Raymond Williams And Post Colonial Studies Cultural Studies Essay

Raymond Williams And Post Colonial Studies Cultural Studies EssayTwentieth snow literary critic Raymond Williams was one of the nearly reputable, yet contested bookmans from the British New Left. Once dubbed our best man in the New Left by his contemporaries, Williamss theme in a post colonial context is less secure.1Patrick Brantlinger said it best Williams was thoroughly the representative man. He was the fathom of the ordinary, the voice of the working-class, the voice of Wales, the voice of British heartyism, the conscience of Britain and of Europe. He understood that his life mattered because it was ordinary, and representative.2However, the early 1980s signified the shift in political and economic relations surrounded by occidental and non-western countries through post-colonialism, including former British colonies.3Moreover, post-colonialism served as an avenue to recover alternative ways of knowing and understanding or simply those other voices as alternatives to pr edominant western constructs.4While Raymond Williams provides British colonial commentary, primarily in his seminal work, The sphere and the City, it was in the periphery of his grander cultural theory. Scholars within the Birmingham initiate and post colonial studies declare debated the implications of this, including Williams himself. Consequently, this essay will outline the scholarly debate regarding Raymond Williamss alleged ambivalence towards British colonialism and race within his supposition of ending. This will allow for an mental testing of Williamss work within the context of postcolonial studies, dissolveicularly the legacy of his cultural theory in a rulern context.Raymond Williamss analysis in The Country and City surely coincides with postcolonial theories emphasis on geography, whether in conversations around spaces, centers, peripheries or borders.5This analysis is especially significant because as argued by Anthony Alessandrini, postcolonial theory has b enefited from the Marxist and Marxist-influenced analyses undertaken by figures snarly in the post-Second World war movements once against imperialism and for national liberation.6Alessandrini attri excepted the 1970s and 1980s political work and cultural analysis of writers like Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall and capital of Minnesota Gilroy for influencing major figures in postcolonial studies such(prenominal) as Franz Fanon and Edwards Said.7Therefore, as Alessandrini continued, We would need to look more closely at the historical circumstances under which the field of postcolonial studies has arisen, and especially at the sorts of strategic decisions involved in the adoption or rejection of particular theoretical paradigms.8Paul Giles would certainly agree as he adds, It would be disingenuous to ignore the fact that postcolonial knowledge in its contemporary guise has as one of its enabling conditions of possibilitythe increasing attention paid to pops of subalternity and hege mony by forms of cultural Marxism such as those of Antonio Gramsci and Raymond Williams.9Consequently, this typography is framed around this very approach in regards to the work of Raymond Williams.While few would question the merit or significance of Raymond Williams and his nuanced study of the nineteenth century British rural working class in both Culture and Society and the Long Revolution, thither has been significant criticism of Williams repayable in part to his silence regarding British colonialism. This has proved to be disturbing for more or less, and certainly problematic for a number of Williamss contemporaries and successors so far within the British New Left. Gauri Viswanathan provides an transcendent layout of the criticisms against Raymond Williams and the British New Left in general to conceptualize culture and imperialism. He outlines that within British cultural Marxist tradition since Williams, the conception of British nationalism has been used interchangea bly with issues of race, colonialism, or imperialism.10This is quite evident in Raymond Williamss Keywords (1976), in which the definition of race is not a separate entry of its own, but is distinctively tied to ideas of nationalism. Williams writesNationoriginally with a primary common sense of a racial group rather than a politically organized grouping. Since there is obvious overlap between these senses, it is not easy to date the emergence of the predominant modern sense of a political formation. The persistent overlap between racial grouping and political formation has been important, since claims to be a nation, and to have national rights, often envisaged the formation of a nation in the political sense, evening against the will of an existing political nation which included and claimed the loyalty of this racial grouping. It could be and is still often said, by opponents of nationalism, that the basis of the groups claim is racial. (Race, of uncertain origin, had been used in the sense of a common stock from C16 sixteenth century. Racial is a C19 nineteenth-century formation. In most C19 uses racial was positive and favourable, but discriminating and arbitrary theories of race were change state more explicit in the same period, generalizing national distinctions in supposedly radical scientific differences. In practice, given the extent of conquest and domination, nationalist movements have been as often based on an existing but subordinate political grouping as upon a group distinguished by a specific language or by a supposed racial community.11Gauri Viswanathan attributes Raymond Williamss understanding of British nationalism as less of a theoretical superintendence or blindness than an sexual restraint with complex methodological and historical origins.12Citing Raymond Williamss conception of base and superstructure, Viswanathan dissects Williamss methodology and level of comfort with Marxist framework. While Viswanathan highlights the energi sing nature of Williamss work as seemingly accommodating a broadened analysis of culture to include colonial relations, he ultimately concedes that Williams continually resisted that kind of finis of his work.13Moreover, Viswanathan continued that this base and superstructure framework restricted him Williams to solely economic determinist out nonpluss and pointed to the inefficacy of Williamss cultural materialism.14Hence Viswanathan concluded that Williamss model was inherently unable to appease British imperialism as a function of metropolitan culture due to the internal restraints of his troubled self-conscious with Marxian15frameworks.Forest Pyle presented a similar commentary in his essay, Raymond Williams and the Inhuman Limits of Culture. Pyle argues that since language is a human instrument it is consequently inhuman for Williams to consider culture as the mapping of a particular historical pattern and of neighborly, economic, and political life.16Moreover, Williamss cu ltural theory is beyond repair and cannot simply be corrected17due to the intertwined nature of culture and community within Williamss work. Therefore Pyle concludes that Raymond Williamss sense of culture cannot paper for the historical and structural forms of colonialism and its aftermath. Pyle then goes a set further than Viswanathan in asserting that this points to not merely a personal limit point but a structural limitation that is explicitly exhibited by Williamss unapologetic understanding of empire.18Both Pyle and Viswanathan provide interesting critiques in light of Raymond Williamss 1973 essay, Base and Superstructure. at heart this essay Williams stated that he had no use or static or highly determined model(s) in which the rules of society are highlighted to the exclusion of the prosodion and historical.19Yet as both Pyle and Viswanathan conclude, Raymond Williamss analysis does not apply this cultural materialism model within an imperial or colonial context. Viswan athan indentified Raymond Williams as having an internal restraint due to his understanding of British culture and national identity.20Therefore Williamss conception of national culture remained hermetically sealed from the continually changing political imperatives of empire.21For example in The Country and the City, Raymond Williams classifies imperialism as the last mode of the city and countrywithin the larger context of colonial expansion in which every(prenominal) idea and every image was consciously and unconsciously affected.22Ultimately, however, British influence extended outward rather than that the periphery had a functional role in determining internal developments.23Consequently, Williams could only conclude that Britain achieved dominance through the power of a fully formed cultural and institutional system which was transplanted and internalized within British colonies.24Unsurprisingly, Raymond Williamss cohorts within the Birmingham have attributed this kind of col onial analysis to racism or an egregious form of Eurocentrism on Williamss part. This is especially the case for those involved in stern cultural studies, namely Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy. Stuart Hall openly critiqued the limitations of the Birmingham cultural theory in dealing with the other during his tenure as program music director in the late 1960s. Hall found that the issues race and cultural relations as advocated by his predecessors were particularly oppressive to minority groups, therefore highlighting a departure of the School itself from Raymond Williams.25In Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies, Hall discusses the question of race in cultural studies as a major break in the Birmingham School. He emphasizesActually getting cultural studies to put on its own agenda the critical questions of race, the politics of race, the resistance to racism, the critical questions of cultural politics, was itself a dense theoretical.and sometimes bitterly contested internal struggle against a resounding but unconscious silence. A struggle which continued in what has since come to be known only in the rewritten history.of the Centre for Cultural Studies.26Paul Gilroy, who studied with Stuart Hall at the Birmingham School in England, focused on postcolonial modes of deracination within transatlantic culture.27As Paul Giles states, Paul Gilroy took issue with what he perceived as traditional racism and ethnocentrism of English cultural studies,28citing in particular the tendencies of E. P. Thompson and Raymond Williams to systematically omit blacks from their analysis on British cultural identity.29Therefore, Gilroy viewed America as a counterpoint to British cultural analysis, and a elbow room of disturbing any narrowly ethnic definition of racial authenticity or the purity of cultures on either side of the Atlantic.30Gilroy juxtaposed black culture in Britain with American black protest movements, in order to discredit conceptions of race, people or n ation as advocated by Raymond Williams. In fact, Gilroy presents one of the most extreme critiques of Raymond Williams, charging him with proposing a new racism in his analysis of culture.31New Left scholar Benita Perry highlights that the new racism advocated by Raymond Williams was especially problematic for Paul Gilroy, who argued that New Left efforts in the 1960s to reclaim patriotism and nationalism resulted in ethnic absolutism.32She continues that the concept of culture itself became a site of struggles over the message of race, nation, and ethnicity for scholars interested in minority studies such as Gilroy.33The main issue for Gilroy was that Raymond Williamss conception of culture, with its emphasis on long find, deflected the nation away from race, setting the get across for British Cultural Marxists in general to write irresponsibly and quite ambivalently about race.34Additionally, this excluded blacks from the significant entities due to Williamss silence on racism, which for Gilroy has its own historical descent with ideologies of Britishness and national identity.35This is very similar to the argument presented by Gauri Viswanathan earlier on the influence of Raymond Williams on British imperial and national scholarship.36Beyond overt notions Eurocentrism, Williamss critics vehemently opposed his understanding of the long British experience deriving from rooted settlement, which excluded colonized groups and immigrants from the significant entity.37Paul Gilroy notes that the most egregious silence in Williamss work is his refusal to reckon the concept of racism which has its own historic relationship with ideologies of Englishness, Britishness and national belonging.38He adds, There can be little doubt that blacks are familiar with the legacy of British bloody mindedness in which he takes great pride. From where they stand it is easier to see that its present day cornerstones are racism and nationalism, its foundations slavery and imperia lism.39Therefore, Gilroy concludes that cultures are not free from each other as Raymond Williams seemly implied in The Country and the City, but are linked to the persistent crisscrossing of national boundaries.40Additionally, Paul Gilroy discussed the implications of Raymond Williamss work for peoples of color residing in or immigrating to England. In direct response to Williamss nonplus on lived experience and rooted settlement, Gilroy pointedly asked How long is long enough to become a bona fide Brit in the context of lived and formed identities?41Gilroy argues, that Williamss favored the exclusion of immigrating peoples of color and contributed to a new racism grounded in a discourse of nation, focused on the enemy within and without race.42This new racism is rooted on cultural rather than biological determination, proving them undeserving of citizenship and creating authentic and inauthentic types of national belonging.43This was a position that his Birmingham School progra m director, Stuart Hall agreed with as well.Raymond Williamss requirements for British citizenship had major implications for those colonial subjects of the Commonwealth outside of Britain, such as Jamaican scholar Stuart Hall. These groups lacked the colonised kind of identity and would certainly not qualify under this sort of citizenship as advocated by Raymond Williams as well.44Raymond Williamss commentary in Towards 2000 favored lived and formed identities, quite those of a settled kind, for practical formation of kind identity has to be lived.45Williams continues Real well-disposed identities are formed by working and living together, with some real place and common interest to identify with.46Unsurprisingly, Stuart Hall retorts I am the sugar at the bottom of the English cup of tea. I am the sweet tooth, the sugar woodlets that rotted generations of English childrens teeth. There are thousands of others beside me that are, you know, the cup of tea itself. Because they don t grow it in Lancashire, you know. Not a single tea plantation exists within the United Kingdom? What could Williams say to this-this outside history that is inside the history of the English?47Donald Nonini adds to this discussion in his analysis of Stuart Halls critique of Raymond Williams. He writes The issue here for Stuart Hall, is the requirements of real and lived social identities, and the manner of exclusion of recent immigrants, who although residence of England, have only been there for a few generations. Clearly they do not share the long historical association with the land and forcible integration upon it as Williams required for real citizenship.48This had major implications on Stuart Halls work within the Birmingham School because he could not ignore the racialized aspects of Raymond Williamss cultural theory. In his essay, Culture, Community, and Nation, Hall equates Williamss cultural belongingness through actual, lived relationships of place, culture and community , amongst politically and culturally subordinate peoples as a heterotaxy for biological determinism and coded language for race and color.49Therefore, Stuart Hall agrees with Paul Gilroy that there is overt ethnic absolutism within Raymond Williams work. Moreover, Hall concludes that post-colonial diasporas of the late-modern experience will never be unified culturally because they are products of cultures of hybridity.50Hall equates this hybridity to a diasporic consciousness, which meant that non- retain strong links with the traditions and places of their origins while adapting to their present circumstances, so that they can produce themselves anew and differently.51In defense of Raymond Williams, Andrew Milner argued that both Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy misinterpreted Williamss position on race, citing Towards 2000 as an example.52Milner writes that Williams was not only vocal about race, but advocated the kind of grassroots social movements that would raise awareness for the heterogeneous strands of English society.53In fact, Williams describes anti-globalization social movements as resources of hope.54Additionally, Milner relates Williams analysis of social movements to his understanding of class. He adds that for Williams, neo- imperialist issues led into the central systems of the industrial-capitalist mode of production and its system of classes.55He supports his position quoting Williams discussion of rooted settlements in Towards 2000 Rooted settlements were alienated superficialities of legal definitions of citizenship with the more substantial reality of deeply grounded and active voice social identities.56This interpretation, according to Milner, was problematic for future Birmingham School scholars, particularly Paul Gilroy, who concluded that Williamss authentic and inauthentic types of national belonging followed the same racist grandiloquence of British conservatives.57Milner, however, maintains that this was a distortion of Williamss o riginal argument. He ultimately concludes that future scholars should reexamine Williamss position on race.58Similar to Milner, Donald Nonini and Christopher Prendergast presents Towards 2000 as the best evidence of Williams conception of racism and visible others in a post colonial context. Nonini cites Williamss observation that the most recent immigrations of more visibly different peopleshave misrepresented and obscured pasts.59Nonini continues that Raymond Williams did account for the differences within British culture and the contested nature of citizenship. For example, Williams wrote that when newly arriving immigrants interacted with true Englishmanangry confusions and prejudices were evident because of the repression of rural culture and people within Great Britain.60Nonini interprets this as a sign of Williams internalized colonist sentiment.61Therefore, Raymond Williams understood racism as the result of the hostility between the formerly integrated peoples and the immig rating more visibly different peoples due to colonial ideology.62Moreover, Andrew Milner continues that Raymond Williams did not exclude blacks from a significant social identity with their white neighbors, as Paul Gilroy suggests highlighting Williamss analysis of rural mining communities in Towards 2000.63Additionally, Stuart Halls assertion that Raymond Williams not only questioned, but ruled out the possibility that relationships between blacks and whites in many inner-city communities can be actual and sustained is even more unfounded when analyzing Williamss work in Towards 2000.64Christopher Prendergast clarifies that Raymond Williams did not consider this as actual racism, but a profound misunderstanding due to purely social and cultural tensions between the English working class and who they perceived as outsiders.65While Williams seems to side with the ordinary, working-class man, Prendergast does specify that Williams did counter nativist claims in his final stage that f oreigners and blacks were just as British as we are.66Therefore, Prendergast maintains that Williams understood the limitations of a merely legal definition of what it is to be British. He adds that Williams felt that attempts to resolve issues around social identities were often colluded with the alienated superficialities of the nation which were often limited to the functional terms of the modern ruling class.67Ultimately, both Prendergast and Milner conclude that Raymond Williams was not oblivious to racial relations, citing Williams again It is by working and living together as free as may be from external ideological definitions, whether divisive or universalist, that real social identities are formed.68While Milner and Prendergast offer an apologetic interpretation of Raymond Williams and colonial relations, Paul Giles and Forest Pyle emphasize Williams conception of culture as the liability in his analysis. In his essay, Virtual Americas The Internationalization of American Studies and the Ideology of Exchange, Paul Giles cites Raymond Williamss idealized conception of community as an empowering and socially cohesive forceas problematic.69Williamss stubborn insistence in holistic communities and rooted settlements creates significant challenges when dealing with imperial relationships. Seemingly, Raymond Williamss cultural analysis accommodates a broadened conceptualization of culture that is inclusive of colonizer-colonized relations, yet this never materializes. Instead, Williamss understanding of the cultural experience becomes overtly exclusive of colonial others, minorities, and immigrants due to his naturalized and geographically localized notion of English national culture.70As outlined previously with Forest Pyle, Williamss appropriation of culture as inhuman and fictional due to the pervasive and elusive nature of the term itself in relation to colonial analysis.71Post colonial scholar R. Radhakrishnan provides a critique of Raymond Williams s cultural theory as a means of deconstructing Eurocentrism in a post colonial context. While Radhakrishnan acknowledges the insight provided in The Country and the City, he argues that Williamss continual self-reflexivity posits him in a contradictory position when it relates to colonialism and culture. Therefore his commentary becomes both oppositional-marginal and dominant-central and ultimately coincides with a demonstrably metropolitan voice.72As a result, those within the margins or periphery of dominant British culture are too easily and prematurely adjusted and accommodated within what Williams considered as a connecting bear on towards a common history.73Radhakrishnan maintains that what differentiates post colonial scholars such as Edward Said or Paratha Chatterjee from Raymond Williams is their awareness and articulation of subaltern marginality that often negates Williamss notion of a successfully transplanted method of cultural commonality.74In that sense British natio nalism or culture can be enacted in the postcolonial context to the detriment of indigenous, peripheral cultures because it fails to spill the beans for them. Therefore, Radhakrishnan concludes that Williamss cultural analysis is incapable of dealing with the nuances of either a colonial or post colonial world.Nevertheless, numerous scholars have worked to