“The Beginning of Their Real Enunciation”: Stuart Hall and the Work of Culture

• Published in: Critical inquiry 2015-09, Vol.42 (1), p.1-30
• Main Author: Bhabha, Homi K.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Alterity; Anxiety; Consumerism; Cultural studies; Dialogism; Ethnicity; Feminism; Gramsci, Antonio; Great Britain; Hall, Stuart; Hegemony; Intellectuals; Jamaica; Leadership; Lebenswelt; Left Wing Politics; Migrants; Political identity; Political philosophy; Political representation; Politics; Populism; Prime ministers; Radicalism; Thatcher, Margaret H
• ISSN: 0093-1896; 1539-7858
• DOI: 10.1086/682994

Here, Bhabha talks about his arliest memories of Stuart Hall that go back to the Thatcher years, heyday of high theory and low spirits. Stuart did much to diagnose the organic crisis that plagued Britain's Lebenswelt in that lean and mean decade of radical right-wing Tory rule. It was ironically those very years, the long 1980s, that provided the provocation for many of Stuart's most influential essays and encouraged some of his most fruitful collaborations. The contours of Thatcherite discourse were custom-built to raise the ire of an early New Left Review intellectual from Jamaica who had deftly recast Antonio Gramsci in the spirit of poststructuralism and was by the mid-'80s increasingly coming to regard Britain as a postcolonial society of diasporic cultures and migrant communities. Margaret Thatcher's consumerist populism with its facile fiat that society does not exist flew in the face of the finely wefted interdisciplinary work--police and public, race and citizenship, gender and public culture--that marked the progressive pedagogy at the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies under Stuart's leadership. Thatcherism brought out the best in Stuart. This had as much to do with Gramsci as with the grocer's daughter from Grantham.