Stuart Hall, 1932–2014

Stuart Hall in February 2011.

Photo by Mahasiddhi

Stuart Hall, who died on 10 February 2014, was one of the most significant intellectuals of his times, an outstanding social and cultural theorist, a gifted teacher and communicator, and a human being of extraordinary generosity, wisdom, and largeness of vision. Though not a historian by either training or formal affiliation, he wrote and thought historically as an axiom of effective understanding, and for readers of this journal a more important contemporary thinker would be exceedingly hard to find. For several generations of such historians, on either side of the Atlantic, he was a vital inspiration. Over a long lifetime – one enviably fulfilled and admirably conducted – he made so many rich and various contributions covering so many areas that any straightforward summary of his work is out of the question. He also touched an astonishing number of lives – as a friend and political comrade, as a teacher and intellectual mentor, as an organizer and collaborator, as an author and editor, as a broadcaster and public intellectual, or simply as the inventive and brilliantly eloquent speaker at countless conferences, seminars, workshops, and public meetings. He had an active intellectual and political presence of international proportions reaching far beyond any direct in-person encounters. At a time when our resources for hope are falling into distressingly short supply, he supplied not just inspiration, but a kind of cement.

Where to begin? Stuart was one of the several most significant voices of the Left in Britain during the second half of the twentieth century. No one did more to mark out the ground where the contemporary politics of race would need to be thought through and faced. In his writings on Thatcherism, from the late 1970s and with acute prescience, he developed a powerful analysis of the dissolution of the postwar settlement and the triumph of neoliberalism. In the academic world he played a singular role in the cross-disciplinary ferment of innovation that came to be called cultural studies, notably between 1964 and 1979 as research fellow and then Director at the University of Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS). Framing each of these purposes, and their accompanying politics of knowledge, were the elements of a personal biography which over time he wrestled into a theoretically shaped ethico-political outlook of remarkable clarity and coherence. These included everything contained in the turbulence of ‘1968’; in the no less powerful meanings of ‘1956’; in all the Caribbean experiences that went into ‘the formation of a diasporic intellectual’; and in his lifelong partnership with the feminist historian Catherine Hall (then Barrett), whom he met and married in 1964. Binding all of it together was the conviction that culture – both as theory and as life, as literature, the arts, and aesthetics and as the ordinary places where people find or make meaning and enjoyment in their lives – is vital for the Left’s practice of democracy. Culture matters, not just for how capitalism secures its stabilities, but for how critique and political resistance will need to be conducted too. The point of taking the forms of popular culture seriously, he argued in New Left Review’s founding editorial in 1960, was that ‘These are directly relevant to the imaginative resistance of people who have to live within capitalism – the growing points of social discontent, the projections of deeply felt needs’. Together with the slightly older Raymond Williams (1921–88), he insisted on bringing cultural questions into the centre-ground of the Left’s primary concerns – as questions of ideology, meaning, identity, and subjectivity, whose pertinence for the chances of political change could then make them objects of analysis and action.

I will not be alone in finding my own intellectual biography mapped by Stuart’s influence and writings. I first started reading him in 1972–3, when I stumbled across the Birmingham Centre’s Working Papers in Cultural Studies in some bookshop or other. I then found a volume he coedited with Paul Walton called Situating Marx: Evaluations and Departures (1973), published from a conference held...