Remembering Stuart Hall

Stuart Hall (1996), who died a year ago today: © Donald Maclellan/Getty Images

By BENJAMIN POORE

In late November last year, in an airy, skylit central hall at Friends House, opposite Euston Station, I was an usher at a memorial service for Stuart Hall. The service brought together close friends and colleagues who spoke movingly to the gathered crowd about their memories of the man, and attempted to give some sense of scale to an extraordinarily productive life. Speakers included Martin Jacques (the editor of Marxism Today), the philosopher Charles Taylor, the filmmaker John Akomfrah and the activist Angela Davis.

It was a long and contemplative afternoon, and many of Hall’s former comrades had not seen each other for many years. Along with spoken tributes, there was music – Hall’s beloved Miles Davis to start; a boisterous, communal “Jerusalem”at the close – and excerpts from Hall’s broadcasts and films, including a new contribution – The Partisan –  from Akomfrah, who was responsible for the BFI’s documentary The Stuart Hall Project  in 2013.

Afterwards, the more steadfast among us headed over to Rivington Place in Shoreditch, for a restorative drink and the opportunity to view Black Chronicles II, an exhibition by the black cultural identity foundation Autograph ABP. On display were nineteenth-century photographs depicting black figures drawn from across Britain’s colonial history;“They are here”, Hall wrote in his contribution to The Missing Chapter project –  the visual archive research programme which underpins the exhibition – “because you were there”. 

The memorial also marked the launch of the Stuart Hall Foundation, based in the same building, which aims to fund researchers, activists and artists working in Hall’s most cherished areas of enquiry – music, popular culture and the visual arts.

A series of clips was screened from Isaac Julien’s film Black Skin, White Mask (1995), about the Marxist Martinique-intellectual Frantz Fanon. Here, Hall, narrating with his usual gravelly gravitas – cheerfully offset by a lime-green shirt – reminds us of Fanon’s argument: “Racism depersonalizes . . . it is a denial of recognition . . . . It is the master saying, ‘I do not see you at all’”.

In one sense, this might be the struggle at the heart of all of Hall’s writings. He was a black intellectual on television when Enoch Powell and law-and-order Toryism imagined young black men as “muggers”, a political and ideological rhetoric unpicked in Hall’s collaborative classic Policing the Crisis (1978). His very presence was an assertion of the rights of black people to a place in the public conversation. And this same struggle for recognition, in the individual and collective sense – a part of which must be what Beatrix Campbell that day described as “the liberating concept of articulation” – is, as recent events in the United States have shown, as vital as ever. 

As David Scott noted, Hall’s education – first at Jamaica College in Kingston and then at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar – made him especially aware of the “moral labour of civilizing subjects” that concerned colonial literary education. It seemed especially apposite then when, late in the afternoon, the historian Sally Alexander read from The Tempest. Voicing Caliban, Alexander read: “Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises, / Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not”.

Here Caliban may become something other than that which he is expected to be; he turns the language taught to him by Prospero to imaginative invention as well as cursing. The suggested parallel with Hall is that he, too, was surely intended to be the ideal product of the British colonial education system. He was not. He did not, to paraphrase Beatrix Campbell, surrender to the language that he was taught to speak. Hall’s language was creative, generous and never deferential; when he spoke, it was often punctuated by unruly chuckling. 

The Derek Walcott poem quoted in the memorial programme describes how we might see Hall’s legacy. “Winding Up”, from Walcott’s collection Sea Grapes (1976), draws together beginnings and endings. The expression suggests sorting things out, setting one’s affairs in order: “we shed freight”, Walcott wrote, “but not our need // for encumbrances”. Things that are wound up need release, indeed, they almost promise it. We wind up a clock so that it continues to tick. An encumbrance is burdensome, something that will not be shifted easily; in legal terms, it is an obligation to the future, a debt to be repaid. Stuart Hall’s attitude of trenchant and insistent critique – of culture and ideology – is, in these senses, both encumbrance and promise.