New Points of Recognition: Stuart Hall’s Gift to the Study of Blackness

This tribute assesses the importance of Stuart Hall’s work both personally, for the author, and in relation to a broader scholarly conversation about blackness that shapes the latter half of the twentieth century and spans the United States, the Caribbean, and the United Kingdom. Themes from this conversation include the roles of black subjects in English and American popular culture, the emergence of a new black aesthetic and poetics, and the centrality of the idea of difference to Hall’s late-twentieth-century understanding of black identity and culture. The essay also discusses the significance of Hall’s Caribbean origins and diaspora identity for his later intellectual and theoretical work.