Permission to Imagine

The first time I read Stuart Hall was in college. I came to his essay “Cultural Identity and Diaspora” nurturing a particular, but by no means unique, anxiety. I had spent my early university years obsessed with my identity and its legibility, clinging to certain adjectives and nouns—first-generation, Ghanaian, immigrant, Black, woman, Bronx—like prescription drugs. If used in the right order and for long enough, I would experience clarity and relief. They would reveal who I was or at least shed light on who I was trying to be. And if I figured that out, I could move through the world unencumbered and free. At least that’s what I told myself.

The opening paragraph of that essay caught me off guard: “Perhaps instead of thinking of identity as an already accomplished fact, which the new cultural practices then represent, we should think, instead, of identity as a ‘production,’ which is never complete, always in process, and always constituted within, not outside, representation.” I felt energized, equipped, and ready to dive into the rest of this offering, which I barely understood. (Hall’s prose, I eventually learned, skews dense and requires multiple readings.) I came to Hall looking for answers, and he gave me something far better: permission to imagine.

Forgive the naivete. Of course, one shouldn’t need permission to imagine. But if you, like me, grew up thinking in a way that privileges rules, order, and categories, that kind of approval feels necessary. Reading Duke University Press’s most recent collection of Hall’s work, Selected Writings on Race and Difference, elicited the same feeling of freedom. The collection, deftly edited by scholars Paul Gilroy and Ruth Wilson Gilmore, gathers Hall’s writings on race across four decades. It’s an expansive volume that tracks the development of his thinking, showing how he wrestled with the meaning of race in a range of contexts—from political organizing to cultural criticism. It’s a labor of love, a trove of possibility, and a guide to understanding the limits of representation in building anti-racist politics.

Stuart Hall was born in 1932 in Kingston, Jamaica. His father, Herman, was the first non-white chief accountant of United Fruit Company, a corporation known for dominating the banana market in Central America and the Caribbean, and his mother, Jessie, ran their household. As a child, Hall was acutely aware of difference—both within and outside the home. His skin was darker than most other members of his family, a fact that occasionally led to him being called a coolie, a degrading term used to refer to Asian laborers. In his memoir Familiar Stranger: A Life Between Two Islands, Hall describes how a persistent feeling of unbelonging shaped his development as an intellectual.

Because of his father’s job, Hall lived in the middle-class area of Kingston, and his mother held upper-class aspirations that later embarrassed him. “In my earliest years, like everyone else, I was innocent of the concept of class,” he writes in Familiar Stranger. “But as soon as I became aware of the world ‘outside,’ I always knew my family occupied an intermediary social position between the wealthy white elite and the mass of poor and unemployed Jamaicans.” For the rest of his life, Hall would navigate being in between classes, races, and generations. In 1951, he won a Rhodes Scholarship and left Jamaica to study at Oxford University, arriving at the same time as members of the Windrush generation—the Black Caribbean migrants who were invited to England to fill labor shortages and took jobs as cleaners, drivers, and nurses. Although he felt connected to the people of that historical moment, he knew, as an academic, that he could not necessarily be of them.

Hall did not always think so deeply about how his upbringing shaped his understanding of race and class. “My first sense of the world derived from my location as a colonized subject and much of my life can...