Inside Ethnicity: Suburban Outlooks

Abstract

Stuart Hall’s essay ‘New ethnicities’ (1996 [1988]) attempts to describe and conceptualize a ‘shift’ in black cultural politics in Great Britain in the 1980s. Hall’s argument belongs with related tendencies in a period which saw the formation of independent black film units and co-ops, the advent of Channel 4 and a new commissioning policy for minority programmes, and the appearance of new black authors, dramatists, bands and singers. These changes had been described by Kobena Mercer in the essay ‘Recoding Narratives of Race and Nation’, and this had been included, along with Hall’s essay, in the publication Black Film/British Cinema (1988), following a conference at the ICA in London, an event which itself signalled the shift in the terms of debate Hall sought to identify. Other contemporary essays by Hall, especially, (‘Minimal Selves’, 1987, ‘Cultural Identity and Diaspora’, 1990), helped frame this new thinking as did the earlier film and literary texts discussed below. Together, this work and associated debate can be said to register and respond to the broader social and political trends which saw ‘race relations’ in Great Britain move into the critical and confrontational stage of direct clashes with police as Thatcherism took hold. The analyses by Martin Jacques and Hall (1983, 1988) of Thatcherism as a form of ‘authoritarian populism’, and their arguments for a radical and progressive populism which would contest this hegemonic form, had also begun to appear from the early 1980s.