Architectures of Imagination
- Architectures of Imagination
Stuart Hall was a great, long-suffering, passionate, and brilliant man who was not afraid to change his mind or to face down the penurious dynamics of local, state, or global power. He was circumspect in the domain of the personal, and eloquently articulate in the service of just analysis and viable paradigms of liberatory intellectual endeavor. I never had occasion to sit down with Stuart Hall and converse. I only encountered him in his written work and in his capacity as a mesmerizing and astute lecturer. Here is what I think.
I believe that had it not been for the brilliance, courage, and honesty—personal and professional—of Stuart Hall, there would have been no influential and efficacious black British cultural studies. Nor would there have been the salient analysis of neoliberalism and the perfidy of Thatcher’s and Reagan’s transfers of wealth and power and militarized violence. Stuart Hall’s cohort—followers and yay-sayers alike—were not without their analytics and proclamations, but there was not one among them who possessed his grace. They were, in so many instances, “main chance,” one-trick “glams” who—like fading stars—bequeathed a febrile paper trail and many recorded missteps and ephemeral whispers.
Truly, Stuart Hall was the magnificence of black British cultural studies … and much more.
This is not to say he shouldered the burden of new paradigms alone. But it is to say that—champions and detractors and wily pedantry noting where he supposedly went astray or missed the point—Stuart Hall was the best of what creates and memorializes the genius of the intellectual life.
As one of my Americanist colleagues stated it in a very different context: “Some who seek and are even accorded the mantle of intellectual greatness go into a room of inquiry and merely move the [End Page 168] furniture around. Those who are truly significant enter the extant, then envision and actualize a wholly vibrant and brilliant new architecture. Theirs is imaginative courage. Theirs is the miracle of reclaimed purpose.” [End Page 169]
Houston A. Baker Jr. is currently Distinguished University Professor and professor of English at Vanderbilt University. His book Betrayal: How Black Intellectuals Have Abandoned the Ideals of the Civil Rights Era received an American Book Award for 2009.
