We are not talking about something that is already secured, we’re actually in the moment of its emergence…. Speak from your confusion, because what you have been hearing is also, if you’ll forgive me, also speech from a confused place or from a place which is moving. (Hall, “Afternoon Discussion” 59)
Introduction
What does it mean to be in, but not of, the academy? How does one conceptualize Black life and Black thought in Europe, a continent that has yet to count fully or acknowledge its Black population, that disregards the idea of Afro-European roots or routes? In this essay I think through these questions in relation to Stuart Hall and the formation of cultural studies, focusing on two central concepts. The first is that academic work is, and should be, political work, regardless of the discipline or institution in which it is performed; this is what Hall describes as the “vocation of intellectual life” (“Race” 11). An intellectual vocation has specific obligations and responsibilities, wrapped up in politics that help determine the possibilities for transformation and liberation. The second idea is that the precarity of Black life and Black study in Europe and North America is a result of the nature of university knowledge production, itself a product of colonialism, slavery, and the development of white European hegemony. The university is thus a site where politics may be obfuscated, but is not absent. By picking up Hall’s conceptualization of the vocation of intellectual life and the role cultural studies played in disrupting the normative knowledge of the university, one can better understand the problematics and potential for Black study today.
Hall’s evocation of speech from a place that is moving, as in this essay’s opening quotation, captures the meanings of both individual and collective identities, positionalities, and locations. These formations are both of the map and of the mind according to Hall, and as such “the question of where one speaks from, who is speaking, is not a simple matter” (Hall, “Introduction” 32). To speak from a moving place is to speak from the confusions and complications that constitute your self and relations over time and through space, and must be understood in this context. This speech is from an enunciated self, “from a particular place and time, from a history and a culture which is specific” (Hall, “Cultural Identity” 68). Hall’s own life was characterized by a series of moves, as who he was (inside and outside the academy) and where he spoke from traversed geographies and communities on both sides of the Atlantic, in but not of Europe (an expression he picked up from C. L. R. James [Hall, “‘In’” 375]). He had an African diasporic and Caribbean cultural sensibility that was also distinctly Black, not defined by belonging to essentialized identity categories but reflecting his investment in a diasporic community and its knowledges. I focus here on Hall’s moving places and placements as they pertain to his understanding of the European university and the moving meanings of this formation.
My analysis follows Hall’s critiques of theorizing in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. In his chapter, Hall engages with debates about ideology and Marxism by relating them to an existing political problem (Thatcherism) and assessing their capacity to not only make sense of but transform these conditions of oppression (“Toad” 35). Consistent in Hall’s writing is the assertion that theory’s purpose is to transform practice and that it must therefore be grounded in concrete cases. I aim to adhere to this guidance by connecting Hall’s analyses of cultural studies to a description of Black studies today. This is not intended to be an authoritative overview. Rather, it considers on a more personal level how Hall’s academic praxis and engagements in the British wing of the European academy inform my own work, taking up the movement of our positionalities and their meanings in the conjuncture of each moment. In order to do this, I describe my experiences, but with each step pause to hear the echoes of Hall’s writing and thought. I wonder how Hall would have, or how he has already, described what was happening, with his prophetic and timeless voice.
I hope through reading to “actively bring something to, rather than simply being spoken by, texts,” to create “an active exchange,” where my confusion is in conversation with his (Hall, “Richard Hoggart” 44). I use autobiographical narrative “not because it is the truth or the only way of telling the history,” but as a way to “say something about what certain theoretical moments in cultural studies have been like for me,” and how they might illuminate future moments (Hall, “Cultural Studies” [1996] 262; emphasis added). In but not of Europe, outside but still captured by the university, these dualities demarcated Hall’s praxis as well as my own. Several decades and a few national borders away from Hall’s work in the United Kingdom, I understand my vocation and positionality in German academia as residing in the afterlives of Hall’s labor, among a field of promises left unfulfilled.
Vocations and the Western University
Before beginning my narratives, I would like to clarify two critical concepts gleaned from Hall’s writing: the vocation of intellectual life and the role of university knowledge production. The vocation of intellectual life is a way to attend to questions of positionality, what being and acting in the university could or should mean. The duty of the intellectual involves more than just the production of knowledge, it requires also that intellectuals do the work of translating this knowledge to society. Hall is careful to differentiate between intellectual work and academic work; though they overlap and interact, each one facilitating the other, they are not the same (“Cultural Studies” [1996] 274). The vocation of the intellectual has political consequences and political engagements attached to it, it demands critical analysis, it uplifts strategies for survival and resources for resistance, and it is driven by a necessity to address society’s “central, urgent, and disturbing questions” (Hall, “Race” 11).
Theoretical work has a tendency to produce formal and irrefutable guidelines, but the pedagogy and practice of engagement with communities demand flexibility. Because community-based political work develops in response to the particular needs and fluidities of groups on the ground level, no singular theoretical intervention can encompass these nuances. Theory’s use comes in its ability to intervene through the creation of “localized, conjunctural knowledges,” political in itself but not a substitution for politics (Hall, “Cultural Studies” [1996] 274). A vocational practice urges scholars to put the system of knowledge and its advantages at the service of another (more liberatory, decolonial) project (“Emergence” 18). The notion of the vocation of intellectual life is critical to Hall’s ongoing relevance to my work and his relationship to the university.
Cultural studies developed through the intellectual vocation described and exercised by Hall, its practitioners positioned both inside and outside the academy, familiar with the “dirty outside world” (“Race” 12). This was a deviation from the traditional mode of academic inquiry where it was “perfectly possible to write elegant treatises on the ‘other’ without ever having encountered what ‘otherness’ is really like for some people actually to live” (“Emergence” 23). Cultural studies and its intellectual workers could not or would not produce these treatises; such detached studies are incommensurable with the practice of the intellectual vocation. Through such adaptations to the academy, cultural studies took up “the task of unmasking…the unstated presuppositions of the humanist tradition” and disciplines’ presentation of “disinterested knowledge” purportedly unconnected from lived realities (“Emergence” 15).
The idea that the university could capture disinterested and supposedly objective knowledge was generated from Enlightenment-era discourses of “humanity,” epistemologies predicated on the belief in white European cultural and intellectual superiority over the rest of the world. This ideology forms what Hall describes as “the West and the Rest,” a standard of comparison for ranking societies, determining who is good (developed, desirable, white, Western) and who is bad (“West” 277). Processes of colonization, slavery, and racialization are the internal logics of these formations, indications of their fundamental lack of objectivity (“Diásporas” 52). In this binarized schema, the ideological basis of who can belong to the West, and therefore belong to humanity, is normalized to the point of invisibility, so firmly established that it can scarcely be called into question. The nebulous idea of the West is thus the organizing factor in global power relations and a way of thinking and speaking about the world (Hall, “West” 278 and “What”).
The Western university was built on this biased knowledge, and its resulting forms of knowledge production are characterized by processes of accumulation, dispossession, and subjugation that demarcate ongoing forms of colonialism and slavery (see further discussion in works such as Weheliye; Macharia; Myers). The “corpus of popular and scholarly legend mapped Europe’s shifting internal borders” and tried to fix the position of its others (Hall, “‘In’” 381). Instead of staying with this (unsatisfying and violent) discourse, the founders of cultural studies attempted to “think forwards from” classical traditions by remixing, rewriting, transcoding, translating, subverting, and in other ways altering the canon (“Cultural Studies” [1980] 72). Hall offers a way of moving through academia that contests anti-Black violence and colonialism, refusing the privileged hierarchy of academic knowledge in favor of collective liberation. He recognizes, deeply and intimately, how European whiteness works, and encourages scholars to think outside and beyond it, pushing for cultural critique and engagement that deconstructs its structures of thought. With the position of the intellectual vocation and its relationship to the violence of the university as a background, I now try to relate Hall’s claims to the conjuncture of my current moment.
My Moving Places
The places I move through and from are geographically and culturally connected to Hall. Though I was raised and socialized in a different Black geography, the United States, my doctoral education was undertaken jointly in the United Kingdom and Germany, and I have stayed in Germany for my postdoctoral work. This was a move from the “wake of slavery” in the settler colony (as Christina Sharpe calls it) to the “shadow of the black diaspora” and the “belly of the beast” (Hall, “Cultural Identity” 69). My move from US to European academia coincided with the global Black Lives Matter movement in 2020, a reawakening of conversations about race and the legacies of colonialism and slavery. Whiteness was no longer an invisible entity but something that could be addressed, identifiable with images of murderers in blue uniforms that flashed across the screen.
This burst of radicalism, which sent millions of people to the streets in protest, was quickly co-opted by universities and state institutions, which spent millions on diversity trainings and tokenized research on race. It was enough for academics to “turn up at the right demonstrations at the right moment”; a political commitment to transform hierarchical structures of exploitation and extraction was not a requirement (Hall, “Emergence” 18). As Hall feared, this institutionalization acted to “formalize out of existence the critical questions of power, history, and politics” (“Cultural Studies” [1996] 273). While it could (finally) be admitted that Blackness and race are relevant to Great Britain and continental Europe, they were studied only as part of a range of other diversities and multiculturalisms, not definitive for the making of the continent itself. Black lives could not really matter.
Faced with the academy’s retreat from Black study, and “against the urgency of people dying in the streets,” I found encouragement in my vocation (Hall, “Cultural Studies” [1996] 271). The vocation of Black studies was for me, as cultural studies was for Hall, simultaneously theoretical and political. This vocation placed my work with African Indigenous people and the Black diaspora both within and beyond the university. Research was a way to fortify political practice, providing tools and resources to intervene into the crises of the streets, while politics provided knowledge that contested institutional limits. Though I was accused, in ways both subtle and direct, of “testing the fine lines between intellectual rigor and social relevance,” I remained committed to the vocation as itself a rigorous intellectual practice (“Race” 11). Even as the European academy and political sphere do not have a place for Blackness, I have continued to move through institutions and programs, in search of Black diasporic and African Indigenous lives and futurities.
More than forty years after the fight for cultural studies, what has become of the field and its intellectual companions (as I understand them)? Have the positions “opened up by feminism and by Black struggles” been embedded into European or British academies (Hall, “Emergence” 22)? In the fall of 2024, I went to conferences of three subfields that are disciplinary counterparts to cultural studies in its various formations: African studies, racism studies, and Black studies. In each of these events I was reminded that despite the openings of Black struggles past and present, mine is a scholarship of the Rest that does not fit so easily into the West.
The first reminder came during a panel discussion on the question of decolonization in African studies. A white scholar introduced herself by affirming her connections to Africa: her parents fled European violence and found refuge in their whiteness, arriving on the African continent as settlers and staking claim to the land (though of course it was not phrased this way in her retelling, which focused on the trauma of their flight rather than on the traumas inflicted on others because of their privileged access of whiteness). She went on to tell us that she worked first in the development industry before finding her way to the African studies classroom. What of the Indigenous Africans who were displaced to provide her safe escape and then redeveloped into good neoliberal citizens through her work? What does she give back to them, communicate with them, support them with now? They are marginalized to the point of erasure, not relevant to the makings of the European expert on Africa.
Her decolonial principles are only metaphoric (see Tuck and Yang; Garba and Sorentino), found in citation and occasional collaboration with Africans. Such a practice, remaining academic and failing to live up to the intellectual vocation, cannot decolonize the university, let alone the knowledge systems it is built on. It remains unclear whether this expert on decolonization and Africa knows what life as colonial object, rather than as beneficiary, “is really like for some people actually to live” (Hall, “Emergence” 23). She writes as someone in but not of Africa, retaining her European “objectivity,” writing the Rest always in relation to the West. Though African identity itself is no guarantee of vocational praxis, her elision of the racial and colonial politics of being “African” reinforces the image of Africa as a fixed object of study.
Another reminder about the difficulty of research on African diasporic peoples as both Black and African was found in a panel at another conference, on media coverage of racism. Panel speakers affiliated with some of Germany’s top research institutions shared data about people in Germany whom they placed in three distinct categories: Black, Asian, and Muslim. When I inquired about the place of intersectionality, a consideration for those who are Black and Muslim or Muslim and White, for example, I was told that it was too complicated to calculate these subgroups. The researchers said they would consider it in the next round of analysis, but for now Blackness could not be part of Islam, and Muslims were not Black. The religious diversities of the African continent are not a possible point of reference if Islam is geographically positioned only across the vague “Middle East.”
As Hall warned, one’s ability to “think racially and to perceive racially has a great deal to do with the languages of racism available” (“Teaching Race” 133). The research institutions that make these types of divisions rely heavily on German state funding and the meanings of race it permits, with the historic violence of its national socialist past always in the background (see Bruce-Jones; El-Tayeb). In this case, the state itself has generated norms of categorical belonging that through their biases enact further bias. How can one conceptualize racism if one cannot even accurately understand races and their meanings, rooted and routed through complex geographies and histories? The language of silence and erasure is a political act, and these academic silences can convey much that academic research leaves out.
At the third conference, on “Blackademia” in Europe, Black scholars and Black study were at the forefront, in full humanity and capacity, leading the conversation. While the intellectual vocation of the organizers prevented the missteps of the previous events, the nature of the white European academy, on both sides of the Channel, still constrained our possibilities. In the opening panel, Kehinde Andrews expressed his regrets and disappointments about the process of institutionalizing the United Kingdom’s first Black studies degree program at Birmingham City University. The degree is now limited to a postgraduate option, since the undergraduate program was a casualty of neoliberal funding cuts. I wonder what Hall would have said in that room, on the panel or from the audience, whether he would have had a dry laugh at the familiarity of these problems.
Hall knew that institutionalization was “a moment of profound danger” (“Cultural Studies” [1996] 272). Though institutes offer something austere and grand, they don’t always speak to the political needs of the communities they are meant to serve (“Race” 11). He also understood neoliberal education policies such as the raising of tuition fees and removal of state support to be a way of targeting Black people (“Neo-liberal Revolution” 719). European academic institutions, the state policies they are governed by, and the ideological projects they serve have failed to prove Hall wrong. Black institutions are in danger and are simultaneously seen as dangerous to the Western academy. Andrews, as well as his fellow Blackademia panelists Maisha Maureen Auma and Mame-Fatou Niang, are politically committed, their vocational practice is decades-old, and their work has inspired transformational action far beyond their academic productions. They speak from moving places as they work to make room for more moves, more possible ways of being and studying Blackness in Europe and the United Kingdom. Though the Blackademia team ended their discussion on a positive note, sharing plans for public education programs and future opportunities for organization, the reality of the broader academic landscape remains grim. Black people are studied but only in a segmented way, decolonization of African studies is led by colonizers, and Black study works in and from the margins, a moving place.
Future Black Study
What is the future, for culture and cultural studies, Blackness and Black lives, in and out of the European academy? There are currently no departments, institutions, or research centers for Black studies in Germany. The few institutes for African studies declare that they are working to shake off their colonial legacies and push for decolonial knowledge, though their governing hierarchies have yet to reflect these changes and their practice remains lacking in commitment to significant change. The work conducted around race and racism comes from interdisciplinary perspectives but includes only a hesitant and tepid engagement with the meanings of Blackness and the specificities of Black life. The place I speak from is one that is seemingly irrevocably tied up in movement, offering grant-funded projects and short-term fellowship positions in the absence of any lasting institutional structure.
To speak of the place of my own research is thus also to speak to the difficulties of Black study in Europe. How does one answer the question of “what it might mean to be [B]lack and free in the twenty-first century” (Hall, “Caribbean Culture” 32)? Hall suggests that some of this practice is already part of Black diasporic life, the capacity to “transcode” and to “reconfigure the elements” (32), that even as we in Black studies are exploited to the margin we can still “groove it in a different way” (33). While the institutionalization of Black studies has failed to emerge, the actual research around and from Black European and Black British scholars makes its own music in the margins. We are not quite accepted among the Africanists and not quite comprehensible to the students of race, and even as we gather, temporarily, as “Blackademics,” we have yet to find a sustainable institutional home to be welcomed into. Although the academy insists we become intellectuals, marching robotically forward in pursuit of disinterested accumulation and knowledge production, we tune in to the melodic call of our communities, Black diasporic sounds with a funkier beat, a music we can move to. Maybe it is thus the groove, this funky and unexpected space, where we could stake a future claim.
