An Ongoing Conversation

by Tony Venezia

 

Anyone writing a novel about the British intellectual Left, who began by looking around for some exemplary fictional figure to link its various trends and phases, would find themselves spontaneously reinventing Stuart Hall.

— Terry Eagleton, ‘The hippest’, London Review of Books 18:5 (7 March 1996), 3.

 

Terry Eagleton’s mildly backhanded compliment still manages to capture something of Stuart Hall’s historical importance to post-war Left-wing thought in this country.  Hall seemed to act as a conduit between the many diverse currents of the Left.  By now the biography has been thoroughly rehearsed and repeated: a Caribbean Rhodes scholar, who in the 1950s played a pivotal role within the New Left; an important figure in the emergent new field of cultural studies within the academy in the 1960s and 1970s. In the 1980s Hall dissected Thatcher and Thatcherism as ‘authoritarian populism’, a sign of ‘New Times’; in the 1990s he continued to offer incisive commentary on diaspora and identity. More recently Hall has been involved with After Neoliberalism: The Kilburn Manifesto, an attempt to map our own post-crash environment and suggest an alternative political vision.

It’s this discursive character that is surely Hall’s defining quality and lasting legacy, rather than, say, the superficial interpretation of his life and work as an authoritative origin for the discipline of cultural studies (a narrative Hall himself disputed). There is no point trying to isolate a ‘Hallian’ approach.  His work was far too sharp and self-aware to lapse into consumable canned theory. Instead Hall’s inheritances undoubtedly derive from his practice; in the ongoing collaborations that refined his thinking in collective events and publications. At the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham Hall oversaw the production of group research developed collaboratively by staff and students. This continued when Hall moved to the Open University, an institution whose aims and structures were arguably better able to facilitate Hall’s ongoing activities.

The collective contexts of the production of Hall’s works are not just a backdrop, but are crucial to understanding the pluralist political arguments that those works made.  Hall’s publications frequently took the form of proceedings and anthologies, often edited in collaboration with others, to which Hall usually contributed pieces (sometimes jointly authored). This means that his extensive writing is necessarily dispersed, preferring the essay form over the monograph. For those encountering him for the first time, this unfinished feel can be a little disorientating. But it is ultimately liberating, daring us to engage. This approach allowed Hall constantly to revise and elaborate his positions, and to make topical interventions that the long lead-time of the monograph prevents.

That sense of dispersal can also be found in John Akomfrah’s film, The Stuart Hall Project (2013), which was released only last year but which now has the air of a testimonial. The film creates an archival collage: its mixture of snippets of Hall from television and radio with news footage, home movies and family photos, held together by the rhythmic pulse of Miles Davis’ music, results in a loose, remixed feel that is entirely in keeping with its subject. One talking-head moment features Hall discussing the notion of identity as an ‘endless, ongoing conversation with those around you’. This is Stuart Hall’s greatest gift to us: his work endures as an ongoing conversation with generations of contemporary and future thinkers.

 

 

Dr Tony Venezia is co-founder of the University of London's Contemporary Fiction Seminar and co-editor of forthcoming anthologies of essays on Twenty-First Century Fiction and on China Miéville. He is completing a book on history in the graphic narratives of Alan Moore.

 

Image by Diane Griffiths under a CC BY-ND license.

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