Stuart Hall
Stuart Henry McPhail Hall FBA (1932–2014) was a
Jamaican-born British Marxist sociologist, cultural theorist, and political
activist. Hall, along with Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams, was one of the
founding figures of the school of thought that is now known as British Cultural
Studies or the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies.
In the 1950s Hall was a founder of the influential New Left
Review. At Hoggart's invitation, he joined the Centre for Contemporary Cultural
Studies at Birmingham University in 1964. Hall took over from Hoggart as acting
director of the centre in 1968, became its director in 1972, and remained there
until 1979. While at the centre, Hall is credited with playing a role in
expanding the scope of cultural studies to deal with race and gender, and with
helping to incorporate new ideas derived from the work of French theorists like
Michel Foucault.
Hall left the centre in 1979 to become a professor of
sociology[citation needed] at the Open University. He was President of the
British Sociological Association from 1995 to 1997.[citation needed] He retired
from the Open University in 1997 and was a professor emeritus.[citation needed]
British newspaper The Observer called him "one of the country's leading
cultural theorists".[7] Hall was also involved in the Black Arts Movement.
Movie directors such as John Akomfrah and Isaac Julien also see him as one of
their heroes. Hall was married to Catherine Hall, a feminist professor of
modern British history at University College London, with whom he had two
children. After his death, Stuart Hall was described as "one of the most
influential intellectuals of the last sixty years"
Stuart Hall was born on 3 February 1932 in Kingston,
Jamaica, into a middle-class Jamaican family of African, English, Portuguese
Jewish, and likely Indian descent. He attended Jamaica College, receiving an
education modelled after the British school system. In an interview Hall
describes himself as a "bright, promising scholar" in these years and
his formal education as "a very 'classical' education; very good but in
very formal academic terms." With the help of sympathetic teachers, he expanded
his education to include "T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Freud, Marx, Lenin and
some of the surrounding literature and modern poetry", as well as
"Caribbean literature". Hall's later works reveal that growing up in
the pigmentocracy of the colonial West Indies, where he was of darker skin than
much of his family, had a profound effect on his views. In 1951 Hall won a
Rhodes Scholarship to Merton College at the University of Oxford, where he
studied English and obtained a Master of Arts degree, becoming part of the
Windrush generation, the first large-scale emigration of West Indians, as that
community was then known. He originally intended to do graduate work on the
medieval poem Piers Plowman, reading it through the lens of contemporary literary
criticism, but was dissuaded by his language professor, J. R. R. Tolkien, who
told him "in a pained tone that this was not the point of the
exercise." He began a PhD on Henry James at Oxford but, galvanised
particularly by the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary (which saw many thousands
of members leave the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) and look for
alternatives to previous orthodoxies) and the Suez Crisis, abandoned this in
1957 or 1958 to focus on his political work. In 1957, he joined the Campaign
for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) and it was on a CND march that he met his future
wife.[18] From 1958 to 1960, Hall worked as a teacher in a London secondary modern
school and in adult education, and in 1964 married Catherine Hall, concluding
around this time that he was unlikely to return permanently to the Caribbean.
After working on the Universities and Left Review during his time at Oxford,
Hall joined E. P. Thompson, Raymond Williams and others to merge it with The
New Reasoner, launching the New Left Review in 1960 with Hall as the founding
editor. In 1958, the same group, with Raphael Samuel, launched the Partisan
Coffee House in Soho as a meeting place for left-wingers.[20] Hall left the
board of the New Left Review in 1961 or 1962. Hall's academic career took off
in 1964 after he co-wrote with Paddy Whannel of the British Film Institute
"one of the first books to make the case for the serious study of film as
entertainment", The Popular Arts. As a direct result, Richard Hoggart
invited Hall to join the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the
University of Birmingham, initially as a research fellow at Hoggart's own
expense. In 1968 Hall became director of the centre. He wrote a number of
influential articles in the years that followed, including Situating Marx:
Evaluations and Departures (1972) and Encoding and Decoding in the Television
Discourse (1973). He also contributed to the book Policing the Crisis (1978)
and coedited the influential Resistance Through Rituals (1975).
Shortly before Thatcher became Prime Minister in 1979, Hall
and Maggie Steed presented It Ain't Half Racist Mum, an Open Door programme
made by the Campaign Against Racism in the Media (CARM) which tackled racial
stereotypes and contemporary British attitudes to immigration.[24] After his
appointment as a professor of sociology at the Open University (OU) that year,
Hall published further influential books, including The Hard Road to Renewal
(1988), Formations of Modernity (1992), Questions of Cultural Identity (1996)
and Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (1997). Through the 1970s
and 1980s, Hall was closely associated with the journal Marxism Today; in 1995,
he was a founding editor of Soundings: A Journal of Politics and Culture. He
spoke internationally on Cultural Studies, including a series of lectures in
1983 at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign that were recorded and
would decades later form the basis of the 2016 book Cultural Studies 1983: A
Theoretical History (edited by Jennifer Slack and Lawrence Grossberg). Hall was
the founding chair of Iniva (Institute of International Visual Arts) and the
photography organization Autograph ABP (the Association of Black
Photographers).[28] Hall retired from the Open University in 1997. He was
elected fellow of the British Academy in 2005 and received the European
Cultural Foundation's Princess Margriet Award in 2008.[3] He died on 10
February 2014, from complications following kidney failure, a week after his
82nd birthday. By the time of his death, he was widely known as the
"godfather of multiculturalism".[29][3][30][31] His memoir, Familiar
Stranger: A Life Between Two Islands (co-authored with Bill Schwarz), was
posthumously published in 2017.
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