Stuart Hall, a sociologist better known as the Godfather of Cultural Studies, has died at the age of 82. Hall’s influence over academic, political, cultural, and social debates spanned over six decades, making him a “Transitional Giant” in the world of social theory. Hall not only tapped into the zeitgeist of the times, he confronted issues of racial domination and multiculturalism, and problematized the role of popular culture to offer points of resistance in the struggle over identity and representation. As a result, Stuart Hall changed the way we think about the role of social theory and its relation to social change.
Hall broke with orthodox boundaries and worked across disciplines, combining and synthesizing ideas from literary criticism to philosophy to forge new approaches to the socio-political changes occurring in contemporary society. Hall rejected the binaries, essentialism, and monolithic camps of existing theories. He deliberately blurred boundaries that had seemed clear such as the difference between interaction and structure, power and resistance, self and society. He re-read classical theories in new ways and recombined strands from these theories to gain new insights. In particular, Hall brought together Marx, Gramsci, race theory, and frameworks from communications and media studies, forcing us to rethink the notions of “identity” previously taken for granted. Stuart Hall’s influence can be considered a “paradigm shift,” changing not only directions in theory, but the ways we theorize, and the ways that theory matters in everyday practical contexts of negotiating the world around us.
Click here to read the excerpted introduction to our chapter on Stuart Hall from the forthcoming new edition of Social Theory: Continuity and Confrontation, A Reader. (Please note that these are uncorrected advance proofs and any typos will most certainly be fixed before the book goes to press!)
With the passing of an intellectual giant, we must remember not only the intellectual tools he provided, but the courage he had to use these tools himself. As an outspoken intellectual, who questioned authority and the status quo at every turn, we must keep Hall’s intellectual spirit alive by refusing to fall into the pitfalls of complacency or to ever accept that the struggle over meaning and representation is an abstract pursuit. Instead, now, more than ever, we must take Stuart Hall at his word when he forced us to consider our own role in relation not just to theory, but to the ways that we live out our lives in the world. With the passing of Stuart Hall, his own words should leave us with a reminder, a reminder that Hall put to us the difficult questions of our time. One in particular looms ahead in North America, as we continue to confront and debate the meaning and significance of immigration. As Stuart Hall remarked:
“The one thing we are not is guaranteed in the truth of what we do. Indeed, I believe that without that kind of guarantee we would need to begin again, begin again in another space, begin again from a different set of presuppositions to try to ask ourselves what might it be in human identification, in human practice, in the building of human alliances, which without the guarantee, without the certainty of religion or science or anthropology or genetics or biology or the appearance of your eyes, without any guarantees at all, might enable us to conduct an ethically responsible human discourse and practice about race in our society. What might it be like to conduct that, without having at our backs just a touch of a certainty that even if we look as if we were wrong if we only had access to the code something would have told us in the beginning what we should do.”
Black Hawk Hancock
Department of Sociology, DePaul University
