Mixed Race Studies

Selected Writings on Race and Difference

Duke University Press
April 2021
376 pages
Paper ISBN: 978-1-4780-1166-8
Cloth ISBN: 978-1-4780-1052-4

Stuart Hall (1932–2014)

Edited by:

Paul Gilroy, Professor of the Humanities
Institute of Advanced Studies, University College London

Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences; Professor of American Studies
Graduate Center, City University of New York

In Selected Writings on Race and Difference, editors Paul Gilroy and Ruth Wilson Gilmore gather more than twenty essays by Stuart Hall that highlight his extensive and groundbreaking engagement with race, representation, identity, difference, and diaspora. Spanning the whole of his career, this collection includes classic theoretical essays such as “The Whites of Their Eyes” (1981) and “Race, the Floating Signifier” (1997). It also features public lectures, political articles, and popular pieces that circulated in periodicals and newspapers, which demonstrate the breadth and depth of Hall’s contribution to public discourses of race. Foregrounding how and why the analysis of race and difference should be concrete and not merely descriptive, this collection gives organizers and students of social theory ways to approach the interconnections of race with culture and consciousness, state and society, policing and freedom.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Race Is the Prism / Paul Gilroy
• Part I. Riots, Race, and Representation
  • 1. Absolute Beginnings: Reflections on the Secondary Modern Generation [1959]
  • 2. The Young Englanders [1967]
  • 3. Black Men, White Media [1974]
  • 4. Race and “Moral Panics” in Postwar Britain [1978]
  • 5. Summer in the City [1981]
  • 6. Drifting into a Law and Order Society: The 1979 Cobden Trust Human Rights Day Lecture [1982]
  • 7. The Whites of Their Eyes: Racist Ideologies and the Media [1981]
• Part II. The Politics of Intellectual Work Against Racism
  • 8. Teaching Race [1980]
  • 9. Pluralism, Race and Class in Caribbean Society [1977]
  • 10. “Africa” Is Alive and Well in the Diaspora: Cultures of Resistance: Slavery, Religious Revival and Political Cultism in Jamaica [1975]
  • 11. Race, Articulation and Societies Structured in Dominance [1980]
  • 12. New Ethnicities [1983]
  • 13. Cultural Identity and Diaspora [1990]
  • 14. C. L. R. James: A Portrait [1992]
  • 15. Calypso Kings [2002]
• Part III. Cultural and Multicultural Questions
  • 16. Gramsci’s Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity [1968]
  • 17. Subjects in History: Making Diasporic Identities [1998]
  • 18. Why Fanon? [1996]
  • 19. Race, the Floating Signifier: What More Is There to Say about “Race”? [1997]
  • 20. “In but Not of Europe”: Europe and Its Myths [2003]
  • 21. Cosmopolitan Promises, Multicultural Realities [2006]
  • 22. The Multicultural Question [2000]
• Index
• Place of First Publication

When Stuart Hall was White

Public Books
2017-01-23

James Vernon, Professor of History
University of California, Berkeley

Dawoud Bey, Stuart Hall (1998)

I do not recall when I discovered that Stuart Hall was black. Growing up in Britain as neoliberalism first began to take shape under the rule of Margaret Thatcher, I found that Hall’s work helped me comprehend what was happening to the world around me. I think I began reading him with “The Great Moving Right Show,” an article published in Marxism Today, the ecumenical and “reform”-minded journal of the Communist Party of Great Britain, in January 1979. It is the piece now celebrated as having named “Thatcherism” as a new political formation. Thatcherism, he argued, represented a new type of politics, one that had mobilized a populist revolt to Make Britain Great Again by running it like a business and stopping immigration. It is strangely unnerving to read it again now. Later that year Hall became a professor of sociology at the Open University and began to appear regularly on its television programs designed (in the era before profit-seeking online classes) for their distance learning, nontraditional, students. It was probably on one of those superb programs, no doubt several years later, that I first saw and heard Stuart Hall.

In retrospect, it is not surprising that I had once assumed Hall was white. Growing up in the countryside as a white middle-class boy, people of color were almost completely absent from my life. I suspect that I was not the only person to imagine he was white. There has long been a way of narrating Hall’s life and work that erases his formation in Jamaica as a colonial subject and a black man. It is a narrative that claims him as part of the British canon, as probably the country’s most influential social and cultural theorist of the late 20th century. It is a narrative that was rehearsed in many of the obituaries that followed his death in 2014.

In this telling, Hall’s life begins when he arrives on the shores of Albion dressed like an English gentleman and goes up to Oxford University to study English literature. It continues with Hall, while writing a PhD on Henry James, beginning to forge, alongside other students there like Raphael Samuel and Charles Taylor, a New Left attuned to the changed social and cultural conditions of Britain in the 1950s. The big question for Britain’s New Left was if or how culture mattered in shaping the working class. For Hall and many of his comrades, the urtexts for thinking through this question were Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy (1957), Raymond Williams’s Culture and Society (1958), and E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1963)…

Read the entire article here.

Fateful Triangles in Brazil: A Forum on Stuart Hall’s The Fateful Triangle: Race, Ethnicity, Nation, Part II

Contexto International
Volume 41, Number 2, Rio de Janeiro (May/Aug. 2019)
pages 449-470
DOI: 10.1590/s0102-8529.2019410200012

Sharon A. Stanley, Professor of Political Science
University of Memphis, Memphis, Tennessee

João Nackle Urt, Assistant Professor
Federal University of Grande Dourados (UFGD), Dourados-MS, Brazil

Thiago Braz, Ph.D. Candidate
Institute of International Relations
Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio), Rio de Janeiro-RJ, Brazil

Stuart Hall, a founding scholar in the Birmingham School of cultural studies and eminent theorist of ethnicity, identity and difference in the African diaspora, as well as a leading analyst of the cultural politics of the Thatcher and post-Thatcher years, delivered the W. E. B. Du Bois Lectures at Harvard University in 1994. In the lectures, published after a nearly quarter-century delay as The Fateful Triangle: Race, Ethnicity, Nation (2017), Hall advances the argument that race, at least in North Atlantic contexts, operates as a ‘sliding signifier,’ such that, even after the notion of a biological essence to race has been widely discredited, race-thinking nonetheless renews itself by essentializing other characteristics such as cultural difference. Substituting Michel Foucault’s famous power-knowledge dyad with power-knowledge-difference, Hall argues that thinking through the fateful triangle of race, ethnicity and nation shows us how discursive systems attempt to deal with human difference.

In ‘Fateful Triangles in Brazil,’ Part II of Contexto Internacional’s forum on The Fateful Triangle, three scholars work with and against Hall’s arguments from the standpoint of racial politics in Brazil. Sharon Stanley argues that Hall’s account of hybrid identity may encounter difficulties in the Brazilian context, where discourses of racial mixture have, in the name of racial democracy, supported anti-black racism. João Nackle Urt investigates the vexed histories of ‘race,’ ‘ethnicity’ and ‘nation’ in reference to indigenous peoples, particularly Brazilian Indians. Finally, Thiago Braz shows, from a perspective that draws on Afro-Brazilian thinkers, that emphasizing the contingency of becoming in the concept of diaspora may ignore the myriad ways by which Afro-diasporic Brazilians are marked as being black, and thus subject to violence and inequality.

Part I of the forum – with contributions by Donna Jones, Kevin Bruyneel and William Garcia – critically examines the promise and potential problems of Hall’s work from the context of North America and western Europe in the wake of #BlackLivesMatter and Brexit.

Read the entire article here.

The Fateful Triangle: Race, Ethnicity, Nation

Harvard University Press
September 2017
256 pages
4-3/8 x 7-1/8 inches
Hardcover ISBN: 9780674976528

Stuart Hall (1932–2014), Professor of Sociology
Open University

Edited by:

Kobena Mercer, Professor of History of Art and African American Studies
Yale University

Foreword by:

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor; Director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Research Institute at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research
Harvard University

In The Fateful Triangle—drawn from lectures delivered at Harvard University in 1994—one of the founding figures of cultural studies reflects on the divisive, often deadly consequences of our contemporary politics of identification. As he untangles the power relations that permeate categories of race, ethnicity, and nationhood, Stuart Hall shows how old hierarchies of human identity in Western culture were forcefully broken apart when oppressed groups introduced new meanings to the representation of difference.

From the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, the concept of race stressed distinctions of color as fixed and unchangeable. But for Hall, twentieth-century redefinitions of blackness reveal how identities and attitudes can be transformed through the medium of language itself. Like the “badge of color” W. E. B. Du Bois evoked in the anticolonial era, “black” became a sign of solidarity for Caribbean and South Asian migrants who fought discrimination in 1980s Britain. Hall sees such manifestations of “new ethnicities” as grounds for optimism in the face of worldwide fundamentalisms that respond with fear to social change.

Migration was at the heart of Hall’s diagnosis of the global predicaments taking shape around him. Explaining more than two decades ago why migrants are the target of new nationalisms, Hall’s prescient vision helps us to understand today’s crisis of liberal democracy. As he challenges us to find sustainable ways of living with difference, Hall gives us the concept of diaspora as a metaphor with which to enact fresh possibilities for redefining nation, race, and identity in the twenty-first century.

Table of Contents

• Foreword by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
• Introduction by Kobena Mercer
• 1. Race—The Sliding Signifier
• 2. Ethnicity and Difference in Global Times
• 3. Nations and Diasporas
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Editor’s Acknowledgments
• Index

Stuart Hall and the Rise of Cultural Studies

The New Yorker
2017-07-17

Hua Hsu

Thirty years ago, many academics considered the study of popular culture beneath them. Stuart Hall helped change that. Photograph by Eamonn McCabe / Camera Press / Redux

In the summer of 1983, the Jamaican scholar Stuart Hall, who lived and taught in England, travelled to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, to deliver a series of lectures on something called “Cultural Studies.” At the time, many academics still considered the serious study of popular culture beneath them; a much starker division existed, then, between what Hall termed the “authenticated, validated” tastes of the upper classes and the unrefined culture of the masses. But Hall did not regard this hierarchy as useful. Culture, he argued, does not consist of what the educated élites happen to fancy, such as classical music or the fine arts. It is, simply, “experience lived, experience interpreted, experience defined.” And it can tell us things about the world, he believed, that more traditional studies of politics or economics alone could not.

A masterful orator, Hall energized the audience in Illinois, a group of thinkers and writers from around the world who had gathered for a summer institute devoted to parsing Marxist approaches to cultural analysis. A young scholar named Jennifer Daryl Slack believed she was witnessing something special and decided to tape and transcribe the lectures. After more than a decade of coaxing, Hall finally agreed to edit these transcripts for publication, a process that took years. The result is “Cultural Studies 1983: A Theoretical History,” which was published, last fall, as part of an ongoing Duke University Press series called “Stuart Hall: Selected Writings,” chronicling the career and influence of Hall, who died in 2014…

Read the entire article here.

Cultural Studies 1983: A Theoretical History

Duke University Press
2016
232 pages
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8223-6248-7
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-6263-0

Stuart Hall (1932–2014)

Edited by:

Jennifer Daryl Slack, Professor of Communication and Cultural Studies
Michigan Technological University

Lawrence Grossberg, Morris David Distinguished Professor of Communication and Cultural Studies
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

The publication of Cultural Studies 1983 is a touchstone event in the history of Cultural Studies and a testament to Stuart Hall’s unparalleled contributions. The eight foundational lectures Hall delivered at the University of Illinois in 1983 introduced North American audiences to a thinker and discipline that would shift the course of critical scholarship. Unavailable until now, these lectures present Hall’s original engagements with the theoretical positions that contributed to the formation of Cultural Studies. Throughout this personally guided tour of Cultural Studies’ intellectual genealogy, Hall discusses the work of Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams, and E. P. Thompson; the influence of structuralism; the limitations and possibilities of Marxist theory; and the importance of Althusser and Gramsci. Throughout these theoretical reflections, Hall insists that Cultural Studies aims to provide the means for political change.

Table of Contents

• Editor’s Introduction / Lawrence Grossberg and Jennifer Daryl Slack
• Preface to the Lectures by Stuart Hall, 1988
• Lecture 1. The Formation of Cultural Studies
• Lecture 2. Culturalism
• Lecture 3. Structuralism
• Lecture 4. Rethinking the Base and Superstructure
• Lecture 5. Marxist Structuralism
• Lecture 6. Ideology and Ideological Struggle
• Lecture 7. Domination and Hegemony
• Lecture 8. Culture, Resistance, and Struggle
• References
• Index

Stuart McPhail Hall was born on February 3 1932 in Kingston, Jamaica, into a middle class family which subscribed to what he called “the colonial romance”. His father, Herman, was the first non-white person to hold a senior position – chief accountant – with United Fruit in Jamaica. Both his parents had non-African components in their ancestry, though as he recalled: “I was always the blackest member of my family and I knew it from the moment I was born.”

Growing up in what he called the “pigmentocracy” of the colonial West Indies had a profound effect on Hall’s childhood and outlook. His mother forbade him from inviting black school friends home, even though to white eyes he was black himself. When his sister fell in love with a black medical student, their mother barred her from seeing him. As a result she suffered a mental breakdown.

“Stuart Hall – obituary,” The Telegraph, (London: February 11, 2014). http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/10629087/Stuart-Hall-obituary.html.

Stuart Hall obituary

The Guardian
2014-02-10

David Morley and Bill Schwarz

Influential cultural theorist, campaigner and founding editor of the New Left Review

When the writer and academic Richard Hoggart founded the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University in 1964, he invited Stuart Hall, who has died aged 82, to join him as its first research fellow. Four years later Hall became acting director and, in 1972, director. Cultural studies was then a minority pursuit: half a century on it is everywhere, generating a wealth of significant work even if, in its institutionalised form, it can include intellectual positions that Hall could never endorse.

The foundations of cultural studies lay in an insistence on taking popular, low-status cultural forms seriously and tracing the interweaving threads of culture, power and politics. Its interdisciplinary perspectives drew on literary theory, linguistics and cultural anthropology in order to analyse subjects as diverse as youth sub-cultures, popular media and gendered and ethnic identities – thus creating something of a model, for example, for the Guardian’s own G2 section…

Read the entire obituary here.

Stuart Hall – obituary

The Telegraph
London, England
2014-02-11

Stuart Hall was a cultural theorist who coined the term ‘Thatcherism’ and profoundly influenced New Labour

Stuart Hall, who has died aged 82, came to Britain from his native Jamaica in 1951 and established himself as a leading cultural theorist and as a hero of the intellectual Left.

A trenchant critic of Thatcherism (a term he coined), Hall had a huge impact on the reconfiguration of Left-wing thinking that underpinned the rise of New Labour, while his contributions to the theory of “multiculturalism” entered the political mainstream.

Hall arrived in Britain from Jamaica on a Rhodes Scholarship to Merton College, Oxford, soon after the first wave of Windrush migrants from the Caribbean. He was thus able to witness the reaction of the motherland to its colonial subjects turning up on her doorstep, and the prejudice he encountered inspired him to become involved in politics.

After abandoning a PhD on Henry James in 1958, Hall became the founding editor of the New Left Review, which did much to open a debate about immigration and the politics of identity. He went on, with Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart, to establish the first Cultural Studies programme at a British university in Birmingham in 1964. In 1979 he moved to the Open University as a Professor of Sociology and for nearly two decades his early morning broadcasts on BBC2 became compulsory viewing for any self-respecting socialist intellectual.

Hall first coined the word “Thatcherism” in a prescient article in Marxism Today in January 1979, four months before Margaret Thatcher herself entered Downing Street. The Conservative leader had been patronised by many on the Left as little more than a shrill housewife. Hall was one of the first to acknowledge that Britain was entering a new era of politics…

…Stuart McPhail Hall was born on February 3 1932 in Kingston, Jamaica, into a middle class family which subscribed to what he called “the colonial romance”. His father, Herman, was the first non-white person to hold a senior position – chief accountant – with United Fruit in Jamaica. Both his parents had non-African components in their ancestry, though as he recalled: “I was always the blackest member of my family and I knew it from the moment I was born.”

Growing up in what he called the “pigmentocracy” of the colonial West Indies had a profound effect on Hall’s childhood and outlook. His mother forbade him from inviting black school friends home, even though to white eyes he was black himself. When his sister fell in love with a black medical student, their mother barred her from seeing him. As a result she suffered a mental breakdown…

Read the entire obituary here.

The Stuart Hall Project (Washington premiere)

The National Gallery of Art
East Building Auditorium
Between 3rd and 9th Streets, N.W. along Constitution Avenue N.W.
Washington, D.C.
2014-01-19, 16:30 EST (Local Time)

The celebrated Jamaican-born sociologist and theorist Stuart Hall (b. 1932) is the founding father of cultural studies — the popular interdisciplinary field that has reworked the way in which cultural patterns are studied within societies. Combining archival imagery, home movies, and found footage with new material and a uniquely crafted Miles Davis soundtrack, “John Akomfrah’s filmmaking approach matches Hall’s intellect, its intimate play with memory, identity, and scholarly impulse traversing the changing historical landscape of the second half of the twentieth century” — British Film Institute. (John Akomfrah, 2013, DCP, 95 minutes)