Stuart McPhail Hall, FBA was a Jamaican-born cultural theorist, political activist and sociologist who lived and worked in the United Kingdom from 1951. Hall, along with Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams, was one of the founding figures of the school of thought that is now known as British Cultural Studies or The Birmingham School of Cultural Studies.
Background
Hall was born in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1932 and was the youngest of three children. His father, Herman, was the chief accountant for the United Fruit Company in Jamaica. His mother, Jessie, was a homemaker from white British ancestry, who had been born in a poor household but was raised by an uncle who was a prominent lawyer.
Education
After graduating from Jamaica College, Hall was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to study at Merton College in Oxford in 1951. Hall was impressed by the flourishing class of West Indians living in England. They gave him a sense of belonging and reaffirmed for the first time his West Indian cultural identity. There he explored his cultural roots and even played piano in a jazz group made up of two West Indian bus drivers. As a student, Hall got involved with the BBC's World Service Radio program in the late 1950s and broadcast with Caribbean writers George Lamming and V. S. Naipaul.
Career
Hall's arrival in England coincided with the emergence of a strong anti-colonial ferment among the Caribbean students and immigrants living in the country. He became involved with the many groups protesting the British colonial presence in the Caribbean. It was this awareness and involvement that led to his study of political theory and the works of Karl Marx, Antonio Gramsci, and Michel Foucault. In 1956 he became the first editor of the New Left Review, a publication that departed from some of the postulates of the classic left and tried to reclaim the importance of culture within economic and political constructs. It also looked at the process of cultural production as it relates to popular culture and asserted that the Soviet Union was just another imperial power trying to take over the world. Hall went on to receive a doctoral degree in American literature at Oxford.
Hall started teaching film and allied media at Chelsea College in London in 1964. He was one of the first scholars to introduce and legitimize the study of popular culture texts within academic settings. His emphasis on the culture that develops and emerges from texts such as radio, television, advertising, and film served as the basis for the later development of the fields of cultural and communication studies in Great Britain. His book Popular Arts (1964) is considered one of the classics in the early analysis of popular culture and cultural studies.
The next step in Hall's career was his appointment as a research fellow at Birmingham's Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in 1968. Along with Richard Hoggart, director of the center, Hall continued setting ground for the development of cultural studies. After Hoggart stepped down, Hall became the center's director from 1968 to 1979. His emphasis on including race, ethnicity, colonialism, and migration as key realms of cultural studies added a significant depth and breadth to the discipline. In 1979, after a period of confrontation with scholars who wanted to introduce a feminist viewpoint into the mission and the research being conducted at the center, Hall left the directorship and took a position as professor of sociology with the Open University.
The Open University is Britain's institution for nontraditional students. Hall was ready to adapt and broaden the theoretical constructs and research that he had developed at Birmingham and make it available to the older nontraditional students who attended the institution. He wanted to use his skills as a lecturer and speaker to positively impact these students. Around this time, Hall became interested in the possible election of a conservative government in Great Britain and the potential negative effects that it could have on the poor and ethnic minorities. In his book Policing the Crisis (1978), Hall warned about the potential dangers of electing a government that wanted to gain support on the basis of a false appeal to Britain's traditions and patriotism. He voiced his concerns that Thatcher and her followers were selling the idea that England needed to be rebuilt. They crafted an appeal to British traditional society that excluded the poor, ethnic minorities, and anyone who fell beyond the white mainstream, and they failed to acknowledge changes in the racial and class landscape of Great Britain. Hall warned early on about the potential of electing a government that would cast the blame of Britain's ills on the poor and the disenfranchised.
After Thatcher's election, Hall was proven correct as the new prime minister sought to appeal to the masses by blaming the poor for Britain's problems and by trying to push the underclasses and the underprivileged out of Great Britain's mainstream society. Hall developed the word "Thatcherism" to characterize the prime minister's racial policies and ideologies. He was a vocal critic of her work and became a central commentator in the British media. During these years he gained a great deal of visibility and credibility among the general public who watched him do his commentaries on British television.
Hall retired from active teaching at the Open University in 1997 and is now a professor emeritus. He lectures often in the United States and throughout Europe. He is co-editor of Soundings, a new publication that comments on culture and the arts.
Personality
Hall's work has had a significant implication for the understanding of the social and psychological processes that evolve from the relationship between culture and society. His theories are based on the assumption that cultures are constantly dynamic and changing. He has demonstrated that the economic forces of any society are key in shaping its culture. Hall has provided strong arguments to demonstrate that people with access to the means of production are likely to play a key, and often oppressive, role in shaping cultures by influencing the nature of the messages constructed through the media. Mainstream media messages often exclude, misconstrue, or fail to acknowledge people with different ethnicities and races. They are designed to protect and promote the interests of the power elite. His work in the area of media representation is one of the most important paradigms in the study and understanding of media representation today.
Quotes from others about the person
According to recent profiles in the British newspaper The Guardian, Hall's interests in race and class relationships may have been motivated by his early life experiences. He was the darkest-skinned child in the family and, as a result, was considered a "coolie." In addition, family relations were always strained by his mother's feeling that she deserved more than what his father could give to her and the family. His mother venerated British cultural traditions and practices and rejected native Jamaican ones. Another factor was his oldest sister's nervous breakdown, which occurred when the family forbade her to date a young, middle-class Barbadian medical student attending school in Jamaica because of race and class prejudices.