Cultural Representation

Biography

Born in 1932 in Kingston, Jamaica, Hall was the son of an accountant working for the United Fruit Company. After attending Jamaica College, in 1951 Hall moved with his mother to Bristol, England. There he soon entered Merton College, Oxford University, as a Rhodes Scholar. Hall earned a PhD in American literature and informally studied European philosophy, international socialist politics, left-wing British history, and nationalist West Indian thought.

During the late 1950s, Hall joined forces with other socialists, including Charles Taylor, Gabriel Pearson, and Raphael Samuel, and launched a radical journal, Universities and the New Left Review. This publication later merged with E. P. Thompson's The New Reasoner, becoming the New Left Review. In 1957, Hall joined the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

From 1957 to 1961, Hall taught high school in Brixton, a working-class London neighborhood with a large Afro-Caribbean immigrant population. He continued to teach in London, changing to film and media studies at Chelsea College from 1961 to 1964. His career took off, after coauthoring The Popular Arts in 1964, when Richard Hoggart offered him a position at Birmingham University at what came to be known as the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies.

As a field, cultural studies focuses upon the meaning of practices within everyday life, actions that encompass ways in which people do certain things in a given culture. For example, habits and routines for contemporary Westerners include [Page 170]watching movies, eating in restaurants, visiting the bathroom, playing sports, and attending religious ceremonies. Cultural studies focuses on the meanings that people give to such social practices and on the objects used within them: tickets, silverware, a toilet, a football, or a special head garment (veil, yarmulke, or turban).

In 1968 Hall became director of the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies and wrote a number of important articles and books, including Situating Marx: Evaluations and Departures, Encoding and Decoding the Television Discourse, Reading of Marx's 1857 Introduction to Grundrisse, and Policing the Crisis.

After being appointed professor of sociology at the Open University in 1979, Hall continued to publish influential books, including New Ethnicities, The Hard Road to Renewal, Resistance Through Rituals, Modernity and Its Future, What Is Black in Popular Culture?, Cultural Identity and Diaspora, Questions of Cultural Identity, and Visual Cultural. One of his most widely received and influential texts, was Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, published in 1997, the year he retired. After decades of teaching, Hall sat on the Runnymeade Trust's Commission on the Future of Multi-ethnic Britain.

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