ABSTRACT
Stuart McPhail Hall was arguably the most innovative and engaged cultural theorist and sociologist of the postwar era and the key driver along with Richard Hoggart to create and legitimate the Cultural Studies – first at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies and later at the Open University. Before soaring to great academic stature via Cultural Studies, he was one of the key figures in addition to EP Thompson and Raymond Williams in establishing the New Left in postwar Britain. Hailed in The Guardian (Butler, 2014)1 as ‘the Godfather of British Multiculturalism,’ a tribute he would wear uncomfortably, Hall was also the leading light in Universities and Left Review, and when it was reinvented, he became a founder of New Left Review. He was also a major contributor to Marxism Today, the foremost Left British journal for many years. An astute analyst of Thatcherism, a term he invented, and more recently, a thoughtful critic of neoliberalism in the journal, Soundings, which he co-founded, Hall’s primary legacy (albeit not yet fully appreciated) will be as an extraordinary educator and public
intellectual. Discourse itself was affected by Stuart Hall’s work, whose editors, Bob Lingard and Fazal Rizvi felt inspired to rename the journal its Australian focus to a transnational and discursive one and retitling it with the inflection of ‘cultural politics’ (i.e., Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education) in the subtitle of the journal. Influenced by others such as Raymond Williams on the British New Left, Hall thought of culture and politics as inseparable processes and practices. This was almost entirely novel for a generation of other hard Left thinkers for whom affect and the popular were minor if nonexistent or suspect terms. Significantly, he showed us how and the ways in which the popularity of particular ideologies such as Thatcherism (which he predicted) came into being through inventing new common-sense meanings, affect and identification, thus reconstituting a dangerous and racist British imaginary. He helped ensure that the successive British fiscal crises of the 1970s, 1980s, and the present were also cultural crises ‘without’ normative ‘guarantees’ of further empire, that Britain became increasingly critical in its multiculturalism and thus, challenged the imperial unquestionable.
