For Stuart Hall By Livio Sansone Some four years ago I was asked by a number of friends and colleagues to write a short text as part of the campaign for the prestigious Holberg Prize to be given to Stuart Hall. Julia Kristeva and Jurgen Habermas got such price. Stuart Hall, for reasons that I do not really know, never got it. That short text came to my mind yersterday night, when I heard of the passing of Stuart Hall. I was not a personal friend of Stuart Hall. In fact I met him only twice or trice. I am, however, an admirer of this brilliant and very humane intellectual. I met him for the first time when I was 22 in the autumn of 1978 in his office at the Centre of Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham. I was struggling with my MA dissertation in sociology at the University of Rome in which I insisted in comparing Punks and Rastas on the basis of archival research and interviews in the East End of London. It turned up I was doing right, and Stuart Hall was a key person in helping me to understand it. The CCCS was for sure the most interesting place to be in those days, but I had no resources to enroll formally. I wrote a letter of introduction in my English, then even poorer than now, and he kindly invited me to visit him. He received me in his room and asked me about Gramsci, an author I knew quite well, having been a very active and prominent left wing activist in Italy. Gramsci had become very popular in Brittan, especially after the publication by Pelican of the abridged version of the translation of his Prison´s Notebooks. Stuart Hall was obviously interested in having a young Italian researcher at the CCCS, especially one familiar with Gramsci and, more generally, what we could now call the humanistic version of Italian communism and left wing thinking. He received me by donating me a pile of books edited through the CCCS and introduced me to three scholars who were later to become highly influential, together of course with Hall himself, in my research and writing to day: Paul Willis, Dick Hebdige and Paul Gilroy. In those days the CCCS was for sure the most interesting place for cultural studies the world over. Working-class culture, learning to labour, the meaning of styles and subcultures, teds, mods and rockers, working-class youth culture, girls´ contribution to youth style, policing the crisis, black and brown Britain, being a black Londoner. In the late seventies THESE were hot and innovating topics in the social science. The simple idea of resistance trough the production of style (´inversion´) or even through certain practice of conspicuous consumption was extremely innovating in a context dominated, on the on e hand, either by the critical theory of the Frankfurter Schule or by Althusserian structuralism, or, on the other hand, by pretty conventional gang- or deviancy-based interpretations of juvenile behavior. Hall´s humanity came immediately to the fore when he easily answered my awkward question: are you English-English? I mean your colour…your accent… I am Jamaican, answered calmly, but have been living here already for many years. As we know the conservative government of Margareth Thatcher meant the de facto demise of the CCCS. Hall moved on to the Open University, again an odd body but an interesting experiment within British academia. From there he kept on publishing and addressing the themes that ended up forming the leading agenda in the social sciences of the Nineties: the advent of multiculturalism, affirmative action, new forms of inequalities, the transition to new forms of conservatism, the growth of a new imperialism, how ´race´ becomes over an again the language of class, communication in the age of globalization. It is worth mentioning that, different from many contemporary scholars in the same field, Hall has always written in a straight and linear fashion, complex, but not complicate. This has made his oeuvre accessible to a wide audience, ranging from high school students, trade union activists in trade unions and other social movements, undergrads to senior scholars. If one insists in labeling Hall as black scholar (I reckon he prefers to be called a scholar AND a black person), I dare saying that he is the most widely read black scholar in Europe. I can say the same for Latin America, the region where I have been working and living since 1992. Hall has been seminal in Diaspora and identity studies, especially in Latin America, where, as I said, he is widely read and translated. According to the Brazilian on line journal library SCIELO (scielo.br), in the Portuguese language he stands above ALL other black thinkers of our times in terms of citations, Paul Gilroy and bell hooks coming second and third. The publication of his work in Portuguese in Brazil has reverberated on his popularity in Lusophone Africa (Cape Verde, Guinea Bissau, Mozambique and Angola), as I could recently come to realize during a lecture tour in Mozambique and my teaching at the University of Cape Verde (where I teach every year a mini-course). One of Hall´s major intellectual contribution is the field of race and identity formation. Largely on account of his past experience with the British Communist Party – a relatively small party, but with important inroads in the British inteligenzia – which reflected in his writing in very innovating journal New Left Review (which he founded together with E.P. Thompson and Richard Hoggarth), Hall concern for race relations is never disjointed from a broader preoccupation with inequality and the necessity of a new politics and practice of redistribution of wealth and resources. Race and class are not each other´s opposite or alter ego, but one co-formats the other. His handling of race relations and racism, moreover, are impregnated with humanism. One is committed to antiracism because the whole humanity will benefit from it, not just the victims, usually brown and black people, but also the perpetrators; racial identity and narratives might be useful as form of strategic essentialism (in the words of Gaiatri Spivak) but they are after all a means rather than an end in itself. In this respect Hall differs radically from most outstanding black intellectuals in the US (especially Cornel West, Henry Luis Gates and bell hooks) who seem to write first of about race rather than also about race. In this sense, Hall is the initiator of a current of thought that one could define Black British political thinking, that leads with the key questions of our time rather than functioning within the given limits of a black community – as it tends to be the case in the US. In many ways this difference between black political thinking in the US and Britain reflects the sociological differences between being black in the US and the UK. In the UK many younger black intellectuals have been inspired by Hall. In fact oftentimes they have been his students, Paul Gilroy is the best known of course, but one can add Kobena Mercer, Julien Jordan and may others. Possibly the main theoretical concern of Hall, and that which made him most famous, is the question of hegemony. Here, by drawing from Antonio Gramsci analysis of the working of power and domination, the function of the intellectual and the development of popular culture, Stuart Hall investigates ´how the establishment keeps itself in power´ by arranging and re-arranging the relationship between the haves and have not, the elite and the subaltern, high-brow and popular culture. This occurs most often than not in the field of mass media, the empirical concern of much of his writing. Mass media, as well as advertising, makes people´s minds while they are made by other people´s minds. They make taste and style, while they are affected by taste and styles. In Latin America, as well as in other regions, Stuart Hall is influential on a large number of fields of interest and disciplines: media studies, cultural studies, education, ethnic studies, the study of identity formation and globalization. In Brazil he was invited in 2000 to give a key-note speech at the very large National Literature Studies Conference (Abralic). It was a great success and the visit led to the publication in Portuguese of two ad hoc useful booklets: A identidade cultural da pós-modernidade. Rio de Janeiro: DP&A, 2002. and Da Diáspora: Identidades e mediações culturais. Belo Horizonte: UFMG: UNESCO no Brasil, 2003. It worth stressing that the second book was sponsored by the Unesco representative in Brazil. I have been the organizer of an international advanced course, the Factory of Ideas, over the last 13 years. We have invited a set of outstanding intellectuals, and twice Paul Gilroy. The only reason why I have not yet invited Hall is because of his faulty health – but I do not plan to give up. Stuart Hall means full house in Brazil. By simply browsing through Google Scholar one sees that Hall has not just published a lot, but also in a variety of formats (books, articles – in journal varying from the most prestigious to the most alternative ones, such as Soundings-, leaflets, electronic texts, radio and TV series, documentaries etc.) . His impressive list of publications shows continuities as well as innovations: mass media and current political themes are part of it throughout, while, of course, late modernity or globalization and the new distribution of (in)equalities and identity formation is present as from the mid Eighties and even more so the Nineties. The same list as well as a quick look at amazon shows that Hall has published a lot and extensively also over the last five years. Moreover, Hall and his work have been the subject of many MA and PhD dissertations as well as of books proper. Amazon lists the following nine books: 1. Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies (Comedia) by Kuan-Hsing Chen and David Morley (Hardcover - Mar. 5, 1996) 2. Without Guarantees: In Honour of Stuart Hall by Paul Gilroy, Lawrence Grossberg, and Angela McRobbie (Paperback - Aug. 2000) 3. Stuart Hall (Routledge Critical Thinkers) by James Procter (Hardcover - May 20, 2004) 4. Stuart Hall (Key Contemporary Thinkers) by Chris Rojek (Paperback - Feb. 7, 2003) 5. Understanding Stuart Hall by Helen Davis (Hardcover - Apr. 10, 2004) 6. Stuart Halls (1997) Random Thoughts Provoked by the Conference Identities, Democracy, Culture and Communication in Southern Africa, critical arts, 11(1/2), ... (Comment).: An article from: Critical Arts by John J Williams (Digital - July 28, 2005) - HTML 7. Stuart Hall (Cultural Theorist): Culture Theory, Sociology, Cultural Studies, Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, Cultural Hegemony, Reception Theory, Social Constructionism, Racism by Lambert M. Surhone, Miriam T. Timpledon, and Susan F. Marseken (Paperback - Jan. 11, 2010) 8. Culture, Politics, Race and Diaspora: The Thought of Stuart Hall (Caribbean Reasonings) by Brian Meeks (Hardcover - Jan. 2007) 9. Conversation with Stuart Hall by Hall (Hardcover - Jan. 1, 2006) - Import Currently unavailable Not many living social scientists have received so much attention. This is even more peculiar if one takes into account the soft personality of Stuart Hall, a person that does not like to behave like a star and who, moreover, has hardly ever been the source of controversy – in fact I know of people who disagree with him on one or more points, but still find him handsome. I know the work of Habermas and Kristeva who won the Holberg Prize in 2005 and 2004. I here state that the work by Stuart Hall is of the same top quality and has, in addition, a format and style that has permitted to an audience larger than just academic to gain access to it. Today I do not believe that there is any single colleague who would not agree that Stuart Hall deserved the Holberg Prize. It would have been, again, a prize to intellectual primacy, academic engagement and social commitment. Livio Sansone ( Dept. of Anthropology, Federal University of Bahia)
Posted on: Sun, 16 Feb 2014 19:36:08 +0000
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