Stuart Hall's Intellectual Formation and Legacy: An Overview Essay for this Special Section

ABSTRACT

This article is the introduction for a special section in the Howard Journal of Communications on Stuart Hall's legacy in the cross-disciplinary field of cultural studies. The discussion considers Hall's life as political activist—a leading spokesperson for Britain's New Left Movement—and scholar, namely his leadership in re-imagining the ways that society, social movements, race, gender, colonialism, and popular culture might be studied. Hall's academic life grew out of his growing racial awareness and his political engagement with key events of the post-World War II era. In seeking a third analytic space, driven neither by Soviet communist nor western capitalist values, Hall took up a traditional socialist path that would lead him into emerging intellectual formations in 1950s Britain. His academic life, which followed, would incorporate the wider range of concerns in the world, giving him global appeal as a thinker and writer.

KEYTERMS:

• critical theory
• ethnicity
• gender
• race
• media

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Corrigendum

Notes

1. The Windrush Generation was named after the SS Empire Windrush that transported Jamaican passengers to Britain in the years after World War II.