| Administrative History | Stuart McPhail Hall was born on 3 February 1932 in Jamaica. He was the son of Herman McPhail Hall, accountant at the Jamaican subsidiary of United Fruit, and his wife, Jessie. He was of mixed African, Scottish, and Portuguese descent. He had a brother and sister, both of whom were older than him. He won a scholarship to Jamaica College, and won a Rhodes scholarship to Merton College at Oxford, travelling to Britain in 1951. He read English at Oxford and graduated in 1954. He began work on a DPhil on Henry James, but was becoming increasingly interested in British politics, and in culture, and moved to London in 1957. This move coincided with his appointment as joint founding editor of the Universities and Left Review, later renamed the New Left Review. He went on the first Aldermaston march in 1958 and became extremely active in both the 'new left' and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, devoting most of his time to them. He taught English at Stockwell secondary modern school and later was a lecturer in film and mass media studies at Chelsea College, part of London University. One of the concerns of the Universities and Left Review and the New Left Review was to understand and analyse cultural change, and especially popular culture. Hall later described this period as the beginning of cultural studies. He was also concerned by British responses to colonial migration during this period, and particularly with the level of awareness of the history of empire.
In 1963 Hall met Catherine Mary Barrett (b. 1946), who was also involved with CND. They married in December 1964, and had two children, Becky (b. 1968) and Jess (b. 1971). Catherine became a member of a women's liberation group in Birmingham, and later formed a collaborative feminist history research group. She later became an acclaimed historian, working on race, gender, and empire, and leading a project on legacies of British slave-ownership.
Stuart Hall joined the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham in 1964 at the invitation of its director, Richard Hoggart. He took over from Hoggart as acting director in 1968, and was Director from 1973 to 1979. In his work at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies he developed ideas set out in 'The Popular Arts' which he co-wrote with Paddy Whannel in 1964, and expanded the scope of cultural studies to deal with race and gender, helping to incorporate new ideas derived from the work of French theorists. He saw cultural studies as multidisciplinary, and in popular rather than elitist terms. He was particularly influenced by Raymond Williams and by the Italian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci, and was interested in culture's relationship with politics and power. His writings usually took the form of collaborations with others, often graduate students of the Centre, and he helped to shape the terms of debate on the media, deviancy, race, politics, Marxism, and critical theory. His output included a number of collectively written and edited volumes, essays and journalism, political speeches, and radio and television talks.
He left Birmingham in 1979 to become Professor of Sociology at the Open University, and held this post until his retirement in 1997. He was appointed emeritus professor in 1998. At the Open University he established a series of courses in communications and sociology, and increasingly his own focus was on questions of race and postcolonialism, and on theorising the migrant view of Britain. Hall also analysed the policies of Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government, elected in 1979, and created the term Thatcherism in an article in Marxism Today, a few months before her election victory. Following on from his work 'Policing the Crisis' (1978), subsequent writings emphasised the role of race in Thatcherite politics, especially in relation to law and order policies, which he characterised as 'authoritarian populism'.
Stuart Hall was a member of a number of public bodies, and from 1997-2000 he served on the Runnymede Commission on the Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain. In retirement, he was also able to devote more time to work with the black arts movement, workinng with artists and film-makers exploring the politics of black subjectivity. He was Chair of Autograph (the Association of Black Photographers) and the International Institute of Visual Arts. He also helped to secure funding for Rivington Place in East London, which was dedicated to public education in multicultural issues. His involvement in the black arts movement gave him new intellectual outlets, and his life and work was reflected in the film produced by John Akomfrah, in the form of a gallery installation, 'The Unfinished Conversation' (2012) and in a film, 'The Stuart Hall Project' (2013).
In 1995 he became one of the founding editors of Soundings: a Journal of Politics and Culture, which he continued to edit. He suffered from increasing ill-health following his diagnosis with kidney disease in the 1980s which resulted in dialysis and, eventually, a kidney transplant. Treatment for this condition took up his time and energy, and eventually restricted his ability to take part in public life. However, he continued working until the end of his life, and collaborated with colleagues at Soundings to issue the Kilburn manifesto for post neoliberal life, in 2013.
His published work includes the collaborative volumes Resistance Through Rituals (1975); Culture, Media, Language (1980); Politics and Ideology (1986); The Hard Road to Renewal (1988); New Times (1989); Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies (1996); and Different: A Historical Context: Contemporary Photographers and Black Identity (2001). He became a Fellow of the British Academy in 2005.
Stuart Hall died on 10 February 2014
Sources: Guardian obituary by David Morley and Bill Schwarz, https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/feb/10/stuart-hall. Accessed January 2019; Oxford DNB entry by Martin Jacques, https://doi.org/10.1093/odnb/9780198614128.013.107673. Accessed January 2019 |
| Custodial History | The archive was kept by Stuart Hall in his home in London and some sorting took place during the last few years of his life. Nick Beech produced a preliminary list of contents based on this work, and also produced a bibliography of Stuart Hall's output, available on the website of the Stuart Hall Foundation:
http://stuarthallfoundation.org/professor-stuart-hall-2/bibliography/ |