By Sean Jacobs
Social Text - August 8th, 2014
My early university education at the then-very white University of Cape Town coincided with South Africa’s transition from Apartheid to democracy. Stuart Hall didn’t feature much, despite the fact, as I would later learn, I was indirectly influenced by his ideas about identity politics, language, culture, race, and social movements. For example, I remember writing a seminar paper as a final year student at the University of Cape Town about “black Afrikaans”—a movement of coloured (STET) poets and educators in Cape Town and the Cape West Coast allied to teacher unions and the United Democratic Front who sought to counter white histories of Afrikaans by emphasizing its hybrid origins in a slave economy and encouraged use of spoken Afrikaans in classroom settings. Nevertheless, culture (or studying culture) was hardly a priority for my late-1980s/early-1990s cohort—South Africa then was in the midst of a violent transition; protest movements and their academic allies were tactically focused on electoral power and state institutions. Strategic considerations, too, pushed us to eschew analyses of race in favor of class. Lynette Steenveld, a media scholar at Rhodes University in South Africa’s Eastern Cape, wrote to me that “… identity was a problem because of the Apartheid state’s racialization of identity and its essentialist stance on culture. So the one progressive move was to eschew identity and focus on class.” That said, there is ample evidence that South African scholars, students and media activists were very familiar with Hall’s work in that period. In 1980s Apartheid South Africa, academics who studied culture, came at it from two diametrically opposed schools: on one side a more traditional behavioralist approach (the Afrikaans “communications studies”) and on the other, leftist /political economy approaches to culture (reflecting dominant positions in the liberation movement and old school Marxist influences).
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