Routes, not Roots.
John Akomfrah, Stuart Hall, and the Black Audio Film Collective

John Akom­frah’s film “The Unfin­ished Conver­sa­tion” (2012), which is on show in the exhi­bi­tion “John Akomfrah. A Space of Empathy” in the SCHIRN, is a tribute to Jamaican-born soci­ol­o­gist and cultural theo­rist Stuart Hall (1932-2014). The three-channel video instal­la­tion consists largely of archive record­ings of Hall’s radio and tele­vi­sion appear­ances on the BBC. In the video, Hall talks about his memo­ries of his country of origin, Jamaica, back then still a British colony, and his arrival in the United Kingdom in the 1950s as a member of the Windrush gener­a­tion, which comprises people who migrated from the Common­wealth states between 1948 and 1971. The name is taken from the epony­mous ship that brought the first immi­grants from the Caribbean across the Atlantic. He also discusses his time at Oxford Univer­sity and his later role as one of the founding figures of cultural studies in Britain. At one point in the film Hall remarks: “When I ask anyone where they´re from I expect nowa­days to be told an extremely long story” and thus summa­rizes the essence of the Black Dias­pora expe­ri­ence, as it existed partic­u­larly in the United Kingdom but also in other Euro­pean coun­tries: For example, making this reality of life more differ­en­ti­ated has also been a central concern for Black people in Germany since the 1980s.

In this instance, it was above all Black femi­nist activists who sought to make their history and present visible. The pioneers of the Afro-German move­ment include among many others the poet and activist of the early days, May Ayim (1960-1996), US writer and civil rights activist Audre Lorde (1934-1992), who lived in Berlin for a time, and histo­rian Katha­rina Ogun­toye (b. 1959). The inter­ac­tion between the various Euro­pean and US discourses on Black iden­ti­ties and their place in soci­eties that insist on defining them­selves as ‘white’ led to a deep bond between them that continues to resonate today.

Just like John Akom­frah, Stuart Hall addressed ques­tions of iden­tity throughout his life and did so in a way that still helps us navi­gate the complex issues of origin, belonging, and race today. In his auto­bi­og­raphy Familiar Stranger. A Life Between Two Islands, he writes:

“We tend to think of iden­tity as taking us back to our roots, the part of us which remains essen­tially the same across time. In fact, iden­tity is always a never-completed process of becoming – a process of shifting iden­ti­fi­ca­tions, rather than a singular, complete, finished state of being.”

For Hall, Caribbean culture is a blue­print for a hybrid society in which everyone comes from some­where else. He describes his own family back­grounds as an amalgam of African, Jamaican, Scot­tish, and Portuguese-Jewish influ­ences. His expe­ri­ences of living in and between several worlds would lead Hall to the real­iza­tion of how culture works in general: not as a stable, linear, progres­sive devel­op­ment eter­nally linked to purported origins but as a sequence of move­ments, dias­poric ruptures, shifts and adap­ta­tions. ‘Routes, not roots’ – paths along which culture has always moved, constantly recon­fig­uring itself without apparent roots to which it could return.