Stuart Hall - Essential Essays, Volume 2 (Stuart Hall: Selected Writings)

Stuart Hall was born in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1932 into an aspirant middle-class brown Jamaican family. He was always conscious of the overbearing complexity of what he later came to call the pigmentocracy of Jamaican society. Skin color was a crucial issuehe was conscious of being known as the blackest member of his own family, and his mothers censorious reaction to his sisters attempt to build a relationship with a boyfriend who was considered to be too black created a familial crisis that remained vivid in Stuarts mind throughout his life. All of that, as he explained at various points, made him feel that he had to escape the Caribbean if he was to survive. Having received a classically British formal education at a prestigious institutionJamaica College in Kingstonhe duly won a Rhodes Scholarship, which enabled him to escape from Jamaica, and arrived at Oxford University in 1951 to study English literature.

His accounts of the initial train ride, following his arrival, through the English countryside en route to Oxford stressed how very much at home he felt in many waysbeing thoroughly familiar with the English landscape from the novels of Thomas Hardy. However, at Oxford he soon realized that although he could easily study English culture on the page, he could never completely belong there, being so fundamentally formed by the colonial experience of Jamaica. He was, he came to realize, simply one member of a particular generation of postwar migrantsstarting with those who arrived in the UK on the ship the Empire Windrush in 1948and who, he said, he knew constituted his prime subject, ever since he met them coming out of Paddington Station, off the boat trains. To that extent, he was part of a massive demographic and cultural change in the composition of the population of Britain, and in some ways he always remained, in part, an outsider, a familiar stranger in a liminal position with a fundamentally migrant/diasporic perspective on the culture of the country in which he lived most of his life. His subjectivity was formed not only on the edges of the British empire but on the edges of the West itself.

Having rapidly involved himself with left-wing politics while at Oxford, becoming a key figure in the emergence of what became known as the New Left, he also (as he put it) found himself dragged into Marxism backwardssimultaneously opposed to the Soviet tanks in Budapest and to the Anglo-French paratroopers dispatched to the Suez Canal. In the crucial (and for Stuart, politically formative) moment of 1956, when those crises in Hungary and Egypt shook the foundations of both of the Cold War empires, he and his fellow postcolonials found it necessary (rather in the spirit of the Non-Aligned Movement of the time) to begin deconstructing the Eurocentric prejudices of the very Marxism to which they had initially been attracted. Only thus could they address the questions at stake in the emerging post-imperial politics of the era, as movements for national independence grew in strength everywhere.