"In this programme we look at how social change affects our sense of who we are, what we feel entitled to, and what society makes available to us." "This programme is a version of one made for an Open University social science course, and it shows how the everyday and mundane elements of our lives can affect the person we become and provide an accurate barometer of social change." "When I was about 19 or 20 Miles Davis put his finger on my soul." "The various moods of Miles Davis matched the evolution of my own feelings." "There continued to be a regret for the loss of a life which I might have lived but didn't live." "And the uncertainty, the restlessness - and some of the nostalgia for what cannot be is in the sound of Miles Davis' trumpet." "Through the experiences of two very different families, the programme examines how the new replaces the old and gradually becomes the way of life we take for granted." "The two families look back over the last forty years and consider the impact on their lives of some of the social changes that have taken place in Britain since the war." "For them, as for most people, it's the changes in the everyday and not the big events which they feel have shaped their lives and, indirectly, their sense of history." "'Filles de Kilimanjaro')" "The programme came onto me at one point in the day and said," "'Do you know of any West Indians 'whom we might have to come on this programme?" "'" "And he's going to be surprised now, because he doesn't know this, but I said, 'Yes, Stuart Hall's a splendid fellow 'because I worked with him once on Meeting Point 'and he seemed to me to be highly intelligent" "'and he'd be your man. '" "Now, this idea was thrown out, because the objection of the programme was that Stuart Hall was far too intelligent and it would appear, and perhaps rightly so, that we had in some way loaded this." "As we slide out of the 1980s and edge our way into a new decade, who's going to define the cultural themes of the next ten years, and who's going to capitalise politically on the changing mood of the new age?" "No one on the British Left thinks harder about this question than Stuart Hall, one-time director of the Centre for Cultural Studies at Birmingham, and now professor at the Open University." "The programme you're about to see deals with another aspect of change - the process of ageing." "It looks at the different stages of life through which we as individuals and generations pass on our way from youth to old age." "The transition from youth to age is not only a matter of our biological and genetic ageing, it's also a question of changing identities, and the programme looks at both these aspects." "From his editorship of Universities and New Left Review, post the crises in Suez and Hungary in the 1950s, through his involvement in the rise of Cultural Studies, to his analyses in the 1980s of Thatcherism," "Stuart Hall has a reasonable claim to be the foremost intellectual of the Left in Britain." "There are Jews to be found in every social class in Britain." "Why then are we dealing with the Jews as a minority community?" "Well, the fact is that in spite of social mobility, the Jews do remain a large and well-defined group, with a distinct and continuing sense of their own identity." "Today there are half a million Jews in Britain, and most of the community are descendants of penniless immigrants who came to Britain largely in the 1890s and settled in the poorer areas of our cities, especially in the East End of London." "In spite of the many factors which seem conducive to the disappearance of the Jewish community, there are important elements which enable the community to survive as an entity." "But to understand this, we need to go back to the roots of the present in the communities of the 1890s." "One of the things that's happening at the moment is that you're doing a television history of the Caribbean." "The Caribbean is the test case for me about this question of identity." "Everybody who's there has come from somewhere else." "So we are all hybrids." "I'm part Scottish, part African, part Portuguese Jew." "I feel archetypal - a 21st-century man." "Increasingly, people's social and cultural identities will be this complex hybridity." "And the Caribbean is the home of hybridity." "I lived through the most exquisitely differentiated class and caste system in the world." "I was three shades darker than my family, and it's the first social fact I knew about myself." "I was running away from that throughout my entire existence really, before I came to England." "I came to England with enormous positive feelings." "But then you discover something quite different." "This is the house where my father was born." "Our family was part English, part African, part Portuguese Jew." "Even, some say, a little East Indian." "My Aunt Jerry was a teacher then, and incredibly she's still a teacher today." "Igo back to the Caribbean because I think it's a kind of test bed of whether one can live without an origin to go back to." "I can't go back to any one origin." "I'd have to go back to five, and I think increasingly that is a world experience." "I've felt this tension throughout my life between what I thought I was, a young, bright Jamaican, and this refusal ofmy family really to live in that world at all." "In Jamaica, the question of exactly what shade you were, in colonial Jamaica that was the most important question, because you could read off class and education and status from that." "I was aware and conscious of that from the very beginning." "We're accustomed to think of other cultures as still very rooted in their national nation state bases, and then in their regions." "And I think that's just finished." "I think economic and cultural processes just mean the interpenetration of the first world with the third and the second with the first." "That's what globalisation means culturally." "We know what it means economically in terms of the integration of financial markets and so on." "Culturally, I think it means that when I ask anybody where they're from," "I expect nowadays to be told an extremely long story." "They're from really five different places and their aunt's here from Odessa, their brothers are in Pakistan, etc." "Everybody seems to come from about five different places, and in their heads, their sense of themselves, to be juggling a kind of set of world identities, as it were, trying to find their place." "'Just an Old-Fashioned Girl')" "?" "I'm just an old-fashioned girl" "?" "With an old-fashioned mind...?" "This is the house where my mother was brought up as a girl." "Her family was poor and her uncle who o wned this place unofficially adopted her and taught her its ways." "No w the singer Eartha Kitt o wns it, though she has not been here for a while." "?" "... a cerise Cadillac, long enough to have a bowling alley in the back...?" "I looked around it with mixed feelings." "?" "... an old-fashioned house with an old-fashioned fence...?" "It seemed to sum up some of the false, pointless aspirations of the past." "?" "I like Chopin and Bizet and the songs of yesterday" "?" "String quartets and Polynesian carols...?" "My mother was brought up thinking that everything that belonged to England was good, and nothing that belonged to the Caribbean was." "I was brought up in that middle class to look do wn on everybody who was not as bro wn or as near to white as I was." "On the other hand, I watched my father being patronised." "I watched my mother not being quite as well offand as respectable and as lauded by other people as she wanted to be." "Constant lack of fulfilment ofambition in this family situation." "I was about 17 when my sister fell in love with a black doctor." "She was in her twenties." "My mother said, 'Absolutely not. '" "Within about three months she'd had a serious nervous breakdo wn, treated with electric shock therapy." "She's never really ever recovered." "In my mother's day, this house and all it stood for must have seemed so permanent." "And yet, just think of who's gone and who's survived." "Gone is the old colonial life, and the Jamaicans who identified with it." "The tropics reclaimed the house, the estate, and the illusions that went with them." "My old school, Jamaica College, hasn't changed much." "But here too there's something different underneath." "These are the children ofindependence." "Unlike me, they've never lived under direct colonial rule." "In those days, colonialism was ending and Jamaica was setting out on her o wn." "Michael Manley was already a prominent figure." "No w he's prime minister." "For the first year I was here as a small boy, it was your last year in the sixth form." "You were among the lords of creation, the prefects here." "Oh my God!" "As a young student in Jamaica, I listened to all kinds ofmusic, but none of that music belonged to me." "The first musical sound that I felt really belonged to me was the first sound ofmodern jazz." "It felt as ifit opened up a new world." "I knew that it was a world from the margins." "It opened up the possibility ofreally experiencing modern life to the full, which formed in me the aspiration to go andget it, wherever it was." "I remember coming down here when I lived in Kingston." "It was poor then, and it's poorer now." "Colonialism has gone, independence governments of right and left have had their turns in power, each with their own brand of solutions." "And the whole process has passed the majority of the ordinary people by." "Rastafarians would say that they're still suffering, still in captivity, and that this is Babylon." "One of the moments in your life for which I have the most emotional sympathy is that moment when I see you as a young boy coming from Jamaica and you come to Oxford for the first time." "Can you remember what that was like?" "What was that moment of encountering Britishness and England for the first time?" "What I wanted to do was to get to another city." "I wanted to get to London and I wanted to get to New York." "I wanted to get to the experiences that London represented." "I was too black in my family." "I was the outsider from the time I was born." "So I couldn't rest on what I was given." "I am of that generation that decided without contacting one another we had to get out in order to do something." "To become writers, become intellectuals." "Someho w we had to get out." "Throughout his history the West Indian has constantly been on the move." "First there was transportation into slavery." "In more recent times there's been the drift from countryside to town, from small island to the larger islands, from the Caribbean to other parts of the world." "The West Indian immigrant looks upon coming to Britain rather as coming home and may not realise how great is the adjustment which is required of him." "To the British, West Indians, like most foreigners, tend to look the same." "My mother delivered me in a felt hat and a check overcoat and a steamer trunk." "It was the apotheosis of everything she had wanted for me and for her family." "Frantz Fanon is one of the most distinguished, best known Martiniquean writers and thinkers." "Fanon was sent abroad to university in France." "He became, among other things, a very distinguished psychiatrist." "And one day, a Frenchwoman and a little girl passed him in the street, and the little girl pointed him out with her finger and exclaimed in a loud voice to her mother, 'Look, maman, a negro. '" "In that moment, Fanon said, he felt as if he didn't exist as a person." "He had been fixed in the glance of the Europeans as something entirely other, a person with a black skin, but trapped in a white mask." "And what I realised the moment Igot to Oxford was that someone like me could not really be part ofit." "It's the peak of the English education system." "You have to remember where I'm coming from as well as where I'm coming to." "I'm coming from a background which in those days was always caught between the question of identification." "And one was coming also, not just to England, but to the heartland... the pinnacle of the English class system, the high point of the English educational elite experience at Oxford." "That was a very profound shock." "In 1952, I went with an American friend to Europe, and I took only two books," "The Odyssey and James Joyce's Ulysses." "They represented my escape from a certain kind of colonialprovincialism, from all the forms of colonial deformation." "They were my route out, my mental fantasy route out." "There were a lot ofpeople from Africa, from India, from the Caribbean, people from Southeast Asia." "And we formed a socialist society, looking for some space between the two alternatives, either capitalism or some form of state communism." "What we related to were all the struggles outside." "Kenya, Indonesia, Burma." "All those terrible, terrible earlypost-colonial struggles, some of them very vicious, they've been forgotten." "I lived quite near to Paddington and week after week at the end of summer you'd see people pouring out of the trains." "Ordinary English people who'd never had much direct experience of the colony suddenly think, 'This is my next door neighbour, 'this is the guy who's at the labour exchange coming for myjob. '" "You kno w, 'He's going to be driving my bus. '" "That is a huge impact." "It does feel, especially in everyday life, as the English population thought," "'Mygod, we have a black population that is going to stay. '" "This is when industry is of course swinging over from wartime to peacetime production and it leads in to the great productive boom of the mid-fifties." "Accommodation and adjustment between blacks and whites is on the agenda." "The black population on the whole maintain a low profile." "They draw the curtains both against the cold and against the outsiders." "It's a period of muted optimism." "The hope and dream of long-term black and white assimilation." "I read things that I wrote in the late 1950s and I find I still not only believe them, but say similar sorts of things." "You need to wait until you understand what the next conjuncture is, and ifit means overthro wing what you thought before, you'd better think again." "Every new configuration contains masses of the old." "I think of the new, not as breaking completely with the past, always as reconfiguring the elements of the past with some elements that are new." "Each time that comes, it does require a change ofperspective." "Sometimes a change ofparadigm." "The Suez Canal is a name familiar to everyone." "It is in fact the greatest international waterway in the world." "And what Colonel Nasser has just done is to seize it for his own ends." "Nobody should be surprised that this has created a very grave situation." "Increasingly, modern governments use the cultural tools at their disposal to mobilise popular support." "Historically we can learn much about what governments wanted their citizens to believe from the three examples we've used in this programme." "The same sort of analysis based on who says what to whom, when, how, why and with what effect can help us to understand governments in action today." "The only interest in history is that it is not yet finally wrapped up." "Another history is always possible, another turning is waiting to happen." "Two dramatic events took place simultaneously," "Hungary and Suez." "Suez shocked some socialists out ofapathy." "Hungary drove some communists out of the party." "1956is the moment when, first ofall, the British revert to an imperial role that everybody thought had disappeared forever." "Gunboat diplomacy." "And at the same time, the Hungarian revolution, which was the first time a satellite East European communist state tried to break free of the Soviet yoke." "This was the beginning ofmy 'New Left' experience." "For the 'New Left', what it meant for me was that space in politics which was defined by the Soviet invasion of Hungary and the invasion of Egypt." "Somewhere in between there, the idea ofa democratic socialist anti-imperialpolitics was born." "'Shake, Rattle and Roll')" "?" "Get out in that kitchen and rattle those pots and pans" "?" "Get out in that kitchen and rattle those pots and pans" "?" "Well, roll my breakfast...?" "In England in '56, this was really a cultural explosion." "I mean, there was new music and new stars, but most important ofall there was this huge pent-up energy and feeling behind it all." "?" "I said shake, rattle and roll" "?" "I said shake, rattle and roll...?" "Youth culture seems to me to be about several kinds ofrebellion, andpop music is the sound of that rebellion in progress." "After '56 we started a thing called Universities and New Left Review, and that was very much edited by the Oxfordgroup;" "myself, Raphael Samuel, Charles Taylor and Gabriel Pearson." "We were sort of the spokespersons for this whole larger enclave who had been debating politics, and also politics and culture." "We were looking for an alternative, more humane, more just, more inclusive, less racially driven, less patriarchal in its forms than either of these two Cold War alternatives." "We used to think of it as part of a very personal private crisis." "We used to think about adolescence as a secretive period in our lives." "The difference is that these crises and tensions are now being lived out publicly on the stage." "They're being dramatised, in the music, in dress and so on." "Adolescence is also a period of idealism and addiction to great causes, when people express their rebellion against the misery, hypocrisy, violence, destructiveness of the world around them." "The coffee bar has been opened by a small group of young people from Oxford, who, having already successfully launched a magazine, now want a meeting place for the left, and a source of income for their publication." "The aim is to provide a place where people will sit and talk, and preferably talk politics." "The first person I met was a secondary modern schoolteacher who had recently left Oxford." "We're angry about a government that's been steadily eroding the welfare state, in spite of what the welfare state's done for a lot of people in the last 15 years." "We're very angry about our generation of young people that have grown up, I think, without any kind of real moral or political leadership." "We're angry about the evasions of the two parties on very important questions like Cyprus and Kenya and colonial policy generally." "The two parties argue about all these subjects and have their policies, but you have another one that you think's better." "They argue in the House..." "The murder of Kelso Cochrane was almost the first time that there's a national black presence on the British streets around an issue." "A black man had been murdered at a street corner in Ladbroke Grove by four or five white youths." "That's when people become aware not just that their community/ black struggle's going on, but that there's a national black politics emerging." "And the New Left Review, the magazine you edited..." "Yes, we started in Oxford a small journalcalled Universities  Left Review and then there was anotherjournal started mainly bypeople who'd left the Communist Party, called The New Reasoner." "And these two journals came together to form New Left Review." "People who ought to have edited had really exhausted themselves in the struggles around to found these journals, and so me, in my early twenties found myself editing these grand figures." "My childhood was the experience ofpassing through a set ofnegative definitions and myparents patrolled who I could and couldn't bring home." "They had to be the right class, the right colour, the right education, they had to have the right air, the right background, right name." "They saw me as an aspiring young scholar who was going to go away, conquer the world and come back and adorn their struggles to improve themselves." "Well, that is what I decided NO T to do." "So who am I?" "I am the person who is refusing that identity." "We're always trying to negotiate between notions of ourselves and of our cultural meanings and the values which enable us to live which are not translatable from one to another." "That's just the modern condition, don't ask me whether it's going to go on being like that." "That's how it is now and I think it's been like that for some time and I don't think it's just superficial confusion that makes us think that." "I think it's a really new dynamic, culturally, across the globe, moving at different speeds across the globe, which gives us that kind of experience of what it's like to be in the modern world." "Panorama tonight is devoting the whole ofits time to one subject, the H-bomb." "These various campaigns against the H-bomb will reach one climax at the coming weekend, when protest marchers from manyparts of the country will converge on a quiet Berkshire village," "Aldermaston." "It's a small figure for a politicalparty, but for a demonstration it's enormous." "So is the figure of 800 people arrested for civil disobedience the other day." "Stuart Hall sums up the hopes which people of the left had for the unilateralist policy." "I think that Britain ought to give up the bomb, unilaterally renounce nuclear weapons and their manufacture and their use, and consider what more positive policies they can adopt in the future." "Because I think it's very important that a country that's been right at the centre of the military build-up should in fact confront the problems ofnuclear weapons and take a new course." "I think the effect in the world of seeing a major po wer do that would have a profound effect." "I don't think that a great deal is going to come out of discussions between East and West either where disarmament or disengagement is concerned." "It's going to come out of the United Nations, and this is the point at which the neutralpo wers could use the increased and added infuence ofa po wer like Britain in their support." "One has to see the way in which the balance ofpo wer has changed in the last five years as a result of the emergence ofAfrican, Asian and Latin American countries into the world scene, their renewed effect on discussions in the United Nations and so on." "Their impact on world affairs has doubled or trebled in the last two or three years." "Once Igot involvedin the New Left, then got involved in CND," "I was on platforms, you kno w, speaking, speaking, speaking." "There's certainly a view that politics is a very separate thing from people's lives and that it ought to be managed by a party hierarchy or people whose trained job it is." "This is a dangerous thing because it leaves a lot of people out." "It makes a lot of people feel that they have no control over their lives, over their environment, over the kind of things that they do, and so on." "I went up and do wn the country speaking at CND meetings for about three years." "I spoke nearly every weekend." "I couldgo to Halifax and then there'd be a New Left editorialboardmeeting." "I understood Oxford, I understood London, I understood the south." "But Halifax?" "It's a completely different thing altogether." "You could still see the smoke coming out of the chimneys." "There were still textile mills." "We often think of England as an old country." "It's been settled for a long time and it presents itself as a society in which there have been relatively little changes across history." "But in fact we know that successive historical changes have reshaped both the social and the physical landscape of England." "Each of these economic and political transformations have brought a new class of persons into an ascendant position in the society." "And as a consequence of that they have constructed for themselves images of their own power and influence and transformed the economic and political relationships around them." "'So What')" "The former colonialpeoples ofAfrica, Asia, South America are no w insisting on self-government, at least in part because they are determined to be treated as equals." "I wanted to question the very sharp opposition which you make between the concepts ofliberty and equality." "This is not only an ethnocentric way oflooking at it, but a peculiarly British way oflooking at it." "I think it has been the idea of equality which has really mobilisedpeople to support nationalist movements." "What they were facing were, in fact, inequalities." "Whether they were economic, or human, or social, or racial, they were essentially inequalities." "I think they impinged on their lives as inequalities, and therefore when they said, 'We want to be free, ' what they meant was we want to be free not to be unequal." "My conception of culture was always of something which is changing." "I have never believed in the absolute moment ofbreak." "When I went to Cuba in 1960 for the New Left, people said, 'This is Year One." "'From here Socialist Man begins. '" "It's not true." "Cuba went on being partly what it was before the revolution." "So I don't believe in absolute breaks." "Our politics have always been grounded on rather long-term universalistic sets of values." "It's also been grounded on long-term historical descriptions of our society." "We thought they would hold as political metaphors, and I just don't think they do, either for the Right or the Left." "It means a politics which is much more self-reflexive, which is constantly inspecting the grounds of its own commitments, which can never hope to mobilise or inscribe support in an automatic way." "Yes?" "There are no large collectivities which could always be whipped up in line." "Professor Richard Hoggart is Professor of English at the university, and the Director of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies." "I'm Stuart Hall, and with a colleague from Birmingham University," "Professor Richard Hoggart," "I'll be talking in this programme about English provincial working-class life andpeople." "Britain was an old class society becoming a mass society." "This is the period of the coming of television, it's the coming ofyouth culture, it's 'Rock Around the Clock', it's the explosion of the 20th century in a sort ofpre-20th century society." "This is Salford in the north of England, and all too often the people who live in the north are sho wn on the screen as simple innocents, easyprey for the metropolitan wide boys." "I met Catherine." "We got married in December '64." "I then encountered racism in a way in which I don't think I'd really encountered it before." "I'd never experienced it very directly." "But in '64 in Birmingham, racism was absolutely overt." "It was the first time that things were called out to us in the streets because we were a mixed couple." "It was really a pretty traumatic experience." "I think you're asking me how can people live without some sense that there's an ultimate truth." "Some universal appeal that one can make beyond the flux of experience." "And I don't know, but I don't any longer think that this is just a transitional phase and that we're moving on to some other more settled period." "I think, you know, we're in... culturally we're in a kind of phase of permanent revolution." "There comes a time in everybody's life when they have to accept themselves - not just what nationality they belong to and what colour they are, but what they are in themselves." "The final question for young colouredpeople in Britain is the same question for young people anywhere." "Who are theygoing to be?" "What are theygoing to be?" "What is their society encouraging them to be?" "Every child, whether white or coloured, wants to belong to the world." "But the world must seem a completely different place when the price ofbelonging to it is that you want to change the colour ofyour skin or the shape ofyour features and your face." "The realproblems seem to arise when the children themselves are beginning to become adults, when they enter adolescent and adult life and then find awaiting them a very hostile world." "A world where the vice of colour seems to entwine with and override intelligence or aptitude or skill." "The rockers were the inheritors of the Teddy Boyperiod, whereas the Mods were really Beatles kids." "The cooler generation, the Mods, were bound to come out on top." "But the rockers weren't going to give up the field to the Mods without a fight." "The public reaction to this was very strong indeed." "Magistrates - saying things about youth culture, which they hadprobably always thought but never had the chance to say before - sent in reinforcements ofpolice to guard the seaport to wns on the weekends." "And these forces which were at play in the confrontation between the Mods and the Rockers, comes right through and erupts into the pop scene itself." "Young people are not onlygoing into a world of their o wn, they're also in some ways trying to get out of somebody else's world." "They're trying to shut that other world out." "It seems to take seven or eight years before you actually confess to yourself that you have chosen to live somewhere else." "And then you and anybody who's been through that experience has this question of who are you, where do you belong?" "You feel at home in both cultures, you kno w a great deal about them both from the inside." "You do find it difficult sometimes ever to say 'we ' or 'us ' about either of them." "This is the multicultural experience." "There was no teaching of film in the universities." "There was no formal study of film at all." "Through the British Film Institute, we started to do lectures on both film as a serious art form, but also on popular cinema." "We got involved trying to write for teachers who wanted to teach this stuff in classrooms, but didn't kno w ho w on earth to do it." "We decided to write a 'Ho w To Do It' book, which was called The Popular Arts." "Almost all of these films are about characters who are on the move in some kind of social terms." "These are either young people affected by new attitudes and therefore moving away from their background, or young men on the make." "There is a kind of submerged theme in these films, never radically questioned, that success and 'the top' is a flimsy kind of thing in the provinces." "To get to the top you've got to get to London, you've got to get to the metropolitan centre, you've got to get to the heart of power." "When the immigrant comes to Britain, the streets are not paved with gold." "Indians who come to Britain do so for three main reasons." "The first group, like doctors, come for specialised training." "The secondgroup are students." "The third and largest group are those who come in search of employment." "Tiger, tiger burning bright" "In the forests of the night" "What mortal hand or eye" "Could frame thy fearful symmetry?" "In what distant deeps or skies" "Burnt the fire of thine eyes?" "I learnt the poem as a child." "It was taught to me in a very special way, taught to me as if it were a poem about how god was able to create the world." "For a long time I thought of the poem quite differently from what it actually is." "I thought it was a kind of picture of a tiger." "Then I've read it again and I have taught it and every time I have to teach it in a different way, or read it in a different way, and I see something that I've not seen before." "I celebrated the fall of the French in Vietnam in the 1950s." "Little did I kno w that it was just the beginning of something, not the end of something." "As our century draws to a close, it seems appropriate that we should pause to look back to its infancy." "With hindsight, it's possible to see the 20th century as one of massive expansion in the role of the state in society." "Many of the changes were chronicled by George Orwell." "We'll be looking at the state and society through his eyes." "From that moment when, as a young man, he returned to Europe from a post in the Burma police to become a writer and to confront the depression." "I went home once and my mother said to me," "'I hope they don't think you're one of those immigrants. '" "And I thought to myself, of course that is exactly what I am." "And she said," "'England, beautiful England, full of those black people." "'The best thing for all of them 'is if theypush the lot of them off the short end ofa long pier. '" "I thought to myself, she's talking about me." "I'm often asked where do I belong?" "And ifl'm going to be honest, I don't belong anywhere any longer." "I was born and brought up in Jamaica and lived there for eighteen years, but I left it a long time ago." "I was educated andgrew up and have spent over eleven years in Britain, and Britain is my home." "But I'm not English." "We always supposed something wouldgive us a definition of who we really were - our class position, or our national position or our geographic origins or where our grandparents came from." "And I don't think any one thing any longer will tell us who we are." "Secondly then is the question of contradiction - there is a jarring of those different things, they're not commensurable with one another." "I think we're always, you know, trying to negotiate between notions of ourselves and our cultural meanings and the values which enable us to live which are not sort of translatable from one to another." "I don't think that identity is a kind of essence which exists inside all the other things." "I think that identity is always constructed in a conversation between who we are and the political ideologies out there." "Although it feels as if it wells up from inside you by something which is absolutely yours, it's not really like that at all." "It's the product of an endlessly ongoing conversation with everybody around you." "You are partly how they see you." "We want blackpower." "We don't have to be ashamed ofit." "We have stayed here and we begged the President." "We begged the federalgovernment." "That's all we've been doing, begging, begging." "It's time we stand up and take over." "We've got to take over the communities where we outnumber people so we can have decent jobs, so we can have decent houses..." "It's not until the movement of decolonisation and civil rights in the States that I recognised that whatever is the actual colour of my skin, socially, historically, culturally, politically," "I made the identification with being black." "I think identity is an endless, ever-unfinished conversation." "We see now the beginning of a genuine underground, with a real interest in pioneering new experiences, with a real interest in developing new artistic forms." "People here are in some ways outside of politics, they're outside of the ongoing way in which the society makes its money and produces things and so on." "This kind of exploration and independence very quickly becomes forms of social protest." "There is an implicit anti-establishment, anti-authority, anti-adult feel within the values being carried by this tradition." "It's a new kind of cultural revolution." "A revolution of a whole generation." "You could catch it in a metaphor by saying that the Paris revolution of May 1968 was the revolution of a dream really." "1968 is also a very cataclysmic year." "In the US, in France, Italy, in Germany and Japan and Czechoslovakia it is the period of the gro wing protest against the Vietnam War, the year of the student revolutions, black po wer, of the cultural underground," "ofhot summers follo wed by hot autumns." "It inaugurates in Britain and elsewhere a period ofprofound social, cultural, politicalpolarisation." "When the smoke and fire cleared, what was impressive were the slower profound changes." "Deep underlying things in the culture really were shifted by '68." "But my acute sense in Britain is that if I might call it, as it were, the enemies of 'all of that' have never forgotten how much was unhinged in '68." "You get two forms of protest:" "the militant marches and demonstrations;" "you also get the beginnings of a desire to drop out of politics altogether - to make your protest by finding your way around adult society instead of taking it on." "And this is really the beginnings of the exploration of new experiences, through drugs, through hallucination, through strange music, through the psychedelic." "1968 is also when the great consensus of the fifties and early sixties comes apart." "When the politics of the Centre dissolves and reveals the contradictions and social antagonisms which are gathering beneath." "A range of politicians and public spokesmen in the press and the media, in this period are mesmerised by the spectacle of a society which is careering into a social crisis." "A crisis of authority." "The enemy is within the gates." "He is nameless, he is protean, he is everywhere." "This is not a crisis of race, but race punctuates and periodises the crisis." "Race is the lens through which people come to perceive that a crisis is developing." "It is the framework through which the crisis is experienced." "Eight days ago," "Enoch Po well hit the headlines with his views on immigrants and immigration." "a problem which especially affects this part of the country, with its high immigrant population." "We want Enoch Powell, we want Enoch Po well." "I was in Birmingham at the time, talking to West Indians about it." "They were genuinely frightened." "They thought if Po well can say that, then it is a kind ofinvitation to people who hold racist opinions anyway to act on them." "It certainly was a call to mobilisation." "Two, four, six, eight, we don't want to integrate..." "If, in the first place, it had been put to the country that we want to make a grand gesture and invite people from all over the world, what do you think about it?" "That would have been the time to do it, not now." "Not people from all over the world - they're from a very special part of the world that has had a very long relationship with you, who weren't asked to vote on whether they wanted to be taken to Africa or not." "We've never had the opportunity to give an opinion on the subject." "One ofthe striking things for me in the sixties was that the British looked in the faces of these black and bro wn people who they had been ruling for 400 years, as if to say, 'Well, I don't really kno w where you've come from" "'or why you've come here or what we have to do with your future. '" "It's amnesia about the empire which settled because, of course, of the paradox that these people came at the very moment when Britain was thinking it was drawing do wn the fag and was rid of them." "There is an overwhelming tendency now to abstract questions of race from their internal social and political basis and context in British society." "To deal with race as if it has nothing intrinsically to do with the present condition of England." "It's viewed as an external problem which has been foisted to some extent on British society from the outside." "Well, I hope to persuade you that this view cannot possibly be true." "The seventies is a period ofprofound alienation, when young black folk could not think of themselves as British." "Nobody wanted them to be, they didn't feel they were." "They were completely alienated from the possibility ofbeing British." "That is the moment of what I'd call the deepest crisis ofidentity." "Between August 1972 and October '73," "Britain experienced a wave of muggings." "And this mugging epidemic got widespread coverage in the press." "But where did this label, 'mugging', come from?" "Here are two news stories, both about someone attacked in the open, one before August 1972, one after." "One difference between them is clearly the size of the coverage." "That's a front page and that's a lead story." "Another difference is the use within the second story only of the mugging label." "It's the size of the sentence..." "The dream, illusion, perhaps on either side, that full assimilation was possible that the people who came would over two generations really sort of disappear into the host community and become more or less indistinguishable from them " "that dream ofassimilation was buried on both sides." "In that moment of crisis black people discover the complex things that make them black can never be traded away." "That's the moment when the ideal ofassimilation in Britain dies." "People say, 'We are not going to stay on the terms ofbecoming just like you. '" "Feminism was one of the most explosive impacts on cultural studies, which in the early stages had been concerned with class questions, therefore concerned with male questions." "I'm exposed to this on both fronts." "The women want to change the culture of the Centre, which was very much a boy's club." "A t home we are renegotiating our marriage." "It's a question of will you shut up no w?" "Can you keep quiet for the next six months, please?" "Don't tellme about the New Left and Edward Thompson and Raymond Williams, let me tell you about seeing marriage as a form of slavery." "Raymond and Edward Thompson were two kind ofheroes ofmine." "Raymond Williams was important for my thought, for mypolitical engagement, but he couldn't be a role model." "Neither of them could be role models." "Feminism taught me the difference between a conviction in the head and a change in ho w you live." "It was a very, very difficult moment, both intellectually in the Centre, and domestically at home." "These are very, very new conditions under which we're existing." "We don't know the connections between those conditions, so one's not trying to say that what's happened in Eastern Europe and here, and the third world are all the same." "But in every department - economic, political, cultural, social - things are changing very fast and very profoundly." "The changes are not just superficial." "The notion of contingency and particularity have entered and undermined all our languages that stretch across time, that are true for all societies, etc." "That's what I think has gone." "That is of course what post modernism sometimes means." "The thing that has shifted for me is that you can't translate a particular judgement to all the other cases, all the other instances." "And when one takes it to that level," "I think it's pointing to something very profound philosophically." "Every new configuration contains masses of the old." "I think of the new not as breaking completely with the past, always as reconfiguring elements of the past with some elements that are new." "Each time that comes, it does require a change ofperspective." "In the last programme we looked at how the image of industrial conflict is shaped by the way strikes are presented on television news." "As we saw, news tends to concentrate mainly on the most dramatic and violent aspects of confrontation rather than on long-term causes or consequences." "All strikers are militants, all strikes are irrational, every picket line is violent, whereas every settlement looks like a victory for common sense because it's represented as in the national interest." "Because I experienced the endpoint of colonialism inside my o wn family as a tragedy," "I came not to be able to maintain the traditional distinction between what is subjective and what is objective." "Once you've opened those gates, you speak, even ifyou're speaking about the political situation, you're speaking, as it were, allo wing something from the psychic energy to fo w into the words." "The summerriots of 1981 and the violence during the coal strike have increased fears ofa crisis ofgovernability." "But rather than a breakdo wn oflaw and order," "Hall argues that Britain is more threatened by a slo w drift to wards authoritarianism." "The most important sense that I have here is that there was a kind of a sense of what the political conversation was about from about 1945 onwards." "And that lasted, I think, in spite of the different rotation of governments and so on." "And I have the sense that in the eighties that conversation has come to a stop." "I've always written as a kind ofintervention in an argument." "I want to turn the argument in a particular kind of way." "I want to recover something which I think is being lost." "It always has a kind ofrelation to the history of the present." "I'm thinking what does that mean no w?" "Ho w is it in the problem space we 're inhabiting currently?" "We can now begin to identify a range of different processes which do tend in our kinds of societies to deliver a significant number of people at the bottom of a number of different ladders." "Some of them are technological." "Some of them have to do with education." "Some of them have to do with race and ethnicity." "Some of them have to do with single parenthood." "Although the causes are multiple, what seems to be important is that they deliver a certain number of people to a multiple series of disadvantages." "And then the question of permanence comes in." "How on earth do people like that get themselves out?" "They don't get themselves out of being stuck in that way by being, you know, thrifty, or getting on their bikes or any of those things." "I've shifted a little bit in my understanding or analysis of Thatcherism." "I think she missed the consequences of not taking care of what holds individuals together." "The most profound thing she ever said is," "'There is no such thing as society, there are only individual men and women. '" "And if you go in the street, or try to educate your children, or try to look after yourself when you're ill, you suddenly realise there's not just individual men and women, there are the networks of relationships which somebody has to articulate," "somebody has to take care of, somebody has to fund." "The question ofrethinking all those different elements that have gone into the making of oneself, the different routes - and by routes I mean R-O-U" " T-E-S, not R-O-O" " T-S." "The different pathways by which one has come to where one is." "And I have come via Oxford, via English literature, via Africa, via Kingston." "You kno w, I've come by manyplaces and who I am are that thing." "Of all Dominica's industries, sugar is the most important and has the longest history." "Columbus brought a bundle of canes with him on his second voyage in 1493." "And sugar was replacing honey as the traditional sweetener." "In Europe there was a huge demand, and Hispaniola couldn't produce enough." "The problem was labour, and that was solved by the Spanish system of repartimiento - rounding up the natives and making them work on the plantations." "We are here to stay." "We are in the centre of the creative and cultural life of the society, and we require the jobs, the training, the opportunities, the funding." "We want the path open, especially for the young people of this society, the young black people of this society, who have created in their myriad art forms, from writing, poetry, dance, music, right through to rap," "created a new culture, a culture which in its variety and power astonishes - astonishes now - the eyes of young white people in the society." "Which is a mark, a sign that they are the people of the future, and that needs organisation and funding and we have to go out and get it, because it's ours." "When I try to think back to '58, to the things which I thought I knew and thought I could see, some of them came up." "One wasn't completely stupid about them, but certain things were completely unpredictable." "I mean, sexual politics." "The consequence of what has happened in the last two or three decades in this whole domain has undoubtedly shaken the commitment of a lot of heterosexual people to the old sexual norms, without necessarily yet undermining them." "People are driven into identifying themselves as a sexual minority when they confront a surrounding culture that gives a particular valorisation for normality." "Then if you want to contest that normality you have to draw people together, and one of the ways of doing that is to mobilise around an identity." "There is what I would call a sociological time change, which isn't a consequence of people organising themselves or political programmes, it's kind of how things settle in a society that is just different twenty years later on." "I think the position of women will never be the same again." "I think the position of sexuality will never be the same again." "Which doesn't mean that there aren't horrendous periods yet to come." "I just think that slow glacier of time has overtaken us on those questions and the ground has shifted." "There is a common sense that Britain is being accepted as a multicultural society." "I would describe this as multicultural drift." "We've just found ourselves in the situation where we 're surrounded bypeople of different racial and ethnic backgrounds, and well, that's what it looks like Britain is going to be." "We haven't really confronted what then are the problems which that poses." "Alongside that is a significant minority of British-born people who don't think that's the way in which Britain shouldgo." "Tell me why have they all come to this country?" "Some of them have come from five countries, six countries, from all over the world." "Not long ago, you were bombing Kosovo." "And the reason why..." "I didn't want any part of that." "Nor did I, but that was the fact." "Now, this is the result of that situation, a long-term result of that situation in which Britain felt, rightly or wrongly, that it had to intervene." "Well, as a consequence of that people are fleeing from the situation in that part of the world and one of the places they want to come to is to this country." "Now, they may not have a genuine case, but I don't know how on earth you could describe the people by simply looking in their faces as 'bogus'." "I feel the world is stranger to me than I've ever felt it before." "I feel out of time for the first time in my life." "The world turned in the 1970s, fundamentally turned." "The end of that post-war social democratic period in Britain, the end of Keynesianism, glimpsing the end of the welfare state." "Ifyou couldpersuade me that all the vital energies of contemporary life in its variety across the globe, finds a place within the existing system ofpo wer, then we 're at the end ofhistory." "Until then we are not." "I think a certain underlying optimism is required." "A pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will, Gramsci said." "That means hard thought, hardgraft, recognising what the world is like, recognising the way the terrain is set against you, and then remembering the openness ofhistory, and seeing whether one can intervene."