Life & Legacies of Stuart Hall - WITS, 10 April 2014

Ode to an Arsenal Fan

Grant Farred, The Con

It was a portentous 10 days. Between February 1 and 10 2014, a strong sense of foreboding haunted me.

For the past several years I have communicated with Stuart Hall at least three times a year. I would email him once on his on his birthday, February 3, and twice a football season. Stuart was an Arsenal fan and I am a partisan of God’s Own Team. He told me that he watched Arsenal with his grandsons. My grandfather, I told him, had been an Arsenal fan; at least he wouldn’t be overseeing a divided house.

The Failure of Partial Displacement: In Honour of Stuart Hall

Grant Farred, The Con

“Three months at Oxford persuaded me that it was not my home,” he told the Guardian in 2012. “I’m not English and I never will be. The life I have lived is one of partial displacement. I came to England as a means of escape, and it was a failure.”

There are few events that demand our thinking as much as death. It is difficult enough to find the right words with which to remember the one who has passed; to remember exactly what it is that mattered in the moment of that passing, a moment unavoidably fraught and overwrought with loss, recollection, pain and immense gratitude for the life that was. Producing a language that befits the dead, who are still so alive to us, is a task made inordinately more difficult when the one who is being honoured is an intellectual who made the political use of language his life’s work. When the intellectual in question, as is the case here, gave theoretical gravity to “articulation”, renovated Marxism for our time, made us think about how “encoding” and “decoding” constituted a critical part of our everyday existence, and, perhaps his greatest accomplishment, made us attend to “culture” as though it were an entirely new concept.

Stuart Hall Taking a Shift at the Daycare Centre at a Women's conference, Ruskin College, Oxford, 1970

Could you name a British black intellectual, now Stuart Hall has gone?

Paul Warmington, The Guardian

As a pioneer of cultural studies and coiner of the term "Thatcherism", Prof Stuart Hall, who died this week, was in the truest sense a public intellectual. He was also something else: probably the only black British intellectual who most people could readily name.

A bit of prompting might produce mention of Paul Gilroy of King's College, author of The Empire Strikes Back and Black Atlantic, who has recently returned to Britain after several years in America's more fertile ebony towers. But how many other black British thinkers have a public profile?

Stuart Hall was a voice for misfits everywhere. That's his real legacy

Suzanne Moore, The Guardian

There are people whose reach and generosity is only fully understood when they go. Stuart Hall was such a man. He was the reason I did cultural studies and went to work at Marxism Today in the 80s. I hardly knew him, but I knew his work well and it was never just "writing" to me. Hall's words were political interventions that changed the terms of the debate – about what Thatcherism meant and how it could be opposed; about race; about class; about culture. This sounds complicated, but to see him speak was to be overwhelmed by his charisma, his eloquence, his desire to include everybody in the room, his sheer moral force.

"My God!" I remember saying. "This man should be in charge of the universe." But then he would sit next to you in some godforsaken canteen at some conference and ask you about your kids.

The Neoliberal Revolution

Stuart Hall by SingleAspect

Stuart Hall: The Life & Times of the New Left

Stuart Hall: LIFE AND TIMES 
OF THE FIRST NEW LEFT by TigersEye99

You Can Go Home Again,. You Just Can't Stay: Stuart Hall and the. Caribbean Diaspora

You Can Go Home Again,. You Just Can't Stay: Stuart Hall and the. Caribbean Diaspora by TigersEye99

Stuart Hall: a class warrior and a class act

Stuart Hall

Gary Younge, The Guardian

At a Race Matters conference in 1994 the great and good of black America's cognoscenti gathered at Princeton University to mark Cornel West's departure to Harvard. Among them were Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, the late Manning Marable, Patricia Williams and Angela Davis. When questions were invited following the opening panel the first speaker came to the mic. "Stuart Hall, the Open University," he said, by way of introduction. "The room exploded into applause," wrote Claire Alexander in a special edition of Cultural Studies in 2009. "It was the only time I have ever witnessed someone getting a standing ovation for simply saying their name."

In gratitude to Stuart Hall, a socialist intellectual who taught us to confront the political with a smile

Africa is a Country

Stuart Hall was the most important public intellectual of the past 50 years. In an age where having a TV show allegedly makes someone a public intellectual and where the status of the university you work at counts for more than what you have to say, Hall’s work seems even more urgent and his passing, somehow, even sadder.

But for Hall I wouldn’t have become an academic. There was no space for someone like me before Hall. Discovering the field of Cultural Studies as an undergraduate, I found validation and recognition. Suddenly, my background and way of life as a working-class black kid mattered and was important beyond the confines of south London. It’s taken for granted now that culture matters, that popular culture is a site of politics, that politics saturates everyday life, and that these things can and should be studied in a serious manner. But despite their claims, it was not Sociology, or History, or Economics, or even Anthropology that created this space. It was Cultural Studies. Most intellectuals are known for contributing to our knowledge on a particular topic or specific theme. Hall was different. He created an entire new academic discipline, and then mentored just about every significant scholar that came through Cultural Studies in the 1970s and 80s.

Stuart Hall's message to those who want change: think, debate – and get off your backside

by Tariq Ali, The Guardian

It is the way our sympathy flows and recoils that really determines our lives. This opening sentence from Stuart Hall's 1960 review of Lady Chatterley's Lover belongs to DH Lawrence. The critic had unearthed it from deep inside the novel. It could serve as an epitaph for Stuart himself. His own sympathies and aversions played a huge part in determining his political makeup. It is not easy to sum up what he leaves behind in a few words. Soon, one hopes, that the conversation his colleague and friend, Bill Schwartz had been conducting with him over several years will be edited and published in book form.

C.L.R. James in Conversation with Stuart Hall

David Scott interviewed by Stuart Hall

Bomb Magazine, 2005

Stuart Hall David, your book Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment is written in the shadow of what you call the exhaustion and collapse of “the social and political hopes that went into the anti-colonial imaginary and postcolonial making of national sovereignties.” What do you think went wrong, fundamentally, with that project?

Stuart Hall: Hall - Race, Articulation, and Societies Structured in Dominance (1980)

9a. Hall - Race, Articulation, and Societies Structured in Dominance.pdf by John Alexander Castañeda Rodríguez

The Ironies of History: An Interview with Stuart Hall

The Ironies of History: An Interview with Stuart Hall by TigersEye99

Stuart Hall lecture: Race, the Floating Signifier