Black History Month - Stuart Hall

Black History Month: 8 October 2020

 

Stuart Hall was a Jamaican-British academic, writer and cultural studies pioneer, who was born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1932. He arrived in Britain in 1951, when he won a Rhodes scholarship to study at Oxford University. Hall was one of the founding figures of the school of thought that is now known as British Cultural Studies or The Birmingham School of Cultural Studies.  Later in the 1950s, Hall was a founder of the influential New Left Review.

 

While at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham, Hall is credited with playing a role in expanding the scope of cultural studies to deal with race and gender. Over his career, Hall became fascinated with theories of "reception"—how we decode the different messages that culture is telling us and how culture helps us choose our own identities. As his thinking evolved, he came to insist on a larger vision of politics, one that ventured beyond traditional institutions to include every aspect of society. He was one of England's best-known intellectuals, celebrated for his pioneering writings in cultural studies, a field he helped invent along with Raymond Williams, and for his work as a spokesman of the New Left.

 

Want to find out more about Stuart Hall? Click here for more about his studies which paved the way for a greater understanding of cultures.