Stuart Hall | |
|---|---|
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| Born | Stuart Henry McPhail Hall (1932-02-03)3 February 1932 |
| Died | 10 February 2014(2014-02-10) (aged 82) London, England |
| Occupation(s) | Marxist sociologist, cultural theorist, political activist |
| Known for | FoundingNew Left Review |
| Spouse | |
| Children | 2 |
| Academic background | |
| Alma mater | Merton College, Oxford |
| Influences | |
| Academic work | |
| Discipline | |
| School or tradition | Birmingham school |
| Institutions | |
| Doctoral students | Paul Gilroy |
| Notable students | Gregor McLennan |
| Notable ideas | Encoding/decoding model of communication |
| Influenced | |
| Website | www |
| Part of a series on |
| New Times movement |
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Organisations & Concepts Organisations
Key Concepts |
Critics & Legacy Critics Legacy & Influence |
Stuart Henry McPhail HallFBA (3 February 1932 – 10 February 2014) was aJamaican-born BritishMarxistsociologist,cultural theorist, andpolitical activist. Hall – along withRichard Hoggart andRaymond Williams – was one of the founding figures of the school of thought known as British Cultural Studies or theBirmingham School of Cultural Studies.[2]
In the 1950s, Hall was a founder of the influential journalNew Left Review. At Hoggart's invitation, he joined theCentre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at theUniversity of Birmingham in 1964. Hall took over from Hoggart as acting director of the CCCS in 1968, became its director in 1972, and remained there until 1979.[3] While at the centre, Hall is credited with playing a role in expanding the scope ofcultural studies to deal with race andgender, and with helping to incorporate new ideas derived from the work of French theorists such asMichel Foucault.[4]
Hall left the centre in 1979 to become a professor of sociology[5] at theOpen University.[6] He was President of theBritish Sociological Association from 1995 to 1997.[5] He retired from the Open University in 1997[7] and wasprofessor emeritus there until his death.[8] British newspaperThe Observer called him "one of the country's leading cultural theorists".[9] Hall was also involved in theBlack Arts Movement. Movie directors such asJohn Akomfrah andIsaac Julien also see him as one of their heroes.[10]
Hall was married toCatherine Hall, a feminist professor of modern British history atUniversity College London, with whom he had two children.[3] After his death, Stuart Hall was described as "one of the most influentialintellectuals of the last sixty years".[11] TheStuart Hall Foundation was established in 2015 by his family, friends and colleagues to "work collaboratively to forge creative partnerships in the spirit of Stuart Hall; thinking together and working towards a racially just and more equal future."[12]
Stuart Henry McPhail Hall was born on 3 February 1932 inKingston,Colony of Jamaica, into a middle-class family. His parents were Herman McPhail Hall and Jessie Merle Hopwood. Herman's direct ancestors wereEnglish, living in Jamaica for several centuries, tracing back to the Kingston tavern-keeper John Hall (1722–1797) and his Dutch wife Allegonda Boom.[13] Hall's direct paternal ancestors were implicated in thetrans-Atlantic slave trade andslavery in Jamaica, being associated with the Grecian Regale Plantation,Saint Andrew Parish. Hall's mother was descended through her mother from John Rock Grosset, a local pro-slaveryTorymember of Parliament.[14] According to the1820 Jamaica Almanac, Stuart's great-great-great-grandfather John Herman Hall owned 20 enslaved BlackAfrican people.[15] His ancestors were Portuguese, Jews, English, Africans and Indians.[9][16][17]
As a teen he had been baptized in anEvangelical Youth Group.[18] He attended theall-maleJamaica College, one of the island's elite establishments, receiving an education modeled after theBritish school system.[19] 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 formalacademic 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".[20] Hall's later works reveal that growing up in thepigmentocracy of the colonial West Indies, where he was of darker skin than much of his family, had a profound effect on his views.[21]
In 1951, Hall won aRhodes Scholarship toMerton College at theUniversity of Oxford, where he studied English and obtained aMaster of Arts degree,[22][23] becoming part of theWindrush generation, the first large-scale emigration ofWest Indians, as that community was then known. He originally intended to do graduate work on the medieval poemPiers 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."[24][25] Hall began a doctorate onHenry James at Oxford but, galvanised particularly by the 1956Soviet invasion of Hungary (which saw many thousands of members leave theCommunist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) and look for alternatives to previous orthodoxies) and theSuez Crisis, abandoned this in 1957[23] or 1958[19] to focus on his political work. In 1957, he joined theCampaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) and it was on a CND march that he met his future wife.[5] From 1958 to 1960, Hall worked as a teacher in a Londonsecondary modern school[26] and in adult education, and in 1964 marriedCatherine Hall, concluding around this time that he was unlikely to return permanently to the Caribbean.[23]
After working on theUniversities and Left Review during his time at Oxford, Hall joinedE. P. Thompson,Raymond Williams and others to merge it withThe New Reasoner journal, launching theNew Left Review in 1960, with Hall as the founding editor.[19][27] In 1958, the same group, withRaphael Samuel, launched thePartisan Coffee House inSoho as a meeting place for left-wingers.[28] Hall left the board of theNew Left Review in 1961[29] or 1962.[30]
Hall's academic career took off in 1964 after he co-wrote withPaddy Whannel of theBritish Film Institute "one of the first books to make the case for the serious study of film as entertainment",The Popular Arts.[31] As a direct result,Richard Hoggart invited Hall to join theCentre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at theUniversity of Birmingham, initially as a research fellow at Hoggart's own expense.[30] In 1968, Hall became director of the centre.[32] He wrote a number of influential articles in the years that followed, includingSituating Marx: Evaluations and Departures (1972) andEncoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse (1973) andThe Great Moving Right Show (for Marxism Today), in which he famously coined the term ‘Thatcherism’. He also contributed to the bookPolicing the Crisis (1978) and coedited the influentialResistance Through Rituals (1975).
Shortly beforeMargaret Thatcher became Prime Minister in 1979, Hall andMaggie Steed presented "It Ain't Half Racist Mum", anOpen Door programme made by the Campaign Against Racism in the Media (CARM), which tackledracial stereotypes and contemporary British attitudes to immigration.[33] After his appointment as a professor of sociology at theOpen University (OU) that year, Hall published further influential books, includingThe Hard Road to Renewal (1988),Formations of Modernity (1992),Questions of Cultural Identity (1996) andCultural Representations and Signifying Practices (1997). Through the 1970s and 1980s, Hall was closely associated with the journalMarxism Today;[34] in 1995, he was a founding editor ofSoundings: A Journal of Politics and Culture.[35]
He spoke internationally on Cultural Studies, including a series of lectures in 1983 at theUniversity of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign that were recorded and would decades later form the basis of the 2016 bookCultural Studies 1983: A Theoretical History (edited by Jennifer Slack andLawrence Grossberg).[36]
Hall was the founding chair ofIniva (Institute of International Visual Arts) and the photography organizationAutograph ABP (the Association of Black Photographers).[37]
Hall retired from the Open University in 1997. He was electedfellow of the British Academy in 2005 and received theEuropean 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".[3][38][39][40] His memoir,Familiar Stranger: A Life Between Two Islands (co-authored withBill Schwarz), was posthumously published in 2017, based on hours of interviews conducted with Hall over many years.[41]
Hall was buried on the eastern side ofHighgate Cemetery,[42] where in 2022 an audio artwork by Trevor Mathison explored his legacy.[43][44] EntitledThe Conversation Continues: We Are Still Listening, the 40-minutesoundscape was "a re-examination of the lives and histories of those laid to rest at Highgate Cemetery in the context of contemporary anti-racism movements."[45][46]
Hall's work covers issues ofhegemony andcultural studies, taking a post-Gramscian stance. He regards language-use as operating within a framework ofpower,institutions and politics/economics. This view presents people asproducers andconsumers of culture at the same time. (Hegemony, in Gramscian theory, refers to the socio-cultural production more of "consent" and "coercion".) For Hall, culture was not something to simply appreciate or study, but a "critical site of social action and intervention, where power relations are both established and potentially unsettled".[47]
Hall became one of the main proponents ofreception theory, and developed the theory ofencoding and decoding. This approach totextual analysis focuses on the scope for negotiation and opposition on the part of the audience. This means that the audience does not simply passively accept a text—social control. Crime statistics, in Hall's view, are often manipulated for political and economic purposes.Moral panics (e.g. over mugging) could thereby be ignited in order to create public support for the need to "police the crisis". The media play a central role in the "social production of news" in order to reap the rewards of lurid crime stories.[48]
Further, Hall is well known for his articulation of the conjuncture and deployment of conjunctural analysis in his work. Hall’s concept of the conjuncture offers a method for apprehending the layered, unstable, and contingent character of the present—an articulation of economic, political, and cultural forces whose contradictions come to a head in moments of crisis. For Hall, conjunctural is not about identifying a singular cause or root, but rather about mapping the movement of struggle, that is, the ensemble of forces that stabilize or destabilize a social order, an overdetermination of structure. Drawing from Gramsci’s initial articulation of the conjuncture, Hall writes: “What defines the ‘conjunctural’—the immediate terrain of struggle—is not simply the given economic conditions, but precisely the ‘incessant and persistent’ efforts which are being made to defend and conserve the position.”[49] As such, the work of conjunctural analysis is an invitation to read the present as a site of rupture, rearticulation, as well as possibility.
In his 2006 essay "Reconstruction Work: Images of Postwar Black Settlement", Hall also interrogates questions of historical memory and visuality in relation to photography as a colonial technology. According to Hall, understanding and writing about the history of black migration and settlement in Britain during the postwar era requires a careful and critical examination of the limited historical archive, and photographic evidence proves itself invaluable. However, photographic images are often perceived as more objective than other representations, which is dangerous. In his view, one must critically examine who produced these images, what purpose they serve, and how they further their agenda (e.g., what has been deliberately included and excluded in the frame). For example, in the context of postwar Britain, photographic images such as those displayed in thePicture Post article "Thirty Thousand Colour Problems" construct black migration, blackness in Britain, as "theproblem".[50] They construct miscegenation as "the centre of the problem", as "the problem of the problem", as "the core issue".[50]
Hall's political influence extended to theLabour Party, perhaps related to the influential articles he wrote for the CPGB's theoretical journalMarxism Today (MT) that challenged the left's views of markets and general organisational and political conservatism. This discourse had a profound impact on the Labour Party under bothNeil Kinnock andTony Blair, although Hall later decriedNew Labour as operating on "terrain defined by Thatcherism".[39]
Hall presented his encoding and decoding philosophy in various publications and at several oral events across his career. The first was in "Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse" (1973), a paper he wrote for theCouncil of Europe Colloquy on "Training in the Critical Readings of Television Language" organised by the Council and the Centre for Mass Communication Research at theUniversity of Leicester. It was produced for students at theCentre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, which Paddy Scannell explains: "largely accounts for the provisional feel of the text and its 'incompleteness'".[51] In 1974 the paper was presented at a symposium on Broadcasters and the Audience inVenice. Hall also presented his encoding and decoding model in "Encoding/Decoding" inCulture, Media, Language in 1980. The time difference between Hall's first publication on encoding and decoding in 1973 and his 1980 publication is highlighted by several critics. Of particular note is Hall's transition from the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies to theOpen University.[51]
Hall had a major influence on cultural studies, and many of the terms his texts set forth continue to be used in the field. His 1973 text is viewed as a turning point in Hall's research toward structuralism and provides insight into some of the main theoretical developments he explored at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies.
Hall takes asemiotic approach and builds on the work ofRoland Barthes andUmberto Eco.[52] The essay takes up and challenges longheld assumptions about how media messages are produced, circulated and consumed, proposing a new theory of communication.[53] "The 'object' of production practices and structures in television is the production of amessage: that is, a sign-vehicle or rather sign-vehicles of a specific kind organized, like any other form of communication or language, through the operation of codes, within the syntagmatic chains of a discourse."[54]
According to Hall, a message "must be perceived as meaningful discourse and meaningfully de-coded" before it has an "effect", a "use", or satisfies a "need".[55] There are four codes of theencoding/decoding model of communication. The first way of encoding is the dominant (i.e. hegemonic) code. This is the code the encoder expects the decoder to recognize and decode. "When the viewer takes the connoted meaning ... full and straight ... and decodes the message in terms of the reference-code in which it has been coded, ... [it operates] inside the dominant code."[56] The second way of encoding is the professional code. It operates in tandem with the dominant code. "It serves to reproduce the dominant definitions precisely by bracketing the hegemonic quality, and operating with professional codings which relate to such questions as visual quality, news and presentational values, televisual quality, 'professionalism' etc."[56] The third way of encoding is the negotiated code. "It acknowledges the legitimacy of the hegemonic definitions to make the grand significations, while, at a more restricted, situational level, it makes its own ground-rules, it operates with 'exceptions' to the rule."[57] The fourth way of encoding is the oppositional code, also known as the globally contrary code. "It is possible for a viewer perfectly to understand both the literal and connotative inflection given to an event, but to determine to decode the message in a globally contrary way."[58] "Before this message can have an 'effect' (however defined), or satisfy a 'need' or be put to a 'use', it must first be perceived as a meaningful discourse and meaningfully de-coded."[55]
Hall challenged all four components of the mass communications model. He argues that (i) meaning is not simply fixed or determined by the sender; (ii) the message is never transparent; and (iii) the audience is not a passive recipient of meaning.[53] For example, a documentary film on asylum seekers that aims to provide a sympathetic account of their plight does not guarantee that audiences will feel sympathetic. Despite being realistic and recounting facts, the documentary must still communicate through a sign system (the aural-visual signs of TV) that simultaneously distorts the producers' intentions and evokes contradictory feelings in the audience.[53]
Distortion is built into the system, rather than being a "failure" of the producer or viewer. There is a "lack of fit", Hall argues, "between the two sides in the communicative exchange"—that is, between the moment of the production of the message ("encoding") and the moment of its reception ("decoding").[53]In "Encoding/decoding", Hall suggests media messages accrue common-sense status in part through their performative nature. Through the repeated performance, staging or telling of the narrative of "9/11" (as an example; there are others like it), a culturally specific interpretation becomes not only plausible and universal but elevated to "common sense".[53]
In his influential 1996 essay "Cultural Identity and Diaspora", Hall presents two different definitions of cultural identity.
In the first definition, cultural identity is "a sort of collective 'one true self' ... which many people with a shared history and ancestry hold in common."[59] In this view, cultural identity provides a "stable, unchanging and continuous frame of reference and meaning" through the ebb and flow of historical change.[59] This allows the tracing back the origins of descendants and reflecting on the historical experiences of ancestors as a shared truth.[60] Therefore, blacks living in the diaspora need only "unearth" their African past to discover their true cultural identity.[60] While Hall appreciates the good effects this first view of cultural identity has had in the postcolonial world, he proposes a second definition of cultural identity that he views as superior.
Hall's second definition of cultural identity "recognises that, as well as the many points of similarity, there are also critical points of deep and significantdifference which constitute 'what we really are'; or rather – since history has intervened – 'what we have become'."[61] In this view, cultural identity is not a fixed essence rooted in the past. Instead, cultural identities "undergo constant transformation" throughout history as they are "subject to the continuous 'play' of history, culture, and power".[61] Thus Hall defines cultural identities as "the names we give to the different ways we are positioned by, and position ourselves within, the narratives of the past."[61] This view of cultural identity was more challenging than the previous due to its dive into deep differences, but nonetheless it showed the mixture of the African diaspora. In other words, for Hall cultural identity is "not an essence but apositioning".[62]
Hall describes Caribbean identity in terms of three distinct "presences": the African, the European, and the American.[63] Taking the terms fromAimé Césaire andLéopold Senghor, he describes the three presences: "Présence Africaine", "PrésenceEuropéenne", and "Présence Americaine".[63] "Présence Africaine" is the "unspeakable 'presence' in Caribbean culture".[63] According to Hall, the African presence, though repressed by slavery and colonialism, is in fact hiding in plain sight in every aspect of Caribbean society and culture, including language, religion, the arts, and music. For many black people living in the diaspora, Africa becomes an "imagined community" to which they feel a sense of belonging.[60]
However, Hall points out, there is no going back to the Africa that existed before slavery, because Africa too has changed. Secondly, Hall describes the European presence in Caribbean cultural identity as the legacy of colonialism, racism, power and exclusion. Unlike the "Présence Africaine", the European presence is not unspoken even though many would like to be separated from the history of the oppressor. But Hall argues that Caribbeans and diasporic peoples must acknowledge how the European presence has also become an inextricable part of their own identities.[60] Lastly, Hall describes the American presence as the "ground, place, territory" where people and cultures from around the world collided.[64] It is, as Hall puts it, "where the fateful/fatal encounter was staged between Africa and the West", and also where the displacement of the natives occurred.[64]
Because diasporic cultural identity in the Caribbean and throughout the world is a mixture of all these different presences, Hall advocated a "conception of 'identity' that lives with and through, not despite, difference; byhybridity".[65] According to Hall, black people living in diaspora are constantly reinventing themselves and their identities by mixing, hybridizing, and "creolizing" influences from Africa, Europe, and the rest of the world in their everyday lives and cultural practices.[66] Therefore, there is no one-size-fits-all cultural identity for diasporic people, but rather a multiplicity of different cultural identities that share both important similarities and important differences, all of which should be respected.[60]
In "Cultural Identity and Diaspora", Hall sheds light on the topic of difference within black identity. He first acknowledges the oneness in the black diaspora and how this unity is at the core of blackness and the black experience. He expresses how this has a unifying effect on the diaspora, giving way to movements such as negritude and the pan-African political project. Hall also acknowledges the deep-rooted "difference" within the diaspora as well. This difference was created by destructive nature of the transatlantic slave trade and the resulting generations of slavery. He describes this difference as what constitutes "what we really are", or the true nature of the diaspora.[60] The duality of such an identity, that expresses deep unity but clear uniqueness and internal distinctness provokes a question out of Hall: "How, then, to describe this play of 'difference' within identity?"[67] Hall's answer is "Différance". The use of the "a" in the word unsettles us from our initial and common interpretation of it, and was originally introduced byJacques Derrida. This modification of the word difference conveys the separation between spatial and temporal difference, and more adequately encapsulates the nuances of thediaspora.
Hall was one of the signatories of the agreement to convene a convention for drafting aworld constitution.[68][69] As a result, for the first time in human history, aWorld Constituent Assembly convened to draft and adopt theConstitution for the Federation of Earth.[70]
Hall was a presenter of a seven-part television series entitledRedemption Song — made by Barraclough Carey Productions, and transmitted onBBC2, between 30 June and 12 August 1991 — in which he examined the elements that make up the Caribbean, looking at the turbulent history of the islands and interviewing people who live there today.[76] The series episodes were as follows:
Hall's lectures have been turned into several videos distributed by the Media Education Foundation:
Mike Dibb produced a film based on a long interview between journalistMaya Jaggi and Stuart Hall calledPersonally Speaking (2009).[77][78]
Hall is the subject of two films directed byJohn Akomfrah, entitledThe Unfinished Conversation (2012) andThe Stuart Hall Project (2013). The first film was shown (26 October 2013 – 23 March 2014) atTate Britain,Millbank, London,[79] while the second is now available on DVD.[80]
The Stuart Hall Project comprised clips drawn from more than 100 hours of archival footage of Hall, woven together over the music of jazz artistMiles Davis, who was an inspiration to both Hall and Akomfrah.[81]
The film's structure is composed of multiple strands. There is a chronological grounding in historical events, such as theSuez Crisis, theVietnam War, and theHungarian Uprising of 1956, along with reflections by Hall on his experiences as an immigrant from the Caribbean to Britain. Another historical event vital to the film was the1958 Notting Hill race riots occasioned by attacks on black people in the area; these protests showed the presence of a black community within England. When discussing the Caribbean, Hall discusses the idea of hybridity and he states that the Caribbean is the home of hybridity. There are alsovoiceovers and interviews offered without a specific temporal grounding in the film that nonetheless give the viewer greater insights into Hall and his philosophy. Along with the voiceovers and interviews, embedded in the film are also Hall's personal achievements; this is extremely rare, as there are no traditional archives of those Caribbean peoples moulded by theMiddle Passage experience.
The film can be viewed as a more pointedly focused take on theWindrush generation, those who migrated from the Caribbean to Britain in the years immediately following theWorld War II. Hall, himself a member of this generation, focused on theracial discrimination faced by the Windrush generation, contrasting the idealized perceptions among West Indian immigrants of Britain versus the harsher reality they encountered when arriving in the "mother country".[82]
A central theme in the film is diasporic belonging. Hall confronted his own identity within both British and Caribbean communities, and at one point in the film he remarks: "Britain is my home, but I am not English."
IMDb summarises the film as "a roller coaster ride through the upheavals, struggles and turning points that made the 20th century the century of campaigning, and of global political and cultural change."[83]
In August 2012, ProfessorSut Jhally conducted an interview with Hall that touched on a number of themes and issues in cultural studies.[84]
Hall was married to thefeminist historianCatherine Hall.[14]
This is not a complete list:
| Academic offices | ||
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| Preceded by | President of theBritish Sociological Association 1995–1997 | Succeeded by |
| Awards | ||
| Preceded by | Bread and Roses Award 2018 With:Reni Eddo-Lodge | Succeeded by |
