Through the Prism of an Intellectual Life: The Work of Stuart Hall

Abstract

This dissertation critically interprets, evaluates and periodizes aspects of Stuart Hall’s work and thought. Tracing the major intellectual shifts in his output between 1951 and roughly 2000 it argues for three dominant phases of work. The anti-humanist, structuralist mainstay of Hall’s career marks a break with the periods before and after, periods in which a willingness to isolate and contemplate the ‘object’ and a producer can be discerned. Narrating these changes by attending to the major influences on his thought, a wide selection of artists and intellectuals that includes Henry James, T.S. Eliot, Raymond Williams, E.P. Thompson, Walter Benjamin, Antonio Gramsci, Louis Althusser, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Isaac Julien, C.L.R. James, and Frantz Fanon, the thesis employs an account of Hall’s identity as montage or bricolage. Hall is not a thinker principally preoccupied with the questions of becoming or recognition, as were others in the traditions into which he wrote, though he becomes more concerned with them in the final phase of his career. The three periods delineated here should not be treated as fully discrete but bearing many filaments of connection. The thesis also follows the genesis and clustering of leitmotifs through time. It parses Hall’s thought analytically and psychoanalytically, understanding his later writing on identity as originating in aspects of his own identity, and advances a reading of a thinker whose ideas were shaped by his ‘social being’: by the mutually entangled formations of class and race; by relationships, social realities and moral customs; by his permanent departure in 1951 from a Jamaica gearing up to decolonization; by his early involvement in a New Left milieu; and by a tissue of affiliations that saw him come late to the question of identity. Inescapably teleological, it is shaped by a sense of who Hall was at the end of his life in 2014; it nonetheless reanimates his contemporaneous relationship with the decades through which he lived.