A Resounding but Unconscious Silence? The Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, Race and Foundations of an Agenda

This article examines lesser-known works on race produced by members of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, most of them prior to the more widely recognised interventions of Policing the Crisis and The Empire Strikes Back . Despite Stuart Hall’s deep engagement with Black politics during his time as director of the Centre, archival and interview sources suggest that Hall did not take a stance within the CCCS that fostered intellectual and theoretical explorations of race and ethnicity. Nevertheless, a wealth of work by a wide range of students devoted attention to the topic. This article examines these other contributions and situates them within the broader narrative of the emergence of the race agenda in CCCS scholarship. It challenges the conventional view that the Centre’s engagement with race began in the late 1970s, arguing instead that earlier works must be seen as an integral part of the development of cultural studies incursions into the subject. By drawing attention to this body of work, the article complicates hegemonic narratives and demonstrates that the construction of the cultural studies project has been intertwined with the study of race from its inception. These issues should be seen as integral to the history of cultural studies, rather than as peripheral additions that emerged later.