Catherine Hall  Histories, Empires and the Post- Colonial Moment

Catherine Hall  In the twentieth century questions about cultural identity seem to have become critical everywhere. (65)  ‘Who are we’? ‘Where we come from’? (65)  The global changes of the past fifty years have involved the movements of peoples on an unprecedented scale, the break-up of empires and decolonisation, the creation of the New Europe and other new power blocs, the destruction of old nations and the re-formation of new ones. (65)

Catherine Hall  Questions as to roots and origins haunt the imaginations of disparate peoples across national and inter-national boundaries. (65)  For colonisation is never only about the external processes and pressures of exploitation. It is always also about the ways in which colonised subjects internally collude with the objectification of the self produced by the coloniser. (69)  What they felt was I have no voice, I have no history, I have come from a place to which I cannot go back and I have never seen. (69)

Catherine Hall  I used to speak a language which can no longer speak, I had ancestors whom I cannot find, they worshipped gods whose names I do not know. (69)  Against this sense of profound rupture, the metaphors of a new kind of imposed religion can be reworked, can become a language in which a certain kind of history is retold, in which aspirations of liberation and freedom can be for the first time expressed, in which what I would call the imagined community of Africans can be symbolically reconstructed. (69)

Catherine Hall  At a time when some are insisting that nations must only comprise one ethnicity, that they must be exclusive and racially pure, there is a vital alternative project which developments both in the Caribbean and Australia might help us to think through. (69)  That is to imagine a British ‘post-nation’ which is not ethnically pure, which is inclusive and culturally diverse. (69)

Catherine Hall  * Re-Thinking the Empire  One way of re-thinking the Empire in a post-colonial frame might be to focus on the inter-connections between the histories of ‘metropolis’ and ‘peripheries’ and refuse the simple binary of coloniser and colonised. (70)  As post-colonial theories have argued, the projection of ‘the other’ is also always about repressed aspects of the self. (70)

Post-Coloniality Edward Said To ignore or otherwise discount the overlapping experience of Western and Orientals, the interdependence of cultural terrains in which colonizer and colonized co-existed and battled each other is to miss what is essential about the world in the past century.

Post-Coloniality Edward Said Gone are the binary oppositions dear to the nationalist and imperialist enterprise. Instead we begin to sense that old authority cannot simply be replaced by new authority, but that new alignments made across borders, types, nations, and essences are rapidly coming into view, and it is those new alignments that now provoke and challenge the fundamentally static notion of identity that has been the core of cultural thought during the era of imperialism.

Post-Coloniality Edward Said Throughout the exchange between Europeans and their "others" that began systematically half a millennium ago, the one idea that has scarcely varied is that there is an "us" and a "them," each quite settled, clear, unassailably self-evident.

Catherine Hall  Relations between coloniser and colonised are characterised by a deep ambivalence, ‘the other’ is both an object of desire and derision, of envy and contempt, with the coloniser simultaneously projecting and disavowing difference in an essentially contradictory way, asserting mastery but constantly finding it slipping away. (70)  The colonies provided the benchmarks which allowed the English to determine what they did not want to be and who they thought they were. (71)

Catherine Hall  Unpicking imperial histories, grasping the raced and gendered ways in which inter-connections and inter- dependencies have been played out, developing a more differentiated notion of power than that which focuses simply on coloniser and colonised, can have emancipatory potential. (76)  It is a history which involves recognition and the re- working of memory.  A history which shows how fantasised constructions of homogenous nations are constructed and the other possibilities which are always there. (76)

Catherine Hall  A history which is about difference, not homogeneity.  In remaking the past and re-evaluating the relations of Empire ‘we’ can begin to understand the ties which bind the different peoples of contemporary Britain in a web of connections which have been mediated through power, the power of coloniser over colonised, that have never moved only from ‘centre’ to ‘periphery’, but rather have criss-crossed the globe. (76)