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I think I can say, without risk of exaggeration, that there has rarely been a day in recent years when I haven't thought of Stuart Hall's work. Its manifold meanings and implications are startlingly resonant today, in a variety of national and global contexts: Britain and the United States, the Caribbean, of course, but also India, and, more broadly, Asia and Africa.
I'll start my conversation with Stuart Hall's work with Anglo-America and Policing the Crisis - which is a landmark text in understanding politics and culture in AngloAmerica, as it has evolved since the economic downturn of the 1970s to our age of Trump and Brexit.1
What defines these decades is a pitiless imposition of market discipline, an assault on welfare-state protections at home and an increase in military interventions abroad.
In economic terms, we have seen a revolutionary mode of upward redistribution - gush-up, rather than trickle-down. In the political domain we have seen the return of a rhetoric about the rooted political community. It is not only far-right movements that have insisted on their right to be culturally different, against the outsiders who want to radically transform and subvert white and Christian Europe.
Not only have we lived through a period of drastic re-engineering: this radical re-structuring has also enjoyed a remarkable degree of public consensus.
The challenge before the ruling classes in democracies was how to create this consensus - a consensus that could justify inequality and the criminalisation of the poor, the precarious and the potentially dangerous in the name of collective security.
In this project, a racialised view of crime and national security, in which dark-skinned people stand ready to commit unspeakable crimes, came in handy in separating the deserving from the undeserving. Policing strategies have been militarised. Emergency powers have been created to deal pre-emptively with potential criminals and suspects. And we have seen in our own time the merging of the rhetoric of crime and terrorism, and a massive upgrading of the machinery of control, coercion and surveillance. It should be noted by the way that no explicit reference to race has been needed to create and entrench a demonology in which the terrorist and the immigrant join the black criminal.
We should also note that what...