Hall - Essential Essays, Volume 1 (Stuart Hall: Selected Writings)

One of the reviewers of a previous book of Stuarts essays remarked, in a seemingly jocular aside, that anyone writing a novel about the British intellectual Left in the postwar period might well find themselves spontaneously reinventing a figure exactly like Stuart Hall, so much had his personal narrative and the public history of Britain in the second part of the twentieth century been strangely intertwined, at once deeply symbiotic and sharply at odds.

The large-format photographs of members of the Windrush generation of migrants from the Caribbean, arriving in London, which greeted any visitor to Stuarts family home in West Hampstead marked his own relation to that critical (and liminal) moment in British history when the SS Empire Windrush arrived at Tilbury in 1948.

At its simplest, one might say that Stuart was born on the periphery of empire and traveled from that marginal setting to the very heartlands of the imperial centerfirst to Oxford University and later into the academic and media worlds of what was, in the later stages of his life, already becoming ex-imperial (or, perhaps better, postcolonial) London. In that capacity he was also one of the major analysts of what became known as multicultural Britainand not only an analyst but an active protagonist in the crucial debates about race, ethnicity, and identity which did so much to transform Britain over the last sixty years.

Stuart himself was always resistant to mere autobiographyalthough there is a moment at which he remarks that there are points when one has to speak autobiographically, not in order to seize the authority of authenticity but in order to properly situate oneself in relation to the circumstances in which one has lived and worked.

Nonetheless, Stuart was well aware that he could never be (nor be accepted as) completely British. He was ineluctably marked by his colonial origins and remained, throughout his life, both the familiar stranger and a marginal native within his adopted country. One could argue that it was precisely that doubling of position which provided him with the epistemological privilege that anthropologists have always understood to be the prerogative of the liminal observer of any group. A person in that position enjoys the advantages of being close enough to understand the groups culture intimately, yet is distant enough not to take it for grantedand is thus able to see it more clearly than those who are completely inside it.