Obituary for Stuart Hall

Abstract

There have been many obituaries for Stuart Hall—the great cultural theorist and public intellectual, who died in February—all remarking on the wider significance of his work and life, especially his unrelenting commitment to social justice and his wonderful humanity. He was successful not only in extending the borders of social science, and cultural studies in particular, but in doing so in such brilliant and accessible ways as to make him possibly the leading public intellectual of the left for some decades. I had the great good fortune to work with him after he joined the Open University in 1979 and to become aware at first hand of the nature and wider significance of his work and life, and of the breadth of his impact. Stuart was in many ways both an iconic and an exemplary figure in social science, especially—but far from exclusively—in the UK, where he worked all his adult life, having arrived as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford from Jamaica in the early 1950s. His contribution stretched over 50 years and he was still going strong until shortly before his death, with the publication of ‘After Neoliberalism: the Kilburn manifesto’, which he wrote with Doreen Massey and Mike Rustin and published last April (available online at www.lwbooks.co.uk/journals/soundings/manifesto.html); typically, this was a stringent and original analysis combined with possibilities of alternatives. It is interesting that this work emerged in the aftermath of a massive and qualitative shift in the nature of capitalism that outstrips the boundaries of current theorizing in fundamental respects, for in some ways it mirrors the political earthquakes that emerged at the beginning of his stay in England, brought about by the quasi-simultaneous eruptions of the Suez crisis and the Hungarian revolution—the one with its dramatic signalling of the end of the imperial world and the other with the devastation of the only realistic alternative to capitalism. They changed not just the focus of politics, but that of existing ways of thinking about politics. These crises forced redefinitions of both the foci and nature of left politics in Britain, and it was in this context that new forms and organs of left theorizing quickly emerged—in particular, perhaps, in the form of the New Left Review, whose first 10 issues Stuart edited (often after days of supply teaching). The whole political landscape was transformed, not just with the search for new understandings of politics, but new practices, for instance in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, of which Stuart was a prominent member, and increasingly of feminist movements. There was a pervasive but unarticulated sense that programmes based on the idea of ‘redistribution’ were no longer sufficient in what were seen—and