Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Writer, teacher, and cultural studies professor; editor of New Left Review; lifelong advocate of multiculturalism and challenger of racial prejudice, whose work
On the island
Eight records
The first musical sound that I felt really belonged to me was the first sound of modern jazz. It felt it's kind of opened up a new world.
this is the sound that saved a lot of second generation black West Indian kids from just, you know, falling through the a hole in the ground because they didn't know who they were
Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 in F major, BWV 1047
English Chamber Orchestra conducted by Benjamin Britten
for the first time I really listened very seriously to classical music and he taught me a lot about it.
one of the things I discovered in that period was the voice of Billie Holiday.
I Heard It Through the Grapevine
Norman Whitfield & Barrett Strong
Marvin Gay stands for all the music I listened to in the 70s. ... One of the things we used to do was to dance.
I've always uh um you know kept going back and listening to the music of my youth. But I like to hear that music rephrased in a more modern idiom.
I Waited for YouFavourite
the uncertainty, the restlessness, and some of the um some of the nostalgia for what cannot be. is in the sound of Myles Davis's trumpet.
Mirella Freni with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Herbert von Karajan
I want to music that will take my soul and just make it sore.
In conversation
Presenter asks
5:37Is the difference [in your musical tastes] symbolic of another difference between you [and your siblings], that they were accepting of the colonial society and you wanted something different?
Yes, I suppose so. I mean, that was certainly the difference between us. ... curiously, uh, I'm the blackest member of my family. ... in Jamaica, uh the question of exactly what shade you were in colonial Jamaica, that was the most important question because you could read off class and education and status from that. I was aware and conscious of that from the very beginning.
Presenter asks
7:46Did you see [your parents] being patronised?
I saw I watched my father being patronized, I watched my mother not being quite as uh you know well off and as uh respectable and as uh lauded by other people as she wanted to be. Uh it it's kind of con constant lack of fulfilment, of ambition in this family situation.
Presenter asks
10:19Did [Oxford] look like it was supposed to look, and did it come up to expectations?
Well, it looked like it was supposed to look. It didn't quite feel like it was supposed to feel after a while. ... Oxford was a bit of a shock, as you can imagine. ... what I realized the moment I got to Oxford was that someone like me could not really be part of it. I mean, I you know, I could make a success there. I could even be perhaps uh accepted into it. But I would never feel it was my place.
The keepsakes
The book
Henry James
I want to take a book which is the language is so complex and the sensibility and feelings are so refined that you could spend a paragraph, you know, would take your whole day really. And that's Henry James's Portrait of a Lady.
The luxury
I better take a piano and I'd really try for the first time to teach myself to play the piano properly.
Presenter asks
13:56Did all of these events [in 1956] have an effect on where you were coming from politically?
the Soviets moved into Hungary, and the the British and the French moved into the Suez Canal. And this was the beginning of my so called New Left experience. And for the New Left what it meant for me was that space wi in politics which was defined by, on the one hand, The Soviet invasion of Hungary ... And on the other hand, the invasion of Egypt ... Somewhere in between there, the idea of a democratic, socialist, anti-imperial politics was born, and that's the moment of the New Left.
Presenter asks
17:35What made you realize that [popular culture like film, television, and pop music] ought to be studied?
Well, I think mainly because I thought the culture itself was being transformed by these forces. You know, I mean, Britain was an old class society becoming a mass society. This is the period of the coming of television, it's the coming of youth culture ... it's just the explosion of the twentieth century in a sort of pre-twentieth century society. And we wanted to say school was a place on which in which you can reflect on life as you know it
Presenter asks
21:53What more are you saying we should do [to build a multicultural society]?
I think it's much more a question of trying to reimagine what Britain is. I think Britain has much more diverse origins, much more uh plural strands in its culture, much more mixes. I think it's got to learn to love mixture. ... It's a process of becoming, not of being.
“There have been a million different ways of being British, and there have been a million different struggles about Britishness, which you know only retrospectively are then sort of smoothly accommodated into the story as if it's unfolding seamlessly from beginning to end. But it isn't like that.”
“I think high high culture is really the very selective appropriation of a certain limited range of cultural forms and the investment in that of a kind of social value. It's it's not that people you know are really responding to what there is in King Lear, but they're appropriating Shakespeare as a kind of badge of I am an educated person.”
“as you brought down the flag of empire, we came to find the mother country. And just as you desert Britishness, we discover that we're really pretty British after all, black and British.”
“I can't ever be English in the full sense, though I know and understand the British from the inside, like the back of my hand. So I'm a sort of diaspora person.”