
one is not being short-listed for prizes or being represented by a leading gal-
lerist and is not selling work, then one is subject to an abyss of self-doubt.
678 The South Atlantic Quarterly October 2016
such spaces. Gilroy countered this argument forcefully back in 1987 when
he posited the political spaces of the times as those of street, community,
home, and leisure environment (i.e., youth clubs!). Gilroys move followed
the Hallian British cultural studies tradition of envisaging the terrain of
popular culture as a site for new political emergences and uprisings: outside
the police stations and courts of law, inside the schools and on the streets
(Gilroy 1987; McRobbie 2015). A recent polemical intervention, which, echo-
ing the ideas of Hardt and Negri, aims at bringing together the operaismo
work with that of critical writing on race, can be found in the coauthored
work of Stefano Harney and Fred Moten (2013). Under the idea of the under-
commons, there is an attempt to validate the autonomist operaismo tradition
by arguing contentiously that it in fact followed the lead from black US radi-
cal traditions including those of the Black Panther Party. Alongside this
claim, Motens poetic voice argues that precarity art transcends the limita-
tions of the European constraints of high and low culture, doing so, as Gilroy
(1993) demonstrates so forcefully, through the bitter and painful historical
experiences of the black Atlantic.
Indeed, it would be amiss not to bring into this discussion the seminal
work of Gilroy, who in effect attended to the gap in the early Birmingham
cultural studies project of the 1970s and 1980s regarding the question of art,
literature, and music. Forceful exclusion from the European canon, from
Immanuel Kant to Theodor Adorno in fact created a space unstriated by the
violent hierarchies of high and low that produced the various forms of black
expressive culture as a counter-culture of modernity, one of whose formal
characteristics was to register a non-hermetic mode, antiphonal, open-to-
the-audience call and response address that echoed slaves songs and came
to be formalized in the music of the black churches. There is a close relation
between this black Atlantic aesthetic and the pedagogic style I have here
attributed to Hall as a third space. If this openness also finds expression in
artworks themselves (and one could attend to this question more fully by
considering, for example, Akomfrahs 2013 film/installation The Stuart Hall
Project and Juliens 2013 Playtime, in which Hall makes a fleeting appear-
ance), nevertheless, to maintain a radical openness and a defiance of the
dynamics of competition in favor of cooperation in times such as these
pushes artists into a difficult position when they are subjected to the full
panoply of dispositifs that entail putting oneself forward for prizes and find-
ing oneself subject to the same kind of rankings and ratings processes that
now prevail across all sectors of professional life. As Nstor Garca Canclini
(2014) points out, in the contemporary art world this means being endlessly
680 The South Atlantic Quarterly October 2016
ranked, or left unranked through the regular lists published in glossy maga-
zines and newspapers naming the top ten or one hundred artists in the
world, or the top ten curators, or simply the top ten players in the gallery
and museum sector. This intensifies the forces of individualization, which
in turn makes it difficult not to be anxious about fulfilling these bench-
marks of success. Therefore, is the openness of Halls third space and the
role it played in the lives of the artists I have mentioned now a matter of clo-
sure? What kind of language would be needed to understand the more
recent conditions of artistic production in the new problem spaces of post-
colonial art? For example, the concerns raised by Nana Adusei-Poku (2012)
in regard to recent debates, mostly conducted in the United States, on post-
Black art, indicates a double movement: on the one hand, the desire of con-
temporary African-American artists to be considered in terms other than
those of blackness, a generational riposte against identity politics, and on the
other hand, the US inflection of what I referred to earlier as the neoliberal
political sensibility that claims that the times of overt racial inequalities are
now in the past, which in turn justifies the idea of the end of multicultural-
ism with its negative associations of publicly funded provisions. In any case,
no sooner is this kind of facile proclamation made than there is an outpour-
ing of black anger across the United States about police brutality against
young black men and women, giving rise to the Black Lives Matter cam-
paign and reminding us forcefully of what triggered Akomfrah and Juliens
earliest works (Gilroy 2014).
Notes
1 To explain, I draw on Bhabhas (1994) idea of Third Space, which he expands on in an
early article reprinted in The Politics of Location as a disruptive time/space created by
postcolonial cultures within the dominant politics of enunciation and language. Here,
however, I decapitalize it as third space and locate the term as a meeting point that
marks the rich and animated dialogues between Bhabha and Hall.
2 I am thinking here of the work of Victor Burgin, Mitra Tabrizian, and Isaac Julien as
well as the American feminist art of the likes of Judy Chicago, all of which many of the
YBAers would have been exposed to at university and then would have loudly rejected.
Please note, however, that the Saatchi Sensation exhibition at the Royal Academy in
1998, which showcased this so-called new generation, also included work by Shonibare
and Chris Ofili.
3 I will return to this point at the conclusion, but the film My Beautiful Laundrette was a
key point of reference here, and it appeared prior to Hanif Kureishis novel The Buddha
of Suburbia (1990), but both were driven by the idea of British youth culture, a trope
deeply inscribed within the Birmingham CCCS collective unconscious. The vernacu-
McRobbie Art and the Politics of Black Cultural Production 681
lar of the Caribbean, its infusion into the punk n reggae mix and the ethos of rock
against racism endured in Halls approach to the idea of art.
4 This point was made when I presented an early version of this essay as a talk at the CSA
at Riverside May 2015. Thanks to Jaafar Aksikas for the invitation and for his valuable
comments.
5 I am thinking here of Juliens first films, especially Young Soul Rebels (1991).
6 Fisher (2009) makes a similar argument in regard to the Cool Britannia moment and
the way in which artists like Gilbert and George along with many of the YBAs com-
prised a right-wing backlash against these prior moments of political anger about racial
inequality being mobilized by artists and filmmakers such as those cited here.
7 More recently, see Ahmed 2012 on diversity management.
8 The negative connotations of the word subsidy as it is associated with the arts and cul-
ture is followed through to the current conservative and previous coalition govern-
ments in the United Kingdom, and more or less adhered to in the influential Warwick
Commission report of 2015.
9 This was a lasting hallmark of the work of this group for over nearly three decades, from
the early 1980s on, one might for example also point to the film Babymother (Henriques
1998) for its high-energy collage effect achieved through combining a seemingly popu-
lar narrative/feature film idiom with a strongly foregrounded sound track and art-
directed cinematography. Like Juliens Young Soul Rebels and Looking for Langston, Hen-
riquess Babymother drew directly on the black youth culture in London.
10 Shonibare takes the popular genre of costume drama and mixes it up, creating sculp-
tural pieces which rewrite history from the viewpoint of the colonized other.
11 Cool Britannia was the phrase used to promote these new cultural policies.
12 Tracey Emin gladly collaborated with Becks beer, while Hirst embarked on various
commercial activities, including, for a while, a restaurant.
13 I recall a turning point when, in 2005, Hall was invited to speak at the Institute of Con-
temporary Arts (ICA) with a panel of other guests from style magazines such as Dazed
and Confused. Hall was sidelined and barely given time to talk, in an atmosphere that
was chaired in Blairite mode by the then director who was championing the talent-led
economy and a new moment of supposedly postpolitical black art and image making.
Afterward, Hall said that he regretted accepting the invitation, since the main idea was
that postcolonial cultural studies was now out of date and no longer needed.
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David Bell
Hall never comments (as far as I have seen) on this reversal of his own map
and seems to use it mainly to humorously evidence his own incompetence as
a geography teacher. But it is too tempting to read it as some form of neces-
sary rectification, or at least a drawing of attention toward what we geogra-
phers like to call the power of maps. Now we know where we are.
Of course, thats one of Halls famous strategies: to take something
obvious, well known, unremarkable and unremarked on, and drawing our
attention to all that it contains, all that it reveals and conceals, to get us to see
differently. The most famous example is of course the cup of sweet tea.
Although it is so well known that many of us can recite it pretty much word
for word, here it is:
People like me who came to England in the 1950s have been there for centu-
ries; symbolically, we have been there for centuries. I was coming home. I am
the sugar at the bottom of the English cup of tea. I am the sweet tooth, the
sugar plantations that rotted generations of English childrens teeth. There
are thousands of others beside me that are, you know, the cup of tea itself.
Because they dont grow it in Lancashire, you know. Not a single tea planta-
tion exists within the United Kingdom. This is the symbolization of English
688 The South Atlantic Quarterly October 2016
identityI mean, what does anybody in the world know about an English per-
son except that they cant get through the day without a cup of tea?
Where does it come from? CeylonSri Lanka, India. That is the out-
side history that is inside the history of the English. (Hall 1991: 4849)
As Les Back writes, after this it was impossible to ever drink a cup of tea again
without being reminded of the imperial traces in the brown leaves and the
sugars sweet taste (Back and Figueroa 2014: 353). And its truethis drawing
attention stays in your mind. There are many other instances dotted through-
out Halls work, where he makes us pause for thought. Theres similar mis-
chief in this quotationimagining tea plantations in Lancashire, the sugar
rotting childrens teethas there is in the misdrawn trade winds. And so we
all persevere with our geography, enlivened by Halls sideways approach to the
subject.1 Lets spend some time looking more explicitly at the interactions
between Hall and his disciplinary home, cultural studies, and geography.
to teach and the hours spent wandering the library shelves, reading the peri-
odicals, cramming my geographical knowledge so as to avoid those faux pas,
trying not to reverse the trade winds. A year into my new job, Peter Jacksons
Maps of Meaning (1989) was published. It was utterly unlike the cultural
geography I was now dimly aware of and pretty uninterested in. The book
had a Christo wrapped buildings picture on the cover. Its foreword, by
Derek Gregory (1989: vii), began by telling us readers that the intellectual
scene is changing fast and that concepts of place, space and landscape have
become central to some of the most exciting developments across the whole
field of the humanities and the social sciences. This message was exhilarat-
ing, to be sure. It felt like a great time to be a geographer.
Jacksons book introduced us to this new cultural geography and to cul-
tural studies. It has been rightly hailed as a classic in human geography in
at least one of our journals (Jackson 2005). Reflecting on the books life and
on its classic status, Jackson explains that his mission in writing it was to
recognize the significance of what was happening in Cultural Studies and
to translate this material for a geographical audience (746). This statement
is a bit modest, but also an interesting way of framing the bookas a trans-
lation of cultural studies. I wonder, what got lost in translation? Why did
cultural studies need translating for us geographers? Anyway, one of the peo-
ple that Jackson introduced us to was, of course, Hall. For this book is about
a certain formation of cultural studies, and the Centre for Contemporary
Cultural Studies (CCCS) at the University of Birmingham is a heavy pres-
ence (for a map of new directions in cultural geography, see also Cosgrove
and Jackson 1987). Halls work is often turned to by Jackson, and I certainly
turned (and was turned on) to the CCCS approach, taken from Maps of Mean-
ing to Resistance through Rituals (Hall and Jefferson 1976) and Policing the
Crisis (Hall et al. 1978). And then down the rabbit hole of cultural studies ...
Jackson notes in his later reflections on Maps of Meaning that there was
two-way traffic between cultural studies and geography at this heady time:
our cultural turn coincided with a spatial turn across the humanities and
the social sciencesas Gregory alluded to in his foreword. And coming
toward us like a speeding train was also postmodernism. For some, the
excesses of postmodernism swallowed up the discipline, while the ascen-
dancy of the cultural led geography away from important issues such as poli-
tics, economics, injustice. I find this collapsing of different agendas and
effects troubling and feel the need to rescue the new cultural geography
from being thrown out with the bathwater of the postmodern. (Actually, I
feel a bit nostalgic for the postmodern, too.)
690 The South Atlantic Quarterly October 2016
about identity, often about his own identity. But in a series of essays from the
mid- to late 1980s, he centrally concerned himself with the question of iden-
tity. By the time I landed in cultural studies in 1995, this was the Hall we
were mainly talking and thinking about.
As I noted earlier, writing this essay has given me a chance to reac-
quaint myself with some of Halls writings, and I have particularly enjoyed
going back to a small piece called Minimal Selves (Hall 1987). Ive always
especially liked its title and its tone. Its an intervention from an event at
the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, called The Real Me, and
was for lots of us in cultural studies an important text on the question of
identitythat phrase inviting the obvious question: Just who is the real me?
Halls paper is a response to that event and its contextwhat we might
call the postmodernizing of identity, its decentering and fragmentation. The
idea of identity as a necessary fiction (and how well I remember an essay
we used to set on this very issue). Minimal Selves involves generous obser-
vations of the present momentas he addresses the audience, noting in the
postmodern age, you all feel so dispersed, adding that I become centred,
meaning that the dispersed experience of the migrant, as he terms it here,
has been taken as the paradigmatic postmodern subject position. This is
coming home with a vengeance, he concludes (more of that characteristic
mischief). The essay/talk continues with some thoughts about home, about
the arbitrary closures of identity, about living with, living through differ-
ence (45). But Hall insists on keeping the political at its heartincluding
but not limited to the politics of identityrefusing to see minimal selves
as atomized and individuated.4
So one central Stuart Hall project is the project of identity, and here we
might include the project (or perhaps problem) of the cultural in both cul-
tural studies and cultural geography. This question, of what counts as the cul-
tural, is beyond my reach here, but within the story of cultural geography it has
been a continued focus, with both expansive and more tightly defined vari-
ants. While some geographers threw their hands in the air in the mid-1990s,
bemoaning that now everything was cultural, others more patiently ques-
tioned what putting cultural and geography together really means and achieves.
One of the pleasures of rereading Minimal Selves was to see the
actual text again, like a forgotten old friend, to hold it in my hands (albeit in
a crumpled, scribbled-on photocopy). That made me reflect on other old
friends from my collection of Halls workthough I have just moved into a
new office at work and am struggling to find lots of my books in the chaos of
hurried packing/unpacking. So, casting about in my memory, rather than
Bell I Persevered with My Geography 693
and not just the very rich, to which she adds that we must understand its
attractions and its purchase if we are to engage with it. But I struggle,
though Im now doubly certain that we must get the students to read Hall
and OSheas critique. Their opening discussion of how politicians mobilize
common sense rings ever truer in the wake of weeks of campaigning, end-
less sound bites and photo opportunities, and a few stage-managed debates
and other media spectacles. Writing back in 2011, Hall (2011: 723) could
hope that there was as yet no overwhelming majority appetite for the neo-
liberal project. The outcome of the general election now suggests otherwise,
at least in England. (He even speculates in that essay about a future Conser-
vative majority.)
It seems to me that we need Hall more than ever; we need to keep
working on his conjunctural analysis, need to keep working at the boundaries
of theory and politics, need to keep unsettling commonsense neoliberalism.
The present conjuncture requires our intervention, in and out of the class-
room. No matter where we call our homewhatever island we find ourselves
inhabitingwe must all continue learning to practice cultural studies and
persevere with our geography.
Notes
1 In work on foods geographies, theres an obvious lineage from Halls cup of sweet tea
to later studies that follow the thing and trace the geographies of foodstuffs. See, e.g.,
Cook et al. 2004.
2 Cultural Studies Now was held at the University of East London in 2007; for transcripts
of many of the talks, including those by Hall and Massey, see CCCS/UEL 2007.
3 And here I cannot help but be reminded that Hall was a big fan of the Australian soap
opera Neighbours.
4 This period in Halls work is marked by an intensifying theorization of identityhe later
reflects critically on what he sees as his ventriloquising of capital-T Theory, exclaiming
at one point, Poor Lacan, remembering what he sees as the rough handling that psy-
choanalysis sometimes got in this ventriloquism (CCCS/UEL 2007).
5 The Stencilled Papers series is archived at the University of Birmingham: www.bir-
mingham.ac.uk/schools/historycultures/departments/history/research/projects/cccs
/publications/stencilled-occasional-papers.aspx.
References
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Barnett, Clive. 1998. The Cultural Turn: Fashion or Progress in Human Geography? Anti-
pode 30, no. 4: 37994.
Bell, David. 2009. Cultural Studies and Human Geography. In International Encyclopedia
of Human Geography, edited by Rob Kitchin and Nigel Thrift, 43741. Amsterdam:
Elsevier.
696 The South Atlantic Quarterly October 2016
Jackson, Peter. 1989. Maps of Meaning: An Introduction to Cultural Geography. London: Unwin
Hyman.
Jackson, Peter. 2005. Authors Response. Progress in Human Geography 29, no. 6: 74647.
Keith, Michael. 2009. Urbanism and City Spaces in the Work of Stuart Hall. Cultural Studies
23, no. 4: 53858.
Massey, Doreen. 2000. Travelling Thoughts. In Without Guarantees: In Honour of Stuart
Hall, edited by Paul Gilroy, Lawrence Grossberg, and Angela McRobbie, 22531. Lon-
don: Verso.
Massey, Doreen. 2014. Symposium: The Kilburn Manifesto: After Neoliberalism? Environ-
ment and Planning A 46, no. 9: 203441.
Rommens, Aarnoud. 2006. In Other Words: Subaltern Epistemologies or How to Eat Hum-
ble Pie. Image and Narrative, no. 14. www.imageandnarrative.be/inarchive/painting
/Aarnoud_Rommens.htm.
The Stuart Hall Project. 2013. Directed by John Akomfrah. London: British Film Institute.
Jernej Habjan
son, thinkers who published their early books on literature before moving on
to politics and writing groundbreaking cultural studies books, while Hall,
also in the midfifties, abandoned his dissertation on Henry James before fin
ishing it, let alone turning it into a book.
Culture Is Ordinary
Between 1950 and 1955, Williams, Hoggart, and Thompson published their
first books: Reading and Criticism, Auden, and William Morris, respectively.
By 1963, these titles were eclipsed by follow-ups of no less revealing, yet quite
different, titles: Culture and Society, The Uses of Literacy, and The Making of
the English Working Class. At the beginning of this sequence of a dozen years,
Hall used his Rhodes Scholarship to escape his middle-class, autoracist fam
ily in Kingston and to study English at Oxford; by the middle of the sequence,
he quit his dissertation on James in the face of the Suez crisis and Nikita
Khrushchevs moves against both Joseph Stalin and Hungary; and, by the
end, Hall was already a key member of the collective response to these events
called the New Left and a student of the three sociological and historiograph
ical follow-ups to the three early books of literary criticism. In 1964 he
assisted Hoggart in institutionalizing this new kind of sociology and histori
ography in the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University
of Birmingham. Five years later, he took over from Hoggart. A decade later,
he left the center as by then already the legendary birthplace of cultural stud
ies to take up a professorship at the Open University.
In Halls work, which more often than not was collaborative and inter
ventionistleading Grant Farred (2007: 85) to speak of the collaborative
Hall modalityone can hardly find a single-authored monograph among
the many articles and interviews, and there certainly is no early book of liter
ary criticism, literature occupying Halls attention only in rare moments
(95). (In thisand only thisrespect, Hall resembles an analytical philoso
pher.) There are only a theater review in the very first issue of the New Left
Review, a short article on Lady Chatterleys Lover in the sixth one, and a book
review in the tenth onethe antepenultimate issue of the British New Lefts
print organ that he edited. And fifteen years later, there appears A Critical
Survey of the Theoretical and Practical Achievements of the Last Ten Years,
an introductory paper at a conference on the sociology of literature that is in
fact an early version of his above-mentioned Cultural Studies: Two Para
digms (which is indeed devoted to cultural studies); in this early version, the
two paradigms, Williams and Althusser, are still only syntagmatic elements:
702 The South Atlantic Quarterly October 2016
Williams I, II, and III (Hall 1977: 12), followed by Althusser I, II,
and III (45). If Williams never really left literary studies, Hall never really
entered it.
It is then indeed ironic . . . that as the Birmingham models influence
spread within Britain and then across the Atlantic to the United States, it
found its most readyif not most hospitablereception in English depart
ments (or their fringes, more precisely). . . . Halls uncompleted thesis on
Henry James returned to situate him, however unintentionally, sometimes
squarely, sometimes disjunctively, as central to the very discipline he had
abandoned almost three decades earlier for more direct involvement in polit
ical struggle (Farred 2003: 167). Moreover, as we have seen, unintention
ally, sometimes squarely, sometimes disjunctively is also how Halls cul
tural studies, his alternative to literary studies, returned to situate him as
central to cultural studies itself, the very discipline he helped develop on
behalf of political struggle, so that there is a political impulse that per
vades his work (Blackburn 2014: 75) throughout all of its phases, from cul
turalism to structuralism to structuralist Marxism to poststructuralism and
post-Marxism (Peck 2001: 200). In other words, cultural studies, too, is a
field that, by 1992, failed to meet Halls (1992: 285, 286) intentions: looking
at what one can only call the deconstructive deluge (as opposed to decon
structive turn) which had overtaken American literary studies, Hall (1992:
286) feared
that if cultural studies gained an equivalent institutionalization in the Ameri
can context, it would, in rather the same way, formalize out of existence the
critical questions of power, history, and politics. Paradoxically, . . . there is no
moment now, in American cultural studies, where we are not able, extensively
and without end, to theorize power. . . . There is hardly anything in cultural
studies which isnt so theorized. And yet, there is the nagging doubt that this
overwhelming textualization of cultural studies own discourses somehow
constitutes power and politics as exclusively matters of language and textual
ity itself.
So the kind of cultural studies that, as I claimed above, engulfs not only its
predecessors such as literary studies but also the initial cultural studies itself
is the textualist cultural studies, a result of the kind of deconstructionism
that depoliticized first literary studies and then, by paradoxically recognizing
politics everywhere, also cultural studies. Hence the paradox of what Hall
(1996: 402) called the return of the literary in the cultural studies of the
1990s, that is, the return of the pre-theoretical impressionist meditation that
Habjan Ordinary Literature Philosophy 703
had passed for literary studies before it was delegitimized precisely by inter
ventions such as that of cultural studies, only to return, by the 1990s, in the
form of quasi-autobiographical cultural studies. At that time, Hall (1992:
278) responded by stressing the dirtiness of the semiotic game and by try
ing to return the project of cultural studies from the clean air of meaning
and textuality and theory to the something nasty down below. Needless to
say, to conclude that this something nasty down below is but vulgar empir
icism would itself be to reproduce what Hall called, in this 1992 interview,
the deconstructive deluge (as opposed to deconstructive turn). Rather,
Halls something nasty down below is simply semiotics as materialism. It
is what, for example, enabled Hall (1986: 57) to respond six years earlier to
the post-Marxism of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffes Hegemony and
Socialist Strategy in the following way: [The Laclau and Mouffe] book thinks
that the world, social practice, is language, whereas I want to say that the
social operates like a language. The allusion to Jacques Lacans (2006: 737)
dictum that the unconscious . . . is structured like a language is fully
intended, of course, as the ending of Halls (1986: 57) paragraphs reads:
What seems to happen is that, in the reaction against a crude materialism,
the metaphor of x operates like y is reduced to x = y. There is a very dramatic
condensation which, in its movement, reminds me of theoretical reduction
ism very strongly. You see it most clearly in something like the reworking of
Lacanian psychoanalysis. All this less than a year after the first and paradig
matic Laclau and Mouffe book, and three years before the first English-lan
guage and no less paradigmatic Slavoj iek book, a neo-Marxist defense of
Lacan published, granted, in Laclau and Mouffes post-Marxist series at
Verso (the publishing house that, first as New Left Books, amplified the New
Left Review in its role as the main print organ of the British New Left).
negative answer: One thing is sure: it cannot mean the very close reading of
very few textssecularized theology, really (canon!)that has radiated
from the cheerful town of New Haven over the whole field of literary stud
ies (Moretti 2000b: 208). And in the New Left Review itself, he character
ized close reading as a theological exercisevery solemn treatment of very
few texts taken very seriouslywhereas what we really need is a little pact
with the devil: we know how to read texts, now lets learn how not to read
them (Moretti 2000a: 57). Five years later, after a series of suggestions to
replace the deconstructive close reading of the canon with what he termed
the distant reading of the world literary system (56), a positive answer fol
lowed in the form of the following retrospection: While recent literary the
ory was turning for inspiration towards French and German metaphysics, I
kept thinking that there was actually much more to be learned from the
natural and the social sciences (Moretti 2005: 2).
Indeed, Moretti produced a new object of knowledge, world literature
as a historically differentiated system of forms, by following the example of
world-systems analysis. And he relied on quantitative historys graphs, geog
raphys maps, and evolutionary biologys trees to outline, respectively, time,
space, and, finally, chronotopes of some of the formal devices that overdeter
mine the genres that in turn overdetermine world literature. Morettis dis
tant reading subverts the hegemonic version of close readingthe decon
structive deluge (as opposed to deconstructive turn) which had overtaken
American literary studiesby turning to the institution of reading itself,
that is, to literary studies. For what he reads in order to formalize it by using
graphs, maps, and trees are the very readings produced by individual
national philologies: instead of reading a canonical novel for the nth time, he
defamiliarizes it by reading histories of the novel and tracing any world-his
toric processes that they might reveal if read synoptically rather than indi
vidually, comparatively rather than within a given national philology. This is
necessarily distant reading conducted collectively: readings by the Stanford
Literary Lab, which Moretti cofounded with Matthew Jockers in 2010, can be
neither close nor his own.
The world-systems school conceptualizes modern history as a process
of forming an interstate system structured by a division between the histori
cally shifting core of capital accumulation and its (semi)periphery. The core,
semiperiphery, and periphery migrate in accordance with the movement of
systemic cycles of accumulation. As we can see, for example, in Giovanni
Arrighis (1994: 364) diagram of these cycles of accumulation, the cycle cen
tered in Genoa begins to take shape in the late fourteenth century and is
Habjan Ordinary Literature Philosophy 705
idiographic, topical philosophy, to the level of the very notion of the perfor
mative. One might even claim that Butlerian performativity theory is the
opposite of Austinian theory of performatives, writes J. Hillis Miller (2007:
227). This transition from literature as Austins condition of impossibility of
ordinary language to Butlers condition of possibility is mediated by Derri
das thesis that literature is the condition of (im)possibility of ordinary lan
guage. Now, the second theoretical project in effect drops this condition of
(im)possibility: for Moretti, Casanova, and Beecroft, rather than the condi
tion of (im)possibility of ordinary language, literature quite simply is an ordi
nary language (like a language, as Hall might say, but also a language). I
want to address the epistemological potential of this second project and read
it as a reply to the deconstructivist uses of Austins ordinary language phi
losophy. My aim is hence a theoretical and political reflection on the ongoing
transition, in literary studies, from deconstructivist accounts of ordinary lan
guage philosophy to Moretti and companys sketch of what might be called
ordinary literature history. In short, my aim is to propose ordinary literature
philosophy.
The relation between the two approaches to literature via the ordinary
is not without its dialectics. The increasing liberalism that seems to mark the
internal development of deconstructivist close reading (and which reaches,
with Butler, anti-statism is repeated and made explicit in the way its practition
ers reject the external alternative, namely, distant reading. And if deconstruc
tivist close reading increasingly ignores the institutional dimension of lit
erature, literature at the level of, ultimately, nation-state(s), this dimension
becomes no less than the main focus of distant reading and similar emerging
returns to world literature. In turn, these returns, as suggested by Moretti
and company, do not simply replace deconstructivist close reading (even
though that is how they sometimes present themselves) but effectively (and
often unknowingly) show that even the social institutions of literature are
readablesomething Hall (implicitly) did for popular culture as early as his
and Paddy Whannels first book, The Popular Arts, as it was recently reread by
Farred (2007: 9496). Thus these returns to world literature arguably imply
that there is no outside-text, to invoke the chief axiom of deconstruction (as
it was translated in Derrida 1997: 158). By effectively studying literary canon
ization as a text, that is, a set of symptomatic displacements and condensa
tions at the level of literature as an institution, they are arguably more loyal to
this Derridean axiom than those deconstructivist studies that claim, or sim
ply presuppose, that the canonical status of a literary text somehow follows
from the inherent qualities of that text. For literature is not just a parasitic
Habjan Ordinary Literature Philosophy 709
like world literature, close readers must believe that (the canon knows that)
the text they chose to read closely is indeed pertinent to world literature.
So, by starting with a system rather than an individual text, distant
reading acknowledges what any close reading must presuppose when it
selects the texts that are worth reading closely in the first place; only once
this presupposition of the existence of a system is acknowledged, the crite
rion for selection can be a system less ideological than the school canon (or
even the personal canon of close readers themselves). If a system of texts is
a necessary condition for selecting a text to be read, why not try to conceptu
alize it instead of relying on, or adding to, the canonical selection that has
already been made by the school apparatus? Rather than confirming, or
seeking, canonization for the individual texts that are allegedly dismissed
by distant reading, close readers should show that the canon is a product of
ideological, and not theoretical, processes. They should realize that canon
ization is (un)done neither by them nor by their theoretical adversaries but
by the market and other institutionsand that, as such, canonization
might not be the desired aim for the individual texts they defend against
distant reading. Literary scholars should realize that distant reading, or any
other theory, can be falsified only by a stronger theory, not by local literary
facts such as individual texts. Perhaps what I call here ordinary literature
philosophy can serve as a starting point for such a stronger theory of
literature.
The ideal nature of the aesthetic phenomenon confronts any attempt
at materialist analysis with an apparently unbearable dilemma: either one
must stick to the materialist ontological commitment, and evolve into vulgar
reductionism, or one must do justice to the object, and slip into idealism.
Thus from the moment we speak about literature as an art, we are in the
midst of a political battle in the Althusserian sense that philosophy is a rep
resentation of the class struggle within the field of theory, writes Rastko
Monik (1986: 171). Of course, the only way one can react to such a forced
choice and still remain in the field of theory is to reject the forced choice
itself. That is precisely what both Hall and Moretti did as they relinquished
the very notion of art: Hall abandoned art for culture, and Moretti, for
literature-as-culture.
Yet it seems that, ever since his plea for distant reading, Moretti has
been increasingly aware that literature-as-culture ought to lead simply to cul
ture, in the sense that can here be called Hallian, namely, culture as politics
by other means. In his first reply to the many critics of his conjectures on
distant reading, Moretti (2003: 81) came to the following conclusion:
712 The South Atlantic Quarterly October 2016
This kind of political comment was preceded, in his first attempt at distant
reading, published two years before he coined the term in his conjectures, by
the following footnote: Virtually all book historians agree that the publica
tion of fiction developed, throughout Western Europe, at the expense of
devotion. This said, one major question must still be answered: did the novel
replace devotional literature because it was a fundamentally secular formor
because it was religion under a new guise? . . . Here, clearly enough, quantita
tive methods are no longer useful. . . . This is a task for morphological analy
sis, and the literary history of the future (Moretti 1998: 169n30). Finally,
fifteen years later, with his latest book, The Bourgeois, a masterpiece of close
reading that he asked Verso to publish on the same day as the book-length
version of his proposal of distant reading, Moretti (2013: 2224) indeed
offered this kind of morphological analysisyet still needed to add, this
time not in a footnote, but in a kind of addendum to the introduction:
There is one topic that I would have really liked to include, had it not threat
ened to become a book all by itself: a parallel between Victorian Britain and
the post-1945 United States, highlighting the paradox of these two hegemonic
capitalist culturesthe only ones that have existed so farresting largely on
anti-bourgeois values. I am thinking, of course, of the omnipresence of reli
gious sentiment in public discourse; a presence that is in fact growing, in a
sharp reversal of earlier trends towards secularization. . . . In this sense,
inscribing The Bourgeois to Perry Anderson and Paolo Flores dArcais . . .
expresses the hope that, one day, I will learn from them to use the intelligence
of the past for the critique of the present. This book does not live up to that
hope. But the next one may.
So this calls for a Gretchenfrage: How is it with religion, here? How is it that
this question is postponed as explicitly in 2013 as it is in 1998? Indeed, if this
metonymic displacement is to be suspended, turning to Anderson and
Flores dArcais seems like a step in the right direction. And Morettis latest
Habjan Ordinary Literature Philosophy 713
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David Faflik
1986 interview with James, as the grand arena of international politics that
both men knew through a lifetime of ocean-spanning advocacy. What James
is mapping with Mariners is the variegated country of culture, of which Hall
was to become one of the most perceptive of critics from his generation and
also ours.
Admittedly, I am dealing in metaphors. And my metaphors are mixed.
See the whiteness of my title, the whale from Melvilles romance, the
visual and physical figures that I apply to Jamess critical method. Yet I have
deliberately chosen this figurative medium, in order to introduce a figurative
message about Hall. Halls writing, it bears emphasizing, made imaginative
use of language for reasons other than the literal conveyance of meaning.
This is not to say that we must close read the body of Halls work within the
insular framework of an aestheticism that he probably would have rejected
out of hand. There will be no mining of metaphors for their own sake here.
Instead, I would have us return to the metaphors that structure Halls writ-
ing for what they reveal about the metaphorical (and necessarily bi-focal)
component of cultural studies as he envisioned it and practiced it. Like
James, Hall maintained a careful balance between his immediate objects of
observation and whatever it was those objects might be said to represent, in
their associative constructions. Whether he was reading some cultural
artifact, a particular social trend, or a certain critical dispositioneither of a
popular or marginal varietyHalls usual interpretive move was a rela-
tional one. The decades-long project he undertook was to demonstrate how,
in his own words, what is socially peripheral may be symbolically central
to the ways we make cultural meanings (Hall 1996b: 303). There is a reason,
then, to approach Halls work from the direction of the metaphorical once-
remove that I have chosen. Thats how and where Hall himself worked. His
writings interrogate that unstable space where metaphors (symbols, in his
formulation) cease to inhere in themselves, and begin to extend outward in
a referential web of comparison by association. As with any metaphor, Halls
readings are always in at least two interpretive places.
If such a critical method seems elusive (a white whale, as it were), Hall
was quite clear when he explained how metaphors were, for anyone invested
in culture, as much a means as they were an end. In an early 1990s lecture
he gave at the University of Sussex, Metaphors of Transformation, Hall
(1996b: 286) spoke directly to the many different kinds of metaphors in
which our thinking about cultural change takes place.3 Indeed, what Hall
described as the relations between the social and the symbolic was for
him the paradigm question in culture theoryat least in all those cultural
718 The South Atlantic Quarterly October 2016
theories ... which have not settled for an elegant but empty formalism
(287). Among the classic metaphors that Hall invokes by way of illustration
are Leon Trotskys world turned upside down and Georg Lukcss world-
views. Hall credits each of these resonant figures of speech as being sig-
nificant, historically, for the radical imaginary of which Halls own work is
now an integral part. And he underscores, moreover, the mutual ties between
fact and figure, society and symbol, when he explains that these metaphors
conceptualize the social and the symbolic or the cultural as stitched together
in a relationship of rough correspondence, so that any reversal in the one
must lead to a concomitant transformation in the other (287).
For all his enthusiasm about metaphor as an instrument for thinking
about cultural change, Hall nevertheless found reason to criticize this same
vehicle of cultural criticism. To speak simply, most metaphors had a shelf life
for Hall. Yesterdays metaphors were likely to grow dated, not least when they
were expected to function as discursive markers, and makers, of the ever-
evolving cultural transformations with which Hall was concerned in his
work. It was Halls view that the classic metaphors of transformation relied
on a suspect set of dramatic simplifications and binary reversals (287) that
ultimately rendered them meaningless over time. Without a doubt Hall
depended on relational meanings, but on the reductive meanings of simplis-
tic metaphors, not so much. In fact, his ready dismissal of easy binaries led
Hall to rhetorically wonder if it were better to have no metaphors than faulty
ones. Deliberating in this way over the nature of relation, Hall asks at the out-
set of Metaphors of Transformation if we would have to abandon outright
the relationship between the social and the symbolic (287).
Hall demurs to his own question by drawing forth another classic met-
aphor, this one exemplary, by his estimation, in the relational work it per-
forms. In literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtins carnivalesque he discovered
what he believed to be a striking and original metaphor of cultural and
symbolic transformation (291). This might be surprising, when we con-
sider that Hall was having to turn back the clock by several decades to locate
a metaphor that suited his purposesone conceived, no less, by one of those
formalists whom Hall has already discounted earlier in his talk. Typically,
we would associate Bakhtins writing on the carnivalesque with his study
Rabelais and His World, which appeared (under a different title) in embry-
onic form as a dissertation in 1940 before being published in English in
1965 (1984: 15). Bakhtin was, however, very much in vogue at the time of
Halls writing. The Russians colorful portrayal of spontaneous, demotic dis-
sent from below in the late medieval world of Rabelaiss sixteenth-cen-
Faflik Stuart Hall and the Whiteness of the Whale 719
tury France had struck a responsive chord with both post-structuralists and
New Historicists in Halls day. More important, Hall felt that he had found
in the carnivalesque a metaphor that was at once oppositional enough to
serve his forward-thinking purposes and sensitive enough an instrument to
accommodate a more nuanced kind of cultural analysis than was permitted
by the old binary standbys. What was most attractive in the carnivalesque
metaphor for Hall (1996b: 287) is that it is not, he says, simply a metaphor
of inversionsetting the low in the place of the high, while preserving the
binary structure of the division between them. On the contrary, Hall con-
tinues, in a passage that is worth quoting at length: In Bakhtins carnival,
it is precisely the purity of this binary distinction which is transgressed. The
low invades the high, blurring the hierarchical imposition of order; creating
not simply the triumph of one aesthetic over another, but ... revealing the
interdependency of the low on the high and vice versa, the inextricably mixed
and ambivalent nature of all cultural life, the reversibility of cultural forms,
symbols, language and meaning (291).
Hall is arguing here not just for a better brand of metaphor, one that
transgresses the false dichotomies we reflexively tend to draw in our sym-
bolic readings. Hes calling for a categorically different conception of culture,
one that is inextricably mixed and ambivalent and so resistant to the dia-
metric manner of meaning making that defines, say, a dialectical method
that by implication Hall would regard as insufficient for a full appreciation of
the reversibility of cultural forms, symbols, language and meaning. In a
sense, then, Hall is to some extent transgressing not a what but a who, James.
For unlike James, who retained an avowed dialectical faith in the fusing, the
uniting, of the disparate binary forces that constituted his notion of culture,
Hall resisted such neat and tidy resolutions.4 In relation to James, Halls cul-
tural life was inextricably mixed. And so, by extension, his metaphors were
comparatively messy. Writing in the aftermath of the updated transforma-
tions instigated by cultural studies as it emerged as a discipline in the 1970s
and 1980s, Hall demanded a metaphorical method that allowed him the
license not only to be in two binary places at once but to maintain multiple
critical positions along the interdependent interstices of his interpretive
grid. After the fashion of Bakhtin, Hall desires the imaginative, carni-
valesque freedom of dialogic, not the binary distinction of dialectic (299).
In fairness to James, his sustained engagement in Mariners with
Moby-Dickand through Melvilles text, to the culture of America that
Hall (1996a: 34) rightly recognized as lying just beyondwas premised in
something other than your average binary. As a known radical activist,
720 The South Atlantic Quarterly October 2016
James had composed his study under detention at New Yorks Ellis Island,
where, during the second half of 1952, he was held (prior to his deportation
in 1953) by the US Immigration and Naturalization Service for having over-
stayed his visa. Cold War politics could thus easily have crept into his book in
the form of a then familiar binary that pitted some allegorical stand-in for
Western democracy against a comparably artificial representation of com-
munist totalitarianism. And, in fact, as Donald E. Pease has noted, period
interpretations of Melvilles novel often did favor such a Manichaean reading
by opposing the simplified character pairs of the everyman Ishmael versus
the authoritarian Ahab. But as Pease (2001: xiv) also observes, James subtly
resisted the hegemony of this conventional split reading by constructing
a counter-hegemony that saw Ishmael, too, compromised by the overween-
ing authority apparatus of the (ship of) state of which he was a laboring
member. James, then, does make much of binaries in Mariners; his discus-
sion relies in large part on the antithetical workers/managers pairing that he
locates among the heroically, ethnically diverse crew of Melvilles storied
whaling vessel, the Pequod. Jamess dialectic was not, however, so overdeter-
mined that he lost sight of the fact that no single theoretical idea governed
Melvilles novel or narrator. Nor was James about to submit himself to the
unwanted guidance of any such inflexible principle, inasmuch as the revo-
lutionary development he invokes as a navigational pole star was by his
standards less an organized way of thinking than a vitally real response
to the vagaries of modernity (Hall 1996a: 35).
Hall, we have seen, had a suitably loose hermeneutic of his own and
summoned his response to culture accordingly. Compared to Hall, James
([1953] 2001: 28) strains under the weight of the qualified binaries that mani-
fest in Mariners, albeit while paying tribute to the sheer poetry that he credits
Melville with conjuring in Moby-Dicks painted image of a common body
of men at work out at sea. Hall by comparison (comparison being the sine
qua non of metaphorical method) traces a circuitous route to an alternate
interpretive disposition. He interplays his way through a polymorphous
mix of metaphors, in the process celebrating the slippages of related (un)
likeness that he encounters in transit from symbol to society and back again.
mous whale of his novel one of the more multivalent symbols of American
letters. That symbols meaning remains open-ended, a partial result of the
symbol itself and the carnivalesque riot of commentary on Melville. The
novels author, moreover, conspicuously thematizes the metaphorical mak-
ing of meaning throughout Moby-Dick, foregrounding in chapters such as
The Doubloon and The Whiteness of the Whale the myriad, conflicting
consequences of cognition by association. Halls signature metaphorical
method has furthermore insinuated itself into our critical consciousness,
such that any anxiety that might otherwise accompany his influence has,
with some notable exceptions, been minimal.5 In scrutinizing, today, a liter-
ary text such as Moby-Dick for its symbols, we almost cannot help but reckon
with society as welljust as our engagement with the social so often leads
us back to a consideration of the symbolic. So boldly metaphorical a work
compels us to perform whats literally impossible, which is to say to read in
multiple places at once. Halls hermeneutic makes the impossible both pos-
sible and meaningful. It achieves this by blurring the lines that suppos-
edly separate literature from life, relying all the while on a socially tending
purposefulness thats denied any symbol for its own sake. The new aes-
thetic revival of a so-called surface reading notwithstanding, literary study
now regularly amounts to cultural studies, in the tradition of Hall.6
It is metaphor that is quietly keeping this tradition alive. Bakhtinian
readings of Melville, for example, who was himself an enthusiast of the
writer Rabelais, have been de rigueur for some time. We need not attribute
this interpretive swing to Halls affinity with the kind of disruptive reading
practices he attributes to Bakhtin. But we should, since the kind of criticism
that adopts carnivalism to do the interpretive work of social subversion
crucially, within the cultural studies context that Hall himself pioneered
is in effect making an unattributed borrowing from the lifes work of
Hall. Timothy B. Powell, for one, promises a multicultural interpretation of
the American Renaissance. Such is the subtitle to Powells study Ruthless
Democracy (2000). Channeling Bakhtins dialogic theory of heteroglossia,
he goes on to explain that Ruthless Democracy (that phrase itself being a met-
aphor, quoted by Melville in a letter he wrote to his friend Nathaniel Haw-
thorne) is founded on contestation rather than consensus in that it tries to
situate the canonical literatures of the American mid-nineteenth century
in dialogic relation to African American, Native American, and women
writers (18). Powell is committed to conducting a wide-ranging conversa-
tion on multiculturalism, in other words, and hes not afraid of using meth-
ods, and metaphors, that Hall would have endorsed to do it. Indeed, the real
722 The South Atlantic Quarterly October 2016
great work or a great artist (3536). If we have learned anything from Halls
work, we would do well to remember the lesson he is imparting here. For by
coincidence, I think, Hall means what we mean by culture. He was always
ready to take fully sensitive measure of our evolving forms of expression,
no matter how unpredictable, incidental, or unstable. By culture Hall means
not coincidence, as in the perfect alignment of a congeries of conflicts, but
rather the relationship of rough correspondence that he insists on in Met-
aphors of Transformation. Halls symbolic conception of culture depends
precisely upon a code of metaphor, the patent unsettledness of which he
takes for granted. And he reminds us whats at stake in that code in the dia-
logue that he and James have staged for the sake of amplifying their over-
lapping, yet not identical, ideas. Hall mildly contradicts James during their
talk. The purport of his doing so is that history and art, in the mind of
the junior of the two men, will no more coincide in a synthesized whole
than a friendly, if opinionated, pair of original thinkers can reach effortless
agreement in a televised tte--tte. Theres a more than metaphorical con-
nection to be made between symbol and society, in other words, much as
there is from the fractious, centuries-long conversation involving Melville,
James, and Hall. For students of Hall, and we are that, the critique of culture
must by definition continue. Thats what meaningful cultural critiques do.
Notes
1 In a 1986 BBC interview that Hall conducted with James, Hall (1996a: 34) himself
called Jamess Mariners a big book in terms of what it tries to cover.
2 James dated these introductory remarks to November 28, 1952.
3 Halls statement Metaphors of Transformation is itself reprinted from White 1993.
4 Neil Larsen (1996: 89) credits James in part with a prophetic anticipation of Cultural
Studies in its present [i.e., 1990s] mode because of his admiration of popular cul-
ture, especially in its American phase. Yet Larsen further explains that James also
preserved a separate aesthetic valuation of high art, which he sought to dialectically
resolve with popular manifestations of culture. And for this reason Larsen opposes
Jamess work to the current default mode of cultural studies.
5 Farreds work constitutes one such exception, although his critique has to do less with
Halls interpretive method than with his postcolonial conception of the Caribbean. See
Farred 2003: 149214.
6 For the definitive statement on surface reading, see Best and Marcus 2009.
7 Melville penned his letter to Hawthorne in the summer of 1851, while he was drafting
the final revisions to Moby-Dick. Concerned over his urge to speak Truth with his
work, Melville (1993: 190) is led to wonder whether when you [Hawthorne] see or hear
of my ruthless democracy on all sides, you may possibly feel a touch of a shrink.
Faflik Stuart Hall and the Whiteness of the Whale 725
References
Bakhtin, Mikhail. (1965) 1984. Rabelais and His World. Translated by Hlne Iswolsky. Bloom-
ington: Indiana University Press.
Best, Stephen, and Sharon Marcus. 2009. Surface Reading: An Introduction. Representa-
tions 108, no. 4: 122.
Farred, Grant. 1996. Introduction. In Rethinking C. L. R. James, edited by Grant Farred,
114. London: Blackwell.
Farred, Grant. 2003. Whats My Name? Black Vernacular Intellectuals. Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press.
Freeburg, Christopher. 2012. Melville and the Idea of Blackness: Race and Imperialism in Nine-
teenth-Century America. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Hall, Stuart. 1996a. A Conversation with C. L. R. James. In Farred, Rethinking C. L. R. James,
1544.
Hall, Stuart. 1996b. For Allon White: Metaphors of Transformation. In Stuart Hall: Critical
Dialogues in Cultural Studies, edited by David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen, 286305.
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James, C. L. R. [1953] 2001. Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville
and the World We Live In. Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College and University Press of
New England.
Larsen, Neil. 1996. Negativities of the Popular: C. L. R. James and the Limits of Cultural
Studies. In Farred, Rethinking C. L. R. James, 85102.
Melville, Herman. 1851. Moby-Dick. New York: Harper and Brothers.
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man Melville. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press; Chicago: Newberry Library.
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Live In. In James, Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways, viixxxiii.
Powell, Timothy B. 2000. Ruthless Democracy: A Multicultural Interpretation of the American
Renaissance. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Reynolds, David S. 1988. Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the
Age of Emerson and Melville. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
White, Allon. 1993. Carnival, Hysteria, and Writing: Collected Essays and Autobiography. Oxford,
UK: Clarendon.
Widmer, Edward L. 1999. Young America: The Flowering of Democracy in New York City. New
York: Oxford University Press.
Jeffrey T. Nealon
Caribbean theory, with copious apologies not only to Hall but also to douard
Glissant and C. L. R. James, among so many others. In the US academy of
the 1980s, or at least my experience of it, there was this high-prestige thing
called continental philosophy (a category explicitly engineered to exclude
theorizing coming from the United Kingdom or its colonies from Euro-
pean philosophy proper), which consisted of French and German phenom-
enology mostly, alongside some Geneva School thinking about linguistics
and a smattering of American pragmatism, from William James to Richard
Rorty. But the category of theory produced in Britain, such as it existed at
all circa 1980-something, was largely confined to the lectures of John L.
Austin, which in turn were only on the syllabus so they could be shown to be
quite radically wrongfirst systematically deconstructed by Jacques Der-
rida and then later taken into the far-from-Oxford realms of queer theory by
Judith Butler and Eve Sedgwick. Likewise, as Lawrence Grossberg points out
in his heartfelt remembrance Rage against the Dying of a Light: Stuart Hall
(19322014) (2014), British cultural studies was a largely unknown dis-
course in the United States before 1989, and of course Marxisms ongoing
commitment to examining quotidian life more generally was sadly under-
represented in the big theory era as well. I vividly remember the Marx
course I took as an undergraduate in 1984, which dedicated three out of the
semesters four months to reading Hegel, suggesting strongly that Marx was
more dialectical footnote than innovator. So given the marginal status of
both Marxism and cultural studies in my student days, I guess its not sur-
prising that some of the finest recent Marxist scholarship on cultural stud-
ieswhich is to say, Halls workwasnt front and center on the syllabus.
Though I admit, with downcast eyes, nor were there academic courses dedi-
cated to British icons the Clash, the Specials, or the Smiths, but I knew
plenty about them circa 1985.
I do so with the bad conscience of one who should have known them and
studied them much earlier than was the case. Perhaps if l had read those
works earlier on, I would have saved useful time, surely: I wouldnt have
needed to write some things and I would have avoided certain errors. At any
rate ... I would have been seduced to the point of doing nothing else in life
but the job of commenting on them. Instead, their influence on me remains
retrospective, a contribution reached when I was no longer at the age of
intellectual discoveries. And I dont even know whether to be glad or to
feel sorry about it.
Unlike Foucaults thoughts about the Frankfurt School, though, I feel sorry
indeed about not much earlier having taken up the insight and challenge of
Halls work. Nevertheless, I preface this essay not with mourning or melan-
cholia (though those are righteous sentiments still so close to his passing,
for all those who remain inspired by Halls life and his work), but I open with
optimism about the myriad detourswhich are also new beginnings, alter-
nate futuresmade possible by Halls conceptual itinerary, the treasure
trove of provocations and transformative possibilities that he left for people
like me, who never knew him personally but have now come to recognize,
after the fact, too late, why he meant so much to so many. And such theoreti-
cal detours are, as Ill try to suggest below, becoming a main road for cul-
tural studies going forward.
ago,1 and surely Halls passing will be taken by some to mark the beginning
of the end for theorys heyday in cultural studies. Of course, special journal
issues like this one (and even more so a quick look through any high-end
university press catalog) would suggest that the death of theory has been
greatly exaggerated across the academic spectrum. In fact, its supposed
demise might be better dubbed, with a nod to Jean-Franois Lyotards trans-
lation by Fredric Jameson, as that desire called the death of theory (insofar
as lots of people really want the passing of theory to be true, whether it is or
not, and they believe, however misguidedly, that its death can be secured by
their repeatedly saying so). However, Id like to take this opportunity to fol-
low and honor Halls project of historicizing theory and to zero in on the role
of theory today in the study of popular culture: in particular, I want to think
about how the detour through theory may or may not have been trans-
formed over the past couple of decades. To show my hand at the beginning,
my primary question here will not concern the continued effectiveness or
necessity of theory in thinking about popular culture. Rather, I want to won-
der whether theory is any longer productively thought of as a detouror
whether its becoming, to extend the metaphor, a main road for cultural
studies and its critical engagement with the present.
But first, of course, well need to revisit the question of what exactly
characterizes what Hall (2010: 1791) dubs the necessary delay or detour
through theory in his work and the associated discourse that came out of
Birmingham and migrated globally: What is theory a detour away from, and
why is this detour necessary? In Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Lega-
cies, Hall makes the important point that theories are just as historically
contextual as the materials theyre often marshaled to help connect or inter-
pret. Thereby theories are not, as Grossberg reminds us in the epigraph,
meant to be procrustean beds or answers that could be known in advance.
That is, I think, the majorand well-foundedconcern that Hall expressed
concerning the specifically literary theory of the poststructuralist era (espe-
cially in the United States). Recall what Hall writes from the vantage point of
1989, referring to work hed done on the early 1980s explosion of literary
theory: Looking at what one can only call the deconstructive deluge (as
opposed to deconstructive turn) which had overtaken American literary
studies, in its formalist mode, I tried to distinguish the extremely important
theoretical and intellectual work which it had made possible in cultural stud-
ies from a mere repetition, a sort of mimicry or deconstructive ventrilo-
quism which sometimes passes as a serious intellectual enterprise (1794).
Which is at least partially to say that in literary circles, theory wasand
732 The South Atlantic Quarterly October 2016
moments, sufficiently wary of, willing to, as it were, resist. And not because
its naive or silly to laud outlet shopping or Comic-Con conventions as
secretly subversive, but because at this point the hidden subversion (the
only political work necessary is the labor required to find or identify the
subversive practice within) theoretical paradigm remains almost completely
homologous with the intense neoliberal capitalism that cultural studies takes
itself to be trying to injurein a scant twenty years its gone from revolution-
ary to simply run-of-the-mill to suggest that there are myriad hidden subver-
sions bubbling just below the surface of the most mundane cultural prod-
ucts and practices. So pointing out shadow sites of resistance within popular
culture practices seems a bit of a nonstarter today, but thats the case because
a certain thinking of resistance has triumphed rather than been vanquished.
Resistance is everywhere in popular cultureI think thats true. The proj-
ect, which I take to have been Halls (not to mention Marxs) all along, is not
to point out that potential for resistance but to find conceptual ways to link
struggles, to mobilize and practice counterhegemony. If you simply point out
hidden cultural resistance, over and over again, thats the reified procrustean
bed of theory fetishism, theory for theorys sake.
And I think that while much left academic critique in the United States
has moved on from the hidden subversion paradigm, its unfortunately
arrived at what Hall might diagnose as a new ventriloquism, falling back
on an oft-repeated mantra, Neoliberalism is bad. This means that we see a
lot of cultural studies work offering a largely moral critique without much
new thinking about ways to conceptualize late, later, or just-in-time capital-
ism or find ways to outflank it. One thing that seems certain, any largely
moral approach to the problempointing out over and over again that free-
market capitalism sucks for most people on the planetis not going to get
the job done. As Hall points out in his genealogy of neoliberal practices in
Britain, The Neo-Liberal Revolution (2011), moralism is one of neoliberal-
isms principal operators. Discussing both Margaret Thatcher and Tony
Blair as prophets of community-busting neoliberal austerity, Hall argues
that the question was moral, not religious. and that everything they did
and said was infused with a strong moral sense: not doing the right thing,
according to some inner moral compass, was unthinkable (71617).
If, as Hall himself concludes, neo-liberalism does constitute a hege-
monic project, and popular thinking and the systems of calculation in
daily life offer very little friction to the passage of its ideas (728), I guess my
question about the present, and its relation to the recent past, goes some-
thing like this. Following from Halls conclusions (as well as transversally
736 The South Atlantic Quarterly October 2016
between abstract versus concrete, theory versus the everyday) thats inherent
in the phrase detour through theory obtains in quite the same way any-
more. As Negri makes clear time and again, and Thomas Pikettys Capital in
the Twenty-First Century confirms, the mid-twentieth-century Keynesian or
Fordist compromise was largely an anomalous attempt to save capitalism by
allowing the nation-state to give with one hand (providing free schooling, fos-
tering unions and minimum-wage legislation, guaranteeing credit for every-
day people to buy homes or go to college, and building smooth new highways
for them to drive to the mall) while taking away with the other (the education,
credit, and consumption regime sutures the vast majority to the system thats
finally not designed for their benefit in the least). The Fordist compromise
offered people, in Althussers concise words, an imaginary relation to their
real conditions, and the cultural studies detour through theory is a road taken
precisely to point out this bait and switch: the free schooling, for example,
was never free, as Althusser showed us time and again, but was rather a way
to reproduce and naturalize social norms supported by the elite classes. But
now there are increasingly fewer of those nation-state-backed neo-welfare
programs to unmask as ideologically suspicious, and as any American K12
teacher will tell you, a large number of Americans on the political right (not
exactly Althusserians) already understand state-run schooling as nothing
other than ideological (though in this case leftist) interpellation.
This contemporary state of affairs also suggests that with the increas-
ing disappearance of the midcentury welfare state, the detour of an unmask-
ing ideology critique is no longer the unflinchingly effective tool kit that it
once was. Surely, obfuscation still exists (as the inheritance tax becomes
the death tax, for example), and, surely, links remain hidden in the prod-
ucts and practices of popular culturesutured contradictions remain to be
untied. But maybe on the horizon we see developing an emergent kind of
direct confrontation with dominant power within much popular culture,
one where biopolitical neoliberalism would be right on the surface of cul-
tural practices, rather than hidden somewhere in their interstices, gaps, and
contradictionsa society where the real isnt hidden within, but smeared
across, the social fabric of practices. A new kind of realism, shorn of its adjec-
tival partner naive?
Indeed, one can see this kind of renewed realism overtaking the theo-
retical tools themselves these dayseven, for example, the tool kit most dear
to people in literature departments, the question of reading. Various brands
of surface reading or distant reading hold out some sense of trying to map
power and resistance across a spectrumin what you might call a wholesale
Nealon Stuart Hall and the Detour through Theory Revisited 739
rather than retail way (in an aggregate sense of widespread social practices,
rather than a focus on individual responses to specific works). If thats too
close to home for many of us, think of what Anahid Kassabian (2013) calls
ubiquitous listening in popular music criticism: her sense that the prac-
tice of listening is no longer dedicated to individual songs or albums (which
require the interpretive detour of theory to make sense of them) but is rather
in tune with the ways that, in the era of the MP3 and the iPod music is every-
where, people use music to create various kinds of soundscapes in their
lives. This ubiquitous analysis of listening cuts across biopower and finance
capital, technology and subjectivity, but pretty much on the surface of these
listening practices rather than hidden somewhere within the lyrics or chord
progressions of individual songs.
In short, and in conclusive haste, one might say that as capitalism has
become almost completely operational, rather than representational, so the
tools required to diagnose and react to it must mutate in that direction. As
the real becomes more and more abstract, does the abstract follow this
inverted logic and become more real? Of course, in the end, this just brings
us back to Halls first detour of theory, his insistence that theories are called
into being by and mutate alongside changing historical conditions. If, as J.
Macgregor Wise (2003: 107) puts it in his reading of Hall, the detour
through theory involves the movement back and forth acrossvarying levels
of abstraction, then maybe everyday life has become synonymous with the
detour through theorybecause, without theory, its hard to make sense of
virtually anything that happens these days, precisely because so much hap-
pens virtually. As Hall writes in The Problem of IdeologyMarxism with-
out Guarantees (1986), the point of doing theory was never to come up with
a proper theory (much less the proper theory); rather, the important ongo-
ing moment is the process of theorizing, of the development and refinement
of new concepts and explanations which, alone, is the sign of a living body of
thought, capable still of engaging and grasping something of the truth about
new historical realities (44). 4 This is to stress again, in the end, Halls cru-
cial and enduring understanding of theory as a practice of ongoing response
to the mutating, complex provocations of the everyday. And Im here merely
trying to extend that sense of theorizing by imbricating it further into the
fabric of our historical moment in what used to be called the First World
West, where the formerly abstract planes of virtuality and theory have
morphed into the plane of the concrete everyday, and vice versa.
You wake up to your cell phone alarm, check your messages, and then
its microwave, GPS, iPod, Bluetooth, subway pass, headphones, MP3, bike
740 The South Atlantic Quarterly October 2016
lane, ATM, laptop, pop-up ad, text message, Facebook, Starbucks, Wi-Fi, check
blog, Twitter feed, flash drive, track changes, Skype call, selfie stick, swipe ID,
Uber car, I-Pass lane, Thai food, credit card, box wine, YouTube, stream con-
tent, answer mail, white-noise app, good night. Start again tomorrow. Within
an everyday life so configured by popular culture,5 maybe the virtual or
abstract detour through theory has become one of the main roads forward.
Notes
This article is a revised version of a talk given in a session titled Theory, Popular, Culture at the
2015 Modern Language Association meeting in Vancouver. I thank panel organizer Hillary
Chute and fellow panelists Grant Farred and W. J. T. Mitchell for their insightful comments.
1 Or so the New York Times told us just after Derridas death in 2004. Journalist Emily
Eakin wrote in her astonishingly condescending The Theory of Everything, R.I.P.
(2004), published just a week after Derridas death: With the death on Oct. 8 of the
French philosopher Jacques Derrida, the era of big theory came quietly to a close.
2 As a concrete example of Halls theoretical analysis of one such historical moment or
movement, see his 1967 essay The Hippies: On an American Moment (2007).
3 On this point, see also Grossbergs CCCS and the Detour through Theory, his intro-
duction to the theory cluster in CCCS Selected Working Papers (2007).
4 Its worth noting that in this essay, Hall expresses concerns about the hiddenness of
ideology in classical Marxist terms. Hall (1986: 35) writes, Marxs taking off from the
exchange point of the recircuit of capital is an ideological process. It obscures, hides, con-
cealsthe terms are all in the textanother set of relations: the relations, which do not
appear on the surface but are concealed in the hidden abode of production (where prop-
erty, ownership, the exploitation of waged labour and the expropriation of surplus value
all take place). The ideological categories hide this underlying reality, and substitute for
all that the truth of market relations. Hall is here at great pains to divert theoretical
attention away from the sense of ideology as a kind of dupe-producing false conscious-
ness, gesturing instead toward the more robust sense of ideology as a set or practices or
a whole way of life, but he does seem keen to hang on to the sense of ideologys hidden
quality, at least in the mid-1980s. He continues: Is the worker who lives his or her rela-
tion to the circuits of capitalist production exclusively through the categories of a fair
price and a fair wage in false consciousness? Yes, if by that we mean there is some-
thing about her situation which she cannot grasp with the categories she is using; some-
thing about the process as a whole which is systematically hidden because the available
concepts only give her a grasp of one of its many-sided moments. No, if by that we mean
that she is utterly deluded about what goes on under capitalism. The falseness therefore
arises, not from the fact that the market is an illusion, a trick, a sleight-of-hand, but only
in the sense that it is an inadequate explanation of a process. It has also substituted one
part of the process for the wholea procedure which, in linguistics, is known as meton-
ymy and in anthropology, psychoanalysis and (with special meaning) in Marxs work, as
fetishism. The other lost moments of the circuit are, however, unconscious, not in the
Freudian sense, because they have been repressed from consciousness, but in the sense
of being invisible, given the concepts and categories we are using (37).
Nealon Stuart Hall and the Detour through Theory Revisited 741
5 I am well aware that this kind of high-tech, device-dependent virtuality is not the daily
experience of everyone in the United States or the United Kingdom, not to mention
everyone on the planet. Though as of this writing (summer 2015), 6 billion people
worldwide (of the global population of approximately 7 billion) have regular access to
mobile phones. Thats a surprising number and a statistic that does tend to signal an
increasing virtuality or networked quality of everyday life globally . . . until you couple
this with the fact that only 4.5 billion people have regular access to a toilet (Robson
2013). As some everyday cultural practices get more abstract and virtual, we do well to
remember that others remain stubbornly concrete, intractable, and urgent. Here I am
crucially schooled by Hall (2010: 1792): Against the urgency of people dying in the
streets, what in Gods name is the point of cultural studies? . . . At that point, I think
anybody who is into cultural studies seriously as an intellectual practice, must feel, on
their pulse, its ephemerality, its insubstantiality, how little it registers, how little weve
been able to change anything or get anybody to do anything. If you dont feel that as one
tension in the work that you are doing, theory has let you off the hook.
References
Deleuze, Gilles. 1995. Difference and Repetition. Translated by Paul Patton. New York: Colum-
bia University Press.
Eakin, Emily. 2004. The Theory of Everything, R.I.P. New York Times, October 17. www
.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/weekinreview/17eaki.html.
Elliot, Gregory. 1987. Althusser: The Detour of Theory. London: Haymarket Books.
Fisher, Mark. 2009. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Winchester, UK: Zero Books.
Foucault, Michel. 1991. Remarks on Marx: Conversations with Duccio Trombadori. Translated by
R. James Goldstein and James Cascaito. New York: Semiotext(e).
Grossberg, Lawrence. 1993. Can Cultural Studies Find True Happiness in Communication?
Journal of Communication 43, no. 4: 8997.
Grossberg, Lawrence. 2007. CCCS and the Detour through Theory. In CCCS Selected Work-
ing Papers, vol. 1, edited by Ann Gray et al., 3347. London: Routledge.
Grossberg, Lawrence. 2014. Rage against the Dying of a Light: Stuart Hall (19322014).
Truthout, February 15. www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/21895-rage-against-the-dying
-of-a-light-stuart-hall-1932-2014.
Hall, Stuart. 1986. The Problem of IdeologyMarxism without Guarantees. Journal of Com-
munication Inquiry 10, no. 2: 2844.
Hall, Stuart. 1997. The Local and the Global: Globalization and Ethnicity. In Culture, Global-
ization, and the World-System: Contemporary Conditions for the Representation of Identity,
edited by Anthony D. King, 1940. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Hall, Stuart. 2007. The Hippies: On an American Moment. In CCCS Selected Working
Papers, vol. 2, edited by Ann Gray et al., 14667. London: Routledge.
Hall, Stuart. 2010. Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies. In The Norton Anthology
of Theory and Criticism, 2nd ed., edited by Vincent Leitch et al., 178295. New York:
Norton.
Hall, Stuart. 2011. The Neo-Liberal Revolution. Cultural Studies 25, no. 6: 70528.
Kassabian, Anahid. 2013. Ubiquitous Listening: Affect, Attention, and Distributed Subjectivity.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
742 The South Atlantic Quarterly October 2016
Rapaport, Herman. 1993. Milton and the Postmodern. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Robson, Steve. 2013. Six of the Worlds 7 Billion People Have Mobile Phones . . . but Only 4.5
Billion Have a Toilet Says UN Report. Daily Mail, March 22. www.dailymail.co.uk
/news/article-2297508/Six-world-s-seven-billion-people-mobile-phones--4-5billion
-toilet-says-UN-report.html.
Smith, Mark M. 2007. Sensing the Past: Seeing, Hearing, Smelling, Tasting, and Touching in His-
tory. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Wise, J. Macgregor. 2003. Reading Hall Reading Marx. Cultural Studies 17, no. 2: 10512.
A G A I N S T the D A Y
Kathi Weeks
T his dossier is intended to identify some of the urgent problems and com-
pelling questions posed by the public toilet. From the history of racial segre-
gation in the United States and the ongoing sex segregation of toilets to the
desperate dearth of facilities around the world, the provision and governance
of the toilet is a politically charged phenomenon. The public toilet serves as
a site of the production and regulation of sex, gender, sexuality, class, caste,
and disability, and it is today the target of activists demanding justice for
many, including women and poor, disabled, queer, and transgender people.
There is clearly much political work to do on all these intersecting
fronts. There is also a pressing need for scholarly studies of the public toilet.
Despite the excellent academic work that has been produced on the topic,1
there remains an enormous amount of intellectual labor yet to dolabor
that can draw from and contribute to ongoing struggles over facilities and
access. There is much we have yet to understand about precisely how the
public toilet functions as a bulwark of sex binarism, a tool of gender regula-
tion, an apparatus of class subordination, a site of heteronormative policing,
an ableist institution, a place of colonial administration, and a mechanism
for the production of subalternity. Rather than simply accommodating pre-
existing variations among us, the dispositif of the public toilet is coconstitu-
tive of these regimes of inequality. For a particularly instructive example,
think about how the standard facility disables the bodies that do not conform
to the model of its generic user. The public toilets utility for these systems of
social hierarchy is only enhanced to the extent that it remains neglected by
our political projects and critical discourses. For years it seems that the many
problems of the public toilet had managed to hide more or less in plain sight.
Note
1 For good introductions to a portion of this work, see the edited volumes by Olga Gersh-
enson and Barbara Penner (2009) and Harvey Molotch and Laura Norn (2010).
References
Cavanagh, Sheila. 2010. Queering Bathrooms: Gender, Sexuality, and the Hygienic Imagination.
Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Desai, Renu, Colin McFarlane, and Stephen Graham. 2015. The Politics of Open Defecation:
Informality, Body, and Infrastructure in Mumbai. Antipode 47, no. 1: 98120.
Gershenson, Olga, and Barbara Penner, eds. 2009. Ladies and Gents: Public Toilets and Gender.
Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Jewitt, Sarah. 2011. Geographies of Shit: Spatial and Temporal Variations in Attitudes towards
Human Waste. Progress in Human Geography 35, no. 5: 60826.
Kafer, Alison. 2013. Feminist, Queer, Crip. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Molotch, Harvey, and Laura Norn, eds. 2010. Toilet: Public Restrooms and the Politics of Shar-
ing. New York: New York University Press.
Penner, Barbara. 2005. Researching Female Public Toilets: Gendered Spaces, Disciplinary
Limits. Journal of International Womens Studies 6, no. 2: 8198.
Plaskow, Judith. 2008. Embodiment, Elimination, and the Role of Toilets in Struggles for
Social Justice. CrossCurrents 58, no. 1: 5164.
Wilson, Ara. 2016. The Infrastructure of Intimacy. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and
Society 41, no. 2: 24780.
A G A I N S T the D A Y
Judith Plaskow
T he brouhaha over Hillary Clintons bathroom break during the third Dem-
ocratic debate in December 2015 brings together two interrelated themes: the
obstacles surrounding womens access to bathrooms and the broader cultural
discomfort with elimination that makes inequities in access difficult to
address. Clintons delay in returning to the stage after using the toilet was not
just a sign of the barriers every woman faces to getting to a public toilet
quickly. It also unleashed a torrent of comment and abuse. Mike Huckabee
opined that Clintons best moment in the entire night was when she was in
the restroom; Republican front-runner Donald Trump said, I know where
she wentits disgusting, I dont want to talk about it (quoted in Weiner
2015). Feminist columnists commenting on these comments were barraged
by further misogynist remarks as well as angry dismissals of the triviality of
the whole subject (Chemaly 2015). And, indeed, the subject is trivial in the
sense that someones using the toilet is an entirely unremarkable, multiple-
times-a-day occurrence. So why all the discussion and attention?
Obviously, Clintons tardy return to the debate touched a couple of
nerves in the broader public. For one thing, it dramatized for a national audi-
ence the very different situations of women and men in relation to bathroom
access and thus, implicitly, the ways social hierarchies are mapped onto pub-
lic space. From decrepit inner-city schools to new building projects featuring
$50 million apartments, the built environment reflects a set of ideas about
who has social value, who does what, and who belongs where (Matrix 1984: 1).
Because the need for toilets is universal, their availability and distribution
provide a particularly revealing map of power relations in US society, an
everyday lesson in who merits social recognition and whose time is consid-
rooms. Women will often have to walk past the mens room in auditoriums,
restaurants, and theatersin Clintons case, for one minute and forty-five
secondsto spaces that are just a bit farther from where the main action
takes place. Often a woman will arrive at the appropriate bathroom only to
find herself confronted with a long line. Every woman who has spent time in
restaurants, theaters, museums, sporting events, airports, train stations, or
other public venues has had the experience of waiting endlessly to use the
toilet while watching men zip in and out of the adjoining mens room. Ineq-
uities in location and access can be dismissed as trivial, but they convey a
message about whose time is more important; they are repeated daily
reminders of whose needs come first and whose second. In learning to stand
in bathroom lines and wait patiently from an early age, girl children are also
learning to accept their subordination quietly. As Congresswoman Yvette
Clarke said, When were talking about restroom equity, were talking about
the time it takes each of us to handle our business and get back to business
(quoted in Talev 2006). But whose business is deemed socially significant
and whose less so?
The message restrooms convey that women are less important than
men and that this lesser significance is simply to be accepted as one of lifes
many inconveniences is underscored by the role of bathrooms in supporting
the gender binary. As one of the last totally gender-divided spaces in US soci-
ety, bathrooms give concrete daily form to a social system in which men are
dominant and women are perceived as other. Sex-segregated lavatories
declare that there are two and only two genders, that everyone is either male
or female, that gender is fixed and self-evident, and that there is some unde-
fined danger in men and women using toilets in a shared space. These les-
sons, too, are imbibed early. Gender is one of the central categories children
are offered for making sense of the world, and bathrooms are important sites
for children learning to perform gender properly. For some people, being
directed to the appropriate restroom prompts their first awareness of gen-
der.2 The point at which a child refuses to go to the toilet with a parent of
the other sex is often an important moment in the childs emerging gender
identification. Judith Halberstam (1998: 23) calls the bathroom, as we know
it, ... the crumbling edifice of gender in the twentieth century. And it is
indeed striking the ways public toilets perpetuate the subordination of
women within a framework in which everyone must identify either as a
woman or as a man.
How to address the inequities in womens access to bathrooms in ways
that do not further reinforce the gender binary or marginalize transgender
Plaskow Taking a Break 751
the ultimate testimony to our cultural discomfort with toilets is the extraordi-
nary absence of public facilities in most cities in the United States. Somehow,
if we act as if we do not need toilets to move comfortably through the world,
then we can also pretend that our need to urinate and defecate doesnt exist. In
the words of one commentator, we are as repulsed by real bodies as medieval
saints were but without their religious motivation (Ashenburg 2007: 271).
But despite efforts to deny this inconvenient part of ourselves, ade-
quate toilets are an essential dimension of access to public space because
elimination is a fundamental aspect of our embodiment. Without elimina-
tion, we could not rid our bodies of waste, remain healthy, take in nourish-
ment, or develop or grow. Yet it seems that urine, and much more especially
feces, evokes in many people strong feelings of disgust. Disgust is a univer-
sal human emotion, found cross-culturally, that more than other feelings
connects to sensory experience in a very visceral way. Disgust is rooted in
what it feels like to see, touch, taste, or smell certain things. While objects of
disgust are certainly partly socially molded, the things that people find dis-
gusting are not a random sample. Cross-cultural studies of disgust have
shown that body waste is at the top of most lists. Disgust is a reaction to stim-
uli such as feces, menstrual blood, and vomit that remind us of our animal
natures. In the words of William Ian Miller (1997: xiv), The basis for all dis-
gust is usthat we live and die and that the process is a messy one emitting
substances and odors that make us doubt ourselves and fear our neighbors.4
Disgust is a response to the awareness that our bodies exceed our conscious
control. However much our cognitive capacities and symbol systems might
allow us to feel that we are above the natural world, our bodies constantly call
attention to our physical limitations. While the ultimate way that bodies
escape conscious control is death, on a more immediate and daily level, we
are reminded of our creaturely nature by our need to eliminate waste. Even
the most brilliant scholar sitting at a desk and writing about the social con-
struction of the body will at some point need to get up and go to the toilet.
Disgust has important political consequences in that the rejection of
elimination as part of human embodiment becomes intertwined with a
series of social hierarchies as the rejected part of the self is then projected
onto multiple others. Marginalized groups are often perceived not simply as
socially inferior but also as contaminating or disgusting. As Ruth Barcan
(2005: 10) says, Those who represent a threat to the established gender/sex-
ual (and sometimes racial) order may themselves come to be imagined as a
form of cultural waste. As Trumps revulsion at the thought of a woman
using the toilet indicates, disgust provides the passion that helps maintain
Plaskow Taking a Break 753
social orderings. Whites, Christians, people with wealth, have at various his-
torical moments complained about the smell of black people, Jews, workers,
homeless people, women, and others (Miller 1997: 245). It is an irony that
nonetheless makes perfect sense that those defined as shit are often pre-
cisely the people denied adequate toilet access; the socially abject are excluded
from toilets as abject space. Insofar as public bathrooms acknowledge the
individuals right to a small private preserve in public space, a small patri-
mony of sacredness (Erving Goffman quoted in Cahill et al. 1985: 3839) to
which everyone is entitled, those defined as other are not imagined as part of
the human community whose needs must be taken into account in the con-
struction of such space. But the absence of toilet access prevents full partici-
pation in public life and forces people into compromises that can reinforce
perceptions of their abjection. Homeless people are the paradigmatic instance
of this double bind in that they are often forced to relieve themselves in pub-
lic because they lack any alternatives and are then perceived as all the more
disgusting. Meanwhile, those for whom easy access to toilets is entirely a
nonissue can more readily disown elimination as an aspect of the self while
denying adequate provision to numerous others.
The fuss around Clintons bathroom break becomes less mysterious,
then, when we reflect on how it pulled together the issues of provision and
disgust in ways that reveal some uncomfortable truths. Even important peo-
ple, people whose needs are generally invisibly and seamlessly met, some-
times have to go to the toilet. And when these important people are women,
they do not get to go with the same ease and dispatch as powerful men do;
thus the profound inequalities in mens and womens access to toilets
become publicly visible. Women are then labeled disgusting for requiring
the facilities that men in power get to take for granted. The discourses of dis-
comfort and disgustof repugnance at the bodily nature we all shareand
of social inequality help construct and reinforce each other. It seems, there-
fore, that thinking through and implementing adequate toilet provision for
all will also entail rethinking attitudes toward elimination as an aspect of
our embodiment.
Notes
1 North Carolina HB2, a bill that requires transgender people to use the bathroom cor-
responding to the sex on their birth certificate, provoked extensive public debate about
the issue of bathroom access. It was passed in March 2016, after this article was
in press.
2 When I have asked students to write about their first awareness of gender, I have been
struck by the number who mentioned bathrooms.
754 The South Atlantic Quarterly Against the Day October 2016
3 This formulation emerged in conversation with Nili Broyer after she presented her
paper at a meeting of the Society for Disability Studies.
4 I am dependent on Miller for my description of disgust.
References
Ashenburg, Katherine. 2007. The Dirt on Clean: An Unsanitized History. New York: North
Point.
Barcan, Ruth. 2005. Dirty Spaces: Communication and Contamination in Mens Public Toi-
lets. Journal of International Womens Studies 6, no. 2: 723.
Broyer, Nili. 2015. From Rights to Radical: A Restrooms Mirror in the Israeli Accessibility
Law. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Disability Studies,
Atlanta, June 11.
Cahill, Spencer, et al. 1985. Meanwhile Backstage: Public Bathrooms and the Interactive
Order. Urban Life 14, no. 1: 3358.
Cannon, Katie. 2008. Author interview, New Haven, CT, April 2.
Chemaly, Soraya. 2015. Biology Doesnt Write Laws: Hillary Clintons Bathroom Break Wasnt
as Trivial as Some Might Like to Think. Huffington Post (blog), December 25. www
.huffingtonpost.com/soraya-chemaly/biology-doesnt-write-laws_b_8874638.html.
Halberstam, Judith. 1998. Female Masculinity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Matrix. 1984. Making Space: Women and the Man-Made Environment. London: Pluto.
Miller, William Ian. 1997. The Anatomy of Disgust. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Talev, Margaret. 2006. As House Gets Its First Female Speaker, Potty Parity Is Revisited.
McClatchyDC, December 21. www.mcclatchydc.com/latest-news/article24460222.html.
Transgender Law Center. 2005. Peeing in Peace: A Resource Guide for Transgender Activists and
Allies. Oakland, CA: Transgender Law Center. transgenderlawcenter.org/issues/public
-accommodations/peeing-in-peace.
Weiner, Jennifer. 2015. The Year of the Toilet. New York Times, December 22. www.nytimes
.com/2015/12/23/opinion/the-year-of-the-toilet.html?_r=0.
A G A I N S T the D A Y
Alison Kafer
A fine restaurant here recently altered the signs on its two single-user restrooms
from Men and Women to read Anybody and Everybody. Unfortunately, one result
is that they are both now filthy, with urine splashed on the floor. I dont go there
anymore for that reason.
Ellen
Joanns and Ellens comments (New York Times 2015) are not new or unusual
in conversations about all-gender bathrooms, even among feminists;1 years
ago on WMST-L (an international womens studies listserv), there was a dis-
cussion of all-gender restrooms that similarly turned on the question of filth:
men, apparently, are messy and out of control, pissing everywhere but inside
the toilet bowl, while women are clean and tidy. I imagine many of us have
watched this assumption play out in daily life: a small cluster of women waits
to use the single-stall restroom marked Women, while the Mens single-stall
restroom remains empty; the women remark to one another that they dont
want to go in the mens room because they know its dirty; knowing laughter
ensues (and the wait continues).
Im struck by the multiple layers of bias in these interactions: the adher-
ence to binary systems of sex and gender; the assertion of essentialized gen-
der roles and behaviors (men are dirty, women are clean); the assumption
that the ones hearing or reading these comments are not the ones cleaning
the bathrooms; the implication that transgender women are really/still men
(conflating trans access to restrooms with mens presence in restrooms); and
the deflection of trans and genderqueer access to public restrooms (having
no problems sharing a restroom with transgender individuals, but priori-
tizing [cis]womens access to clean restrooms). Why focus on the need for
restrooms that are safe and accessible for allthe subject of the newspaper
article to which Joann and Ellen were respondingwhen there is (mens)
piss on the floor?
The piss on the floor concerns me, too, although not in the same way
that it does these commenters. Why does the conversation about all-gender
bathrooms turn so frequently to the topic of dirt, filth, and hygiene (see figure
1)? How is it that such claims are seen as justifying the continued practice of
gender-segregated spaces, even though such spaces actively exclude trans,
genderqueer, and gender-nonconforming people? What can we learn from the
assumption that these assertions are simply common sense? As Tanya Titch-
kosky (2011: 73) argues, Justification is not second order to the fact of exclu-
sion; ... it is how we do exclusion as well as generate its everyday sensibility.
Kafer Other Peoples Shit (and Pee!) 757
in public, or make maneuvering the flush handle difficult. But most of the
piss and shit I encounter in public restrooms comes from people who choose
to piss on the seat or leave the toilet full of their waste, all in the name of
cleanliness. In the interest of protecting themselves from germs, they
have chosen to hover over the toilet bowl or avoid the flush handle.3 And this
cleanliness is, for women like Joann and Ellen, part of the safety and com-
fort they associate with women-only spaces, but it is a cleanliness and com-
fort forged in a stunning lack of concern for others. What illustrates egocen-
tric individualism better than the act of hovering?
I remember my mother instructing me to hover in public restrooms
so that I wouldnt have to sit on the toilet seat (I still had the ability to squat
then); my students report receiving the same advice from their relatives and
friends. Whether I pissed on the seat in the process was irrelevantall that
mattered was that I kept my body at a safe remove from the toiletbesides,
any other person using the toilet was surely going to hover, too. Paper seat
covers were a possible alternative, but they werent always available, they
were slippery, and they required ones hands to get perilously close to touch-
ing the toilet. Better to hover.
Perhaps it isnt surprising that the public toilet is charged with anxiety
about germs and dirt: restrooms are, by definition, sites of bodily waste and
its accompanying sounds and smells. As Ruth Barcan (2010) explains, this
dirtiness is heightened by the fact that public toilets contain the bodily
waste of others, so that we imagine the flush handle or toilet seat as being
contaminated by their touch. Yet Barcan notes that this fear is not really
grounded in reality; computer keyboards and telephones are often far more
germy than toilet seats or faucets. As a result, she explains: When I hear
of people afraid to touch a tap, I think less of real germs than of the fear of
the other. Prohibitions on touching objectswhatever their microbiological
basis, sound or otherwiseinevitably involve a fear of touching the body of
another, even by proxy. ... Surely fear of the prewarmed seat is less a ratio-
nally grounded fear of infection than a fear of the touch of the stranger (36).
This fear of the touch of the stranger motivates much of what hap-
pens in and around public restrooms. Women hover so as not to touch the
seat, leaving behind splatters of piss; people refuse to touch the flush handle,
leaving their piss, paper, and shit in the bowl. Both practices make it more
difficult for people who lack the muscles or bodily configuration to hover to
use the toilet; they may also make it more difficult for those who need the
toilet to empty catheter bags or need the stall to perform medical procedures.
(And if the typical multistall restroom has only one accessible stall, and
Kafer Other Peoples Shit (and Pee!) 759
that stall is rendered unusable, then the person needing an accessible stall
must now find another bathroom on a different floor, in a different building,
on a different block, etc.) Concerns about the smells of others, or about oth-
ers encountering ones own smell, lead to chemical air fresheners that can
make restrooms dangerous for those with chemical sensitivities or breath-
ing difficulties. And all of these practices prioritize the cleanliness, com-
fort, and safety of the individual user over the people tasked with cleaning
the bathrooms; the latter are literally unimaginable in a bathroom politics
that sees safety in sameness and danger in difference (men are dirty, toilets
are full of other peoples germs, and unseen others clean it up while we
women can hover safely above it all). Can we instead imagine a different
potty politics, one less focused on individualism and detachment and more
invested in the multiplicity of bodies and minds in the loo?
One of the sites for such explorations has been the signage posted out-
side public restrooms (indeed, the comments that begin this essay were in
response to an article about such signs). Once we move beyond the Men and
Women signs, with gendered stick figures to match, what else might we
imagine? What kinds of coalitions do different terms or images make pos-
sible, and what kinds of coalitions do they foreclose?
I spend a lot of time fantasizing about bathroom signage, and I have to
admit that my thoughts dont always come from a coalitional or feminist/
queer/crip space. The fantasies often come when Im in the airport trying to
squeeze a bathroom break in between flights and I find myself waiting (and
waiting, and waiting, ...) for someone to vacate the accessible stall while I
look longingly at all the empty inaccessible stalls around me. 4 At those
moments, the imagined sign goes something like Does your body fit in the
other stalls? Then why are you in this one?, or Not disabled? Then make
room for those who are, or, as my departure time gets closer and my bladder
fuller, For disabled people only.
Although in my more desperate moments I do find myself wishing
there were some way to get nondisabled people to stop using the accessible
stalls in multistall restrooms when the other stalls are empty, I dont really
want to place yet another layer of surveillance on the public toilet. Bathrooms
are already sites of surveillance and exclusion, where those who dont belong
are kept out. Insisting that wide stalls are for disabled people only would
likely increase such practices, encouraging users to monitor the bodies of
others for signs of legitimate use. As Ellen Samuels (2014: 12640) reveals
in her analysis of parking spaces, such policing relies on ableist assumptions
about what disability looks like; harassment of those deemed insufficiently
760 The South Atlantic Quarterly Against the Day October 2016
disabled by passersby is common, and there are even websites where people
can report illegitimate users. I dont want the same for bathroom stalls.
So I keep trying: If you dont need the grab bars for balance, arent
traveling with an infant or small children, or dont need the extra room to
accommodate the size of your body or wheelchair or to perform medical pro-
cedures, you are taking this space away from those who do. Although its a
bit long for a bathroom sign, this option recognizes that there are many dif-
ferent reasons one might need the larger stall, thereby refusing the abled/
disabled binary and expanding ideas of access and accessibility. (It also
makes room for a much more complex range of stick figures.) But it still
doesnt go far enough toward imagining the kinds of bathroom coalitions
that many of us think are possible.5 This checklist approach to belonging
suggests that some uses and users are authorized while others are not.
My sister and brother-in-law have a cross-stitched sign in their guest
bathroom that gets closer, in that the text focuses on the person outside
rather than the person inside: Who waits outside the door / One may never
know / So tarry not my friend / He too may have to go. Here, in contrast to
the disregard of future users inherent in hovering and splattering, the cur-
rent user is encouraged to remember that the space of the toilet is always (to
be) shared. A similar sentiment is found in another cross-stitched sign I
remember encountering as a kid: a cross-stitched image of a stick figure in a
flowery bathroom accompanied by the text, If you sprinkle when you tinkle,
please be neat and wipe the seat. Explicitly pedagogical, both of these signs
were undoubtedly intended to normalize behavior in ways far beyond the
space of the toilet, and they unabashedly present the bathroom as a site of
self- and other-surveillance.6 At the same time, they do refuse the individual-
ist approach inherent in hovering and imagine the toilet as a site of collec-
tive, shared use.
What might a poster campaign look like that takes this kind of imag-
ining further, one that encourages us to embrace the presence of the other
who came before us and the other who will come after (and even the other
who might be in the space with us at the same time)? Can we imagine
new signs not only for outside the door, marking what kind of space it is, but
also a sign or signs inside the door, acknowledging and even embracing the
kinds of acts that might take place in the space? A poster or series of post-
ers that helps us remember that bodies come in all sizes and configura-
tions, that bathrooms are sites of many different kinds of activities and prac-
tices, that other people always need to be able to use the same toilets we do.
Signs that remind us that safety, comfort, and cleanliness are often
Kafer Other Peoples Shit (and Pee!) 761
codes for exclusions, for casting other people as dirty and out of place. Signs
addressing access as being not only about the space but also about how we
relate in the space together, to one another, to the technologies and equip-
ment in the space. Signs that offer revolution.
Notes
I thank Julie Avril Minich, Dana Newlove, Banu Subramaniam, and Kathi Weeks for their
wise insights into this topic and help with this essay.
1 The commenters were responding to Aimee Lee Balls article The Symbols of Change
(2015), which discussed initiatives to increase gender access to public restrooms in
spaces across the United States.
2 Opponents were successful in defeating the 2015 measure, in large part because of their
fearmongering over bathrooms. One television ad showed a male stranger hiding in a
bathroom stall in the womens room; when a young light-skinned schoolgirl entered the
restroom, he followed her into another stall, closing the door behind them. Some oppo-
nents went so far as to dub the law the Sexual Predator Protection Act, continuing a
long history of representing trans and genderqueer people as dangerously deviant in
order to obscure (cis)male violence. For an account of the laws defeat, see Moyer 2015.
3 Some have suggested kick-pedal flush handles as an alternative, but these presume a
high level of mobility and balance; others favor automatic flushing systems, but, as Irus
Braverman (2010: 72) explains, these presume a standard person with more or less
standard needs engaged in an anticipated standard behavior. So it is a single individual
(not with a helper or child, for example) making a single bowel movement (rather than
a series) or making typical movements in a stall (not preparing for an injection, for
example). As a wheelchair user who moves horizontally onto and off a toilet rather
than vertically, I typically trigger two to four flushes per piss, wasting water (and often
being splashed) in the process. Automation is often a tool of normalization.
4 Although commercial planes come equipped with toilets, they only accommodate cer-
tain bodies, regardless of what the signs may say.
5 My bathroom dreams will always be indebted to Simone Chess, Jessi Quizar, and Matt
Richardson (Chess et al. 2004).
6 The text in my sisters sign, for example, is illustrated with heavily gendered stick fig-
ures, making clear that the waiting he is anything but generic: there are three femi-
ninized stick figures tarrying (putting on makeup, primping, and lounging in the
tub), while a masculine stick figure waits outside the door.
References
Ball, Aimee Lee. 2015. The Symbols of Change. Sunday Styles, New York Times, November 8.
Barcan, Ruth. 2010. Dirty Spaces: Separation, Concealment, and Shame in the Public Toilet.
In Toilet: Public Restrooms and the Politics of Sharing, edited by Harvey Molotch and
Laura Norn, 2541. New York: New York University Press.
Braverman, Irus. 2010. Potty Training: Nonhuman Inspection in Public Washrooms. In
Molotch and Norn, Toilet, 6586.
762 The South Atlantic Quarterly Against the Day October 2016
Chess, Simone, et al. 2004. Calling All Restroom Revolutionaries! In Thats Revolting! Queer
Strategies for Resisting Assimilation, edited by Mattilda, aka Matt Bernstein Sycamore,
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Samuels, Ellen. 2014. Fantasies of Identification: Disability, Gender, Race. New York: New York
University Press.
Titchkosky, Tanya. 2011. Where?: To Pee or Not to Pee. In The Question of Access: Disability,
Space, Meaning, 6991. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
A G A I N S T the D A Y
Ben Fawcett
M ost readers of this article will be able to flush and forget their bodily
waste, conveniently and hygienically, at any time, almost wherever they are.
However, this is far from the case for a huge proportion of the global popula-
tion. About one in every three of us do not have access to an effective toilet
one that satisfactorily separates us and everybody else from our potentially
disease-carrying feceswithin or near our home, our workplace, or our
school. This lack of access has dire impacts on lives and livelihoods.
Data from the United Nations Childrens Fund and the World Health
Organization (2015), which have been monitoring worldwide water supplies
and sanitation, show that, in 2015, 32 percent of the global population2.34
billion peopledid not have access to an improved toilet. The data also
indicate that 950 million women, men, and children do not even have use of
a dirty, unsafe latrine; they are obliged to resort to open defecation, on
beaches, on riverbanks, on railway lines, in the fields or forests, or using
plastic bags, which are then disposed of at random. Of the worlds open def-
ecators, 560 million live in India.
The proportion of people with access to an adequate toilet is reported
to be much greater in towns and cities of the world than in rural villages.
However, the forty-eight countries classified as least developed by the
United Nations had only an average of 47 percent toilet coverage in their
towns and cities in 2015. Urban population growth is currently very rapid
and likely to remain so, particularly compared with slowing growth in rural
areas. In consequence of this growth, while more than 1.4 billion people
have gained access to improved sanitation in towns and cities across the
developing world since 1990, the absolute number without access increased
by 230 million, 50 percent more than in 1990. In particular, slums and infor-
mal settlements in poorer countries are growing rapidly. The United Nations
Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat 2013) has estimated that
slums may be home to 2 billion people by 2030, up from 863 million in
2012. It is possible that a third of the worlds people will be slum dwellers by
the middle of the twenty-first century.
Slums around the world have several common features: inadequate
infrastructure and services for water supply, sanitation, drainage, and elec-
tricity; often makeshift shelter, lacking durability; insecure tenure, resulting
in lives under the threat of eviction by authorities or private landlords; over-
crowding, exacerbating poor health conditions, increasing social tensions,
and giving rise to congested lanes that make access to goods and services dif-
ficult; and lack of legal recognition, resulting in the term informal settle-
ments. Because of lack of official recognition, slum dwellers are often not
included in censuses; it is therefore likely that the number of people without
sanitation is underestimated (Satterthwaite, Mitlin, and Bartlett 2015).
The impacts of not having access to a toilet are often devastating, both
in terms of physical health, particularly for young children, and in social
terms, especially for women and girls.
Diarrhea: 1.7 billion episodes every year, causing 760,000 deaths in children under five
years old. Transmitted by all fecal-oral routes. Treatable by oral rehydration and largely
preventable by effective WASH.
Roundworm, whipworm, and hookworm: Infections with these soil-based worms cause
asthma, anemia, undernutrition, and impaired physical and intellectual development;
transmitted from eggs in human feces to another person, by mouth (roundworm and
whipworm) or through the skin (hookworm). At least 800 million children are infected
with roundworm, 600 million with whipworm, and 575 million with hookworm.
Trachoma: The leading cause of preventable blindness; 1.8 million with severe visual
impairment; transmitted in eye discharge by person-to-person contact and by Musca
sorbens flies that breed on human feces.
Schistosomiasis: Transmitted through human excreta to snails living in water bodies,
which pass it back to another person by skin penetration or consumption of infected water.
Over 200 million people are affected, most of them children; 20 million suffer severe,
debilitating consequences.
Source: World Health Organization 2016
damages their small intestines, such that they can absorb less nutrients. At
the same time, their immune response in fighting these infections consumes
both energy and protein. The result is malnutrition and, in many cases, stunt-
ing. Research in India (Spears 2012), where so many of the worlds open def-
ecators live, and in Cambodia (Water and Sanitation Program 2013) has indi-
cated a clear correlation between environmental enteropathy, open defecation,
permanent stunting, and poor educational performance. Being brought up
in an environment where open defecation is the norm, as is common in Cam-
bodia, especially during the critical first two years of an infants life, results,
almost inevitably, in permanent stunting and devastating physical and intel-
lectual impacts. Researchers have also highlighted that the effect of open def-
ecation on stunting is much more pronounced in densely populated urban
areas, that is, the slums, than in rural areas.
Thanks, in large part, to overcrowding, health conditions tend to be
worse in slums than in villages and significantly worse than in other areas of
towns and cities. Siddharth Agarwal (2011) shows that the poorest quartile of
urban populations in six Indian states suffered under-five mortality rates 79
percent higher than the rest of the urban population. Madhya Pradesh had a
staggering differential of 300 percent. Diarrheal diseases are reported as the
leading cause of these child deaths.
Poor health has numerous indirect effects, including those on educa-
tional performance and productivity. Likewise, good health relates not just to
freedom from diseases; it is a state of complete physical, social, and mental
well-being, determined by numerous factors, many of which are directly
affected by inadequate sanitation.
being forced to squat down in the open, with no respect for privacy, not hav-
ing the opportunity to clean oneself after defecating and facing the constant
threat of assault in such a vulnerable moment. (Albuquerque 2009: 18)
Marni Sommer et al. (2015) usefully summarize the four most com-
mon categories of violence related to WASH: sexual violence; psychological
violence, including harassment and bullying; physical violence; and socio-
cultural violence, including ostracism, discrimination, and marginalization.
The authors give numerous examples of the feelings of fear, shame, and
helplessness that women around the developing world experience in open
defecation and the use of distant, unsafe, unlit, and often unhygienic toilet
facilities. Likewise, women in both Uganda and India expressed feelings of
anger and disgust at the daily struggle to manage their sanitation needs with
dignity and in safety. Although women are massively constrained by socio-
cultural mores against being seen to defecate, particularly in India, such that
they are obliged to do so only at night, the dangers of attack are multiplied
when they move around in the dark. Public toilets are common sites of sex-
ual violence. Railway tracks are commonly used for defecation in India, but
at great risk to women and girls doing so under cover of darkness.
Anupama Nallari (2015) movingly describes the experiences of adoles-
cent girls in four poor settlements in Bengaluru, India. Radha, the oldest of
five children living with their parents in a small home in an unrecognized
slum of about two hundred other such homes, is perhaps the most chal-
lenged. She is obliged to use the vacant land beside the settlement for her
toilet needs. She feels exposed as she passes through the gap in the wall sur-
rounding the slum, has difficulty achieving privacy, and is frightened by
snakes. It is particularly hard for the girls when they are menstruating, as
they have the additional challenge of disposing of their sanitary napkins or
rags discreetly in garbage piles out in the open. Radha complained that she
had been teased and verbally harassed by boys when caught in the act (79).
As Nallari reports, mothers are afraid for their daughters: If something
happens, these girls lives will be ruined forever. ... Lack of sanitation is not
just an inconvenience for adolescent girls, it shapes their very identity and
how they experience the world around them (8586).
Sanitation is not just about managing excreta; bathing and washing
clothes is equally important and problematic for many people. Deepa Joshi,
Ben Fawcett, and Fouzia Mannan (2011) found how important it is, even for
the poorest in Bangladesh and India, to be able to wash regularly; being,
and being seen to be, unclean is a huge stigma. Girls in Beguntila, a slum in
Dhaka, explained that they have to get up early in the morning, before the
768 The South Atlantic Quarterly Against the Day October 2016
men are around: We bathe in the dirty pond, with our clothes on. Then we
go home, change our clothes and then come back [to the pond] to wash the
changed clothes. This is so difficult when we are bleeding (menstruating).
We also need to wash the rags we use during this period, but there is no
space [private enough] to dry them (104).
A male-dominated WASH sector and male control over infrastructure
investments have resulted in the needs and rights of women and girls being
ignored. But more recent concerns with human rights and with privacy and
dignity have led to recognition of the importance of menstrual hygiene man-
agement. Work in this area needs to start from an understanding of tradi-
tional beliefs, knowledge, and practices (Sommer, Kjelln, and Pensulo
2013). Beliefs include many taboos and cultural attitudes, most significantly
concerning secrecy and shame. Knowledge about menstrual onset and man-
agement and about reproductive health may also be limited. Menstrual
hygiene practices define the requirements for privacy and safety, including
space and facilities for bathing, changing, and the disposing or washing
and drying of used materials. All too often, personal needs are severely con-
strained and result in indignity and shame, every month, for hundreds of
millions of girls and women. Lack of adequate, gender-segregated toilets in
schools results in huge numbers of girls dropping out of education or regu-
larly missing classes and therefore not achieving their potential.
Alongside those living in slums, towns and cities in low-income coun-
tries include numerousat least 100 million (CARDO, n.d.)homeless
people and pavement dwellers, whose sanitation and hygiene needs are even
more inadequately met. Facilities and services for such peopleindividuals
and families alikeare sorely lacking, and life is hard. For Safia, a young
married girl living on the streets of Hyderabad in India, Everything is a
problem on the pavement. There is no privacy. People are watching all the
time. . . . People are waiting to take advantage. Theres no safety. . . . [Safias]
first baby . . . died [after] a few months. . . . Her second child is three years
old. On the day the [research] team met Safia, she had just suffered the mis-
carriage of her third childon the street (Joshi, Fawcett, and Mannan 2011:
9697). One can only imagine the difficulties for pavement dwellers to meet
their sanitation and hygiene needs.
Note
1 DALYs = years of life lost through premature mortality (YLLs) + years of life lived with
a disability, weighted by severity (YDLs).
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Agarwal, Siddharth. 2011. The State of Urban Health in India: Comparing the Poorest Quar-
tile to the Rest of the Urban Population in Selected States and Cities. Environment and
Urbanization 23, no. 1: 1328.
Albuquerque, Catarina de. 2009. Report of the Independent Expert on the Human Right to Safe
Water and Sanitation. Report to the United Nations Human Rights Council A/HRC/12/24.
New York: United Nations.
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Extent of Homelessness in Developing Countries. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: CARDO, Univer-
sity of Newcastle-upon-Tyne.
Chambers, Robert, and Gregor von Medeazza. 2014. Undernutritions Blind Spot: A Review
of Fecally Transmitted Infections in India. Journal of Water, Sanitation and Hygiene for
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itation: Experiences and Perceptions of the Urban Poor. Environment and Urbanization
23, no. 1: 91111.
Nallari, Anupama. 2015. All We Want Are Toilets inside Our Homes! The Critical Role of
Sanitation in the Lives of Urban Poor Adolescent Girls in Bengaluru, India. Environ-
ment and Urbanization 27, no. 1: 7388.
770 The South Atlantic Quarterly Against the Day October 2016
Prss-stn, Annette, and Carlos Corvaln. 2006. Preventing Disease through Healthy Envi-
ronments: Towards an Estimate of the Environmental Burden of Disease. Geneva: World
Health Organization.
Prss-stn, Annette, et al. 2014. Burden of Disease from Inadequate Water, Sanitation, and
Hygiene in Low- and Middle-Income Settings: A Retrospective Analysis of Data from
145 Countries. Tropical Medicine and International Health 19, no. 8: 894905.
Satterthwaite, David, Diana Mitlin, and Sheridan Bartlett. 2015. Editorial: Is It Possible to
Reach Low-Income Urban Dwellers with Good-Quality Sanitation? Environment and
Urbanization 27, no. 1: 318.
Sommer, Marni, Marianne Kjelln, and Chibesa Pensulo. 2013. Girls and Womens Unmet
Needs for Menstrual Hygiene Management (MHM): The Interactions between MHM
and Sanitation Systems in Low-Income Countries. Journal of Water, Sanitation and
Hygiene for Development 3, no. 3: 28397.
Sommer, Marni, et al. 2015. Violence, Gender, and WASH: Spurring Action on a Complex,
Under-Documented and Sensitive Topic. Environment and Urbanization 27, no. 1:
10516.
Spears, Dean. 2012. Height and Cognitive Achievement among Indian Children. Economics
and Human Biology 10, no. 2: 21019.
UN-Habitat (United Nations Human Settlements Programme). 2013. State of the Worlds Cities
2012/2013: Prosperity of Cities. Nairobi: UN-Habitat.
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and Drinking Water2015 Update and MDG Assessment. Geneva: United Nations Chil-
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A G A I N S T the D A Y
Dharman Jeyasingham
Since the mid-1990s, the number of public toilets in Britain that are open
and effectively available as sites for sex between men has reduced dramati-
cally. In 2004 Clara Greed (2004) had already noted a drop of 40 percent in
the number of public toilets across the country, while a state policy of auster-
ity in Britain since 2010 has meant that many more public toilets have
closed. Those toilets that remain are likely to have changed significantly.
Several years ago, I explored how public toilets were being materially reorga-
nized to make activities within them more open to view (Jeyasingham 2010).
I used several toilets in Manchester, England, as case studies to show how
greater acceptance of sexual minorities as citizens with rights to protection
from homophobic abuse had developed in tandem with greater expectations
about appropriate behavior and policing practices that, more effectively than
before, mitigated against homoerotic activity in public toilets. All of those
toilets have since closed, and Manchester, which has a population of around
five hundred thousand people, now has only one functioning local authority
public toilet (George 2011). While restrooms have not necessarily been clos-
ing with the same frequency elsewhere, material adaptations and increased
surveillance, both natural (the opening up of spaces to general view) and
technological, now seem to be a feature of public toilets in many locations
across the West (Dalton 2008; Braverman 2010). This shift has occurred
alongside the increased social and political inclusion of certain forms of les-
bian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) identities in the same global
regions.
The decreases in the number of public toilets and in the privacy and
comfort that they offer have potentially disastrous consequences for many
older people, disabled people, those caring for young children, and others
who are likely to have greater need for such facilities. These shifts also mark
a decline in the opportunities that such spaces might provide for queer inter-
actions outside of social networks that feel increasingly normative to many
and a consequent decline in the social, erotic, and identificatory potential
that such interactions might have provided. Even so, it might be that toilets
continue to provide queer potential, as figures that represent certain queer
affective experiences and as sites where such experiences resonate and can
still be felt. This essay examines two examples of recent engagements with
toilets that arguably offer queer possibilities, even as they mark the passing
of these toilets as venues for sex between men. The first of these is Tearoom,
a film (2007) and accompanying book (2008) by William E. Jones, which
presents footage that was shot during covert police surveillance of a public
toilet in Ohio in 1962 and was subsequently used in criminal prosecutions.
The second example is the Edwardian Cloakroom in Bristol, England, a
building that was a functioning public toilet until 2001 and, since 2011, has
been made available as a gallery space for emerging artists in the city.
The status of both examples as toilets of the past hardly makes them
unusual in the critical literature about sex in toilets, which has tended to
focus on spaces that no longer exist or are no longer used for sex. This focus
on the past is partly because of the significance given to toilets as places of
sexual and social interaction for emerging queer communities in the late
nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries (Humphreys 1970; Chauncey 1994;
Maynard 1994; Houlbrook 2005). Ethical considerations have also had this
effect, in that writing about venues for secluded and stigmatized activities
holds the potential to compromise the opportunities for continuing seclu-
sion in those places, so published research has tended to focus on places
where sexual activity has already dropped off, even if only recently. More fun-
damentally, the resonance of past incidents is integral to many experiences
of seeking sex in public toilets. Toilets, as spaces of solitude intermittently
interrupted, have usually provided more opportunities for thinking about
what has happened in the past and what might happen soon than for engag-
ing with other copresent bodies.
Material features of public toilet spaces, as well as providing erotic
potential in themselves (Brown 2008), often recall more closeted eras
(whether the grandeur of fin de sicle toilet spaces or the utility of postwar
modernist ones)in fact, their erotic appeal might rely in part on their sta-
Jeyasingham Closure, Affect, and the Queer Potential of Public Toilets 773
Tearoom
Tearoom (2007) is a fifty-six-minute film by Jones that presents footage
filmed by police officers over the course of three weeks in 1962 in Mansfield,
Ohio, at an underground public restroom next to the towns Central Park.1
The film consists mostly of footage from covert surveillance of the restroom
from an adjacent service corridor, through a two-way mirror. This footage
shows men engaged in cruising each other and having sex as well as doing
other more mundane activities such as combing hair and listening to the
radio. It was produced as evidence in criminal prosecutions that resulted in
at least thirty-eight men being convicted and either imprisoned or detained
in psychiatric hospitals, almost exclusively for taking part in consensual sex-
ual acts. What we see in the film, therefore, are images of men whose lives
were about to change forever and in quite horrible ways. The toilet itself was
demolished once the first trials had begun, with the underground rooms,
perhaps symbolically, being filled with earth (Jones 2008). The material
filmed by police officers was subsequently used in Camera Surveillance
(1964), a film produced by the Ohio-based Highway Safety Foundation for
use in police training, which Jones reworked in Tearoom forty years later. In
turning a training film into a piece of cinematic art, Jones made only a few
changes, the most significant of which was to remove the disgust-filled com-
mentary that formed Camera Surveillances sound track and screen the film
in silence.
774 The South Atlantic Quarterly Against the Day October 2016
Edwardian Cloakroom
The Edwardian Cloakroom is an exhibition space in a building that used
to be a public toilet in Bristol. The building offers two distinct spaces, previ-
ously the gentlemens and the ladies toilets, which still have entrances labeled
as such (further details can be found at Bristol City Council 2016). Artists
can arrange to use the venue to exhibit their work without a charge, on the
condition that they curate the exhibition and cause minimal disruption to
the site. The building is listed as having architectural and historical signifi-
cance, and it retains its original features, to the extent that people occasion-
ally mistake it for a restroom during exhibitions and attempt to use the toi-
lets or urinals.
The architecture of the mens toiletan entrance set back from the
street and sight lines within the building that provide opportunities for both
seclusion and displayand its location on the edge of the city center, close to
776 The South Atlantic Quarterly Against the Day October 2016
other, similarly secluded toilets, meant that it was frequently used for cruis-
ing prior to its closure in 2001. Now, despite the venues quaint title, the
same space is often used to exhibit works that explore questions of sexuality,
liminality, and decay. Many of the exhibitions have drawn meaning from
their location in a space that was used for private and intimate acts, while
others have focused on the gender segregated nature of the spaces, such as
Claudio Ahlerss 2014 exhibition of velvet models of male and female geni-
tals and Ladies Room, a 2016 installation by Catherine Anyango and Julie
Hill, which has focused on messages written by women in horror films.
Exhibits have frequently returned to questions of observation, stigma, and
abjection, such as Rachel Sokals 2011 piece Peeping TomCamera Obscura,
which explored the use of developments in surveillance technology, and the
2014 exhibition Smoke and Mirrors, which referenced the Pendle witch trials.
They have also often focused on solitude and reflectionfor instance, Cait-
lin Shepherds 2015 sound installation Sanctuary. My focus here is not so
much on whether these pieces are successful or innovative in artistic terms
(although many are) but on their shared aim to draw on the continuing reso-
nances of a building that was once the venue for abjected, stigmatized, and
often criminalized acts. As Shepherds introduction to Sanctuary states, the
site is an abandoned building, full of other peoples histories (Bristol City
Council 2016), and it is the feeling of continued presence of such past events
that enables the best of the work to succeed in a exhibition space that appears
at first to be rather inflexible and confined.
the past to intrude into the present can also disrupt those false ideas about a
unity between time and event that lead us to discount what has happened in
the past and ignore its significance for present times (Trigg 2009). These
remains of toilets can be seen as enabling different relationships to the past
and communities across time, as well as offering possibilities of alternative
erotic and affective engagements with the continuing resonance of long-
gone bodies and interactions.
Note
1 At least two excerpts of Tearoom are, at the time of writing, available to view on You-
Tube, while a better-quality version of the entire film can be found on the porn network
Xvideos.com.
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October. www.frieze.com/blog/entry/in_the_tearoom_not_really_what_i_expected.
Link no longer active. Blog entry quoted at http://www.williamejones.com/collections
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Maynard, Steven. 1994. Through a Hole in the Lavatory Wall: Homosexual Subcultures,
Police Surveillance, and the Dialectics of Discovery, Toronto, 18901930. Journal of the
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halle Exnergasse. www.williamejones.com/collections/about/11.
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Ruins. Memory Studies 2, no. 1: 87101.
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60s Sex Sting. Out, May: 9.
A G A I N S T the D A Y
edge the instability of gender itself as a social system for classifying and
administering human lives according to a purportedly natural sex dichot-
omy. While misplacing the source of these anxieties, Campaign for Houston
(2016) explicitly acknowledged the threat, seeing the bathroom ordinance as
deceptive tactics to re-structure society to fit a societal vision that was an
attack on the traditional family. In the end, Campaign for Houston deemed
the bathroom a battleground worth fighting for based on the same problem-
atic logic used by those who previously fought for sex-segregated bathrooms
in the past, considering it a space that upholds the status quo by maintaining
gender binaries accomplished through the spatial segregation of the sexes,
justified by anatomical difference.
However, instead of fostering a productive dialogue that would have
encouraged Houstonians to confront the underlying social anxieties trig-
gered by gender-appropriate public toilet access for trans people, both sides
of the debate framed the issue in a reductive way, posing it as a question
of safety and privacy. Opponents asserted that transgender women threat-
ened the safety of cisgender women and children, while proponents saw
proper access as a way of protecting transgender people from harassment
and assaults. Strikingly, both sides believed that their concerns over the
ostensibly objective problem of public safety could be adequately addressed
through an architectural solutionmaking the built environment of the
restroom facilitate a particular vision of a desired body politic.
Design Recommendations
Designers need to craft flexible environments that can allow all embodied
individuals to express a wide spectrum of identities in public space. As
gender expression becomes more diverse and differently attached to and
Sanders and Stryker Stalled 783
detached from physicality, this need becomes ever more pertinent. With
respect to public bathrooms, that means jettisoning what is now the gener-
ally accepted solution that consists of maintaining gender-specific bath-
rooms and merely supplementing the status quo with a single-stall or sin-
gle-occupancy room, not so different from the single-occupancy bathrooms
mandated by the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Advocates fre-
quently justify this solution on economic grounds, arguing that its modest
footprint does not impose undue hardship on building owners and develop-
ers who would otherwise be compelled to fund more elaborate architectural
solutions. However, the drawback of the single-occupancy gender-neutral
bathroom is that it spatially isolates and excludes. While some users prefer
the privacy it offers, it can nevertheless exacerbate problems of social exclu-
sion by segregating transgender people from shared public space and stig-
matizing their presence in mixed groups of people.
A better solution, supported by many trans activists, and increasingly
found in trendy urban nightclubs and restaurants, is to eliminate gender-
segregated facilities entirely and treat the public restroom as one single open
space with fully enclosed stalls. One example is the Modern, Danny Meyers
upscale restaurant in New Yorks Museum of Modern Art. A circulation
corridor divides the linear room into two parallel zones: one is dedicated to
washing and features a horizontal mirror hanging above a row of freestand-
ing pedestal sinks; the other, dedicated to eliminating, comprises an unin-
terrupted wall of European-style floor-to-ceiling stalls. This type of facility
has many advantages. Gender-nonconforming people are not forced to
choose between two unacceptable options, each of which makes them
uncomfortable, while trans and cis people who express their gender in a
more binary fashion need not worry about being in the wrong restroom.
European-style stalls are equipped with doors with no peek-a-boo cracks and
therefore ensure visual privacy and inhibit nonconsensual sex between
stalls. Most important, by consolidating a greater number of people in one
room rather than two, the unisex, gender-neutral bathroom provides safety
in numbers: increasing bathroom occupancy reduces risks of predation
associated with being alone and out of sight.
Our design proposal takes the single-room typology as a point of
departure, but takes it one step further by posing an alternative to the domi-
nant spatial paradigm that relies on walls to solve social issues. The bath-
room is but one instance of a building type that, like fortresses and prisons,
subscribes to the generally accepted belief that by erecting boundaries, archi-
tects can create protected precincts that ensure safety through the separation
784 The South Atlantic Quarterly Against the Day October 2016
Conclusion
The overall objective of our design proposal is to create a relatively barrier-
free open precinct that encourages all embodied subjects to freely and safely
engage with one another in public space. The realization of our design pro-
posal, as well as the more modest proposals like the single-occupancy unisex
bathroom described above, depends not only on design innovation but also
on legislation that would rewrite building and plumbing codes. Making
these changes requires acknowledging the pivotal role that building codes
play in shaping identity through design, as well as acknowledging that such
codes are not neutral functional objectives but rather reflect and reproduce
deep-seated cultural beliefs that shape the design of the spaces of our daily
lives, including bathrooms. Transforming the codes that govern public spaces
such as toilets is a long-term project that will require concerted effort to
change entrenched ideas about the naturalness and fixity of our social gen-
der binary and the assumptions that undergird them. But because the goal
we seek is justicea nonutopian call to make the world be more as it should
bewe should not be deterred by the size of the task from starting such
work in the present.
References
Bidgood, Jess. 2016. 10 More States Sue U.S. Over Transgender Policy for Schools. New York
Times, July 8. www.nytimes.com/2016/07/09/us/10-states-sue-us-transgender-schools
.html?_r=0.
Campaign for Houston. 2016. www.campaignforhouston.com (accessed March 11, 2016).
Cavanagh, Sheila. 2010. Queering Bathrooms: Gender, Sexuality, and the Hygienic Imagination.
Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Madhani, Aamer. 2016. Battle Brewing over Transgender Bathroom Laws in State Capitals.
USA Today, February 27. www.usatoday.com/story/news/2016/02/27/battle-brewing
-over-transgender-bathroom-laws-state-capitals/81006894.
Notes on Contributors
doi 10.1215/00382876-3656202