Stuart Hall obituary
Influential cultural theorist, campaigner and founding editor of the New Left Review
Stuart Hall was born
in Jamaica and won a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford University, arriving
in 1951. He always saw himself as a 'familiar stranger' in Britain.
Photograph: Eamonn McCabe
When the writer and academic Richard Hoggart founded the Centre
for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University in 1964, he
invited Stuart Hall,
who has died aged 82, to join him as its first research fellow. Four
years later Hall became acting director and, in 1972, director. Cultural
studies was then a minority pursuit: half a century on it is
everywhere, generating a wealth of significant work even if, in its
institutionalised form, it can include intellectual positions that Hall
could never endorse.
The foundations of cultural studies lay in an insistence on taking popular, low-status cultural forms seriously and tracing the interweaving threads of culture, power and politics. Its interdisciplinary perspectives drew on literary theory, linguistics and cultural anthropology in order to analyse subjects as diverse as youth sub-cultures, popular media and gendered and ethnic identities – thus creating something of a model, for example, for the Guardian's own G2 section.
The foundations of cultural studies lay in an insistence on taking popular, low-status cultural forms seriously and tracing the interweaving threads of culture, power and politics. Its interdisciplinary perspectives drew on literary theory, linguistics and cultural anthropology in order to analyse subjects as diverse as youth sub-cultures, popular media and gendered and ethnic identities – thus creating something of a model, for example, for the Guardian's own G2 section.
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