Border Crossers Underpinning Cultural Studies

Cultural studies’ precursors and founders can best be understood in terms Anzaldúa uses for herself in the preface to Borderlands / La frontera—that is, as “border” people. In his 1983 lectures, Hall narrates what began in Birmingham in terms that echo Anzaldúa’s expanded sense of the border, a key gift from Latinx studies to other fields, including cultural studies (see Aparicio; Flores). Hall uses the metaphor of the border to describe Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams as arrivants who had to invent the field of cultural studies to find a vocabulary for thinking about their oral, working-class cultures of origin. While Hoggart grew up in an impoverished neighborhood of Leeds and Williams in the Welsh borderlands, Hall arrived from an “unknown” majority-Black, class- and color-stratified culture to the elite British university space: “Cambridge didn’t know it existed and if it had known, it wouldn’t have known how to talk about it because it had no language for it. How could it? Cambridge is addicted to notions of culture which depend upon that which is written down in books” (Cultural Studies 26). Hoggart and Williams made the architecture of working-class sitting rooms and the history of capitalist encroachment on the Welsh borderlands into objects of study. Hall arrived in Oxford at the same time as the Windrush generation began to transform British culture from within. Like the other founders of cultural studies, Hall engaged in intramural teaching of an increasingly multiracial, postcolonial working class seeking to claim their future within a Britain different from the one that assumed and enforced the racist slogan “There ain’t no black in the Union Jack.”

Like the founders of cultural studies, Lorde and Anzaldúa arrived in a version of the US academy that did not know their cultures existed. When Anzaldúa was trying to advance to candidacy for a PhD in comparative literature at the University of Texas, Austin, her proposed topic was unknown and her research unsupported. She tells another working-class Chicano scholar, Hector Torres, “I could not focus on Chicano literature because these white guys didn’t know anything other than English literature and Anglo-American” (“Author” 122). “[A]t UT,” she says in another interview, “they didn’t consider ethnic cultural studies as having the impact or weight needed to enter the academy. So in a lot of these classes I felt silenced, like I had no voice” (“Interview” 230). While Hoggart founded the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, Anzaldúa abandoned the PhD and headed to San Francisco, where she met Moraga, and together they confronted a white, middle-class culture of women writers. Anzaldúa specifies that in the Feminist Writer’s Guild, the leaders “thought all women were oppressed in the same way, and they tried to force me to accept their image of me and my experiences.” Anzaldúa and Moraga responded with This Bridge Called My Back, which features work by Black, Chicana, Latina, Asian American, Native American, and Jewish writers, including a reprinting of the Combahee River Collective’s “Black Feminist Statement,” from Zillah Eisenstein’s Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism (1978), and Lorde’s essay “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House” (1979), now foundational texts for thinking about culture and progressive change.

These women of color directly confronted the “particular academic arrogance” that, Lorde writes, assumed it was legitimate to discuss feminism “without significant impact from poor women, Black and Third World women, and lesbians” (Sister Outsider 110). The same assertion applies to Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. In April 1980, Lorde theorized intersectionality in a lecture at Amherst College entitled “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference.” In making the connection between the disavowal of difference and capitalist exploitation of “surplus people,” Lorde in this essay draws on the Brazilian theorist Paulo Freire to describe the entrenched and intimate effects of centuries of enslavement and colonization: “the true focus of revolutionary change is never merely the oppressive situations we seek to escape, but that piece of the oppressor which is planted deep within each of us, and which knows only the oppressors’ tactics, the oppressors’ relationships” (123). Hall arrives at a similar conclusion in “Minimal Selves” (1987), where he confesses that despite his attempt to escape his family’s identification with the British and US planter classes, he nonetheless brought this family with him. Decolonization demanded a new theoretical interdiscipline to address personal and political change.

Living in the midst of crack, AIDS, and racism epidemics, including the killings of more than two dozen Black children in Atlanta between 1979 and 1981 (De Veaux 283; Hudes), Lorde and Anzaldúa documented the conditions that nearly brought New York City to bankruptcy during a “moving right show” parallel to Margaret Thatcher’s.Footnote ³ While Lorde was preparing keynotes for the 1979 National Third World Gay and Lesbian Conference in Washington, DC, and the National Women’s Studies Association conference at the University of Connecticut; finishing Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982) and Chosen Poems (1982); and compiling her essay collection Sister Outsider (1984), Anzaldúa in 1982 fictionalized the psychic life of New York’s brown Latinx migrants in her portrait of a Chicana punk rock artist sporting a purple mohawk, wandering through a burned-out and broken-down Lower East Side, in her unpublished short story “Susto in the City.”

Lorde and Anzaldúa were visible nationally in the years leading up to the 1983 conference. Anzaldúa, Barbara Smith, and Moraga attended the second Women in Print conference in 1981, together with other contributors to This Bridge Called My Back. Anzaldúa appeared on a keynote panel organized by Chela Sandoval at the National Women’s Studies Association conference of 1982.Footnote ⁴ These radical feminists of color articulated their position as within but critical of the effervescence of (white-dominant) feminist internationalism and of Third World projects for liberation, a perspective Franco brought to Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. The Third World Women’s Alliance came into being in Brooklyn and Oakland (see Romney), while militant Latina and Black feminist leaders emerged within the Young Lords (Iris Morales) and the Black Panthers (Ericka Huggins and Angela Davis). During these years, the Guatemalan activist Rigoberta Menchú and the Venezuelan anthropologist Elisabeth Burgos published in 1983 the genre-defining testimonio of Menchú, a Laj Chimel Quiché leader who would be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992. These collaborations revealed new forms of women’s revolutionary agency and expression. A robust and transformative dialogue might have ensued between radical women of color feminists and US and European cultural theorists with Marxist commitments.

In this tradition, Anzaldúa and Lorde irrevocably challenged the silencing or tokenizing of women and queer people of color among feminist, LGBTQ, leftist, and ethnonational movements. Anzaldúa notes, “Women are made to feel total failures if they don’t marry and have children” (Borderlands 39). Lesbians, queer women, or any woman who refuses the traditional role of wife assigned by the family, the church, and by extension, the ethnonation and movements for its liberation, become “traitors,” according to Moraga: “the woman who defies her role as subservient to her husband, father, brother, or son by taking control of her own sexual destiny is purported to be a ‘traitor to her race’ by contributing to the ‘genocide’ of her people—whether or not she has children” (113). Anzaldúa rewrote classic Mexican narratives that blame La Malinche (also known as la Chingada), Hernán Cortés’s translator, for “selling out”: “Not me sold out my people but they me” (Borderlands 43). Franco echoes this critique in pointing out at the conference how a male Latin American left intelligentsia “attempted to speak on behalf of the nonliterate, the indigenous, and women” (513).

While neither Latinx nor Black women made it onto the Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture program, a handful of speakers from or based in Latin America participated, including an illustrious list of criollo poets and philosophers: the Argentine-born political philosopher Ernesto Laclau, the Belgian transplant to Salvador Allende’s Chile, Armand Mattelart, the Uruguayan poet Hugo Achugar, the Chilean journalist Fernando Reyes Matta. The Salvadoran American scholar of Latin America and its diaspora George Yúdice contributed to the conference as a translator. Some of the anonymous questions could have come from Yúdice and Franco’s collaborator, the Puerto Rican radical Juan Flores, a founder of Latino Studies who had received the Casa de las Américas prize in 1980. Besides exposing the patriarchal bias of the Latin American intelligentsia, Franco reminds the conference participants that Latin American women such as the “madwomen” of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina, who formed one node in a continental network of committees of family members of the disappeared throughout the Americas, innovated gendered modes of denouncing and dismantling repression (513).

Like the Latin American women activists whose rebellious voices Franco lifts up, Lorde’s and Anzaldúa’s rhetorical styles also broke rules governing the conventional forms of academic discourse, expanding academic writing to include theorizing through autotheory. Although Hall did not publish his memoir about living “between two islands” during his lifetime, the 1983 lectures and interviews about his own formation reveal the influence of Lorde’s and Anzaldúa’s attention to uncomfortable yet generative locations in-between. According to Hall’s preface to the transcription of his 1983 lectures, cultural studies is “an intellectual and political space between a number of intersecting, intellectual and academic disciplines” (Cultural Studies 4; emphasis added). Anzaldúa’s concept of the interstitial and Crenshaw’s attention to intersections figure in Hall’s lexicon. This vocabulary and rhetorical strategy reveal Hall’s own belated identification with the “southern meridian” of the Black Atlantic, as identification itself became for Hall a process of negotiation, becoming, and translation in postcolonial borderlands (“Diasporas” 49).

Border man that he was, Hall refused to believe that the Caribbean had no history and no culture worth speaking of apart from what the colonizers had bequeathed. Hall lived between his parents’ brown middle-class identification with a white British or North American planter class, on the one hand, and the Black Jamaican popular culture all around him, which he furtively sought out, on the other. The latter brought Hall into contact with African religious practices such as pocomania and protestant revivalism, African-derived folktales, and an affirmation of the remaking of the English language into Jamaican patois, all set to the powerful bass line and conscious lyrics of reggae. Culture became a field of resistance that helped bring an end to British rule in 1962. The field of cultural studies effectively emerges, Hall asserts, in “contact zones of colonization,” a phrase Hall adapts from the major theorist of transculturation Mary Louise Pratt, who was one of Franco’s students (“Diasporas” 47).

Hall’s “Bahian Moment”: Another Theoretical Origin for Cultural Studies

In his 2000 keynote address to the Brazilian Comparative Literature Association (Associação Brasileira de Literatura Comparada) in Salvador da Bahía, “Diasporas; or, The Logics of Cultural Translation,” Hall introduces the fundamental yet little-known role of Latin American and Caribbean theories of colonization and diaspora in cultural studies’ beginnings (Familiar Stranger 249). At the site of the colonial capital of the Portuguese empire built through exploitation of the largest segment of the African diaspora, Hall announced the inextricability of the colonizers and the colonized: “Since the sixteenth century, these differential temporalities, histories, cultures have continued to exist while being violently yoked together—and at the same time refusing simply to become ‘the same.’ Indeed, their grossly unequal and uneven trajectories have formed the very ground of political antagonism and cultural resistance” (“Diasporas” 53–54). Latin American and Caribbean theory provided a vocabulary for understanding how tensions and cultural resistance emerging from colonial contact zones fueled a process of decolonization that changed Hall’s own autohistoria.

Hall’s reading in the 1950s of theories of a center-periphery, metropole-colony dialectic and of diasporic societies in translation became a persistent concern, he asserts, “through the by-ways and hedges of my life ever since” (48). Instead of pursuing his proposed study of Henry James, Hall read the work of Fernando Ortiz on transculturation and sugar in Cuba, Jean Price-Mars on Haiti and religious syncretism, Gilberto Freyre and Roger Bastide on Brazil, and Melville Herskovits on African cultural retentions in the Americas. Hall arrived at a relational and comparative understanding of mutually constituting—rather than stark, mutually exclusive—binaries dividing border spaces. The diverse culture of the postcolonial nation emerged “as a result of the reciprocal but unequal processes of transculturation and the often brutal transactions between these different elements” (Familiar Stranger 249). Between two islands, uninterested in becoming English, and having fled the colonial regime that shaped his youth, Hall observed in the Windrush immigrants’ diasporic style and sound a decolonial future for Britain and for himself (“Minimal Selves” 44; Familiar Stranger 172; “Formation” 490).

This body of Caribbean and Latin American theory beginning in the 1950s reveals colonization as constitutive of modernity and not only of an earlier, formative stage. It challenges a liberal historiographic narrative as much as it unmasks Western Marxism’s Eurocentrism. In his Bahian moment, Hall explodes the binary of center and periphery, where the Third World functions as a constitutive outside, and recognizes the persistent unevenness and heterogeneity of the globe, in which distinct cultures became inextricably, hierarchically “yoked together.” This observation of two-directional transcultural influence—in keeping with Ortiz’s theory—brings an end to the presumption of Europe’s modernity as singular and announces multiple modernities, with distinct idioms and accents. The “Bahian moment” marks, for Hall, “the end of ‘Modernity’ defined exclusively in western terms” (“Diasporas” 48, 57). When the Europe and English no longer have a privileged voice in the definition of the modern, a decolonial future opens up.

Hall’s affirmation of multiple modernities “with distinct vernacular accents” (57) and emerging from the borders of European and US capitals echoes Anzaldúa’s theory of linguistic terrorism in Borderlands/La frontera. In her rejection of English-only values, Anzaldúa claims nine different languages, dialects, and idioms, or mixtures thereof, as a matter of self-definition: “until I can take pride in my language, I cannot take pride in myself” (Borderlands 81). Anzaldúa documents the nuns’ striking her palms with a ruler for speaking Spanish at school. Her undergraduate university required Chicanx students to take “speech” classes designed to eradicate traces of a Mexican accent. Even Anzaldúa’s mother asks, “Qué vale toda tu educación si todavía hablas inglés con un ‘accent’?” (“What good is all your education if you still speak English with an accent?”; Borderlands 76; my trans.). Anzaldúa’s autohistoria rebelliously embraces multiple languages that define her aesthetic.

Hall draws on Anzaldúan autotheory and Lorde’s biomythography in Zami in discussing his disidentification with the colonial culture prized by his parents. Haltingly, he acknowledges how identifying as “black” was slow in coming: “it has taken a very long time, really, to be able to write in that way [i.e., as black], personally” (“Formation” 491). In his middle-class Jamaican family in the 1930s and 1940s, “the very word ‘black’ was taboo, unsayable” (Familiar Stranger 14). Hall, like Anzaldúa, disidentified with his family’s disavowal. Hall was the darker sibling, whom his sister jokingly referred to as a “coolie baby,” borrowing an epithet suggesting “impoverished, brown Indian peddlers” (34). But the reference to Stuart’s darker skin tone also obliquely acknowledged their shared African ancestry. Watching his sister’s mental breakdown after his mother forbade her engagement to a darker-skinned Bajan doctor made Hall aware of how colonialism “could destroy you, objectively” (“Formation” 490).

In his memoir and in an interview with Kuan-Hsing Chen, Hall’s toggling between intellectual history and personal anecdote about the gendered effects of anti-Blackness reveals the overlap of public and private selves. Hall recounts the guilt he felt for an escape that was unavailable to his sister. His memoir documents how the growing Black consciousness of Jamaicans issued a death warrant for the middle class’s “complicit, perverse version of subordination” (Familiar Stranger 54). Hall could not articulate the logic of his changing self-definition until the diaspora arrived on the streets of England to stay, as the postcolonial nation emerged: “In my case (although it surprises people when I say it), black as a personal identity had to wait for decolonization,” including Black power, Black consciousness, and civil rights movements, along with the changes they wrought (Familiar Stranger 15).

The “Third World” of the 1980s—today’s “Global South” on the other side of an ever more violently militarized border—“grates against the First World and bleeds,” in Anzaldúa’s famous phrase (Borderlands 25). As Hall, Anzaldúa, and Lorde all note, these “worlds” and the people who live in them do not stay put, displaced as they are by empire’s global reach. Just as political and cultural changes in the diaspora made it possible for Hall to name and respond to the anti-Blackness of his home, the migrations to which Anzaldúa’s and Lorde’s families belonged were transforming the US academy. In the Q and A sessions of Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, as British cultural studies sprouted American roots, Franco pointed to decolonial feminist futurities arising at the limits, frontiers, and boundaries. Here I reimagine this founding conference’s legacies through possible keynotes that might have been delivered by Lorde and Anzaldúa del otro lado—from the other side—of the walls surrounding the academy.Footnote ⁵