The worldliness of Stuart Hall

This special issue of the International Journal of Cultural Studies brings together a number of articles that address the work of Stuart Hall and issues of considerable import and, in some cases, of pressing concern in various locales around the world. As such it is a collective exercise in both illustrating how Hall’s work has been received and put to work internationally and indeed in putting Hall’s work right back to work. To my mind this is part of the second stage of responses to the passing of the towering figure of Stuart Hall. The first stage was one of grief, celebration and remembrance: mourning the loss of Hall as intellectual figure; celebration of a life so well and productively lived; acknowledgement of his almost immeasurable contributions to the field of cultural studies and beyond; remembrance of his wit, his articulate and passionate engagement and dedication to social justice, his friendship, his mentorship, his humility. Upon Hall’s passing a torrent of tributes poured out from various sources, traditional and new media journals (Cultural Studies, Radical Philosophy, Inter-Asia, Identities); blogs of journals and publishing houses (Verso blog; Theory, Culture & Society), newspapers (the British newspaper, the Guardian carried a particularly extensive set); progressive news and commentary outlets (Left Socialist Blog; truthout; Active Voice; open democracy) and individual academics and intellectuals (innumerable mentions and reflections on Facebook pages and on Twitter – a striking example being Gil Rodman, who posted a different quote from Hall’s work every day for 50 straight days, each one as profound and thought provoking as the last). His biography was told and retold in tribute after tribute, each working as an inflected reiteration of the last, each an exclamation mark at the end of the story of his passing, each seemingly attempting the impossible: recalling the whole of the man and his works, keeping him alive in the very telling of his passing, rushing in in the vain attempt to fill what Annie Paul (2014) so poetically and trenchantly described as a ‘Stuart Hall-shaped hole in the universe’.

That was the first stage. The second stage, while less raw, is also very difficult and stretches far out into the future: it involves going on doing cultural studies after Stuart Hall. More specifically, it involves doing work on Stuart Hall and/or cultural studies work that draws substantially on Hall without the guarantee that he will be out there, working as something of a beacon on the cutting edge of sociocultural and political developments. Of course we still have much of Stuart Hall with us to undertake this work – his books and book chapters, articles, interviews, talks and lectures – his work audio and video-recorded and in print. And we have all the previous work by others about him, from budding scholars (e.g. Hussey, 2014) to seasoned academics who have elaborated on aspects of his theoretical and intellectual work (e.g. Wise [2003] on ‘Reading Hall reading Marx’; Alexander [2009] on ‘Stuart Hall and “race”’, and perhaps most frequently, insistently, engagingly, Grossberg [most recently, Grossberg, 2015b]) to those who have critiqued him, read against the grain of his thought and image text (e.g. Rojek, 1998). Early signs and examples of work in this second stage are to be found in journal special issues (e.g. Grossberg’s special issue of Cultural Studies which focuses primarily on Hall and the relationship between cultural studies and communications studies [see Grossberg, 2015a] and Kuan-Hsing Chen’s 2015 issue of Inter-Asia on reflections on Hall and reception of his work at various locales around the world [see Chen, 2015]).

Hall never subscribed to the idea of radical breaks and it is fitting that we should not see these two stages as simply distinct: rather, they bleed into one another. Thus, for example, Chen’s (2014) editorial eschews discussion of the essays and is instead a tribute titled ‘Editorial introduction: in memory of Stuart Hall (1932–2014)’ and several of the essays in the collection are brief combinations of tribute and discussion of Hall’s work. In the case of the Cultural Studies issue Grossberg (2015a: 1) declares that ‘this is not an issue aimed at memorializing Stuart Hall but one simply aimed at remembering him’, and also eschews discussion of the essays, which include tributes to Hall and essays on the worldliness of cultural studies, the relationship between cultural studies and communications studies, and the life, times and demise of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies – thus some directly and others only tangentially about Stuart Hall.

This present collection, coming as it does with the passage of some time after Hall’s passing, nudges us further and more firmly into the second stage, based on the reception of Hall’s work in various locales around the world, and especially on putting Hall’s work to work in addressing issues of import and organized around what we might refer to as the worldliness of Stuart Hall. Like the shift from Richard Johnson’s (1996) ‘What is cultural studies anyway?’ to Meaghan Morris’s (1997) ‘What does cultural studies do?’, ¹ the shift in emphasis here is from ‘Who was (is?) Stuart Hall?’ to ‘What does Stuart Hall’s work do (and what can we do with it)?’ The consideration is of Hall’s work as ‘worldly’ both in the naïve sense of the international scope of its reception (imbricated as that is with the international spread of cultural studies) and in the more specifically Saidian (Hall, 1992; Said, 1983) sense of it not only having theoretical meaning but having impact on praxis in the development of the field of cultural studies and on our thinking about and intellectual work on social and political developments around the world by its very existence.

As a loose organizing frame, the worldliness of Stuart Hall is represented here with British bookends in the form of essays by Glenn Jordan and Chris Weedon. We open with Jordan’s article, ‘Beyond essentialism: on Stuart Hall and Black British arts’ in which Jordan employs Hall’s method of conjunctural analysis to examine the Black art movement in Britain, asserting importantly that Hall favoured an anti-essentialist conception of blackness but that ultimately, with its the strongly Afrocentric orientation, this stage of the movement (1980s and 1990s) remained resistant to Hall’s reconceptualization of blackness. It is only fitting to start in Britain, which is the focus and context of virtually all of Hall’s work and where he spent most of his life. Finally, the topic of the theorization and politics of artistic expression reflects Hall’s preference for political, intellectual and artistic work over academic work (and indeed Jordan himself, as a photographer and academic, is a figure who traverses both worlds and indeed brings them together in his work). We can in fact take up these various strands from Jordan’s article in our consideration of the other articles.

In ‘Stuart Hall and the tension between academic and intellectual work’, the article following Jordan’s, Ien Ang weaves in an autobiographical account in taking up this last issue of the relationship between intellectual and academic work. Geographically speaking, consideration of Hall’s influence on Ang involves a consideration of Hall’s influence on cultural studies in Holland and Australia (Ang’s early and present career locations). Stuart Hall held firmly that while they can be closely related and abut or even overlap with one another, progressive academic and intellectual work are not synonymous, and he held the latter to be much more important. For Hall, the university was initially simply another site at which to undertake political struggle and he later declared it to be where he earned his money so he could pursue intellectual work. It is not surprising, then, that Ang recounts Hall advising her early on against pursuing a PhD (the context being the sweeping success of her first book, Watching Dallas, which was based on her MA thesis). Ang ended up not taking that advice, recognizing that the PhD was a passport to the academic ranks and was in fact needed in order to do cultural studies in the academy, a passport she has used not only to produce her own work but also to extend and promote cultural studies nationally, including establishing the Institute for Culture and Society at the University of Western Sydney. Her account traces variously Hall’s relationship with, influence on and ambivalence about the academy and academic work (as opposed to intellectual work); the institutionalization of cultural studies (with an emphasis on the Australian context), the contrast between American and British cultural studies and academism and the difficulties of undertaking academic cultural studies in the present age of neoliberalism. By early in the 21st century, Ang stresses, Stuart Hall was disillusioned with the British left and with cultural studies and was sustained by a personal turn to an engagement with the arts.

Ang’s article addresses cultural studies principally as academic work in Britain and in Australia and, while the two locations are quite distant geographically, Australia, with its history as a post-colony of Britain and early and direct involvement in the evolution of cultural studies, is very much a part of cultural studies’ academic mainstream, if not its centre. In the next article, ‘Stuart Hall from/in Latin America’, Daniel Mato invites us to cultural studies’ periphery and continues in some ways with Ang’s theme of the tension between academic and intellectual work. Mato traces the reception and, necessarily, the translation of Hall’s work and the development of academic and intellectual Latin American studies from the 1960s to the present. Although he does not stress it in this article, the Latin American context brings to the fore one of the core problems of global cultural studies, namely the fact that English was and continues to be virtually the exclusive language in which cultural studies work is written and engaged. ² Mato speaks to the reception of Stuart Hall’s work not in a specific country but in the region of Latin America more generally. In part the article is a chronological tale about the contribution of Hall’s work and thought to an emergent formation: Latin American cultural studies. However, such a reading would be partial, oversimplistic and even misleading. Mato’s tale is not one of mere ready appropriation but rather one of disjointed and critical engagement of Stuart Hall’s work. Represented in his chronological survey of the reception of Hall in Latin America are not only scholars who readily identify with cultural studies but also those who could be identified as cultural studies scholars but who do not actively self-identify as such and others still who are outside of or resistant to the cultural studies project. Represented in the essay are those who read and incorporate Hall into their work and others who reject both him and cultural studies. Even Latin American studies is not taken up by Mato as a given but rather explored as a conscious construction (bringing together the social sciences and humanities). As such, a consideration of Hall’s influence addresses Morris’s question in a more detailed manner – what does Stuart Hall (and by extension, cultural studies) do in Latin American studies? Mato touches on the importance of face-to-face interaction in contributing to the emergence and promotion of cultural studies in Latin America. In particular, he highlights the Cultural Boundaries conference (held at the University of Stirling, 1996), the first time Stuart Hall, Néstor García Canclini and Jesus Martín-Barbaro met in person, the Third International Crossroads in Cultural Studies conference (in Birmingham, UK, 2000), which several Latin American scholars attended and, lastly, Hall’s presence and presentation at the Brazil Association of Comparative Literature (in Bahia, 2000) as particularly generative for reception of and engagement with Hall’s work and cultural studies in the Latin American context.

Keyan Tomaselli takes us to another far-flung outpost of cultural studies, namely continental Africa, or, more specifically, South Africa. And if face-to-face interaction is as critical for the development and promotion of cultural studies and the reception of Hall’s work as Mato asserts, then it must be acknowledged that Africa is at a distinct disadvantage. I know of only one documented account of Hall’s presence on the continent, a 1997 workshop/conference on Identities, Democracy, Culture and Communication in Southern Africa (University of Natal). Nevertheless there is a formation we can call African Cultural Studies to which academics and intellectuals both on the continent and in the African diaspora contribute (Tomaselli and Wright, 2011; Wright, 2004) and of which South African cultural studies is the most well-established, well-financed and vibrant constituent part. Indeed, Tomaselli is one of the earliest contributors to African cultural studies (and a cultural studies approach to media studies in South Africa). In his contribution to this collection, ‘Encoding/decoding and a court of law’, Tomaselli provides an account of how the transmission model was utilized in a court case in South Africa which pitted the Minister of Defence against the End Conscription Campaign. While it was the minister’s lawyer who initially introduced the transmission model into the court case, their side was eventually defeated, in part through the employment of a blend of Hall’s encoding/decoding and C.S. Peirce’s theory of the interpreter and the interpretant. Hall’s encoding/decoding has of course been discussed and taught quite widely since Hall first published it in 1973. Tomaselli’s article is distinct as an account of a concrete example of putting Hall’s theory to work in intellectual and indeed activist praxis. Beyond accepting the theory as is, however, the case adds the wrinkles of combining it with an earlier theory, as well as a caution about simply accepting (let alone applying) Hall’s theory as conceptually and universally adequate and applicable.

Keeping with Tomaselli’s theme of putting Hall’s work to work, Mikko Lehtnonen in ‘“What’s going on in Finland?” Employing Stuart Hall for a conjunctural analysis’, takes us to Finland and back to conjunctural analysis (the specific notion and methodology with which Jordan started us off). Lehtonen has been an active contributor to the evolution of Nordic Cultural Studies (a regional formation epitomized by Eskola and Vainikkala’s [1994] special issue, Nordic Cultural Studies) and, by translating Stuart Hall’s work into Finnish, to the spread of Hall’s work in Finland and into Finnish cultural studies and, by extension, Nordic cultural studies. In his contribution to this collection, Lehtonen employs both articulation and conjunctural analysis in an attempt to make meaning of the relatively recent turn to the right in Finnish politics and the popularity of right-wing parties among the populace. Taking as his premise the idea that it is not culture as an end in itself that is of interest to cultural studies but rather the study of culture as a means of understanding power relations (the articulation of the economic, the political and the cultural), Lehtonen indicates that a cultural studies approach can be used to understand the current political paradox in which Finns have turned their backs on the left but are still ardent supporters of the state welfare system historically advocated by the left. The problem (the middle-class attraction to globalization, neoliberalization and neo-nationalism) demands a solution which in turn involves the left developing and representing itself as a viable alternative, one that involves a renewal of the left (including broadening its politics to address wider sociocultural difference), and a projection of alternatives to rightist nationalism, to the fetishization of the economy as the absolute determinant of social and cultural activities and well-being, etc.

In my own contribution to the collection (Wright, ‘Stuart Hall’s relevance for the study of African blackness’), I return us to the African continent and to the problematic of black identity covered by Jordan. Black identity is usually engaged as a diasporic concern. Continental blackness is usually not engaged in any sustained manner since it is the presumed temporal and geographical premise and foundation (originary, essential, given) upon which the potential complexity of diasporic blackness is built. In my article I challenge this assumption, using Stuart Hall’s work on the complexity of (diasporic) black identity and his albeit few pronouncements on Africa and concrete examples of popular culture (the music scene in West Africa) to argue that continental African identity, especially cultural identity, is far more complex and nuanced than is usually allowed in (mostly passing) references. Hall’s preference for routes rather than roots of identity, I observe, helps to underscore the conception of blackness as point of identification rather than given identity (emphasizing that phenotypical blackness hardly registers in so-called black Africa). I point to the spectre of ebola in West Africa as backdrop to my discussion and conclude that continued misrepresentation of continental blackness has implications for and beyond identity and identity politics.

The final paper in the collection, Chris Weedon’s ‘Stuart Hall, the British multicultural question and the case of western jihadi brides’ brings us full circle, back to Britain. Where Jordan started us off with a consideration of Hall’s contributions to understanding a recent historical slice of an ongoing movement in Britain, Weedon ends the collection by inviting us to consider a particularly immediate and pressing problematic, namely the phenomenon of jihadi brides. Stuart Hall has been dubbed ‘the father of British multiculturalism’, a mantle he undoubtedly found uncomfortable, even though he did indeed make important contributions to the conceptualization of what he referred to as ‘the multicultural question’ in the British context (e.g. Hall, 2000) and Weedon takes up multiculturalism in general and Hall’s work on multiculturalism and his preference for case studies as a methodology, to make meaning of the phenomenon of jihadi brides.

In taking up the worldliness of Stuart Hall, therefore, we are in part conceptualizing him as a global intellectual figure, a designation that is simultaneously quite apt and very awkward. It is apt to represent Hall as a global intellectual because, as the articles in this collection illustrate, his work has been taken up quite widely in the formation of cultural studies and in addressing questions of culture and power in locales across the world. The articles represent a complex international span in terms of the work of authors and their national contexts (e.g. an African-American working long term in Wales in the case of Jordan, a Sierra Leonean teaching in Canada in my case, an Indonesian Chinese who worked first in Holland and now Australia in the case of Ang and a Venezuelan working in the Argentinian academy in the case of Mato), in terms of addressing specific topics in those specific national contexts (e.g. the turn to the right in Finnish politics in Lehtonen’s piece and how Hall’s notion of encoding/decoding has been employed in a court case in South Africa in Tomaselli’s), and in regional and transnational scope (e.g. continental African blackness in the context of the continent’s relationship with and the making of the black diaspora in the case of my article, or the globalization of so called Jihadi militancy (spread internationally and in and through cyberspace via social media) in the case of Weedon’s contribution. ).

On the other hand, it is decidedly awkward to represent Hall as a global intellectual figure because he never presented himself as a global figure: he was always modestly concerned with understanding British or, even more specifically, English culture, institutions and society. In fact, despite his many and insightful contributions, he positioned himself as an insider/outsider: in an interview with Zoe Williams (2012) he declared, ‘I am not English and I never will be. I came to England as a means of escape, and it was a failure.’ That escape was from colonial Jamaica and a racially stratified society and elitist family. While he visited several times, Hall never did return to Jamaica to live and he has pointed out his astonishment at developments, such as the news being read in Creole. Beyond this and a few other observations (made only upon direct prompting, for example during interviews), Hall did not cover Jamaica in his work and, if he was reluctant to address his homeland of Jamaica, he was understandably equally reticent about making sustained pronouncements about other places. In sum, Hall is undoubtedly a global intellectual figure, not because he aspired let alone declared himself to be, but because the reception and application of his work around the world have made him a global intellectual.

This collection collectively illustrates the worldliness of Stuart Hall, his stature as a particularly influential global intellectual. The articles begin to provide a response to our adaptation of Morris’s (1997) question, ‘What does cultural studies do?’, namely, ‘What does Stuart Hall’s work do (and what can we do with it)?’ They constitute a modest illustration of what we, as cultural studies scholars across the world, must do in this long second phase after the passing of Stuart Hall: go on theorizing, go on doing cultural studies, go on employing Stuart Hall, without guarantees.