Stuart Hall

From MarxWiki

Cultural theorist Stuart Hall was born in Kingston Jamaica in 1932 and moved to Bristol, England in 1951 with his mother to study at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar. During the 1950s, Hall joined forces with Raphael Samuel, Charles Taylor, and Gabriel Pearson to create the New Left Review, a socialist journal. After co-writing The Popular Arts in 1964, Hall was invited to become a member of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University (he went on to become the director in later years). During his time at the Univeristy, Hall published several influential books including Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse, Situating Marx: Evaluations and Departures, and Reading of Marx’s 1857 Introduction to the Grundrisse. Hall was appointed as a Professor of Sociology in 1979 at the Open University in the United Kingdom where he remained until his retirement in 1997.

Various key issues of cultural studies are addressed in Hall’s work, specifically the issue of hegemony. Like Gramsci, Hall argues that subjects negotiate meaning as opposed to passively accepting it. According to Hall, factors such as cultural background affect the way audiences interpret meaning. His theories of encoding and decoding further illustrate this point.

Hall wrote `Gramsci's Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity`