Stuart Henry McPhail Hall
Stuart Hall was born on February 3, 1932 in Kingston, Jamaica to parents of mixed-race African, Indian and British descent. From an early age he was made very aware of race and color.
He was a British Marxist, Cultural Theorist and Political Activist.
Stuart Hall, along with Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams, was one of the founding figures of Birmingham School of Cultural Studies. Further, Hall studied at Jamaica College until he was awarded a Rhodes scholarship to attend Merton College at the Oxford University in 1951, where he studied English and obtained a Master of Arts degree. Hall began on PhD on Henry James at Oxford but he abandoned his work in 1957 or 1958 to focus on his political work and in 1957, he joined Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament(CND) and it was on a CND march that he met his future wife. From 1958 to 196, Hall taught at a London Secondary Modern School and in adult education, and in 1964 married Catherine Hall, who was a feminist professor of Modern British History at University College London, with whom he had 2 children.
During his lifetime (1960-70) he was a part of two important movements:-
(1) Black Arts Movement – Which was an American-African led movement which looked into identity and the pride of black people.
(2) New Left Movement – Which was the opposition party to the then prevalent Conservative Party, being the leftist the conservative party(Ruling Party), of that time and he was in opposition to Margaret Thatcher(Leader), hence they coined a term which is famously known as “Thatcherism”.
In 1960, Hall was founder of the influential Journal “New Left Review” which talked about social issues, political rights, gender roles and many other issues of the working class people.
He joined the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies(CCCS) at Birmingham University in 1964 at Hoggart’s invitation. Hall took over from Hoggart as acting director of the CCCS in 1968, became its director in 1972 and remained there until 1979.
In 1964, Hall wrote his first book, “The Popular Arts” with Paddy Whannel, which was based on the British Film Institute( the case for the serious study of film as entertainment). In 1968, he published “The Hippies: An American Movement”, which was one of the first studies of the impact of that American counter culture phenomenon.
In 1979, he took a position as Professor of Sociology at the Open University in London which he held until his retirement in 1997. During these 20 years, he wrote a number of influential articles in the years that followed including “Situating Marx: Evaluations and Departures” in 1972 and the most important “Encoding and Decoding in Television Discourse” in 1973.
He also contributed to the book “Policing the Crisis” in 1978 and coedited the influential”Resistance Through Rituals ” in 1975, “The Hard Road to Renewal” in 1988, “Formation of Modernity” in 1992, “Question of Cultural Identity” in 1996 and “Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices” in 1997. Hall was closely associated with the journal Marxism.
Halls’s work covers the issue of hegemony and cultural studies .
Hegemony- It studies the dominance of the producing class society over the working class society and we can also see a heavy influence of Mass culture and Popular culture and he is trying to understand and explain how these two are affecting the life of the normal people and ordinary people.
For Hall, culture was not something to simply appreciate or study, but a critical site of social action and intervention, where power relations are both established and potentially unsettled. Hall presents two different definitions of cultural identity:-
(1) A sort of collective one true self, which many people with a shared history and ancestry hold in common.
(2) Recognises that, as well as the many points of similarity, these are also critics points of deep and significant differences which contribute ‘what we really are’, or rather — since history has intervened — ‘what we have become’.
His contribution in works was the main and the theory of prominent of the Reception Theory which looks into the effect of the media culture. The most important are:-
(1) Encoding and Decoding – This theory offers an approach of how media messages are produced, distributed and inter-predict by the audience.
(2) Circuit of Culture:-
- Representation
- Identity
- Production
- Consumption
- Regulation
Stuart Hall widely known as a founder of British cultural studies and the Birmingham school of cultural studies, pioneered theories of multiculturalism. Hall was elected Fellow of the British Academy(FBA) in 2005 and received the European Cultural Foundation’s Princess Margaret Award in 2008. Stuart Hall died on February 10, 2014 in London following a kidney failure.
Written by – Rajat Ranjan
Source- Google
