Stuart Hall

Born 1932 in Kingston, Jamaica. Very well known cultural theorist and sociologist.

He has two siblings, one brother and one sister. In 1964 Stuart Hall gets married to Catherine Barrett who is a post-colonial historian. They have to face prejudices against mixed-raced relationships. When they become a family with two children they make up the ideal melting pot.

His educational career started in Jamaica where he visited the Jamaica College in Kingston. "[B]orn into a middle-class family in thrall to what he calls 'the colonial romance' (Guardian), Hall considers his migration to Britain in 1950 as an escape. Due to a Rhodes scholarship he studied at Merton College in Oxford.

In the 1960s Stuart Hall is the founding editor of the journal the New Left Review where themes like culture, economy and world politics are addressed with a political alignment of Socialism and Marxism.

Stuart Hall was exposed to cultural studies at an early stage in his life when he could not understand why he was disallowed to bring home a black friend after school even though Stuart could be considered black himself. He realised then that not all cultures are the same. Some claim to have an subaltern position over the other. Therefore it is not surprising that Hall was among the first to establish the first cultural studies programme at the University of Birmingham in 1964. Furthermore he became the director of contemporary cultural studies at the University of Birmingham between 1968 and 1979. From 1979 until he retired in 1997 Stuart Hall was professor of sociology at the Open University.

Stuart Hall is well known for his theories, ideas and writings in cultural studies. Topics which he often addressed and discussed were ethnicity, race, identity and cultural representation. Hall believes that identity is not fixed but always changing due to historical and cultural influences. In his essay on "New Ethnicities" he states that being black is just a category which is politically and culturally constructed and not real.

Selected Works:

Policing the Crisis (1979)

The Hard Road to Renewal (1988)

Resistance Through Rituals (1989)

Questions of Cultural Identity (1996)

Sources:

Adams, Tim. ”Cultural Hallmark” The Guardian/The Observer (23 September, 2007) http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2007/sep/23/communities.politicsphilosophyandsociety

Hall, Stuart. "New Ethnicities." Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies. Eds. David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen. London: Routledge, 1996. 441-449.