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STUART HALL (B. 1932) Born in Kingston, Jamaica, Stuart Hall migrated to the UK in 1952, and was educated at Merton College, Oxford University. With others such as E. P. Thompson and Raymond Williams, he helped to establish cultural studies as a field of academic enquiry in postwar Britain, and was active in the influential Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at Birmingham University, UK, which he joined in 1964. Much of Hall’s work has drawn on developments in Marxist and leftist intellectual thinking in opening up ways of reading popular culture in relation to wider issues of power, hegemony and resistance. As Hall has argued, culture is always formative, rather than merely reflective, of social and political engagements and struggles; in both studying and practising culture, we acquire the agency to contest and transform the predominant, hegemonic structures of knowledge and feeling which seek to direct social and cultural life. Hall’s significance extends across a range of fields; yet he is of particular interest to postcolonial studies for his work on race, resistance, diaspora and ethnicity. In essays such as ‘New Ethnicities’ (1988) he explores the politics of representation both of, and by, black writers and film-makers, and the ways in which identity is being reconceptualized; while his essay ‘Cultural Identity and Diaspora’ (1990) mobilizes poststructuralist critical theories to fashion a way of reconceptualizing diaspora identities as perpetual processes of unfinished becoming. His essay ‘When Was “the Post-Colonial”?: thinking at the limit’ (1996) is perhaps one of the most readable and intelligent critiques of debates within postcolonial studies. A committed public intellectual, Stuart Hall worked for many years as Professor of Sociology at the Open University, UK, until his retirement in 1997.