ABSTRACT
I first encountered the work of Stuart Hall in 1981 through a short article that Hall had written a few years earlier on the politics of racism and reaction in Britain. I had been thinking tentatively about issues of race and racism for a number of years, though never in any sustained and systematic way. Born in India, I was conscious of the diverse and complex ways in which minorities were subjected to racism while negotiating their lives and, also in Australia, a country to which my family had immigrated while I was still a teenager. However, it was as a graduate student in England that I first confronted racism in its more explicit forms, forcing me to think more seriously about its various configurations, its origins, and its social consequences. I read widely on the then popular theories of racism, most of which seemed located within the empiricist traditions of social psychology. These theories viewed racism as an expression of prejudice that some individuals harbored toward those they regarded as culturally different and inferior. While there were clearly many elements of truth in these theories, I found them inadequate, incapable of accounting for the complexities of racial formation and racism that I had experienced and which were clearly evident in British society.
