Hall, Stuart,
1932–2014, Jamaican-born British sociologist and cultural theorist,
b. Kingston, Jamaica. Hall attended Jamaica College and moved to England in
1951 after winning a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University, where he
earned a Master of Arts degree. Politically, Hall identified as a Marxist
but did not join the Communist Party,
instead categorizing himself as a member of what became known as the New
Left. In 1957, Hall joined scholars E. P. Thompson, Raymond Williams, and
Ralph Miliband to launch two journals, The New Reasoner and
the New Left Review, of which Hall was the founding editor.
In 1961, he became a lecturer at Chelsea College. He joined the Centre for
Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at the University of Birmingham and
took on the role of director in 1968. Hall became a professor of sociology
in 1979 at the Open University. He became a member of the Commission on the
Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain after retiring from the Open University in
1997. In 2005, he became a fellow of the British Academy. British artist and
filmmaker John Akomfrah has focused on the history of Hall's life and work
in the form of a gallery installation in 2012, The Unfinished
Conversation, and a documentary film in 2013, The
Stuart Hall Project.
Hall made significant contributions to the study of culture, race, media, diaspora, and postcolonialism.
He was intellectually commitment to the development of anti-authoritarian,
revisionist Marxism, and he participated in public debates on Thatcherism, capitalism, and
multiculturalism. In this role as director if the CCCS, Hall engaged in
inter-disciplinary research that would eventually morph into the academic
field of cultural studies, where culture is generally defined as a space of
interpretative and contested struggle. Hall's work focused on popular media
and so-called low cultural forms, and tracing the intersecting dynamics of
politics, power, and culture. He emphasized the role of culture in the
construction of identity and meaning.
Hall co-wrote and edited several books and collections, including, but not
limited to, Encoding and Decoding in the Television
Discourse (1973), Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the
State and Law and Order (1978), The Hard Road to
Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left (1988),
Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying
Practices (1997), and Familiar Stranger: A Life Between
Two Islands (2017). After Hall's death, Duke University Press
established itself as "the official home for the writings of Stuart Hall."
From 2019 to 2021, the press published numerous volumes of Hall's collected
work on Marxism, cultural studies, race and difference, politics, popular
art, and the media.
See D. Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen, eds., Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues
in Cultural Studies (1996); P. Gilroy et al., ed.
Without Guarantees: In Honour of Stuart Hall (2000); J.
Procter, Stuart Hall (2004); C. Barker and E. A. Jane,
eds., Cultural Studies: Theory and Practice (5th ed. 2016);
D. Scott, Stuart Hall's Voice: Intimations of an Ethics of Receptive
Generosity (2017); J. Henriques et al., ed. Stuart
Hall: Conversations, Projects and Legacies (2017); G. Titley,
Racism and Media (2019).
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