Stuart Hall

Routledge Critical Thinkers

by James Procter

James Procter's introduction places Hall's work within its historical contexts, providing a clear guide to his key ideas and influences, as well as to his critics and his intellectual legacy. Stuart Hall has been pivotal to the development of cultural studies during the past forty years. Whether as director of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, or as one of the leading public intellectuals of the postwar period, he has helped transform our understanding of culture as both a theoretical catagory and a political practice. Topics * popular culture and youth subcultures
* the CCCS and cultural studies
* media and communication
* racism and resistance
* postmodernism and the postcolonial
* Thatcherism
* identity, ethnicity, diaspora

Stuart Hall is the ideal gateway to the work of a critic described by Terry Eagleton as 'a walking chronicle of everything from the New Left to New Times, Leavis to Lyotard, Aldermaston to ethnicity'

Genres: Cultural Studies, Nonfiction

184 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2004

Reviews

[Imran Rasid · Rating 3 out of 5]

Second time reading this introductory book. I need to revise some of the important discussions in Cultural Studies.

Stuart Hall was being hailed as the pioneer of Cultural Theory, of which he politely declined and has nominated thinkers like Raymond William, and others instead. Yet, few will disagree that it was Stuart Hall that has revived, systematized and expanded the discussion of culture, especially pop culture, beyond the language of his predecessors.

He situated popular culture as one of the dominant site for ideological struggle, and saw the revolutionary potential in it for changes in society to occur. Calling himself a "Marxist without guarantee" he departed from an orthodox reading of Marx that placed too much emphasis on mode of production and the homogeneity of each classes, and brilliantly proposed a more complex picture of capitalist-societal relations comprising cultures, identity, race, and sexuality.

[Anasma · Rating 5 out of 5]

Since Hall was a multidimensional intellectual whose writings cannot be located within a single discipline, a text like this can be very useful for scholars new to his works. That being said, Hall was not an intellectual with identity crisis whose writings seem to be all over the place, but, like Gramsci, he was truly an intellectual of praxis who was much preoccupied with the politics of his time through constant dialogue with dominant academic discourses.

[Denis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Yet another excellent volume in the Routledge Critical Thinkers series.