South Atlantic Quarterly South Atlantic Quarterly Volume 115 Number 4 October 2016 Stuart Hall 1

Grant Farred
To Be and Not to Be
Men make their own history, but they do make it just as

they please; they do not make it under circumstances
chosen by themselves, but under circumstances
directly found, given and transmitted from the past.
The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a
nightmare on the brain of the living. And just when
they seem engaged in revolutionizing themselves and
things, in creating something entirely new, precisely in
such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously con-
jure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow
from them names, battle slogans and costumes in order
to present the new scene of world history in this time-
honored disguise and this borrowed language.
Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis
Bonaparte
In making the documentary The Stuart Hall

Project (2013), the filmmaker John Akomfrah was
not free to make history just as he pleased.
Instead, Akomfrah, one of the founders of the
Black Audio Film Collective and the producer of
Handsworth Songs (1986), the most important cin-
ematic account of racial tension in 1980s Britain,
was confronted with an unarguable and, dare one
say, painful reality. Akomfrah was making a doc-
umentary not just about a dying intellectual but
about one of the most important intellectuals of
The South Atlantic Quarterly 115:4, October 2016

doi 10.1215/00382876-3656070 2016 Duke University Press
652 The South Atlantic Quarterly October 2016
the twentieth century. And, given the political tenor of Akomfrahs career
(his commitment to the black immigrant experience in postimperial Brit-
ain), it is easy to imagine that there was something even more significant at
stake for Akomfrah in making The Stuart Hall Project.
After all, the Accra-born Akomfrah is not simply the son of Ghanaian
immigrants but the son of one of Kwame Nkrumahs ministersand, it
should be added, the son of a mother who believed her life in danger after
the military coup in 1966 that overthrew Nkrumah. (Akomfrah moved to
England at the age of four. He attributes his fathers death to the 1966 coup.)
For Akomfrah, then, making a documentary on the Jamaican-born Stuart
McPhail Hall (February 1932February 2014) must have been from the very
beginning an especially critical undertaking. After all, he was trying to cap-
ture, for a posterity that was imminent, the life of one of the preeminent black
voices of the past sixty years, a voice molded by the struggle against colonial-
ism and its metropolitan afterlife, a voice that contributed to key debates on
the left in Britain, the United States, and many newly sovereign sites, from
his native Caribbean to sub-Saharan Africa and the Asian subcontinent.
Operating under the sign of (impending) death, Akomfrah under-
stood, following Marxs spirit in the Eighteenth Brumaire, that he was not
free to make history just as he pleased. Recognizing the difficulty of trying
to capture an ailing thinker, Akomfrah turnedhe had no other choice, in
truthto Hall in his pomp (if such a phrasing might be indulged, because
the word pomp seems plainly wrong when used in relation to Hall, a thinker
who eschewed any kind of grandiosity). What The Stuart Hall Project cap-
tures is an intellectual holding forth on national television (the BBC) from
what seems like the 1950s, shortly after Hall arrived to study at Merton Col-
lege, Oxford, to fin de sicle Britain. The Stuart Hall Project traces the think-
ers life from his earliest years in colonial Kingston, Jamaicathere are
images of Hall as an infant, Hall as a schoolboy at elite Jamaica College, and,
the most salient, Hall in an exchange with Michael Manley, the former
prime minister of Jamaica1to his final, declining years in postimperial
Britain. The last images are of Hall visibly ill but still delivering eloquent cri-
tiques on race, politics, and culture, critiques that are, as Jeffrey T. Nealon
argues in this special issue on Halls work, always routedespecially in the
1980s and 1990sthrough theory in an effort to think the politics of every-
day life, a critical part of Halls commitment to cultural studies, that politi-
cal project with which Hall is most closely associated. Cultural studies is
also a project that Hall, who numbers among the fields founders, was always
rethinking, always in the business of renewing; Hall was always considering
Farred To Be and Not to Be 653
what its optimal articulation(s) might be. The commitment to cultural stud-
ies emanates clearly in the footage Akomfrah has assembled and Hall
addresses, especially as it pertains to the issues of diasporization and the
ways that racialized communities struggle to make a place for themselves in
the metropolis.
As Hall remarks in The Stuart Hall Project (2013), When I ask some-
one where theyre from, nowadays I expect a very long answer. Identifying
exactly where it is someone is from is a difficulty David Bell addresses in
this issue. In I Persevered in My Geography, Bell explicates Halls impor-
tance (and that of cultural studies) to a generation of human geographers
who were interested in routes, or the ways by which people arrived in a par-
ticular place and the various reasons why people relocated, rather than in
roots, or how people understood their own, shall we say, autochthony. To
the very end, Hall theorizes (Marx, Antonio Gramsci, Thatcherism, and so
on), and he informs disciplines far beyond (or perhaps not so far beyond) cul-
tural studies with enthusiasm and his customary commanding intellectual
presence. In so many of the interviews from which Akomfrahs project is
culled, Halls eyes are twinkling with that wonderful intelligence, his face
almost always, it seems, on the verge of a captivating smile, even as he is
making the most incisive and sometimes damning political point.
The initial conception of the project, I have been told by Akomfrah,
was to conduct a series of interviews with Hall. This method would have
allowed Akomfrah to film Hall reflecting, in what Hall must surely have
known were his final days, on his own life. Instead, history intervenedor
to amend and reconceive John Lennons famous phrase, Life and death are
what happen while youre making other plans. In retrospect, this conversa-
tion, which did not happen because Halls health would not permit it,
emerges as a ghostly presence. It is not so much the cinematic and political
road not taken, although it is that too. It is, rather, that the impossibility of
that conversation leaves us nostalgic for what never was; it is nothing other
than our wishing for one more close-up of the contemporary Hall. Not
because the historican earlierHall will not do, but because we want
to hear Hall thinking, for us, in a moment closer to us; if only there were one
more opportunity to witness his mind at work. Alas.
However, if we pause for a moment, we recognize not just what a fig-
ure the historic Hall is but that this historic recapturing introduces us to a
Hall with whom we were familiar only in passing. It could be argued that the
historic Hall is, indeed, known to only a fewhis early New Left contempo-
raries, a few friends, political intimates and comrades with whom he worked
in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, and family members such as his wife, Cath-
erine Hall. What a thing it is, then, that Akomfrah was compelled into the
archives by a history of the present (an ailing subject) and left with nothing
to do but cast Hall in this borrowed language. The Stuart Hall Project is, of
course, properly speaking, not a borrowed language because it is, after all,
still Hall speaking, albeit a Hall with whom many are making acquaintance
for the very first time.
And yet, it is not. The Stuart Hall Project does more than simply make
the historic Hall available to us. The Stuart Hall Project recovers Hall both
for us and, I suggest, for Hall himself. The Stuart Hall Project retrieves from
the visual archive a Hall who, it seems, addresses race from the very first
moment of his entry into British political life, so that Akomfrahs documen-
tary editsthe process and the politics of selection (what to include, what to
leave out)the making of Hall as a black anti- and postcolonial intellectual.
The Stuart Hall Project shows its subject speaking to issues of race through
the prisms of, among others, violence against black bodies (such as that
against Kelso Cochrane in May 1959, in Notting Hill, London, which sparked
a series of race riots) and culture (Halls ongoing recognition of the contribu-
tion migrant black communities made to metropolitan life, from music
reggae, hip-hop, soul, and funkto film, especially under the auspices of
the British Film Institute, to lifestyle, including fashion, hairstyles, and
modes of self-representation).
The subject of The Stuart Hall Project stands in contrast to Halls writ-
ten work in which the issue of race does not find its voice until 1978 in
Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order (Hall et al. 1978).
Policing the Crisis is based on a 1972 event in the Handsworth neighborhood
of Birmingham in which three teenage boys, two with immigrant profiles
(Paul Storey was the son of a West Indian father; Mustafa Fuats family had
Cypriot connections; and James Duignan lived on a street deemed a mini
United Nations), attacked an elderly white man, Robert Keenan. (Hands
worth, of course, provided the title for Akomfrahs film Handsworth Songs.)
Hall, who was then director of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Stud-
ies (CCCS) at the University of Birmingham, and his fellow editors (Chas
Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke, and Brian Roberts) followed this event
for a biopolitically important reason. The fate of Handsworth teenagers mat-
tered because of the ways the British state, importing the term mugging in its
full racial articulation from the United States, brought to bear an unusually
harsh sentence against the immigrant youth from one of the poorer sections
of what was then still known as Britains second city.
As such, The Stuart Hall Project offers a sharp disjuncture between

Halls public interventionhis television appearancesinto race (racial
conflict, racialized policing) in postimperializing Britain and his written
oeuvrethat body of work that scholars, myself included, have been able to
access more easily in our research into Hall.2 The Stuart Hall Project, in these
terms, can be understood as a historically irruptive forceit erupts before
us, laying bare the inadequacies and inaccuracies of extant scholarship on
Hall and race. In Marxs terms, the tradition as such now becomes, in light
of these new exposures, these under-regarded, critically neglected inter-
ventions by Hall, a nightmare on the brain of the living. Scholars of Hall
and race are, as it were, called to accountthe value of Marxs nightmare
is that it opens into the possibility for recognizing how critical and formative
race was to Halls thinking from the very earliest moment, certainly from
the very moment of his entre into British political and intellectual life.
In this regard, however, Marxs nightmarethe specter of intellec-
tual omission, in this instanceis not such a bad thing precisely because it
allows for another positing of Hall, a thinking that makes a renewed figure
of racial thinking out of old (but now made invaluable by Akomfrah) televi-
sion footage. The Stuart Hall Project demands, in making Halls earlier and
more public addresses on race (racial violence; injustice; the failure of Brit-
ains legal system, of which the Cochrane case was only one among such inci-
dents; and the vulnerability of black bodies in the face of a punitive state), a
second thinking of Hall on racea thinking that extends now as a more fully
articulated understanding of the path that leads from Notting Hill to Hands
worth, from Cochrane to Storey, Fuat, and Duignan, from that instance of
mugging in early 1970s Birmingham to the violence that wracked Brixton
and Tottenham (London), Chapeltown (Leeds), and Toxteth (Liverpool) in
1981, when Thatcherism seemedif such a judgment were at all possible
given the other violences committed against the British working classat
its most pernicious. In his 1985 reflections on Tottenham, Halls (1990a: 79)
tone is full of foreboding as he anticipates how Margaret Thatchers repres-
sive forces will respond to black resistance:
It seems to me undeniable that the crisis of Tottenham is now also a crisis of
and for black politics. Keeping faith with people who, in the teeth of relentless
oppression, spontaneously resist, is all right on the night. But it is not enough
when the next day dawns, since all it means is that, sooner or later, the front-
line troops, with their superior weapons and sophisticated responses, will cor-
ner some of our young people on a dark night along one of these walkways
and take their revenge for Tottenham.
Most salient here is the way Hall acknowledges the frustration and courage
of black British communities (a people who, in the teeth of relentless
oppression, spontaneously resist) while capturing the ominousness of
Thatchers law and order strategythe inevitability that the frontline
troops will take their revenge for Tottenham. In a word, this is the crisis
for the black community in Britain: How does a community vulnerable to
state-orchestrated violence resist? Much of Halls career, it could be argued,
is a commitment to addressing this dilemma, a dilemma that Hall first con-
fronted with the murder of the Antiguan-born Cochrane in 1959.
In conjuring up the spirit of the past, The Stuart Hall Project per-
forms the important and, indeed, the ironic historical task of allowing Hall
to borrow from himself. In The Stuart Hall Project Hall is sutured to him-
self (that jagged act of self-restoration), and we are able to see him almost
address himself across the decades. The many iterations of Hall are accompa-
nied this time by the haunting soundtrack of Miles Davis, by the many moods
of Davis. The Davis tunes are by turns mournful, contemplative, boppy, soul-
ful, uplifting, swinging, but always innovative and thought provoking;
mainly, however, Davis forms a moving sound track to The Stuart Hall Proj-
ect. From the very beginning of Akomfrahs project, Hall articulates what can
only be described as a profound debt to Davis. The first time we hear Hall on
the voice-over, it is Davis whom he invokes in deeply metaphysicaland
poeticterms: When I was about nineteen or twenty, Hall remarks, Miles
Davis put his finger on my soul. The various moods of Miles Davis matched
the evolution of my own feelings. There is something moving, and almost
melancholy, about Halls reflection so that it leaves us with a real apprecia-
tion for Halls familiarity with Daviss oeuvre. (The temptation is to get out
your Davis CDs and listen along to the various Davis titlesSummertime,
Miles Ahead, Moodthat punctuate every segment of Akomfrahs docu-
mentary. At other times Daviss pathos is so overwhelming that one almost
yearns for the obdurate abstraction of a Keith Jarrett, particularly as ren-
dered by Jarrett in his concert series in Europe [Bremen, Lausanne] and
Japan [Tokyo, Osaka].)3 Yet, most striking, is how Halls regard for Davis
betrays a tone of wistful sadness, the black intellectual finding solace in the
black artistic genius, each of them in the business of securing, against con-
siderable odds, their souls.
Halls affinity for like-minded souls is elucidated by David Faflik in
this issue, as he tracesthrough, of all literary devices, the metaphor
Halls thinking through C. L. R. Jamess Mariners, Renegades, and Cast-
aways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In. The Trinida-
dian-born James, of course, belonged to the generation that preceded Halls

in the colonial metropolis, but Hall and James had a great deal in common,
politically and culturally. In many ways Jamess autobiographical Beyond a
Boundary stands as one of the inaugural texts of cultural studies. But Mari-
ners is a different kettle of fish entirely, grounded as it is in Herman Mel-
villes Moby-Dick. What Fafliks essay demonstrates, however, is not simply
how Hall drew on literary theory (on Georg Lukcs and Jacques Lacan, all
the while remaining opposed to empty formalism) but how, through his
openness to figures such as James and Davis, Hall learned from them. Yet
what is most important is how his spirit was very much in sympathy with
theirs and, for this reason among others, Halls oeuvre constitutes such a
singular archive of (black) intellectual life.
The Hall-Davis relation establishes an exchange between two modes of
black being, gentlyand poignantlygrounding The Stuart Hall Project in a
black political aesthetic so that there is a certain inexorability in how Akomfrah
makes us turn back to Hall, turn to Hall as we have not heretofore encoun-
tered him. The Stuart Hall Project wills us to reencounter Hall on race, a black
intellectual who engages race critically. As Angela McRobbie (who belongs to
the second generation of CCCS graduates) writes in a moving and deftly tuned
personal way in this issue, race was always a key commitment for Hallhe
was consistently supportive of black and Asian cultural producersthe
term Hall preferred to artists. But Halls was never an essentialist underwrit-
ing, as McRobbie emphatically points out, dedicated as he wasin McRob-
bies renderingto securing a third space in which to conduct politics.
Race is never an essence for Hall because he always understands it as
a complicated mode of operating in the world (determined by ethnicity, class,
sexual orientation, political inclination, conjuncture, and so on), a mode full
of restriction but never without the possibility for articulation for how black
subjects might sustain themselveseven thrivein the world.
What Have We Inherited from Stuart Hall?

It is through the difficulties of inheritance that Marx becomes audible
speaksto us in The Stuart Hall Project. Akomfrahs documentary presents
to us the question of our inheritance from the dead: What are we to make of
the legacy bequeathed to us by the recently departed Hall? If Halls spirit is
animated by Davis (Miles Davis put his finger on my soul), then in our
epoch of revolutionary crisis what names, battle slogans and costumes
that Hall gave usgives us in the documentary yet one more timeare we
to repurpose for addressing the particular difficulties of our conjuncture?

Out of this emerges a series of questions that now derive their greater urgency
from the death of Hall, questions that hover everywhere over The Stuart Hall
Project, questions that relate us, the living, to the dead, to the dead intellectual
who iswho will be, for a very long time, as long as we have need to think
race, culture, and imperial and postimperial politicsspectrally present. The
unavoidable provocation that Akomfrahs documentary reminds us of again
and again is, how can we honor Halls legacy? What can we extract for our
purposes through Akomfrahs signal retrieval, the filmmakers re-presenta-
tion, of Hall? In what kind of intellectual and political borrowing will we
engage? That is the challenge of The Stuart Hall Project: not only to mourn
and grieve Halls loss (as much as we must allow ourselves to do so) but to
understand the necessary incompleteness of his projects so that it becomes
possible to see how his work might be continued.
And to state the matter bluntly: Hall always makes it necessary to work
in the reflective, probing, self-interrogative spirit of Hall. In Halls terms, as
I shall show shortly, on what grounds will we conduct our ongoing conver-
sation with ourselves, among ourselves? How seriously, how carefully, in
what intellectual register, in what soulful key, will we inherit Hall? With
whom can we imagine Hall to be in conversation? What might such a con-
versation yield, theoretically? Jernej Habjan, in his essay in this issue, makes
this point in a most intriguing fashion, not so much by proposing cultural
studies as an alternative to literary studies but by putting Halls thinking on
cultural studies alongside the distant reading strategies of Franco Moretti.
Both Hall and Moretti, Habjan asserts, work against depoliticized readings
and, as such, Halls cultural studies functions as a theoretical recourse for
the kinds of work that Moretti and others are trying to do in relation not only
to literary studies but to cultural studies as well.
In recapitulating Halls proximity to literature, Habjan offers a reminder
that what would be most antithetical to Hall would be a seamless rendering
of a significant intellectual. That would be tantamount to dogma, which Hall
eschewed. After all, Hall was always in the business of rethinking his own
workmuch as he remarks, almost mischievously, that he agrees with sen-
tences he crafted in the 1950s. I find myself agreeing [with myself] is
almost what he says. To rechart this persistent rethinking, we need only
recall, say, the difference in his understanding of the popular as a radical gal-
vanizing and mobilizing force in The Popular Arts (cowritten by Hall and
Paddy Whannel [1964] when they were both London secondary school teach-
ers interested in film) and The Hard Road to Renewal (in which Halls [1990b]
critiques both of Thatcherism, as well as Reaganism, and of the Labour

Partys inabilityblatant refusal, Hall might have counteredto mobilize
through the popular are most severe). Written more than twenty years apart,
these two works speak of a serious reconsideration of the radical propensities
of the popularfrom an almost Leavisite reading of film (echoes of Richard
Hoggarts The Uses of Literacy [1957] are audible, as they should have been,
given how closely Hoggart and Hall worked as the inaugural directors, the lat-
ter succeeding the former, of the CCCS project) in The Popular Arts to a deep
understanding of how popular cultural practices (with musical ventures
Bob Geldofs Live Aid and other such undertakings) might manifest them-
selves, as he says in The Hard Road to Renewal, with the specificity of a his-
torical conjecture: how different forces might come together, conjuncturally,
to create the new terrain on which a different politics must form up (Hall
1990b: 163).4 Out of this mode of contestation, this commitment to a differ-
ent politics, it is possible to imagineto constructa different set of social
movements, to produce different political subjects with political identities
specific to the demands of contemporary society.
In this regard, it is the possibility of different (new) subjects and
political identities that should preoccupy us most because it contains within
it the hard kernel of Halls opposition to essentialism of any stripe. It is a
resistance to essentialism that is instructive. If, as Hall says in his critique of
identity politics in Akomfrahs documentary, identity is not an essence . . .
[but] the product of an endlessly ongoing conversation . . . [an] endless, ever
unfinished conversation, then The Stuart Hall Project reveals to us some of
the very first articulations in that conversation.
It is an important conversation because of the potential philosophical
terminus that it might signal. Halls skepticism about essentialism raises the
possibility of a conversation that might end in a radical homelessness. This
radical homelessness figures Hall as a figure who cannot find, in Martin Hei-
deggers terms, a dwelling (i.e., a place where he can fully or properly be,
which is to say, in both Heideggers and Halls terms, a place from which the
intellectual is unable to think, thus forging an unbreakable bond between
being and thinking). If the conversation is indeed permanently incomplete,
ever unfinished, and translates as a form of radical homelessness, it reveals
for us the difficulty of late imperial hospitality. Hall, the bright colonial sub-
ject, graduate of the prestigious Jamaica College (not only does Manley num-
ber among its alumni, but his father, Norman Washington Manley, does too;
Derek Walcott taught there from 1953 to 1957, just a few years after Hall grad-
uated), newly arrived from Kingston, is at once welcomed into the rarified
environs of Merton College, Oxford, and made to confront the racism of life
in Birmingham. (Hospitality signifies here in Derridas sense: it contains
within it the possibilityfor the immigrantof finding both a place and
hostilitybeing figured as other and vulnerable to the violence of the
declining imperial center.) Because of Halls conflict, he is not so much a sub-
ject trapped (as Sam Selvons [1956] lonely Londoners are by their lack of
material resources) in the metropolis but an intellectual vital in giving politi-
cal and intellectual shape to the discourse of the challenges facing postwar
and postimperial Britain. Halls, then, is a positioning of the self that does not
quite fulfill the definition of an exile, but neither is he fully something else,
something sui generis, either.
The Metropolis: A Place from Which the Intellectual Can Do Work

Above all else, however, what Hall gives voice to in Akomfrahs documentary
is that England is the place that enables him to do his work. England, more-
over, is the place that enabled him to escape the strictures of his familys
brutal immersion in the colonial project. Hall is especially critical of his
mothers hewing to the colonial logic of white superiority, especially as it per-
tained to metropolitan life. (His mother is aghast when he visits from Lon-
don and recounts the arrival of black immigrants from the colonies. She
was talking about me, Hall shakes his head in bemusement.) Speaking for
his generation of thinkers who fled the Caribbean, Hall is rueful, burdened
by loss and a barely disguised resentment about the possibilities denied by
colonial life. His anger, I want to be clear, is aimed not at the colonizer as
such but at the ways in which colonialism interpellated the native bourgeoi-
sie. We had to get out, Hall insists, to become writers, to become intellec-
tuals. Everything in the Caribbean, or other such colonial sites, for that
matter, mitigated against the prospect of becoming a writer or an intellec-
tual. Getting out was the only option. Halls lament, of course, is not of the
same variety as V. S. Naipauls, but there are, nevertheless, haunting echoes.
We might recall, just for a moment, the strictures imposed in Naipauls novel
A House for Mr. Biswas (1961) by that architectural monstrosity that is the
house Mohun Biswas buildsoverbuilt, full of odd angles that press
downward on the aspiring intellectual.
Biswas is a tragicomic figure trapped in the house that he hoped would
liberate him from the noise and clamor of his in-laws abode and into a life of
the mind. Biswas sought an intellectual life, in a house he could call his very
own; he imagines that intellectuals live in some bucolic English settinga
house, of course, built in a climate more temperate and more conducive,

Biswas is sure, to intellectual endeavors. Instead, the house that Biswas
builds turns into a kind of benign, and not a little noisy, prison where the
children are always underfoot and Biswas is still not free and clear of his in-
laws. The house first oppresses Biswas before becoming the object, of his
own making, that mocks his intellectual ambition. By the end of the novel,
Biswas, now more bereft and forlorn than ever, is more or less convinced that
the colonies are no place for an intellectual. A certain irony obtains in that
Biswas knows, better than most, the life of thwarted desire of which Hall
speaks, given the radically opposed ideologies to which Hall and Naipaul
subscribe. However, what matters most is that for Hall not to be able to be a
writer, which is for him nothing less than a life-sustaining possibility, is a
costly psychological business. England was Halls way out of the oppressive
strictures of the respectable Jamaican middle class, offering him precisely
the mode of life he so desired without it ever truly becoming his home.
It is from this intensely conflicted position that Hall speaks of his time
in the metropolis. Britain, he says, is my home, but Im not English.
Such an incommensurability, to designate Britain home but follow, imme-
diately, with the force of a signal negation, Im not English, is possessed of
a rare capacity for apprehension. That is, it asksdirectly, without so much
as a hint of poignancywhat it means to live, first as an anticolonial and
then as a postcolonial intellectual, in the metropolis, to live at once at such a
remove from and so anchored within a declining postimperial center. What
does it mean to have renounced Jamaica but to have made common cause
with the postwar immigrants who came to the metropolis before him, with
him, and after him? What does it mean to have spent the vast majority of his
life in England (so that it becomes his permanent place of residence, his
home in a more than putative or geographical sense) but to resist any
national affiliation?
There is something of substance at stake here because it extends far
beyond the biography of Hall. In his claiming Britain as a home that is not
quite a home, all the while refusing national identification of any kind, Hall
speaks for what must now amount to possibly three or four generations of
writers and intellectuals who have made their home in the metropolis
but cannot or will never align themselves completely with it. There is some-
thing Shakespearean about that because it is grandiose as a political gesture
(to enjoy the benefits metropolitan life affords the intellectual and others in
this class) and yet, strangely, real as the lived everyday experience of the dis-
located. This condition is, dare one say, profoundly ontological in nature:
To be or not to be. That, it would seem, is the question for Halls condi-
tiona condition shared by many, many others like him. Let us delineate, if
we can, the contorted topography of this condition. In the impossibility of
either declaring an affinity with the metropolis or forswearing it, the impos-
sibility of being either English or not English, there is only one possibility
for Hall to ground himself in England: the narrowly familialto make
England a sustainable home with Catherine and their children, Rebecca and
Jesse, and their grandchildren that is at once insistently domestic (local, if
not national, but such a disarticulation is precarious, at best)and reso-
lutely internationalist, to take ones political cues from all over the globe.
This Hall did, from the moment he became involved in the then incipient
New Lefts campaign against British, French, and Israeli aggression that was
the event of Suez and in his opposition to the Soviet tanks rolling into Hun-
gary in 1956, a commitment that wended its way through the promise (and
subsequent disillusionment) of Ghanaian independence in 1957 and the
Algerian war of independence in 195462, two very different paths toward
national sovereignty in Africa, of course; he was fully involved in the protest
that erupted after Cochranes murder in Notting Hill in 1959; and the events
of Paris, Chicago, and Czechoslovakia in 1968 coincided almost exactly with
the moment when he took up the reigns at CCCS from Hoggart.
For an intellectual such as Hall, the constant struggle to understand
the thinkers displacement is what it means to be at home and in an ongoing
conflict (conversation, he might correct me) with this place that enables his
work and is at the core of his work. Still, this place is not his. This is what it
means to make a life that is affectively rooted (by family, friends, and politi-
cal and intellectual associates) but philosophically always on the verge of
being unmoored (drawn to other places and recognizing resonances in other
struggles taking place far from Birmingham or London).
No wonder Hamlets phrase, with a small grammatical adjustment
(with one conjunction, and, replacing another, the historic or), comes so eas-
ily to mind: To be and not to be. That is the life that Hall made with his
wife, his political collaborators, and his writing partners (the many of them,
from Whannel to Martin Jacques, and the several in between, most espe-
cially those with whom he worked on Policing the Crisis), now captured and
made available as never before by The Stuart Hall Project.
It is in the tension between home and the negation Im not English
that it becomes possible to discern why, as Hall suggests in The Stuart Hall
Project, he is in solidarity with the position of that generation of immigrant
youth who came of age under Thatchers regime. Out of the struggle between
them and their British antagonists, says Hall, emerged a critical recognition:
the dream of assimilation buried on both sides. More to the point, how-
ever, is the paraphrasing of the immigrant youths position that Hall offers
next: We are not going to stay on the terms of becoming just like you. To be
at home will, then, never translate into a national identity. Articulated
through this rejection, We are not going to become like you, is the ten-
sion that has shaped Hall as a thinker: to make a home here, which is not
the there from which he fled (the subject who fled the colonial violence
that so brutally affected his family), does not mean that heor subsequent
generationswill submit (fully) to the metropoles terms. The struggle, the
constitutive center of that ongoing conversation, is for Hall to understand
how he can be here without acceding to [their] terms. They are recogniz-
able, [their] terms, but they will never completely be his. They will not,
their terms, overwhelm Hall into Englishness. The only way to be at home
without a national identification is to be in tension, is to be shaped, mis-
shapen, sometimes torn asunder, by that tension.
In order to be, Hall must commit himself to making his own history
under circumstances found, given and transmitted from the past. In order to
be, he must, before all else, turn to face himself as he does with such insight,
a gentleness of spirit, and critical acumen in The Stuart Hall Project. Above all
else, then, what Akomfrahs documentary recapitulation of Halls provides, in
the context of this SAQ special issue and beyond, is not only the opportunity to
achieve a more historic sense of Halls trajectorya cinematic biography
of sortsbut also an occasion to once again think about Halls life and his
work and how they continue to resonate in our moment. The Stuart Hall Proj-
ect allows Hall to pose the questions, about race, diaspora, Marx, Gramsci,
theory, the Left, politics, culture (cultural production), identity, gender, sexual-
ity, and the everyday, directly to us, which makes Akomfrahs rendering noth-
ing other than an invitation to engage with the inspiring body of thoughtthe
corpus, even as we remember the corpsethat is the Hall oeuvre.
Notes
1 In a wonderfully touching moment, Hall and Manley exchange pleasantries, and Hall,
breaking into a laugh, remarks on being in a lower form [grade] at Jamaica College
than Manley was: You sixth formers, when giants walked the earth. There is some-
thing like awe, and no small amount of affection, in Halls voice as he says this.
2 In Whats My Name? Black Vernacular Intellectuals (Farred 2003), I offer a critique of
the extended silence on race that marks Halls work. The Stuart Hall Project demon-
strates the need for a revision of my earlier position.
3 Or perhaps I should simply acknowledge that the sound track to The Stuart Hall Project
put me, at once, in a Davis and a Jarrett mood.
4 Hall was Hoggarts assistant director when CCCS was founded in 1964. It is also telling
that Hall, when discussing how he fashioned himself as an intellectual, insists that,
much as he regarded Hoggart and Raymond Williams highly, they could not serve as
intellectual models for him. This impossibility, he suggests, was wrought by the effects
of growing up in the Caribbeanand the consequence of being a black intellectual and
not a product of the Yorkshire working class (Hoggart) or the Welsh lower-middle class
(Williams). See, in this regard, Hall 1988 (on the cultural politics of the Greater London
Council) and Hall and Jacques 1990 (on the politics of aid as a radicalizing possibility).
References
Farred, Grant. 2003. Whats My Name? Black Vernacular Intellectuals. Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press.
Hall, Stuart. 1988. Face the Future. In Hall, Hard Road to Renewal, 23338.
Hall, Stuart. 1990a. Cold Comfort Farm. In Hall, Hard Road to Renewal, 7579.
Hall, Stuart. 1990b. The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left. New
York: Verso.
Hall, Stuart, et al. 1978. Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order. Basingstoke:
Macmillan.
Hall, Stuart, and Martin Jacques. 1990. People Aida New Politics Sweeps the Land. In
Hall, Hard Road to Renewal, 25158.
Hall, Stuart, and Paddy Whannel. 1964. The Popular Arts. New York: Beacon.
Handsworth Songs. 1986. Directed by John Akomfrah. London: Black Audio Film Collective.
Hoggart, Richard. 1961. The Uses of Literacy: Changing Patterns in English Mass Culture. Boston:
Beacon.
Naipaul, V. S. 1961. A House for Mr. Biswas. New York: Penguin.
Selvon, Sam. 1956. The Lonely Londoners. London: Longman Group.
The Stuart Hall Project. 2013. Directed by John Akomfrah. London: British Film Institute.
Angela McRobbie
Stuart Hall:
Art and the Politics of Black Cultural Production
Identity politics . . . , perhaps deservedly, acquired a

bad name. However I want to argue here that in this
moment the emergence of the identity question consti-
tuted a compelling and productive horizon for artists.
Stuart Hall, Black Diaspora Artists in Britain:
Three Moments in Post-War History
. . . hybridity to me is the third space which enables

other positions to emerge.
Homi K. Bhabha, The Third Space: An Interview
with Homi Bhabha
The challenge to assumptions of national identity posed

by Signs of Empire signalled a turn among younger art-
ists toward more pluralised subjectivities, configured
through a re-articulation of prevailing political realities
with cultural counter-memories and neglected diaspora
histories that extended beyond national boundaries.
Jean Fisher, The Other Story and the Past
Imperfect
Introduction: The Third Space of Pedagogy
In this article I attend to three elements in the

work of Stuart Hall. First, I take the concept third
space from Homi Bhabha (bearing in mind that
he and Hall were conversing and sharing ideas for

many years) and, retrieving its meaning as bringing together both hybridity
and capacity, I repurpose it as a way of understanding the importance and
lasting impact of Halls work on British cultural studies and postcolonial
pedagogy. 1 This is a space that Hall establishes in order to conjoin an activist
engagement on various projects throughout his life, with his work as an aca-
demic in the UK university system. Indeed, in keeping with his implicit and
sometimes explicit critique of the Oxford and Cambridge system to which
he was first exposed on arriving in the United Kingdom (and then again on
many subsequent occasions) the space of pedagogy was also a subaltern
space, a radical position to happily occupy in an academic context where the
cloisters and the primacy of research were, and remain, the standard mark-
ers of status and success. How marvelous then that Hall was able to engi-
neer this academic subalternality to such effect. It was a high-risk strategy,
but one that saw Hall constantly champion a teaching mode in lesser institu-
tions, such as the new universities. Second, I address Halls close working
relationships with a group of young black and Asian artists dating back to
the mid- to late 1980s, which became the defining feature of the later stages
of his career. Third, I consider the way in which aspects of the rise of neolib-
eralism across the landscape of British society (what Hall originally called
the great moving right show) have impacted deleteriously on the social
conditions of both emergence and reproduction of this flowering of black
and Asian arts.
In relation to the group of artists I will be discussing, I use the word
British here reservedly, not to confirm some sort of movement, and certainly
not to echo the nationalist-populist rhetoric of Cool Britannia that came
into being around the self-promotional and brashly commercial strategies of
the Young British Artists (YBAs) of the 1990s, including the now world-
famous Damien Hirst. Deploying irony and ostensible humor, this YBA
group was a right-wing counter to the serious and theoretically informed art-
work (left, feminist, and antiracist) that preceded it.2 In what follows, I will
show how the art practices of the British black and Asian group, both in
terms of a diasporic emplacement in the United Kingdominside and out-
side the established arts worldand as regards an abiding concern with the
politics of race and ethnicity, echoed Halls style of open pedagogy. Halls
earlier influence in shaping the field of cultural studies extended into the
field of postcolonial art practice by means of a consistently anti-elitist rheto-
ric, one which confounded the division between high and low culture and
refuted the centrality of the lifted-out and gilded cosmopolitan capital cities.
Hall often had Birmingham on his mind. To go further, it could be argued
McRobbie Art and the Politics of Black Cultural Production 667
that Hall propagated an idea of the popular arts as a distinguishing feature

of the black British cultural assemblage.3 This propagation took place
through dialogues with the artists, with Hall as the older teacher providing
a set of working concepts, as well as being able to point these then young
people toward other thinkers such as Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, Bhabha,
Gayatri Spivak, Paul Gilroy, Kobena Mercer, and bell hooks. This was the
seminaristic aspect of Halls professional life. His warm and engaging way
of speaking set a framework for his relationship to academic work, to the
politics of pedagogy, and to his own distinctive writing style.
Halls body of work, the forms his teaching took, his ways of conduct-
ing a seminar, his talks, his broadcasts and more formal lectures, and, of
course, his writing could be seen as marking out a third space. It was the
closest Hall came to being an auteur. During his career, the concept of a
third space was useful for reflecting on practices of cultural mingling and
hybridity. The vernacular activities gave rise to changes in the landscape of
urban everyday life. Films, novels, poetry, and popular music were the key
cultural frames for providing critical reflection on and analysis of these
emerging forms of social mixing. From the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s,
Hall and Bhabha were in regular dialogue with each other, sharing ideas
and cross-fertilizing on various issues at conferences and on panels in many
venues (Bhabha 2015). Recently Kobena Mercer (2015: 78) has referred to
Halls future-facing outlook and the way in which his sociological eye was
finely tuned to capture and analyze things that were happening around him.
I likewise reiterate this combination of qualities here, foregrounding the
institutional sites of education and developing further the impact of Halls
voice in this new sector of the art world. Indeed, I argue that it is the combi-
nation of sociological and cultural studies elements that provides the key to
a fuller understanding of the artworks than the more conventional vocabu-
laries of art history or visual culture can supply.
Halls third space was an open-ended, nonelite teaching machine
through which he was able to be a specific kind of subaltern intellectual. In
this space he brought together a prevailing commitment to radical politics
and his professional life as an academic. We can justifiably attribute to Halls
teaching style a kind of richness and productivity whereby new knowledge
could be both produced and put into circulation for a wider population than
that typically envisaged by academics. At the same time, Hall inspired others
to work in a similar kind of way, first at the Birmingham Centre for Contem-
porary Cultural Studies (CCCS) and then at the Open University. However,
such a mode of operation was also of its time and was made possible by an
infrastructure of seemingly enduring social democratic institutional invest-

ments that are now dramatically curtailed.
Halls evasion of the process of individualization required of academics
today, which in the recently labeled entrepreneurial university entails relent-
less and hubristic forms of self-promotion (see Brown 2015), enabled the
emergence of an original and accessible style of scholarship. This style of
scholarship engaged a sizable international readership, many translations,
and a lasting influence not only over media and cultural studies, sociology
and criminology, cultural anthropology, race and ethnicity studies, and post-
colonial studies but also over what was then considered art history and is now
more often referred to as the field of visual culture. One significant sector of
this audience and readership was the group of young black and Asian dia-
sporic artists and photographers, many of whom were still students when
first introduced in the mid-1980s to Halls work. Some years later, on the
occasion of being given an honorary doctorate, and in a self-effacing manner,
Hall downplayed, indeed overlooked altogether, the key role he played in
coalescing and galvanizing this group. One of my intentions in this essay is
thus to reverse his self-effacement by considering the generative dynamics of
this Hallian third space (Hall 2006). Halls close working involvement with
the black and Asian British artists remains fairly unknown to some, despite
the many well-known and often quoted articles by Hall on race, visual cul-
ture, and new ethnicities.4 There are so many strands of continuity between
Halls earlier work and this later set of relationships. These strands included
the policy-oriented activity he led first with Autograph ABP and then with
the Institute of International Visual Arts (INIVA) gallery in Rivington Street
East London (this activity also formed his first major project on retiring from
the Open University in 2000), lectures, catalogue essays, and simply work-
ing with people like Isaac Julien and David A. Bailey. One of the obvious con-
nections between early and later writing can be seen in the way Hall, eschew-
ing the traditional idea of the artistic genius, refers not so much to art but
rather to black cultural production and black cultural workers. Not only
does this remind us of the death of the author debates that were prevalent
at the time, but it also implicitly reflects the anti-elitist and radically collab-
orative nature of Halls undertaking as he envisaged it.
Halls work was always less stamped with his own authorial signature
than is conventional in academia. His style was self-effacing, often sub-
merged, registering at the level of what Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari
(2004) would label a minor literature; indeed this quality was also a critical
aspect of its potency. Hall addressed others generously. The early days of col-
lective authorship, in the context of producing journals, pamphlets, and the

Birmingham CCCS stenciled occasional papers, produced a mingled voice
that was constantly in dialogue with his colleagues. Drawing on writers such
as Peter Stallybrass and Allon White in relation to popular culture as well as
Fanon, Bhabha, Gilroy, Mercer, Avtar Brah, Michele Wallace, Cornel West,
and Judith Butler, to name but a few, Hall, over the years, forged both his
own open pedagogic third space style and a distinctive contribution to intel-
lectual work. So many of Halls articles take place in the present tense. He is
mapping a field, he is testing out a set of ideas, he is contributing, he is trying
out and making sense of, he is explaining and explicating to a wider popular
audience, and, in this way, he is also always reaching into some space beyond
the confines of the current sociopolitical circumstances. He is translating
and synthesizing, widening out and drawing togetherin a sense, assem-
bling a new sociocultural constituency. The third space of open pedagogy
was interstitial, liminal, relatively undesignated, informal, on the edge of
bigger institutions, and carrying within it traces of subordinated histories,
traces of countercultures of resistance.
What came into being as black cultural production in the form of
painting, sculpture, installations, and photography reflected something of
Halls pedagogy in that it was always a kind of work in progress. As this work
drew more on the popular culture of migrant populations, on the cut n mix
of reggae sound systems, and on the drama of urban youth subcultures than
on the traditions of the avant-garde, no one, not even the artists themselves,
actually called it art initially.5 Rarely did this emerging body of work attract
recognition from the curators, funding agencies, and critics of the art world.
In the early days, this work was only able to exist within that same cultural
studies (and British Film Institute) circuit of workshops and seminars
occasionally taking place in locations such as the Institute of Contemporary
Arts (ICA) in London. Hall would be talking about and writing essays for the
nascent black photography movement. Other marginalized voices in Bir-
mingham, in the West Midlands, and in London found some ways of cob-
bling together funding bids to local regional councils, or they approached
new organizations with an access policy such as Channel 4. By hosting
events and talks and by showing short films and videos at off-the-beaten-
track locations such as Wolverhampton in the West Midlands, the third
space in sociogeographical terms constituted sites of popular participation.
It is telling that the first films by John Akomfrah and Julien reported on
urban unrest and racist policing in Handsworth Birmingham and in reac-
tion to the death of Colin Roach in Stoke Newington. Arguably, this was not
community arts, coming as it did from a younger, more politicized genera-

tion for whom such terms as these marked out container spaces of cultural
subordination (though of course such spaces could also be repurposed for
the sake of grant applications). The early films offered a distinctive montage
of sound and image while also registering a sociological voice by drawing
from the work of Hall and Gilroy, each of whom had written about the eco-
nomic marginalization of black youth, as well as from the racist stereotypes
that littered the media landscape, creating ripe environments for intensify-
ing the policing of society.
Halls conjunctural analysis during the 1980s and into the 1990s pro-
duced a series of concepts to reflect on the sociopolitical exclusions of black
and Asian youth, and the attempts by the right-wing press to consolidate tra-
ditional notions of Englishness against the seeming threat of multicultural-
ism and a breakdown of law and order (Hall 1979, 1988; Hall et al. 1978).
Along with Gilroys (1987) There Aint No Black in the Union Jack, there was
an acknowledgment of the role of black music and style as affirmative and
contestatory. Influenced by Gilroy, Hall refuted the idea of ethnic absolutism
and instead reflected on the third spaces of convivial mingling while also
remaining constantly alert to the forces that aimed to defuse radicalism by
co-opting black and Asian people into the world of consumer culture. Start-
ing in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Hall began to comment on how the
values of enterprise culture as promoted by Margaret Thatchers govern-
ment came to be taken up by young black and Asian people who otherwise
found themselves more or less excluded from mainstream labor markets.
This paradox of marginalization and cooptation was one element within the
idea of new ethnicities, and it articulated three ways: first with the Thatch-
erite imperative, second with the longer tradition of, as Hall put it, hus-
tling, itself a marker of usually black masculine economic marginalization,
and third with the prevalent punk (and hence youth cultural) ethos of creat-
ing a do-it-yourself labor market (Hall 1989; McRobbie 1989).
This moment of Halls conjunctural analysis also marked out a point of
convergence where Hall and I shared a sociological focus on the emerging
subjectivizing discourses and the ambivalent political formation of so-called
Thatchers children, be they black, white, or Asian. For the following two
decades, Hall and I conversed and sat on conference panels, attending to the
corrosive effect of the emerging neoliberalism, especially the Tony Blair era
and the sustained undoing of the progressive alliance politics of race, ethnic-
ity, gender, sexuality, and class. This experience led me to borrow from Halls
emphasis on articulation to reflect on the aggressively disarticulating strate-
gies adopted by New Labour when it came to office in 1997, through its vocal
disavowal of left, feminist, and antiracist work as no longer relevant while
also asserting that this kind of work was being taken into account (McRob-
bie 2008). Through the joint forces of the popular press and the offices of
New Labour and its favored think tanks, there was an attempt to engineer a
disconnect, a disavowal of history through discounting the previous work of
antiracist groups and alliances that had fought for equal opportunities and
an end to workplace discrimination. Years of struggle and campaigning
came to be trivialized and undermined, associated with the kind of out-of-
date left-wing politics that made the party, or so it was argued, unelectable.
As an alternative, by the early 2000s, New Labour was championing a new
kind of black or Asian high achiever, the top girls/boys who would put the
meritocracy to good use and make their way into the boardroom or legal
chambers or, indeed, even the House of Commons. Given Halls previous
proximity to many of the people around Blair (as regular contributors to the
magazine Marxism Today), one could almost argue that it was his radicalism
that was being refuted, albeit with his presence continuing to haunt the
edges of the New Labour vocabularies. In The Aftermath of Feminism (2008)
I refer to this process as a complexification of backlash.6 What the public
relations machinery around New Labour sought were feel good stories
about successes in black and Asian business, not a radicalism that drew
attention to racial violence, black urban poverty, and unemploymentthat
all belonged to the past. Words such as poverty and unemployment virtually
disappeared from the vocabulary of issues to be tackled by New Labour in
office. Instead they were redesignated as words of insult, used in a pejorative
way to further stigmatize those locked into dependency culture and wel-
fare benefits. The repetitive power of single words and phrases, and therefore
the politics of language, played a key role in the securing of consent, in this
case, to a new form of corporate-political managerialism which had the de-
democratizing effect of discouraging people from everyday engagement in
politics, including local politics. Gilroy (2013) has also bemoaned this de-
politicizing effect during and after the New Labour years. These were the
sociocultural contours within which New Labour and the general population
reviled both the antiracist movements of the 1970s and 1980s and the legiti-
macy of black anger in regard to policing in the inner cities, favoring, rather,
notions of achievement, aspiration, and success. As Sarat Maharaj (1999) has
argued, this New Labour pathway replaced ideas of social justice with multi-
cultural managerialism, which with the growth of the creative economy
also led to various high profile programs in cultural leadership (Maharaj
1999).7 By the time Hall had retired from the Open University and was dedi-
cating a good deal of time to the new black arts venue INIVA, he was also
entangled in these changes to the landscape, which could be defined as the
undoing of antiracism and the dismantling of multiculturalism. This
moment also brought Hall directly into the fraught terrain of arts and cul-
tural policy making, where, with the support of Gilane Tawadros and Lola
Young (now Baroness Young of Hornsey), he played a key role in bringing
the past, present, and future work of the black and Asian British artists into
a more formalized institutionalized space at just that point in time when the
arts and cultural fields were being restructured under the rubric of the new
managerialism endorsed by New Labour and presided over by Minister of
Culture Chris Smith at the Department for Culture, Media, and Sport. There
was already a new vocabulary of leadership, enterprise, and sponsorship in
the air that opposed previous ideas of support and subsidy for the arts.8 And
yet, Hall found this immersion in the INIVA project deeply rewarding; he
was working in a collective and talking endlessly with architect David Adjaye
and photographer Mark Sealy, while trying to fend off various ambitious
New Labour figures.
Conditions of Emergence:
From Arts Cooperatives to the Talent-Led Economy
Throughout his lifetime, Hall maintained an interest in the archival photog-
raphy of Caribbean immigration to the United Kingdom in the 1950s. In the
journal Ten 8 he wrote movingly about what a certain kind of genre of photo-
graphs said about the new life as it was to be seen by the folks back home.
The eagerness and sense of expectation was simultaneously undercut by
what Hall also described as the psychic ambivalence of fear and desire,
which underpinned the intensity of the host populations racial prejudice
and hatred, which, in turn, rendered this portraiture as anxious as it was
optimistic (Bailey and Hall 1992a, 1992b). The flow in Halls engagement
with visual culture moved from photography to film and then to art. This
flow was accompanied by Halls emphasis on understanding the dynamics
of sociopolitical change, understood in terms of conjunctural moments. As
mentioned above, a key conjunctural moment in the United Kingdom by the
mid- to late 1980s and early 1990s was what Hall labeled the time of new
ethnicities. Three seminal films at least partly triggered these consider-
ations of Britains new multiculturalism: My Beautiful Laundrette (Frears
1985), Looking for Langston (Julien 1989), and Young Soul Rebels (Julien 1991),
all of which opened up questions about visual culture and the act of looking,
youth culture/subculture, the black body, masculinity, gay sexual desire
against a backdrop of economic hardship, homophobia, and urban racism.
Two defining features of these works are that they defy the stable boundaries
of high and low culture and that they are inflected by the idea of subculture.9
The joyful moments in all three works also convey something of what Hall
was striving to verbalize, which was a sense of black and Asian desiring
agency, a sense of new subjects coming into being, new ethnicities, albeit
against a backdrop of racial violence and social exclusion. Thus, we could say
Halls writing touched on the paradoxes of black cultural production, of
being outside and inside (bearing in mind Ernesto Laclaus notion of the
constitutive outside). Meanwhile, black cultural production found itself sud-
denly undergoing a shift from the margins to the center at that point at
which the art establishment woke up and began to engage (albeit in a critical
vein, as witnessed in the exchange between Salman Rushdie and Hall fol-
lowing Rushdies hostile review of Akomfrahs 1987 film, Handsworth
Songs). The third space of black cultural production, including the early
films of both Akomfrah and Julien and echoing Halls own pedagogic style,
announced a presence that was other than modernity, distancing itself from
the avant-garde while also refusing the playful shiny surfaces of the post-
modern. History here was reduced neither to pastiche nor to costume
drama.10 Instead, it was urgently disputatious, a matter of nonchronological
questions about temporality, confronting what Bhabha (1994: 19192) called
the time lag of modernity. With original footage, Julien had Langston
Hughes dance forward with his poetry-rap of the Harlem Renaissance inter-
rupting the slower and carefully composed images of black gay desire as
played out in the spaces of contemporary club scenes.
To understand the coming together of the third space of black cultural
production, we need to consider the sociohistorical conditions of its emer-
gence. The latter-day legitimation of and awarding of prizes to these works
by painters, photographers, filmmakers, and sculptors from Bailey, Sonia
Boyce, Chila Burman, Julien, Akomfrah, and Yinka Shonibare to Chris Ofili
and Steve McQueen took place after the event of their being present. The
1989 show at the Hayward Gallery, The Other Story, curated by Rasheed
Araeen, which showed works mostly from an older generation of artists (but
did include Eddie Chambers, Keith Piper, and Boyce), was, as Jean Fisher
(2009) reminded her readers in her Tate essay from 2009, met with hostility
and undisguised racial prejudice on the part of establishment arts writers.
For example, Brian Sewell (quoted in Fisher 2009: 5) wrote that these artists
parroted Western visual idioms they dont understand as third rate imita-
tions of the white mans clich. Nevertheless, what created and sustained
these younger artists in their practice were a set of conditions, the outcome
of education and cultural policies pursued by social democratic and left-
wing municipal local authorities from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s,
albeit in circumstances of constraint and with decreasing budgets until that
point in 1997 when the power of local government was curtailed and virtu-
ally halted by the incoming New Labour government. (This too was part of
the anti-municipalism of New Labour, for the reasons of local governments
capacity to foster new and rekindle old forms of radical democracy.) There
was a direct line of connection between this educational-cultural appara-
tus and the pedagogic third space of cultural studies. Julien, as a boy grow-
ing up in Bow in east London and attending a local comprehensive, was
encouraged to apply through an access route to Central Saint Martins Col-
lege of Art and Design thanks to a Hackney youth arts program run along
youth club lines. Burman, whose father was an immigrant from the Punjab
and was forced to make his living with an ice cream van, grew up in working-
class Liverpool and got a first from Leeds Metropolitan University and then
completed a masters degree from the prestigious Slade School in London.
Shonibare, the British-African artist whose work won the preeminent place
on Londons Trafalgar Square plinth in 2011, worked in the early days for
Southwark Council in arts administration, and he too benefited from free
higher education in the anti-elitist art-school sector. Likewise, though from
a younger generation, McQueen has talked a lot about his time in a White
City (west London) comprehensive in a period where black boys almost
automatically found themselves put into the lowest nonacademic streams
(Aikenhead 2014). Nevertheless, thanks to a few inner-city radical teachers
he found his way into the Chelsea College of Arts and from there to Gold-
smiths, University of London. So it was not that these institutions offered
some sort of antiracist utopia (far from it), but they did provide publicly
funded avenues that have since been more or less closed down. For each of
these artists, growing up in times of harsh racial violence and inequality,
there were still routes for disadvantaged students made available through
local democracy in the form of studentships, part-time jobs, and even the
possibility of subsidized shared housing for artists under the remit of the
Greater London Council. Secondary-school teachers and youth workers also
played a key role in supporting black and ethnic-minority young people as
part of various urban antiracist initiatives. The removal of such provision
and the rise of the commercial market and private sponsorship in the arts in
the last fifteen years has arguably had dire consequences for the reproduc-
tion of this generation of black and Asian artists, insofar as the tropes of
excessive competition and the high personal costs that have to be borne in
order to get this far in the new talent led economy already excludes so
many, while also stopping in its tracks a more collective ethos. These munic-
ipal environments were also the very spaces that Hall chose to associate
with, for example, arts organizations and photography workshops existing in
a kind of extramural relationship with the bigger former polytechnics (now
new universities). In this sense, we can see continuities in the cultural stud-
ies tradition stretching from Raymond Williamss involvement in adult edu-
cation through to the involvement of Hall and others around him in regional
and London-based arts projects. These conditions of emergence depended
then on a set of openings that decades of radical, often grass-roots activism,
had made possible. What Hall did was to pitch in with the kind of debates
and arguments that moved things forward, and this was most apparent in
the New Ethnicities and other articles that stressed the need for impurity
and nonidentity, for difference and differance for the necessary lack of fix-
ity around the category of black or Asian.
Hall offers one of the most succinct accounts of his engagement with
the black and Asian British artists in his lecture at the University of East
London titled Black Diaspora Artists in Britain: Three Moments in Post-
War History (2006). Here, he offers a wider and more historical account of
what I have called the conditions of emergence, that is, a conjunctural anal-
ysis which allows him to pay particular attention to two specific groups, what
he calls the last colonials who arrived typically from the Caribbean in the
UK (and also Paris) in the 1950s and for whom at least initially the space of
international modernism and abstractionism permitted a sense of possibil-
ity even if for some, a few years later, such optimism came to be retracted.
Hall cites the emergence of the second group, the postcolonials as a discur-
sive formation whose coming together takes the form of a kind of clustering
in what, as Hall quoting David Scott (2004) describes, could be seen as a
problem space. This work (and he mentions a range of visual artists from
Keith Piper and Boyce to Julien and Burman), argues Hall, takes the form of
a constitutive outside to our island story. In the work itself, the interroga-
tive is entwined with the aesthetic. These practices take shape in the context
of the presence of race as a key political signifier in postwar British urban
life, and they find expression in the context of the popular antiracist politics
from the late 1970s and the rising tide of black anger in a social context of
being pushed around by the police with the consequences that nothing
can protect the black body. Hall then goes on to herald this emergence of
the new black and Asian arts movement as a kind of coming out. He points
to the polemical and politicised art that broke down the space between
image and language, which borrowed from urban forms such as graffiti and
the music of marginalized youth subcultures. This intermingling contested
the divisions between high culture and popular or vernacular culture, and it
defined the work as a whole as hybridic, at odds with, or holding at a distance
from, the need for recognition from the mainstream art world, which from
the start could be perceived as hostile. This self-positioning as extraneous to
the mainstream of the arts is also what brings the work close together with
Halls own preferred third space of cultural studies pedagogy.
The question is then raised as to what the future had in store for this
group of subaltern artists with whom Hall formed such a close bond? We
could summarize some of the socioeconomic transformations to which they
became subject under the label of the creative economy, which was spear-
headed by the New Labour government with a remit given to the Department
of Culture, Media, and Sport to encourage growth within the sector that
included artists, fashion designers, musicians, graphic designers, and so
on.11 The new focus on creativity was announced with great fanfare, but the
underlying emphasis was on encouraging overall a more highly individual-
ized and entrepreneurial outlook across this sector of young people, while
also advocating self-employment and thus self-reliance. With the United
Kingdom then priding itself on expanding its talent-led economy the so-
called Young British Artists (with Hirst as a figurehead) gladly occupied this
space, singing the praises of the union of art and business.12 A new vocabu-
lary came into being, led by a political rationality of competitive individual-
ism and enterprise culture. Indeed, in the United Kingdom under the aus-
pices of the new creative economy artists came to occupy a kind of pioneer
role: the artist as human capital (McRobbie 2015). This ethos of personal
ambition, the requirement to become an entrepreneur of the self, the need to
multitask (to spread the risk, as the advocates of this ethos would advise), the
need to search for sponsors and self-promote at every possible opportunity,
clearly had consequences for the pedagogic, self-effacing, third space.13 The
repercussions that this shift away from locally funded and regionally based
arts provision toward a more fully market-driven and sponsorship-led model
have had for the artists I have been referring to are as yet unclear. We would
need to look closely at the artists curriculum vitae one at a time to determine
such repercussions. We would also have to take into account the kinds of
generic factors that Bourdieu (1993) alluded to in his analysis of the art
field, such as early youthful days being devoted to joint projects, where there
is strength in numbers, giving way later on to more individualized profes-
sional careers. However, in Bourdieus time, the category of artist was also
something of a professional rarity, which allowed Bourdieu to develop the
argument that the long period of waiting for recognition while living on a pit-
tance was something only possible for those with access to private means.
Now that hundreds of thousands of young people are being trained to gradu-
ate level in the diverse field of creative arts, the question of how they can
make a living becomes one of much wider concern. The artists we are refer-
ring to here would have been exposed to both the earlier social democratic
period of relative munificence and the last fifteen years of neoliberal individ-
ualism as it came to be translated into an ethos for artists and creative types.
How then will a younger generation of black and Asian artists emerge
given the sweeping changes across the landscape of the British universities
and the gradual replacement of cultural studies with a more business-
focused curriculum (McRobbie 2015)? The entrepreneurial university not
only champions a more competitive ethos but also requires students to take
out loans to cover the cost of fees. How this has impacted the ability of black
and Asian students to train in fine arts, film, photography, and so on is yet to
be fully investigated. The influence of creative entrepreneurship pedagogy,
cluttered as it is with a fine array of tool kits and modules as to how to com-
mercialize the work, will surely diminish the generous, gift-giving dimen-
sions of the third space, which I have attributed to Halls academic oeuvre.
Within the audit culture of the new university regime, or bedded down inside
the spaces of the art school today, there is an ethos that weighs against the
giving of time where there is not, as Wendy Brown (2015) puts it, a return on
investment. In effect, both the breadth and range of the curriculum and the
teacherly style of its delivery is truncated or compromised when enterprise
culture steps in. This does not augur well for future generations of artists
from backgrounds similar to the group of artists we are currently discussing.
Through the years the artists who gathered around Hall had to negotiate
pathways through these now standard requirements which emphasize not
just self-promotion but also the seeking of prizes, the search for sponsors,
the relentless application for grants, and the whole business of making a liv-
ing in already difficult circumstances. In such a highly competitive sphere, if
one is not being short-listed for prizes or being represented by a leading gal-
lerist and is not selling work, then one is subject to an abyss of self-doubt.
Conclusion: Precarity Politics and Black Arts?

The impact of neoliberalism in the arts pushed established black and Asian
artists further in the direction of bolstering their careers as best they could,
according to the logic of prizes and prestigious international commissions,
while leaving their younger counterparts to manage the debt-ridden avenues
that have their own vivid disincentives. However, the story does not quite end
here. Since the economic crisis of 2008, there have been persistent efforts to
dislodge the depoliticized art and the winner-takes-all ethos championed by
creative economy advocates. Citing movements and journals such as Former
West and e-flux, Irit Rogoff (2008) has referred to this as the educational
turn, that is the way in which art and museum spaces have become epicen-
ters for the development of new radical political movementsthey have
become unruly spaces of assembly for a debate which shifts attention away
from the singular magisterial work itself to a less grandiose place for art
where it exists in conjunction with some of the important social and political
issues of the moment. This gives rise to a new productive interface between
social and cultural theory and artists who define themselves against the
market and who seek a new space/time of political engagement, identifying
themselves within a frame of the artist-precariat (Bain and McLean 2012;
Lorey 2015). However, the politics of precarity are not entirely unproblematic
when viewed from the perspective of race and ethnicity.
The autonomist Marxist writing of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri
(2000), which has been so influential for this largely white European precar-
ity movement, marks a return to 1970s and early 1980s ideas of workerism,
albeit a workerism defined by its desires to escape the factory floor by various
means of flight or exodus or through the refusal of work. These ideas were
developed through bringing Karl Marxs Grundrisse to bear on the industrial
disputes in Italy particularly in the car factories of the North. The authors
update this focus to engage with contemporary forms of cognitive or imma-
terial labor. It is understandable why this work has appealed to a younger
generation of European radicals, not just for its attention to new forms of
work and labor but also for its attention to processes of migration and its
focus on the political potential of the multitude. However, the concept of the
multitude does not adequately engage with questions raised by feminist the-
ory and from within postcolonial studies or race and ethnicity studies. One
problem was perhaps there from the start insofar as the factory floor was
always considered the uncontested center for political consciousness as well
as a place of white, male labor even if these young men were in flight from
such spaces. Gilroy countered this argument forcefully back in 1987 when
he posited the political spaces of the times as those of street, community,
home, and leisure environment (i.e., youth clubs!). Gilroys move followed
the Hallian British cultural studies tradition of envisaging the terrain of
popular culture as a site for new political emergences and uprisings: outside
the police stations and courts of law, inside the schools and on the streets
(Gilroy 1987; McRobbie 2015). A recent polemical intervention, which, echo-
ing the ideas of Hardt and Negri, aims at bringing together the operaismo
work with that of critical writing on race, can be found in the coauthored
work of Stefano Harney and Fred Moten (2013). Under the idea of the under-
commons, there is an attempt to validate the autonomist operaismo tradition
by arguing contentiously that it in fact followed the lead from black US radi-
cal traditions including those of the Black Panther Party. Alongside this
claim, Motens poetic voice argues that precarity art transcends the limita-
tions of the European constraints of high and low culture, doing so, as Gilroy
(1993) demonstrates so forcefully, through the bitter and painful historical
experiences of the black Atlantic.
Indeed, it would be amiss not to bring into this discussion the seminal
work of Gilroy, who in effect attended to the gap in the early Birmingham
cultural studies project of the 1970s and 1980s regarding the question of art,
literature, and music. Forceful exclusion from the European canon, from
Immanuel Kant to Theodor Adorno in fact created a space unstriated by the
violent hierarchies of high and low that produced the various forms of black
expressive culture as a counter-culture of modernity, one of whose formal
characteristics was to register a non-hermetic mode, antiphonal, open-to-
the-audience call and response address that echoed slaves songs and came
to be formalized in the music of the black churches. There is a close relation
between this black Atlantic aesthetic and the pedagogic style I have here
attributed to Hall as a third space. If this openness also finds expression in
artworks themselves (and one could attend to this question more fully by
considering, for example, Akomfrahs 2013 film/installation The Stuart Hall
Project and Juliens 2013 Playtime, in which Hall makes a fleeting appear-
ance), nevertheless, to maintain a radical openness and a defiance of the
dynamics of competition in favor of cooperation in times such as these
pushes artists into a difficult position when they are subjected to the full
panoply of dispositifs that entail putting oneself forward for prizes and find-
ing oneself subject to the same kind of rankings and ratings processes that
now prevail across all sectors of professional life. As Nstor Garca Canclini
(2014) points out, in the contemporary art world this means being endlessly
ranked, or left unranked through the regular lists published in glossy maga-
zines and newspapers naming the top ten or one hundred artists in the
world, or the top ten curators, or simply the top ten players in the gallery
and museum sector. This intensifies the forces of individualization, which
in turn makes it difficult not to be anxious about fulfilling these bench-
marks of success. Therefore, is the openness of Halls third space and the
role it played in the lives of the artists I have mentioned now a matter of clo-
sure? What kind of language would be needed to understand the more
recent conditions of artistic production in the new problem spaces of post-
colonial art? For example, the concerns raised by Nana Adusei-Poku (2012)
in regard to recent debates, mostly conducted in the United States, on post-
Black art, indicates a double movement: on the one hand, the desire of con-
temporary African-American artists to be considered in terms other than
those of blackness, a generational riposte against identity politics, and on the
other hand, the US inflection of what I referred to earlier as the neoliberal
political sensibility that claims that the times of overt racial inequalities are
now in the past, which in turn justifies the idea of the end of multicultural-
ism with its negative associations of publicly funded provisions. In any case,
no sooner is this kind of facile proclamation made than there is an outpour-
ing of black anger across the United States about police brutality against
young black men and women, giving rise to the Black Lives Matter cam-
paign and reminding us forcefully of what triggered Akomfrah and Juliens
earliest works (Gilroy 2014).
Notes
1 To explain, I draw on Bhabhas (1994) idea of Third Space, which he expands on in an
early article reprinted in The Politics of Location as a disruptive time/space created by
postcolonial cultures within the dominant politics of enunciation and language. Here,
however, I decapitalize it as third space and locate the term as a meeting point that
marks the rich and animated dialogues between Bhabha and Hall.
2 I am thinking here of the work of Victor Burgin, Mitra Tabrizian, and Isaac Julien as
well as the American feminist art of the likes of Judy Chicago, all of which many of the
YBAers would have been exposed to at university and then would have loudly rejected.
Please note, however, that the Saatchi Sensation exhibition at the Royal Academy in
1998, which showcased this so-called new generation, also included work by Shonibare
and Chris Ofili.
3 I will return to this point at the conclusion, but the film My Beautiful Laundrette was a
key point of reference here, and it appeared prior to Hanif Kureishis novel The Buddha
of Suburbia (1990), but both were driven by the idea of British youth culture, a trope
deeply inscribed within the Birmingham CCCS collective unconscious. The vernacu-
lar of the Caribbean, its infusion into the punk n reggae mix and the ethos of rock
against racism endured in Halls approach to the idea of art.
4 This point was made when I presented an early version of this essay as a talk at the CSA
at Riverside May 2015. Thanks to Jaafar Aksikas for the invitation and for his valuable
comments.
5 I am thinking here of Juliens first films, especially Young Soul Rebels (1991).
6 Fisher (2009) makes a similar argument in regard to the Cool Britannia moment and
the way in which artists like Gilbert and George along with many of the YBAs com-
prised a right-wing backlash against these prior moments of political anger about racial
inequality being mobilized by artists and filmmakers such as those cited here.
7 More recently, see Ahmed 2012 on diversity management.
8 The negative connotations of the word subsidy as it is associated with the arts and cul-
ture is followed through to the current conservative and previous coalition govern-
ments in the United Kingdom, and more or less adhered to in the influential Warwick
Commission report of 2015.
9 This was a lasting hallmark of the work of this group for over nearly three decades, from
the early 1980s on, one might for example also point to the film Babymother (Henriques
1998) for its high-energy collage effect achieved through combining a seemingly popu-
lar narrative/feature film idiom with a strongly foregrounded sound track and art-
directed cinematography. Like Juliens Young Soul Rebels and Looking for Langston, Hen-
riquess Babymother drew directly on the black youth culture in London.
10 Shonibare takes the popular genre of costume drama and mixes it up, creating sculp-
tural pieces which rewrite history from the viewpoint of the colonized other.
11 Cool Britannia was the phrase used to promote these new cultural policies.
12 Tracey Emin gladly collaborated with Becks beer, while Hirst embarked on various
commercial activities, including, for a while, a restaurant.
13 I recall a turning point when, in 2005, Hall was invited to speak at the Institute of Con-
temporary Arts (ICA) with a panel of other guests from style magazines such as Dazed
and Confused. Hall was sidelined and barely given time to talk, in an atmosphere that
was chaired in Blairite mode by the then director who was championing the talent-led
economy and a new moment of supposedly postpolitical black art and image making.
Afterward, Hall said that he regretted accepting the invitation, since the main idea was
that postcolonial cultural studies was now out of date and no longer needed.
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David Bell
I Persevered with My Geography
Its the day before the 2015 UK general election,

and Im reading (for the first time, Im embar-
rassed to admit) Common-Sense Neoliberalism
(Hall and OShea 2013). Its unbelievably good.
Im immediately thinking of the best place for it
in the curriculum Im currently helping to teach.
Maybe the economic geography course could
really use it. Or maybe it could be used as a tuto-
rial reading, to help critique the various forms of
common sense that sometimes pervade our
classroom discussions.
Common-Sense Neoliberalism is part of a
collection of essays gathered under the title The
Kilburn Manifesto, associated with the journal
Soundings, which Stuart Hall was an editor of for
a number of years. These essays provide a num-
ber of different perspectives on and responses to
neoliberalism. Hall and Alan OShea contribute a
brilliant and nuanced discussion of how common
sense works and of the work that common sense
does. It returns our attention to Antonio Gramsci
and draws on diverse sourcesincluding com-
ments from UK tabloid the Suns online blog. It is
sharply politicaland feels especially so at the
time Im reading it.

It also mentions space and placenot least in noting that common

sense is expressed in vernacular spaces: the familiar language of the street,
the home, the pub, the workplace and the terraces (and, we might add, given
their work with Sun readers online comments, of the Internet) (Hall and
OShea 2013: 9). While these geographies of common sense are not a central
concern of the analysis, its not uncommon to see location, place, home, space,
globalization, and a whole host of geographical concepts nested within Halls
work. And vice versaHalls thinking has long been a key influence in some
parts of human geography, notably those once labeled the new cultural
geography. (I think weve been here long enough to drop the new now.)
That productive interaction will be a key focus of my discussion here.
I also want to weave my own story into this discussion, as someone who
has moved from geography to cultural studies and back again. For some thirty
years, I have at various times turned to Halls work to think with, to teach
with, and to learn with. My move into cultural studies (or at least formally into
it, as my institutional home) in 1995 was during the period of the expansion
of cultural studies (and its close relation, media studies) in UK universities, as
well as during the cultural turn (and its poor relation, the spatial turn).
Hall has himself reflected on the arc of cultural studies in the United King-
dom, perhaps most candidly in interviews or conference talks (some of which
I turn to here), and I shall also be reflecting on that arc and its intersections
with my own path through work and life. And I want to say from the outset
that all of us engaged in the project of understanding culture, wherever we
find our institutional home, owe a tremendous debt to Hall. In this essay I am
both revisiting some of his familiar work and catching uphis output is so
vast that it is great to have the excuse to take time to read things I missed the
first time round, like Common-Sense Neoliberalism.
Trade Winds and Cups of Tea

The title of my essay comes from an interview with Hall by Colin MacCabe in
2008. The anecdote is one I have seen in a couple of places, so it was clearly a
favorite of Halls. He is reminiscing about being a schoolteacher in the late
1950s, when he found himself teaching everything from English literature to
mathematics and swimming. And even geography: I taught geography. I
remember a point at which the geography master came in and pointed out
gently to me that my diagram on the board managed to reverse the north-east
and south-west trades. But still I persevered with my geography (Hall 2008:
12). This account resonates with me in so many ways! Like Hall, I found
Bell I Persevered with My Geography 687
myself teaching geography (though in a polytechnic, in the late 1980s), and I

was permanently paranoid about making a geographical faux pas, the equiva-
lent of reversing the trade winds. But like Hall, I persevered with my geogra-
phy. Theres a temptation to read this reversal as mischievousas, perhaps,
a way to draw attention to the common sense that links winds to trade and
thus to the whole business of mercantilism and colonialism. What if the trade
winds were reversed? It reminds me of Uruguayan artist Joaqun Torres-Gar-
cas map of South America, drawn upside down, with the caption Our
north is the South. As Torres-Garca explains:
Our north is the South. There should be no north for us, except in opposition
to our South. That is why we now turn the map upside down, and now we
know what our true position is, and it is not the way the rest of the world
would like to have it. From now on, the elongated tip of South America will
point insistently at the South, our North. Our compass as well; it will incline
irremediably and forever towards the South, towards our pole. When ships
sail from here traveling north, they will be traveling down, not up as before.
Because the North is now below. And as we face our South, the East is to our
left. This is a necessary rectification; so that now we know where we are.
(quoted in Rommens 2006)
Hall never comments (as far as I have seen) on this reversal of his own map
and seems to use it mainly to humorously evidence his own incompetence as
a geography teacher. But it is too tempting to read it as some form of neces-
sary rectification, or at least a drawing of attention toward what we geogra-
phers like to call the power of maps. Now we know where we are.
Of course, thats one of Halls famous strategies: to take something
obvious, well known, unremarkable and unremarked on, and drawing our
attention to all that it contains, all that it reveals and conceals, to get us to see
differently. The most famous example is of course the cup of sweet tea.
Although it is so well known that many of us can recite it pretty much word
for word, here it is:
People like me who came to England in the 1950s have been there for centu-
ries; symbolically, we have been there for centuries. I was coming home. I am
the sugar at the bottom of the English cup of tea. I am the sweet tooth, the
sugar plantations that rotted generations of English childrens teeth. There
are thousands of others beside me that are, you know, the cup of tea itself.
Because they dont grow it in Lancashire, you know. Not a single tea planta-
tion exists within the United Kingdom. This is the symbolization of English
identityI mean, what does anybody in the world know about an English per-
son except that they cant get through the day without a cup of tea?
Where does it come from? CeylonSri Lanka, India. That is the out-
side history that is inside the history of the English. (Hall 1991: 4849)
As Les Back writes, after this it was impossible to ever drink a cup of tea again
without being reminded of the imperial traces in the brown leaves and the
sugars sweet taste (Back and Figueroa 2014: 353). And its truethis drawing
attention stays in your mind. There are many other instances dotted through-
out Halls work, where he makes us pause for thought. Theres similar mis-
chief in this quotationimagining tea plantations in Lancashire, the sugar
rotting childrens teethas there is in the misdrawn trade winds. And so we
all persevere with our geography, enlivened by Halls sideways approach to the
subject.1 Lets spend some time looking more explicitly at the interactions
between Hall and his disciplinary home, cultural studies, and geography.
Cultural Geography and Its Legacies

Back in 1992, Hall considered cultural studies and its theoretical legacies;
this phrase, he writes, suggests a look back to the past, to consult and think
about the Now and the Future of cultural studies by way of a retrospective
glance. It does seem necessary to do some genealogical and archaeological
work on the archive (Hall 1992: 277). Here he acknowledges that his version
of the story of cultural studies is only one of many, is partial and particular,
biographical. The way we tell and retell stories about disciplinary formations
(and about everything else), of course, plays more than an archival role: it con-
stitutes disciplinary identity (Hemmings 2011). And all stories are contested,
subject to revision and retrospective editing. Let me tell you one such story.
(For a different telling, see Bell 2009. See what I mean about stories?)
Once upon a time, there used to be something called cultural geogra-
phy, built from the work of great men such as Carl Sauer or Paul Vidal de la
Blanche, concerned with mapping where distinctive cultures existed, and
understanding why, largely through a deterministic lensa lens focused on
the cultural landscape. In the 1980s, when I came into human geography
as a polytechnic lecturer (Id previously mainly been studying physical geog-
raphy and geology, but thats another story), this version of cultural geogra-
phy was relatively quiet, dormant even. Largely unknown to me as a very
junior member of the discipline, there was a revolution going on, a paradigm
shift. I gradually became aware of this shift through the courses I was asked
to teach and the hours spent wandering the library shelves, reading the peri-
odicals, cramming my geographical knowledge so as to avoid those faux pas,
trying not to reverse the trade winds. A year into my new job, Peter Jacksons
Maps of Meaning (1989) was published. It was utterly unlike the cultural
geography I was now dimly aware of and pretty uninterested in. The book
had a Christo wrapped buildings picture on the cover. Its foreword, by
Derek Gregory (1989: vii), began by telling us readers that the intellectual
scene is changing fast and that concepts of place, space and landscape have
become central to some of the most exciting developments across the whole
field of the humanities and the social sciences. This message was exhilarat-
ing, to be sure. It felt like a great time to be a geographer.
Jacksons book introduced us to this new cultural geography and to cul-
tural studies. It has been rightly hailed as a classic in human geography in
at least one of our journals (Jackson 2005). Reflecting on the books life and
on its classic status, Jackson explains that his mission in writing it was to
recognize the significance of what was happening in Cultural Studies and
to translate this material for a geographical audience (746). This statement
is a bit modest, but also an interesting way of framing the bookas a trans-
lation of cultural studies. I wonder, what got lost in translation? Why did
cultural studies need translating for us geographers? Anyway, one of the peo-
ple that Jackson introduced us to was, of course, Hall. For this book is about
a certain formation of cultural studies, and the Centre for Contemporary
Cultural Studies (CCCS) at the University of Birmingham is a heavy pres-
ence (for a map of new directions in cultural geography, see also Cosgrove
and Jackson 1987). Halls work is often turned to by Jackson, and I certainly
turned (and was turned on) to the CCCS approach, taken from Maps of Mean-
ing to Resistance through Rituals (Hall and Jefferson 1976) and Policing the
Crisis (Hall et al. 1978). And then down the rabbit hole of cultural studies ...
Jackson notes in his later reflections on Maps of Meaning that there was
two-way traffic between cultural studies and geography at this heady time:
our cultural turn coincided with a spatial turn across the humanities and
the social sciencesas Gregory alluded to in his foreword. And coming
toward us like a speeding train was also postmodernism. For some, the
excesses of postmodernism swallowed up the discipline, while the ascen-
dancy of the cultural led geography away from important issues such as poli-
tics, economics, injustice. I find this collapsing of different agendas and
effects troubling and feel the need to rescue the new cultural geography
from being thrown out with the bathwater of the postmodern. (Actually, I
feel a bit nostalgic for the postmodern, too.)
I have chosen two moments of this two-way traffic to explore here.

The first is a short piece by Doreen Massey, a frequent collaborator and close
friend of Hall. In one of a number of collections made in his honor, Massey
(2000) describes driving from London to Milton Keynes with Hallboth
were at the time working at the Open University. I read this article just this
week, and it fired off intertextual connections in my mind to two recent BBC
TV comedies, The Trip and Car Share. In both, the main characters spend
lots of time confined together driving and passengering in a car, and much
of the comedy comes from their conversations on the road. So I imagine
Massey and Hall bickering, doing impressions, singing along to the radio
though Massey only admits to their arguing with Melvyn Bragg (a relatively
high-brow Radio 4 presenter). Massey also uses the journey to think about
space-time and to mull over a key theme in Halls workhome and going
home. Even when explored through their mundane M1 trips, she acknowl-
edges that going home is not at all going back to the same place (Massey
2000: 227)home is moving on all the time, not frozen in patient wait for
our return. You cant go back, she later adds, because that sense of place as
an enduring site is a fiction (230). People change and so do places.
Massey also explored this theme in a conference presentation at Cul-
tural Studies Now.2 There she notes the difficulty of drawing a line to sepa-
rate the disciplines of geography and cultural studies (which was for some
people part of the problem, at least for geographysuddenly it had all gone
cultural; see Barnett 1998). Massey says that geography and cultural studies
have been good neighbors3 and that geography has learned from its neighbor
how to think about identity, including the identity of place: Weve learnt a
lot from our conversations. One of the crucial political engagements with
Cultural Studies, for me as a geographer, has been ... about the question of
identity. But here, what was at issue was the identity of geographical things;
national identity, the identity of places, the question of the relation between
local and the global (CCCS/UEL 2007).
And to this we might add the question of home. For the issue of home
of being at home and not at home, to borrow the title from another inter-
view (Hall and Back 2009)has long been central to Halls work, and this
attention to home has certainly made the concept central to geography (Blunt
and Dowling 2006). As Massey indicates, cultural studies has led geogra-
phers to rethink places as articulations of wider practices, relations and
flows (CCCS/UEL 2007) and also as a question of identity. I will say more
about Halls theorizing of identity later.
In terms of the two-way-ness of this conversationand this is my sec-

ond momentMichael Keith (2009: 548) has explored how the urban fig-
ures in Halls work, beginning with Policing the Crisis and the notion of
ghetto urbanism, moving through New Ethnicities (1988) and spatial
metaphors of location, grounding, and placing, and on to The Multicultural
Question (2000) and its cartography of the present and multiscalar
approach, taking in the local, national, and global. Across this twenty-plus-
year period in Halls work, Keith (2009: 540) charts a changing role for the
city such that, by the end of this trajectory, the spatial has become a consti-
tutive feature of theorization. Indeed, this interplay of the spatial with the
cultural did mean that the gap between the disciplines closed up, as Massey
notesor closed enough for a geographer like me to jump across and join a
cultural studies department.
Cultural geography, meanwhile, continued to grow and diversify, for
a while (in the United Kingdom at least) seeming like the dominant way
of doing (human) geography. It even had a few turns of its ownan
emotional turn, a performative turn, a material turn. It starts to feel a bit like
plate spinningall that turning, all at once. In 2010 the journal Cultural
Geographies published a number of essays looking backward and forward,
taking stock of cultural geography, including those that readdressed the
story I have told above about how cultural geography translated cultural stud-
ies and became new. Philip Crang (2010: 197), in summing up his thoughts
on what was, what is, and what will be, ends with an upbeat prognosis: Cul-
tural Geography is particularly vibrant at present, energized by a returning
tension, namely how to stitch together a dual concern with the mundane and
trivial and with the remarkable and significant. Todays Cultural Geography
is, in my view, at its best characterized by powerful senses of texture, creativ-
ity and public engagement. Its that last powerful sense that I want to think
about later in this essay.
Stuart Hall Projects

I am using the word projects both as a noun and as a verb hereto highlight
both the many intellectual and political projects that Hall has been involved
with and in the sense of his work projecting into our own work and lives. It
is, of course, also a nod to John Akomfrahs film The Stuart Hall Project
(2013). The first project (and projection) I would like to think about is what
we might call the project of identity. Of course, Halls work has always been
about identity, often about his own identity. But in a series of essays from the
mid- to late 1980s, he centrally concerned himself with the question of iden-
tity. By the time I landed in cultural studies in 1995, this was the Hall we
were mainly talking and thinking about.
As I noted earlier, writing this essay has given me a chance to reac-
quaint myself with some of Halls writings, and I have particularly enjoyed
going back to a small piece called Minimal Selves (Hall 1987). Ive always
especially liked its title and its tone. Its an intervention from an event at
the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, called The Real Me, and
was for lots of us in cultural studies an important text on the question of
identitythat phrase inviting the obvious question: Just who is the real me?
Halls paper is a response to that event and its contextwhat we might
call the postmodernizing of identity, its decentering and fragmentation. The
idea of identity as a necessary fiction (and how well I remember an essay
we used to set on this very issue). Minimal Selves involves generous obser-
vations of the present momentas he addresses the audience, noting in the
postmodern age, you all feel so dispersed, adding that I become centred,
meaning that the dispersed experience of the migrant, as he terms it here,
has been taken as the paradigmatic postmodern subject position. This is
coming home with a vengeance, he concludes (more of that characteristic
mischief). The essay/talk continues with some thoughts about home, about
the arbitrary closures of identity, about living with, living through differ-
ence (45). But Hall insists on keeping the political at its heartincluding
but not limited to the politics of identityrefusing to see minimal selves
as atomized and individuated.4
So one central Stuart Hall project is the project of identity, and here we
might include the project (or perhaps problem) of the cultural in both cul-
tural studies and cultural geography. This question, of what counts as the cul-
tural, is beyond my reach here, but within the story of cultural geography it has
been a continued focus, with both expansive and more tightly defined vari-
ants. While some geographers threw their hands in the air in the mid-1990s,
bemoaning that now everything was cultural, others more patiently ques-
tioned what putting cultural and geography together really means and achieves.
One of the pleasures of rereading Minimal Selves was to see the
actual text again, like a forgotten old friend, to hold it in my hands (albeit in
a crumpled, scribbled-on photocopy). That made me reflect on other old
friends from my collection of Halls workthough I have just moved into a
new office at work and am struggling to find lots of my books in the chaos of
hurried packing/unpacking. So, casting about in my memory, rather than
on my bookshelves, I am particularly reminded of three series of texts. The

first was when, doing my PhD in Birmingham (but in a geography depart-
ment seemingly untouched by its neighbor the CCCS), I happened upon the
famous Stencilled Papers series in the university library. These dog-eared,
decidedly DIY, even punkish papersmore like fanzines than scholarly arti-
cles, bashed out on manual typewriters and run off on low-tech copiers
gave me quite a thrill.5 Finding them in such a stuffy campus environment
made me feel that a different kind of academic work was possible, even here.
The second came when I was landed with a first-year cultural studies
course to teach on modernity and postmodernity. Its core texts were the
Open Universitys four-part Understanding Modern Societies series, which
included two Hall essaysThe West and the Rest: Discourse and Power,
in Formations of Modernity (Hall and Gieben 1992), and The Question of
Cultural Identity, in Modernity and Its Futures (Hall, Held, and McGrew
1992). These books were also a revelation and really great to teach with. In
the third, also an Open University series (Culture, Media, and Identities),
were the edited books Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying
Practices (Hall 1997) and, especially helpful for me, since I was now teaching
courses on technology and culture and on consumption, Doing Cultural
Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman (du Gay et al. 1997). What I particu-
larly love about all these Open University books is their user-friendliness, for
teachers and for students. They handle often really difficult ideas, but with a
lightness of touch and an engaging tone that carries the reader along. I think
I learned a lot from these books, not just about their topics but about how to
teach and how to write. And from the Stencilled Papers I learned that aca-
demic work could engage with the popular, but that it works best when it
does so with a strong political engagement. As Hall himself said, cultural
studies must be haunted by the important question: But what does this
have to do with everything else? (CCCS/UEL 2007).
Now, as noted, an important feature of those Open University series is
that they are textbooks. And, given the way the Open University operates,
they are textbooks that have to do a lot of work, to guide student readers
through ideas, to exemplify, to ask questions and give examples. Ive always
thought that textbook writing is an undervalued art. Like first-year teaching,
I think theres a real skill in distilling things without dumbing them down.
Getting the voice right is very tricky, especially perhaps in cultural studies.
Even more impressive is that these are edited collectionsanother underval-
ued form in academic work. But getting different authors to produce some-
thing coherent yet polyvocal seems a doubly taxing task. (I was working at
this time with Christine Gledhill, who contributed to RepresentationI wish

Id talked more with her about the actual experience of working on these
books.) For those of us working at the chalk face in cultural studies and cul-
tural geography in the 1990s, these books were both a tremendous help and
a fantastic guidewe were, as Hall (1992: 281) says, learning to practice
cultural studies, and these books showed us how to get the voice right, too.
I would later return to both OU series, the first highlighted in a sketch of
Halls work in a lecture on the impact of nongeographers on contemporary
geographical thought (alongside Michel Foucault and Donna Haraway) and
the second in a course on media geographies, where the Walkman reap-
peared in a discussion of mobile media.
Now, its well known that Hall also had a prominent public profile and
media presenceor at least as prominent as academics seem able to become
in the United Kingdom. As The Stuart Hall Project shows, he made fairly fre-
quent appearances on television, whether fronting Open University pro-
grams or sitting on panels, often screened late at night, discussing current
affairs. And, of course, he once appeared on BBC Radio 4s Desert Island
Discs (Hall 2000), where for forty-five minutes guests tell their life stories
via ten pieces of musicmusic that they might imagine being some sort of
comfort (or reminder of home?) if they found themselves stranded on a des-
ert island. Halls role as a public intellectual is rightly celebrated; indeed, as
Henry Giroux (2000: 342) writes, all of Halls work is crucial for under-
standing pedagogy as a mode of cultural criticism that is essential for ques-
tioning the conditions under which knowledge is produced and subject posi-
tions are put into place, negotiated, taken up, or refused. And I really like
Girouxs summing up of the character of Halls work: It is accessible but
refuses easy answers (356). Even on Desert Island Discs, he sneaks in some
sophisticated analysis, woven into autobiography and interspersed with Bob
Marley, Puccini, and Miles Davis.
Refusing Easy Answers

Its now two days after the general electionan election that has seen the
Conservative government returned to power with an absolute majority. A
question from Halls The Neo-Liberal Revolution (2011: 705) has been
ringing in my ears since Friday morning: How do we make sense of our
extraordinary political situation in Britain? How indeed? Talking with my
students only depresses me moresometimes they seem to speak the words
of commonsense neoliberalism. As Massey (2014: 2038) notes, depress-
ingly about neoliberalism, There are many who love this new way of being,
and not just the very rich, to which she adds that we must understand its
attractions and its purchase if we are to engage with it. But I struggle,
though Im now doubly certain that we must get the students to read Hall
and OSheas critique. Their opening discussion of how politicians mobilize
common sense rings ever truer in the wake of weeks of campaigning, end-
less sound bites and photo opportunities, and a few stage-managed debates
and other media spectacles. Writing back in 2011, Hall (2011: 723) could
hope that there was as yet no overwhelming majority appetite for the neo-
liberal project. The outcome of the general election now suggests otherwise,
at least in England. (He even speculates in that essay about a future Conser-
vative majority.)
It seems to me that we need Hall more than ever; we need to keep
working on his conjunctural analysis, need to keep working at the boundaries
of theory and politics, need to keep unsettling commonsense neoliberalism.
The present conjuncture requires our intervention, in and out of the class-
room. No matter where we call our homewhatever island we find ourselves
inhabitingwe must all continue learning to practice cultural studies and
persevere with our geography.
Notes
1 In work on foods geographies, theres an obvious lineage from Halls cup of sweet tea
to later studies that follow the thing and trace the geographies of foodstuffs. See, e.g.,
Cook et al. 2004.
2 Cultural Studies Now was held at the University of East London in 2007; for transcripts
of many of the talks, including those by Hall and Massey, see CCCS/UEL 2007.
3 And here I cannot help but be reminded that Hall was a big fan of the Australian soap
opera Neighbours.
4 This period in Halls work is marked by an intensifying theorization of identityhe later
reflects critically on what he sees as his ventriloquising of capital-T Theory, exclaiming
at one point, Poor Lacan, remembering what he sees as the rough handling that psy-
choanalysis sometimes got in this ventriloquism (CCCS/UEL 2007).
5 The Stencilled Papers series is archived at the University of Birmingham: www.bir-
mingham.ac.uk/schools/historycultures/departments/history/research/projects/cccs
/publications/stencilled-occasional-papers.aspx.
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Jernej Habjan
Ordinary Literature Philosophy:

Literary Studies after Cultural Studies
W hen it comes to thinkers like Stuart Hall,

what they do not do is as equally decisive as what
they do do. In Halls case, one such negative fact
with positive effects, perhaps the most decisive
one, is the striking absence of literary studies.
Among the many things that needed to be done
for cultural studies to be developed, one fails to
find literary studies. More precisely, one can find
literary studies only in its absence, an absence
hardly to be expected in the case of a founding
figure of British cultural studiesthe paradox
being, in Halls (1990: 14) own words, that nearly
all of us who entered the cultural studies project
were actually formed in the Leavisite ethos. More
precisely still, among the many steps that the
development of cultural studies demanded was
also a step back from literary studies. Today, when
literary studies is to a large extent a subfield of
cultural studiesand when literary scholars
either mimic or regret the practice of cultural
studiesthis step back may not deserve much
attention. What is more interesting, even para
doxical, is that the absence of literary studies is
becoming a necessary step even for those who want
to continue doing literary studies itself. For argu
ably the only positive program in contemporary

literary studiesthe only alternative to the many ways literary studies is

reducing itself to either a copy or a denial of the kind of cultural studies that
is subsuming itis Franco Morettis distant reading, an approach that
along with similar suggestions put forward, for example, by Alexander Bee
croft and Pascale Casanovaexplicitly moves back from literary studies in
much the same way as Hall did when he was developing cultural studies as
an alternative to literary studies. So the many legacies of Halls epistemologi
cal choices include an external alternative to literary studies. But what they
also include is, much more interestingly, a homological step taken, by
Moretti, within literary studies itself, a step that today can retroactively be
viewed as an internalization of the external alternative in a time when this
external alternative seems to be engulfing literary studies anyway.
The problem, however, is that the cultural studies that is subsuming
literary studies only seems to be the cultural studies developed by Hall;
Morettis nearing to cultural studies only appears as a step taken by a literary
scholar toward that which is infiltrating literary studies anyway. In other
words, the cultural studies whose hegemony is increasingly felt even within
literary studies is not the cultural studiesthe political projectthat Hall
fought for. Todays cultural studies is a far cry from this politics by other
means (Hall 1990: 12); it is a product of what, in 1992, Hall himself warned
against as the enormous explosion of cultural studies in the U.S., its rapid
professionalization and institutionalization, which favored ways of consti
tuting power as an easy floating signifier which just leaves the crude exercise
and connections of power and culture altogether emptied of any significa
tion (1992: 285, 286). Paradoxically, this kind of cultural studies is to a large
extent the institutional marriage of the two master paradigms in Cultural
Studies that Hall (1980: 67) identified and praised in 1980, the early cul
tural studies of a Raymond Williams and the poststructuralism of a Louis
Althusser. Contemporary post-structuralist cultural studies equals the two
paradigms combined, yet only as the kind of easy synthesis (Hall 1980: 72)
and the institutionalization (Hall 1992: 285) that Hall feared in the closing
of his respective essays. As we will see, Morettis plea for distant reading is
not plain acceptance of what isthe cultural studies that increasingly domi
nates the humanities and the literary studies that either simulates or ignores
itbut an alternative. And that is why it is homological to Halls initial proj
ect. Hence what is at stake here is not simply literary studies in its relation to
cultural studies but cultural studies itself; what must be defended against
the hegemonic, depoliticized cultural studies is the very cultural studies that
Hall developed together with Williams, Richard Hoggart, and E. P. Thomp
Habjan Ordinary Literature Philosophy 701
son, thinkers who published their early books on literature before moving on
to politics and writing groundbreaking cultural studies books, while Hall,
also in the midfifties, abandoned his dissertation on Henry James before fin
ishing it, let alone turning it into a book.
Culture Is Ordinary
Between 1950 and 1955, Williams, Hoggart, and Thompson published their
first books: Reading and Criticism, Auden, and William Morris, respectively.
By 1963, these titles were eclipsed by follow-ups of no less revealing, yet quite
different, titles: Culture and Society, The Uses of Literacy, and The Making of
the English Working Class. At the beginning of this sequence of a dozen years,
Hall used his Rhodes Scholarship to escape his middle-class, autoracist fam
ily in Kingston and to study English at Oxford; by the middle of the sequence,
he quit his dissertation on James in the face of the Suez crisis and Nikita
Khrushchevs moves against both Joseph Stalin and Hungary; and, by the
end, Hall was already a key member of the collective response to these events
called the New Left and a student of the three sociological and historiograph
ical follow-ups to the three early books of literary criticism. In 1964 he
assisted Hoggart in institutionalizing this new kind of sociology and histori
ography in the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University
of Birmingham. Five years later, he took over from Hoggart. A decade later,
he left the center as by then already the legendary birthplace of cultural stud
ies to take up a professorship at the Open University.
In Halls work, which more often than not was collaborative and inter
ventionistleading Grant Farred (2007: 85) to speak of the collaborative
Hall modalityone can hardly find a single-authored monograph among
the many articles and interviews, and there certainly is no early book of liter
ary criticism, literature occupying Halls attention only in rare moments
(95). (In thisand only thisrespect, Hall resembles an analytical philoso
pher.) There are only a theater review in the very first issue of the New Left
Review, a short article on Lady Chatterleys Lover in the sixth one, and a book
review in the tenth onethe antepenultimate issue of the British New Lefts
print organ that he edited. And fifteen years later, there appears A Critical
Survey of the Theoretical and Practical Achievements of the Last Ten Years,
an introductory paper at a conference on the sociology of literature that is in
fact an early version of his above-mentioned Cultural Studies: Two Para
digms (which is indeed devoted to cultural studies); in this early version, the
two paradigms, Williams and Althusser, are still only syntagmatic elements:
Williams I, II, and III (Hall 1977: 12), followed by Althusser I, II,
and III (45). If Williams never really left literary studies, Hall never really
entered it.
It is then indeed ironic . . . that as the Birmingham models influence
spread within Britain and then across the Atlantic to the United States, it
found its most readyif not most hospitablereception in English depart
ments (or their fringes, more precisely). . . . Halls uncompleted thesis on
Henry James returned to situate him, however unintentionally, sometimes
squarely, sometimes disjunctively, as central to the very discipline he had
abandoned almost three decades earlier for more direct involvement in polit
ical struggle (Farred 2003: 167). Moreover, as we have seen, unintention
ally, sometimes squarely, sometimes disjunctively is also how Halls cul
tural studies, his alternative to literary studies, returned to situate him as
central to cultural studies itself, the very discipline he helped develop on
behalf of political struggle, so that there is a political impulse that per
vades his work (Blackburn 2014: 75) throughout all of its phases, from cul
turalism to structuralism to structuralist Marxism to poststructuralism and
post-Marxism (Peck 2001: 200). In other words, cultural studies, too, is a
field that, by 1992, failed to meet Halls (1992: 285, 286) intentions: looking
at what one can only call the deconstructive deluge (as opposed to decon
structive turn) which had overtaken American literary studies, Hall (1992:
286) feared
that if cultural studies gained an equivalent institutionalization in the Ameri
can context, it would, in rather the same way, formalize out of existence the
critical questions of power, history, and politics. Paradoxically, . . . there is no
moment now, in American cultural studies, where we are not able, extensively
and without end, to theorize power. . . . There is hardly anything in cultural
studies which isnt so theorized. And yet, there is the nagging doubt that this
overwhelming textualization of cultural studies own discourses somehow
constitutes power and politics as exclusively matters of language and textual
ity itself.
So the kind of cultural studies that, as I claimed above, engulfs not only its
predecessors such as literary studies but also the initial cultural studies itself
is the textualist cultural studies, a result of the kind of deconstructionism
that depoliticized first literary studies and then, by paradoxically recognizing
politics everywhere, also cultural studies. Hence the paradox of what Hall
(1996: 402) called the return of the literary in the cultural studies of the
1990s, that is, the return of the pre-theoretical impressionist meditation that
had passed for literary studies before it was delegitimized precisely by inter
ventions such as that of cultural studies, only to return, by the 1990s, in the
form of quasi-autobiographical cultural studies. At that time, Hall (1992:
278) responded by stressing the dirtiness of the semiotic game and by try
ing to return the project of cultural studies from the clean air of meaning
and textuality and theory to the something nasty down below. Needless to
say, to conclude that this something nasty down below is but vulgar empir
icism would itself be to reproduce what Hall called, in this 1992 interview,
the deconstructive deluge (as opposed to deconstructive turn). Rather,
Halls something nasty down below is simply semiotics as materialism. It
is what, for example, enabled Hall (1986: 57) to respond six years earlier to
the post-Marxism of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffes Hegemony and
Socialist Strategy in the following way: [The Laclau and Mouffe] book thinks
that the world, social practice, is language, whereas I want to say that the
social operates like a language. The allusion to Jacques Lacans (2006: 737)
dictum that the unconscious . . . is structured like a language is fully
intended, of course, as the ending of Halls (1986: 57) paragraphs reads:
What seems to happen is that, in the reaction against a crude materialism,
the metaphor of x operates like y is reduced to x = y. There is a very dramatic
condensation which, in its movement, reminds me of theoretical reduction
ism very strongly. You see it most clearly in something like the reworking of
Lacanian psychoanalysis. All this less than a year after the first and paradig
matic Laclau and Mouffe book, and three years before the first English-lan
guage and no less paradigmatic Slavoj iek book, a neo-Marxist defense of
Lacan published, granted, in Laclau and Mouffes post-Marxist series at
Verso (the publishing house that, first as New Left Books, amplified the New
Left Review in its role as the main print organ of the British New Left).
Literature Is Not Extraordinary

Ever since his editorial to the inaugural issue of the New Left Review, Hall
had been committed to what, in 1992, he called the something nasty down
below that escapes the deconstructive deluge. It was only in the first issue
of the second series of the New Left Review, the fortieth-anniversary issue,
published in 2000, that such a commitment was articulated within literary
studies, the field that Hall abandoned for the nastiness. In what Moretti
(2000a: 55n1) called a companion piece to his contribution to the fortieth-
anniversary issue of the New Left Review, he asked what it might mean for
literary studies to move beyond the world canon, and he gave the following
negative answer: One thing is sure: it cannot mean the very close reading of
very few textssecularized theology, really (canon!)that has radiated
from the cheerful town of New Haven over the whole field of literary stud
ies (Moretti 2000b: 208). And in the New Left Review itself, he character
ized close reading as a theological exercisevery solemn treatment of very
few texts taken very seriouslywhereas what we really need is a little pact
with the devil: we know how to read texts, now lets learn how not to read
them (Moretti 2000a: 57). Five years later, after a series of suggestions to
replace the deconstructive close reading of the canon with what he termed
the distant reading of the world literary system (56), a positive answer fol
lowed in the form of the following retrospection: While recent literary the
ory was turning for inspiration towards French and German metaphysics, I
kept thinking that there was actually much more to be learned from the
natural and the social sciences (Moretti 2005: 2).
Indeed, Moretti produced a new object of knowledge, world literature
as a historically differentiated system of forms, by following the example of
world-systems analysis. And he relied on quantitative historys graphs, geog
raphys maps, and evolutionary biologys trees to outline, respectively, time,
space, and, finally, chronotopes of some of the formal devices that overdeter
mine the genres that in turn overdetermine world literature. Morettis dis
tant reading subverts the hegemonic version of close readingthe decon
structive deluge (as opposed to deconstructive turn) which had overtaken
American literary studiesby turning to the institution of reading itself,
that is, to literary studies. For what he reads in order to formalize it by using
graphs, maps, and trees are the very readings produced by individual
national philologies: instead of reading a canonical novel for the nth time, he
defamiliarizes it by reading histories of the novel and tracing any world-his
toric processes that they might reveal if read synoptically rather than indi
vidually, comparatively rather than within a given national philology. This is
necessarily distant reading conducted collectively: readings by the Stanford
Literary Lab, which Moretti cofounded with Matthew Jockers in 2010, can be
neither close nor his own.
The world-systems school conceptualizes modern history as a process
of forming an interstate system structured by a division between the histori
cally shifting core of capital accumulation and its (semi)periphery. The core,
semiperiphery, and periphery migrate in accordance with the movement of
systemic cycles of accumulation. As we can see, for example, in Giovanni
Arrighis (1994: 364) diagram of these cycles of accumulation, the cycle cen
tered in Genoa begins to take shape in the late fourteenth century and is
overshadowed in the middle of the sixteenth century by the Dutch cycle,

which in the middle of the eighteenth century gives way to the British cycle,
which is itself followed in the late nineteenth century by the US cycle, with
the United States for the past forty years increasingly losing the struggle for
extra profits to China and India.
Moretti does not try, say, to apply this history to the history of art and
see in the Italian Renaissance, or in Dutch and Italian baroque, so many
reflections of cycles of accumulationonly inevitably to find himself at a
deadlock after the seventeenth century when such analogies become far-
fetched. Instead, he avoids this kind of economic reductionism and takes
from the world-systems analysis only the basic idea of an asymmetric system
and the main conceptual strategy of tracing and formalizing not observa
tions on individual countries, societies, regions, and other elements of the
system (which would amount to a kind of close reading in economic history)
but rather observations common to the existing analyses of those elements.
So, like the modern world-system, world literature is, for Moretti (2000a:
56), one, and unequal, a system whose structure is split between the canoni
cal core and the marginalized (semi)peripheries. Following Immanuel
Wallersteins example, Moretti grasps this system with the strategy of dis
tant reading, which analyzes not texts but already available local analyses of
texts. He reconstructs the boring (Moretti 1998: 150) longue dure of inert
forms in the canons periphery as the canons background, that is, as a poten
tial but not actualized canon. This, of course, makes interesting not only this
boredom of ordinary, everyday literature butperhaps an even more diffi
cult taskthe canon itself, which suddenly poses anxiety-ridden questions
such as, How does a new narrative form crystallize out of a collection of
haphazard, half-baked, often horrendous attempts? (150).
Besides a similar approach proposed by Casanova (2005), and a pro
ductive response to both Moretti and Casanova with which Beecroft
(2008)the narcissism of minor differences asidein effect suggested a
third, similar approach, the New Left Review and other venues published, in
the early 2000s, a series of critiques unseen in literary studies ever since the
Fredric JamesonAijaz Ahmad debate on Third World literature. Between
the two debates, the first starting two years before 1989 and the second a
year before 9/11, Ahmads alleged liberalization of Jamesons stubborn Marx
ism has become a liberal commonplace to the point that it has often been
used against Morettis own stubbornness, as if Ahmad (1992: 1011) had not
distanced himself, by 1992, from such liberal appropriations of his Marxist
critique of Jamesons Marxism. During that time, the 1990s, within the
JamesonAhmad problematic, postcolonial critics gradually turn on its head

Ahmads defense of Jamesons Marxism against his Third-Worldism, and
hence, the critique mutates from a Marxist critique of Third-Worldism
into a Third-Worldist critique of Marxism (Lazarus 2011: 99). So, too,
between this problematic and Morettis, the question changes, during those
1990s, from how to be a historical materialist in literary studies to whether
or not to be one. Moretti, however, poses, like Hall, the first of these two
questions, giving, moreover, a reply remarkably similar to Halls something
nasty down below: in 2006 Moretti ends the five-year-long dispute over dis
tant reading by ending his The End of the Beginning (2006: 86) with the
wager that one must bid farewell to the ethereal elegance of methodological
abstractions, and return to the messy realities of social history.
This homology is not surprising, given Morettis trajectory. Through
out the 1970s, Moretti, a fresh graduate in literature from La Sapienza, was
making appearances in his brother Nannis amateur films, until the latter
shot Ecce bombo (Behold the Bumblebee), a 1978 film that is still legendary in
Italy, and the former published his first notable studies. A unique blend of
historical materialism and psychoanalysis, these analyses of subjects as var
ied as the Elizabethan tragedy, the Gothic, Balzac, detective fiction, James
Joyce, and T. S. Eliot were collected, by Verso in 1983, under the title Signs
Taken for Wonders. They started a series of, so far, seven Verso books devoted
to prose in modernity, as well as numerous New Left Review articles, secur
ing Moretti a professorship first at Columbia and then at Stanford. After
2000, Morettis above-cited critique of the hegemonic literary studies made
him the chief persona non grata in literary studies, as well as one of its few
representatives who continue to inspire someone like Jameson (2013: 145,
203), himself one of the few representatives of literary studies who have
like, perhaps, only Leo Spitzer, Erich Auerbach, Ernst Robert Curtius,
Edward Said, and Terry Eagletonbroken its mold to become sources of
proper theoretical inspiration across academic disciplines.
Granted, the lag of two decades, the peculiarities of the British and the
American higher education systems, and the specificities of their respective
academic fields make for such differences between Halls and Morettis biog
raphies as, on the one hand, the fact that the formers political project is
being marginalized by way of mythologization rather than directly or, on the
other hand, the fact that the latter moved from the Ivy League to its Califor
nian competition rather than from the first redbrick university to the United
Kingdoms only distance learning university. Which makes even more strik
ing the similarity between Halls nasty and Morettis messy response to
postmodern textualismthe whole Yale school, its textualism run wild

(Hall 1996: 403) or the secularized theology radiating from the cheerful
town of New Haven (Moretti 2000b: 208). If one had to trace this to one
single axiom decisive for both thinkers, Culture is ordinaryto borrow
the title of Williamss 1958 piecemight be as good a formulation as any. If
there is one link between Morettis mid-nineteenth-century realist prose and
Halls late twentieth-century popular culture, it is the ordinary, art as ordi
nary culture, something that Moretti (2013: 23n47) comes close to, in his lat
est book, when he compares Victorian Britain and the postWorld War II
United States by saying that the most representative story-tellers of the two
culturesDickens and Spielberghave both specialized in stories that
appeal to children as much as to adults.
Ordinary Literature Philosophy

That finally brings me to my argument for what I call ordinary literature phi
losophy, a theorization of literature as ordinary, institutional practice. My
claim is that this banally ordinary dimension paradoxically makes literature
more than a precious yet idiosyncratic set of individual uses of ordinary lan
guage. In other words, the more literature is marred with the ordinary, the
heteronomous, the more even its autonomous formal transformations are
pertinent to critical cultural theory today.
To my view, there exist two major theorizations of literature and the
ordinary: deconstructivist readings of ordinary language philosophy and
emerging materialist histories of what might be called the ordinary dimen
sion of literature. Both these theoretical projects engender groundbreaking
encounters around the fall of the Berlin Wall, with Jacques Derridas (1988)
final retort to John R. Searle, in the first case, and Jamesons (1987) conclud
ing reply to Ahmad, in the second. The two projects saturate around the fall
of the World Trade Center, when Derrida is appropriated by Judith Butler
(1997), and Moretti (2000a) is rejected across literary studies. I want to use
here the epistemological concerns of the first project to show the value of the
second for the world post the fall of Lehman Brothers.
The first of these two theoretical projects is the result of the process
leading from John L. Austins constitutive exclusion of aesthetic discourses
from his theory of the performative to Butlers grounding of her theorization
of performativity precisely in these discourses. Literature is hence being
painstakingly expelled, by Austins nomothetic, critical science, from the
notion of the performative and equally painstakingly elevated, by Butlers
idiographic, topical philosophy, to the level of the very notion of the perfor
mative. One might even claim that Butlerian performativity theory is the
opposite of Austinian theory of performatives, writes J. Hillis Miller (2007:
227). This transition from literature as Austins condition of impossibility of
ordinary language to Butlers condition of possibility is mediated by Derri
das thesis that literature is the condition of (im)possibility of ordinary lan
guage. Now, the second theoretical project in effect drops this condition of
(im)possibility: for Moretti, Casanova, and Beecroft, rather than the condi
tion of (im)possibility of ordinary language, literature quite simply is an ordi
nary language (like a language, as Hall might say, but also a language). I
want to address the epistemological potential of this second project and read
it as a reply to the deconstructivist uses of Austins ordinary language phi
losophy. My aim is hence a theoretical and political reflection on the ongoing
transition, in literary studies, from deconstructivist accounts of ordinary lan
guage philosophy to Moretti and companys sketch of what might be called
ordinary literature history. In short, my aim is to propose ordinary literature
philosophy.
The relation between the two approaches to literature via the ordinary
is not without its dialectics. The increasing liberalism that seems to mark the
internal development of deconstructivist close reading (and which reaches,
with Butler, anti-statism is repeated and made explicit in the way its practition
ers reject the external alternative, namely, distant reading. And if deconstruc
tivist close reading increasingly ignores the institutional dimension of lit
erature, literature at the level of, ultimately, nation-state(s), this dimension
becomes no less than the main focus of distant reading and similar emerging
returns to world literature. In turn, these returns, as suggested by Moretti
and company, do not simply replace deconstructivist close reading (even
though that is how they sometimes present themselves) but effectively (and
often unknowingly) show that even the social institutions of literature are
readablesomething Hall (implicitly) did for popular culture as early as his
and Paddy Whannels first book, The Popular Arts, as it was recently reread by
Farred (2007: 9496). Thus these returns to world literature arguably imply
that there is no outside-text, to invoke the chief axiom of deconstruction (as
it was translated in Derrida 1997: 158). By effectively studying literary canon
ization as a text, that is, a set of symptomatic displacements and condensa
tions at the level of literature as an institution, they are arguably more loyal to
this Derridean axiom than those deconstructivist studies that claim, or sim
ply presuppose, that the canonical status of a literary text somehow follows
from the inherent qualities of that text. For literature is not just a parasitic
use of language, be it an Austinian or a Derridean parasite, but also a para

sitic use of literature itself. Literary texts fail not only as performatives; they
can also fail as literary texts. And most literary texts really do fail as literary
texts: as the new returns to world literature show, such textsthe result of
Morettis (1998: 150) boring longue dure of inert formsare what makes
up the iceberg that deconstructive close reading neglects by focusing on its
tip, the canonized masterpieces, and, vice versa, this tip is not just what Der
rida saved from Austin but also what the institution of literature, with its liter
ary canon, has been saving from oblivion.
Finally, deconstructivist (counter)attacks on Morettis distant reading
ignore precisely this deconstructive effect of distant reading as the close-
reading-of-distance, including the institutionalized distance between the
canon and the rest, or between the tip of the iceberg and the iceberg itself.
Derrida explicitly posited Austins possibility of literary and other kinds of
parasites of ordinary language (Austin 1962: 2122) as an essential possi
bility (Derrida 1988: 133) that makes such parasites the condition of pos
sibility as well as impossibility of that language, and Moretti implicitly pos
ited this literature-as-condition-of-(im)possibility-of-ordinary-language as,
well, an ordinary language. Both gestures, however, in effect asserted a
seeming epistemological obstacle as an ontological conditionpossibility as
essential possibility; essential possibility as the thing itselfwhich is a fun
damental task of any dialectical thought.
In the previous section, I linked the distant-reading debate, which after
its first decade is now producing its first book-length defenses and critiques
of Morettis distant reading, to another debate, a decade older still, the one on
Third World culture. In and around this debate, Ahmad launched a critique
of close reading that can today be strengthened by Morettis similar critique,
as well as a rejection of Jamesons Third Worldism that today arguably mani
fests some of the empiricism of the critiques of distant reading. What Jame
sons and Ahmads interventions in literary theory meant at the end of the
alternative represented by really existing socialism, and Morettis at the end
of the US alternative to really existing socialism, a synoptic reading of all
three interventions might help achieve today, at the end of what seemed like
the European alternative to the US alternative.
Today literary scholars tell us that they remain the only readers of liter
ary works of art. They tend to state this as an argument for the conclusion
that literary studies should be reconstructed. It is with reconstruction in
mind that Marjorie Perloff (1995: 182) speaks of the undergraduate who has
read precious little of that high literature in elementary and secondary
school and of the retrenchment and attrition of graduate programs; it is

reconstruction that Marko Juvan (2011: 179) attempts in a time when litera
ture is losing its special charm and is increasingly merging into public dis
course crowded with print and electronic media. I will draw a much more
modest conclusion, one that only concerns the question of reading (and that
may as such, nonetheless, touch on the big issue of reconstruction): if it is
true that literary scholars are the only remaining readers of literary art
worksand why would they say it if they were not?then any study of read
ing should be a study of scholarly reading. From this point of view, it becomes
obvious that literary scholars statements about the disappearance of read
ing, gloomy as they may appear, are even optimistic. For, as we have seen,
Moretti, one of the most outspoken, if controversial, literary scholars today,
openly encourages his own colleagues, the supposed only remaining read
ers, to omit reading literary texts. Granted, Moretti discards here a specific
practice of scholarly reading, the close reading of canonical texts, but as,
according to Moretti (2000b: 208), close reading has radiated from the
cheerful town of New Haven over the whole field of literary studies, by close
reading, he really means reading.
I wish to suggest that with this absolute negation of reading, the ongo
ing marginalization of reading reaches its climaxand hence its dialectical
turn. Moretti forsakes the close reading of the Western canon not for non
reading but for the distant reading of the history of formal differentiation of
world literature. And, contra the usual reproach that distant reading fails to
recognize the particularities of individual languages as it relies solely on
philological studies that are secondhand (and available in hegemonic lan
guages, as Jonathan Arac [2002: 40] adds), one can argue that distant read
ing refers to secondhand studies precisely so as to be able to grant their
respective objects, individual local literatures, the dignity of the object of lit
erary world-systems analysis. Distant reading takes the risk of reading extra
textual devices and genres (and secondary literature written in hegemonic
languages) in order not to be limited, like close reading, to reading (primary)
literature written in the same hegemonic languagesRousseau, Nietzsche,
Rilke, and Proust, to quote a paradigmatic subtitle (de Man 1979), or, say,
Proust, Woolf, Nabokov, to quote a recent notable actualization of this para
digm (Hgglund 2012). While distant reading relies, potentially as well as
actually (as an avowed strategy), on sciencethe national philologies, world-
systems analysis, and the scientific models such as graphs, maps, and
treesclose reading relies, both necessarily and unwittingly, on ideology,
namely, the canon: in the absence of the very tools for mapping something
like world literature, close readers must believe that (the canon knows that)
the text they chose to read closely is indeed pertinent to world literature.
So, by starting with a system rather than an individual text, distant
reading acknowledges what any close reading must presuppose when it
selects the texts that are worth reading closely in the first place; only once
this presupposition of the existence of a system is acknowledged, the crite
rion for selection can be a system less ideological than the school canon (or
even the personal canon of close readers themselves). If a system of texts is
a necessary condition for selecting a text to be read, why not try to conceptu
alize it instead of relying on, or adding to, the canonical selection that has
already been made by the school apparatus? Rather than confirming, or
seeking, canonization for the individual texts that are allegedly dismissed
by distant reading, close readers should show that the canon is a product of
ideological, and not theoretical, processes. They should realize that canon
ization is (un)done neither by them nor by their theoretical adversaries but
by the market and other institutionsand that, as such, canonization
might not be the desired aim for the individual texts they defend against
distant reading. Literary scholars should realize that distant reading, or any
other theory, can be falsified only by a stronger theory, not by local literary
facts such as individual texts. Perhaps what I call here ordinary literature
philosophy can serve as a starting point for such a stronger theory of
literature.
The ideal nature of the aesthetic phenomenon confronts any attempt
at materialist analysis with an apparently unbearable dilemma: either one
must stick to the materialist ontological commitment, and evolve into vulgar
reductionism, or one must do justice to the object, and slip into idealism.
Thus from the moment we speak about literature as an art, we are in the
midst of a political battle in the Althusserian sense that philosophy is a rep
resentation of the class struggle within the field of theory, writes Rastko
Monik (1986: 171). Of course, the only way one can react to such a forced
choice and still remain in the field of theory is to reject the forced choice
itself. That is precisely what both Hall and Moretti did as they relinquished
the very notion of art: Hall abandoned art for culture, and Moretti, for
literature-as-culture.
Yet it seems that, ever since his plea for distant reading, Moretti has
been increasingly aware that literature-as-culture ought to lead simply to cul
ture, in the sense that can here be called Hallian, namely, culture as politics
by other means. In his first reply to the many critics of his conjectures on
distant reading, Moretti (2003: 81) came to the following conclusion:
Finally, politics. . . . The way we imagine comparative literature is a mirror of how

we see the world. Conjectures tried to do so against the background of the
unprecedented possibility that the entire world may be subject to a single cen
tre of power. . . . Early March 2003, when these pages are being written, is in
this respect a wonderfully paradoxical moment, when, after twenty years of
unchallenged American hegemony, millions of people everywhere in the world
have expressed their enormous distance from American politics. As human
beings, this is cause to rejoice. As cultural historians, it is cause to reflect.
This kind of political comment was preceded, in his first attempt at distant
reading, published two years before he coined the term in his conjectures, by
the following footnote: Virtually all book historians agree that the publica
tion of fiction developed, throughout Western Europe, at the expense of
devotion. This said, one major question must still be answered: did the novel
replace devotional literature because it was a fundamentally secular formor
because it was religion under a new guise? . . . Here, clearly enough, quantita
tive methods are no longer useful. . . . This is a task for morphological analy
sis, and the literary history of the future (Moretti 1998: 169n30). Finally,
fifteen years later, with his latest book, The Bourgeois, a masterpiece of close
reading that he asked Verso to publish on the same day as the book-length
version of his proposal of distant reading, Moretti (2013: 2224) indeed
offered this kind of morphological analysisyet still needed to add, this
time not in a footnote, but in a kind of addendum to the introduction:
There is one topic that I would have really liked to include, had it not threat
ened to become a book all by itself: a parallel between Victorian Britain and
the post-1945 United States, highlighting the paradox of these two hegemonic
capitalist culturesthe only ones that have existed so farresting largely on
anti-bourgeois values. I am thinking, of course, of the omnipresence of reli
gious sentiment in public discourse; a presence that is in fact growing, in a
sharp reversal of earlier trends towards secularization. . . . In this sense,
inscribing The Bourgeois to Perry Anderson and Paolo Flores dArcais . . .
expresses the hope that, one day, I will learn from them to use the intelligence
of the past for the critique of the present. This book does not live up to that
hope. But the next one may.
So this calls for a Gretchenfrage: How is it with religion, here? How is it that
this question is postponed as explicitly in 2013 as it is in 1998? Indeed, if this
metonymic displacement is to be suspended, turning to Anderson and
Flores dArcais seems like a step in the right direction. And Morettis latest
piece is a joint effort, with Dominique Pestre, an analysis called Bankspeak:

The Language of World Bank Reports (2015); moreover, it is a product of
collective work conducted in Morettis Stanford Literary Lab, which, a month
before the bankspeak piece appeared in the New Left Review, held its first
conference, whose first paper, by Ted Underwood (2015), addressed Thomas
Pikettys application of literature in economic history. Such collective efforts
to intervene in political economy, unexpected as they are today from almost
anyone, let alone literary historians, are probably welcomed by Anderson and
Flores dArcais. And if there is a conclusion to be drawn from all this, it is
that they would also be welcomed by Hall.
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of Multiculturalism, edited by Charles Bernheimer, 17586. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
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ruary 13. arcade.stanford.edu/content/pikettys-model-literary-history-without-fixed
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7492. London: MacGibbon and Kee.
David Faflik
Stuart Hall and the Whiteness of the Whale
I came to Stuart Hall by sea, in a whale ship bound

for nowhere. My captain was Herman Melville, the
American author of the nineteenth-century philo-
sophical seafaring novel Moby-Dick (1851). My pilot
was C. L. R. James, the twentieth-century social
theorist whose published work not only looked
back to the politics of Melvilles metaphysics but
also anticipated the contours of Halls own epic
life and writings. It was through James that I first
encountered the work of Hall. A train of associa-
tions led me forward from the scholarship of the
one man to that of the other. It was in Hall that I
acquired a guide to my area of academic special-
ization, early American literature and culture. Not
a few like-minded professional students of lan-
guage and literature have sought Halls help in
navigating the twin disciplines with which hes
identified, notably the fields of popular cultural
and postcolonial studies. Rarer is the Americanist
who recognizes in Hall something more funda-
mental, a way to read thats added multidimen-
sional depth to the work that we do. What follows
is a depth exploration of the hermeneutic that we
have received from Hall, conducted through the
graded layers of signification that I would argue
he has, in part, made available to us.

James in his classic study Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways: The

Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In ([1953] 2001) set an impor-
tant precedent in a mode of cultural criticism that Grant Farred (1996: 5) has
characterized as bi-focal for the tandem, multidirected tendencies of its
habits of observation. In the case of Mariners, ostensibly the subject of what
James named his small book on Melville was the very big book the US
author had written, the above named Moby-Dick, during a tumultuous
moment in the onset of American modernity.1 In fact, James examines sev-
eral of Melvilles antebellum novels and shorter works in his not-so-modest
little monograph, even while he meditates broadly on authors, authorship,
and the representative stakes of literary artistry in general. With Mariners,
James models the critical kind of negative capability that informed so much
of his work, inhabiting as he does two intersecting planes (contexts, well call
them) of interpretation simultaneously.
It was not just Jamess willingness to entertain complementary topics
that made his work so expansive. Nor did the capacity for complexity that
Hall inherited from James depend on the content of their thoughts alone.
With Mariners, James signals an altogether different order of understanding
in his ability to traverse multiple critical registers at once. Hence James
([1953] 2001: 3) can write in his introduction of the miracle that is Melville.2
Whats miraculous in Melville, at least in Jamess sympathetic eyes, is that
the author had managed with Moby-Dick to write his way into an essentially
omniscient position that was at once plural in the variable vantage points it
inscribes yet singularly integrating in the scope and scale of vision it makes
possible. On the one hand, Melville tells in Moby-Dick the tale of a want-away
American sailor, Ishmael, and the cosmic thunder he encounters in the per-
son of his mad captain, Ahab. As grand as that narrative sounds, it consti-
tutes for the commentator James only a comparatively narrow area of inquiry.
On the other hand, James says that Melville has painted in the full range
of his early prose writings a picture of the world in which we live (3). The
suggestion is that theres a whole world beyond this or any given books
textual boundaries. We is the key to that worlds unfolding. For with this
first-person plural pronoun James formallyand collectively, through a
we that comprises each and all of us, his readerslays claim to the field-
defining interpretive ground he would come to occupy at the moment of his
reckoning with Melville, where Hall himself, before long, would similarly
take up residence beginning in the late 1960s and after. With Mariners, that
is to say, James is writing on the historical past as well as the up-to-date pres-
ent, America in isolation and also what Hall (1996a: 34) identified, in a
Faflik Stuart Hall and the Whiteness of the Whale 717
1986 interview with James, as the grand arena of international politics that
both men knew through a lifetime of ocean-spanning advocacy. What James
is mapping with Mariners is the variegated country of culture, of which Hall
was to become one of the most perceptive of critics from his generation and
also ours.
Admittedly, I am dealing in metaphors. And my metaphors are mixed.
See the whiteness of my title, the whale from Melvilles romance, the
visual and physical figures that I apply to Jamess critical method. Yet I have
deliberately chosen this figurative medium, in order to introduce a figurative
message about Hall. Halls writing, it bears emphasizing, made imaginative
use of language for reasons other than the literal conveyance of meaning.
This is not to say that we must close read the body of Halls work within the
insular framework of an aestheticism that he probably would have rejected
out of hand. There will be no mining of metaphors for their own sake here.
Instead, I would have us return to the metaphors that structure Halls writ-
ing for what they reveal about the metaphorical (and necessarily bi-focal)
component of cultural studies as he envisioned it and practiced it. Like
James, Hall maintained a careful balance between his immediate objects of
observation and whatever it was those objects might be said to represent, in
their associative constructions. Whether he was reading some cultural
artifact, a particular social trend, or a certain critical dispositioneither of a
popular or marginal varietyHalls usual interpretive move was a rela-
tional one. The decades-long project he undertook was to demonstrate how,
in his own words, what is socially peripheral may be symbolically central
to the ways we make cultural meanings (Hall 1996b: 303). There is a reason,
then, to approach Halls work from the direction of the metaphorical once-
remove that I have chosen. Thats how and where Hall himself worked. His
writings interrogate that unstable space where metaphors (symbols, in his
formulation) cease to inhere in themselves, and begin to extend outward in
a referential web of comparison by association. As with any metaphor, Halls
readings are always in at least two interpretive places.
If such a critical method seems elusive (a white whale, as it were), Hall
was quite clear when he explained how metaphors were, for anyone invested
in culture, as much a means as they were an end. In an early 1990s lecture
he gave at the University of Sussex, Metaphors of Transformation, Hall
(1996b: 286) spoke directly to the many different kinds of metaphors in
which our thinking about cultural change takes place.3 Indeed, what Hall
described as the relations between the social and the symbolic was for
him the paradigm question in culture theoryat least in all those cultural
theories ... which have not settled for an elegant but empty formalism
(287). Among the classic metaphors that Hall invokes by way of illustration
are Leon Trotskys world turned upside down and Georg Lukcss world-
views. Hall credits each of these resonant figures of speech as being sig-
nificant, historically, for the radical imaginary of which Halls own work is
now an integral part. And he underscores, moreover, the mutual ties between
fact and figure, society and symbol, when he explains that these metaphors
conceptualize the social and the symbolic or the cultural as stitched together
in a relationship of rough correspondence, so that any reversal in the one
must lead to a concomitant transformation in the other (287).
For all his enthusiasm about metaphor as an instrument for thinking
about cultural change, Hall nevertheless found reason to criticize this same
vehicle of cultural criticism. To speak simply, most metaphors had a shelf life
for Hall. Yesterdays metaphors were likely to grow dated, not least when they
were expected to function as discursive markers, and makers, of the ever-
evolving cultural transformations with which Hall was concerned in his
work. It was Halls view that the classic metaphors of transformation relied
on a suspect set of dramatic simplifications and binary reversals (287) that
ultimately rendered them meaningless over time. Without a doubt Hall
depended on relational meanings, but on the reductive meanings of simplis-
tic metaphors, not so much. In fact, his ready dismissal of easy binaries led
Hall to rhetorically wonder if it were better to have no metaphors than faulty
ones. Deliberating in this way over the nature of relation, Hall asks at the out-
set of Metaphors of Transformation if we would have to abandon outright
the relationship between the social and the symbolic (287).
Hall demurs to his own question by drawing forth another classic met-
aphor, this one exemplary, by his estimation, in the relational work it per-
forms. In literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtins carnivalesque he discovered
what he believed to be a striking and original metaphor of cultural and
symbolic transformation (291). This might be surprising, when we con-
sider that Hall was having to turn back the clock by several decades to locate
a metaphor that suited his purposesone conceived, no less, by one of those
formalists whom Hall has already discounted earlier in his talk. Typically,
we would associate Bakhtins writing on the carnivalesque with his study
Rabelais and His World, which appeared (under a different title) in embry-
onic form as a dissertation in 1940 before being published in English in
1965 (1984: 15). Bakhtin was, however, very much in vogue at the time of
Halls writing. The Russians colorful portrayal of spontaneous, demotic dis-
sent from below in the late medieval world of Rabelaiss sixteenth-cen-
tury France had struck a responsive chord with both post-structuralists and
New Historicists in Halls day. More important, Hall felt that he had found
in the carnivalesque a metaphor that was at once oppositional enough to
serve his forward-thinking purposes and sensitive enough an instrument to
accommodate a more nuanced kind of cultural analysis than was permitted
by the old binary standbys. What was most attractive in the carnivalesque
metaphor for Hall (1996b: 287) is that it is not, he says, simply a metaphor
of inversionsetting the low in the place of the high, while preserving the
binary structure of the division between them. On the contrary, Hall con-
tinues, in a passage that is worth quoting at length: In Bakhtins carnival,
it is precisely the purity of this binary distinction which is transgressed. The
low invades the high, blurring the hierarchical imposition of order; creating
not simply the triumph of one aesthetic over another, but ... revealing the
interdependency of the low on the high and vice versa, the inextricably mixed
and ambivalent nature of all cultural life, the reversibility of cultural forms,
symbols, language and meaning (291).
Hall is arguing here not just for a better brand of metaphor, one that
transgresses the false dichotomies we reflexively tend to draw in our sym-
bolic readings. Hes calling for a categorically different conception of culture,
one that is inextricably mixed and ambivalent and so resistant to the dia-
metric manner of meaning making that defines, say, a dialectical method
that by implication Hall would regard as insufficient for a full appreciation of
the reversibility of cultural forms, symbols, language and meaning. In a
sense, then, Hall is to some extent transgressing not a what but a who, James.
For unlike James, who retained an avowed dialectical faith in the fusing, the
uniting, of the disparate binary forces that constituted his notion of culture,
Hall resisted such neat and tidy resolutions.4 In relation to James, Halls cul-
tural life was inextricably mixed. And so, by extension, his metaphors were
comparatively messy. Writing in the aftermath of the updated transforma-
tions instigated by cultural studies as it emerged as a discipline in the 1970s
and 1980s, Hall demanded a metaphorical method that allowed him the
license not only to be in two binary places at once but to maintain multiple
critical positions along the interdependent interstices of his interpretive
grid. After the fashion of Bakhtin, Hall desires the imaginative, carni-
valesque freedom of dialogic, not the binary distinction of dialectic (299).
In fairness to James, his sustained engagement in Mariners with
Moby-Dickand through Melvilles text, to the culture of America that
Hall (1996a: 34) rightly recognized as lying just beyondwas premised in
something other than your average binary. As a known radical activist,
James had composed his study under detention at New Yorks Ellis Island,
where, during the second half of 1952, he was held (prior to his deportation
in 1953) by the US Immigration and Naturalization Service for having over-
stayed his visa. Cold War politics could thus easily have crept into his book in
the form of a then familiar binary that pitted some allegorical stand-in for
Western democracy against a comparably artificial representation of com-
munist totalitarianism. And, in fact, as Donald E. Pease has noted, period
interpretations of Melvilles novel often did favor such a Manichaean reading
by opposing the simplified character pairs of the everyman Ishmael versus
the authoritarian Ahab. But as Pease (2001: xiv) also observes, James subtly
resisted the hegemony of this conventional split reading by constructing
a counter-hegemony that saw Ishmael, too, compromised by the overween-
ing authority apparatus of the (ship of) state of which he was a laboring
member. James, then, does make much of binaries in Mariners; his discus-
sion relies in large part on the antithetical workers/managers pairing that he
locates among the heroically, ethnically diverse crew of Melvilles storied
whaling vessel, the Pequod. Jamess dialectic was not, however, so overdeter-
mined that he lost sight of the fact that no single theoretical idea governed
Melvilles novel or narrator. Nor was James about to submit himself to the
unwanted guidance of any such inflexible principle, inasmuch as the revo-
lutionary development he invokes as a navigational pole star was by his
standards less an organized way of thinking than a vitally real response
to the vagaries of modernity (Hall 1996a: 35).
Hall, we have seen, had a suitably loose hermeneutic of his own and
summoned his response to culture accordingly. Compared to Hall, James
([1953] 2001: 28) strains under the weight of the qualified binaries that mani-
fest in Mariners, albeit while paying tribute to the sheer poetry that he credits
Melville with conjuring in Moby-Dicks painted image of a common body
of men at work out at sea. Hall by comparison (comparison being the sine
qua non of metaphorical method) traces a circuitous route to an alternate
interpretive disposition. He interplays his way through a polymorphous
mix of metaphors, in the process celebrating the slippages of related (un)
likeness that he encounters in transit from symbol to society and back again.
Melville in the Wake of Metaphor

It could be said that metaphor, as a means of reading, has become the default
mode in the recent scholarship on Moby-Dick, for reasons that have every-
thing and nothing to do with Hall. Melville, to begin, created in the epony-
mous whale of his novel one of the more multivalent symbols of American
letters. That symbols meaning remains open-ended, a partial result of the
symbol itself and the carnivalesque riot of commentary on Melville. The
novels author, moreover, conspicuously thematizes the metaphorical mak-
ing of meaning throughout Moby-Dick, foregrounding in chapters such as
The Doubloon and The Whiteness of the Whale the myriad, conflicting
consequences of cognition by association. Halls signature metaphorical
method has furthermore insinuated itself into our critical consciousness,
such that any anxiety that might otherwise accompany his influence has,
with some notable exceptions, been minimal.5 In scrutinizing, today, a liter-
ary text such as Moby-Dick for its symbols, we almost cannot help but reckon
with society as welljust as our engagement with the social so often leads
us back to a consideration of the symbolic. So boldly metaphorical a work
compels us to perform whats literally impossible, which is to say to read in
multiple places at once. Halls hermeneutic makes the impossible both pos-
sible and meaningful. It achieves this by blurring the lines that suppos-
edly separate literature from life, relying all the while on a socially tending
purposefulness thats denied any symbol for its own sake. The new aes-
thetic revival of a so-called surface reading notwithstanding, literary study
now regularly amounts to cultural studies, in the tradition of Hall.6
It is metaphor that is quietly keeping this tradition alive. Bakhtinian
readings of Melville, for example, who was himself an enthusiast of the
writer Rabelais, have been de rigueur for some time. We need not attribute
this interpretive swing to Halls affinity with the kind of disruptive reading
practices he attributes to Bakhtin. But we should, since the kind of criticism
that adopts carnivalism to do the interpretive work of social subversion
crucially, within the cultural studies context that Hall himself pioneered
is in effect making an unattributed borrowing from the lifes work of
Hall. Timothy B. Powell, for one, promises a multicultural interpretation of
the American Renaissance. Such is the subtitle to Powells study Ruthless
Democracy (2000). Channeling Bakhtins dialogic theory of heteroglossia,
he goes on to explain that Ruthless Democracy (that phrase itself being a met-
aphor, quoted by Melville in a letter he wrote to his friend Nathaniel Haw-
thorne) is founded on contestation rather than consensus in that it tries to
situate the canonical literatures of the American mid-nineteenth century
in dialogic relation to African American, Native American, and women
writers (18). Powell is committed to conducting a wide-ranging conversa-
tion on multiculturalism, in other words, and hes not afraid of using meth-
ods, and metaphors, that Hall would have endorsed to do it. Indeed, the real
subject of Ruthless Democracy, Powell says, is not simply a revision of the

canon of American literature, but rather an argument for how engaging a
multiplicity of cultural perspectives (both historical and literary) can lead to
a greater understanding of the richly complicated, infinitely conf licted
nature of American identity (19).7
If that assertion recalls the mixed perspective of Hall, then so, too,
do a number of other monographs treating Melville. Christopher Freeburg
echoes Ishmaels famous meditation on whiteness in Melville and the
Idea of Blackness: Race and Imperialism in Nineteenth-Century America (2012).
More to our purposes, Freeburg has very much written in the metaphorical
(not to mention postcolonial) mold of Hall, even though he never explicitly
cites Hall. The same can be said of Edward L. Widmers Young America
(1999). A sometime speechwriter for former US president Bill Clinton, Wid-
mer shared with Hall an interest in the international politics that the latter
talked over with James in the 1980s. More telling, Widmer takes the occa-
sion of his book to expound, after the fashion of Hall, on the discernible tan-
gle of the local and the global: he writes of the role that Melville and his Man-
hattan circle of literatiardent participants, all of them, in the contemporary
Democratic Partyplayed in a partly European-inspired domestic move-
ment that Widmer decrees was representative of the flowering of democ-
racy in New York City. And, finally, David S. Reynolds owes perhaps as pro-
found a debt as any scholar to Hall for advancing the modern colloquy on
symbol and society. Reynoldss Beneath the American Renaissance (1988) has
been justly celebrated for probing the roots of the United States dynamic
antebellum literary scene among various popular forms of expression, from
the anecdotal plainspokenness of the eras new sermon style to the radically
democratic rhetoric that reappeared in fused form in Melvilles own work.
Reynoldss Renaissance was not just vernacular; it was Bakhtinian, Reyn-
olds going so far as to name a late chapter in his volume The Carnivaliza-
tion of American Language. There Reynolds explains, As important as the
carnival was in the European culture Bakhtin studies, it was perhaps even
more so in democratic America, which was a kind of carnival culture, one
that abolished the social distance between people and yoked together the
high and the low in an atmosphere of jolly relativity (444). The degree to
which Reynolds has in fact respected the cultural relativity to which
Bakhtin (and Hall after him, in his pledged belief in the ambivalent nature
of all cultural life) subscribed has been open to debate since Beneath the
American Renaissance appeared in print. That Reynolds, with his professed
faith in the subversive imagination, was writing in the shadow of Hall

seems self-evident, regardless. For in Reynoldss work, as in the work of Hall
and James and Melville before him, things that signify in one way at the level
of surface meaning are likely to signify in another, deeper, and often unti-
dier way as well. Its left to us to connect the metaphoric (and dialogic) dots
that Reynolds helps us see between ruthlessness and truthfulness, black-
ness and whiteness, renaissance and radicalism, democratic flowering and
symbolic signification. We remain in a cultural moment of metaphors,
which we are better able to critically manage and mobilize because of Hall.
That returns us to the start of our circular journey. In his conversa-
tion with James, Hall (1996a: 35) is keen to discuss what he calls the Trinida-
dians massive involvement in America. There was politics to consider, of
course. Youve got deeply involved in the politics, Hall says, in what must be
considered an understatement in light of Jamess expulsion from the United
States. Theres also ... the culture of America, Hall elaborates, by which he
presumably means something other than the strictly political. Eventually,
Hall stops a loquacious James short after the elder man segues into a ram-
bling discussion of Mariners. Up to this point Hall has been trying and failing
to elicit from James a more penetrating statement on what I take to be the rig-
orous critical method he suspects is lurking beneath Jamess digressions.
Asked, then, about the culture of America, James meanders his way around
a response that randomly touches on the black question in the United
States, the Caribbean, and the leadership of the Marxist party. Queried
next on what is really essentially American in Melville, James returns with
a wayward allusion to a picture called Dog Day Afternoon, in reference to a
1975 Sidney Lumet film, starring Al Pacino, that depicts a New York summer
bank heist gone horribly wrong. But you saw something in Melville and,
especially, in Moby-Dick, Hall all of a sudden remarks, his tone growing
increasingly urgent as his aimless back-and-forth exchanges with a bi-focal
James proceed without achieving much progress. Not taking the bait, James
reiterates his respect for Melville, an author who hes sure got the real instinc-
tive revolutionary development, and the people, in his narrative portrayals of
the multiethnic proletariat that by and large completes the novels roster of
characters. But you also see something important, Hall repeats.
That something, I want to suggest, is for Hall a symbol and how it
relates (or doesnt relate) to society. Its not only in Melville, Hall counters.
Its when you write about Aeschylus, its when you write about Shakespeare;
you see something about the coincidence of a great historical moment and a
great work or a great artist (3536). If we have learned anything from Halls
work, we would do well to remember the lesson he is imparting here. For by
coincidence, I think, Hall means what we mean by culture. He was always
ready to take fully sensitive measure of our evolving forms of expression,
no matter how unpredictable, incidental, or unstable. By culture Hall means
not coincidence, as in the perfect alignment of a congeries of conflicts, but
rather the relationship of rough correspondence that he insists on in Met-
aphors of Transformation. Halls symbolic conception of culture depends
precisely upon a code of metaphor, the patent unsettledness of which he
takes for granted. And he reminds us whats at stake in that code in the dia-
logue that he and James have staged for the sake of amplifying their over-
lapping, yet not identical, ideas. Hall mildly contradicts James during their
talk. The purport of his doing so is that history and art, in the mind of
the junior of the two men, will no more coincide in a synthesized whole
than a friendly, if opinionated, pair of original thinkers can reach effortless
agreement in a televised tte--tte. Theres a more than metaphorical con-
nection to be made between symbol and society, in other words, much as
there is from the fractious, centuries-long conversation involving Melville,
James, and Hall. For students of Hall, and we are that, the critique of culture
must by definition continue. Thats what meaningful cultural critiques do.
Notes
1 In a 1986 BBC interview that Hall conducted with James, Hall (1996a: 34) himself
called Jamess Mariners a big book in terms of what it tries to cover.
2 James dated these introductory remarks to November 28, 1952.
3 Halls statement Metaphors of Transformation is itself reprinted from White 1993.
4 Neil Larsen (1996: 89) credits James in part with a prophetic anticipation of Cultural
Studies in its present [i.e., 1990s] mode because of his admiration of popular cul-
ture, especially in its American phase. Yet Larsen further explains that James also
preserved a separate aesthetic valuation of high art, which he sought to dialectically
resolve with popular manifestations of culture. And for this reason Larsen opposes
Jamess work to the current default mode of cultural studies.
5 Farreds work constitutes one such exception, although his critique has to do less with
Halls interpretive method than with his postcolonial conception of the Caribbean. See
Farred 2003: 149214.
6 For the definitive statement on surface reading, see Best and Marcus 2009.
7 Melville penned his letter to Hawthorne in the summer of 1851, while he was drafting
the final revisions to Moby-Dick. Concerned over his urge to speak Truth with his
work, Melville (1993: 190) is led to wonder whether when you [Hawthorne] see or hear
of my ruthless democracy on all sides, you may possibly feel a touch of a shrink.
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Jeffrey T. Nealon
Stuart Hall and the Detour through Theory

Revisited
Cultural studiesneither applies theory as if answers

could be known in advance, nor is it empiricism
without theory. Culturalstudies is committed to
the detour through theory.
Lawrence Grossberg, Cultural Studies and/in
New Worlds
The Detour That Is Stuart Hall (for Me)
Michel Foucault, when asked about the reso-

nances of his work with that of the Frankfurt
School, responded apologetically that he engaged
with it relatively late. In the same way, I would like
to preface this essay with an embarrassed confes-
sion: if Id have known about Stuart Halls work
when I was young (and I readily admit its nobodys
fault but mine that I didnt), it would have made
my life and my work infinitely richer and more
nuanced, not to mention that I might have got-
ten to know another of the giants of intellectual
endeavor over the past few decades. But alas, in the
dominant philosophical-theoretical discourse of
the North American academy circa the mid-1980s,
at least the academic discourses wherein I came of
age, there simply was no British theory worth the
name. And even more so elided was postcolonial

Caribbean theory, with copious apologies not only to Hall but also to douard
Glissant and C. L. R. James, among so many others. In the US academy of
the 1980s, or at least my experience of it, there was this high-prestige thing
called continental philosophy (a category explicitly engineered to exclude
theorizing coming from the United Kingdom or its colonies from Euro-
pean philosophy proper), which consisted of French and German phenom-
enology mostly, alongside some Geneva School thinking about linguistics
and a smattering of American pragmatism, from William James to Richard
Rorty. But the category of theory produced in Britain, such as it existed at
all circa 1980-something, was largely confined to the lectures of John L.
Austin, which in turn were only on the syllabus so they could be shown to be
quite radically wrongfirst systematically deconstructed by Jacques Der-
rida and then later taken into the far-from-Oxford realms of queer theory by
Judith Butler and Eve Sedgwick. Likewise, as Lawrence Grossberg points out
in his heartfelt remembrance Rage against the Dying of a Light: Stuart Hall
(19322014) (2014), British cultural studies was a largely unknown dis-
course in the United States before 1989, and of course Marxisms ongoing
commitment to examining quotidian life more generally was sadly under-
represented in the big theory era as well. I vividly remember the Marx
course I took as an undergraduate in 1984, which dedicated three out of the
semesters four months to reading Hegel, suggesting strongly that Marx was
more dialectical footnote than innovator. So given the marginal status of
both Marxism and cultural studies in my student days, I guess its not sur-
prising that some of the finest recent Marxist scholarship on cultural stud-
ieswhich is to say, Halls workwasnt front and center on the syllabus.
Though I admit, with downcast eyes, nor were there academic courses dedi-
cated to British icons the Clash, the Specials, or the Smiths, but I knew
plenty about them circa 1985.
In short, I begin with this detour of a preface to highlight that, much

to my chagrin, I approach Hall from a different angle than many other con-
tributors to this special issue. Unfortunately, I know Hall not as a teacher, a
mentor, a friend, a voice, a political compass, or even a presence on the con-
ference circuit; alas, I know him primarily as a set of intense textual provoca-
tions and challenges to think differently. To redeploy Foucaults (1991: 119
20) specific words on his discovering the Frankfurt School later in life,
When I recognize all these merits of Halls work with the Centre for Con-
temporary Cultural Studies (CCCS),
Nealon Stuart Hall and the Detour through Theory Revisited 729
I do so with the bad conscience of one who should have known them and
studied them much earlier than was the case. Perhaps if l had read those
works earlier on, I would have saved useful time, surely: I wouldnt have
needed to write some things and I would have avoided certain errors. At any
rate ... I would have been seduced to the point of doing nothing else in life
but the job of commenting on them. Instead, their influence on me remains
retrospective, a contribution reached when I was no longer at the age of
intellectual discoveries. And I dont even know whether to be glad or to
feel sorry about it.
Unlike Foucaults thoughts about the Frankfurt School, though, I feel sorry
indeed about not much earlier having taken up the insight and challenge of
Halls work. Nevertheless, I preface this essay not with mourning or melan-
cholia (though those are righteous sentiments still so close to his passing,
for all those who remain inspired by Halls life and his work), but I open with
optimism about the myriad detourswhich are also new beginnings, alter-
nate futuresmade possible by Halls conceptual itinerary, the treasure
trove of provocations and transformative possibilities that he left for people
like me, who never knew him personally but have now come to recognize,
after the fact, too late, why he meant so much to so many. And such theoreti-
cal detours are, as Ill try to suggest below, becoming a main road for cul-
tural studies going forward.
The Detour through Theory

The detour through theory was a central thematic for Birmingham School
studies of popular culture, and certainly that commitment to theory got
intensified through varying translations of CCCS work into the context of
the United States, as cultural studies was (for better or worse) trying to con-
figure itself as an academic field in the 1990s. Theory as a kind of detour is
a trope deployed widely by both Hall and Grossberg, though it is of course
also the subtitle of Gregory Elliots (1987) fine book on Louis Althussers
somewhat vexed reception by British Marxism. And depending on whom
you ask or what translation you consult, the sense that theory is a detour
can be traced all the way back to Marx himself (certainly the Theses on Feuer-
bach are all about the subordinate relation of theory to practice), though
Elliot attributes the actual phrase detour of theory to Pierre Macherey.
In any case, Im less interested in the metaphors pedigree and more
interested in thinking about whats living and whats dead in the detour
through theory when it comes to parsing and practicing the relations

among theory, the popular, and culture today. In taking up this diagnostic
project, Im trying to follow and pay tribute to Halls example in Cultural
Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies (2010), which he prefaces by saying:
This is not a commentary on the success or effectiveness of different theo-
retical positions in cultural studies (that is for some other occasion). It is an
attempt to say something about what certain theoretical movements in cul-
tural studies have been like for me, and from that position, to take some
bearings about the general question of the politics of theory (1783). In
extending Halls lifelong project of thinking those legacies of theory in the
study of popular culture (in this case within the specific context of my lived
experience, North America), Id begin by noting the irony that theory is
probably the concept thats today under more duress than popular culture.
Over the nearly twenty-five years Ive been working in an English depart-
ment in the United States (undoubtedly things have been quite different in
communications, American studies, and other fields associated with aca-
demic cultural studies), people have slowly come around to the consensus
that popular culture is a viableindeed vibrantsite of critical engage-
ment. Who doesnt love Beyonc , or maybe Downton Abbeys more your
style, but the point is that a kind of Adornian pooh-poohing of popular cul-
ture, which was still a real thing in the American academy as late as the early
1990s (when people would still growl about Madonna studies or disparage
reading comic books in literature classes), has all but disappeared. Its odd to
recall that even films were controversial in literature departments when I
was an undergraduate in the early 1980syou could show them, but only to
demonstrate how badly Roman Polanski had mangled Thomas Hardys Tess
of the dUrbervilles. Which is to say, not that long ago there was maybe an
adaptation classbook to film, with book the inevitable winnerbut pre-
cious little else of so-called popular culture in the literature classroom. And
outside the narrow confines of the literary, other humanities disciplines
have in recent years likewise turned (back) toward the everyday, the somatic,
and the popularthink of the so-called sensory turn in history (e.g., Mark
M. Smiths Sensing the Past [2007]) or the recent moves toward exploring
race, affect, and embodiment in philosophy.
However, as much as popular culture studies are alive and well on the
American academic scene these days (as much as cultural studies has tri-
umphed in putting the quotidian everyday squarely back on the academic
map), you may have heard the unfortunate news that our old friend theory is
dead. It was buried, I understand, alongside Derrida more than a decade
ago,1 and surely Halls passing will be taken by some to mark the beginning
of the end for theorys heyday in cultural studies. Of course, special journal
issues like this one (and even more so a quick look through any high-end
university press catalog) would suggest that the death of theory has been
greatly exaggerated across the academic spectrum. In fact, its supposed
demise might be better dubbed, with a nod to Jean-Franois Lyotards trans-
lation by Fredric Jameson, as that desire called the death of theory (insofar
as lots of people really want the passing of theory to be true, whether it is or
not, and they believe, however misguidedly, that its death can be secured by
their repeatedly saying so). However, Id like to take this opportunity to fol-
low and honor Halls project of historicizing theory and to zero in on the role
of theory today in the study of popular culture: in particular, I want to think
about how the detour through theory may or may not have been trans-
formed over the past couple of decades. To show my hand at the beginning,
my primary question here will not concern the continued effectiveness or
necessity of theory in thinking about popular culture. Rather, I want to won-
der whether theory is any longer productively thought of as a detouror
whether its becoming, to extend the metaphor, a main road for cultural
studies and its critical engagement with the present.
But first, of course, well need to revisit the question of what exactly
characterizes what Hall (2010: 1791) dubs the necessary delay or detour
through theory in his work and the associated discourse that came out of
Birmingham and migrated globally: What is theory a detour away from, and
why is this detour necessary? In Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Lega-
cies, Hall makes the important point that theories are just as historically
contextual as the materials theyre often marshaled to help connect or inter-
pret. Thereby theories are not, as Grossberg reminds us in the epigraph,
meant to be procrustean beds or answers that could be known in advance.
That is, I think, the majorand well-foundedconcern that Hall expressed
concerning the specifically literary theory of the poststructuralist era (espe-
cially in the United States). Recall what Hall writes from the vantage point of
1989, referring to work hed done on the early 1980s explosion of literary
theory: Looking at what one can only call the deconstructive deluge (as
opposed to deconstructive turn) which had overtaken American literary
studies, in its formalist mode, I tried to distinguish the extremely important
theoretical and intellectual work which it had made possible in cultural stud-
ies from a mere repetition, a sort of mimicry or deconstructive ventrilo-
quism which sometimes passes as a serious intellectual enterprise (1794).
Which is at least partially to say that in literary circles, theory wasand
maybe still is?taught and deployed primarily as a series of methodologies

or templates that could be laid over any given object to produce a new read-
ing of it: so you can deconstruct the sitcom, or new historicize the Battle of
Waterloo, or use affect or trauma theory to produce a journal article on Ham-
let. This sense of mimicry or deconstructive ventriloquism is the kind of
thing on display when Herman Rapaport prefaces his Milton and the Post-
modern (1993: xiii) with the caveat that his study was not originally com-
posed with the idea of advancing a primer on either contemporary theory or
Miltons works, for [he] was interested in attempting to use Milton as a test
case for a poststructuralist reading.
Against that sense of theory as a test case in producing a new read-
ing of an existing canonical figure or problem, Hall insists that for cultural
studies its not changing academic fads or methodological test-drives that
call forth theoretical intervention; its much more the case that movements
provoke theoretical moments and that historical conjectures insist on theo-
ries: they are real moments in the evolution of theory (Hall 2010: 1790).2
The emergence of contemporary events (singular moments or eruptions into
everyday lives) brings theoretical inquiry into existencein the sense that
Gilles Deleuze (1995: 139) conjures when he remarks, Something in the
world forces us to think.
It is just this kind of radically contextual use value in responding to the
provocation of events that Hall (2010: 1791) reserves for his own definition of
that necessary detour through theory, one that allows us to forestall both
theory fetishism (mere application of a method; Hall understands clearly what
is lost in and because of such instrumentalism) and the even more dangerous
absence of any methodological reflexivity at all, what he calls the invocation
of a simple-minded anti-theoretical populism (1791). So the detour through
theory is necessary for Hall first and foremost because of our historical situa-
tion (things are complicated and ever changing, so we require complicated
tools to work on our morphing present), and, second, theory is necessary
because of the dangers of a simple-minded anti-theoretical populism or a
kind of naive realism that would take the artifacts of popular culture at face
value. Im sure weve all had these kinds of conversations with Aunt Sadie and
Uncle Ed at the family reunionCalm down, Frozen is a fun, harmless story
about girls and the stuff they like. Dont overthink itlet it go.
So its the second of Halls two theoretical legaciesthe disruption
of a naive, face-value realismthat comprises most of what we (or at least I)
think of as the detour through theory in cultural studies: in short, if the
critic simply employs what Grossberg calls empiricism without theory in
studying popular culture, he or she will likely get a tautological garbage in

garbage out kind of analysis. As the Gang of Four put it in their song Why
Theory?, you need theory because, without it, each day seems like a natural
fact. To put an even finer point on it, this second version of the detour
through theory is perhaps better thematized as the detour through ideology
critique, wherein the popular culture product or practice will consistently be
forced to surrender its hidden homologies (or breaks) with dominant modes
of economic production, dominant race and class positions, and the hege-
monic enabling myths of capitalism. And thereby the detour of theory will
disrupt a naive realism by unmasking these subterranean connections,
showing us how consent is manufactured (or how subtle forms of resistance
are enabled) within popular culture.
This second sense of the detour through theory is then a detour
through a higher level of abstraction wherein various dots can be connected
(ah, The Lego Movie is actually about machinic enslavement and worker flex-
ibility under neoliberal biopower), so that when one returns from the theo-
retical detour to the more concrete level of dialogue, action, or interpretation,
one has a better handle on the hidden workings of popular culture. Pretty
straightforwardly, Hall (1997: 42) states that theory is always a detour on
the way to something more important, that something more important
being an effective understanding and critique of the status quo: the abstract-
ing detour through theory allows us to return better equipped to a direct
engagement withand potential transformation ofconcrete social and
political inequities. And Grossberg (1993: 89), for his part, clearly concurs,
following Halls sense that cultural studies is committed to the necessary
detourthrough theory while at the same time refusing to be driven by its
theoretical commitments and that it is instead driven by its ownsense of
history and politics, its own desire to understandand, more importantly,
to engage and transformthe present.3
This sort of unmasking or debunking detour through theory was and
remains an important task for cultural studies. However, its precisely this
second of Halls two detours through theory (the ideology critics detour into
theory to undermine the naive or naturalistic realism of the everyday) that I
want to consider going forward, and I want to speculate about it precisely in
terms of Halls first understanding of the detour through theory: Halls
sense that theory only arises and becomes useful historically within a con-
texthis insistence that movements provoke theoretical moments and his-
torical conjectures insist on theories. That being the case, theories in turn
must change and adapt over time. In Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical
Legacies, youll no doubt recall Halls example of the revolutions wrought by

feminist theory and its incursions into male-dominated worlds of British
Marxism and cultural studies. Feminism, as Hall (2010: 1789) memorably
notes, forced its own detour of theory: Feminism ... broke in; interrupted,
made an unseemly noise, seized the time, crapped on the table of cultural
studies. In short, its this initial historical or provocative sense of the detour
of theory that I want to highlight and think about hereHalls insistence
that theory has its own evolutionary mutations, ones that have everything to
do with changed social and economic conditions. And I want to wonder
about this first sense of theoretical detour precisely by folding it back on
Halls second (or ideology critique) sense of the detour of theory. I come
before you not so much to crap on the table of cultural studies but to wonder
out loud a bit about the unmasking work of ideology critique in the present
and in the future.
To put the question quite economically, I wonder whether a kind of
realism (often associated by cultural studies with a clumsy or unthinking
naturalism or economic determinism) is still the enemy that it was twenty or
thirty years ago and, as such, whether the hidden depth underneath or
unseen within cultural practices constitutes the privileged bearing zone for
something like cultural studies theory. One might add here that this is
why for Hall the metaphor of detour is also a metaphor of struggling with
theory, never quite hitting it head-on, because theory on Halls account exists
on a different level than the everyday (hence the need for a detour up or
down to the level of theory; this sense of Hall coming at theory from some-
where else, some other place, possibly familiar or recognizable but maybe
not; somewhere theory, the practice of abstraction, can surprise thecul-
tural studiestheorist). Thereby theory is both useful for disrupting a rei-
fied common sense and dangerous, because theory can entice you to mis-
take the detour (of abstract theorizing) for the main road (of cultural
critique). As Hall (2010: 1786) writes, The only theory worth having is that
which you have to fight off, which I take to mean that theory can become as
totalizing and distracting as the reductionism and economism (1786) that
the critic initially needs theory to combat. If the tools become the focus, you
lose sight of the project, and you fall back into the ventriloquism that had
so concerned Hall in literary studies.
For example, I think we can probably all agree that the cultural studies
project of teasing out the moments of resistance hidden within what looked
like wholly commodified situations has largely played itself outthe resis-
tance is everywhere omnivore that cultural studies was not, in critical
moments, sufficiently wary of, willing to, as it were, resist. And not because
its naive or silly to laud outlet shopping or Comic-Con conventions as
secretly subversive, but because at this point the hidden subversion (the
only political work necessary is the labor required to find or identify the
subversive practice within) theoretical paradigm remains almost completely
homologous with the intense neoliberal capitalism that cultural studies takes
itself to be trying to injurein a scant twenty years its gone from revolution-
ary to simply run-of-the-mill to suggest that there are myriad hidden subver-
sions bubbling just below the surface of the most mundane cultural prod-
ucts and practices. So pointing out shadow sites of resistance within popular
culture practices seems a bit of a nonstarter today, but thats the case because
a certain thinking of resistance has triumphed rather than been vanquished.
Resistance is everywhere in popular cultureI think thats true. The proj-
ect, which I take to have been Halls (not to mention Marxs) all along, is not
to point out that potential for resistance but to find conceptual ways to link
struggles, to mobilize and practice counterhegemony. If you simply point out
hidden cultural resistance, over and over again, thats the reified procrustean
bed of theory fetishism, theory for theorys sake.
And I think that while much left academic critique in the United States
has moved on from the hidden subversion paradigm, its unfortunately
arrived at what Hall might diagnose as a new ventriloquism, falling back
on an oft-repeated mantra, Neoliberalism is bad. This means that we see a
lot of cultural studies work offering a largely moral critique without much
new thinking about ways to conceptualize late, later, or just-in-time capital-
ism or find ways to outflank it. One thing that seems certain, any largely
moral approach to the problempointing out over and over again that free-
market capitalism sucks for most people on the planetis not going to get
the job done. As Hall points out in his genealogy of neoliberal practices in
Britain, The Neo-Liberal Revolution (2011), moralism is one of neoliberal-
isms principal operators. Discussing both Margaret Thatcher and Tony
Blair as prophets of community-busting neoliberal austerity, Hall argues
that the question was moral, not religious. and that everything they did
and said was infused with a strong moral sense: not doing the right thing,
according to some inner moral compass, was unthinkable (71617).
If, as Hall himself concludes, neo-liberalism does constitute a hege-
monic project, and popular thinking and the systems of calculation in
daily life offer very little friction to the passage of its ideas (728), I guess my
question about the present, and its relation to the recent past, goes some-
thing like this. Following from Halls conclusions (as well as transversally
linked analyses of everything from Foucauldian biopower to Michael Hardt

and Antonio Negris work on the multitude), one might wonder: When it
comes to diagnosing and offering some kind of friction that resists the
neoliberal present, is the question of theoretical detour (as unmasking hid-
den mediation) still the primary question of cultural studies? Or do we con-
front power (biopower, the power of the culture industry, the economic
power of the 1 percent, or the persistence of white privilege) more directly
today? And thereby do we require not so much an unmasking detour of
theory but a deployment of new theories? As Hall (2011: 722) himself sums
up the capitalist present from the vantage point of 2012:
In a culture where neo-liberal ideas represent a widely circulating current, the
free, ubiquitous and all-encompassing character of wealth is a dominant
theme. This is increasingly money in its naked, materialistic Americanised
formshorn of the old, deferential, aristocratic, upper-class connotations and
moral liberal reservations which have accompaniedand inflectedit in the
British context. Greed is good, Michael Douglas asserted in Wall Street. We
are extremely relaxed about people becoming filthy rich, Peter Mandelson,
one of the architects of New Labours Third Way declared. How much does
he earn?, How big is his bonus?, What is she worth?, How much does
that Gucci handbag / Jimmy Choo shoes cost? Does he own a yacht? Or a
football club? How much are they worth? Where can I get my hands on
some of it? These are key questions which dominate the cultural moment.
As Hall contends, we hardly live in an ideology-free moment, but exposing

that ideologys functions today takes place less through laboriously excavating
hidden homologies (showing how the ideology of neoliberalism manufac-
tures consent in a sly or underhanded way), than it functions through hege-
monic powers outright and unapologetic lauding of these imperatives. Its
right on the surface that the rich want their taxes lowered, that unfettered
capitalism is the only product on offer, even while Hall always reminds us
that this ideology is not deterministic in any direct base-superstructure way:
ideology is always contradictory, and there is no single, integrated ruling
ideology (713) because dominant or hegemonic ideologies are not iron sets
of logically determined, consistently enforced beliefs but a kind of practice-
based social connective tissue that Hall names conjunctureswhich he
compares to structures of feeling (following Raymond Williams) or sys-
tems of equivalence (following Ernesto Laclau). For Hall, as for Marx, ideol-
ogy is a lived relationa way of life, rather than an abstract, deterministic
belief system; so pointing out its existence or its contradictory nature, while a
crucial project during the Fordist or disciplinary years of welfare-state capital-

ism, seems increasingly unable to injure the conjuncture that is neoliberal
capitalism (precisely because this ideology doesnt have to hide in Fordist
compromises or various bait-and-switch schemes). When it comes to neolib-
eralism, what you see is what you getin Halls concise words, the fetishiza-
tion of money in its naked, materialistic Americanised form. This quota-
tion decisively names neoliberalisms ideological content, but Im not sure
Hall offers us much to unmask here. Which is maybe only to suggest that
ideology and its critique remain essential tasks; the question is whether the
bearing area of the critique is anymore a hidden or abstract deployment of
power, buried deep within or hovering abstractly above dominant practices.
Or maybe its simply that the historical situation has shifted: everyday
life itself has become abstractedall screens and virtual engagements,
everything from intensely personal practices like dating to the inhuman
flows of the global financial systemto the point where quotidian practices
meet theory on an abstracted plane that has become the new everyday. As
a dominant or hegemonic set of practices, neoliberalism is perhaps less a
chimera shimmering abstractly above or below our socius, than it constitutes
a new kind of realism, as Mark Fisher suggests in Capitalist Realism (2009).
To link this neoliberal conjuncture to the transversal plane of theoreti-
cal conjecture, one could at this point wonder about the cultural return of
what looks like several unrelated strands of naive realismin everything
from object-oriented ontology and speculative realism to thing theory and
posthumanism, all the way to the MP3-fueled rise of ubiquitous listening
and poptimism in music criticism (the new respect afforded all kinds of pop-
ular music) or something like conceptual writing in poetics (which eschews
the depths of poetic expression altogether and merely copies preexisting doc-
uments). Might these transversal returns of realism constitute less a series
of ideologically motivated escapes from neoliberal capitalism (a worrisome
return of naive empiricism) and maybe constitute instead a kind of post-
postmodern reinvigoration of realism and its mode of cultural critique? Now
I dont want to suggest that Kenneth Goldsmith is the new Theodore Drei-
ser, because hes not, or that the ubiquitous listening made possible by the
iPod is the replacement for Woody Guthries guitar as the fascist-killing
machine of our era, because its not. My question is more modest: Have
mutations in finance or neoliberal capitalism over the past few decades
refashioned a job for a certain kind of realism in popular culture today?
If thats indeed the case, then its not clear to me that the notion of
methodological separation and application (and the sense of strict separation
between abstract versus concrete, theory versus the everyday) thats inherent
in the phrase detour through theory obtains in quite the same way any-
more. As Negri makes clear time and again, and Thomas Pikettys Capital in
the Twenty-First Century confirms, the mid-twentieth-century Keynesian or
Fordist compromise was largely an anomalous attempt to save capitalism by
allowing the nation-state to give with one hand (providing free schooling, fos-
tering unions and minimum-wage legislation, guaranteeing credit for every-
day people to buy homes or go to college, and building smooth new highways
for them to drive to the mall) while taking away with the other (the education,
credit, and consumption regime sutures the vast majority to the system thats
finally not designed for their benefit in the least). The Fordist compromise
offered people, in Althussers concise words, an imaginary relation to their
real conditions, and the cultural studies detour through theory is a road taken
precisely to point out this bait and switch: the free schooling, for example,
was never free, as Althusser showed us time and again, but was rather a way
to reproduce and naturalize social norms supported by the elite classes. But
now there are increasingly fewer of those nation-state-backed neo-welfare
programs to unmask as ideologically suspicious, and as any American K12
teacher will tell you, a large number of Americans on the political right (not
exactly Althusserians) already understand state-run schooling as nothing
other than ideological (though in this case leftist) interpellation.
This contemporary state of affairs also suggests that with the increas-
ing disappearance of the midcentury welfare state, the detour of an unmask-
ing ideology critique is no longer the unflinchingly effective tool kit that it
once was. Surely, obfuscation still exists (as the inheritance tax becomes
the death tax, for example), and, surely, links remain hidden in the prod-
ucts and practices of popular culturesutured contradictions remain to be
untied. But maybe on the horizon we see developing an emergent kind of
direct confrontation with dominant power within much popular culture,
one where biopolitical neoliberalism would be right on the surface of cul-
tural practices, rather than hidden somewhere in their interstices, gaps, and
contradictionsa society where the real isnt hidden within, but smeared
across, the social fabric of practices. A new kind of realism, shorn of its adjec-
tival partner naive?
Indeed, one can see this kind of renewed realism overtaking the theo-
retical tools themselves these dayseven, for example, the tool kit most dear
to people in literature departments, the question of reading. Various brands
of surface reading or distant reading hold out some sense of trying to map
power and resistance across a spectrumin what you might call a wholesale
rather than retail way (in an aggregate sense of widespread social practices,
rather than a focus on individual responses to specific works). If thats too
close to home for many of us, think of what Anahid Kassabian (2013) calls
ubiquitous listening in popular music criticism: her sense that the prac-
tice of listening is no longer dedicated to individual songs or albums (which
require the interpretive detour of theory to make sense of them) but is rather
in tune with the ways that, in the era of the MP3 and the iPod music is every-
where, people use music to create various kinds of soundscapes in their
lives. This ubiquitous analysis of listening cuts across biopower and finance
capital, technology and subjectivity, but pretty much on the surface of these
listening practices rather than hidden somewhere within the lyrics or chord
progressions of individual songs.
In short, and in conclusive haste, one might say that as capitalism has
become almost completely operational, rather than representational, so the
tools required to diagnose and react to it must mutate in that direction. As
the real becomes more and more abstract, does the abstract follow this
inverted logic and become more real? Of course, in the end, this just brings
us back to Halls first detour of theory, his insistence that theories are called
into being by and mutate alongside changing historical conditions. If, as J.
Macgregor Wise (2003: 107) puts it in his reading of Hall, the detour
through theory involves the movement back and forth acrossvarying levels
of abstraction, then maybe everyday life has become synonymous with the
detour through theorybecause, without theory, its hard to make sense of
virtually anything that happens these days, precisely because so much hap-
pens virtually. As Hall writes in The Problem of IdeologyMarxism with-
out Guarantees (1986), the point of doing theory was never to come up with
a proper theory (much less the proper theory); rather, the important ongo-
ing moment is the process of theorizing, of the development and refinement
of new concepts and explanations which, alone, is the sign of a living body of
thought, capable still of engaging and grasping something of the truth about
new historical realities (44). 4 This is to stress again, in the end, Halls cru-
cial and enduring understanding of theory as a practice of ongoing response
to the mutating, complex provocations of the everyday. And Im here merely
trying to extend that sense of theorizing by imbricating it further into the
fabric of our historical moment in what used to be called the First World
West, where the formerly abstract planes of virtuality and theory have
morphed into the plane of the concrete everyday, and vice versa.
You wake up to your cell phone alarm, check your messages, and then
its microwave, GPS, iPod, Bluetooth, subway pass, headphones, MP3, bike
lane, ATM, laptop, pop-up ad, text message, Facebook, Starbucks, Wi-Fi, check
blog, Twitter feed, flash drive, track changes, Skype call, selfie stick, swipe ID,
Uber car, I-Pass lane, Thai food, credit card, box wine, YouTube, stream con-
tent, answer mail, white-noise app, good night. Start again tomorrow. Within
an everyday life so configured by popular culture,5 maybe the virtual or
abstract detour through theory has become one of the main roads forward.
Notes
This article is a revised version of a talk given in a session titled Theory, Popular, Culture at the
2015 Modern Language Association meeting in Vancouver. I thank panel organizer Hillary
Chute and fellow panelists Grant Farred and W. J. T. Mitchell for their insightful comments.
1 Or so the New York Times told us just after Derridas death in 2004. Journalist Emily
Eakin wrote in her astonishingly condescending The Theory of Everything, R.I.P.
(2004), published just a week after Derridas death: With the death on Oct. 8 of the
French philosopher Jacques Derrida, the era of big theory came quietly to a close.
2 As a concrete example of Halls theoretical analysis of one such historical moment or
movement, see his 1967 essay The Hippies: On an American Moment (2007).
3 On this point, see also Grossbergs CCCS and the Detour through Theory, his intro-
duction to the theory cluster in CCCS Selected Working Papers (2007).
4 Its worth noting that in this essay, Hall expresses concerns about the hiddenness of
ideology in classical Marxist terms. Hall (1986: 35) writes, Marxs taking off from the
exchange point of the recircuit of capital is an ideological process. It obscures, hides, con-
cealsthe terms are all in the textanother set of relations: the relations, which do not
appear on the surface but are concealed in the hidden abode of production (where prop-
erty, ownership, the exploitation of waged labour and the expropriation of surplus value
all take place). The ideological categories hide this underlying reality, and substitute for
all that the truth of market relations. Hall is here at great pains to divert theoretical
attention away from the sense of ideology as a kind of dupe-producing false conscious-
ness, gesturing instead toward the more robust sense of ideology as a set or practices or
a whole way of life, but he does seem keen to hang on to the sense of ideologys hidden
quality, at least in the mid-1980s. He continues: Is the worker who lives his or her rela-
tion to the circuits of capitalist production exclusively through the categories of a fair
price and a fair wage in false consciousness? Yes, if by that we mean there is some-
thing about her situation which she cannot grasp with the categories she is using; some-
thing about the process as a whole which is systematically hidden because the available
concepts only give her a grasp of one of its many-sided moments. No, if by that we mean
that she is utterly deluded about what goes on under capitalism. The falseness therefore
arises, not from the fact that the market is an illusion, a trick, a sleight-of-hand, but only
in the sense that it is an inadequate explanation of a process. It has also substituted one
part of the process for the wholea procedure which, in linguistics, is known as meton-
ymy and in anthropology, psychoanalysis and (with special meaning) in Marxs work, as
fetishism. The other lost moments of the circuit are, however, unconscious, not in the
Freudian sense, because they have been repressed from consciousness, but in the sense
of being invisible, given the concepts and categories we are using (37).
5 I am well aware that this kind of high-tech, device-dependent virtuality is not the daily
experience of everyone in the United States or the United Kingdom, not to mention
everyone on the planet. Though as of this writing (summer 2015), 6 billion people
worldwide (of the global population of approximately 7 billion) have regular access to
mobile phones. Thats a surprising number and a statistic that does tend to signal an
increasing virtuality or networked quality of everyday life globally . . . until you couple
this with the fact that only 4.5 billion people have regular access to a toilet (Robson
2013). As some everyday cultural practices get more abstract and virtual, we do well to
remember that others remain stubbornly concrete, intractable, and urgent. Here I am
crucially schooled by Hall (2010: 1792): Against the urgency of people dying in the
streets, what in Gods name is the point of cultural studies? . . . At that point, I think
anybody who is into cultural studies seriously as an intellectual practice, must feel, on
their pulse, its ephemerality, its insubstantiality, how little it registers, how little weve
been able to change anything or get anybody to do anything. If you dont feel that as one
tension in the work that you are doing, theory has let you off the hook.
References
Deleuze, Gilles. 1995. Difference and Repetition. Translated by Paul Patton. New York: Colum-
bia University Press.
Eakin, Emily. 2004. The Theory of Everything, R.I.P. New York Times, October 17. www
.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/weekinreview/17eaki.html.
Elliot, Gregory. 1987. Althusser: The Detour of Theory. London: Haymarket Books.
Fisher, Mark. 2009. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Winchester, UK: Zero Books.
Foucault, Michel. 1991. Remarks on Marx: Conversations with Duccio Trombadori. Translated by
R. James Goldstein and James Cascaito. New York: Semiotext(e).
Grossberg, Lawrence. 1993. Can Cultural Studies Find True Happiness in Communication?
Journal of Communication 43, no. 4: 8997.
Grossberg, Lawrence. 2007. CCCS and the Detour through Theory. In CCCS Selected Work-
ing Papers, vol. 1, edited by Ann Gray et al., 3347. London: Routledge.
Grossberg, Lawrence. 2014. Rage against the Dying of a Light: Stuart Hall (19322014).
Truthout, February 15. www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/21895-rage-against-the-dying
-of-a-light-stuart-hall-1932-2014.
Hall, Stuart. 1986. The Problem of IdeologyMarxism without Guarantees. Journal of Com-
munication Inquiry 10, no. 2: 2844.
Hall, Stuart. 1997. The Local and the Global: Globalization and Ethnicity. In Culture, Global-
ization, and the World-System: Contemporary Conditions for the Representation of Identity,
edited by Anthony D. King, 1940. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Hall, Stuart. 2007. The Hippies: On an American Moment. In CCCS Selected Working
Papers, vol. 2, edited by Ann Gray et al., 14667. London: Routledge.
Hall, Stuart. 2010. Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies. In The Norton Anthology
of Theory and Criticism, 2nd ed., edited by Vincent Leitch et al., 178295. New York:
Norton.
Hall, Stuart. 2011. The Neo-Liberal Revolution. Cultural Studies 25, no. 6: 70528.
Kassabian, Anahid. 2013. Ubiquitous Listening: Affect, Attention, and Distributed Subjectivity.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Rapaport, Herman. 1993. Milton and the Postmodern. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Robson, Steve. 2013. Six of the Worlds 7 Billion People Have Mobile Phones . . . but Only 4.5
Billion Have a Toilet Says UN Report. Daily Mail, March 22. www.dailymail.co.uk
/news/article-2297508/Six-world-s-seven-billion-people-mobile-phones--4-5billion
-toilet-says-UN-report.html.
Smith, Mark M. 2007. Sensing the Past: Seeing, Hearing, Smelling, Tasting, and Touching in His-
tory. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Wise, J. Macgregor. 2003. Reading Hall Reading Marx. Cultural Studies 17, no. 2: 10512.
A G A I N S T the D A Y
The Politics of the Public Toilet

Kathi Weeks, Editor
Kathi Weeks
Introduction: The Politics of the Public Toilet
T his dossier is intended to identify some of the urgent problems and com-
pelling questions posed by the public toilet. From the history of racial segre-
gation in the United States and the ongoing sex segregation of toilets to the
desperate dearth of facilities around the world, the provision and governance
of the toilet is a politically charged phenomenon. The public toilet serves as
a site of the production and regulation of sex, gender, sexuality, class, caste,
and disability, and it is today the target of activists demanding justice for
many, including women and poor, disabled, queer, and transgender people.
There is clearly much political work to do on all these intersecting
fronts. There is also a pressing need for scholarly studies of the public toilet.
Despite the excellent academic work that has been produced on the topic,1
there remains an enormous amount of intellectual labor yet to dolabor
that can draw from and contribute to ongoing struggles over facilities and
access. There is much we have yet to understand about precisely how the
public toilet functions as a bulwark of sex binarism, a tool of gender regula-
tion, an apparatus of class subordination, a site of heteronormative policing,
an ableist institution, a place of colonial administration, and a mechanism
for the production of subalternity. Rather than simply accommodating pre-
existing variations among us, the dispositif of the public toilet is coconstitu-
tive of these regimes of inequality. For a particularly instructive example,
think about how the standard facility disables the bodies that do not conform
to the model of its generic user. The public toilets utility for these systems of
social hierarchy is only enhanced to the extent that it remains neglected by
our political projects and critical discourses. For years it seems that the many
problems of the public toilet had managed to hide more or less in plain sight.

Weeks Introduction 745
But times are changing. For example, the stubborn naturalization of

sex-segregated public toilets, even when most household toilets are shared, is
now, finally, coming under fire in public venues, most notably by trans activ-
ists and their allies. The public debates that have been staged across the
country over queer and transgender peoples access to public bathrooms
offer some intriguing insights into the current state of the politics of sex and
gender, although the controversies require one to dig through several layers
of ideological camouflage. Thus, for instance, the vulnerability that some
women or girls report feeling in the public toilet and the louder voices of
their would-be protectors are best read as displaced symptoms, but perhaps
in need of a differential diagnosis. The disingenuous evocation of the spec-
ter of violence against women in these debates is particularly galling because
of the way it both trivializes what remains a pervasive social problem that
obviously occurs more often in households than in public toilets and ignores
other instances of violence, including the well-documented instances of vio-
lence to which transgender people have been subjected and the violence
done to people around the world who, for lack of access, are unable to urinate
or defecate when necessary in sanitary conditions.
A wide range of analytical apparatuses and conceptual lenses have
been and could be used to study this site. In considering some of the possi-
bilities, an intersectional methodology is critically important. The public toi-
let is remarkable as a location from which to view the production of multiple
social inequalities. Attending to the interaction of multiple axes of difference
in such a site can, for example, enable us to disaggregate the experiences of
a group like women along lines of gender, race, class, sexuality, disability,
and nation (see, e.g., Plaskow 2008) and, by the same token, to craft poten-
tially coalitional models of political response (see, e.g., Kafer 2013).
Continuing this review of possible analytics, the public-private dis-
tinction, at least when deployed in a nondichotomous fashion, can argu-
ably reveal some interesting aspects of the site. Among other reasons, this
is because the contents and boundaries of what is configured as private
and public are highly variable and remarkably fluid in the case of the pub-
lic toilet. Clearly, the 1970s feminist adage that the personal is political is
especially applicable to a site that can be imagined as the location of an
intensely private experience that is also to some degree publicly exposed.
The analysis of what is conceived as private and what is seen as public
about the space is made even more complex with the increasing privatiza-
tion of social services under the conditions of neoliberalism, in this case,
when businesses like malls, stores, and restaurants are sometimes expected
746 The South Atlantic Quarterly Against the Day October 2016
to provide facilitiespublic in only the most impoverished sensethat

are accessible only to those who can pass as acceptable consumers.
There are a range of different temporal registers that could benefit
from further contributions. For instance, historical work on the public toilet
faces a number of hurdles. Barbara Penner (2005: 87) describes some of the
difficulties she faced in trying to learn exactly how nineteenth-century Brit-
ish women urinated and defecated in public when the standard archives
relied on polite abstractions couched in terms of public health, sanitation,
and hygiene. Speculation about the possibilities of potential futures with
alternative facilities is equally hampered by the paucity of the forward-look-
ing social and political imagination.
Consider too some of the various spatial scales through which we can
gain further analytical purchase on the site. For example, beginning by map-
ping the architecture of a facility, we might then, relying on an infrastruc-
tural point of entry (see Desai, McFarlane, and Graham 2015; Wilson 2016),
trace the networks of pipes to the sewage treatment plant or into the soil or
water and, finally, drawing on a transnational methodology, raise questions
about the fiscal and environmental sustainability of the continued reliance
in the global North on flush-and-discharge systems (see Jewitt 2011).
The affective turn offers a number of generative angles from which to
approach the public toilet. It is a location around which a host of powerful
affects circulate, including shame, anxiety, revulsion, and disgust. But it can
also be, perhaps not coincidentally, the locus for the experience of a variety of
poorly understood and often suppressed pleasurable intensities. This too
would seem to render the site a particularly fertile ground for psychoanalytic
thought (see, e.g., Cavanagh 2010).
Finally, conceived as a biopolitical institution, the public toilet offers a
rich object of study for political ecology and posthumanist thought. Urinat-
ing and defecating are arguably the ways we most often, and perhaps most
profoundly, experience our porousness with the sociobiological ecosystem
and our kinship with other forms of life. In this sense, they routinely chal-
lenge the disembodied abstractions of both liberal individualism and speci-
est humanism. The problems that such bodily events raise for these models
of the relentlessly individuated and supposedly sovereign subject are not just
a matter of the material leakiness of our bioexistence but are also a matter
of the sounds and smells that, in refusing to stay put, violate the tidy bound
aries of the sanitized sensorium that we owe in part to these models.
The essays that follow develop a number of these analytical rubrics
and lines of inquiry to examine the past, present, and future of the public
Weeks Introduction 747
toilet. Since they intervene at a nexus of intersecting forces of oppression,

theoretical and practical work on this area are necessarily collective and coali-
tional. The public toilet has been the scene of exclusions, but it is also becom-
ing the site of new possibilities for political theory and practice.
Note
1 For good introductions to a portion of this work, see the edited volumes by Olga Gersh-
enson and Barbara Penner (2009) and Harvey Molotch and Laura Norn (2010).
References
Cavanagh, Sheila. 2010. Queering Bathrooms: Gender, Sexuality, and the Hygienic Imagination.
Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Desai, Renu, Colin McFarlane, and Stephen Graham. 2015. The Politics of Open Defecation:
Informality, Body, and Infrastructure in Mumbai. Antipode 47, no. 1: 98120.
Gershenson, Olga, and Barbara Penner, eds. 2009. Ladies and Gents: Public Toilets and Gender.
Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Jewitt, Sarah. 2011. Geographies of Shit: Spatial and Temporal Variations in Attitudes towards
Human Waste. Progress in Human Geography 35, no. 5: 60826.
Kafer, Alison. 2013. Feminist, Queer, Crip. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Molotch, Harvey, and Laura Norn, eds. 2010. Toilet: Public Restrooms and the Politics of Shar-
ing. New York: New York University Press.
Penner, Barbara. 2005. Researching Female Public Toilets: Gendered Spaces, Disciplinary
Limits. Journal of International Womens Studies 6, no. 2: 8198.
Plaskow, Judith. 2008. Embodiment, Elimination, and the Role of Toilets in Struggles for
Social Justice. CrossCurrents 58, no. 1: 5164.
Wilson, Ara. 2016. The Infrastructure of Intimacy. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and
Society 41, no. 2: 24780.
Judith Plaskow
Taking a Break: Toilets, Gender, and Disgust
T he brouhaha over Hillary Clintons bathroom break during the third Dem-
ocratic debate in December 2015 brings together two interrelated themes: the
obstacles surrounding womens access to bathrooms and the broader cultural
discomfort with elimination that makes inequities in access difficult to
address. Clintons delay in returning to the stage after using the toilet was not
just a sign of the barriers every woman faces to getting to a public toilet
quickly. It also unleashed a torrent of comment and abuse. Mike Huckabee
opined that Clintons best moment in the entire night was when she was in
the restroom; Republican front-runner Donald Trump said, I know where
she wentits disgusting, I dont want to talk about it (quoted in Weiner
2015). Feminist columnists commenting on these comments were barraged
by further misogynist remarks as well as angry dismissals of the triviality of
the whole subject (Chemaly 2015). And, indeed, the subject is trivial in the
sense that someones using the toilet is an entirely unremarkable, multiple-
times-a-day occurrence. So why all the discussion and attention?
Obviously, Clintons tardy return to the debate touched a couple of
nerves in the broader public. For one thing, it dramatized for a national audi-
ence the very different situations of women and men in relation to bathroom
access and thus, implicitly, the ways social hierarchies are mapped onto pub-
lic space. From decrepit inner-city schools to new building projects featuring
$50 million apartments, the built environment reflects a set of ideas about
who has social value, who does what, and who belongs where (Matrix 1984: 1).
Because the need for toilets is universal, their availability and distribution
provide a particularly revealing map of power relations in US society, an
everyday lesson in who merits social recognition and whose time is consid-

Plaskow Taking a Break 749
ered to be of value. The profoundly unequal toilet facilities available to

whites and coloreds under segregation, for example, gave the daily lie to
the notion of separate but equal. Black people traveling through the South
during the Jim Crow era had to plan carefully where they might be able to
stop for toilet breaks or had to relieve themselves between car doors on the
side of the road (Cannon 2008). The quest of transgender people for places to
pee in peace (Transgender Law Center 2005), free from surveillance, hostil-
ity, and the risk of violence has been crucial to placing bathroom access on the
public policy agenda.1 As virtually all transgender narratives testify, standing
at the door of a standard sex-segregated restroom wondering what awaits on
the other side is a powerful daily reminder of ones outsiderness and differ-
ence. Similarly, despite the twenty-five years that have passed since the enact-
ment of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), disabled people often
confront supposedly ADA-compliant facilities that are up two steps or double
as storage rooms for mops and high chairs, in which toilet doors open inward
or are not wide enough to admit a wheelchair, and where absolutely no accom-
modations are made for disabilities other than wheelchair use.
Able-bodied and cisgendered women do not usually face the same
obstacles to moving around freely in public space, but it is nonetheless inter-
esting to reflect on how shifts in womens bathroom access closely mirror
their changing social status. Until quite recently, the complete absence of
womens toilets in certain locations clearly signaled their exclusion from halls
of power. Sandra Day OConnor found when she joined the Supreme Court in
1981 that, unlike her male colleagues, who had their own restroom, she had
to walk down a long hall to the public lavatory. Similarly, there were no wom-
ens toilets near the Senate floor until 1992. Women in the House of Repre-
sentatives finally got a bathroom near the House chamber only in 2011. Insti-
tutions such as the Princeton Graduate School, Harvard Law School, and Yale
Medical School for many years not only had no restrooms for women but also
justified womens exclusion on the grounds that there were no available lava-
tories. Today cisgendered, able-bodied women are more on the civic map. As
half of every social group, including elites, they can be fairly certain that there
will be some space available in which they can relieve themselves. Yet the
placement and (in)adequacy of toilet facilities for women still provide clues to
their social subordination. They may not be expunged from public space in
the same way as transgender and disabled people, but womens needs are cer-
tainly not accorded the same status as those of men.
To begin with, as Clintons experience indicates, womens bathrooms
are generally less conveniently located than supposedly equivalent mens
rooms. Women will often have to walk past the mens room in auditoriums,
restaurants, and theatersin Clintons case, for one minute and forty-five
secondsto spaces that are just a bit farther from where the main action
takes place. Often a woman will arrive at the appropriate bathroom only to
find herself confronted with a long line. Every woman who has spent time in
restaurants, theaters, museums, sporting events, airports, train stations, or
other public venues has had the experience of waiting endlessly to use the
toilet while watching men zip in and out of the adjoining mens room. Ineq-
uities in location and access can be dismissed as trivial, but they convey a
message about whose time is more important; they are repeated daily
reminders of whose needs come first and whose second. In learning to stand
in bathroom lines and wait patiently from an early age, girl children are also
learning to accept their subordination quietly. As Congresswoman Yvette
Clarke said, When were talking about restroom equity, were talking about
the time it takes each of us to handle our business and get back to business
(quoted in Talev 2006). But whose business is deemed socially significant
and whose less so?
The message restrooms convey that women are less important than
men and that this lesser significance is simply to be accepted as one of lifes
many inconveniences is underscored by the role of bathrooms in supporting
the gender binary. As one of the last totally gender-divided spaces in US soci-
ety, bathrooms give concrete daily form to a social system in which men are
dominant and women are perceived as other. Sex-segregated lavatories
declare that there are two and only two genders, that everyone is either male
or female, that gender is fixed and self-evident, and that there is some unde-
fined danger in men and women using toilets in a shared space. These les-
sons, too, are imbibed early. Gender is one of the central categories children
are offered for making sense of the world, and bathrooms are important sites
for children learning to perform gender properly. For some people, being
directed to the appropriate restroom prompts their first awareness of gen-
der.2 The point at which a child refuses to go to the toilet with a parent of
the other sex is often an important moment in the childs emerging gender
identification. Judith Halberstam (1998: 23) calls the bathroom, as we know
it, ... the crumbling edifice of gender in the twentieth century. And it is
indeed striking the ways public toilets perpetuate the subordination of
women within a framework in which everyone must identify either as a
woman or as a man.
How to address the inequities in womens access to bathrooms in ways
that do not further reinforce the gender binary or marginalize transgender
people is something of a conundrum. On the one hand, women deserve lava-

tories that meet their physical and social needsneeds that are too often left
out of account in the creation of public space. Even where mens and womens
restrooms have equal square footageand that is not always the case in older
buildingsthe fact that urinals take up less floor space than stalls do means
that men generally have more toilet fixtures. But for both biological and social
reasons, women need more fixtures than men, not fewer. Studies have shown
that, for many reasons, women take longer than men to go to the toilet: They
have to undo their clothing and then rearrange it. A substantial percentage of
adult women are menstruating at any given time, which increases both their
need for toilets and the time they spend there. Womens urethras are shorter
than mens, and women are therefore more prone to urinary tract infections
that increase both the frequency and urgency of urination. Pregnant women
also need to urinate more frequently. Women are often responsible for
escorting children and elders to the toilet. A number of municipalities have
passed so-called potty parity laws that attempt to equalize the time men and
women spend in public restrooms by requiring that, in new construction,
women have two or three times the number of stalls that men have. Such
laws enormously enhance womens ready access to toilets. On the other
hand, potty parity does nothing to address the gender segregation that is
another striking aspect of toilet culture in the United States and which ren-
ders transgender people invisible.
Sorting through issues of equity and the range of needs around ade-
quate and accessible bathroom space is made difficult, however, by the sec-
ond way in which Clintons bathroom break touched a nerve among the
public: the topic of toilets leaves people embarrassed and uncomfortable.
How else do we explain the combination of fascination, ogling, and distaste
about something that, on the face of it, is entirely unremarkable? I know
where she went, said Trump, too repelled to even utter the word. And while
he may be particularly misogynist and squeamish about bodily discharges,
repugnance at elimination is a much broader cultural phenomenon. The
fact of multiple euphemisms for the toiletbathroom, restroom, cloak-
room, washroom, powder room, lavatory, loo, john, WCitself testifies to a
general unwillingness to use the actual word. Then toilets are often hidden
away, in the least attractive part of buildings or public areas. In restaurants,
they are often found down in the basement; in malls and stores, around cor-
ners or in hidden nooks. Toilets are abject spacesqueer spaces, crip
spaces, marginalized and disparaged spaces to which people resort to do
what is considered unseemly to witness or discuss (Broyer 2015).3 Perhaps
the ultimate testimony to our cultural discomfort with toilets is the extraordi-
nary absence of public facilities in most cities in the United States. Somehow,
if we act as if we do not need toilets to move comfortably through the world,
then we can also pretend that our need to urinate and defecate doesnt exist. In
the words of one commentator, we are as repulsed by real bodies as medieval
saints were but without their religious motivation (Ashenburg 2007: 271).
But despite efforts to deny this inconvenient part of ourselves, ade-
quate toilets are an essential dimension of access to public space because
elimination is a fundamental aspect of our embodiment. Without elimina-
tion, we could not rid our bodies of waste, remain healthy, take in nourish-
ment, or develop or grow. Yet it seems that urine, and much more especially
feces, evokes in many people strong feelings of disgust. Disgust is a univer-
sal human emotion, found cross-culturally, that more than other feelings
connects to sensory experience in a very visceral way. Disgust is rooted in
what it feels like to see, touch, taste, or smell certain things. While objects of
disgust are certainly partly socially molded, the things that people find dis-
gusting are not a random sample. Cross-cultural studies of disgust have
shown that body waste is at the top of most lists. Disgust is a reaction to stim-
uli such as feces, menstrual blood, and vomit that remind us of our animal
natures. In the words of William Ian Miller (1997: xiv), The basis for all dis-
gust is usthat we live and die and that the process is a messy one emitting
substances and odors that make us doubt ourselves and fear our neighbors.4
Disgust is a response to the awareness that our bodies exceed our conscious
control. However much our cognitive capacities and symbol systems might
allow us to feel that we are above the natural world, our bodies constantly call
attention to our physical limitations. While the ultimate way that bodies
escape conscious control is death, on a more immediate and daily level, we
are reminded of our creaturely nature by our need to eliminate waste. Even
the most brilliant scholar sitting at a desk and writing about the social con-
struction of the body will at some point need to get up and go to the toilet.
Disgust has important political consequences in that the rejection of
elimination as part of human embodiment becomes intertwined with a
series of social hierarchies as the rejected part of the self is then projected
onto multiple others. Marginalized groups are often perceived not simply as
socially inferior but also as contaminating or disgusting. As Ruth Barcan
(2005: 10) says, Those who represent a threat to the established gender/sex-
ual (and sometimes racial) order may themselves come to be imagined as a
form of cultural waste. As Trumps revulsion at the thought of a woman
using the toilet indicates, disgust provides the passion that helps maintain
social orderings. Whites, Christians, people with wealth, have at various his-
torical moments complained about the smell of black people, Jews, workers,
homeless people, women, and others (Miller 1997: 245). It is an irony that
nonetheless makes perfect sense that those defined as shit are often pre-
cisely the people denied adequate toilet access; the socially abject are excluded
from toilets as abject space. Insofar as public bathrooms acknowledge the
individuals right to a small private preserve in public space, a small patri-
mony of sacredness (Erving Goffman quoted in Cahill et al. 1985: 3839) to
which everyone is entitled, those defined as other are not imagined as part of
the human community whose needs must be taken into account in the con-
struction of such space. But the absence of toilet access prevents full partici-
pation in public life and forces people into compromises that can reinforce
perceptions of their abjection. Homeless people are the paradigmatic instance
of this double bind in that they are often forced to relieve themselves in pub-
lic because they lack any alternatives and are then perceived as all the more
disgusting. Meanwhile, those for whom easy access to toilets is entirely a
nonissue can more readily disown elimination as an aspect of the self while
denying adequate provision to numerous others.
The fuss around Clintons bathroom break becomes less mysterious,
then, when we reflect on how it pulled together the issues of provision and
disgust in ways that reveal some uncomfortable truths. Even important peo-
ple, people whose needs are generally invisibly and seamlessly met, some-
times have to go to the toilet. And when these important people are women,
they do not get to go with the same ease and dispatch as powerful men do;
thus the profound inequalities in mens and womens access to toilets
become publicly visible. Women are then labeled disgusting for requiring
the facilities that men in power get to take for granted. The discourses of dis-
comfort and disgustof repugnance at the bodily nature we all shareand
of social inequality help construct and reinforce each other. It seems, there-
fore, that thinking through and implementing adequate toilet provision for
all will also entail rethinking attitudes toward elimination as an aspect of
our embodiment.
Notes
1 North Carolina HB2, a bill that requires transgender people to use the bathroom cor-
responding to the sex on their birth certificate, provoked extensive public debate about
the issue of bathroom access. It was passed in March 2016, after this article was
in press.
2 When I have asked students to write about their first awareness of gender, I have been
struck by the number who mentioned bathrooms.
3 This formulation emerged in conversation with Nili Broyer after she presented her
paper at a meeting of the Society for Disability Studies.
4 I am dependent on Miller for my description of disgust.
References
Ashenburg, Katherine. 2007. The Dirt on Clean: An Unsanitized History. New York: North
Point.
Barcan, Ruth. 2005. Dirty Spaces: Communication and Contamination in Mens Public Toi-
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Broyer, Nili. 2015. From Rights to Radical: A Restrooms Mirror in the Israeli Accessibility
Law. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Disability Studies,
Atlanta, June 11.
Cahill, Spencer, et al. 1985. Meanwhile Backstage: Public Bathrooms and the Interactive
Order. Urban Life 14, no. 1: 3358.
Cannon, Katie. 2008. Author interview, New Haven, CT, April 2.
Chemaly, Soraya. 2015. Biology Doesnt Write Laws: Hillary Clintons Bathroom Break Wasnt
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Matrix. 1984. Making Space: Women and the Man-Made Environment. London: Pluto.
Miller, William Ian. 1997. The Anatomy of Disgust. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Talev, Margaret. 2006. As House Gets Its First Female Speaker, Potty Parity Is Revisited.
McClatchyDC, December 21. www.mcclatchydc.com/latest-news/article24460222.html.
Transgender Law Center. 2005. Peeing in Peace: A Resource Guide for Transgender Activists and
Allies. Oakland, CA: Transgender Law Center. transgenderlawcenter.org/issues/public
-accommodations/peeing-in-peace.
Weiner, Jennifer. 2015. The Year of the Toilet. New York Times, December 22. www.nytimes
.com/2015/12/23/opinion/the-year-of-the-toilet.html?_r=0.
Alison Kafer
Other Peoples Shit (and Pee!)
I have no problems sharing a restroom with transgender individuals. I have a

major problem sharing a public restroom with people (usually men) who dont
put the seat down or who drip or splatter on the floor.
Joann
A fine restaurant here recently altered the signs on its two single-user restrooms
from Men and Women to read Anybody and Everybody. Unfortunately, one result
is that they are both now filthy, with urine splashed on the floor. I dont go there
anymore for that reason.
Ellen
Joanns and Ellens comments (New York Times 2015) are not new or unusual
in conversations about all-gender bathrooms, even among feminists;1 years
ago on WMST-L (an international womens studies listserv), there was a dis-
cussion of all-gender restrooms that similarly turned on the question of filth:
men, apparently, are messy and out of control, pissing everywhere but inside
the toilet bowl, while women are clean and tidy. I imagine many of us have
watched this assumption play out in daily life: a small cluster of women waits
to use the single-stall restroom marked Women, while the Mens single-stall
restroom remains empty; the women remark to one another that they dont
want to go in the mens room because they know its dirty; knowing laughter
ensues (and the wait continues).
Im struck by the multiple layers of bias in these interactions: the adher-
ence to binary systems of sex and gender; the assertion of essentialized gen-
der roles and behaviors (men are dirty, women are clean); the assumption

Figure 1. Unititled. Courtesy of Julie Avril Minich
that the ones hearing or reading these comments are not the ones cleaning
the bathrooms; the implication that transgender women are really/still men
(conflating trans access to restrooms with mens presence in restrooms); and
the deflection of trans and genderqueer access to public restrooms (having
no problems sharing a restroom with transgender individuals, but priori-
tizing [cis]womens access to clean restrooms). Why focus on the need for
restrooms that are safe and accessible for allthe subject of the newspaper
article to which Joann and Ellen were respondingwhen there is (mens)
piss on the floor?
The piss on the floor concerns me, too, although not in the same way
that it does these commenters. Why does the conversation about all-gender
bathrooms turn so frequently to the topic of dirt, filth, and hygiene (see figure
1)? How is it that such claims are seen as justifying the continued practice of
gender-segregated spaces, even though such spaces actively exclude trans,
genderqueer, and gender-nonconforming people? What can we learn from the
assumption that these assertions are simply common sense? As Tanya Titch-
kosky (2011: 73) argues, Justification is not second order to the fact of exclu-
sion; ... it is how we do exclusion as well as generate its everyday sensibility.
Kafer Other Peoples Shit (and Pee!) 757
This particular justificationgender-segregated bathrooms are neces-

sary to shield women from male filthis closely related to the other main
justification for maintaining gender-segregated bathrooms, the need to pro-
tect women from male violence. As opponents of the Houston Equal Rights
Ordinance put it, creating all-gender restrooms or allowing transgender peo-
ple to use the restrooms consistent with their gender expression would
allow troubled men to enter womens public bathrooms, showers and locker
rooms. This would violate [womens] privacy and put them in harms way2
(Moyer 2015). Both justificationsdirt, violencecast (cis)women and (cis)
girls as in need of protection from men, a protection best offered through
gender-segregated spaces. They rely, in other words, on the assumption that
all women are, at core, the same and that with that sameness comes safety.
Yetas many of us know all too wellthe womens room has never
been a site of safety or privacy for all women: transwomen and gender-non-
conforming people are policed and harassed; disabled women find them-
selves the objects of invasive curiosity; homeless women are shunned or
thrown out; women of color are met with scrutiny and suspicion, especially
in predominantly white spaces; women wearing hijabs are greeted with hos-
tile stares; fat women encounter murmurs and looks of disgust; and so on.
In other words, there are many people who do not experience women-only
spaces or rooms full of women as necessarily or inherently safe; a little piss
on the floor is the least of their worries when entering the loo.
I usually enter womens rooms with a mixture of anxiety and dread.
These feelings are certainly driven by the inaccessibility of much of the built
landscape: regardless of the presence or absence of an access sign, will the
bathroom be architecturally accessible to my wheelchair? But my anxiety
and dread are also motivated by years of experiences with a more attitudinal
inaccessibility, and it is this manifestation of ableism that makes bathrooms
feel like anything but safe havens of sameness. I am often confronted with
stares, intrusive questions, and counterproductive offers of help in the
bathroom, all of which remind me that I dont belong. But even more anxiety
producing is the state of the stall itself: contrary to Joanns and Ellens asser-
tions, the womens wheelchair toilet is often covered in piss, full of shit, and
stopped up with toilet paper; paper seat covers linger half on, half off the
seat. The sign may say accessible, but the reality is anything but.
The ableist reading of this scenario would be that disabled people are
messy, but the reality is a lot more complicated. There are undoubtedly peo-
ple with illnesses or impairments that make it difficult for them to control
the flow of their urine, increase the likelihood that they will need to defecate
in public, or make maneuvering the flush handle difficult. But most of the
piss and shit I encounter in public restrooms comes from people who choose
to piss on the seat or leave the toilet full of their waste, all in the name of
cleanliness. In the interest of protecting themselves from germs, they
have chosen to hover over the toilet bowl or avoid the flush handle.3 And this
cleanliness is, for women like Joann and Ellen, part of the safety and com-
fort they associate with women-only spaces, but it is a cleanliness and com-
fort forged in a stunning lack of concern for others. What illustrates egocen-
tric individualism better than the act of hovering?
I remember my mother instructing me to hover in public restrooms
so that I wouldnt have to sit on the toilet seat (I still had the ability to squat
then); my students report receiving the same advice from their relatives and
friends. Whether I pissed on the seat in the process was irrelevantall that
mattered was that I kept my body at a safe remove from the toiletbesides,
any other person using the toilet was surely going to hover, too. Paper seat
covers were a possible alternative, but they werent always available, they
were slippery, and they required ones hands to get perilously close to touch-
ing the toilet. Better to hover.
Perhaps it isnt surprising that the public toilet is charged with anxiety
about germs and dirt: restrooms are, by definition, sites of bodily waste and
its accompanying sounds and smells. As Ruth Barcan (2010) explains, this
dirtiness is heightened by the fact that public toilets contain the bodily
waste of others, so that we imagine the flush handle or toilet seat as being
contaminated by their touch. Yet Barcan notes that this fear is not really
grounded in reality; computer keyboards and telephones are often far more
germy than toilet seats or faucets. As a result, she explains: When I hear
of people afraid to touch a tap, I think less of real germs than of the fear of
the other. Prohibitions on touching objectswhatever their microbiological
basis, sound or otherwiseinevitably involve a fear of touching the body of
another, even by proxy. ... Surely fear of the prewarmed seat is less a ratio-
nally grounded fear of infection than a fear of the touch of the stranger (36).
This fear of the touch of the stranger motivates much of what hap-
pens in and around public restrooms. Women hover so as not to touch the
seat, leaving behind splatters of piss; people refuse to touch the flush handle,
leaving their piss, paper, and shit in the bowl. Both practices make it more
difficult for people who lack the muscles or bodily configuration to hover to
use the toilet; they may also make it more difficult for those who need the
toilet to empty catheter bags or need the stall to perform medical procedures.
(And if the typical multistall restroom has only one accessible stall, and
that stall is rendered unusable, then the person needing an accessible stall
must now find another bathroom on a different floor, in a different building,
on a different block, etc.) Concerns about the smells of others, or about oth-
ers encountering ones own smell, lead to chemical air fresheners that can
make restrooms dangerous for those with chemical sensitivities or breath-
ing difficulties. And all of these practices prioritize the cleanliness, com-
fort, and safety of the individual user over the people tasked with cleaning
the bathrooms; the latter are literally unimaginable in a bathroom politics
that sees safety in sameness and danger in difference (men are dirty, toilets
are full of other peoples germs, and unseen others clean it up while we
women can hover safely above it all). Can we instead imagine a different
potty politics, one less focused on individualism and detachment and more
invested in the multiplicity of bodies and minds in the loo?
One of the sites for such explorations has been the signage posted out-
side public restrooms (indeed, the comments that begin this essay were in
response to an article about such signs). Once we move beyond the Men and
Women signs, with gendered stick figures to match, what else might we
imagine? What kinds of coalitions do different terms or images make pos-
sible, and what kinds of coalitions do they foreclose?
I spend a lot of time fantasizing about bathroom signage, and I have to
admit that my thoughts dont always come from a coalitional or feminist/
queer/crip space. The fantasies often come when Im in the airport trying to
squeeze a bathroom break in between flights and I find myself waiting (and
waiting, and waiting, ...) for someone to vacate the accessible stall while I
look longingly at all the empty inaccessible stalls around me. 4 At those
moments, the imagined sign goes something like Does your body fit in the
other stalls? Then why are you in this one?, or Not disabled? Then make
room for those who are, or, as my departure time gets closer and my bladder
fuller, For disabled people only.
Although in my more desperate moments I do find myself wishing
there were some way to get nondisabled people to stop using the accessible
stalls in multistall restrooms when the other stalls are empty, I dont really
want to place yet another layer of surveillance on the public toilet. Bathrooms
are already sites of surveillance and exclusion, where those who dont belong
are kept out. Insisting that wide stalls are for disabled people only would
likely increase such practices, encouraging users to monitor the bodies of
others for signs of legitimate use. As Ellen Samuels (2014: 12640) reveals
in her analysis of parking spaces, such policing relies on ableist assumptions
about what disability looks like; harassment of those deemed insufficiently
disabled by passersby is common, and there are even websites where people
can report illegitimate users. I dont want the same for bathroom stalls.
So I keep trying: If you dont need the grab bars for balance, arent
traveling with an infant or small children, or dont need the extra room to
accommodate the size of your body or wheelchair or to perform medical pro-
cedures, you are taking this space away from those who do. Although its a
bit long for a bathroom sign, this option recognizes that there are many dif-
ferent reasons one might need the larger stall, thereby refusing the abled/
disabled binary and expanding ideas of access and accessibility. (It also
makes room for a much more complex range of stick figures.) But it still
doesnt go far enough toward imagining the kinds of bathroom coalitions
that many of us think are possible.5 This checklist approach to belonging
suggests that some uses and users are authorized while others are not.
My sister and brother-in-law have a cross-stitched sign in their guest
bathroom that gets closer, in that the text focuses on the person outside
rather than the person inside: Who waits outside the door / One may never
know / So tarry not my friend / He too may have to go. Here, in contrast to
the disregard of future users inherent in hovering and splattering, the cur-
rent user is encouraged to remember that the space of the toilet is always (to
be) shared. A similar sentiment is found in another cross-stitched sign I
remember encountering as a kid: a cross-stitched image of a stick figure in a
flowery bathroom accompanied by the text, If you sprinkle when you tinkle,
please be neat and wipe the seat. Explicitly pedagogical, both of these signs
were undoubtedly intended to normalize behavior in ways far beyond the
space of the toilet, and they unabashedly present the bathroom as a site of
self- and other-surveillance.6 At the same time, they do refuse the individual-
ist approach inherent in hovering and imagine the toilet as a site of collec-
tive, shared use.
What might a poster campaign look like that takes this kind of imag-
ining further, one that encourages us to embrace the presence of the other
who came before us and the other who will come after (and even the other
who might be in the space with us at the same time)? Can we imagine
new signs not only for outside the door, marking what kind of space it is, but
also a sign or signs inside the door, acknowledging and even embracing the
kinds of acts that might take place in the space? A poster or series of post-
ers that helps us remember that bodies come in all sizes and configura-
tions, that bathrooms are sites of many different kinds of activities and prac-
tices, that other people always need to be able to use the same toilets we do.
Signs that remind us that safety, comfort, and cleanliness are often
codes for exclusions, for casting other people as dirty and out of place. Signs
addressing access as being not only about the space but also about how we
relate in the space together, to one another, to the technologies and equip-
ment in the space. Signs that offer revolution.
Notes
I thank Julie Avril Minich, Dana Newlove, Banu Subramaniam, and Kathi Weeks for their
wise insights into this topic and help with this essay.
1 The commenters were responding to Aimee Lee Balls article The Symbols of Change
(2015), which discussed initiatives to increase gender access to public restrooms in
spaces across the United States.
2 Opponents were successful in defeating the 2015 measure, in large part because of their
fearmongering over bathrooms. One television ad showed a male stranger hiding in a
bathroom stall in the womens room; when a young light-skinned schoolgirl entered the
restroom, he followed her into another stall, closing the door behind them. Some oppo-
nents went so far as to dub the law the Sexual Predator Protection Act, continuing a
long history of representing trans and genderqueer people as dangerously deviant in
order to obscure (cis)male violence. For an account of the laws defeat, see Moyer 2015.
3 Some have suggested kick-pedal flush handles as an alternative, but these presume a
high level of mobility and balance; others favor automatic flushing systems, but, as Irus
Braverman (2010: 72) explains, these presume a standard person with more or less
standard needs engaged in an anticipated standard behavior. So it is a single individual
(not with a helper or child, for example) making a single bowel movement (rather than
a series) or making typical movements in a stall (not preparing for an injection, for
example). As a wheelchair user who moves horizontally onto and off a toilet rather
than vertically, I typically trigger two to four flushes per piss, wasting water (and often
being splashed) in the process. Automation is often a tool of normalization.
4 Although commercial planes come equipped with toilets, they only accommodate cer-
tain bodies, regardless of what the signs may say.
5 My bathroom dreams will always be indebted to Simone Chess, Jessi Quizar, and Matt
Richardson (Chess et al. 2004).
6 The text in my sisters sign, for example, is illustrated with heavily gendered stick fig-
ures, making clear that the waiting he is anything but generic: there are three femi-
ninized stick figures tarrying (putting on makeup, primping, and lounging in the
tub), while a masculine stick figure waits outside the door.
References
Ball, Aimee Lee. 2015. The Symbols of Change. Sunday Styles, New York Times, November 8.
Barcan, Ruth. 2010. Dirty Spaces: Separation, Concealment, and Shame in the Public Toilet.
In Toilet: Public Restrooms and the Politics of Sharing, edited by Harvey Molotch and
Laura Norn, 2541. New York: New York University Press.
Braverman, Irus. 2010. Potty Training: Nonhuman Inspection in Public Washrooms. In
Molotch and Norn, Toilet, 6586.
Chess, Simone, et al. 2004. Calling All Restroom Revolutionaries! In Thats Revolting! Queer
Strategies for Resisting Assimilation, edited by Mattilda, aka Matt Bernstein Sycamore,
189206. Brooklyn, NY: Soft Skull.
Moyer, Justin. 2015. Why Houstons Gay Rights Ordinance Failed: Fear of Men in Womens
Bathrooms. Washington Post, November 4. www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning
-mix/wp/2015/11/03/why-houstons-gay-rights-ordinance-failed-bathrooms.
New York Times. 2015. Comments. Sunday Styles, November 15.
Samuels, Ellen. 2014. Fantasies of Identification: Disability, Gender, Race. New York: New York
University Press.
Titchkosky, Tanya. 2011. Where?: To Pee or Not to Pee. In The Question of Access: Disability,
Space, Meaning, 6991. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Ben Fawcett
Shit in Developing Cities:

A World of Ill Health, Indignity,
Violence, and Death
M ost readers of this article will be able to flush and forget their bodily
waste, conveniently and hygienically, at any time, almost wherever they are.
However, this is far from the case for a huge proportion of the global popula-
tion. About one in every three of us do not have access to an effective toilet
one that satisfactorily separates us and everybody else from our potentially
disease-carrying feceswithin or near our home, our workplace, or our
school. This lack of access has dire impacts on lives and livelihoods.
Data from the United Nations Childrens Fund and the World Health
Organization (2015), which have been monitoring worldwide water supplies
and sanitation, show that, in 2015, 32 percent of the global population2.34
billion peopledid not have access to an improved toilet. The data also
indicate that 950 million women, men, and children do not even have use of
a dirty, unsafe latrine; they are obliged to resort to open defecation, on
beaches, on riverbanks, on railway lines, in the fields or forests, or using
plastic bags, which are then disposed of at random. Of the worlds open def-
ecators, 560 million live in India.
The proportion of people with access to an adequate toilet is reported
to be much greater in towns and cities of the world than in rural villages.
However, the forty-eight countries classified as least developed by the
United Nations had only an average of 47 percent toilet coverage in their
towns and cities in 2015. Urban population growth is currently very rapid
and likely to remain so, particularly compared with slowing growth in rural

areas. In consequence of this growth, while more than 1.4 billion people
have gained access to improved sanitation in towns and cities across the
developing world since 1990, the absolute number without access increased
by 230 million, 50 percent more than in 1990. In particular, slums and infor-
mal settlements in poorer countries are growing rapidly. The United Nations
Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat 2013) has estimated that
slums may be home to 2 billion people by 2030, up from 863 million in
2012. It is possible that a third of the worlds people will be slum dwellers by
the middle of the twenty-first century.
Slums around the world have several common features: inadequate
infrastructure and services for water supply, sanitation, drainage, and elec-
tricity; often makeshift shelter, lacking durability; insecure tenure, resulting
in lives under the threat of eviction by authorities or private landlords; over-
crowding, exacerbating poor health conditions, increasing social tensions,
and giving rise to congested lanes that make access to goods and services dif-
ficult; and lack of legal recognition, resulting in the term informal settle-
ments. Because of lack of official recognition, slum dwellers are often not
included in censuses; it is therefore likely that the number of people without
sanitation is underestimated (Satterthwaite, Mitlin, and Bartlett 2015).
The impacts of not having access to a toilet are often devastating, both
in terms of physical health, particularly for young children, and in social
terms, especially for women and girls.
Health Impacts: Disease, Disability, and Death

Although the past twenty-five years have seen a considerable reduction in
both reported morbidity and mortality resulting from unsafe water, sani-
tation, and hygiene (WASH), millions of people still die every year from
preventable, WASH-related causes, and hundreds of millions suffer the
long-term disabling and debilitating effects of nonfatal diseases. About one-
quarter of the global disease burden, more than one-third of that among
children, and 23 percent of all deaths can be attributed to modifiable envi-
ronmental factors, including WASH (Prss-stn and Corvaln 2006).
Such diseases include diarrhea, roundworm, whipworm, hookworm, schis-
tosomiasis, and trachoma (see table 1). Feces are implicated in the transmis-
sion of all of these, and it is reported that, at any one time, around half of all
people in the developing world are suffering from one of these six
diseases.
Fawcett Shit in Developing Cities 765
Table 1. Fecally Transmitted Infections: Transmission, Morbidity, Mortality, and Prevention
Diarrhea: 1.7 billion episodes every year, causing 760,000 deaths in children under five
years old. Transmitted by all fecal-oral routes. Treatable by oral rehydration and largely
preventable by effective WASH.
Roundworm, whipworm, and hookworm: Infections with these soil-based worms cause
asthma, anemia, undernutrition, and impaired physical and intellectual development;
transmitted from eggs in human feces to another person, by mouth (roundworm and
whipworm) or through the skin (hookworm). At least 800 million children are infected
with roundworm, 600 million with whipworm, and 575 million with hookworm.
Trachoma: The leading cause of preventable blindness; 1.8 million with severe visual
impairment; transmitted in eye discharge by person-to-person contact and by Musca
sorbens flies that breed on human feces.
Schistosomiasis: Transmitted through human excreta to snails living in water bodies,
which pass it back to another person by skin penetration or consumption of infected water.
Over 200 million people are affected, most of them children; 20 million suffer severe,
debilitating consequences.
Source: World Health Organization 2016
Incidence of diarrhea has been considered as the primary health-

related indicator of inadequate WASH for many years. In 2012 361,000
deaths from diarrhea attributable to inadequate WASH were reported among
children under five years old, representing 5.5 percent of all deaths in that
age group (Prss-stn et al. 2014). The authors of that study also estimate
that a total of 72 million disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) due to diarrhea
are attributable to inadequate WASH in all developing countries.1 Fecal-oral
transmission of diarrhea is most effectively stopped by disposal of feces in
an appropriate toilet, combined with adequate hand washing.
Robert Chambers and Gregor von Medeazza (2014: 576) suggest, how-
ever, that diarrheas are only the visible tip of the fecally-transmitted infec-
tion (FTI) iceberg and that concentration on diarrhea no longer adequately
serves the WASH sector and those we are seeking to protect. They recom-
mend that equal consideration be given to a much broader range of FTIs,
including all six diseases identified in table 1, plus several other intestinal
parasites; conditions such as hepatitis A, B, and E; typhoid; and poliomyelitis
and other enteroviruses.
A recent, groundbreaking article (Humphrey 2009) introduced a new-
comer to the WASH sector and the FTIs: environmental enteropathy. The
hypothesis is that in living in an environment surrounded by feces from
many sources, both human and animal, infants ingest contamination that
damages their small intestines, such that they can absorb less nutrients. At
the same time, their immune response in fighting these infections consumes
both energy and protein. The result is malnutrition and, in many cases, stunt-
ing. Research in India (Spears 2012), where so many of the worlds open def-
ecators live, and in Cambodia (Water and Sanitation Program 2013) has indi-
cated a clear correlation between environmental enteropathy, open defecation,
permanent stunting, and poor educational performance. Being brought up
in an environment where open defecation is the norm, as is common in Cam-
bodia, especially during the critical first two years of an infants life, results,
almost inevitably, in permanent stunting and devastating physical and intel-
lectual impacts. Researchers have also highlighted that the effect of open def-
ecation on stunting is much more pronounced in densely populated urban
areas, that is, the slums, than in rural areas.
Thanks, in large part, to overcrowding, health conditions tend to be
worse in slums than in villages and significantly worse than in other areas of
towns and cities. Siddharth Agarwal (2011) shows that the poorest quartile of
urban populations in six Indian states suffered under-five mortality rates 79
percent higher than the rest of the urban population. Madhya Pradesh had a
staggering differential of 300 percent. Diarrheal diseases are reported as the
leading cause of these child deaths.
Poor health has numerous indirect effects, including those on educa-
tional performance and productivity. Likewise, good health relates not just to
freedom from diseases; it is a state of complete physical, social, and mental
well-being, determined by numerous factors, many of which are directly
affected by inadequate sanitation.
Social Impacts: Indignity and Violence

When the global press carried the story of two teenage girls allegedly gang-
raped and murdered as they sought a secluded place to defecate in Uttar
Pradesh, India, in 2014, everybody was shocked and horrified. But, as weve
seen, nearly one in seven of the worlds people are obliged to defecate in the
open, with no access to a toilet of any kind, opening themselves to gross
indignity and the possibility of violence. The first United Nations special rap-
porteur on the human right to safe water and sanitation wrote:
Sanitation, more than many other human rights issues, evokes the concept
of human dignity; consider the vulnerability and shame that so many people
experience every day when, again, they are forced to defecate in the open. ...
Dignity closely relates to self-respect, which is difficult to maintain when
being forced to squat down in the open, with no respect for privacy, not hav-
ing the opportunity to clean oneself after defecating and facing the constant
threat of assault in such a vulnerable moment. (Albuquerque 2009: 18)
Marni Sommer et al. (2015) usefully summarize the four most com-
mon categories of violence related to WASH: sexual violence; psychological
violence, including harassment and bullying; physical violence; and socio-
cultural violence, including ostracism, discrimination, and marginalization.
The authors give numerous examples of the feelings of fear, shame, and
helplessness that women around the developing world experience in open
defecation and the use of distant, unsafe, unlit, and often unhygienic toilet
facilities. Likewise, women in both Uganda and India expressed feelings of
anger and disgust at the daily struggle to manage their sanitation needs with
dignity and in safety. Although women are massively constrained by socio-
cultural mores against being seen to defecate, particularly in India, such that
they are obliged to do so only at night, the dangers of attack are multiplied
when they move around in the dark. Public toilets are common sites of sex-
ual violence. Railway tracks are commonly used for defecation in India, but
at great risk to women and girls doing so under cover of darkness.
Anupama Nallari (2015) movingly describes the experiences of adoles-
cent girls in four poor settlements in Bengaluru, India. Radha, the oldest of
five children living with their parents in a small home in an unrecognized
slum of about two hundred other such homes, is perhaps the most chal-
lenged. She is obliged to use the vacant land beside the settlement for her
toilet needs. She feels exposed as she passes through the gap in the wall sur-
rounding the slum, has difficulty achieving privacy, and is frightened by
snakes. It is particularly hard for the girls when they are menstruating, as
they have the additional challenge of disposing of their sanitary napkins or
rags discreetly in garbage piles out in the open. Radha complained that she
had been teased and verbally harassed by boys when caught in the act (79).
As Nallari reports, mothers are afraid for their daughters: If something
happens, these girls lives will be ruined forever. ... Lack of sanitation is not
just an inconvenience for adolescent girls, it shapes their very identity and
how they experience the world around them (8586).
Sanitation is not just about managing excreta; bathing and washing
clothes is equally important and problematic for many people. Deepa Joshi,
Ben Fawcett, and Fouzia Mannan (2011) found how important it is, even for
the poorest in Bangladesh and India, to be able to wash regularly; being,
and being seen to be, unclean is a huge stigma. Girls in Beguntila, a slum in
Dhaka, explained that they have to get up early in the morning, before the
men are around: We bathe in the dirty pond, with our clothes on. Then we
go home, change our clothes and then come back [to the pond] to wash the
changed clothes. This is so difficult when we are bleeding (menstruating).
We also need to wash the rags we use during this period, but there is no
space [private enough] to dry them (104).
A male-dominated WASH sector and male control over infrastructure
investments have resulted in the needs and rights of women and girls being
ignored. But more recent concerns with human rights and with privacy and
dignity have led to recognition of the importance of menstrual hygiene man-
agement. Work in this area needs to start from an understanding of tradi-
tional beliefs, knowledge, and practices (Sommer, Kjelln, and Pensulo
2013). Beliefs include many taboos and cultural attitudes, most significantly
concerning secrecy and shame. Knowledge about menstrual onset and man-
agement and about reproductive health may also be limited. Menstrual
hygiene practices define the requirements for privacy and safety, including
space and facilities for bathing, changing, and the disposing or washing
and drying of used materials. All too often, personal needs are severely con-
strained and result in indignity and shame, every month, for hundreds of
millions of girls and women. Lack of adequate, gender-segregated toilets in
schools results in huge numbers of girls dropping out of education or regu-
larly missing classes and therefore not achieving their potential.
Alongside those living in slums, towns and cities in low-income coun-
tries include numerousat least 100 million (CARDO, n.d.)homeless
people and pavement dwellers, whose sanitation and hygiene needs are even
more inadequately met. Facilities and services for such peopleindividuals
and families alikeare sorely lacking, and life is hard. For Safia, a young
married girl living on the streets of Hyderabad in India, Everything is a
problem on the pavement. There is no privacy. People are watching all the
time. . . . People are waiting to take advantage. Theres no safety. . . . [Safias]
first baby . . . died [after] a few months. . . . Her second child is three years
old. On the day the [research] team met Safia, she had just suffered the mis-
carriage of her third childon the street (Joshi, Fawcett, and Mannan 2011:
9697). One can only imagine the difficulties for pavement dwellers to meet
their sanitation and hygiene needs.
The Next Fifteen Years

As Catarina de Albuquerque (2009: 25) stresses, access to sanitation should
be safe, hygienic, secure, affordable, socially and culturally acceptable, pro-
viding privacy and ensuring dignity in a non-discriminatory manner. Above

all, meeting these conditions requires political commitment and a thorough
understanding of the needs of those most affected by inadequate sanitation.
The aim of the new Sustainable Development Goals, targeting the
period to 2030, is that no one will be left behind (United Nations 2015: 3) in
our efforts to eliminate open defecation and to achieve universal access to
basic WASH for households, schools and health facilities (Water Supply and
Sanitation Collaborative Council 2014). These are ambitious targets but ones
that, as illustrated in this article, deserve every effort. Defecation is a taboo
subject, cloaked in secrecy. We need the four-letter expletiveshitto high-
light the urgent need for greater efforts to improve sanitation, particularly in
the rapidly growing slums, and hopefully to shock those with influence into
increased action. Shit is implicated in far too much illness, suffering, indig-
nity, and death to continue to be ignored as a result of taboos and shame.
Note
1 DALYs = years of life lost through premature mortality (YLLs) + years of life lived with
a disability, weighted by severity (YDLs).
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CARDO (Centre for Architectural Research and Development Overseas). n.d. The Nature and
Extent of Homelessness in Developing Countries. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: CARDO, Univer-
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Dharman Jeyasingham
Closure, Affect, and the Continuing

Queer Potential of Public Toilets
Since the mid-1990s, the number of public toilets in Britain that are open
and effectively available as sites for sex between men has reduced dramati-
cally. In 2004 Clara Greed (2004) had already noted a drop of 40 percent in
the number of public toilets across the country, while a state policy of auster-
ity in Britain since 2010 has meant that many more public toilets have
closed. Those toilets that remain are likely to have changed significantly.
Several years ago, I explored how public toilets were being materially reorga-
nized to make activities within them more open to view (Jeyasingham 2010).
I used several toilets in Manchester, England, as case studies to show how
greater acceptance of sexual minorities as citizens with rights to protection
from homophobic abuse had developed in tandem with greater expectations
about appropriate behavior and policing practices that, more effectively than
before, mitigated against homoerotic activity in public toilets. All of those
toilets have since closed, and Manchester, which has a population of around
five hundred thousand people, now has only one functioning local authority
public toilet (George 2011). While restrooms have not necessarily been clos-
ing with the same frequency elsewhere, material adaptations and increased
surveillance, both natural (the opening up of spaces to general view) and
technological, now seem to be a feature of public toilets in many locations
across the West (Dalton 2008; Braverman 2010). This shift has occurred
alongside the increased social and political inclusion of certain forms of les-
bian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) identities in the same global
regions.

The decreases in the number of public toilets and in the privacy and
comfort that they offer have potentially disastrous consequences for many
older people, disabled people, those caring for young children, and others
who are likely to have greater need for such facilities. These shifts also mark
a decline in the opportunities that such spaces might provide for queer inter-
actions outside of social networks that feel increasingly normative to many
and a consequent decline in the social, erotic, and identificatory potential
that such interactions might have provided. Even so, it might be that toilets
continue to provide queer potential, as figures that represent certain queer
affective experiences and as sites where such experiences resonate and can
still be felt. This essay examines two examples of recent engagements with
toilets that arguably offer queer possibilities, even as they mark the passing
of these toilets as venues for sex between men. The first of these is Tearoom,
a film (2007) and accompanying book (2008) by William E. Jones, which
presents footage that was shot during covert police surveillance of a public
toilet in Ohio in 1962 and was subsequently used in criminal prosecutions.
The second example is the Edwardian Cloakroom in Bristol, England, a
building that was a functioning public toilet until 2001 and, since 2011, has
been made available as a gallery space for emerging artists in the city.
The status of both examples as toilets of the past hardly makes them
unusual in the critical literature about sex in toilets, which has tended to
focus on spaces that no longer exist or are no longer used for sex. This focus
on the past is partly because of the significance given to toilets as places of
sexual and social interaction for emerging queer communities in the late
nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries (Humphreys 1970; Chauncey 1994;
Maynard 1994; Houlbrook 2005). Ethical considerations have also had this
effect, in that writing about venues for secluded and stigmatized activities
holds the potential to compromise the opportunities for continuing seclu-
sion in those places, so published research has tended to focus on places
where sexual activity has already dropped off, even if only recently. More fun-
damentally, the resonance of past incidents is integral to many experiences
of seeking sex in public toilets. Toilets, as spaces of solitude intermittently
interrupted, have usually provided more opportunities for thinking about
what has happened in the past and what might happen soon than for engag-
ing with other copresent bodies.
Material features of public toilet spaces, as well as providing erotic
potential in themselves (Brown 2008), often recall more closeted eras
(whether the grandeur of fin de sicle toilet spaces or the utility of postwar
modernist ones)in fact, their erotic appeal might rely in part on their sta-
Jeyasingham Closure, Affect, and the Queer Potential of Public Toilets 773
tus as spaces designed at a time when queer possibilities could present

themselves while remaining unspoken. Focusing on the two toilets dis-
cussed below allows exploration of the material, temporal, and affective
qualities of toilets, which have been so important for their erotic potential in
the past and which continue to reverberate after opportunities for sex have
disappeared. They allow us to consider how these qualities might continue
to be important, even though they are more elusive now than they might
have been in the recent past. They provoke other questions, too, about what
happens when once secluded and abject spaces and actions within the public
toilet are put on show and become either a venue for art or a piece of art
themselves. Are these further ways in which toilets become sanitized and
homonormativity is imposed? Or is there something more to the public toi-
let, its spatial arrangements and its atmospheres, its reiteration in these new
forms as art, that provides ways of challenging contemporary rules for sex-
ual engagement?
Tearoom
Tearoom (2007) is a fifty-six-minute film by Jones that presents footage
filmed by police officers over the course of three weeks in 1962 in Mansfield,
Ohio, at an underground public restroom next to the towns Central Park.1
The film consists mostly of footage from covert surveillance of the restroom
from an adjacent service corridor, through a two-way mirror. This footage
shows men engaged in cruising each other and having sex as well as doing
other more mundane activities such as combing hair and listening to the
radio. It was produced as evidence in criminal prosecutions that resulted in
at least thirty-eight men being convicted and either imprisoned or detained
in psychiatric hospitals, almost exclusively for taking part in consensual sex-
ual acts. What we see in the film, therefore, are images of men whose lives
were about to change forever and in quite horrible ways. The toilet itself was
demolished once the first trials had begun, with the underground rooms,
perhaps symbolically, being filled with earth (Jones 2008). The material
filmed by police officers was subsequently used in Camera Surveillance
(1964), a film produced by the Ohio-based Highway Safety Foundation for
use in police training, which Jones reworked in Tearoom forty years later. In
turning a training film into a piece of cinematic art, Jones made only a few
changes, the most significant of which was to remove the disgust-filled com-
mentary that formed Camera Surveillances sound track and screen the film
in silence.
Academic discussions about Tearoom and reviews published in film,

art, or porn periodicals have largely been concerned with two matters. The
first of these is the ethics of re-presenting images of men engaged in private
sexual activities that were recorded and used as criminal evidence leading to
their incarceration. The second concerns what counts as evidence of erotic
pleasure. My purpose here is not to attempt to answer such questions.
Instead, I want to explore the films capacity to complicate them, for instance
by presenting images that have, historically, counted as compelling evidence
of abject immorality, in ways that refute such judgments but also trouble
current homonormative responses to sex in places such as public toilets.
While almost all the reviews of Tearoom have noted its importance as a
record of historical homophobia and most see it as a powerful artistic work,
they take widely different views about whether what the film depicts is sex-
ual pleasure and whether viewing it is an arousing experience. Richard
Knight Jr. (2008) describes Tearoom as mesmerizing and sexy, while
Dietmar Schwrzler (2009) has said that the film has some really funny . . .
very sexy parts. . . . Sometimes the sex reminds me of a dance. In contrast,
Chris Chang (2008: 17) describes the film as 56 interminable minutes of
anonymous, mechanical and utterly joyless acts; Fred Camper (2008: 78) is
full of praise for the Tearoom but sees it as a film that intensifies ones voy-
euristic attention to these taboo but notably unerotic images and describes
participants as joyless men. Nicholas Weist (2008: 9) simply sees men who
dont appear to enjoy themselves (or each other), while Christy Lange
(2008) sees the film as disturbing and unsatisfying on multiple levels, even
more so than the average porn. This quality of the sex shown in Tearoom
as something that, judged by current criteria, fails to count as evidence of
pleasureis discussed by Jones himself. He sees it as pre-porn sex, from a
time when men had sex without adopting the standard ways of talking and
moving found in mainstream porn (Jones quoted in Schwrzler 2009). But
some of the same qualities of interactionlittle eye contact, no kissing, a
resolute focus on genitals or anuses, and few self-conscious attempts to
behave sexilyalso appear in much more recent accounts of queer sex in toi-
lets (see, e.g., Jeyasingham 2002; Brown 2008; Dalton 2008), so perhaps
they reveal something about the social and spatial contexts of public toi-
letshow people might engage in same-sex encounters outside of private
and, in homonormative times, more or less legitimated social contexts.
Approaching Tearoom in this way involves identifying potential commonali-
ties between different temporal contexts rather than explaining the film, in
the first instance, as an example of historical remains. Doing so allows Tea-
room to remind us that it is still possible to experience sex outside of the

requirements of contemporary homonormativity, where sex counts as such
only when it is productive of private timespaces, is personally defining,
involves some direct engagement, and apparently occurs without anxiety.
Tearoom is a reworking of material that was initially produced in order
to identify perpetrators and provide incriminating evidence. Part of its suc-
cess as a piece of art lies in how it draws our attention to the beauty of these
same images and, in so doing, to the pathos of the men who appear in them.
Because of the small amount of film that was available to those carrying out
the surveillance, we often see only brief instances of incriminating activity,
followed by film of another interaction between the same or different men. A
result is that the film feels disjointed and stilted, but also compulsive and
intriguing. Of course, many of the reviews of Tearoom engage with it as an
insight into public sexual relations between closeted men in the 1960s, rather
than a piece of film that reveals how such interactions were recorded and ren-
dered as criminal evidence. For me, Tearoom succeeds as art because it trans-
forms Camera Surveillance, a film that claims to catch deviants unaware, into
something that reveals some qualities of public sex in an earlier, more closeted
era but that also reveals something enduring about queer sexual experiences.
Brevity, the impossibility of identifying queer desire in the faces of strangers,
and the constant chance of being apprehended and shamed are revealed as
erotically productive qualities in Tearoom, rather than further reasons to be
appalled by queer sex (as they were presented in Camera Surveillance).
Edwardian Cloakroom
The Edwardian Cloakroom is an exhibition space in a building that used
to be a public toilet in Bristol. The building offers two distinct spaces, previ-
ously the gentlemens and the ladies toilets, which still have entrances labeled
as such (further details can be found at Bristol City Council 2016). Artists
can arrange to use the venue to exhibit their work without a charge, on the
condition that they curate the exhibition and cause minimal disruption to
the site. The building is listed as having architectural and historical signifi-
cance, and it retains its original features, to the extent that people occasion-
ally mistake it for a restroom during exhibitions and attempt to use the toi-
lets or urinals.
The architecture of the mens toiletan entrance set back from the
street and sight lines within the building that provide opportunities for both
seclusion and displayand its location on the edge of the city center, close to
other, similarly secluded toilets, meant that it was frequently used for cruis-
ing prior to its closure in 2001. Now, despite the venues quaint title, the
same space is often used to exhibit works that explore questions of sexuality,
liminality, and decay. Many of the exhibitions have drawn meaning from
their location in a space that was used for private and intimate acts, while
others have focused on the gender segregated nature of the spaces, such as
Claudio Ahlerss 2014 exhibition of velvet models of male and female geni-
tals and Ladies Room, a 2016 installation by Catherine Anyango and Julie
Hill, which has focused on messages written by women in horror films.
Exhibits have frequently returned to questions of observation, stigma, and
abjection, such as Rachel Sokals 2011 piece Peeping TomCamera Obscura,
which explored the use of developments in surveillance technology, and the
2014 exhibition Smoke and Mirrors, which referenced the Pendle witch trials.
They have also often focused on solitude and reflectionfor instance, Cait-
lin Shepherds 2015 sound installation Sanctuary. My focus here is not so
much on whether these pieces are successful or innovative in artistic terms
(although many are) but on their shared aim to draw on the continuing reso-
nances of a building that was once the venue for abjected, stigmatized, and
often criminalized acts. As Shepherds introduction to Sanctuary states, the
site is an abandoned building, full of other peoples histories (Bristol City
Council 2016), and it is the feeling of continued presence of such past events
that enables the best of the work to succeed in a exhibition space that appears
at first to be rather inflexible and confined.
The Continuing Resonance of Public Toilets

This essay is concerned with the powerful affective resonances of many pub-
lic toilets, where past experiences of solitude, sanctuary, brief intimacy, and
occasional, spectacular violence continue to be felt. These resonances com-
municate something about the opportunities for imagining and being with
unknown others that toilets have provided in the pastwhether because of
their homoerotic potential, the gender-specific spaces they have offered, or
because they have provided the seclusion needed for intimate care in wider
public contexts. Tearoom and the Edwardian Cloakroom enable those reso-
nances to continue long after the toilets in question have been filled in or
closed off. Engaging with these affective experiences and reflecting on them
can have a political purpose because, as Caitlin DeSilvey and Tim Edensor
(2012) discuss, such spaces can provide points from which to counter domi-
nant ways of ordering both social relations and material spaces. Allowing
the past to intrude into the present can also disrupt those false ideas about a
unity between time and event that lead us to discount what has happened in
the past and ignore its significance for present times (Trigg 2009). These
remains of toilets can be seen as enabling different relationships to the past
and communities across time, as well as offering possibilities of alternative
erotic and affective engagements with the continuing resonance of long-
gone bodies and interactions.
Note
1 At least two excerpts of Tearoom are, at the time of writing, available to view on You-
Tube, while a better-quality version of the entire film can be found on the porn network
Xvideos.com.
References
Braverman, Irus. 2010. Potty Training: Nonhuman Inspection in Public Washrooms. In Toi-
let: Public Restrooms and the Politics of Sharing, edited by Harvey Molotch and Laura
Norn, 6586. New York: New York University Press.
Bristol City Council. 2016. The Edwardian Cloakroom. bristolcitycouncilcreativespace.word
press.com/facilities/edwardian-cloakroom-3 (accessed February 16, 2016).
Brown, Gavin. 2008. Ceramics, Clothing and Other Bodies: Affective Geographies of Homo-
erotic Cruising Encounters. Social and Cultural Geography 9, no. 8: 91532.
Camera Surveillance. 1964. Mansfield, OH: Highway Safety Foundation.
Camper, Fred. 2008. Critics Choice: Tearoom. Chicago Reader, May 15.
Chang, Chris. 2008. In Flagrante Delicto: William E. Jones Collaborates with the Police in
Tearoom. Film Comment 44, no. 4: 17.
Chauncey, George. 1994. Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male
World, 18901940. New York: Basic Books.
Dalton, Derek. 2008. Gay Male Resistance in Beat Spaces in Australia: A Study of Out-
lawDesire. Australian Feminist Law Journal 28, no. 1: 97119.
DeSilvey, Caitlin, and Tim Edensor. 2012. Reckoning with Ruins. Progress in Human Geog-
raphy 37, no. 4: 46585.
George, Rose. 2011. Public Toilets Go Down the Pan. Guardian, February 18. www.theguardian
.com/commentisfree/2011/feb/18/public-toilets-conveniences-councils-loos.
Greed, Clara. 2004. Public Toilets: The Need for Compulsory Provision. Municipal Engineer
157, no. 2: 7785.
Houlbrook, Matt. 2005. Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis, 19181957.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Humphreys, Laud. 1970. Tearoom Trade: A Study of Homosexual Encounters in Public Places.
London: Gerald Duckworth.
Jeyasingham, Dharman. 2002. Ladies and Gentlemen: Location, Gender, and the Dynam-
ics of Public Sex. In In a Queer Place: Sexuality and Belonging in British and European
Contexts, edited by Kate Chedgzoy, Emma Francis, and Murray Pratt, 7388. Alder-
shot: Ashgate.
Jeyasingham, Dharman. 2010. Building Heteronormativity: The Social and Material Recon-
struction of Mens Public Toilets as Spaces of Heterosexuality. Social and Cultural
Geography 11, no. 4: 30725.
Jones, William E. 2007. Tearoom. 16mm film transferred to video, color, silent, 56 minutes.
http://www.williamejones.com/collections/view/11/.
Jones, William E. 2008. Tearoom. Los Angeles: 2nd Cannons.
Knight, Richard, Jr. 2008. Queercentric: William E. Jones Found Document Is Mesmeriz-
ing. Windy City Times, May 14.
Lange, Christy. 2008. In the Tearoom . . . Not Really What I Expected. Editors Blog, Frieze.com,
October. www.frieze.com/blog/entry/in_the_tearoom_not_really_what_i_expected.
Link no longer active. Blog entry quoted at http://www.williamejones.com/collections
/about/11.
Maynard, Steven. 1994. Through a Hole in the Lavatory Wall: Homosexual Subcultures,
Police Surveillance, and the Dialectics of Discovery, Toronto, 18901930. Journal of the
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halle Exnergasse. www.williamejones.com/collections/about/11.
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Joel Sanders and Susan Stryker
Stalled: Gender-Neutral Public Bathrooms
A long-simmering moral panic over the presence of transgender people in

sex-segregated public toilets has reached an acute state since the spring of
2015, as an unprecedented wave of mass culture visibility for trans* issues
has intersected with recent court decisions guaranteeing trans* people access
to gender-appropriate toilets. When we drafted this article in March 2016,
only one state, South Dakota, had passed (but subsequently vetoed) a bill
attempting to restrict gender-appropriate public toilet access for transgender
people, although more than two dozen such bills had been introduced nation-
wide (Madhani 2016). Since then, North Carolina passed HB2, its notorious
bathroom bill; the Obama administration issued new directives on gender-
appropriate access to toilets and locker rooms in public schools nationwide;
twenty-one states have sued the federal government to block implementation
of those directives, and the seemingly obscure issue of transgender public
toilet access seems headed to the Supreme Court (Bidgood 2016).
The current backlash against trans* people using public toilets that
match their gender identity reflects a longer history of public toilets, which
themselves date to early eighteenth-century Paris (Cavanagh 2010: 28), and
registers social anxieties triggered by the threat of various marginalized
groups entering into normative society. Previous debates were sparked by the
introduction of the womens room to accommodate female participation in
the paid workforce, the fight to abolish colored bathrooms by the civil rights
movement, the furor over unisex toilets that helped derail passage of the
Equal Rights Amendment, the fear of contamination posed by gay men using
public lavatories during the AIDS crisis, and pressure to make bathrooms
accessible to the disabled. In each instance, the public restroom stages the

transformation of an abstract concern into a tangible threat, by virtue of it

being a physical space in which so-called normal citizens are brought into
intimate physical proximity with precisely those presumably nonnormal
people whose expulsion from or invisibilization within the body politic under-
pins and enables our societys norms of embodied personhood.
Houston Case Study

The November 2015 defeat of the Houston Equal Rights Ordinance (HERO)
offers a compelling recent case study regarding the manner in which trans-
gender presence in public toilets has become a flashpoint for broader social
anxieties about shifting norms of gender and sexuality. When Houstons
openly lesbian mayor Annise Parker proposed a nondiscrimination bill that
would protect all Houston citizens no matter their race, religion, age, sex,
gender, or disability, it seemed that the wide range of antidiscrimination pro-
visions would offer protection to even the most marginalized groups that fell
under the ordinances umbrella. Opponents, led by the group Campaign for
Houston, defeated the bill, however, by targeting one constituency, transgen-
der women, and one space, the public toilet. The opponents misguided ral-
lying cry of No men in womens bathrooms! and the diatribe that accompa-
nied it on the Campaign for Houstons (2016) website, perpetuated
stereotypes of transgender women as sexually perverse men. It took aim at
gender-confused men, whounder this ordinancecan call themselves
women on a whim and use womens restrooms whenever they wish to prey
on wives, mothers and daughters. Through targeting trans* women in
particular, Campaign for Houston took aim at what it considered the ordi-
nances real purpose, which was to make sexual orientation and gender
identification two new protected classes.
A similar controversy, waged on similar ground, had erupted in Can-
ada in February 2015 when Senator David Plett authored an amendment to
gut the trans-inclusive provisions of the Canadian Human Rights Act.
Dubbed the bathroom bill, it also cited safety as the justification for prohib-
iting transgender people from using public restrooms, claiming that it
would harbor pedophiles and make abused women uncomfortable by
exposing them totransgender individualswho had biologically male charac-
teristics. The transmisogyny and sex negativity evident in these campaigns
speak to a fundamental anxiety about gender ambiguity that is perhaps most
in evidence in public discussions of sex-segregated public toilets, given our
cultural beliefs about the anchoring of social gender in our genitals and sec-
ondary sex characteristics. It underscores our societys refusal to acknowl-
Sanders and Stryker Stalled 781
edge the instability of gender itself as a social system for classifying and
administering human lives according to a purportedly natural sex dichot-
omy. While misplacing the source of these anxieties, Campaign for Houston
(2016) explicitly acknowledged the threat, seeing the bathroom ordinance as
deceptive tactics to re-structure society to fit a societal vision that was an
attack on the traditional family. In the end, Campaign for Houston deemed
the bathroom a battleground worth fighting for based on the same problem-
atic logic used by those who previously fought for sex-segregated bathrooms
in the past, considering it a space that upholds the status quo by maintaining
gender binaries accomplished through the spatial segregation of the sexes,
justified by anatomical difference.
However, instead of fostering a productive dialogue that would have
encouraged Houstonians to confront the underlying social anxieties trig-
gered by gender-appropriate public toilet access for trans people, both sides
of the debate framed the issue in a reductive way, posing it as a question
of safety and privacy. Opponents asserted that transgender women threat-
ened the safety of cisgender women and children, while proponents saw
proper access as a way of protecting transgender people from harassment
and assaults. Strikingly, both sides believed that their concerns over the
ostensibly objective problem of public safety could be adequately addressed
through an architectural solutionmaking the built environment of the
restroom facilitate a particular vision of a desired body politic.
Reframing the Issue

In what follows, we reframe the assumptions that undergird the necessity of
sex-segregated public toilets and advocate for gender-neutral facilities
instead. Our assessment of the situation does not diminish the very real and
legitimate dangers that have been measured in reliable studies document-
ing the incidents of discomfort, harassment, and assaults experienced by
transgender people, as well as cisgender women, children, and even men
in public bathrooms. Instead, our objective is to shift the terms of the argu-
ment, recognizing that safety is one symptom of a larger dilemma posed
when groups that mainstream society considers abnormal or deviant clamor
for nonprejudicial access to public space. The future of gender-neutral bath-
room design depends on reframing the argument, getting beyond problem-
atic ideological misconceptions and prejudices that still haunt our thinking.
If Campaign for Houston exemplifies how our society continues to patholo-
gize gender variance, then we need to craft a new kind of public bathroom
and ultimately a new model of public spacethat allows people to become
aware of and accept multiple forms of gender expression by allowing them to

freely mix with one another. However, accomplishing this goal requires
adopting a new way of thinking that shifts the argument from gender neu-
trality to gender diversity and, ultimately, to human diversity.
Since the 1960s, social justice efforts have sparked national conversa-
tions focused on addressing the urgent needs of particular marginalized
communities, including women, people of color, and queers. At a moment
when transgender people have entered the media spotlight and public dis-
course to an unprecedented degree, transgender experience offers a new
lens for addressing the persistent problems of embodied difference that have
long plagued the space of the public toilet. But our work casts a wider net
while coming up with a public toilet design that responds to transgender
needs is an important undertaking, we understand receptivity to transgen-
der needs to be a generative and productive way to begin to rethink the way
all embodied subjects interact with one another in public space.
We need to explore the architectural implications of gender variance.
Design matters. It is not coincidental that most of the arguments both for
and against gender-neutral restrooms tend to leave out any meaningful anal-
ysis of the design of the actual site. This oversight underscores the need to
make people aware that the designed environment plays a central role in
shaping all human identities by orchestrating how people use public space
and engage with each other in it. In the past few years, activists at many pro-
gressive colleges and universities have taken a leading role nationally in
advocacy efforts that expand access to public accommodations while protect-
ing privacy for transgender peopleincluding everything from correct reg-
istration of names/pronouns in staff and student records to fitness facilities
to dorm rooms and restrooms. While the push to recognize gender-appropri-
ate pronouns or to embrace new gender-neutral forms of personal pronouns
has provoked a national conversation that has raised public awareness of how
language informs gender expression, there has not been a similarly nuanced
exploration of gender-neutral public space. We need to expand our thinking
to take into account how environmental design, like language, is a discourse
with the power to shape human identity.
Design Recommendations
Designers need to craft flexible environments that can allow all embodied
individuals to express a wide spectrum of identities in public space. As
gender expression becomes more diverse and differently attached to and
detached from physicality, this need becomes ever more pertinent. With
respect to public bathrooms, that means jettisoning what is now the gener-
ally accepted solution that consists of maintaining gender-specific bath-
rooms and merely supplementing the status quo with a single-stall or sin-
gle-occupancy room, not so different from the single-occupancy bathrooms
mandated by the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Advocates fre-
quently justify this solution on economic grounds, arguing that its modest
footprint does not impose undue hardship on building owners and develop-
ers who would otherwise be compelled to fund more elaborate architectural
solutions. However, the drawback of the single-occupancy gender-neutral
bathroom is that it spatially isolates and excludes. While some users prefer
the privacy it offers, it can nevertheless exacerbate problems of social exclu-
sion by segregating transgender people from shared public space and stig-
matizing their presence in mixed groups of people.
A better solution, supported by many trans activists, and increasingly
found in trendy urban nightclubs and restaurants, is to eliminate gender-
segregated facilities entirely and treat the public restroom as one single open
space with fully enclosed stalls. One example is the Modern, Danny Meyers
upscale restaurant in New Yorks Museum of Modern Art. A circulation
corridor divides the linear room into two parallel zones: one is dedicated to
washing and features a horizontal mirror hanging above a row of freestand-
ing pedestal sinks; the other, dedicated to eliminating, comprises an unin-
terrupted wall of European-style floor-to-ceiling stalls. This type of facility
has many advantages. Gender-nonconforming people are not forced to
choose between two unacceptable options, each of which makes them
uncomfortable, while trans and cis people who express their gender in a
more binary fashion need not worry about being in the wrong restroom.
European-style stalls are equipped with doors with no peek-a-boo cracks and
therefore ensure visual privacy and inhibit nonconsensual sex between
stalls. Most important, by consolidating a greater number of people in one
room rather than two, the unisex, gender-neutral bathroom provides safety
in numbers: increasing bathroom occupancy reduces risks of predation
associated with being alone and out of sight.
Our design proposal takes the single-room typology as a point of
departure, but takes it one step further by posing an alternative to the domi-
nant spatial paradigm that relies on walls to solve social issues. The bath-
room is but one instance of a building type that, like fortresses and prisons,
subscribes to the generally accepted belief that by erecting boundaries, archi-
tects can create protected precincts that ensure safety through the separation
of human bodies from one another. The bathroom, conceived of as a series

of walled enclosures nested inside a larger enclosure purportedly accom-
plishes this objective through what Sheila Cavanagh (2010) terms the
hygienic imagination: by dividing clean public space from the dirty
realm of the abject body and by separating men from women, able-bodied
from disabled, and, in a previous era, members of one race from another.
Walls, however, by definition belong to both inside and outside and, as a con-
sequence, stage contiguity and potentials for porosity as much as they signal
separation and containment. This is true of the shared boundary wall,
inscribed with dual-entry doors designated for men and women, that
assumes the burden of dividing adjacent public and private space as well as
for the shared wall that typically allows a back-to-back mens and womens
room to touch. The same can be said for the series of partitions that subdi-
vide the bathroom interior, ephemeral floating screens, placed between uri-
nals and toilets, that ostensibly create visual privacy between members of the
same sex. Walls are symbolically fragile: no matter how thick, they are pen-
etrable and can be breached.
Our design proposal jettisons these boundary-laden solutions (see fig-
ure 1). Instead, we draw inspiration from another spatial paradigmthe
urban street and square. Our scheme dispenses with the wall that typically
divides public space from private bathroom and instead treats the restroom
as a well-defined, clearly marked but open precinct that can be located adja-
cent to lobbies and circulation corridors typically found in standard building
types like airports, shopping malls, schools, and offices. In addition, our pro-
posed design can be deployed indoors or outdoors. This solution would be in
keeping with the initiatives of global cities like Rosario (Argentina), Rotter-
dam (Netherlands), and Wellington (New Zealand), which are hiring top-
notch designers to revive the tradition of making public bathrooms directly
accessible from streets, parks, and town squares.
Whether it is located inside or outside, our bathroom precinct is con-
ceived of as one open space subdivided into activity zones to accommodate
the three activities that typically take place in public restroomscoifing,
washing, and eliminatingactivities that many consider the universal com-
mon denominator of all human beings. However, our proposal also recog-
nizes how these embodied activities are inflected by culture and reinforced
by design. For example, not all cultures accept the Western standard that
dictates that males urinate standing up and females urinate sitting down.
Nevertheless, bathroom layouts and the ergonomic design of individual
bathroom fixturesurinals versus toiletsperpetuate this convention

based on the presumption that posture is a function of anatomy, not culture.
Complicating the issue, bathroom rituals are also defined by psychology.
Doctors have studied how the cultural injunction that males urinate while
standing at a urinal triggers paruresis, a phobia that makes many males
unable to urinate in public. Likewise, another seemingly straightforward
bathroom activity, hand washing, can also be experienced in different ways
depending on a persons cultural, psychological, or religious background.
Muslims performing cleansing ablutions before prayer and individuals com-
pelled to wash their hands because they suffer from obsessive-compulsive
disorder are only two examples. Our bathroom design accommodates diver-
sity, not only gender diversity but also human diversity, by providing differ-
ent ways that a wide range of embodied subjects can perform the same com-
monplace activity according to their individual needs and temperaments
based on the understanding that these are shaped by the convergence of bio-
logical, cultural, and psychological factors.
Our design proposal conceives of the bathroom precinct as three paral-
lel and overlapping activity zones. Rather than adhere to the convention of
hanging small mirrors over rows of individual sinks, our design treats coifing
and washing as two independent areas open to one another. Double-sided,
freestanding, full-length mirrors arranged as linear screens allow people,
depending on their mood or temperament, to coif either partially concealed or
in full view of others. In our proposal, washing occurs around a freestanding
island inspired by the public fountains that activate Roman piazzas. Jets of
water emerge from a communal basin whose height varies to accommodate
people of different ages, heights, and dis/abilities. Elimination takes place in
private stalls, treated like cabanas, that can be deployed in various configura-
tions. Depending on the particular size and shape of the bathroom precinct,
stalls might be arranged in linear or circular formations, either located at the
periphery of the space or freely disposed as bounded islands scattered through-
out the precinct. Each stall houses a toilet shielded by full-height lockable
doors. Depending on the fixture count, our design provides for larger ADA
stalls, big enough to accommodate a wheelchair or attendant as well as a sink
and mirror for people who would prefer to coif or wash unseen by others.
(While we are well aware that there are historical and cultural precedents that
allow people to eliminate in open single-sex latrines, elimination in our pro-
posal takes place in private bounded stalls in deference to Western social con-
vention and the recommendations of transgender bathroom studies.)
Figure 1. Single-unit gender-neutral bathroom.
Courtesy of Kara Biczykowski and Joel Sanders Architect
Conclusion
The overall objective of our design proposal is to create a relatively barrier-
free open precinct that encourages all embodied subjects to freely and safely
engage with one another in public space. The realization of our design pro-
posal, as well as the more modest proposals like the single-occupancy unisex
bathroom described above, depends not only on design innovation but also
on legislation that would rewrite building and plumbing codes. Making
these changes requires acknowledging the pivotal role that building codes
play in shaping identity through design, as well as acknowledging that such
codes are not neutral functional objectives but rather reflect and reproduce
deep-seated cultural beliefs that shape the design of the spaces of our daily
lives, including bathrooms. Transforming the codes that govern public spaces
such as toilets is a long-term project that will require concerted effort to
change entrenched ideas about the naturalness and fixity of our social gen-
der binary and the assumptions that undergird them. But because the goal
we seek is justicea nonutopian call to make the world be more as it should
bewe should not be deterred by the size of the task from starting such
work in the present.
References
Bidgood, Jess. 2016. 10 More States Sue U.S. Over Transgender Policy for Schools. New York
Times, July 8. www.nytimes.com/2016/07/09/us/10-states-sue-us-transgender-schools
.html?_r=0.
Campaign for Houston. 2016. www.campaignforhouston.com (accessed March 11, 2016).
Cavanagh, Sheila. 2010. Queering Bathrooms: Gender, Sexuality, and the Hygienic Imagination.
Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Madhani, Aamer. 2016. Battle Brewing over Transgender Bathroom Laws in State Capitals.
USA Today, February 27. www.usatoday.com/story/news/2016/02/27/battle-brewing
-over-transgender-bathroom-laws-state-capitals/81006894.
Notes on Contributors
David Bell is a critical human geographer at the University of Leeds, United

Kingdom, where he is currently head of school. His most recent book is
Cultural Policy, coauthored with Kate Oakley (2015).
David Faflik is associate professor of English at the University of Rhode
Island. The author of Boarding Out: Inhabiting the American Urban Literary
Imagination, 18401860 (2012), he is also the editor of Englishman Thomas
Butler Gunns classic 1857 account of New York habitation, The Physiology
of New York Boarding-Houses (2009). Faflik is currently at work on a book-
length study of reading practices in the antebellum city.
Grant Farred teaches at Cornell University. His most recent work is Martin
Heidegger Saved My Life (2015). His previous books include In Motion, At
Rest: The Event of the Athletic Body (2014), Whats My Name? Black Vernacu-
lar Intellectuals (2004), Phantom Calls: Race and the Globalization of the
NBA (2006), and Long Distance Love: A Passion for Football (2008).
Ben Fawcett is a practitioner, teacher, and lobbyist with thirty-five years
experience in the water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) sector in the
developing world, campaigning particularly for toilets for those suffering
the indignity of life without such essential facilitiessomewhere to go.
He is coauthor of The Last Taboo: Opening the Door on the Global Sanitation
Crisis (2008) and is currently a lecturer at the International WaterCentre,
Brisbane, Australia.
Jernej Habjan is a researcher at the literary institute of the Research Centre
of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts. He was also a postdoctoral
researcher at the University of Munich and a research fellow at the Interna-
tionales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften (IFK) in Vienna. He
has coedited, with Jessica Whyte, (Mis)readings of Marx in Continental Phi-
losophy (2014) and, with Fabienne Imlinger, Globalizing Literary Genres:
Literature, History, Modernity (2016).
Dharman Jeyasingham is a lecturer in social work at the University of Man-
chester, UK. His research relates to questions of race, sexuality, child pro-
tection practice, and space. His writing on public toilets concerns their sig-
nificance as locations for sexual activity and as spaces that have been
subject to regulation and material reorganization to prevent their use for
queer sex.
Alison Kafer is professor of feminist studies at Southwestern University,

where she also teaches in the race and ethnicity studies and environmental
studies programs. She is the author of Feminist, Queer, Crip (2013).
Angela McRobbie is professor of communications at Goldsmiths Univer-
sity of London. She began her career at the Birmingham University Centre
for Contemporary Cultural Studies in 1974. Her most recent books are The
Aftermath of Feminism (2008) and Be Creative: Making a Living in the New
Culture Industries (2015). She currently holds the Mercator Fellowship at
Oldenburg University, Germany.
Jeffrey T. Nealon is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English and Philosophy at
Pennsylvania State University. His most recent books are Foucault beyond
Foucault: Power and Its Intensifications since 1984 (2008); Post-Postmodernism;
or, The Cultural Logic of Just-in-Time Capitalism (2012); and Plant Theory:
Biopower and Vegetable Life (2015). He is presently at work on a book about
popular music.
Judith Plaskow is professor emerita of religious studies at Manhattan Col-
lege and a Jewish feminist theologian. Cofounder and for many years coed-
itor of the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, she is the author or editor
of several works in feminist theology, including Standing Again at Sinai:
Judaism from a Feminist Perspective (1990), The Coming of Lilith: Essays on
Feminism, Judaism, and Sexual Ethics, 19722003 (2005), and her new book,
coauthored with Carol P. Christ, Goddess and God in the World: Conversa-
tions in Embodied Theology (2006).
Joel Sanders is principal at Joel Sanders Architect, adjunct professor at the
Yale School of Architecture, and editor of Stud: Architectures of Masculinity
(1996). His exhibitions include Open House at the Vitra Design Museum,
Cut: Revealing the Section and Glamour at the San Francisco Museum of
Modern Art, New Hotels for Global Nomads at the Cooper-Hewitt National
Design Museum, and Unprivate House at New Yorks Museum of Modern
Art. His books include Joel Sanders: Writings and Projects (2005) and Ground-
work: Between Landscape and Architecture (with Diana Balmori; 2011). Proj-
ects by Joel Sanders Architect have received numerous design awards includ-
ing nine American Institute of Architects Design Awards, four Interior
Design Best of Year Awards, and two Design Citations from Progressive
Architecture.
Susan Stryker is associate professor of gender and womens studies and
director of the Institute for LGBT Studies at the University of Arizona. She is
Notes on Contributors 791
an Emmy Awardwinning documentary filmmaker (Screaming Queens: The

Riot at Comptons Cafeteria; 2005); the editor of numerous anthologies and
special journal issues and author of articles on various trans and queer top-
ics for Parallax, Radical History Review, Womens Studies Quarterly, and GLQ:
A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies; a founding coeditor of TSQ: Transgen-
der Studies Quarterly; and the author of the book Transgender History (2008).
Kathi Weeks teaches in the womens studies program at Duke University.
She is the author of Constituting Feminist Subjects (1998) and The Problem
with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics and Postwork Imaginaries
(2011) and coeditor of The Jameson Reader (2000).
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Grant Farred

Men make their own history, but they do make it just as

In making the documentary The Stuart Hall

The South Atlantic Quarterly 115:4, October 2016

As such, The Stuart Hall Project offers a sharp disjuncture between

dian-born James, of course, belonged to the generation that preceded Halls

What Have We Inherited from Stuart Hall?

to repurpose for addressing the particular difficulties of our conjuncture?

critiques both of Thatcherism, as well as Reaganism, and of the Labour

The Metropolis: A Place from Which the Intellectual Can Do Work

house, of course, built in a climate more temperate and more conducive,

Identity politics . . . , perhaps deservedly, acquired a

. . . hybridity to me is the third space which enables

The challenge to assumptions of national identity posed

Introduction: The Third Space of Pedagogy

In this article I attend to three elements in the

The South Atlantic Quarterly 115:4, October 2016

that Hall propagated an idea of the popular arts as a distinguishing feature

infrastructure of seemingly enduring social democratic institutional invest-

lective authorship, in the context of producing journals, pamphlets, and the

community arts, coming as it did from a younger, more politicized genera-

Conclusion: Precarity Politics and Black Arts?

I Persevered with My Geography

Its the day before the 2015 UK general election,

The South Atlantic Quarterly 115:4, October 2016

It also mentions space and placenot least in noting that common

Trade Winds and Cups of Tea

myself teaching geography (though in a polytechnic, in the late 1980s), and I

Cultural Geography and Its Legacies

I have chosen two moments of this two-way traffic to explore here.

In terms of the two-way-ness of this conversationand this is my sec-

Stuart Hall Projects

on my bookshelves, I am particularly reminded of three series of texts. The

this time with Christine Gledhill, who contributed to RepresentationI wish

Refusing Easy Answers

Blunt, Alison, and Robyn Dowling. 2006. Home. London: Routledge.

Ordinary Literature Philosophy:

W hen it comes to thinkers like Stuart Hall,

The South Atlantic Quarterly 115:4, October 2016

literary studiesthe only alternative to the many ways literary studies is

Literature Is Not Extraordinary

overshadowed in the middle of the sixteenth century by the Dutch cycle,

JamesonAhmad problematic, postcolonial critics gradually turn on its head

postmodern textualismthe whole Yale school, its textualism run wild

Ordinary Literature Philosophy

use of language, be it an Austinian or a Derridean parasite, but also a para

school and of the retrenchment and attrition of graduate programs; it is

Finally, politics. . . . The way we imagine comparative literature is a mirror of how

piece is a joint effort, with Dominique Pestre, an analysis called Bankspeak:

Stuart Hall and the Whiteness of the Whale

I came to Stuart Hall by sea, in a whale ship bound

The South Atlantic Quarterly 115:4, October 2016

James in his classic study Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways: The

Melville in the Wake of Metaphor

subject of Ruthless Democracy, Powell says, is not simply a revision of the

faith in the subversive imagination, was writing in the shadow of Hall

Stuart Hall and the Detour through Theory

Cultural studiesneither applies theory as if answers

The Detour That Is Stuart Hall (for Me)

Michel Foucault, when asked about the reso-

The South Atlantic Quarterly 115:4, October 2016

In short, I begin with this detour of a preface to highlight that, much

The Detour through Theory

through theory when it comes to parsing and practicing the relations