Jamaican-born British cultural theorist, founding editor of New Left Review and director of the Birmingham cultural studies centre
In January 1979, four months before Margaret Thatcher took office, his "The Great Moving Right Show" in Marxism Today analysed Thatcherism as a new right-wing politics rooted in the disappointment of much of the working class.
A Jamaican-born British Marxist sociologist and cultural theorist from a middle-class family in Kingston. He came to Merton College, Oxford, as a Rhodes Scholar in 1951 to read English, and in the wake of the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary and the Suez Crisis abandoned his doctorate for political work. After Universities and Left Review he became the founding editor of New Left Review in 1960. Invited by Richard Hoggart to the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at the University of Birmingham in 1964, he was its acting director from 1968 and director from 1972 to 1979, widening cultural studies to race and gender. He is known for "Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse" (1973), the co-written Policing the Crisis (1978) and his analysis of Thatcherism, and was professor of sociology at the Open University from 1979 to 1997.
Also known as: Stuart Henry McPhail Hall
Activities and affiliations
- 1964–1997
From Kingston to Oxford and the first New Left
He was born on 3 February 1932 in Kingston, in the British colony of Jamaica, into a middle-class family whose ancestors were Portuguese, Jewish, English, African and Indian, and whose paternal line had been tied to plantation slavery. At the elite Jamaica College he received a classical British-style education and read Eliot, Joyce, Freud, Marx, Lenin and Caribbean literature. Growing up darker-skinned than much of his family in the pigmentocracy of the colonial West Indies left a lasting mark on his thought.
In 1951 he went to Merton College, Oxford, as a Rhodes Scholar to read English, becoming part of the Windrush generation. He began a doctorate on Henry James but, galvanised by the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary, which drove thousands out of the Communist Party of Great Britain, and by the Suez Crisis, abandoned it in 1957 or 1958 to concentrate on politics. He joined the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in 1957 and from 1958 to 1960 taught at a London secondary modern school and in adult education.
After working on Universities and Left Review at Oxford, he joined E. P. Thompson, Raymond Williams and others in merging it with The New Reasoner to launch New Left Review in 1960, with Hall as founding editor. In 1958 the same group, with Raphael Samuel, opened the Partisan Coffee House in Soho as a meeting place for the left. He left the board of New Left Review in 1961 or 1962.
The Birmingham Centre: encoding/decoding and Policing the Crisis
In 1964 he co-wrote with Paddy Whannel of the British Film Institute The Popular Arts, one of the first books to argue for the serious study of film as entertainment, and as a direct result Richard Hoggart invited him to the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham. He succeeded Hoggart as acting director in 1968, became director in 1972 and led the centre until 1979, extending cultural studies to race and gender and bringing in French theorists such as Foucault; he co-edited Resistance Through Rituals (1975) on youth subcultures.
Taking a post-Gramscian view of hegemony, Hall held that language use operates within a framework of power, institutions and political economy, and that people are both producers and consumers of culture. Culture for him was not only something to appreciate or study but a critical site of social action and intervention, where power relations are established and potentially unsettled. "Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse" (1973) started from the claim that a broadcast message must be meaningfully decoded before it can have an "effect", and distinguished dominant-hegemonic, negotiated and oppositional readings. Its insistence that audiences do not passively accept a text but can negotiate or oppose it made it a founding text of reception theory.
Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order (1978), written with colleagues, examined the 1970s British panic over mugging as a crime supposedly imported from America. Hall and his co-authors argued that the "rising crime rate equation" performs an ideological function of social control: crime statistics are manipulated for political and economic ends, igniting moral panics that build public support for the need to "police the crisis".
Thatcherism and the Open University years
In January 1979, four months before Margaret Thatcher became prime minister, Hall analysed "Thatcherism" in "The Great Moving Right Show" in Marxism Today, the theoretical journal of the Communist Party of Great Britain. When much of the left saw Thatcher as little more than a shrill housewife, he traced Thatcherism's roots to the disappointment of large parts of the working class with state bureaucracy and with the unions' lack of an alternative social vision. Thatcherism, he argued, had changed the contours of public thinking by addressing people on questions of culture and morality usually regarded as unpolitical, and he urged the left to work with new social movements such as multiculturalism, the lesbian and gay movement and environmentalism.
His Marxism Today articles, which challenged the left's views of markets and its organisational and political conservatism, influenced the Labour Party under Neil Kinnock and Tony Blair, though Hall later decried New Labour as operating on "terrain defined by Thatcherism".
After becoming professor of sociology at the Open University in 1979 he published The Hard Road to Renewal (1988), Formations of Modernity (1992) and Questions of Cultural Identity (1996), and became a leading voice on diaspora and cultural identity. He was president of the British Sociological Association from 1995 to 1997, a founding editor of Soundings in 1995, and founding chair of Iniva and of Autograph ABP, the Association of Black Photographers. He retired in 1997 and died of complications following kidney failure on 10 February 2014; he is buried in Highgate Cemetery.