Making and moving publics: Stuart Hall's projects, maximal selves and education

Abstract

An extraordinary educator and public intellectual, Stuart Hall's career as a scholar, activist, teacher and mentor has touched almost every field in the social sciences and humanities. Paradoxically, education rarely claims him as an educator. Stuart Hall's refusal to see publics as given, fixed or settled matters with clear or final demarcations and boundaries allowed him to move pedagogically and politically between and among different constituencies and sites of formal and non-formal education, policy and praxis, arts’ groups and social theorizing in larger national and transnational spaces as places for public thinking, teaching publics and, thus, for making what I will call ‘maximal selves’. Indeed, his praxis articulated Michael Warner's queering of our theoretical understandings of publics and counter-publics, addressing and registering affectively and effectively with variously hyphenated communities. I will show how his formation as an intellectual worked with uncomfortable diasporic differences of his own ‘minimal selves’ to suture together alliances with specific marginalized groups as part of his extraordinary commitment to education as public thinking and teaching publicly. It is only until we understand him as an extraordinary educator that our tasks and inheritance from Hall's varied projects become appreciable.

Keywords:

• Stuart Hall
• publics
• counter-publics
• educator
• diaspora
• conjuncture
• scholar
• activist
• public pedagogy

Acknowledgements

My deep appreciation goes to Avtar Brah, Les Back, John Clarke, Jessica Evans, Annette Henry, Bob Lingard, Peter McLaren and André Mazawi for their insightful comments and/or enriching conversations. I thank Avtar for the example of a spiritual and meditative approach to scholarship, Les for the epistolary encouragement, John for pointing me to Warner's work and Dennis for all our shared history with Stuart Hall. Dawn Butler of Discourse made all of us look good. The Rainbow PUSH office in Chicago helped me rediscover Lillian Lohman's name. Becky O’ Connell deserves appreciation for her archival work on my behalf to locate ‘hidden treasures’ of African-American and mainstream press coverage on Tutu in Chicago. I thank Catherine, Becki, Jess and Stuart's extended family for sharing Stuart with all of us. This paper was made possible by all the extraordinary educators with whom I have had the privilege of working – among them Michael Apple, Fazal Rizvi, Dorothy E. Smith and Stuart Hall.

Notes

1. See Brah (1999) for an example of such a meditative approach.

2. Hall discloses his experiences playing jazz with Caribbean bus drivers and at Oxford in an interview with writer, Caryl Phillips (1997).

3. I have capitalized here because Hall himself uses this name of ‘Secondary Modern’ to discuss his recollections of teaching in this specific school, standing for a pseudonym. (Hall, 1959, pp. 17–25.)

4. See Davis’ (2004) discussion of Hall's speech to the National Committee for the Commonwealth on ‘Young Englanders’ and its references to his teaching in the Secondary Modern School.

5. Hall (1958) commits to what we now call a critical public pedagogy and a living conception of life and culture in plays, poems and films which offer both readers and writers ways to engage meanings relevant to their lives.

6. See Linder (2000) who argues that ‘Absolute Beginnings’ is a ‘blueprint’ for Hall's work at the CCCS.

7. See Dworkin (2014b).

8. See Dworkin (1990, 1997) – the latter, the book it would become.

9. See Lohr (1985).

10. Both photos in Figures 1 and 2 have been granted permission to be published here alone by Dennis Dworkin. The Figure 2 photo was not selected to be published by Marxism Today and remains in the personal archival collection of Dennis Dworkin. Marxism Today no longer exists but in its day it was a most influential left British magazine.

11. Judy Bloomfield (1986, p. 33) expressed discomfort with what she saw as Hall's fascination with Jackson's star figure status, stating, ‘It is only too easy to be dazzled by the stardom and avoid posing the sticky and difficult questions’. Her letter writer asked why Jackson was not pressed harder on the racial division in the labour movement, Louis Farakan's anti-Semitism, the re-emergence of anti-Semitism in the black community, the role of black businesses or issues where race and class intersect. John Whittier (1986, p. 33) commented that it unfair of Jackson to say ‘British black people do not have a voice in our society’, advising ‘us to pursue representation in various institutions’. Astutely, his letter mentioned that African-Americans have one fundamental advantage over Black British peoples in developing a Civil Rights movement – the fact of being the ninth or tenth generation to work out what representation means in business, politics, labour, etc., whereas British Blacks were only the second generation at this time.

12. See Sandra Crockett's (1986b, p. 3) coverage of Tutu in Daley Plaza in which she quotes Robert Spark's speech as the Co-Chair of Chicago's Free South Africa Movement on how symbolic Daley Plaza was to mainstream Chicago's anti-Apartheid lineup of engagements by Bishop Tutu. Free South African protesters had just been acquitted due to arrested related to their sit-in protest against Apartheid. Daley Plaza was located in near the Federal buildings where the protests had taken place.

13. Upon his return to South Africa, Tutu would face tremendous White anger over his increasingly vocal criticism of Apartheid. See Chicago Defender (1986/January 28), ‘Fear mars Tutu's Return’. http://www.lbcofchicago.org/History.html

14. Dennis Dworkin (personal communication, 2014a) recalls that he sat next to Mayor Washington with Stuart Hall between the two of us.