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Without Guarantees: In Honour of Stuart Hall
Stuart Hall’s retirement from the Open University in 1997 provided a unique opportunity to reflect on an academic career which has had the most profound impact on scholarship and teaching in many parts of the world.
From his early work on the media, through his influential re-working of Gramsci for the analysis of Britain in the late 1970s, through his considered debates on Thatcherism and more recently on “race” and new ethnicities, Hall has been an inspirational figure for generations of academics. He has helped to make universities places where ideas and social commitment can exist alongside each other.
This collection invites a wide range of academics who have been influenced by Stuart Hall’s writing to contribute not a memoir or a eulogy but an engaged piece of social, cultural or historical analysis which continues and develops the field of thinking opened up by Hall. The topics covered include identity and hybridity, history and post-colonialism, pedagogy and cultural politics, space and place, globalization and economy, modernity and difference.
From his early work on the media, through his influential re-working of Gramsci for the analysis of Britain in the late 1970s, through his considered debates on Thatcherism and more recently on “race” and new ethnicities, Hall has been an inspirational figure for generations of academics. He has helped to make universities places where ideas and social commitment can exist alongside each other.
This collection invites a wide range of academics who have been influenced by Stuart Hall’s writing to contribute not a memoir or a eulogy but an engaged piece of social, cultural or historical analysis which continues and develops the field of thinking opened up by Hall. The topics covered include identity and hybridity, history and post-colonialism, pedagogy and cultural politics, space and place, globalization and economy, modernity and difference.
416 pages, Paperback
First published August 1, 2000
50 people want to read
About the author
Lawrence Grossberg
94 books14 followersMorris Davis Distinguished Professor of Communication Studies and Cultural Studies, adjunct distinguished professor of anthropology, and the director of the University Program in Cultural Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
He has won numerous awards from the National Communication Association and the International Communication Association, as well as the University of North Carolina Distinguished Teaching Award (for post-baccalaureate teaching). He has been the co-editor of the international journal Cultural Studies for over fifteen years. He has written extensively about the philosophy and theory of culture and
communication, and the interdisciplinary practice of cultural studies. His research focused for many years on American popular music and youth culture, but his recent work has turned to the contemporary
U.S. political culture and the global struggle over the possible ways of being modern. His work has been translated into a dozen languages.
He has won numerous awards from the National Communication Association and the International Communication Association, as well as the University of North Carolina Distinguished Teaching Award (for post-baccalaureate teaching). He has been the co-editor of the international journal Cultural Studies for over fifteen years. He has written extensively about the philosophy and theory of culture and
communication, and the interdisciplinary practice of cultural studies. His research focused for many years on American popular music and youth culture, but his recent work has turned to the contemporary
U.S. political culture and the global struggle over the possible ways of being modern. His work has been translated into a dozen languages.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
December 25, 2015
Stuart Hall’s impact on British scholarly traditions and practice kin the latter part of the 20th century is hard to overstate; a point made by many obituary writers in February 2014, one going so far as to call him the Godfather of Multiculturalism which isn’t too far from the truth (allowing for the hyperbole of the obituary). This engaging and in places challenging festschrift does not mark Hall’s death but his retirement in 2000 from his post as professor of sociology at the Open University; the challenge comes not from the difficulty of the pieces in the collection (with a couple of exceptions) but for the sheer breadth of the work marking Hall’s impact.
It was not as a result of his work in the OU that Hall is best known, but as the head of Birmingham University’s Centre of Contemporary Cultural Studies in the 1960s and 1970s, and as on the UK’s most high profile leftist public intellectuals – a role he continued until his death, working with Doreen Massey and Michael Rustin on an analysis of neo-liberalism and contemporary politics as The Kilburn Manifesto . Many of the essayists in this festschrift refer to Hall’s work as a public intellectual but most (not all, but the vast majority) draw on his scholarly work – covering issues of ‘race’ and ethnicity, media studies, the state, Thatcherism through lenses provided by versions of Althusserian and Poulantzian structuralism but more significantly through applications and adaptation of Gramsci theories of hegemony to the emerging neo-liberalisation of Britain.
The essays take a range of forms, from Gilane Tawadros’ poetic mediations on the final section of Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth to Judith Butler’s dense, demanding Lacanian discussion of the subject in the politics of style (I have to confess, mainly because Lacan is not quite my thing, I just didn’t get that piece). Some draw directly on Hall’s work, such as in Joe Sim’s criminological analysis of the coercive power of the state-through-criminal law in the eras of Major and Blair. Others explore the global and local in cultural studies (in the UK, where Hall was one of a small group who defined the area of study) as In Keyan Tomaselli’s discussions of critical cultural studies in late apartheid and early post-apartheid South Africa, where Marxism was tolerated as a model of analysis but many key texts were banned when they began to reflect on the organisation of struggle. There are broad theoretical discussion (Doreen Massey on movement and ideas) and specific case studies (such as Glenn Jordan & Chris Weedon’s case study of a working class, multi-racial local art and history project in Cardiff’s Tiger Bay) Others are ‘vaguely inspired by Hall’s work’, as in what is for me perhaps the best piece, Wendy Brown’s discussion of Walter Benjamin’s work on ‘left melancholia’ (which has been picked up again in recent discussion of the The Idea of Communism and work on The Communist Hypothesis and elsewhere).
There were three essays (in addition to Brown) that stood out for me: Angie Chabram-Dernersesian’s discussion of the relations between Chicana/o studies and cultural studies, raising important questions of politics and identity in ‘ethnic’ studies, David Scott’s consideration of pluralism, difference and assimilation in colonial and post-colonising states, focussing on Jamaica, and Gail Guthrie Valaskakis’s exploration of being ‘Indian’ (as in Aboriginal/First Nation/Native) in North America where there is so often a reification of blood quantum. It’s not that these were the best pieces (I really liked Néstor García Cancliní’s piece on hybridization and James Clifford on identity politics, Lola Young’s on black women, colour, identity and the state, and both Henry Giroux and Angela McRobbie on pedagogy and the crisis of higher education). There are some great challenges to practice here – Gail Lewis’s call for political analyses of policy and John Clarke’s critique of a poorly conceptualised ‘social’ in social policy discussions or Paul du Gay on the need to think and work culturally about both the economy and economic life.
The breadth and demands of these pieces are, as noted, a sign of Hall’s breadth and impact. I would have liked to have seen a little more attention to the place and role of the public intellectual (to be fair, both Giroux and McRobbie are careful in their attention to this aspect of Hall’s work. More significantly, it is now 15 years since the collection was published and despite some glitches where authors reflect on then contemporary politics (no more than 2½ years into the New Labour project) the collection has held up really well with most of the papers still fresh.
It’s a reminder of how rich and challenging cultural studies can be, and a call to those of us still in academia to renew and revive the political verve the area once had.
It was not as a result of his work in the OU that Hall is best known, but as the head of Birmingham University’s Centre of Contemporary Cultural Studies in the 1960s and 1970s, and as on the UK’s most high profile leftist public intellectuals – a role he continued until his death, working with Doreen Massey and Michael Rustin on an analysis of neo-liberalism and contemporary politics as The Kilburn Manifesto . Many of the essayists in this festschrift refer to Hall’s work as a public intellectual but most (not all, but the vast majority) draw on his scholarly work – covering issues of ‘race’ and ethnicity, media studies, the state, Thatcherism through lenses provided by versions of Althusserian and Poulantzian structuralism but more significantly through applications and adaptation of Gramsci theories of hegemony to the emerging neo-liberalisation of Britain.
The essays take a range of forms, from Gilane Tawadros’ poetic mediations on the final section of Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth to Judith Butler’s dense, demanding Lacanian discussion of the subject in the politics of style (I have to confess, mainly because Lacan is not quite my thing, I just didn’t get that piece). Some draw directly on Hall’s work, such as in Joe Sim’s criminological analysis of the coercive power of the state-through-criminal law in the eras of Major and Blair. Others explore the global and local in cultural studies (in the UK, where Hall was one of a small group who defined the area of study) as In Keyan Tomaselli’s discussions of critical cultural studies in late apartheid and early post-apartheid South Africa, where Marxism was tolerated as a model of analysis but many key texts were banned when they began to reflect on the organisation of struggle. There are broad theoretical discussion (Doreen Massey on movement and ideas) and specific case studies (such as Glenn Jordan & Chris Weedon’s case study of a working class, multi-racial local art and history project in Cardiff’s Tiger Bay) Others are ‘vaguely inspired by Hall’s work’, as in what is for me perhaps the best piece, Wendy Brown’s discussion of Walter Benjamin’s work on ‘left melancholia’ (which has been picked up again in recent discussion of the The Idea of Communism and work on The Communist Hypothesis and elsewhere).
There were three essays (in addition to Brown) that stood out for me: Angie Chabram-Dernersesian’s discussion of the relations between Chicana/o studies and cultural studies, raising important questions of politics and identity in ‘ethnic’ studies, David Scott’s consideration of pluralism, difference and assimilation in colonial and post-colonising states, focussing on Jamaica, and Gail Guthrie Valaskakis’s exploration of being ‘Indian’ (as in Aboriginal/First Nation/Native) in North America where there is so often a reification of blood quantum. It’s not that these were the best pieces (I really liked Néstor García Cancliní’s piece on hybridization and James Clifford on identity politics, Lola Young’s on black women, colour, identity and the state, and both Henry Giroux and Angela McRobbie on pedagogy and the crisis of higher education). There are some great challenges to practice here – Gail Lewis’s call for political analyses of policy and John Clarke’s critique of a poorly conceptualised ‘social’ in social policy discussions or Paul du Gay on the need to think and work culturally about both the economy and economic life.
The breadth and demands of these pieces are, as noted, a sign of Hall’s breadth and impact. I would have liked to have seen a little more attention to the place and role of the public intellectual (to be fair, both Giroux and McRobbie are careful in their attention to this aspect of Hall’s work. More significantly, it is now 15 years since the collection was published and despite some glitches where authors reflect on then contemporary politics (no more than 2½ years into the New Labour project) the collection has held up really well with most of the papers still fresh.
It’s a reminder of how rich and challenging cultural studies can be, and a call to those of us still in academia to renew and revive the political verve the area once had.
May 31, 2017
Notes:
From Identity Blues by Ang:
As Hall (1996) points out, identity is not to be limited to what ‘is.’ Rather, it is a state of becoming. There should be no fear of this becomingness, Ang (2000) notes, for the active process of becoming does not in fact contradict with the being: together, they create an inclusive setting. Consequently, the interaction, sense of curiosity, and openness to the multiple layers of identity and imagined self/selves become reminiscent of the idea that culture is not static but rather ever-changing; it recreates itself as based on circumstance. After all, the act of being-on-the-go, in and of itself, creates something while it is passing (Conquergood, 1991). The openness of character, therefore, makes one’s identity, as Appadurai (1996) points out, no longer restricted.
The immovable romanticized idea of “who we are” has more to do with the “nostalgic harking back to an imagined golden past – embodied in the selective memory of ‘tradition’ and ‘heritage’ – than with the visionary articulation of a new future” (Ang, 2000, p. 6)
From Identity Blues by Ang:
As Hall (1996) points out, identity is not to be limited to what ‘is.’ Rather, it is a state of becoming. There should be no fear of this becomingness, Ang (2000) notes, for the active process of becoming does not in fact contradict with the being: together, they create an inclusive setting. Consequently, the interaction, sense of curiosity, and openness to the multiple layers of identity and imagined self/selves become reminiscent of the idea that culture is not static but rather ever-changing; it recreates itself as based on circumstance. After all, the act of being-on-the-go, in and of itself, creates something while it is passing (Conquergood, 1991). The openness of character, therefore, makes one’s identity, as Appadurai (1996) points out, no longer restricted.
The immovable romanticized idea of “who we are” has more to do with the “nostalgic harking back to an imagined golden past – embodied in the selective memory of ‘tradition’ and ‘heritage’ – than with the visionary articulation of a new future” (Ang, 2000, p. 6)
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews