Stuart Hall’s relevance for the study of African blackness

Abstract

In this article I draw on Stuart Hall’s extensive writing on blackness generally, touch on the few instances of him directly addressing Africa and continental African blackness and on what Gayatri Spivak rightly sees as the missed articulation of Africa(ns) and the postcolonial cultural studies project in Hall’s work in order to undertake, à la Hall’s essay on Gramsci’s relevance for the study of race and ethnicity, a brief exercise on Hall’s relevance for the study of continental African blackness. The premise of my arguments is that Hall’s insistence on the importance of both difference and complexity should give us pause about the neat dualism of hybrid, evolving diasporic blackness and originary fixed continental blackness on the one hand and the assumptions of a spatio-temporally seamless homogeneous blackness from the continent to the far reaches of the diaspora on the other. Africa in general, and African blackness in particular, I argue, are in fact rather complex and this ought to be taken up more seriously and rigorously in conceptualizations of blackness and the field of cultural studies. Continued failure to do so, I conclude, has potentially serious consequences for the politics of representation and beyond.

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