‘A different rhythm’: Stuart Hall’s Du Bois Lectures

When Stuart Hall began these lectures in April 1994 he described the creation of ‘the Du Bois Institute in the heart of Harvard’, the sponsor of his visit, as ‘an extremely important political intervention’.¹ Read in the context of this still relatively new institution, Hall could also have been referring to his own work, his deeply held conviction that all intellectual labour takes the form of a strategic intervention, a necessary contribution to a wider socio-political dialogue. From the outset, therefore, it is essential to bear in mind the unique history of the setting in which he had been invited to speak. Founded in the mid-1970s to honour and pursue the legacy of the great black historian and sociologist, William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (1868-1963),² the Institute grew out of the black American struggles for civil rights in the previous decade and, when a distinguished lecture series bearing Du Bois’s name was inaugurated in 1981 under the auspices of its first permanent director, Nathan Irving Huggins, many of the topics chosen during that decade reflected a distinctively rights-based agenda. Early speakers included the Nobel Prizewinning political economist from St Lucia, Sir William Arthur Lewis (1982), the African American civil rights advocate Judge A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr (1984) and the children’s rights activist Marian Wright Edelman (1986). But then, following the appointment of Henry Louis Gates Jr and Kwame Anthony Appiah in 1991, the former as the new (and still current) director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Research Institute with, in the words of its website, ‘a mandate to assemble a world class team in Afro-American Studies’, there was a significant move away from law and the social sciences in the choice of Du Bois lecturers and a turn towards the humanities and cultural studies. Figures like Cornel West in 1992, Hazel Carby (1993), Arnold Rampersad (1998), and Homi Bhabha in 1999, were teachers and researchers of a very different stamp from those who spoke in the 1980s, leaning towards political and cultural criticism rather than social policy. As befits more troubled times this dialectical movement between contrasting intellectual projects has accelerated in recent years, the juxtaposition of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s ‘Du Bois at Large’ in 2009 and Condoleezza Rice’s ‘American Foreign Policy and the Black Experience’ in 2010 being an especially striking example.³

So, set against these often-contentious styles of thought, what kind of political intervention do Stuart Hall’s lectures represent? We are extremely fortunate that the text of these lectures have survived and are now available in published form as The Fateful Triangle: Race, Ethnicity, Nation (2017). In particular, our deepest thanks are due to the meticulous and loving editorial work carried out by Kobena Mercer who has not only established a definitive version of the ‘manuscript materials’ on which Hall drew, but has also provided a set of detailed bibliographical notes that allow the reader to reconstruct the theoretical context and cultural coordinates within which Hall’s argument was taking shape (p215). In the light of the more than twenty-year gulf between the initial delivery of these lectures and their appearance in print Mercer’s painstaking archival recovery fills a major gap in our understanding of Hall’s oeuvre. As so often, Hall never turned these drafts into the long-promised monograph, always succumbing instead to other more immediate requests or political contingencies that demanded a closely argued response. Still, even had this book been completed in his lifetime, we can be sure that it would have been very different from the text that now stands before us.

In Hall’s eyes, to revisit earlier ideas and analyses invariably required a reinvigorated intellectual effort simply because there was always ‘a new conjuncture to understand’, another unprecedented historico-political situation that had to be confronted and called to account. Consequently, if one was no longer the person one once had been, then ‘to...