Stuart McPhail Hall: In Memoriam (1932–2014)

Courtesy the artist and Stuart Hall Foundation. Photo: Dharmachari Mahasiddhi

It is difficult to take the measure of a life, to understand how an individual's passing affects those with whom he or she came into contact. It is especially difficult to measure a life such as Stuart Hall's because of the many ways in which his work influenced several generations of intellectuals—anticolonials, postcolonials, postwar leftists impatient with the orthodoxies of the Old Left, newly emerging cultural studies scholars, and, by no means least, immigrants recently arrived in the European metropolises from far-flung outposts in the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia.

Born in colonial Kingston, Jamaica, Hall graduated from elite Jamaica College, whose alumni included the future Jamaican prime minister, Michael Manley. After winning a Rhodes Scholarship, Hall left Jamaica in 1951 to read for a degree in English at Merton College, Oxford University.

Although Hall's work would have a significant impact on the ways in which universities were radically reorganized from the 1960s on, he took the decision to abandon his doctoral work in 1956 in order to immerse himself in the construction of the New Left. A response to the three political crises of 1956—the Soviet invasion of Hungary; Nikita Krushchev's public denunciation of Stalin's atrocities; and the Suez Crisis, originating in Gamel-Abdel Nasser's decision to nationalize the canal, to which the British, French, and Israeli governments responded with the threat of military intervention—the New Left sought to reconceive politics in its entirety. Alongside figures such as Raymond Williams and E. P. Thompson, Hall was instrumental in creating a mode of thinking about politics that was distinctly different from what would become known in its decline as the Old Left, particularly those leftists who remained in the thrall of various European communist parties.

Out of this period of political ferment Hall established himself as a leading intellectual. He was the inaugural editor of the extant journal the New Left Review, and together with Williams, Thompson, and Richard Hoggart, Hall became one of the enduring voices of the cultural studies project. In 1969 Hall succeeded Hoggart, the first director of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at the University of Birmingham in the English Midlands, a position he would hold for the next decade. Out of this intellectual formation emerged generations of scholars who would, each in their own way across continents, leave a mark on cultural studies: Paul Willis, Dick Hebdige, Pratibha Parma, Paul Gilroy, Hazel Carby, and Michael Denning, to name only a few.

After he left CCCS in 1979 Hall went on to teach in another pathbreaking project, the Open University, an institution established to make tertiary education available to those sectors of the British population historically excluded because of class, race, or gender. Hall would remain at the Open University until his retirement from the institution in 1997. It was during his tenure at the Open University that Hall developed his critiques of the British left, especially the Labour Party, and using the work of Antonio Gramsci, he was among the first political theorists to recognize and understand the political danger incarnated by the "authoritarian populism" of Margaret Thatcher and, no less so, Ronald Reagan.

With the increasing dissemination of Hall's work the influence of cultural studies and the politics it advocated and advanced gained favor in universities, political organizations, and a range of civic institutions. However, Hall's most important contribution to the work of politics—and cultural studies, the study of race and racism, media studies, the study of sexuality—was his commitment to thinking—rethinking—the very presumptions of his own positions. That he maintained such a commitment over a lifetime is perhaps the distinguishing mark of his work. Little wonder, then, that several generations, in the wake of his passing, find themselves taking his measure, each in their own way, each with the sense that his oeuvre bequeathed a different salience to them. In taking the measure of Stuart Hall, all those who learned from him, who sought to work...