Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Stuart Hall is one of the founding figures of British cultural studies, providing a number of incisive commentaries that have helped to shape the field. Born in Jamaica in 1932, Hall has lived in Britain since 1951, originally studying literature at Oxford University as a Rhodes scholar. He has held several academic positions, including director of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at the University of Birmingham and chair of the Sociology Department at the Open University. Hall is a major analyst of the black British experience, and an influential political theorist and public intellectual. He played a critical role in founding the British New Left in the late 1950s and was in the forefront of analyzing the New Right in Britain in the 1970s and ‘80s. Hall is responsible for coining the term “Thatcherism,” and he played a prominent role in rethinking left-wing politics in an age of globalization and conservative hegemony. Hall's intellectual trajectory can be divided into three phases. The first roughly coincides with his role in founding the British New Left (1956–64). Hall was among the founders of Universities and Left Review, a journal produced by radical Oxford students impatient with existing political orthodoxies and critical of Britain's role in the 1956 Suez crisis. He was the first editor of New Left Review and played a primary role in mediating between ... log in or subscribe to read full text