‘Nostalgia for what cannot be’: an interpretive and social biography of Stuart Hall's early years in Jamaica and England, 1932–1959

Abstract

Much has been written about Stuart Hall's intellectual and theoretical contributions especially after the mid-1960s. This interpretive and social biography places Stuart Hall's life from 1932 to 1959 in a socio-historical context, beginning with his childhood in Jamaica and his early years in England. I draw on Hall's own biographical reflections during the last years of his life and his writings about secondary schools and working-class youth from his insights as a teacher in South London, as well as his writings on identity and diaspora, as he reflects on the early years later in his life. By examining this less celebrated time, I hope to bring insights about pedagogy, identity, exile and nostalgia, and make connections between the early experiences and the more celebrated years of Stuart Hall as an outstanding educator and public intellectual.

Keywords:

• Stuart Hall
• social biography
• Jamaicans
• diasporic migrations
• race and identity
• pedagogy

Acknowledgement

A special thank you to Guest Editor Leslie Roman for the opportunity for rich discussion and helpful insights while writing this essay.

Notes

1. In John Akomfrah's film, the Stuart Hall Project (2012), the music of Miles Davis is as much a feature of the film as Hall's life history. In the film, Hall remarks, ‘Nostalgia for what cannot be is in the sound of Miles Davis's trumpet’. ‘The nostalgia for what cannot be’ exemplifies Stuart Hall's relationship with Jamaica and perhaps the immigrant's diasporic consciousness; thus, it was chosen as the title of this essay.

2. See chapter 8 in Mervyn Alleyne's (2005) Construction and Representation of Race and Ethnicity in the Caribbean World for a discussion of these various waves of immigrant groups, and the interrelationships between race, colour, ethnicity and class.

3. Permission for use of this image was granted by Patrick Montgomery, Caribbean Photo Archives, Jamaica https://www.flickr.com/photos/caribbeanphotoarchive/3025515206/in/set-72157608965430475/lightbox/

4. This influx feeds the erroneous notion that Africans and Caribbeans did not live in the UK before the Second World War. See Green, 2000, ‘Before the Windrush’.

5. I have used the term ‘West Indian’ to mark this particular era of migration history and when citing authors who used the term when writing about this time period. While still prevalently used, ‘West Indian’ reminds us of the erroneous naming attributed to Christopher Columbus and needs to be problematized.

6. Photograph from author's personal collection. Photographer: Ernest Smith, 37, the Main Way, Chorleywood.

7. Listen to poets Bennett and Johnson perform their poetry on Youtube to appreciate the beauty of the Jamaican language.

8. Cooper writes her tribute to Hall in two separate forms of Creole orthography that she calls ‘chaka-chaka’ (irregular) and ‘prapa-prapa’ (proper). I used the former above because of its proximity to English orthography for the sake of the reader. Prapa-prapa is based upon a phonetic system devised by Jamaican linguist Frederic Cassidy and updated by the Jamaica Language Unit at UWI. The sentence above would be written more phonetically as follows: ‘So wa mek Stuart Hall neva kom bak a yaad; Im did visit, yes. Bot im liv out im laif a Inglan’ (Cooper, 2014).

9. In The magic of diaspora (2011), the author argues for the growing economic importance of diasporas and the contribution they make to a country's economic growth. The Economist.com, online. See Trotz and Mullings (2013) for a critique of this ‘diaspora option’.

10. http://www.mona.uwi.edu/library/sites/default/files/library/uploads/Stuart%20Hall.pdf