Stuart Hall Conversations, Projects and Legacies

Stuart Hall Conversations, Projects and Legacies Stuart Hall Conversations, Projects and Legacies Edited by Julian Henriques & David Morley with Vana Goblot © 2017 Goldsmiths Press Published in 2017 by Goldsmiths Press Goldsmiths, University of London, New Cross London SE14 6NW Printed and bound in the United States of America. Distribution by The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England Copyright © 2017 David Morley and Julian Henriques for selection and editorial material. Chapter copyright belongs to individual contributors. The right of David Morley and Julian Henriques to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 in the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means whatsoever without prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and review and certain non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law. A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-906897-47-5 (hbk) ISBN 978-1-906897-48-2 (ebk) www.gold.ac.uk/goldsmiths-press This book is dedicated to Catherine, Jess and Becky Hall 11 Introduction 25 Part I Cultural Studies: Multiple Legacies 31 1 The Red Plot Bill Schwarz 38 2 Stuart Hall Redux: His Early Work, 1964–1984 James Curran 47 3 The Politics of Theory and Method in Cultural Studies David Morley 54 4 Stuart Hall and the Fate of Welfare in Neoliberal Times Angela McRobbie 69 Part II The Politics of Conjuncture 79 5 Doing the Dirty Work: The Challenges of Conjunctural Analysis John Clarke 86 6 The Soundings Conjuncture Projects: The Challenge Right Now Doreen Massey 94 7 The Politics of Conjuncture: The Stuart Hall Projects—Outcomes and Impacts David Edgar 99 8 Stuart Hall and the Early New Left Michael Rustin 107 9 Wrestling with the Angels of Cultural Studies Lawrence Grossberg 117 10 Race, Immigration and the Present Conjuncture Tony Jefferson 127 Part III Identities and the Redefinition of Politics 133 11 Sonic Identities and Conjunctures of Listening Julian Henriques 144 12 Remembering Sex and Identity in the 1960s and 1970s Frank Mort 151 13 The Labour of Identity: ‘A World at One with Itself’ Charlotte Brunsdon 155 14 The Uses of Stuart Hall Caspar Melville 165 Part IV Policy, Practice and Creativity 172 15 Reflecting and Remembering the Work of Stuart Hall Avtar Brah 179 16 Policy, Politics, Practice and Theory Lola Young 185 17 The Partisan’s Prophecy: Handsworth Songs and Its Silent Partners John Akomfrah 204 18 The Historical Conditions of Existence: On Stuart Hall and the Photographic Moment Mark Sealy 215 Part V The International Expansion and Extension of Cultural Studies 222 19 Home and Away: Cultural Studies as Displacement Dick Hebdige 229 20 Stuart Hall, Brazil and the Cultural Logics of Diaspora Liv Sovik 236 21 Stuart Hall and the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Project Kuan-Hsing Chen 241 22 Mediterranean Archives, Sounds and Cultural Studies Iain Chambers 253 Part VI The Intellectual Legacies of Policing the Crisis 257 23 Policing the Crisis Today Angela Y. Davis 267 Part VII Biographies and Institutional Histories 275 24 Back in the CCCS: A Photoessay Mahasiddhi (Roy Peters), with notes by Bob Lumley 305 Afterword Catherine Hall 307 Contributors 311 Index Introduction Stuart Hall has been described as an ‘intellectual giant’ whose influence now spans the work of several generations of intellectuals in the field of cultural studies—not simply in Britain, Europe and North America, but also in Latin America, Africa, Asia and the Ca- ribbean. Importantly, he was also a public intellectual. The field of cultural studies on which Hall has had such a for- mative influence has three key characteristics: First, it researches contemporary popular culture to show its influence and impor- tance for understanding society as a whole. Second, especially in Hall’s hands, cultural studies informs intellectual interventions in particular political moments—what Hall calls conjunctures. The collapse of the grand narratives, whether Marxism in the 1980s or the neoliberal consensus more recently, underlines the value of—and continuing need for—Hall’s mode of political and intellectual engagement. Third, cultural studies often embodies a particular collaborative method of working and takes a specific instant as the spark to ignite the research. One example is the way that close scrutiny (reinvoking an almost Leavisite discourse) of a particular localised incident—the coverage of a single mugging in a Birmingham newspaper story—eventually led to the development of a theoretical analysis of authoritarian populism in the book Policing the Crisis, a work that resonates today perhaps more than ever, as Angela Davis’s contribution makes clear. 12 Through his collaborators and colleagues—including, as just mentioned, Angela Davis, as well as Angela McRobbie, Dick Heb- dige and John Akomfrah—Conversations, Projects and Legacies gives a uniquely valuable point of access to the increasing influence of Hall’s work since his death in February 2014. However familiar or unfamiliar you might be with Hall’s opus, this collection offers a rich array of personal, political, cultural and intellectual insights, entirely in keeping with the nature of Hall’s distinctive contribution throughout his long career as a teacher and public intellectual. Henry Louis Gates Jr. has said that he can think of ‘no other theorist whose international standing is higher or whose work has had a greater influence in defining the studies of history, literature, art and the social sciences’. David Scott described Hall as ‘one of the handful of intellectuals anywhere in the world who can claim to have literally transformed the character and practices of the social sciences and humanities in the 20th century.’ Jacqueline Rose nominated Hall as ‘one of the most prestigious, productive and creative intellectual figures of [his] time’. The influence of his work spans many different regions—as witnessed when Kuan-Hsing Chen said, ‘There is no one else who has the same degree of intellectual influence in East Asian humanities and social science’, or in Liv So- vik’s essay (chapter 20), which demonstrates the wide resonance of Hall’s work in the cultural and racial politics of Latin America.1 Hall was among the founding figures of what has now internationally become known as cultural studies and is internationally recognised as such. His work has become canonical in the study of media representations, audiences, cultural theory, postcolonial- ism, subcultures and studies of ethnicity, identity, ‘race’ and diaspora. It has been translated into Italian, Korean, French, Arabic, Finnish, German, Turkish, Spanish, Hebrew, Chinese, Portuguese, Japanese and Dutch, among other languages. The speed of political change appears to be accelerating, but this does nothing to diminish the relevance of Hall’s work to the issues facing contemporary societies worldwide. Central to the politics of today are urgent questions of nationhood, identity, race, multiculturalism and fundamentalism, along with the rise of a va- riety of forms of authoritarian populism—represented not only by figures like Donald Trump in the United States and Marie Le Pen in France, but also by right-wing parties in many other parts of the world. These are all issues to which Hall made significant con- tributions—and they remain atop our political agenda today, in Introduction the wake of the financial crash of the first part of the twenty-first century, as the worldwide hegemony of neoliberalism now creaks Introduction under the pressure of stagflation, rising structural unemployment and the growth of resistance to globalisation from both ends of the political spectrum. One of the reasons that Hall’s work remains res- onant in this way is because of his working method, as many of our contributors note. Hall’s relevance, above all, stems from the methodology of his work and from his contribution to the development of a certain way of being a public intellectual and using academic theoretical termi- nology to contribute to the analysis of contemporary culture and politics. That way of proceeding is what he taught—and still teaches us now—and is what he exemplified in his own work. This was -di alogical and collective in its mode of conduct and conjunctural in the application of its intellectual product. Hall’s articles, essays and chapters were invariably conceived strategically, as an intervention in the contingencies—to use two of his key terms—of a specific political moment. His coining of the term Thatcherism in ‘The Great Moving Right Show’ (1979)2 is just one example—and one in which he presciently conceptualised what turned out to be the dominant mode of governmentality in the United Kingdom over the subsequent thirty years. Nor was he satisfied with merely identifying the early beginnings of that politics; he then pursued its development in a series of subsequent articles from ‘The Great Moving Centre Show’ and ‘Tony Blair: The Greatest Tory since Thatcher?’ in 1997 through to ‘New Labour’s Double Shuffle’ in 2003 and ‘The Neo-lib- eral Revolution’ in 2011.3 Contrary to what might be expected in some quarters of the left, this eschewing of grand theory for ideas born from trying to understand the specifics of the moment, offers the best guarantee of their continuing relevance—even if Hall always pointedly insisted that in the end, there were no absolute guarantees to be had. Stuart Hall arrived in England from Jamaica to study at Oxford University in the early 1950s, in the wake of the first wave of post- war Afro-Caribbean immigration now known, retrospectively, as the Windrush generation (after the Empire Windrush, the ship that brought the first of these immigrants to the United Kingdom).

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