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 1956 provided a fillip to his political activism.

In 1957, he quit Oxford and cofounded and coedited the University and Left Review (ULR), a publication that presented “New Left” thinking on politics and the arts. In 1960, the ULR was merged with the New Reasoner, dominated by an older group of intellectuals, notably John Saville and Edward and Dorothy Thompson, to form the New Left Review. Between 1960 and 1962, Hall edited the journal, publishing articles on popular culture, housing, politics, and dissent, especially the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Hall is unusual among intellectuals of his generation in having a background in which prominent media experience preceded an academic career.

In 1962, Hall was appointed to teach media, film, and popular culture at Chelsea College, University of London. He also engaged in collaborative research for the British Film Institute into the popular arts. In 1964, he accepted the post of research fellow at the newly established Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham. Founded by Richard Hoggart, the Centre sought to examine culture, especially working-class culture, through a mixture of political, sociological, and literary perspectives. Hall succeeded Hoggart as director in 1968.

Under Hall's influence, intellectual labour in the Centre became more theoretical and political. A dialogue between a variety of approaches from continental traditions, including Volosinov's “multiaccented” approach to linguistics, semiotics, Lévi-Strauss, Lacan, Poulantzas, Lukács, Althusser, Gramsci, and many others, was attempted. It was layered on to the native tradition of British culturalism that purported to understand “the whole way of life” of the people, as embodied in the writings of Raymond Williams and E. P. Thompson. The model of intellectual labour was borrowed from Gramsci's concept of the organic intellectual, which emphasizes the requirement of the intellectual to operate at the cutting edge of new ideas and constitute the transmission belt of knowledge to the working class. The concept gives pronounced importance to the political responsibilities of the intellectual. To some extent, the intellectual labour conducted in the Centre during Hall's time can best be understood as an attempt to fuse elements of continental structuralism and poststructuralism with the domestic tradition of culturalism and socialist humanism. However, by the mid1970s, when arguably the Centre began to produce its most important work, the theoretical rudder behind research and debate was Althusserian “scientific” structuralist-Marxism uneasily combined with Gramsican culturalism. During this period, Hall and his associates made a number of key interventions into British cultural and political life, notably through innovative and challenging studies of schooling (Hall and Jefferson 1990), ideology (Hall, Lumley, and McLennan 1978), and state formation (Hall, Langan, and Schwarz 1985). Hall (1973) also achieved a minor success de scandale in the field of mass communications research, with his encoding/decoding model of the media message. This was an explicitly political reading of the media that attacked professional notions of media objectivity and transparency and sought to elucidate the mechanisms of media manipulation and the demystification of media messages.

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