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Previously, I’ve tried to open out the questions about the local and the global from their somewhat closed, somewhat overintegrated, and somewhat over- systematized formulations. My argument was that we need to think about the pro cesses which are now revealing themselves in terms of the local and the global, in those two spaces, but we also need to think of these as more con- tradictory formulations than we usually do. Unless we do, I was concerned that we are likely to be disabled in trying to think those ideas po liti cally.

I was therefore attempting— certainly not to close out the questions of power and appropriation which I think are lodged at the very center of any notion of a shift between the dispositions of the local and the global in the emergence of a cultural politics on a world scale— but rather to conceptual- ize that within a more open- ended and contingent cultural politics.

In the course of these reflections, however, I was obliged to ask if there is a politics, indeed, a counterpolitics of the local. If there are new globals and new locals at work, who are the new subjects of this politics of position? What conceivable identities could they appear in? Can identity itself be re- thought and relived, in and through difference?

It is this question which I want to address here. I have called it “Old and New Identities, Old and New Ethnicities,” and what I am going to do first is to return to the question of identity and try to look at some of the ways in which we are beginning to reconceptualize that within con temporary theo- retical discourses. I shall then go back from that theoretical consideration

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to the ground of a cultural politics. Theory is always a detour on the way to something more impor tant.

I return to the question of identity because the question of identity has returned to us; at any rate, it has returned to us in British politics and British cultural politics today. It has not returned in the same old place; it is not the traditional conception of identity. It is not going back to the old identity poli- tics of the 1960s social movements. But it is, nevertheless, a kind of return to some of the ground which we used to think in that way. I will make a com- ment at the very end about what is the nature of this theoretical- political work which seems to lose things on the one side and then recover them in a diff er ent way from another side, and then have to think them out all over again just as soon as they get rid of them. What is this never- ending theoretical work which is constantly losing and regaining concepts? I talk about identity here as a point at which, on the one hand, a whole set of new theoretical discourses intersect and where, on the other, a whole new set of cultural practices emerge. I want to begin by trying, very briefly, to map some of those points of intersection theoretically, and then to look at some of their po liti cal consequences.

The old logics of identity are ones with which we are extremely familiar, either philosophically or psychologically. Philosophically, the old logic of identity which many people have critiqued in the form of the old Cartesian subject was often thought in terms of the origin of being itself, the ground of action. Identity is the ground of action. And we have in more recent times a psychological discourse of the self which is very similar: a notion of the continuous, self- sufficient, developmental, unfolding, inner dialectic of self- hood. We are never quite there, but always on our way to it, and when we get there, we will at last know exactly who it is we are.

Now this logic of identity is very impor tant in a whole range of po liti cal, theoretical, and conceptual discourses. I am interested in it also as a kind of existential real ity because I think the logic of the language of identity is extremely impor tant to our own self- conceptions. It contains the notion of the true self, some real self inside there, hiding inside the husks of all the false selves that we pres ent to the rest of the world. It is a kind of guarantee of authenticity. Not until we get really inside and hear what the true self has to say do we know what we are “ really saying.”

There is something guaranteed about that logic or discourse of identity. It gives us a sense of depth, out there and in here. It is spatially or ga nized. Much of our discourse of the inside and the outside, of the self and other, of

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the individual and society, of the subject and the object, are grounded in that par tic u lar logic of identity. And it helps us, I would say, to sleep well at night.

Increasingly, I think one of the main functions of concepts is that they give us a good night’s rest. Because what they tell us is that there is a kind of stable, only very slowly changing ground inside the hectic upsets, disconti- nuities, and ruptures of history. Around us history is constantly breaking in unpredictable ways but we, somehow, go on being the same.

That logic of identity is, for good or ill, finished. It is at an end for a whole range of reasons. It is at an end in the first instance because of some of the great decenterings of modern thought. One could discuss this very elaborately— I could spend the rest of the time talking about it, but I just want to slot the ideas into place very quickly by using some names as reference points.

It is not pos si ble to hold to that logic of identity after Marx because al- though Marx does talk about man (he does not talk about women making history, but perhaps they were slotted in, as the nineteenth century so often slotted women in under some other masculine title), about men and women making history but under conditions which are not of their own choosing. And having lodged either the individual or collective subject always within his- torical practices, we as individuals or as groups cannot be, and can never have been, the sole origin or authors of those practices. That is a profound historical decentering in terms of social practice.

If that was not strong enough, knocking us sideways as it were, Freud came knocking from under neath, like Hamlet’s ghost, and said, “While you’re being decentered from left to right like that, let me decenter you from below a bit, and remind you that this stable language of identity is also set from the psychic life about which you don’t know very much, and can’t know very much. And which you can’t know very much about simply by taking it at face value: the great continent of the unconscious speaks most clearly when it’s slipping rather than when it’s saying what it means.” This makes the self begin to seem a pretty fragile thing.

Now, buffeted on one side by Marx and upset from below by Freud, just as it opens its mouth to say, “Well, at least I speak so therefore I must be some- thing,” Saussure and linguistics come along and say, “That’s not true either, you know. Language was there before you. You can only say something by positioning yourself in the discourse. The tale tells the teller, the myth tells the myth- maker. The enunciation is always from some subject who is positioned by and in discourse.” That upsets that. Philosophically, one comes to the end of any kind of notion of a perfect transparent continuity between our

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language and something out there which can be called the real, or the truth, without any quotation marks.

These vari ous upsets, these disturbances in the continuity of the notion of the subject and the stability of identity, are indeed what modernity is like. It is not, incidentally, modernity itself. That has an older, and longer, history. But this is the beginning of modernity as trou ble. Not modernity as enlight- enment and pro gress, but modernity as a prob lem.

It is also upset by other enormous historical transformations which do not have, and cannot be given, a single name, but without which the story could not be told. In addition to the three or four that I have quoted, we could mention the relativization of the Western narrative itself, the Western episteme, by the rise of other cultures to prominence, and fifthly, the dis- placement of the masculine gaze.

Now, the question of trying to come to terms with the notion of identity in the wake of those theoretical decenterings is an extremely problematic enterprise. But that is not all that has been disturbing the settled logic of identity. Because, as I was saying earlier when I was talking about the rela- tive decline, erosion, or instability of the nation- state, of the self- sufficiency of national economies, and consequently, of national identities as points of reference, there has si mul ta neously been a fragmentation and erosion of col- lective social identity.

I mean here the great collective social identities which we thought of as large- scale, all- encompassing, homogenous, unified collective identities, which could be spoken about almost as if they were singular actors in their own right but which, indeed, placed, positioned, stabilized, and allowed us to under- stand and read, almost as a code, the imperatives of the individual self: the great collective social identities of class, race, nation, gender, and the West.

These collective social identities were formed in, and stabilized by, the huge, long- range historical pro cesses which have produced the modern world, just as the theories and conceptualizations that I just referred to very briefly are what constituted modernity as a form of self- reflection. They were staged and stabilized by industrialization, by capitalism, urbanization, the formation of the world market, the social and the sexual division of labor, the great punctuation of civil and social life into the public and the private, the dominance of the nation- state, and the identification between Western- ization and the notion of modernity itself.

I spoke in my previous talk about the importance, to any sense of where we are placed in the world, of the national economy, the nation- state, and

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national cultural identities. Let me say a word here about the great class identities which have stabilized so much of our understanding of the im- mediate and not- so- immediate past.

Class was the main locator of social position, that which or ga nized our understanding of the main grid and group relations between social groups. They linked us to material life through the economy itself. They provided the code through which we read one another. They provided the codes through which we understood each others’ languages. They provided, of course, the notions of collective action itself, that which would unlock politics. Now as I tried to say previously, the great collective social identities rise and fall, and it is almost as difficult to know whether they are more dangerous when they are falling than when they are rising.

These great collective social identities have not dis appeared. Their pur- chase and efficacy in the real world that we all occupy is ever pres ent. But the fact is that none of them is, any longer, in either the social, historical, or epistemological place where they were in our conceptualizations of the world in the recent past. They cannot any longer be thought in the same homogenous form. We are as attentive to their inner differences, their inner contradictions, their segmentations, and their fragmentations as we are to their already- completed homogeneity, their unity, and so on.

They are not already- produced stabilities and totalities in the world. They do not operate like totalities. If they have a relationship to our identities, cul- tural and individual, they do not any longer have that suturing, structuring, or stabilizing force, so that we can know what we are simply by adding up the sum of our positions in relation to them. They do not give us the code of identity as I think they did in the past.

It is a moot point by anybody who takes this argument directly on the pulses, as to whether they ever functioned in that way. Perhaps they never functioned in that way. This may be, indeed, what the narrative of the West is like: the notion that we told of the story we told ourselves, about their functioning in that way. We know that the great homogenous function of the collective social class is extremely difficult for any good historian to actually lay his or her fin ger on. It keeps disappearing just over the horizon, like the organic community.

You know the story about the organic community? The organic community was just always in the childhood you have left behind. Raymond Williams has a wonderful essay on these people, a range of social critics who say you can mea sure the pres ent in relation to the past, and you know the past because

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back then it was much more organic and integrated. When was “back then”? Well, when I was a child, there was always some adult saying, “When I was a child, it was much more integrated.” And so, eventually, some of these great collectivities are rather like those people who have an activity of his- torical nostalgia going on in their retrospective reconstructions. We always reconstructed them more essentially, more homogenously, more unified, less contradictorily than they ever were, once you actually know anything about them.

That is one argument. What ever the past was like, they may have all marched forth, unified and dictating history forward, for many de cades in the past. They sure aren’t doing it now.

Now, as I have said, the question of how to begin to think questions of identity, either social or individual, not in the wake of their disappearance but in the wake of their erosion, of their fading, of their not having the kind of purchase and comprehensive explanatory power they had before, that is what it seems to me has gone. They used to be thought of— and it is a won- derfully gendered definition—as “master concepts,” the “master concepts” of class.

It is not tolerable any longer to have a “master concept” like that. Once it loses its “master” status, its explanatory reach weakens, becomes more prob- lematic. We can think of some things in relation to questions of class, though always recognizing its real historical complexity. Yet there are certain other things it simply will not, or cannot, decipher or explain. And this brings us face to face with the increasing social diversity and plurality, the technologies of the self which characterize the modern world in which we live.

Well, we might say, where does this leave any discourse on social identity at all? Haven’t I now abolished it from about as many sides as I could think of? As has been true in theoretical work over the past twenty years, the mo- ment a concept dis appears through the left- hand door, it returns through the right- hand win dow, but not in quite the same place. There is a wonderful moment in an Althusser text where he says, “I can now abolish the notion of ideas.” And he actually writes the word “ideas” and draws a line through it to convince himself that we need never use the word again.

In exactly the same way, the old discourse of the subject was abolished, put in a deep container, concrete poured over it, with a half- life of a mil- lion years. We will never look at it again, when, bloody hell, in about five minutes, we are talking about subjectivity, and the subject in discourse, and

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it has come roaring back in. So it is not, I think, surprising that, having lost one sense of identity, we find we need it. Where are we to find it?

One of the places that we have to go to is certainly in the con temporary languages which have rediscovered but repositioned the notion of the sub- ject, of subjectivity. That is, principally, and preeminently, the languages of feminism and of psychoanalysis.

I do not want to go through that argument, but I want to say something about how one might begin to think questions of identity from this new set of theoretical spaces. And I have to do this programmatically. I have to state what I think, from this position, identity is and is not as a sort of protocol, although each one could take me a very long time.

It makes us aware that identities are never completed, never finished, that they are always, as subjectivity itself is, in pro cess. That itself is a pretty difficult task. Though we have always known it a little bit, we have always thought about ourselves as getting more like ourselves every day. But that is a sort of Hegelian notion, of going forward to meet that which we always were. I want to open that pro cess up considerably. Identity is always in the pro cess of formation.

Secondly, identity means, or connotes, the pro cess of identification, of saying that this here is the same as that, or we are the same together, in this re spect. But something we have learned from the whole discussion of identification, in feminism and psychoanalysis, is the degree to which that structure of identification is always constructed through ambivalence. Always constructed through splitting.

Splitting between that which one is and that which is the other. The attempt to expel the other to the other side of the universe is always compounded by the relationships of love and desire. This is a diff er ent language from the language of, as it were, the Others who are completely diff er ent from oneself.

This is the Other that belongs inside one. This is the Other that one can only know from the place from which one stands. This is the self as it is inscribed in the gaze of the Other. And this notion which breaks down the bound aries between outside and inside, between those who belong and those who do not, between those whose histories have been written and those whose histories they have depended on but whose histories cannot be spo- ken. That the unspoken silence in between that which can be spoken is the only way to reach for the whole history. There is no other history except to take the absences and the silences along with what can be spoken. Every thing

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that can be spoken is on the ground of the enormous voices that have not yet been, or cannot yet be, heard.

This doubleness of discourse, this necessity of the Other to the self, this inscription of identity in the look of the other finds its articulation profoundly in the ranges of a given text. And I want to cite one which I am sure you know but will not remember necessarily, though it is a wonderful, majestic mo- ment in Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, when he describes himself as a young Antillean, face to face with the white French child and her mother. And the child pulls the hand of the mother and says, “Look, Mama, a black man.” And he said, “For the first time, I knew who I was. For the first time, I felt as if I had been si mul ta neously exploded in the gaze, in the violent gaze of the other, and at the same time, recomposed as another.” The notion that identity in that sense could be told as two histories, one over here, one over there, never having spoken to one another, never having anything to do with one another, when translated from the psychoanalytic to the historical ter- rain, is simply not tenable any longer in an increasingly globalized world. It is just not tenable any longer.

People like me who came to England in the 1950s have been there for centuries; symbolically, we have been there for centuries. I was coming home. I am the sugar at the bottom of the En glish cup of tea. I am the sweet tooth, the sugar plantations that rotted generations of En glish children’s teeth. There are thousands of others beside me that are, you know, the cup of tea itself. Because they don’t grow it in Lancashire, you know. Not a single tea planta- tion exists within the United Kingdom. This is the symbolization of En glish identity— I mean, what does anybody in the world know about an En glish per- son except that they cannot get through the day without a cup of tea?

Where does it come from? Ceylon/Sri Lanka, India. That is the outside history that is inside the history of the En glish. There is no En glish history without that other history. The notion that identity has to do with people who look the same, feel the same, call themselves the same, is nonsense. As a pro cess, as a narrative, as a discourse, it is always told from the position of the Other.

What is more is that identity is always in part a narrative, always in part a kind of repre sen ta tion. It is always within repre sen ta tion. Identity is not something which is formed outside and then we tell stories about it. It is that which is narrated in one’s own self. I will say something about that in terms of my own narration of identity in a moment— you know, that wonderful moment where Richard II says, “Come let us sit down and tell stories about

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the death of kings.” Well, I am going to tell you a story and ask you to tell one about yourself.

We have the notion of identity as contradictory, as composed of more than one discourse, as composed always across the silences of the other, as written in and through ambivalence and desire. These are extremely impor- tant ways of trying to think an identity which is not a sealed or closed totality.

Now we have within theory some in ter est ing ways of trying to think dif- ference in this way. We have learned a lot about sexual difference in femi- nist writers. And we have learned a lot about questions of difference from people like Derrida. I do think that there are some impor tant ways in which Derrida’s use of the notion of the difference between “difference” and “différance,” spelt with an “a,” is significant. The “a,” the anomalous “a” in Derrida’s spelling of différance, which he uses as a kind of marker that sets up a disturbance in our settled understanding of translation of our concept of difference is very impor tant, because that little “a,” disturbing as it is, which you can hardly hear when spoken, sets the word in motion to new meanings, yet without obscuring the trace of its other meanings in its past.

His sense of différance, as one writer has put it, remains suspended between the two French verbs “to differ” and “to defer,” both of which contribute to its textual force, neither of which can fully capture its meaning. Language depends on difference, as Saussure has shown: the structure of distinctive propositions which make up its economy. But where Derrida breaks new ground is in the extent to which “differ” shades into “defer.”

Now this notion of a différance is not simply a set of binary, reversible op- positions, thinking sexual difference not simply in terms of the fixed oppo- sition of male and female, but of all those anomalous sliding positions ever in pro cess, between which opens up the continent of sexuality to increasing points of disturbance. That is what the odyssey of difference now means in the sense in which I am trying to use it.

That is about difference, and you might ask the question, Where does identity come in to this infinite postponement of meaning that is lodged in Derrida’s notion of the trace of something which still retains its roots in one meaning while it is, as it were, moving to another, encapsulating another, with endless shiftings, slidings, of that signifier?

The truth is that Derrida does not help us as much as he might here in thinking about the relationship between identity and difference. And the appropriators of Derrida in Amer i ca, especially in American philosophical and literary thought, help us even less. By taking Derrida’s notion of différance

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precisely out of the tension between the two textual connotations, “defer” and “differ,” and lodging it only in the endless play of difference, Derrida’s politics is in that very moment uncoupled.

From that moment unrolls that enormous proliferation of extremely sophisticated, playful deconstruction which is a kind of endless academic game. Anybody can do it, and on and on it rolls. No signifier ever stops; no one is ever responsible for any meaning; all traces are effaced. The moment anything is lodged, it is immediately erased. Every body has a great time; they go to conferences and do it, as it were. The very notion of the politics which requires the holding of the tension between that which is both placed and not stitched in place, by the word which is always in motion between positions, which requires us to think both positionality and movement (both together, not one and the other), not playing with difference, or “finding nights to rest under” identity, but living in the tension of identity and difference, is uncoupled.

We have then to go on thinking beyond that mere playfulness into the really hard game which the play of difference actually means to us histori- cally. For if signification depends upon the endless repositioning of its dif- ferential terms, meaning in any specific instance depends on the contingent and arbitrary stop, the necessary break. It is a very simple point.

Language is part of an infinite semiosis of meaning. To say anything, I have got to shut up. I have to construct a single sentence. I know that the next sentence will open the infinite semiosis of meaning again, so I will take it back. So each stop is not a natu ral break. It does not say, “I’m about to end a sentence and that will be the truth.” It understands that it is contingent. It is a positioning. It is the cut of ideology which, across the semiosis of language, constitutes meaning. But you have to get into that game or you will never say anything at all.

You think I am joking. I know gradu ate students of mine who got into this theoretical fix in the 1970s, one enormous French theoretician after an- other, throwing them aside, until they could not commit a single word to paper at all because to say anything was to open oneself to the endless sliding of the signifier. So if they said, what I think Derrida really, in— really— ooh— start again, yes, start again.

Meaning is in that sense a wager. You take a bet. Not a bet on truth, but a bet on saying something. You have to be positioned somewhere in order to speak. Even if you are positioned in order to unposition yourself, even if you

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want to take it back, you have to come into language to get out of it. There is no other way. That is the paradox of meaning.

To think it only in terms of difference and not in terms of the relational position between the suturing, the arbitrary, overdetermined cut of lan- guage which says something which is instantly opened again to the play of meaning; not to think of meaning always, in supplement, that there is always something left over, always something which goes on escaping the precision; the attempt of language to code, to make precise, to fix, to halt, etc.; not to think it in that way is to lose hold of the two necessary ends of the chain to which the new notion of identity has to be conceptualized.

Now I can turn to questions of politics. In this conception of an identity which has to be thought through difference, is there a general politics of the local to bring to bear against the great, overriding, power ful, technologically based, massively invested unrolling of global pro cesses which I was trying to describe in my previous talk, which tend to mop up all differences, and occlude those differences? Which means, as it were, they are diff er ent— but it does not make any difference that they are diff er ent, they are just diff er ent.

No, there is no general politics. I have nothing in the kitbag. There is noth- ing I can pull out. But I have a little local politics to tell you about. It may be that all we have, in bringing the politics of the local to bear against the global, is a lot of little local politics. I do not know if that is true or not. But I would like to spend some time later talking about the cultural politics of the local, and of this new notion of identity. For it is in this new frame that identity has come back into cultural politics in Britain. The formation of the black diasporas in the period of postwar migration in the 1950s and ’60s has transformed En glish social, economic, and po liti cal life.

In the first generations, the majority of people had the same illusion that I did: that I was about to go back home. That may have been because every- body always asked me when I was going back home. We did think that we were just going to get back on the boat; we were here for a temporary so- journ. By the ’70s, it was perfectly clear that we were not there for a tempo- rary sojourn. Some people were going to stay, and then the politics of racism really emerged.

Now one of the main reactions against the politics of racism in Britain was what I would call “Identity Politics One,” the first form of identity poli- tics. It had to do with the constitution of some defensive collective identity against the practices of racist society. It had to do with the fact that people

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were being blocked out of and refused an identity and identification within the majority nation, having to find some other roots on which to stand. Because people have to find some ground, some place, some position on which to stand. Blocked out of any access to an En glish or British identity, people had to try to discover who they were. This is the moment I defined in my previous talk. It is the crucial moment of the rediscovery or the search for roots.

In the course of the search for roots, one discovered not only where one came from; one began to speak the language of that which is home in the genuine sense, that other crucial moment which is the recovery of lost his- tories. The histories that have never been told about ourselves that we could not learn in schools, that were not in any books, and that we had to recover.

This is an enormous act of what I want to call imaginary po liti cal reiden- tification, reterritorialization and reidentification, without which a counter- politics could not have been constructed. I do not know an example of any group or category of the people of the margins, of the locals, who have been able to mobilize themselves socially, culturally, eco nom ically, and po liti cally in the past twenty or twenty- five years who have not gone through some such series of moments in order to resist their exclusion, their marginaliza- tion. That is how and where the margins begin to speak. The margins begin to contest, and the locals begin to come to repre sen ta tion.

The identity which that whole, enormous po liti cal space produced in Britain, as it did elsewhere, was the category black. I want to say something about this category which we all now so take for granted. I will tell you some stories about it.

I was brought up in a lower- middle- class family in Jamaica. I left there in the early 1950s to go and study in England. Until I left, though I sup- pose 98  percent of the Jamaican population is either black or colored in one way or another, I had never ever heard anybody either call themselves, or refer to anybody else as, “black.” Never. I heard a thousand other words. My grand mother could differentiate about fifteen diff er ent shades between light brown and dark brown. When I left Jamaica, there was a beauty contest in which the diff er ent shades of women were graded according to diff er ent trees, so that there was Miss Mahogany, Miss Walnut, etc.

People think of Jamaica as a simple society. In fact, it had the most com- plicated color stratification system in the world. Talk about practical semio- ticians; anybody in my family could compute and calculate anybody’s social status by grading the par tic u lar quality of their hair versus the par tic u lar quality of the family they came from and which street they lived on, includ-

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ing their physiognomy, shading, etc. You could trade off one characteristic against another. Compared with that, the normal class stratification system is absolute child’s play.

But the word “black” was never uttered. Why? No black people around? Lots of them, thousands and thousands of them. Black is not a question of pigmen- tation. The black I am talking about is a historical category, a po liti cal category, a cultural category. In our language, at certain historical moments, we have to use the signifier. We have to create an equivalence between how people look and what their histories are. Their histories are in the past, inscribed on their skin. But it is not because of their skin that they are black in their heads.

I heard “black” for the first time in the wake of the civil rights movement, in the wake of the decolonization and nationalistic strug gles. “Black” was cre- ated as a po liti cal category in a certain historical moment. It was created as a consequence of certain symbolic and ideological strug gles. We said, “You have spent five, six, seven hundred years elaborating the symbolism through which black is a negative factor. Now I don’t want another term. I want that term, that negative one, that’s the one I want. I want a piece of that action. I want to take it out of the way in which it has been articulated in religious dis- course, in ethnographic discourse, in literary discourse, in visual discourse. I want to pluck it out of its articulation and rearticulate it in a new way.”

In that very strug gle is a change of consciousness, a change of self- recognition, a new pro cess of identification, the emergence into visibility of a new sub- ject. A subject that was always there, but emerging, historically.

You know that story, but I do not know if you know the degree to which that story is true of other parts of the Amer i cas. It happened in Jamaica in the 1970s. In the 1970s, for the first time, black people recognized themselves as black. It was the most profound cultural revolution in the Ca rib bean, much greater than any po liti cal revolution they have ever had. That cultural revolution in Jamaica has never been matched by anything as far- reaching as the politics. The politics has never caught up with it.

You prob ably know the moment when the leaders of both major po liti cal parties in Jamaica tried to grab hold of Bob Marley’s hand. They were trying to put their hands on black; Marley stood for black, and they were trying to get a piece of the action. If only he would look in their direction he would have legitimated them. It was not politics legitimating culture, it was culture legitimating politics.

Indeed, the truth is I call myself all kinds of other things. When I went to England, I would not have called myself an immigrant either, which is what

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we were all known as. It was not until I went back home in the early 1960s that my mother, who, as a good middle- class colored Jamaican woman, hated all black people (you know, that is the truth), said to me: “I hope they don’t think you’re an immigrant over there.”

And I said, “Well, I just migrated. I’ve just emigrated.” At that very mo- ment, I thought, that is exactly what I am. I have just left home— for good.

I went back to England, and I became what I had been named. I had been hailed as an immigrant. I had discovered who I was. I started to tell myself the story of my migration.

Then black erupted and people said, “Well, you’re from the Ca rib bean, in the midst of this, identifying with what’s going on, the black population in England. You’re black.”

At that very moment, my son, who was two and a half, was learning the colors. I said to him, transmitting the message at last, “ You’re black.” And he said, “No. I’m brown.” And I said, “Wrong referent. Mistaken concreteness, philosophical mistake. I’m not talking about your paintbox, I’m talking about your head.” That is something diff er ent. The question of learning, learning to be black. Learning to come into an identification.

What that moment allows to happen are things which were not there before. It is not that what one then does was hiding away inside as my true self. There was not any bit of that true self in there before that identity was learned. Is that, then, the stable one, is that where we are? Is that where people are?

I will tell you something now about what has happened to that black identity as a matter of cultural politics in Britain. That notion was extremely impor tant in the antiracist strug gles of the 1970s: the notion that people of diverse socie ties and cultures would all come to Britain in the 1950s and ’60s as part of that huge wave of migration from the Ca rib bean, East Africa, and the Asian subcontinent, and all identified themselves po liti cally as black.

What they said was, “We may be diff er ent actual color skins but vis- à- vis the social system, vis- à- vis the po liti cal system of racism, there is more that unites us than what divides us.” People begin to ask, “Are you from Jamaica? Are you from Trinidad? Are you from Barbados?” You can just see the pro cess of divide and rule. “No. Just address me as I am. I know you can’t tell the difference so just call me black. Try using that. We all look the same, you know. Certainly can’t tell the difference. Just call me black. Black identity.” Antiracism in the 1970s was only fought and only resisted in the community, in the localities, behind the slogan of a black politics and the black experience.

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In that moment, the enemy was ethnicity. The enemy had to be what we called “multiculturalism.” Because multiculturalism was precisely what I called previously “the exotic.” The exotica of difference. Nobody would talk about racism, but they were perfectly prepared to have “International Eve- nings,” when we would all come and cook our native dishes, sing our own native songs, and appear in our own native costume. It is true that some people, some ethnic minorities in Britain, do have indigenous, very beauti- ful indigenous forms of dress. I didn’t. I had to rummage in the dressing-up box to find mine. I have been deracinated for four hundred years. The last thing I am going to do is dress up in some native Jamaican costume and ap- pear in the spectacle of multiculturalism.

Has the moment of the strug gle or ga nized around this constructed black identity gone away? It certainly has not. So long as that society remains in its economic, po liti cal, cultural, and social relations in a racist way to the variety of black and Third World peoples in its midst, and it continues to do so, that strug gle remains.

Why, then, don’t I just talk about a collective black identity replacing the other identities? I can’t do that either, and I’ll tell you why.

The truth is that in relation to certain things, the question of black, in Britain, also has its silences. It had a certain way of silencing the very specific experiences of Asian people. Because though Asian people could identify, po liti cally, in the strug gle against racism, when they came to using their own culture as the resources of re sis tance, when they wanted to write out of their own experience and reflect on their own position, when they wanted to create, they naturally created within the histories of the languages, the cul- tural tradition, the positions of people who came from a variety of diff er ent historical backgrounds. And just as black was the cutting edge of a politics vis- a- vis one kind of enemy, it could also, if not understood properly, pro- vide a kind of silencing in relation to another. These are the costs, as well as the strengths, of trying to think of the notion of black as an essentialism.

What is more, there were not only Asian people of color, but also black people who did not identify with that collective identity. So that one was aware of the fact that always, as one advanced to meet the enemy, with a solid front, the differences were raging behind. Just shut the doors and conduct a raging argument to get the troops together, to actually hit the other side.

A third way in which black was silencing was to silence some of the other dimensions that were positioning individuals and groups in exactly the same way. To operate exclusively through an unreconstructed conception

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of black was to reconstitute the authority of black masculinity over black women, about which, as I am sure you know, there was also, for a long time, an unbreakable silence about which the most militant black men would not speak.

To or ga nize across the discourses of blackness and masculinity, of race and gender, and forget the way in which, at the same moment, blacks in the underclass were being positioned in class terms, in similar work situations, exposed to the same deprivations of poor jobs and lack of promotion that certain members of the white working class suffered, was to leave out the critical dimension of positioning.

What, then, does one do with the power ful, mobilizing identity of the black experience and of the black community? Blackness as a po liti cal identity in light of the understanding of any identity is always complexly composed, always historically constructed. It is never in the same place but always po- sitional. One always has to think about the negative consequences of the positionality. You cannot, as it were, reverse the discourses of any identity simply by turning them upside down. What is it like to live, by attempting to valorize and defeat the marginalization of the variety of black subjects and to really begin to recover the lost histories of a variety of black experiences, while at the same time recognizing the end of any essential black subject?

That is the politics of living identity through difference. It is the politics of recognizing that all of us are composed of multiple social identities, not of one. That we are all complexly constructed through diff er ent categories, of diff er ent antagonisms, and these may have the effect of locating us socially in multiple positions of marginality and subordination, but positions which do not yet operate on us in exactly the same way. It is also to recognize that any counterpolitics of the local which attempts to or ga nize people through their diversity of identifications has to be a strug gle which is conducted po- sitionally. It is the beginning of antiracism, antisexism, and anticlassism as a war of positions, as the Gramscian notion of the war of position.

The notion of the strug gles of the local as a war of positions is a very difficult kind of politics to get one’s head around; none of us knows how to conduct it. None of us even knows whether it can be conducted. Some of us have had to say there is no other po liti cal game, so we must find a way of playing this one.

Why is it difficult? It has no guarantees. Because identifications change and shift, they can be worked on by po liti cal and economic forces outside of

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us, and they can be articulated in diff er ent ways. There is absolutely no po- liti cal guarantee already inscribed in an identity. There is no reason on God’s earth why the film is good because a black person made it. There is abso- lutely no guarantee that all the politics will be right because a woman does it.

There are no po liti cal guarantees of that kind. It is not a free- floating open space because history has lodged on it the power ful, tendential organ ization of a past. We bear the traces of a past, the connections of the past. We cannot conduct this kind of cultural politics without returning to the past, but it is never a return of a direct and literal kind. The past is not waiting for us back there to recoup our identities against. It is always retold, rediscovered, reinvented. It has to be narrativized. We go to our own pasts through history, through memory, through desire, not as a literal fact.

It is a very impor tant example. Some work has been done, in feminist his- tory, in black history, and in working- class history recently which recovers the oral testimonies of people who, for a very long time, from the viewpoint of the canon and the authority of the historian, have not been considered to be historymakers at all. That is a very impor tant moment. But it is not pos si ble to use oral histories and testimonies, as if they are just, literally, the truth. They also have to be read. They are also stories, positionings, narratives. You are bringing new narratives into play, but you cannot mistake them for some “real,” back there, by which history can be mea sured.

There is no guarantee of authenticity like that in history. One is ever afterward in the narrativization of the self and of one’s histories. Just as in trying to conduct cultural politics as a war of positions, one is always in the strategy of hegemony. Hegemony is not the same thing as incorporat- ing every body, of making every body the same, though nine- tenths of the people who have marginally read Gramsci think that that is what he means. Gramsci uses the notion of hegemony precisely to counteract the notion of incorporation.

Hegemony is not the disappearance or destruction of difference. It is the construction of a collective will through difference. It is the articulation of differences which do not dis appear. The subaltern class does not mistake it- self for people who were born with silver spoons in their mouths. They know they are still second on the ladder, somewhere near the bottom. People are not cultural dopes. They are not waiting for the moment when, like an over- night conversion, false consciousness will fall from their eyes, the scales will fall away, and they will suddenly discover who they are.

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They know something about who they are. If they engage in another proj ect, it is because it has interpellated them, hailed them, and established some point of identification with them. It has brought them into the historical proj ect. And that notion of a politics which, as it were, increasingly is able to address people through the multiple identities which they have— understanding that those identities do not remain the same, that they are frequently contradic- tory, that they crosscut one another, that they tend to locate us differently at diff er ent moments, conducting politics in light of the contingent, in the face of the contingent—is the only po liti cal game that the locals have left at their disposal, in my view.

If they are waiting for a politics of maneuver, when all the locals, in every part of the world, will all stand up at the same moment and go in the same direction, and roll back the tide of the global in one great historical activity, it is not going to happen. I do not believe it anymore; I think it is a dream. In order to conduct the politics really, we have to live outside of the dream, to wake up, to grow up, to come into the world of contradiction. We have to come into the world of politics. There is no other space to stand in.

Out of that notion some of the most exciting cultural work is now being done in England. Third- generation young black men and women know they come from the Ca rib bean, know they are black, know they are British. They want to speak from all three identities. They are not prepared to give up any one of them. They will contest the Thatcherite notion of En glishness, because they say this En glishness is black. They will contest the notion of blackness because they want to make a differentiation between people who are black from one kind of society and people who are black from another. Because they need to know that difference, that difference that makes a dif- ference in how they write their poetry, how they make their films, how they paint. It makes a difference. It is inscribed in their creative work. They need it as a resource. They are all those identities together. They are making as- tonishing cultural work, the most impor tant work in the visual arts. Some of the most impor tant work in film and photography and nearly all the most impor tant work in popu lar music is coming from this new recognition of identity that I am speaking about.

Very little of that work is vis i ble elsewhere, but some of you have seen, though you may not have recognized, the outer edge of it. Some of you, for example, may have seen a film made by Stephen Frears and Hanif Kureishi called My Beautiful Laundrette. This was originally made as a tele vi sion film for local distribution only and was shown once at the Edinburgh Festival,

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where it received an enormous reception. If you have seen My Beautiful Laun- drette, you will know that it is the most transgressive text there is. Anybody who is black, who tries to identify it, runs across the fact that the central characters of this narrative are two gay men. What is more, anyone who wants to separate the identities into their two clearly separate points will dis- cover that one of these gay men is white and one of these gay men is brown. Both of them are struggling in Thatcher’s Britain. One of them has an uncle who is a Pakistani landlord who is throwing black people out of the win dow.

This is a text that nobody likes. Every body hates it. You go to it look- ing for what are called “positive images,” and there are none. There aren’t any positive images like that with which one can, in a simple way, identify. Because as well as the politics— and there is certainly a politics in that and in Kureishi’s other work, but it is not a politics which invites easy identification— it has a politics which is grounded in the complexity of identifications which are at work.

I will read you something which Hanif Kureishi said about the question of responding to his critics who said: “Why don’t you tell us good stories about ourselves, as well as good/bad stories? Why are your stories mixed about our- selves?” He spoke about the difficult moral position of the writer from an oppressed or persecuted community and the relation of that writing to the rest of the society. He said it is a relatively new one in England, but it will arise more and more as British writers with a colonial heritage and from a colonial or marginal past start to declare themselves.

“ There is sometimes,” he said, “too simple a demand for positive images. Positive images sometimes require cheering fictions— the writer as Public Relations Officer. And I’m glad to say that the more I looked at My Beautiful Laundrette, the less positive images I could see. If there is to be a serious attempt to understand present- day Britain with its mix of races and colors, its hysteria and despair, then writing about it has to be complex. It can’t apolo- gize, or idealize. It can’t sentimentalize. It can’t attempt to represent any one group as having the total, exclusive, essential mono poly on virtue.

“A jejune protest or parochial lit er a ture, be it black, gay or feminist, is in the long run no more po liti cally effective than works which are merely public relations. What we need now, in this position, at this time, is imagina- tive writing that gives us a sense of the shifts and the difficulties within our society as a whole.

“If con temporary writing which emerges from oppressed groups ignores the central concerns and major conflicts of the larger society, and if these

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are willing simply to accept themselves as marginal or enclave lit er a tures, they will automatically designate themselves as permanently minor, as a sub- genre. They must not allow themselves now to be rendered invisible and marginalized in this way by stepping outside of the maelstrom of con- temporary history.”