The Unfinished Conversations of Cultural Studies

Abstract

This article discusses the ‘field imaginary’ of Cultural Studies through a reading of the three-screen video installation, John Akomfrah's 2012 film The Unfinished Conversation. In approaching the life and work of Stuart Hall through the incommensurate scales of personal and political histories which run simultaneously across and between the three screens, I argue that this installation enacts something we might call the intellectual aesthetic of the project of British Cultural Studies. The article is drawn from a talk which originally formed part of a panel discussion on ‘The Mark of Cultural Studies on Communication Research’ at the International Communication Association annual conference in 2013.

Keywords:

• Stuart Hall
• The Unfinished Conversation
• John Akomfrah
• the field imaginary
• communication studies

Acknowledgements

I am extremely grateful to Smoking Dogs Films for their kind permission to use these images.

Notes on Contributor

Jackie Stacey is Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Manchester where she is currently Director of CIDRAL (the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in the Arts and Languages). She is author of Star Gazing: Female Spectators and Hollywood Cinema (1994); Teratologies: A Cultural Study of Cancer (1997) and The Cinematic Life of the Gene (2010), and co-author (with Sarah Franklin and Celia Lury) of Global Nature, Global Culture (2000). In addition, she has co-edited a number of books, including: Thinking Through the Skin (with Sara Ahmed, 2001); Queer Screens (with Sarah Street, 2007); and, most recently Writing Otherwise: Experiments in Cultural Criticism (with Janet Wolff, 2013). She has been an editor of Screen since 1994.

Notes

1 The Unfinished Conversation was commissioned by Autograph ABP and directed by John Akomfrah, produced by Lina Gopaul and David Lawson (all of Smoking Dogs Films, and previously of Black Audio Film Collective, 1982–1998).

2 Since the writing of this talk for the ICA annual conference 2013, Smoking Dogs Films have released The Stuart Hall Project (2013), a single-screen documentary containing much of the same footage but extending the time period of the events covered, whereas The Unfinished Conversation is concerned with the post-war period up until 1968. Although The Stuart Hall Project is a single-screen format, it nonetheless retains some of the fleeting and woven aesthetic of the original three-screen installation. For reasons of space and timing, I shall not extend my discussion to include the single-screen film here.

3 These quotations are taken from Akomfrah's lecture on 4 March 2013 for Art, Culture, Technology (ACT) at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) on The Stuart Hall Project, considered in relation to The Unfinished Conversation.

4 Launch Event, 10 May 2013 at the New Art Exchange, Nottingham: http://www.nae.org.uk/exhibition/the-unfinished-conversation-john/5 (accessed 21 January 2014).

5 For example, Women Take Issue (Women’s Studies Group 1978), The Empire Strikes Back (CCCS 1982) and Off-Centre: Feminism and Cultural Studies (see Franklin et al. 2000).