‘The last colonial’: becoming Stuart Hall

ABSTRACT

The essay situates colonial Jamaica as constitutive to the postcolonial black British intellectual Stuart Hall becomes. It also reads Hall’s memoir in conversation with other Jamaican writers explicating the brown Jamaican middle class experience.

KEYWORDS:

• Race
• colonial
• postcolonial
• decolonization
• Jamaica
• memoirs
• life writings
• brown middle class

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. See Bill Schwarz’ earlier essay, ‘Becoming Postcolonial’, where he positions Hall in relationship to CLR James and their shared moment of West Indian decolonization (Gilroy, Grossberg, and McRobbie 2000, 268–281).

2. I am not making a claim for Hall as a religious subject; in fact, he was raised in a deeply secular home. Instead, here I am drawing attention to the uses Hall himself points out that he made of the organized Christian church.

3. While both his parents come from what is a recognizable brown middle class, he points out that his father is from a family of traders while his mother is from a professional class. These distinctions show up again when he draws attention to Norman Manley brown middle-class ‘country’ family (Hall 2017, 41).

4. To the extent that we have been able to access the autobiographical voices of that generation of intellectuals, it has been a belated arrival – articulated in interviews such as Hall’s turn to the personal interview in the last conjuncture of his life as well as the interviews David Scott has conducted with that generation published in Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism.

5. One of the few unmediated texts of the period is Joyce Gladwell’s Brown Face Big Master (Gladwell 1969). See also The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Mary Seacole in Many Lands (Seacole 2005). Patricia Cumper’s One Bright Child (Cumper 1999); Lorna Goodison’s From Harvey River: A Memoir of My Mother and Her Island; Mark Holland The Jippi-Jappa Hat Merchant and His Family: A Jamaican Family in Britain (Holland 2014). See Paquet’s (2002).

6. Born in 1907, 1916 and 1922, Doris Harvey, Louis Fernando Henriques and Gloria Cumper are of the generation that precedes Stuart Hall. This generation’s stories narrate the material and entangled ways in which the war impacted everyday life in the metropole and its reverberations in the colonies, preparing readers for the postwar England Hall encounters in 1951.