Profile

What was the time period like?:

Born in Jamaica in 1932 with African, Portuguese, Indian, Scottish, and Jewish ancestry. Growing up in Jamaica when it was a British colony, meaning it was ruled by the British and ultimately was a possession of the British Crown. Stuart grew up in a fairly middle class family: his father was an accountant for the United Fruit Company, which was a powerful American corporation.

His parents were snobbish about who him and his siblings could hang out with. They instructed them not to befriend people darker-skinned than themselves. Stuart rebelled against that, and it made him reject the society he grew up in. Which lead to reading more widely, including the work of Communist theoretician Karl Marx. Stuart did well at school and in 1951 won a scholarship to the University of Oxford.

Stuart was the editor of New Left Review in its early years. The work was busy and Stuart was in constant conversations with friends and colleagues, including the famous historian E.P. Thompson. He was involved with activism. For instance, supporting French students who opposed the war to retain control of Algeria. After several years, Stuart resigned from the New Left Review.

After resigning from New Left Review he began to work in academia as a researcher, writer, and teacher. He joined the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham and by 1968 was the director.

Through the 1960s and 1970s, he wrote various books and articles about socialist politics (such as May Day Manifesto) and theoretical work about how we should understand culture and entertainment in a capitalist society.

In the 1980s, Stuart became a professor at the Open University. He wrote more essays on British politics. He was strongly against the Thatcher government but concerned that her opponents in the Labour Party and social movements seemed unable to beat her. One of his most famous essays from these years was called ‘The Great Moving Right Show’, which discussed the reasons for Thatcher’s election victory in 1979. It was published in a magazine called Marxism Today, which was run by other famous academics like Eric Hobsbawm and which tried to adapt Marxism in new ways.

Stuart worked closely with Marxism Today for a long time. He made some television programmes during the 1980s, where he sought to educate more people about Marxism and the Caribbean.

Stuart Hall was the first person to use the word Thatcherism!

During this time, he also began to write in new ways about race and racial identity. He developed ideas about how people can have different and sometimes conflicting identities at the same time: like he was Jamaican or Caribbean, but at the same time he was British. Stuart argued that society needed to challenge colonialism not just as a political relationship but also a cultural order which presented British culture as superior to others. He argued that society needed to develop and be more accepting of mixed or “hybrid” identities.

During the 1990s, Stuart continued to work in academia, and founded a new journal called Soundings. He also wrote about British politics. For a time, he thought Tony Blair might be a good leader for the British Left, but quickly became very disillusioned with his government and became very critical of it.