Opinion Culture warrior

The work of Stuart Hall, ‘godfather of multiculturalism’, will remain seminal.

February 13, 2014 12:05 AM IST First published on: Feb 13, 2014 at 12:05 AM IST

The work of Stuart Hall, ‘godfather of multiculturalism’, will remain seminal.

Few voices have been as significant in shaping how we think about issues such as race, gender and sexuality as that of sociologist and cultural theorist Stuart Hall, who passed away earlier this week. After abandoning a PhD on Henry James at Oxford, Hall became the founding editor of the influential New Left Review, and went on to establish Britain’s first cultural studies programme at the University of Birmingham.

Not only are his theories of multiculturalism seminal in the construction and consideration of identity politics today, Hall is also credited with having coined the term “Thatcherism” in a Marxism Today article in January 1979, anticipating the Iron Lady’s election to 10 Downing Street by four months.

Hall’s experience of being a Jamaican in Britain imbued the way he approached his subjects. He considered himself an outsider at Oxford; he told a newspaper in 2012 that three months at the university persuaded him that it was not his home. He was forever a “familiar stranger”, never quite fitting in with his British peers. Hall held cultural identities to be fluid rather than fixed, writing that they “are formed at the unstable point where personal lives meet the narrative of history”, constituting an “ever-unfinished conversation”.

It is Hall who championed the idea that identities are subject to the eternal play of history, culture and power.
Hall was also one of the first academics to consider seriously how the media influences perceptions of groups and individuals. In his 1973 essay, “Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse”, he proposed a new model of communication that argued that audiences were not passive consumers of television content but actively engaged with it.

Hall proposed that the portrayal of minorities on television contributed to how they were perceived generally. His work will continue to exercise influence over the study of culture and politics.