ANGELA MeROBBIE, References Brunsdon, , (1997) ‘Pedagogies ofthe Feminine’, in Sen Tass: Soap Opera ‘0 Sate Dishes, London: Routledge, Butler, J. (1998) “Merely Cultural’, New Left Revien, 227, pp. $944 Dearing, R. (1996) Tae Dearing Rehr, London: HMSO. Debray, R (1981) Teachers, Writes, Celdrites: The Idlictuas of Medien France London: New Left Books. Grossberg, L. (1904) ‘Introduction’, in H. Giroux and P. MeLaren (eds), Betucon Borders: Pedagogy and the Politics of Cultural Sues, New York Routledge Hall, . (1996) “The Formation of a Diasporic Intellectual: An Interview with Sart Hall by Kuan-Hsing Chen’, in D. Morley and KH. Chen (eds), Seon Halt Critical Dilogus in Cultral Studien, London: Rociledge Hall, S. (1998) ‘Aspiration and Autiuide ~ Reflections on Blsck Britain in the Nineties’, New Formations, No. 38, Spring, pp. 38-17, Hall, S. and Jefferson, T. (eds, (1976) Resistance Through Rituals Youth Subcut ‘resin Poster Britain, London: Hutchinson, Hal. ak (1978) Pacing the Crass: Mung the State and Law and Onde, Basingstoke: Macmillan Kennedy, H., QC (1997) The Kennedy Report, London: HMSO. MeRobbie, A. (1999) Jn The Cultre Soi: Ax, Fashion and Popular Musi London: Routledge 19 Travelling Thoughts Doreen Massey me begin by proposing the following “Spice oa configuraion (a simutaneiy but come bak oa) of ammlipticiy of pectoris : Te clei pies and the ocean tt cole (poten) intertatednen which that entais ie te to tine a Pie mat think space and sine Logeher, tine and space (1 kao wre alvay saying that hee da but bear wth me 3 ie) iE that reall 2, we ean no tore go tack In space, relum to winence we cane, than we are able wo go Back nine What we en dole ect up agang catch up with where another’ history has got to "no's iterace agai (on tern that most be the Stl of pain) wih another of tote multiple tnjectories, inary yea, fom 1982 unt he so inconsiderate reine, Sn tied to Gee me 8 lik wo work, rom norton Londo, up the Iter oreo ey mies, oto the capital's hoagh theta lan ew im he at ea miso itn Kees ‘na bck agin might: Aourey, etree? And back agin? tian in rr aig es by, of going on (Thrift, 1996), it may be adequate thus to. concep ti nn corm tome fhe wg wa Sep bere began on tote tourney ad they be continued develop tinct on the wasn whch Ino to mc mee fen take. Soe me ‘Sct iat joey Bra momen Ie ate he opening epi roy, wen you mak ha Jourocy, fom Linton 10 ion Keys, ou we nat jut teling 7 foo ce bene wo svi e-yely seen earn die cocoate prac wr retion/ mentions you ae abe belo although oth cu 08 peter miner ay226 DOREEN MASSEY to Produce it. You are part of the constant process of the making and breaking of links that is an element in the constitution (1) of you yourself, (2) of London, which will not have the pleasure of your company for the day, (3) of Milton Keynes, which will (and whose existence as, say, an independent node of commuting is reinforced as 2 result) and thus (4) of space itself. You are not just travelling across space; you are altering ita litle, moving iton, producing it. The relations that constitute itare being reproduced in an always slightly altered form Second, this journey of yours is anyway not just spatial. It is alse temporal. It is a movement in/of (a production of) both space and Lime. ‘The London you left just half an hour ago (as you speed through Cheddington, its clay-damp fields spreading away on either side) is not the London of now. It has already moved on (without you). And you are on your way to meet a Milton Keynes that is also moving on, and that has been doing so, in large measure without the slightest regard for, and with no relation to, your impending arrival. It has its own story, in which you once again, and in a pretty minor way, are about to Participate. Movement and the making of relations also take/make time. (OF course, you may well be objecting by now, and correctly, that Milton Keynes has more than one ‘story’ going on within it (and even more so is this the case for London) and that some of these stories have indeed been preparing for your arrival. Security guards and Secretaries have already arrived at the university, doors have been unlocked, telephone messages have been taken; the cleaners overnight hhave emptied your wastepaper basket (thus are we academics served). Agreed. Indeed, the way one might conceptualize towns, and cities «even more, is precisely as peculiarly intense, and probably heterogene. us, constellations of social trajectories (see Massey, Allen and Pile 1999).) Third, however, if space and time are both dimensions of this journey, then what is at issue is not my crossing space to get to Milton Keynes but my constructing a trajectory that meets up with the trajec. tory that is Milton Keynes and, within the intense multiplicity of trajectories that is that city, seeking out just some of them with which {o interact. In this space of fresh configurations new stories will emerge, new trajectories will be set in motion, Other people and things indeed have been collected there, some precisely for this purpose. People and papers have gathered for « ‘meeting, faxes have arrived from around the world, an email from Larry reminding me that am late with this piece; and I in tur will despatch a whole cartography of communications while I am “there! Meetingsup in, and dispersals out from, this focus of space-time. ‘TRAVELLING THOUGHTS 227 we set off again, making our way And then, come the evening, weary, r hhome to the big city. Yet that going home is not at all going back to the same place. London is not the same place we left this morning. It, 100, has moved on; things have been happening while we've been gone. Once again, as in the morning meeting with Milton Keynes, this isnot matter of crossing space toa static place that has been somehow lying there, waiting for our arrival. You have to catch up with what's been happening, with how this place, too, has been moving. Emerging, into the crush of Euston station I scan the headlines in the evening Paper to see what's new; leaving the station I search the sky and evementsfel he sr wondering wat the weather’ en ik (vil i water®); finally arrived in my apartment my garden be crying out for water); finaly arrived in my check the post, the telephone messages, ind out ‘what's been happen- ing here’ while I've been away. Bit by bit I retmmerse myself in the trajectories of London. ‘There was a point in my describing, earlier, the journey from London to Milton Keynes in terms of the landscape we were crossing. For it seems to me that we frequently understand space in this way, in terms of travelling across it. The very surface, of land or sea, becomes ‘equated with space itself. We do it without thinking (and maybe will deny i when faced with the explicit proposition), but it has serious effect space and maps. This, too, is unfortunate. In fact, it may indeed well be that our usual notion of maps has pacified, has taken the life out of, how most of us most commonly think about space. Of course, is important to me here. ime here is another and less recognized aspect of this hat maps, too, give the impression that space is a So why docs it matter if we imagine space like that? Well, T would argue that it evokes the understanding of other places, peoples, cultures... a located on this surface. Immobilized, they await our arrival, ‘They lie there, in place, without trajectories; we can no longer see in ‘our minds’ eyes the stories they, (00, are telling, living out, producing. Itis to render them, as Eric Wolf (1982) at the end of a rather different argument has put it, ‘without history’ ‘There are many who have ied to puncture that smooth surface, ‘The art events of Clive van den Berg (1997) aim to disrupt the complacent landscape of white South Africa with reminders of the history om which it is based. Iain Sinclair's (1997) dévives through ‘eastern London evoke, through the surface, pasts (and presents) not usually noticed. Anne McClintock's (1995) provocative notion of ‘anachronistic space’ a permanently anterior time within the space of the modern ~ is catching at something similar. Between London and, Milton Keynes indeed, right by Berkhamsted station, there’s a Norman, motte and bailey, getting on for a thousand years old, which T always try to glimpse as we pass and which always sets me thinking. We know, then, that the presentness of the horizontaity of space is in fact a product of a multitude of histories whose resonances are still there, if ‘we would but see them, and which sometimes catch us with full force ome years ago, a geographer named H.C. Darby wrote an article entitled "The Problem of Geographical Description’ (1962). In it, he argued that while histories were relatively straightforward to tell, the problem of describing the spatial was how to represent, on the page in words and in a single story, ‘Now, many criticisms could be, and have been, made of piece. But one element of the significance of the argument has often been missed. Darby was, it seems to me, both making a fundamental mistake and grasping at something the mirror of this: his recognition that the ‘problem’ of the spatial is its character of multiplicity. Darby is by no means the only person to hhave worked with that combination of ideas. Fredric Jameson (1991) in a very similar formulation finds the complexity of spatial multiplicity so utterly disconcerting that he calls not only for a cognitive ‘map’ but for the restoration of some notion of narrative (see Massey 1992). That sumption sof cure, that ar wl rextore order oe is an anumptn that may be wilded te! the in inering niles of the spat. Taking nen ‘or thinking space-time, makes ‘that manoeuvre space seriously, being ar singular story and the legibility of eet rather, it is part of the delight, and the the amaotines of sf roa hesis, just to unsettle things a litle more. CU cannot rei er Poems in conext, remember tha ica SS eae (while we argue with Melvyn Bragg, mag mundane up the ML syn Bs tg thc arsine othe sah an pray moving. 0 2 the pepe change ona car Sat. ie pinning in 2 wo fun, tha = - Anc the tance that annual ottion ede arom me England (ve cal rks Tg down, 70 milion to 100 milion years ago) i of course tt! mows Ii don 70 min aan op downward cova the nee ore every (a mst be gue 4 Se) Soe gpm omy erin go Allover, asthe) 3, any 10,000 yeas oi thea fal of hw each wane (0 ef oure remember tha what cou, remem at place, Tere pebaps, then, no eb eter. a ich wre woul al ages ah ab ace single salar uftaneles we might call HO) ime and haps then need 10 ins ce between them. ‘as we customarily do on the differen« rie rae ecet up. again, cach up wit) Where teeny rte ae another are and ow) 6 Seo your mering a2 + s0 much, in the end, how I imagine that journey aoa eee Milton Keynes. But the thoughts that it evoked between London230 DOREEN MASSEY do have, I would argue, a more general relevance. And their import is political, To begin with, and most obviously, they mean that we can never go home’, or at any rate we cannot do so if we imagine home as an ‘enduring site from whence we came, You can't go back. It is a point that is often made, Neither Stuart nor I ‘come from’ this tract of southeastern England but we both know that neither Jamaica nor Manchester is the same as when we left. It is obvious yet it is often forgotten, England’s ‘Angry Young Men’ who came south in the fifties both ridiculed and held in aspic the northern places they had left. That kind of longing for a place called home, that view of place in nostalgia, precisely robs it of a history. (And if nostalgias are not necessarily bad, as Wendy Wheeler (1994) has persuasively pointed out, we none the less do maybe need to rework them so that they are less immobilizing of others.) For this is an approach that operates, as is often recognized, in the same way as those great dualisms between Culture and Nature, and it resonates too with views of place as Woman, as Mother ~ as what thas been left behind and is (supposedly) unchanging. Iisa view found in songs of home, in novels, in academic writing. It is beautifully captured and critiqued (in the migrant’s desire to cling to the supposed traditions of home while the visitor from this supposedly traditional pplace is all jazzed-up in thoroughly ‘modern’ gear) in Bhaji on the Beach Ie is deep in Raymond Williams's Border Countn. It is comforting, but it is to be rejected. Places change; they go on without you. Just as Mother hhas a life of her own, So you can’t go back. There is nothing for it but to keep trucking fon, And that’s OK. But the real reason behind this point is that others have their stories too. When Hern’n Cortés heaved to the top of the pass between the snow-covered voleanoes and looked down upon the incredible island city of pyramids and causeways, the immense central valley between the ‘mountain ranges stretching away into the heat, he wasn't just ‘conquer- ing space’. What was about to happen, as he and his army, and the locals they had reeruited along the way, marched down upon Tenoch- titkin, was the meeting up of stories, each already with its own spaces and geographies, two imperial histories: the Aztec and the Spanish. We read so often of the conquest of space, but what was/is at issue is also the meeting up with others who are also journeying, also making histories. ‘What is fascinating is how the most frequent imagination of this process performs a double operation. Not only is space, lazily, con- ceived of as a surface, but crossing it in this context (the voyages of discovery, the explorations of anthropologists) is indeed imagined as “TRAVELLING THOUGHTS 231 temporal too. But this is time travel that goes backwards in time. Instead of producing space-time in its voyages forth, the West imagined itself going out and finding not contemporary stories but the past. This latter imagination is now commonly acknowledged and criticized (for ‘example, Fabian 1983). But maybe there is, also, no simple ‘conquering of space’ at all. The ravages of imperialism and the conquerings and cooptations of colonialism were not horizontal movements across a space that is a surface. They were engagements of previously separate Uuajectories. And it is the terms of that meeting that are the stuff of politics. The shift in naming, from la conguista to et encuentro, speaks also of a more active imagination of the engagement between space and time. ‘And while, maybe, we think we know all this already (and maybe we do, for the events of centuries past) we nevertheless keep making the same mistake. history, their stabilization providing the solid ground for our own story. Se one te eee ae ae coon sme, once me eognine he mpi of hier that then what could be more both ordered and chaotic than space, with all is happenstance juxtapositions and unintended emer- gent effects? Here, for certain, there can be no guarantees References arty, H.C. (1962) "The Problem of Geographical Description’, Transact: of ‘the Institute of British Geographers, Vol. 80, pp. I-14 Fabian, J. (1983) Tine cad the Other: Hew Anthropology Mads Is Obj, New York: Columbia University Press Grossberg, L. (1996) ‘The Space of Culture, the Power of Space’ in Chambers, 1. and Cur, L. (eds) The Patolnial Question, London: Routledge, pp. 169-88, Jameson, F. (1991) Postmodernism; a, the Logic of Late Capital, London: Verso Massey, D. (1992) ‘Politics and space-time’, Naw Left Reva, No. 196, pp. 65-84 (reprinted in Massey, D. 1994 Space, Pace and Gender, Oxford: Polity Press, pp. 249-272), Massey, D, Allen, J.and Pile, S. (eds) (1999) City Words, Routledge and the ‘Open Universi. McClintock, A. (1995) Imperial eather: Race, Gender and Secualisy in the Colonial Const, London: Routledge. ‘Sinclair, L. (1997) Lights ou for the Teron, London: Granta Books.OUKEEN MASSEY. ‘Th, N. (1986) Spat! mations London: Sag va den Berg, (1997) "Bate Ste Mine Bu ie Bee, G07 Mine Dump, and Other Spaces of Eemgry: im Golding, 8. (et) The Boh eda y tees Lees Wels W. (1990) ‘Nowalga k's Nay: The Posmodetnisng of Palamen tar pmocracy’, in Perryman, M. (ed.) Altered States: sa rion, Culture, London: Lawrence & Wishart, Pp. 94-109. » maa Wolf, (1982) Eunpe and 0 Californie Roget on the Pople wathows For, London: University of a A Sociography of Diaspora Kobena Mercer Swart Hall's approach to the subject of diaspora is indirect or even Gircuitous, rather than programmatic or goal-oriented. Whereas such essays as ‘New Ethnicities’ (1988) and ‘Cultural Identity and Diaspora’ (1990) addressed the topic explicitly, the issue was implicit in Hall's early work on the sociology of immigration, such as The Young England- ‘as (1967). Key contributions to postcolonial theory, such as “The Question of Cultural Identity’ (1992), are of recent provenance, although Hall's longstanding interest in conceptualizing diaspora dates back to such publications as Africa is Alive and Well and Living in the Diaspora (1975). In other words, Stuart Hall's writings on diaspora are themselves scattered and dispersed within his oeuvre as a whole.* This chapter will not attempt to synthesize a general theory of diaspora from these disparate texts and interventions, This is because it seems that what is distinctive about Hall’s perspective is how his conjunctural approach touches upon all aspects of the cultural studies repertoire, while at the same time moving across or against the borders of various disciplines in such a way that the connective dots between ‘them remain valuably open. Stuart Hall does not write about diaspora as a discrete sociological object so much as he writes from the social worlds of diaspora to produce knowledge as a situated practice of interruption. The twists and turns involved in the journey of the diaspora concept have opened up one of the most compelling stories in recent intellectual life. Hall's influence on this broad trajectory has been crucial and subtle. It seems timely, then, to trace its passage within his own work, as well as to ask whether the diaspora concept is, now due for some interruption of its own. “The career of sociology has been coterminous with the career of nationstate formation and nationalism,’ observes Jan Nederveen Pie- terse, who has taken the view that, in the context of late-twentieth- century globalization, this trajectory ‘is in for retooling’. ‘A global sociology is taking shape,’ he argues, ‘around notions such as social