Cultural Studies again

A few weeks ago I read Raka Shome's "Post-colonial Reflections on the 'Internationalization' of Cultural Studies", Roxy Harris's "Black British, Brown British and British Cultural Studies" (Cultural Studies, Vol. 23, No. 4, July 2009, pp. 483-512) came out from my suitcase this weekend. 

Drawing on Caryl Phillips' lament on the absence, in British fiction of the 1950s and 1960s, of black and brown immigrants from the British Commonwealth, and Paul Gilroy's critique of "strategic silences" in the works of major figures in British Cultural Studies, such as Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams and E. P. Thompson, Harris suggests that the "strategic silences" are part of a long and deep tradition in the serious analysis of Anglo-British culture.

According to Shome, most of the literature "about the popular cultural tastes of young people of South Asian descent in British in the 1980s and 1990s had emphasized their attachment to Bhangra music." Noting nowadays young people's choices of music being grunge, rock, heavy metal, pop, rap, hip hop, jazz, r & b etc, Shome's, himself of Sierra Leonean descent, irritation frustrated him. Stuart Hall's theoretical formulation of "new ethnicities" opened up his mind to recognize the musical tastes of them "were representative of the tastes of other British youth of their generation in the late 1990s, not of the imagined and guaranteed tastes of some sort of essential South Asian ethnicity." (p. 503)

Suggesting the continual process of translation of black and brown British, Hall contended that "[s]uch people retain strong links with their places of origin and their traditions, but they are without the illusion of a return of the past...they are irrevocably the product of several interlocking histories and cultures, belong at one and the same time to several 'homes'...People belong to such cultures of hybridity have had to renounce the dream or ambition of rediscovering any kind of 'lost' cultural purity, or ethnic absolutism. They are irrevocably translated...They are the products of the new diasporas created by the post-colonial migrations. They must learn to inhabit at least two identities, to speak two cultural languages, to translate and negotiate between them." (Hall, 1992, p. 310)

Are we Hong Kong Chinese in the same way in the middle of illusion of a return to the Chinese past forgotten and unrooted but imagined and guaranteed by their parents and earlier generations?

Stuart Hall, "The Question of Cultural Identity," in Modernity and its Futures, eds Stuart Hall, D. Held & T. McGrew (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992)

Read another Shouleh Vatanabadi's "Translating Transnational: Teaching the 'Other' in Translation," Cultural Studies, Vol. 23, Nos. 5-6, Sep-Nov 2009, pp. 795-809. Vatanabadi' explores the uneven landscape of cultural flows across the global south and north in the production of knowledge through translation and teaching.