1.-Eley-Stuart Hall, 1932-2014, HWJ 2015

OBITUARY

Stuart Hall, 19322014

by Geoff Eley

Stuart Hall, who died on 10 February 2014, was one of the most significantintellectuals of his times, an outstanding social and cultural theorist, a giftedteacher and communicator, and a human being of extraordinary generosity,wisdom, and largeness of vision. Though not a historian by either trainingor formal affiliation, he wrote and thought historically as an axiom of ef-fective understanding, and for readers of this journal a more importantcontemporary thinker would be exceedingly hard to find. For several gen-erations of such historians, on either side of the Atlantic, he was a vitalinspiration. Over a long lifetime one enviably fulfilled and admirably con-ducted he made so many rich and various contributions covering so manyareas that any straightforward summary of his work is out of the question.He also touched an astonishing number of lives as a friend and political

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Stuart Hall in February 2011.

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comrade, as a teacher and intellectual mentor, as an organizer and collab-orator, as an author and editor, as a broadcaster and public intellectual, orsimply as the inventive and brilliantly eloquent speaker at countless confer-ences, seminars, workshops, and public meetings. He had an active intellec-tual and political presence of international proportions reaching far beyondany direct in-person encounters. At a time when our resources for hope arefalling into distressingly short supply, he supplied not just inspiration, but akind of cement.

Where to begin? Stuart was one of the several most significant voices ofthe Left in Britain during the second half of the twentieth century. No onedid more to mark out the ground where the contemporary politics of racewould need to be thought through and faced. In his writings onThatcherism, from the late 1970s and with acute prescience, he developeda powerful analysis of the dissolution of the postwar settlement and thetriumph of neoliberalism. In the academic world he played a singular rolein the cross-disciplinary ferment of innovation that came to be called cul-tural studies, notably between 1964 and 1979 as research fellow and thenDirector at the University of Birmingham Centre for ContemporaryCultural Studies (CCCS). Framing each of these purposes, and their accom-panying politics of knowledge, were the elements of a personal biographywhich over time he wrestled into a theoretically shaped ethico-political out-look of remarkable clarity and coherence. These included everything con-tained in the turbulence of 1968; in the no less powerful meanings of 1956;in all the Caribbean experiences that went into the formation of a diasporicintellectual; and in his lifelong partnership with the feminist historianCatherine Hall (then Barrett), whom he met and married in 1964. Bindingall of it together was the conviction that culture both as theory and as life,as literature, the arts, and aesthetics and as the ordinary places where peoplefind or make meaning and enjoyment in their lives is vital for the Leftspractice of democracy. Culture matters, not just for how capitalism securesits stabilities, but for how critique and political resistance will need to beconducted too. The point of taking the forms of popular culture seriously,he argued in New Left Reviews founding editorial in 1960, was that Theseare directly relevant to the imaginative resistance of people who have to livewithin capitalism the growing points of social discontent, the projectionsof deeply felt needs. Together with the slightly older Raymond Williams(192188), he insisted on bringing cultural questions into the centre-groundof the Lefts primary concerns as questions of ideology, meaning, identity,and subjectivity, whose pertinence for the chances of political change couldthen make them objects of analysis and action.

I will not be alone in finding my own intellectual biography mapped byStuarts influence and writings. I first started reading him in 19723, when Istumbled across the Birmingham Centres Working Papers in CulturalStudies in some bookshop or other. I then found a volume he coeditedwith Paul Walton called Situating Marx: Evaluations and Departures

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(1973), published from a conference held at the Centre around DavidMcLellans early selections from Marxs Grundrisse (1971). By that time Iwas delving into the early issues of New Left Review (NLR) and Universitiesand Left Review, so I was encountering Stuarts writings there as well. Butmore generally he was showing up in anthologies on aspects of the history ofthe press and media, as well as in the sociology of deviance and radicalcriminology, fields each then undergoing an exciting boom. The pioneeringessays on The Social Eye of Picture Post and The Determination of NewsPhotographs first appeared at this time, for instance (in Working Papers 2and 3), as did the especially classic Encoding and Decoding in the MediaDiscourse (as Stencilled Paper 7). Each was notable for utilizing a stillunfamiliar European resource of theory (semiotics and structuralism,Roland Barthes, Claude Levi-Strauss, Louis Althusser) to read mediatexts in more complicated and less transparently common-sensical ways.But pretty soon, by the mid 1970s, references to the writings and ideas ofboth Stuart himself and the CCCS seemed to be everywhere.

The early work on popular culture continued apace on television andviolence, news and current affairs, journalism and the press, media powerand effects in a variety of journals, anthologies, conference proceedings,and working papers. The renowned studies of youth subcultures appearedfirst asWorking Papers 7/8 and then immediately in book form as the first ofthe Hutchinson CCCS series, Resistance through Rituals: Youth Subculturesin Postwar Britain (1976), coedited with Tony Jefferson. Simultaneously, theearliest versions of parts of the Mugging Study appeared as StencilledPapers 27 and 36, before eventually culminating as the famous multi-authored Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order(1978). Stuart was also producing remarkable readings of the works ofMarx, a sustained exercise in theoretical reflection, which were central tothe Marxist renaissance of the time.1 Emblematic here was the CCCSvolume On Ideology, which became Working Papers 10 (1977) before ap-pearing the following year as a Hutchinson volume guided editorially by BillSchwarz with Stuarts support. Stuarts own part of the latter project,a coauthored essay on Antonio Gramsci and the relationship of politicsand ideology, was especially important for his own intellectual progression.This striking intensity of writing and publication confirmed him as a leadingpublic intellectual of the Left, forging the connections between ideas andpractice, theory and politics. If the resonance occurred at this stage mainlyinside the settings of the Left itself, this was also a time of huge energy andexcitement, when the Left was expanding outward, rather than recoiling intodefeat.

This unity of intellectual and political work, so characteristic of the headyyears between the mid 1960s and late 1970s, became ever more pronouncedin the next decades. Stuarts passing, in addition to the terrible sadness ofpersonal loss, therefore leaves a devastating absence in this most vital ofpolitical ways. He was stunningly successful at occupying a place that can be

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otherwise so exceptionally difficult to claim: one where important intellec-tual work, matters of the highest public concern, the political common senseof ordinary people, and the pressing political demands of the present con-juncture all come together. That difficult intersection is the place wherecomplicated theory, the established patterns of politics, the shape of popularculture, and the logics of contemporary history can all be found in combin-ations containing simultaneously great danger and great possibility. Thatwas where Stuart tried to do his thinking. Trying to understand how ideas,politics, popular culture, and the movements of history all join with eachother, as a basis for the most effective intervention, was one of the mainthemes of his life. This constant movement back and forth between the spaceof experience (all the given practices, structures, and relations that can po-tentially enable us, yet so often end up holding us in place) and the movinghorizon of expectation (the space where we can imagine living differently)was key to how he thought. Actually, it was less a movement back and forththan an active simultaneity, an effort at thinking these things together: spaceof experience, horizon of expectation; the weight of history, the vision ofpossible futures. That is what Stuart meant by conjuncture. He asked: Whatjoins together to make the big shifts in consciousness?2

Stuart McPhail Hall was born in Kingston, Jamaica on 3 February 1932into what he called a lower-middle-class family that was trying to be anupper-middle-class family trying to be an English Victorian family.3 In re-flecting on this point of departure, as he did with growing frequency fromthe later 1980s, he found both formative strengths and the source of muchunease and pain. The first non-white to hold a senior position at the UnitedFruit Company, his father Herman came from a poor shopkeeper family ofextremely mixed ethnicity African, East Indian, Portuguese, Scottish,Jewish and lived deferentially inside the given racial and colonial hierar-chies. His mother Jessie (an overwhelmingly dominant person, as he calledher) came from the better-off middle class: very light-skinned and pro-foundly conservative in outlook, she identified both with England as themother country and with that old plantation world. . . as a golden age.4

On the one hand, Stuart received what by any criteria was a fine academicschooling. At Kingstons Jamaica College, with its entirely English and im-perial curriculum, he ended by reading T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Freud,Marx, Lenin, and some of the surrounding literature and modern poetry.A number of his teachers, attuned to the emergent Caribbean nationalism,broadened his access to reading, ideas, and current affairs at a time (themiddle and late 1940s) when big events were in train.

On the other hand, his family was highly race-conscious in severely self-damaging ways. In his final years at school, his parents vetoed his eldersisters love relationship with a black Barbadian medical student ruledinadmissable by the colour of his skin. In course of the resulting conflict,his sister had a catastrophic psychic collapse, was subjected to electro-convulsive treatment, and never recovered. As witness to this family




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drama, Stuart was, by his own much later account, pitched into a differentunderstanding: I was suddenly aware of the contradiction of a colonialculture, of how one lives out the colour-class-colonial dependency experi-ence and of how it could destroy you, subjectively. At several decadesdistance, shaped by the intervening languages of theory, this story acquiredformative coherence: It broke down forever, for me, the distinction betweenthe public and the private self. I learned about culture, first, as somethingwhich is deeply subjective and personal, and at the same moment, as astructure you live.

In his later telling, the story became paradigmatic. Personally, it impelledhim outwards. His sisters life became a complete tragedy, which I livedthrough her, and I decided I couldnt take it; I couldnt help her, I couldntreach her, although I understood what was wrong. The experience crystal-lized my feelings about the space I was called into by my family. I was notgoing to stay there, I was not going to be destroyed by it. I had to get out.Indeed, by 1951 he was gone, borne by a Rhodes Scholarship and escortedto Merton College in Oxford by his mother. It was only by 1957 that thepoints were finally set, but he never went back. Once she learned about thecharacter of his politics, his mother told him to stay away too. By the 1980s,from the mature vantage-point of theory, Stuart made this story founda-tional. It became the moment from which he unfolded his thinking about thein-betweenness of the diasporic condition the necessary unfinishedness oftrying to make a new home (the permanent ambivalence of being inEngland), yet the impossibility of being able to go home again. This ex-perience, he argued, the late twentieth century had now universalized andmade archetypal. Importantly, moreover, the power of this story couldonly be reclaimed later, enabled by Stuarts own thinking and writingabout race, colonialism, diaspora, and postcoloniality, along with a largercorpus of thought he helped inspire, for which Paul Gilroys The BlackAtlantic (1993) became the pioneer. Being able to write about hisJamaican starting point in that way personally rather than just analytic-ally and from inside the position of a black West Indian, just like everybodyelse took him a very long time. As he reflected in 1992, I am able towrite about it now because Im at the end of a long journey. . . In that sense,it has taken me fifty years to come home.5

Stuart read English at Oxford, finishing in 1954 and moving directly to adissertation on Henry James, which the political urgencies of 1956 led him toset aside. Two parallel times marked his years in Oxford. He moved first inmainly expatriate circles of fellow students from the Caribbean, whose en-counter with students from Africa made them into West Indians in a rathernew way. We were passionate about the colonial question, Stuart later said.We followed the expulsion of the French from Indochina with a massivecelebration dinner. He was very much formed inside this first generation,black, anti-colonial or postcolonial intelligentsia, who studied in England,did graduate work, trained to be economists.6 When most of them went

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back, he stayed. His second scene, overlapping slightly in time with the firstvia friendships with classicist Alan Hall and fellow Rhodes Scholar CharlesTaylor, was the Oxford left. Little more than a loose conversation acrossstudent Communists (the Balliol Reds Raphael Samuel, Peter Sedgwick,Gabriel Pearson), the Cole Group (the politics seminar of G. D. H. Cole),and a few independents like the two Halls and Taylor, they together revivedthe previously moribund Socialist Club. When the momentous events of1956 arrived, it was this nascent network that supplied one of the NewLefts main strands. As Stuart recalled, it included more than its fairshare of exiles and migrants, which reinforced its cosmopolitanism: theycame from Trinidad, Jamaica, Quebec, Sudan, Syria, and from one kind ofBritish margin or another provincial, working-class, or Scottish, Welsh,Irish, and Jewish.7

The story of 1956 as the crucible of the New Left has been well told, manytimes. From the cataclysmic political shocks of that year first the revela-tions of Nikita Khrushchevs denunciation of Stalin at the TwentiethCongress of the CPSU in February; then the dual crisis of the invasionsof Egypt and Hungary in October-November came a vital shift in theprospects for the Left in Britain. If this produced no massed ranks of afull-fledged popular movement, it vitally unlocked the existing fronts ofexpectation. As Stuart later reflected, the events broke through the climateof fear and suspicion that prevailed during those years, when the ColdWar dominated the political horizon, positioning everyone and polarizingevery topic by its remorseless binary logic. The combined spectacle ofHungary and Suez dramatized the bankruptcy of each of the Lefts primarytraditions, Communism and social democracy. It unmasked the underlyingviolence and aggression latent in the two systems which dominated politicallife at that time Western imperialism and Stalinism. It promised thebreak-up of the political Ice Age. It pointed the way forward to an exciting,unanticipated opportunity, a third political space where a New Left couldform.8

This was the defining political experience of Stuarts life. It posed chal-lenges which he continued to engage with throughout his later career. Onewas the very idea of a third space itself. In our own time, after the end ofCommunism in 1989, when the vast weight of official and media commen-tary began dragooning any permissible opinion into the crude polarity ofsocialisms definitive failure and market capitalisms triumph, he refused tobe unnerved. Those who were inspired by the breaks of 1956 should have noembarrassment about the ending of the state-socialist model, he arguedsardonically, because we have been waiting for it to happen for three dec-ades. The New Left positions of 19567 were fully continuous with thediscourse of democracy in 1989.9

The new space was to be made beyond the existing models of politicalleadership whether vanguardist and sectarian, democratic-centralist,Fabian and expert-derived, or based in the machinery of Labourism in




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parliament, elections, conference, and trade-union block vote. The politicscrystallizing out of the crisis years frenetic disarray had two main tribu-taries. One was a new generations critique of the reconstructed capitalistsociety observably changing around them these were the younger intellec-tuals, still mainly in their twenties, for whom Stuart and the Oxford groupwanted to speak (Stuart called them an alternative not to say beleaguered intellectual minority culture).10 They conceived a new journal, Universitiesand Left Review (ULR), launched in early 1957 with a Samuel-Pearson-Taylor-Hall editorial team. At the same time, the dissident Communistsand their allies, famously grouped around Edward Thompson, JohnSaville, and The Reasoner, drew passionately on an older set of Anglo-British socialist and popular radical traditions, now recharged as socialisthumanism. This grouping launched The New Reasoner. Increasingly, thetwo networks were joined in a common conversation. Some organized ini-tiatives ensued New Left Clubs around the country (twenty in 1960, a yearlater forty-one, by 1963 still thirty-eight); the Partisan coffee house in Soho;the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (launched 19578), which became akey New Left arena. But the movement was avowedly one of ideas of non-sectarian networking, of debates across the old dividing lines, of ideas assuch (against the conventional anti-intellectualism of the British labourmovement). It spelled a participatory politics inside an ethics of commit-ment, dubbed by Stuart our missionary phase.11

The two journals merged by the end of 1959 to form New Left Review,with an unmanageably expanded board and Stuart as the Editor, a role hedischarged until the end of 1961, thereby bringing the years of the first NewLeft to a close. The latters full history was too complex to be treated here.It remained entirely innocent of the gender issues that exploded aroundthe second New Left ten years later, for example; and if not absent, racequestions stayed embedded in contexts formally about something else, suchas poverty, welfare, housing. But three decisive recognitions moving theULR part of this story stayed vital for the next six decades. In each,Stuart was an active intelligence. The first addressed contemporary capital-ism and its new corporate organization, fresh dynamics of accumulation,and burgeoning consumerism. Social structure, labour markets, patterns ofresidence, spending habits, educational chances, mass leisure and entertain-ment in short the entire given meanings of class and their relations topolitics were made open to question. Stuarts 1958 article A Sense ofClasslessness (ULR 1: 5, pp. 2632) was fundamental here. Second, anexisting narrow definition of politics was blown apart. The politicaldomain became radically redefined. While work and its social relations re-mained vital, politics moved away from the point of production towardother places too. The boundaries were changing.

We raised issues of personal life, the way people live, culture, whichwerent considered the topics of politics on the left. We wanted to talk

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about the contradictions of this new kind of capitalist society in whichpeople didnt have a language to express their private troubles, didntrealize that these troubles reflected political and social questions whichcould be generalized.12

That points precisely to the third decisive recognition: the centralityof culture. For the ULR circles, it was in the cultural and ideologicaldomain that social change appeared to be making itself most dramaticallyvisible. Moreover, the cultural dimension seemed to us not a secondary,but a constitutive dimension of society, signifying as such a key part ofthe New Lefts long-standing quarrel with the reductionism and econo-mism of the base-superstructure metaphor. Most vitally, of all, it wasthrough cultural analysis that the most empowering critique of the newcapitalism would be mounted by tracing the impact of commodifica-tion in areas of life far removed from the immediate sites of wage-labourexploitation. By these means, the traditional framing of debate as highculture versus popular culture could be transcended. In Stuarts wordsagain, the discourse of culture seemed to us fundamentally necessary toany language in which socialism could be redescribed. And then crucially:No one expressed the fundamental and constitutive character of this argu-ment for and within the New Left more profoundly than RaymondWilliams.13

On the very eve of Suez-Budapest, in the summer of 1956, Stuart hadgone with Alan Hall and two other friends for a summers working vacationto sketch out a book on the new contours of cultural change inContemporary Capitalism. With them went a small library of readingthat included two typescript chapters of what was to become RaymondWilliams Culture and Society. Stuart had just met Williams for the firsttime at the Oxford seminar of F. W. (Freddy) Bateson (190178), an oldersocialist and literary scholar of the eighteenth century, who launched thequarterly Essays in Criticism in 1951 as an alternative to F. R and Q. D.Leaviss Scrutiny.14 Williams, still a little-known figure, now came via thesecontacts to the centre of New Left circles, particularly once Culture andSociety was published in 1958. That was a momentous conjunction.Coming fast upon Richard Hoggarts The Uses of Literacy in 1957,Williamss thinking converged powerfully with discussions in ULR andNR, whose pages dripped with references and allusions to his andHoggarts impact. It was thus only natural that for his first issue of the freshlymerged New Left Review Stuart should organize a dialogue on Working-Class Attitudes (NLR 1, pp. 2630) between Williams and Hoggart, whichwas also the first occasion on which those two figures actually met.

Having taught in South London secondary schools during 19579, Stuartnow took a lectureship in media, film, and popular culture at ChelseaCollege of the University of London, probably one of the earliest teachingpositions of its kind. From his experience there and his work with Paddy




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Whannel at the British Film Institute came the jointly authored study of ThePopular Arts (1964), which along with Discrimination and Popular Culture,edited by Denys Thompson (1964) remains the defining book of its kindfrom that time. When Richard Hoggart moved universities in 1964 fromLeicester to Birmingham and created the CCCS, he asked Stuart to take theCentre on. Hoggart thought that, with my combination of interests in tele-vision, film, and popular literature, my knowledge of the Leavis debate andmy interest in cultural politics, I would be a good person. I went toBirmingham in 1964, and got married to Catherine who transferred toBirmingham from Sussex the same year.15

Yet, if Stuarts connections to Hoggart, personally and intellectually,proved relatively fleeting, ending effectively when Hoggart left for a positionat UNESCO in 19689, those to Williams proved lasting and close.Separated in years by a decade (and generationally by the wartime), withobvious differences of origin and race, they shared far more than might beassumed. Each travelled the similar journey of a scholarship boy, the onefrom colony and colour, the other from region and class. Williams pitchedhis tent in the border country of nation and class, Stuart in the margins ofrace, gender, and the postcolonial. They shared a complex, if differentlygrounded, commitment to thinking out a post-Leavisite conception of theimportance of culture for democratic nationhood. Their common route tothis was through a sustained and extremely creative encounter withGramsci. They each spent much of the 1970s and 1980s working theirway systematically through the widest body of European theoreticalMarxism (though Williams, interestingly, stopped mainly short ofFoucault). Closer to home, they each pioneered the serious critical analysisof television: while Stuart was developing his own highly original method-ology, Williams was delivering his monthly column for The Listener during196872 and writing Television: Technology and Cultural Form (1973). Inretrospect, this seems a fascinating set of convergences, emblematic for anentire slice of later twentieth-century intellectual life. Taken together, theirwork brilliantly established the necessity of culture for social and politicalanalysis, not just for the Left or people in cultural studies directly, butfor anyone seeking to make our world intelligible. It was no surprise tofind them each working together so centrally on the May Day Manifestoin 196768.16

Stuarts years at CCCS were uniquely productive. His leadership wasinspirational and charismatic, yet democratic and enabling. He was intellec-tually rigorous and exacting, yet generous, patient, calming. By the timehe left in 1979 to take up the Chair of Sociology at the Open University,cultural studies was becoming tentatively established as a recognized cross-disciplinary field. In the course of the 1980s, former students of the Centrefanned out into academic and associated employment, not often with im-mediate security or conventional high-end recognition, most commonly inthe former polytechnics, where cultural studies gained its first institutional

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footholds. New journals were launched. Stronger programmatic initiativesdeveloped, especially later during the 1990s. This history is often describedas a straightforwardly Birmingham story, in which not only the degree ofinfluence, but also the intellectual cohesion of the people who passedthrough the Centre become too easily inflated (Stuart habitually deflectedtalk of the Birmingham school), as if CCCS had been the only active origin.Yet that the Centre spearheaded a series of very major discussions can neverbe gainsaid. These are best represented by the eight Hutchinson volumesbetween Resistance through Rituals (1976) and Crises in the British State18801930, edited by Mary Langan and Bill Schwarz (1985), in an approachof bold and trailblazing originality, with echoes and reverberations acrossmany fields and countries. During the 1980s that resonance also becamefully international. Stuarts ideas and writings were at the heart of it all.By the time of the two big conferences in Urbana-Champaign (1983 and1990) and the resulting volumes Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture,edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (1988), and CulturalStudies, edited by Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson and Paula Treichler(1992), the Old Testament and the New Stuarts centrality was plain.

Much of this wider influence unfolded while Stuart was teaching at theOpen University (OU) between 1979 and his retirement in 1998. HisBirmingham time had been extraordinarily intense. In one set of ways, hehad thrived there. With no resources from the University and an institu-tional climate at best indifferent and mostly adversarial, he enabled a col-lective and collaborative way of working that broke down the usual barriersseparating teachers and students. But as imagined at CCCS, this collectiveideal was far more than a working method or an approach to going aboutones academic studies. It was an effort at radically reconceiving what asocially responsible and ethically driven commitment to such a thingmight mean an entire outlook, an ethos, a common acceptance that think-ing, learning, writing, personal life, and politics all belonged axiomaticallytogether. From person to person, among the students and teachers involvedin the Centre, the exact balance of those commitments varied, some tendingmore to intellectual work, some to community-based activism, some to thesocialist projects that became so energizing at the time, some to a culturalpolitics of identity and style. From the Labour and Communist Parties,through the International Marxist Group, the Socialist Workers Party,and Big Flame, to various unaffiliated anarchisms and Marxisms and,cutting across all of these and increasingly against them, the emergent fem-inisms most groups and tendencies were present. But belonging to one oranother of these was largely beside the point. The collective quality of theCentres ethos came from the common involvement in the unities of ideas,politics, and practice. To call that the politics of intellectual work wouldalso be a misnomer, an import from our own subsequent time, as its prac-titioners deliberately refused the separation this implied. It was also theground from which Stuarts Gramscian commitments were able to unfold.




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The intellectual work that Stuart did personally at CCCS and the re-search and writing he helped to inspire, on media, deviance, race, class,history (especially of Britains early twentieth century), politics, and criticaltheory, really did shift terms of debate and understanding across a largeswathe of intellectual life in Britain and elsewhere. But there were costs. Hefound the necessary turbulence of the Centres collectivist culture many ofthe entailments of trying to produce knowledge democratically exhausting.The conflicts around feminism in particular were painfully hard, placingStuart, an avowedly feminist man but the responsible director of an institu-tion, in situations less and less tractable. By the later 1970s, he was caughtstructurally in what he knew to be an impossibly contradictory position.However patiently non-hierarchical his vision of the Centres practices andprocedures, certain conflicts and dilemmas were unavoidable. It wasnt apersonal thing, he later reflected. Im very close to many of the feminists ofthat period. It was a structural thing. I couldnt any longer do any usefulwork, from that position. It was time to go.17

The OU offered a less fraught and more conventional teaching situation,yet one different enough a more flexible interdisciplinary setting, collab-orative teaching, media-related pedagogy, non-traditional students, an ethosof expanding access to higher education still connected to the sixties toprovide scope for a politics. For Stuart, it offered the chance to translate theCentres theory-driven vision of cultural studies into forms more accessibleto a wider audience. Amid the resulting accomplishments, four bodies ofwork especially stand out. The first two centred on the OU courses Stateand Society (D209) and Beliefs and Ideologies (DE354). The one producedanthologies edited by Stuart along with Gregor McLennan and David Heldon The Idea of the Modern State (1984) and State and Society inContemporary Britain: a Critical Introduction (1984); the other a readeredited by Stuart and James Donald on Politics and Ideology (1986). Latercame OU D318 Culture, Media and Identities, with six collectively gener-ated original readers, including Stuarts edited Representation: CulturalRepresentations and Signifying Practices (1997); and finally, OU D213Understanding Modern Societies, with four edited volumes, later impos-ingly anthologized into a single-volume sociology textbook entitledModernity: An Introduction to Modern Societies (1996), which Stuart coe-dited with David Held, Don Hubert, and Kenneth Thompson.Immeasurably more than any codification of the already familiar, each ofthese initiatives brilliantly realized the purposes of a politically engaged andtheoretically formed pedagogy. Partly via the OUs use of TV and radio forteaching, Stuart was also more involved in broadcasting, developing docu-mentaries for example on the Caribbean for BBC TV, on W. E. B. DuBoisfor radio.

These were also the years when Stuart acquired vital presence in a na-tional political ferment of the Left. That process began, arguably, in thenotorious encounter between Edward Thompson and Richard Johnson at

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the thirteenth Ruskin History Workshop on 1 December 1979, when Stuart,as a third speaker on the podium, had tried vainly to mediate the disagree-ment and contain Thompsons grandiosity. The impulse for that occasioncame from important discussions on historiography at CCCS, with earliergenealogies in lastingly influential debates of the mid 1960s involvingThompson on the one side, Perry Anderson and Tom Nairn on the other,themselves centring on the contested intellectual and political legacy of theNew Left. In one way, the Ruskin event was the nadir of the increasinglyembittered divisiveness surrounding precisely the purposes of the theorywork that had come to identify Stuarts importance. But in the event, itproved cathartic. Six months before, Margaret Thatchers government hadbeen elected, with consequences that rapidly changed the stakes of politicalargument. A few months before that, Stuart had developed his category ofThatcherism in The Great Moving Right Show (Marxism Today, January1979), itself prefigured in Policing the Crisis, which now framed the termsthrough which the Left sought to respond to this new right. Publishedmainly in the political journals Marxism Today and New Socialist, writtendeliberately for the widest readership, his essays of the 1980s showed Stuartat his perlucidly accessible and communicative best. First in The Politics ofThatcherism (1983), edited with Martin Jacques, and then in his own TheHard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left (1988), hedissected and examined the new political terrain. This was the vital return onall of that arduous theory work of the preceding decade. He showed, in thecourse of political commentary intended to be useful, how readings of Marx,Althusser, Poulantzas, feminist theory, theories of language and discourse,Laclau and Mouffe, Foucault, above all Gramsci could really help. In therelated project of New Times: the Changing Face of Politics in the 1990s(1989), edited with Martin Jacques, he turned to the constructive questionof the possible political strategies that were now beginning to open.

As we can see, the optimism behind the New Times project failed to winthrough. It outlasted to some extent the shock of the 1992 election result andthe Conservatives fourth term, but the immediate disappointment of NewLabour after 1997, followed by the relentless attrition wreaked on publicand social goods by the Blair years, left little remaining. While still highlyactive and inspiring public figures, moreover, two of Stuarts leading com-rades of the first New Left, the Marxist historians Edward Thompson andRaphael Samuel, were each immersed in historical work taking very differ-ent directions from Stuarts own. With the tragically early death ofRaymond Williams in 1988, he had already lost a vital interlocutor, andnow Thompson followed in 1993, Samuel in 1996. With a third historian,another key voice of New Times, Eric Hobsbawm (who died in 2013), thedifferences had always been clear. But Stuart continued arguing patientlyaway, drawing not only on the arguments forged from the 1980s, but on theperduring insights of the 1950s too. The New Left had already grasped thatpeople no longer live their relation to society through just a single identity




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(if they ever did), he pointed out, however salient such big identities as classmight sometimes become. Rather, there were different identities, differentforms of social subjectivity, which had to be mobilized in any kind of con-temporary political movement.18 Not only under Thatcher but also Majorand again since 2010 Cameron, he noted, the Tories are sitting on top ofa society without commanding even a normal electoral, popular majority.To stay there, they must constantly adapt, absorb, translate, and transform.They are constantly buying in from society, whether it is ecology or con-sumer needs, and transforming ideas into their own language.19 NewLabour succeeded only by mimicking a modified version of this establishedpost-Thatcherist script, but a real Left had to find ways of building its ownpopular democratic leadership, speaking across differences with a compel-ling political appeal. Nor is this a matter of merely patching issues andcauses together in some additive or rhetorically aggregating fashion.A new vision, one to reclaim the popular high ground, with moral-politicalpersuasiveness in the Gramscian way, required something more. I couldgive you a whole range of arenas around which I think one ought now toorganize and mobilize, but still there would always be in my mind the largerquestion of how those particular struggles connect with a larger socialistproject.20

However dispirited by the managerial gutting of public life, Stuart nevergave up. He continued looking for new ways to have an effect. In 1995, outof the ruins of New Times, he launched a new journal Soundings, along withDoreen Massey, Michael Rustin, and a wider circle of cothinkers. Togetherthey began issuing, in spring 2013, the Kilburn Manifesto, intended to as-semble the ground for a post-neoliberal politics. But at the same time, hehad long been committing main energies to questions of race, to radicalizingand democratizing the discourse of multiculturalism, and to campaigningfor racial justice. Going back to his earliest London years and the NottingHill riots, followed by the climate of fear in Birmingham surrounding EnochPowells rivers of blood speech in 1968, those questions were never very faraway, but from the mid 1970s and Policing the Crisis they gained evergreater immediacy. Though he had left by the time it came out, the land-mark CCCS volume The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in 70sBritain (1982) eloquently bears his imprint. A wide variety of his essaysappeared during the 1980s, some directly on race as such paradigmaticallywith The Whites of their Eyes: Racist Ideologies and the Media, in SilverLinings: Some Strategies for the Eighties, edited by George Bridges andRosalind Brunt (1981), and Race, Articulation, and Societies Structuredin Dominance, in a 1980 UNESCO volume on Sociological Theories:Race and Colonialism. Other writings threaded that problem throughwider discussions of ideology, politics, and increasingly diaspora and post-colonialism. Later, in the 1990s, he became active in various practical ways,including in the Stephen Lawrence campaign, and was recruited for a varietyof public bodies, official and unofficial. In 1997, he joined the Runnymede

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Trust Commission on the Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain, which publishedits findings in October 2000.

Across these same years, from the later 1980s and intensifying over thenext decade, Catherine Hall undertook her own travels through the historyof the Caribbean, beginning literally from a family trip to Jamaica in thesummer of 1988. Having earlier pioneered the study of gender, family, andcapital formation in the making of the English middle class, she now movedher thinking about England onto the global stage, locating the imaginednation firmly within a wider frame of empire.21 A series of essays on thecolonial relationship soon followed, and by May 1993 she joined Stuart inreflecting on the meaning of the post-colonial in a major conference inNaples.22 They worked in a kind of brilliant counterpoint. While Stuartargued patiently and insistently that race and the legacies of empire bebrought finally into the open, so that the English might actually face upto their whiteness (and lose what James Baldwin called the jewel of [their]naivete), Catherine showed in compelling detail how colonialism worked itseffects, whether at home in the remaking of metropolitan society or awaythrough its impact on the colonized worlds.23 Catherines books followed inrapid succession: a benchmark anthology on Cultures of Empire: Colonizersin Britain and the Empire in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (2000);an analysis of the political conjuncture of the 1860s, Defining the VictorianNation: Class, Race, Gender and the Reform Act of 1867 (also 2000),co-authored with Keith McClelland and Jane Rendall; her magnum opus,Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 18301867 (2002); and an outstanding volume of essays coedited with Sonya Rose,At Home with the Empire: Metropolitan Culture and the Imperial World(2006). While Stuart brought the empires continuing presence under hisfinely focused theoretical lens, Catherine gave theory its history. Their col-laboration was a model for the kind of reciprocal inspiration that any life-long intellectual partnership would hope to attain.

On retiring from academic life in 1998, Stuart began devoting himselfwholeheartedly to the black arts movement, which brought him energeticallyinto conversation with younger generations of artists, photographers, andfilmmakers, with a whole new chapter of publication in catalogues, journals,and anthologies. He was active in the creation of Rivington Place inShoreditch, which opened in 2007 as a centre for public education andexhibition in the contemporary visual arts around multiculturalism andglobal diversity. He chaired both Iniva (Institute of International VisualArts) and Autograph (Association of Black Photographers), organizationsattaching to Rivington Place, which also contains the Stuart Hall Library.While contributing to the writing of the postwar history of the blackdiaspora through the optic of its visual arts and thereby exploring the pol-itics of black subjectivity, Stuart brilliantly connected this interest to otherunderlying problems.24 On the one hand, he further complicated and dis-turbed the available master-narrative of British national history. On the




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other hand, he pursued another long-lasting problem namely, the diffi-culty of trying . . . to make connections between works of art and widersocial histories without collapsing the former or displacing the latter.25

With this, we come full circle. Stuart had journeyed as a young personfrom the edges of an empire into its core and contributed perhaps more thananyone else to exposing and exploring the continuing effects of that colonialand postcolonial history, exchanging in the process one James for another the Henry James of that discarded dissertation for the C. L. R. James whobecame one of his defining influences during the coming decades. JohnAkomfrahs recent gallery installation, The Unfinished Conversation andthe associated film The Stuart Hall Project (2013), have beautifully capturedthat cultural itinerary, through which Stuarts politics emerged. By 1990, hewas approaching questions of identity and subjectivity using diaspora andthe postcolonial as primary analytics, vitally informed by his critical rework-ing of post-Althusserian French thought, with a major battery of essays asthe result.26 He was now engaging more directly with Caribbean historiestoo, as an interview in HWJ, Breaking Bread with History: C. L. R. Jamesand The Black Jacobins (46, autumn 1998) and a reflection on Franz Fanoneach eloquently confirmed.27 That during this period Catherine began work-ing on Jamaica and the history of the imperial relationship within a conver-gent set of questions worked vitally with the direction of his thinking. Theingrained assumptions of racial difference around which British identity(and the Englishness at its heart) was structured became a recurring pre-occupation. Contemporary national identity was centred around an un-marked and unspoken whiteness, he argued, which ensured that otherpopulations in Britain were kept to a margin. This was the red thread thatran through all of Stuarts biography, certainly from the middle to late1960s. It was what made him the most eloquent architect, advocate, andpractitioner of British multiculturalism. It was what shaped his writingsand influence on race, identity, politics, diaspora, difference, and latterlythe movement for black arts. From the 1970s forward, he helped pioneerthe new understanding of race and its centrality for late twentieth and earlytwenty-first-century social, cultural, and political life.

What more to say? Stuarts role as a founding architect of culturalstudies remains a fundamental part of his legacy, whether in his insistenceon taking popular cultural forms seriously or in his patient advocacy forcross-disciplinary forms of intellectual collaboration. He believed passion-ately in a democracy of the intellect. Among his countless publicationsover a fifty-year period, he never published a book in his own name only.As a critical theorist, he combined lucidly accessible grasp of themost difficultareas of high theory, equally brilliant attentiveness to the common sense ofpopular beliefs, visionary breadth and precision of contemporary politicalanalysis, and exceptional clarity of communication. Somehow, he was ableto think simultaneously with and inside many distinct bodies of contempor-ary thought western Marxism, structuralism and semiotics, literary theory,

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ethnography and cultural anthropology, communications and media studies,

psychoanalysis, theories of language, feminist theory, post-structuralism,

post-colonial theory, and more while modelling the importance of such a

widely based non-sectarian conversation for others. He was an extraordinary

teacher not just in the seminar room, the lecture theatre, and the institu-

tional world of the university, but in the very fullest sense of public and

political pedagogy, including of course the media programming of the

Open University and his many TV appearances. He was a brilliant commu-

nicator. When he lectured, he brought light into the room.Stuarts final years were impeded by ill-health, burdening him with in-

tensive dialysis and eventually a kidney transplant. Inevitably, this began

affecting his ability to work. Increasingly, it kept him from speaking in

public, and certainly from serious travelling. He received many honours,

including election to the British Academy in 2005. In 2007 at the

University of Michigan, to our own immense honour, he was to receive

an Honorary Degree, but could not make the trip. He is survived by

Catherine, his daughter Rebecca and son Jess, two grandchildren, his

sister Patricia, and by an immense multitude of friends and admirers.This loss of his warmth of presence and guiding intelligence is simply not

bearable. At the end of their obituary in the Guardian, David Morley and

Bill Schwarz described Stuarts appearance on Desert Island Discs, when he

talked about his lifelong passion for Miles Davis. He explained that the

music represented for him the sound of what cannot be. What was his

own intellectual life, they asked, but the striving, against all odds, to make

what cannot be alive in [thought and] the imagination? He was the source

of extraordinary wisdom and generosity. One of the best lights of the world

is gone.

Geoff Eley is Karl Pohrt Distinguished University Professor of

Contemporary History at the University of Michigan. He works on

modern German and European History, fascism, film and history, and his-

toriography. His earliest works were Reshaping the German Right: Radical

Nationalism and Political Change after Bismarck (1980, 1991) and (with

David Blackbourn) The Peculiarities of German History (1980, 1984).

More recent books include Forging Democracy: a History of the Left in

Europe, 18502000 (2002), A Crooked Line: From Cultural History to the

History of Society (2005), (and with Keith Nield) The Future of Class in

History (2007), and Nazism as Fascism: Violence, Ideology, and the Ground

of Consent in Germany, 19301945 (2013). He is coeditor of German

Colonialism in a Global Age (2014). He is writing a general history of

Europe in the twentieth century and a new study of the German Right,

Genealogies of Nazism: Conservatives, Radical Nationalists, Fascists in

Germany, 18601945.




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1 Especially the following: Marxs Notes on Method: a Reading of the 1857Introduction, Working Papers in Cultural Studies 6, University of Birmingham, 1974, pp.13271; Rethinking the Base and Superstructure Metaphor, in Class, Hegemony, and Party:the Communist University of London 8, ed. Jon Bloomfield, Lawrence &Wishart, London, 1977,pp. 4372; The Political and the Economic in Marxs Theory of Classes, in Class andClass Structure, ed. Alan Hunt, Lawrence & Wishart, London, 1978, pp. 1560; The Problemof Ideology: Marxism without Guarantees, in Marx 100 Years On, ed. Betty Matthews,Lawrence & Wishart, London, 1983, pp. 5785.

2 Suzanne Moore, Stuart Hall Was a Voice For Misfits Everywhere. Thats His RealLegacy, Guardian, 13 Feb. 2014.

3 Stuart Hall, Minimal Selves, in Identity: the Real Me, ICA Documents 6, Institute ofContemporary Arts, London, 1988, p. 45.

4 Kuan-Hsing Chen, The Formation of a Diasporic Intellectual: an Interview with StuartHall, in Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, ed. David Morley and Kuan-HsingChen, Routledge, London, 1996, pp. 489, 485.

5 The quotations are taken from Stuarts account in Formation of a DiasporicIntellectual, pp. 48491.

6 Hall, Formation of a Diasporic Intellectual, p. 492.7 Stuart Hall, The First New Left: Life and Times, in Out of Apathy: Voices of the New

Left 30 Years On, ed. Oxford University Socialist Discussion Group, Verso, London, 1989, pp.1920.

8 Hall, The First New Left, pp. 1617, 13.9 Stuart Hall, Coming Up For Air, Marxism Today, March 1990, p. 25.10 Hall, The First New Left, p. 19.11 In his opening editorial for New Left Review, JanuaryFebruary 1960.12 Stuart Hall in 1968: A Student Generation in Revolt, ed. Ronald Fraser, New York:

Pantheon, New York, 1988, p. 30.13 Hall, The First New Left, pp. 25, 27.14 Dai Smith, Raymond Williams: a Warriors Tale, Parthian, Cardigan, 2008, pp.

3989.15 Hall, Formation of a Diasporic Intellectual, p. 498.16 Originally issued the previous year and published in greatly expanded form by Penguin

in 1968, May Day Manifesto was drafted by a committee headed by Williams, Hall and EdwardThompson. See Stephen Woodhams, The 1968 May Day Manifesto, in About RaymondWilliams, ed. Monika Seidl, Roman Horak, and Lawrence Grossberg, London, Routledge,2010, pp. 5767.

17 Hall, Formation of a Diasporic Intellectual, p. 500.18 Stuart Hall, in Then and Now: a Re-evaluation of the New Left, Out of Apathy,

p. 152.19 Stuart Hall, Opening Up Our Vision, interview with Adam Lent, in Talking About

Tomorrow: a New Radical Politics, ed. Stuart Wilks, Pluto Press, London, 1993, p. 158.20 Hall in Then and Now, p. 168.21 See Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the

English Middle Class, 17801850, Hutchinson, London, 1987; Catherine Hall, The NationWithin and Without, in C. Hall, Keith McClelland, and Jane Rendall, Defining theVictorian Nation: Class, Race, Gender, and the Reform Act of 1867, Cambridge UniversityPress, Cambridge, 2000, p. 179.

22 Stuart Hall, When was the Post-Colonial? Thinking at the Limit, and CatherineHall, Histories, Empires, and the Post-Colonial Moment, both in The Post-Colonial Question:Common Skies, Divided Horizons, ed. Iain Chambers and Lidia Curti, Routledge, London,1996, pp. 24260 and 6577.

23 James Baldwin, Stranger in the Village (1953), reprinted in Notes to a NativeSon (1955), Penguin, 1995, pp. 15165, quoted by Catherine Hall, Civilizing Subjects:Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 18301867, University of Chicago Press,2002, pp. 56.

24 Stuart Hall, Black Diaspora Artists in Britain: Three Moments in Postwar History,History Workshop Journal 61, spring 2006, p. 22.

25 Hall, Black Diaspora Artists in Britain, p. 23.

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26 For example, Cultural Identity and Diaspora, in Identity: Community, Culture,Difference, ed. Jonathan Rutherford, Lawrence & Wishart, London, 1990, pp. 22237; TheQuestion of Cultural Identity, in Modernity and its Future, ed. Stuart Hall, David Held, andAnthony McGrew, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1992, pp. 274316; When was the Post-Colonial? in The Post-Colonial Question, ed. Chambers and Curti, pp. 24260.

27 Stuart Hall, The After-Life of Franz Fanon: Why Fanon? Why Now? Why Black Skin,White Masks?, in The Fact of Blackness: Franz Fanon and Visual Representation, ed. AlanRead, ICA and Iniva, London, 1996, pp. 1244.




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