Hall, Stuart

Born in Kingston, Jamaica, Stuart Hall's (b. 1932) contribution has been threefold: He is (1) a founding father of cultural studies, (2) a major, largely synthetic theorist of culture and race, and (3) a leading black public intellectual. He was educated in Jamaica College, an elite school in the West Indies with a long tradition of training professionals [Page 354]and colonial administrators. He migrated to England in 1951, enrolling as a Rhodes scholar at Merton College, Oxford. Here he became involved in British and Jamaican politics and embarked on a PhD studying the relationship between Europe and America in the novels of Henry James. What he calls “the double conjuncture” of the Allied invasion of Suez and the Soviet repression of the Hungarian Revolution in ...