I recently returned, along with some friends, to Stuart Hall’s work, and wanted to write something that could serve as a brief introduction to him, in an effort to persuade readers to turn to his writing and interviews (much of it produced in collaboration with others). My words below are primarily addressed to those dissatisfied with the American left, which has fallen into a moribund state and relies on tired, musty rhetoric about the “working class” (a fungible category in this country), but I hope they can be useful to others. This is not a complete or academic introduction to Stuart Hall: for that people should turn to a vast body of work on and by the man, available everywhere (including your public library). There are also several films and videos available online.
Many thanks, as always, to The Group: A, J, and W.
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As the days churn with increasingly more shocking events, it can become difficult to comprehend how things came to be: it can be even harder for us to remember that we have understand the histories of our present time. The words “constitutional crisis” barely begin to describe what we see around us. By the time I finish writing this essay, we will have heard of yet another incomprehensible attack on rights and individuals. By the time you finish reading this, we will have read of yet another person hijacked and disappeared from the streets, bundled into a black van, never to be seen.
I have long held that we are where we are today not because of the rise of the right but because of the failure of the left (and I will continue to voice this view, like a cawing Cassandra). We are now only a few months into a second Trump presidency, and already living in utter chaos: many are thrown into terror and fear, wondering what might happen to them as they walk home from the grocery store. It is easy to blame the right for all of this, but it is the left that has failed on so many fronts and paved the way for Trump. In future work, I will be discussing the many ways the left (at least in the U.S) has largely been a complete failure, with very few wins (such as a slight uptick in union organising). On immigration and abortion rights, for instance, the American left has not only failed to gain significant advances but caused us to move backwards: immigrant rights groups, supported by the left, abandoned their constituents in favour of a narrative of exceptionalism, and people who wish to terminate their pregnancies now have even fewer rights than they did eight years ago. In such times, the left has to understand how to not only resist but to rethink its past strategies in order to move forward.
What went wrong? How did we arrive here? Every time the right rises again, the American left jettisons yet another group of people, with the claim that too much attention to it led to losses. In 2016, it blamed the rise of Trump to too much attention to, oh, horrors, Black people, and insisted that we should have paid more attention to the “White Working Class,” which, for a while, was handily referred to by the acronym WWC. The left is unhealthily obsessed with “identity politics” as a bogeyman. Following Trump’s return in 2024, sectors of the left have been darkly muttering over and over that there needs to be a “class first” strategy, moving forward. This ignores the fact that all identities are in fact intertwined with class—many trans people are either working class or suffer the pitfalls of enormous economic inequality upon coming out. The only women who suffer from a lack of abortion rights are working class and poor women, often also Black and people of colour: Well-off women with private healthcare don’t have to worry about driving miles to access abortion, with the fear of losing their already ill-paid jobs. The American left has drifted into a wilderness marked by a lack of imagination, an inability to hold on to what should be its most basic, fundamental tenet: We leave no one behind.
The work of the late, great Stuart Hall offers us a way out of this morass. Hall, who died in 2014, was, as Wiki puts it concisely, a “Jamaican-born British Marxist sociologist, cultural theorist, and political activist.” That description hints at the complexity of Hall’s origins and life, certainly, but also provides a sense of the rich history of his intellectual work and its long, deep effects on the kind of materialist, historically grounded leftist analysis we should all seek. Hall arrived in England in 1951 on a Rhodes scholarship at Oxford, obtained a master’s degree, and began doctoral work on Henry James, before he abandoned that for a life in political activism and a job as a secondary school teacher in London. He would go on to found the New Left Review, was one of the leading figures of the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies, and a professor of Sociology at the Open University. What we understand today as “Cultural Studies” emerged from the work of Hall and his peers, all of whom took culture in its various forms seriously, without imposing the traditional qualitative distinctions between “low” and “high” art. For those of us now accustomed to analyses of everything from operas to the latest animated movie through the lenses of race and gender, in every possible publishing outlet, from blogs to USA Today, this approach may not seem noteworthy but it was groundbreaking for its time. Cultural Studies was, at its outset, a specifically leftist methodology, although its later iterations may have wandered away from that, somewhat (a topic for a later day).
Why read a “Jamaican-born British Marxist sociologist” who was most famous for the phrase “Thatcherism,” and whose work may seem bound to a distant island (one that nevertheless continues to have a profound grasp on our collective imagination, revolutions be damned)? Hall’s political work and writing recorded a period of enormous shifts in the balance of power in the England of the 1950s and onwards. By 1979, when Margaret Thatcher was elected as Prime Minister, politics and culture appeared to be moving rightward. To read Hall in the context of his life and political work is to be disoriented, and that disorientation can lead to a more profound rethinking and realignment of the tattered ideals of the current American left.
My friends and I recently read the first few essays by Hall in Selected Writings on Race and Difference, edited by Paul Gilroy and Ruth Wilson Gilmore, alongside the 1983 movie Educating Rita. The latter was a massive hit at the time, winning several awards, including three Oscars, and made it to the British Film Institute’s list of Top 100 British Films in 1999. It is about a young and very spirited, working-class hairdresser Rita (Julie Waters) who wants to move up in the world by learning how to talk about books in the ways that she imagines educated people do, with ease and langour and style. She enrolls in classes at the Open University, where she is assigned to a tutor, Frank Bryant (Michael Caine), a perennially drunk, faded professor who at first can’t fathom the enthusiasm of his new student. In the process of their relatively brief collaboration, we see the world shifting through the prism of their pedagogical relationship: Rita is, for a while, stuck in a marriage where her husband has only contempt for her attempts to better herself (as she sees it), and he goes so far as to literally burn her books. Frank, meanwhile, is forced to confront the unraveling of his own life as he teeters from his classrooms to his office. In the process, he finds himself compelled to teach Rita how to shift—in some ways, even stymie—her original approaches to literature so that she might learn how to adhere to the requirements of a standard university exam. What allows her to get ahead is, in the end, not her originality but her ability to demonstrate that she has a grasp of Literature, with a capital L, Literature as it is read and understood by the upper classes, in a homogenous (and canonical) way: Blake can now be recited from memory, along with the casually observation, “Well, you don’t do Blake without doing Innocence and Experience, do you?” Rita becomes a brilliant student, but must first wear the skin of inevitability that shadows every Eng Lit candidate.
The two texts, Hall and Educating Rita, may seem like an odd combination, especially since the film shows almost no awareness that there is anything beyond white Britain (if you blink, you’ll miss the one Black student in one of the classes). And yet.
In “Absolute Beginnings: Reflections on the Secondary Modern Generation,” Hall looks at four books, fiction and nonfiction, about the state of secondary education and the construction of the “youth” market in consumer culture. Among them is the famous 1959 memoir, To Sir with Love (which would go on to become the 1967 movie starring Sidney Poitier). The insights Hall derives offer a view of a depressing reality:
One of the most disturbing experiences in a Secondary Modern school is the open, callous manner in which many teachers accept the fact that the lively, vital fourth stream class in the First Year will become, inevitably, the blasé, disenchanted, inattentive “shower” in the Fourth—without asking how on earth this transformation ever takes place.
In Braithwaite’s memoir, the view, in a world slowly rolling towards the formalised inequality of the 1980s, is of a segment of the population—working class, mostly of colour—considered expendable, deemed unworthy of the kind of education (Classics, languages, philosophy) routinely bestowed upon their wealthier counterparts. They are not there to be educated but to be formed and shaped into pliant subjects, adults who will perform the tasks required to keep the homes and institutions of the upper crusts going. The field of Cultural Studies, at least in the U.S, has mostly dwindled into an exercise in reading culture in banal and uninteresting ways. While it will always be important to think of how, for instance, race and class might manifest in, say, Barbie, analyses in this vein rarely go beyond the surface of representational politics. The question is always, “Is this a good or bad representation?” And focusing on that question alone means leaving the structures of power untouched and undimmed. Class in Rita is both uncomplicated and complicated: Rita can ascend to a point where she will “disappear,” as Frank puts it: it’s not that she will vanish from his life, but that she will become something else, leaving her old and more questioning self behind as she ascends to another rung on the social ladder.
Reading Hall in the contexts of the texts he read, and through the works that, in a sense, read him, allows for a more contentious understanding of how culture and politics combine, a pricklier way to think about matters like class and race than what is offered within what is now a stale discourse that asks people to group themselves around meaningless questions about “wokeness” or “anti-wokeness,” and their cousin, “anti-wokeness-anti-wokeness.” (His influence was widespread and palpable and it is difficult to imagine that the setting of the film in the Open University was unrelated to the ways in which 1980s Britain was trying to deal with the onslaught of what he so brilliantly called “Thatcherism.”)
Hall persistently and elegantly refuted any turns towards the conservative, using language that does not dip into left clichés and is resoundingly effective. In this excerpt from an interview on the cultural implications of globalisation, he is asked about the question of value—given that everything, from “high art,” to “popular culture” is now a legitimate object of study, what remains valuable as such? His response was, like many of his conversations and insights, clear but not simple, as Karma Chávez puts it, and it indirectly describes the world of To Sir with Love and its much whiter descendant, Educating Rita :
That sense of a cultural hierarchy, which is what the arts used to transmit, why in English literature and English culture and the English academy we had the arts there at all: a means of transmitting that sense of a set of hierarchy, values, which were of course socially inscribed as well. They weren’t just values free floating out there. Certain people held those values. Nevertheless, they could be transmitted from one generation to another, and I think it’s impossible to live now without a sense of cultural relativism.But I think the deeper question lies behind your question. I think you’re asking me, ‘How can people live without some sense that there’s an ultimate truth or an ultimate scale of value’?…I don’t any longer think that this is just a transitional phase and we’re moving on to some other more settled period. We’re culturally in the phase of permanent revolution. We are going to have to live in a more relativist universe, and I think there’s some good things there, because that old sense of cultural values was of course, for people like me on the margins, profoundly rooted in power, it had to do with the economic and political and cultural and class power, white power, European power, colonial power. And the undermining of that…holds out the possibility of other scales of value that have been actively marginalised.
I’ll stop here since my aim is not provide an exhaustive introduction to Hall’s work but to indicate the reasons why he remains a vital intellectual force: someone whose work needs to be studied and understood in their contexts, but also with a sense of how relevant he remains to the left internationally, even its many different geographic contexts. The contemporary left seeks to understand what is happening through a sometimes facile discourse that also planes down current events into an easily understandable and comforting set of memes and stock sayings, but we are better off living in the instability of it all. Understanding the contradictions is what will see us through. I’ll end with my friend and fellow intellectual traveler Wes Low’s words, on what makes Hall so relevant to this moment in time.
Hall is very clear about the fact that all issues are issues of the present “conjuncture” that have arisen over time and through a variety of contradictions, but political movements attain social force and power only when they effectively deploy various relevant cultural concepts and schemas into a coherent map that tells people how to move forward through those contradictions. The right has a full cartography that speaks to a lot of people about what’s happening now and what to do about it (but one that’s losing coherence). The left is dusting off copies of outdated maps and utterly flabbergasted by the fact that people are literally unmoved by them.
See also: Hall’s “The Great Moving Right Show,” written in 1979, and startlingly relevant to our times (with many thanks to Wes Low).
For an excellent audio introduction to Hall, listen to “Remembering Stuart Hall,” moderated by Karma Chávez and featuring Jonathan Gray, Sut Jhally, Lisa Henderson, and Aswin Punathambekar. Jhally correctly points out that the best way to gain an introduction to Hall is by listening to his many lectures, widely available on YouTube and elsewhere. Some of them, and their transcripts, can also be found on Jhally’s Media Education Foundation website (yes, the films are expensive, but they are expensive to produce: check your public library or ask it to acquire copies—please don’t try to “liberate” them). You can also find more at the Stuart Hall Foundation.
Enjoy the contradictions: they are all that will keep us alive.
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