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Stuart Hall: Selected Writings
Essential Essays, Volume 1: Foundations of Cultural Studies
From his arrival in Britain in the 1950s and involvement in the New Left, to founding the field of cultural studies and examining race and identity in the 1990s and early 2000s, Stuart Hall has been central to shaping many of the cultural and political debates of our time. Essential Essays —a landmark two-volume set—brings together Stuart Hall's most influential and foundational works. Spanning the whole of his career, these volumes reflect the breadth and depth of his intellectual and political projects while demonstrating their continued vitality and importance.
Volume 1: Foundations of Cultural Studies focuses on the first half of Hall's career, when he wrestled with questions of culture, class, representation, and politics. This volume's stand-out essays include his field-defining “Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies"; the prescient “The Great Moving Right Show,” which first identified the emergent mode of authoritarian populism in British politics; and “Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse,” one of his most influential pieces of media criticism. As a whole, Volume 1 provides a panoramic view of Hall's fundamental contributions to cultural studies.
Volume 1: Foundations of Cultural Studies focuses on the first half of Hall's career, when he wrestled with questions of culture, class, representation, and politics. This volume's stand-out essays include his field-defining “Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies"; the prescient “The Great Moving Right Show,” which first identified the emergent mode of authoritarian populism in British politics; and “Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse,” one of his most influential pieces of media criticism. As a whole, Volume 1 provides a panoramic view of Hall's fundamental contributions to cultural studies.
424 pages, Hardcover
Published January 23, 2019
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About the author
Stuart Hall
189 books399 followersStuart Hall was an influential Jamaican-born British sociologist and cultural theorist. He was Professor of Sociology at the Open University, the founding editor of New Left Review, and Director of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
July 19, 2025
One of the most sticky debates within the Marxist intellectual tradition, in both the Western academic and Eastern practical schools, has been the question of how ideology functions in society. Marx and Lenin laid out some bare scaffolding, but their focus on the deep details of the economics of capitalism and the structural approach to revolution, respectively, left many questions out. Antonio Gramsci developed these questions to their height for the early 20th century, as his writings on hegemony and the way the state and "civil society" formations are tied at the hip form the basis for practically all later work in the area. From Gramsci, Althusser and his students developed the structural conception of how hegemony is constructed, the "relative autonomy' of the "superstructural instances" of society from the economy, and the question of determination. However, the French school often fell into extreme formalism, debates over the meaning of individual words, and seeking to find all answers within the pages of Capital.
Which is why finally getting around to reading Stuart Hall has been a breath of fresh air. Hall brilliantly builds off of Gramsci and Althusser's work, critiquing it where it ends up in blind alleys, but developing the vital areas where it points towards a real explanatory model of society. With so many western academic Marxists or "post-Marxists" happy to stick to endless but meaningless debates confined to the academy, Hall's work carries an urgency and attachment to the actual practices of resistance and revolutionary organizing they lack. While I don't agree with all the conclusions in every essay (nor of course would Hall himself, understanding his work as a continuous process of development), the questions he raises and the advances made in these crucial essays are vitally important for anyone seeking to build a counter-hegemonic project today.
Highly recommended
Which is why finally getting around to reading Stuart Hall has been a breath of fresh air. Hall brilliantly builds off of Gramsci and Althusser's work, critiquing it where it ends up in blind alleys, but developing the vital areas where it points towards a real explanatory model of society. With so many western academic Marxists or "post-Marxists" happy to stick to endless but meaningless debates confined to the academy, Hall's work carries an urgency and attachment to the actual practices of resistance and revolutionary organizing they lack. While I don't agree with all the conclusions in every essay (nor of course would Hall himself, understanding his work as a continuous process of development), the questions he raises and the advances made in these crucial essays are vitally important for anyone seeking to build a counter-hegemonic project today.
Highly recommended
August 16, 2020
Stuart Hall’s career as a critic and activist spanned the second half of the twentieth century and the years of the twenty-first up until his death in 2014. During that time, he set out a perspective on the world which synthesised Marxism with the insights gained from European structuralism and other sociological perspectives. All of this made him one of the most important figures in the New Left currents that emerged from disillusionment with the Soviet- inspired orthodoxy that repelled so many people after the invasion of Hungary in 1956.
This volume of his ‘Essential Essays’ sets out the positions he became committed as one of the founders of the Cultural Studies school of criticism. At the heart of his concerns was the need to establish the role that culture played in determining the lived realities of people of people at the point of time – the conjunction – which we all inhabit. The inherited version of Marxism presented the view that culture was determined by the economic forces that determined the historical mode of production. But this predicted the polarisation of society into two great camps based on their economic interests – capitalists on one hand and the working class on the other. Class struggle would produce cultures appropriate to these class interests, with the working class emerging as a revolutionary force committed to the overthrow of capitalism.
That this wasn’t the path that history took was accounted for by the concept of ‘false consciousness’, with capitalists enjoying success in imprinting on the thinking of the working class an ideology which bound them to consumerist promises of an economy which would provide all the wealth and security they needed.
The essays in this volume set out the reasoning which led Hall and his associates to break with this model of the ‘base and superstructure’ of the social system. Beginning with the work of Richard Hoggart in the 1950s, the innovators of Cultural Studies saw culture as operating in a more nuanced way, providing perspectives in which working class people could accept the basic premises of capitalist common sense about the world and the way it worked, but still nurture within their own communities outlooks and values which pitched them into episodic bouts of conflict and tension with the system. It became possible to see culture as a field of struggle which mobilised the values of community and solidarity against market consumerism at key points and opened up the possibility of a break with bourgeois common sense.
Could this point of a break be arrived at by means of a conscious left wing political strategy? The work of Raymond Williams crops up here, but even more so the perspectives of the French structuralist school that was being led by Louis Althusser. Althusser wanted to understand human culture in the way the theorists of linguistics understood language – as a system in which meaning condensed out of an array of activities and attached itself to particular ‘facts’. This was an inherently complex process with outcomes arising not for any single reasons, but as consequence of the ‘over-determination’ arising from the operation of many different factors. The events of May ’68, for example, and in particular the France’s eventual pacification with the return of de Gaulle from his temporary exile, were over-determined by ideologies rooted in the educational system, the Catholic church, the economism of the trade union movement, the way politics was discussed in the mass media, etc, etc.
Cultural Studies worked with this view (though registering scepticism about the extent to which over-determination had its roots in structures rather than social action) and it influenced the ways in which Hall and his colleagues understood the relative autonomy of each ideological sphere. This was of greatest importance in understanding how the various departments of the state could enter into conflict with the market when it came to developing commitments to providing healthcare, education, and other welfare policies on a public interest basis. For a period of a few decades the ideologues of state action could convince themselves that capitalism had been transcended and what now existed was a benign system of managed corporativism.
But Hall continued to ponder Marx’s understanding of the economy, in the last instance, being the determinant of superstructural culture. The essay “Rethinking the Base and Superstructure Metaphor’ is key to understanding his approach. His reading of the mature works of Marx’s corpus encouraged him to think of capitalism as being not so much a ‘pure’ mode of production, but an agglomeration of social forces with sufficient flexibility within the overall form of the system as to allow for a switch from the extraction of absolute surplus value, as in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to relative surplus value, marked in England by the factory legislation in the mid-1800s. “We can see in this shift as providing the baseline of solutions to the contradictions to which capitalism, as a fully established mode of production, is progressively exposed.“
“If we then attempt to think all that is involved – politically, socially, ideologically, in terms of the state, of politics, of the reproduction of skills, the degree of labour and the application of science as a ‘productive force’ as a consequence of the uneven development of this second ‘moment’ in the unfolding of capitalist accumulation (….) then we begin to see how ‘Capital’ provides the foundation for the development of a Marxist theory of the superstructures within the framework of ‘determination in the last instance’ without falling back into the identity-correspondence position in ‘The German Ideology.’
The second half of the set of essays hinge around the question of racism and the role it plays in “societies structured in dominance’. The themes already set out in the discussion about the foundations of Cultural Studies are called into play here, requiring us to understand racism, not as a single phenomenon structured by an essential antagonism between people of different ‘racial’ groups, but as something cultural specific to definite societies at particular points in their history. The extent to which it gives the appearance of being a unified force derives from the common feature of the exploitation of non-European people in the service of Western capitalist interests. This means that the racism of the slave trade, the plantation, the colonial period, and of migrant labour seems to be covered by an over-arching imperative, which Hall sets out to show needs unpicking to understand how it acquires its force at specific moments in time. “Race, Articulation, and Societies Structured in Dominance’ is the standout essay on this issue.
The final part of this volume deals with the media in contemporary society, and elaborates on Hall’s understanding on how it needs to be ‘read’ to appreciate its role in the formation of culture. Maintaining his perspective on relative autonomy and the need for specific, concrete analysis of issues, he disputes the view that it functions as an all-powerful force able to corrupt the thinking of the masses, and shows how in its populist form it works with concepts and viewpoints that mirror those already held by working class people, but edging them towards conclusions that fit in with broader, pro-market, pro-established authority perspectives. The final two essays – a preface to the 2013 edition of ‘Policing the Crisis’, and the iconic ‘Great Moving Right Show’, demonstrate the power of Hall’s analysis to set out what has come to be the enduring statements on critical political phenomena as they emerged in the UK during the phase of the crisis of the welfare state and the transition into Thatcherism.
This volume of his ‘Essential Essays’ sets out the positions he became committed as one of the founders of the Cultural Studies school of criticism. At the heart of his concerns was the need to establish the role that culture played in determining the lived realities of people of people at the point of time – the conjunction – which we all inhabit. The inherited version of Marxism presented the view that culture was determined by the economic forces that determined the historical mode of production. But this predicted the polarisation of society into two great camps based on their economic interests – capitalists on one hand and the working class on the other. Class struggle would produce cultures appropriate to these class interests, with the working class emerging as a revolutionary force committed to the overthrow of capitalism.
That this wasn’t the path that history took was accounted for by the concept of ‘false consciousness’, with capitalists enjoying success in imprinting on the thinking of the working class an ideology which bound them to consumerist promises of an economy which would provide all the wealth and security they needed.
The essays in this volume set out the reasoning which led Hall and his associates to break with this model of the ‘base and superstructure’ of the social system. Beginning with the work of Richard Hoggart in the 1950s, the innovators of Cultural Studies saw culture as operating in a more nuanced way, providing perspectives in which working class people could accept the basic premises of capitalist common sense about the world and the way it worked, but still nurture within their own communities outlooks and values which pitched them into episodic bouts of conflict and tension with the system. It became possible to see culture as a field of struggle which mobilised the values of community and solidarity against market consumerism at key points and opened up the possibility of a break with bourgeois common sense.
Could this point of a break be arrived at by means of a conscious left wing political strategy? The work of Raymond Williams crops up here, but even more so the perspectives of the French structuralist school that was being led by Louis Althusser. Althusser wanted to understand human culture in the way the theorists of linguistics understood language – as a system in which meaning condensed out of an array of activities and attached itself to particular ‘facts’. This was an inherently complex process with outcomes arising not for any single reasons, but as consequence of the ‘over-determination’ arising from the operation of many different factors. The events of May ’68, for example, and in particular the France’s eventual pacification with the return of de Gaulle from his temporary exile, were over-determined by ideologies rooted in the educational system, the Catholic church, the economism of the trade union movement, the way politics was discussed in the mass media, etc, etc.
Cultural Studies worked with this view (though registering scepticism about the extent to which over-determination had its roots in structures rather than social action) and it influenced the ways in which Hall and his colleagues understood the relative autonomy of each ideological sphere. This was of greatest importance in understanding how the various departments of the state could enter into conflict with the market when it came to developing commitments to providing healthcare, education, and other welfare policies on a public interest basis. For a period of a few decades the ideologues of state action could convince themselves that capitalism had been transcended and what now existed was a benign system of managed corporativism.
But Hall continued to ponder Marx’s understanding of the economy, in the last instance, being the determinant of superstructural culture. The essay “Rethinking the Base and Superstructure Metaphor’ is key to understanding his approach. His reading of the mature works of Marx’s corpus encouraged him to think of capitalism as being not so much a ‘pure’ mode of production, but an agglomeration of social forces with sufficient flexibility within the overall form of the system as to allow for a switch from the extraction of absolute surplus value, as in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to relative surplus value, marked in England by the factory legislation in the mid-1800s. “We can see in this shift as providing the baseline of solutions to the contradictions to which capitalism, as a fully established mode of production, is progressively exposed.“
“If we then attempt to think all that is involved – politically, socially, ideologically, in terms of the state, of politics, of the reproduction of skills, the degree of labour and the application of science as a ‘productive force’ as a consequence of the uneven development of this second ‘moment’ in the unfolding of capitalist accumulation (….) then we begin to see how ‘Capital’ provides the foundation for the development of a Marxist theory of the superstructures within the framework of ‘determination in the last instance’ without falling back into the identity-correspondence position in ‘The German Ideology.’
The second half of the set of essays hinge around the question of racism and the role it plays in “societies structured in dominance’. The themes already set out in the discussion about the foundations of Cultural Studies are called into play here, requiring us to understand racism, not as a single phenomenon structured by an essential antagonism between people of different ‘racial’ groups, but as something cultural specific to definite societies at particular points in their history. The extent to which it gives the appearance of being a unified force derives from the common feature of the exploitation of non-European people in the service of Western capitalist interests. This means that the racism of the slave trade, the plantation, the colonial period, and of migrant labour seems to be covered by an over-arching imperative, which Hall sets out to show needs unpicking to understand how it acquires its force at specific moments in time. “Race, Articulation, and Societies Structured in Dominance’ is the standout essay on this issue.
The final part of this volume deals with the media in contemporary society, and elaborates on Hall’s understanding on how it needs to be ‘read’ to appreciate its role in the formation of culture. Maintaining his perspective on relative autonomy and the need for specific, concrete analysis of issues, he disputes the view that it functions as an all-powerful force able to corrupt the thinking of the masses, and shows how in its populist form it works with concepts and viewpoints that mirror those already held by working class people, but edging them towards conclusions that fit in with broader, pro-market, pro-established authority perspectives. The final two essays – a preface to the 2013 edition of ‘Policing the Crisis’, and the iconic ‘Great Moving Right Show’, demonstrate the power of Hall’s analysis to set out what has come to be the enduring statements on critical political phenomena as they emerged in the UK during the phase of the crisis of the welfare state and the transition into Thatcherism.
December 27, 2019
no more base/superstrucure!!! necessary reading...
January 30, 2024
I have mixed feelings about this book. Hall was obviously a very clever man. These essays feel like a haphazard tour across the social sciences. The overriding theme, as far as I can discern, is to stake a claim for 'Post-Marxism'. He says that he is very influenced by Marxism, but is constantly wrestling with Marx. His disgruntlement with Marx derives from the distaste that many Western Socialists felt after the crushing of the Hungarian uprising in 1956 by the Soviet Union, and Hall's sense that Marxist thought was essentially Eurocentric and didn't apply so well in places like the West Indies that he grew up in. The other overwhelming source of disagreement is with the concept of Materialism, and the idea that it has a deterministic effect on culture; or in more technical Marxist language, the idea that the Base determines the Superstructure. Anyone who is engaged in developing an academic discipline known as 'Culture Studies' is obviously going to feel like this.
Reading this collection of essays made me very aware of the fact that I left University 20 years ago, and I can't really remember what Poststructuralism is. It begins with lots of references to British leftist thinkers like EP Thompson, Raymond Williams Richard Hoggart, but as it goes on it refers more and more often to European thinkers like Gramsci, Althusser, Foucault and Lacan. As I read these essays one thought that turned over more and more in my mind was how far removed they were from ordinary people, or the working class. The essays are extremely referential and intertextual, and you have to have a good base of background knowledge about arguments within Marxism, the ideas of Max Weber, psychoanalysis, global political history, semiology and linguistics to keep on top of what he's writing about. I have a reasonable level of understanding of these things from decades of reading across subjects and genres, but I think this places me squarely in the minority. It reminded me of what I started to find annoying about Mid to Late 20th Century European thinkers, which is how insular and removed they are from 'the people'. Marx said that "Philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it". It's clear that thinkers like Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Luxemburg and Gramsci were intellectuals and philosophers who were also men and women of action, who were actually engaged in trying to change the world for the better. A later generation of thinkers retreated to the ivory tower of academia and removed themselves from the struggle to directly fight for what they believed. They became enmeshed in more and more obtuse and rarefied intellectual pursuits, and this had a terrible effect on the struggle for social justice.
I was surprised when I came across a quote I have encountered many times “race is the modality in which class is lived". I was surprised because I encountered it in a long, extremely difficult and technical essay about debates within Marxism. I simply don't believe that most of the people who use or encounter this line again and again have read this essay. I've just Googled the expression so I could remind myself of the title of the essay this line comes from, and as if to prove my point, all of the top results are from other sources quoting the line, and you would have to dig much deeper and research further to be able to find the actual essay itself. I strongly suspect this line is being referenced often as a jab at 'class reductionist Marxism' by people who haven't read the essay, or understand the context from which it is drawn.
Part of my reservation in reading these essays by Stuart Hall is because of the time in history that I am reading them. I am reading them from a vantage point in which the New Left, of which he is a leading figure, are seen to carry some of the blame for the appalling state that the left is in today. To summarise it as I understand it, with the caveat that I haven't read most of this stuff and I am making judgements from their reputation and not from my personal understanding; The New Left emerged in the West in opposition to traditional Marxism or Socialism, which was stained by the perceived failure of the Soviet Union and its allies. Marxism was too Eurocentric, and was fixated upon the Working Class as embodied in the idea of the White, Male manual labourer. Marx was wrong in many of ideas, and the world was more complicated than he imagined. Class was not the dominant system of oppression, the idea of the primacy of the economic base over culture was flawed, and the Left should be paying more attention to inequalities inscribed in gender, race, sexuality and other markers of identity. This attitude has brought many positive developments to society over the past few decades, improving the lives of women, ethnic and sexual minorities, and challenging white supremacy, the patriarchy, heteronormality and more. On the other hand it is increasingly recognised that this turn towards issues of identity has played into the hands of the Ruling Class, deradicalized supposedly radical movements, fractured the unity of the working class and left us at the mercy of an increasingly monstrous and devastating Neo Imperial form of Capitalism that is literally destroying the Earth.
Stuart Hall was obviously much more intelligent and well read than I am. It is obvious from reading his work that he has read far more than I have, and knows Marx's work inside out. But as I was reading it I couldn't help feeling like I disagreed with his analysis on some points. For example the final essay in this collection is 'The Great Moving Right Show', which is widely regarded as a classic work, analysing and predicting the rise of Thatcherism when many of his comrades on the British Left thought she was just another manifestation of the same old Conservatism. But I don't understand his insistence that the Base does not determine the Superstructure, or that economics and production do not determine culture in the final instance. It is my understanding that the rise of the New Right, with the election of Thatcher in the UK and Reagan in the USA, the overthrow of the Keynesian consensus in favour of Neoliberalism inspired by Hayek and Friedman, is in fact an outcome of massive economic shifts caused by the Oil crises of the early 70's and Nixon dropping the Gold Standard and opening up relations with China, which eventually meant that European and American Capitalists could relocate production to Asia. As far as I am concerned the phenomenon and the culture of 'Thatcherism' is downstream from these economic conditions.
I am glad I have now read a decent chunk of Hall's work. I've been meaning to do it for years, but as it says in the introduction to this collection of essays, he doesn't really have many key, go-to books to read. There aren't many classics that are instantly associated with his name. His work is spread out in academic essays, speeches and interviews, and many of his works are collaborative rather than works of single authorship. He is a deep and thought provoking thinker and I have mixed feelings about his work, but I do respect it. But I can't say that I 'enjoyed' it, because it is very complicated academic work. Other books that I have read in the Black Marxist tradition over the past few years such as Black Jacobins by CLR James, or How Europe Underdeveloped Africa by Walter Rodney were a lot more enjoyable and I felt like they enriched my thinking and understanding a lot more, but perhaps that's just because I already more or less agreed with what they wrote before I read them.
Reading this collection of essays made me very aware of the fact that I left University 20 years ago, and I can't really remember what Poststructuralism is. It begins with lots of references to British leftist thinkers like EP Thompson, Raymond Williams Richard Hoggart, but as it goes on it refers more and more often to European thinkers like Gramsci, Althusser, Foucault and Lacan. As I read these essays one thought that turned over more and more in my mind was how far removed they were from ordinary people, or the working class. The essays are extremely referential and intertextual, and you have to have a good base of background knowledge about arguments within Marxism, the ideas of Max Weber, psychoanalysis, global political history, semiology and linguistics to keep on top of what he's writing about. I have a reasonable level of understanding of these things from decades of reading across subjects and genres, but I think this places me squarely in the minority. It reminded me of what I started to find annoying about Mid to Late 20th Century European thinkers, which is how insular and removed they are from 'the people'. Marx said that "Philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it". It's clear that thinkers like Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Luxemburg and Gramsci were intellectuals and philosophers who were also men and women of action, who were actually engaged in trying to change the world for the better. A later generation of thinkers retreated to the ivory tower of academia and removed themselves from the struggle to directly fight for what they believed. They became enmeshed in more and more obtuse and rarefied intellectual pursuits, and this had a terrible effect on the struggle for social justice.
I was surprised when I came across a quote I have encountered many times “race is the modality in which class is lived". I was surprised because I encountered it in a long, extremely difficult and technical essay about debates within Marxism. I simply don't believe that most of the people who use or encounter this line again and again have read this essay. I've just Googled the expression so I could remind myself of the title of the essay this line comes from, and as if to prove my point, all of the top results are from other sources quoting the line, and you would have to dig much deeper and research further to be able to find the actual essay itself. I strongly suspect this line is being referenced often as a jab at 'class reductionist Marxism' by people who haven't read the essay, or understand the context from which it is drawn.
Part of my reservation in reading these essays by Stuart Hall is because of the time in history that I am reading them. I am reading them from a vantage point in which the New Left, of which he is a leading figure, are seen to carry some of the blame for the appalling state that the left is in today. To summarise it as I understand it, with the caveat that I haven't read most of this stuff and I am making judgements from their reputation and not from my personal understanding; The New Left emerged in the West in opposition to traditional Marxism or Socialism, which was stained by the perceived failure of the Soviet Union and its allies. Marxism was too Eurocentric, and was fixated upon the Working Class as embodied in the idea of the White, Male manual labourer. Marx was wrong in many of ideas, and the world was more complicated than he imagined. Class was not the dominant system of oppression, the idea of the primacy of the economic base over culture was flawed, and the Left should be paying more attention to inequalities inscribed in gender, race, sexuality and other markers of identity. This attitude has brought many positive developments to society over the past few decades, improving the lives of women, ethnic and sexual minorities, and challenging white supremacy, the patriarchy, heteronormality and more. On the other hand it is increasingly recognised that this turn towards issues of identity has played into the hands of the Ruling Class, deradicalized supposedly radical movements, fractured the unity of the working class and left us at the mercy of an increasingly monstrous and devastating Neo Imperial form of Capitalism that is literally destroying the Earth.
Stuart Hall was obviously much more intelligent and well read than I am. It is obvious from reading his work that he has read far more than I have, and knows Marx's work inside out. But as I was reading it I couldn't help feeling like I disagreed with his analysis on some points. For example the final essay in this collection is 'The Great Moving Right Show', which is widely regarded as a classic work, analysing and predicting the rise of Thatcherism when many of his comrades on the British Left thought she was just another manifestation of the same old Conservatism. But I don't understand his insistence that the Base does not determine the Superstructure, or that economics and production do not determine culture in the final instance. It is my understanding that the rise of the New Right, with the election of Thatcher in the UK and Reagan in the USA, the overthrow of the Keynesian consensus in favour of Neoliberalism inspired by Hayek and Friedman, is in fact an outcome of massive economic shifts caused by the Oil crises of the early 70's and Nixon dropping the Gold Standard and opening up relations with China, which eventually meant that European and American Capitalists could relocate production to Asia. As far as I am concerned the phenomenon and the culture of 'Thatcherism' is downstream from these economic conditions.
I am glad I have now read a decent chunk of Hall's work. I've been meaning to do it for years, but as it says in the introduction to this collection of essays, he doesn't really have many key, go-to books to read. There aren't many classics that are instantly associated with his name. His work is spread out in academic essays, speeches and interviews, and many of his works are collaborative rather than works of single authorship. He is a deep and thought provoking thinker and I have mixed feelings about his work, but I do respect it. But I can't say that I 'enjoyed' it, because it is very complicated academic work. Other books that I have read in the Black Marxist tradition over the past few years such as Black Jacobins by CLR James, or How Europe Underdeveloped Africa by Walter Rodney were a lot more enjoyable and I felt like they enriched my thinking and understanding a lot more, but perhaps that's just because I already more or less agreed with what they wrote before I read them.
August 27, 2019
An excellent collection and introduction to Stuart Hall's thought. This volume emphasizes, it seems to me, Hall's indebtedness to Marxism; most essays work to stake out a place for 'culture' (lived experience and consciousness) within the tradition, with this being more pronounced toward the beginning of the volume. The latter sections delve more specifically into the relationship between language, mediation, and social power. Having only come across Hall a few times before reading this, I appreciated the explanatory introductions and meticulous editing in this collection. Everyone interested in the critical analysis of politics and society should read this.
April 29, 2024
3 stars not in a bad way just in a this is very much a *foundations* essay collection. It did somewhat elaborate on my question of what the hell structuralism actually is and whether all those Frenchies are talking in metaphor or analogy or actual substance. I also appreciated the last few essays, and they feel very relevant today. I would like more elaboration and examples, and will continue to read Hall. Happy to have started reading him although it is way too late.
October 16, 2019
A brilliant collection of essays. Stuart Hall is required reading for anyone awake & aware.
February 5, 2025
I understand why the Europeans are so mad at us now - there should be statues of this man on every street corner! We made Stephen Fry our national intellectual instead!
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews