Two years after the death of influential theorist Stuart
Hall, scholars will meet at a university in Dortmund, Germany, to examine his
legacy, in a world where the cultural and media landscape has changed
tremendously over the past decade.
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| Stuart Hall (photo: E. McCabe) |
The
conference, titled “Wrestling
with the Angels: Exploring Stuart Hall’s Theoretical Legacy”, is being hosted
by the Technische Universität (TU) from Feb. 25 to 27.
Participants will “engage
with, examine, use, question, criticise, develop and transform Hall's many
concepts and ideas”, according to the organizers - professors
Gerold Sedlmayr, Florian
Cord, and Marie Hologa.
Hall was one of the founding thinkers of “cultural studies”,
an inter-disciplinary field that focuses on the political dynamics of
contemporary culture, and on how power-relations play out between producers and
consumers.
Scholars generally focus on analyzing the social and political
contexts of culture, and, in this, Hall was primarily concerned with the impact
on both individuals and communities, vis-à-vis society’s structure. But
some current theorists are moving away from the “power and political” aspects,
Prof. Cord said.
 |
| Prof. Florian Cord |
“We still feel a belief in the relevance of Hall’s work,
but has the field nowadays become too de-politicized? That’s something we’d
like to examine,” he told SWAN.
As a long-time director of the University of Birmingham’s
Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, Hall wielded major influence both
within academic circles and in wider public discussions of politics, race and
media.
Born into a so called middle-class family in Jamaica in
1932, he went to England as a Rhodes Scholar in 1951 to study at Oxford
University. He continued on a PhD route (which he later abandoned), became a central
figure of the British New Left, and co-founded the journal New Left Review.
For Hall, “intellectual practice was politics, and
questions of culture were political questions,” say the meeting’s conveners.
The conference’s title is in fact inspired by Hall’s own stated view that
theoretical work meant “wrestling with the angels” and that the only theory
worth having was one for which you had to fight and with which you had to
struggle.
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| Author Caryl Phillips (photo: Daria Tunca) |
British-Caribbean author Caryl Phillips has described
Hall as a “sociologist, writer, film critic and political activist” and said
that the theorist’s achievements were an extension of the work of a man Hall
greatly admired, the Trinidadian intellectual, C.L.R. James.
Outside of the academic world, Hall developed into “Britain’s
most insightful media critic on matters as wide-ranging as film, literature,
race migration and class”, Phillips wrote in an article.
He considered Hall to be unique in his ability to “move
between the worlds of the academy and the popular media with both elegance and
authority”, he added.
“One day he is on television interviewing Spike Lee, or
presenting a documentary about Derek Walcott, the next day he is delivering a
guest lecture on [Italian theoretician Antonio] Gramsci’s political thoughts to
a university audience, and the day after that writing a paper on the role of
the modern black photographer in British society to be read at a gallery
opening,” Phillips wrote in 1997, in the introduction to an interview with
Hall.
It is this multi-faceted nature that makes Hall’s work so
engrossing, according to professors Cord and Sedlmayr. But his achievements and personality could be overshadowing
his ideas.
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| Prof. Gerold Sedlmayr |
“Hall is still very relevant - he is mentioned in almost
every paper about cultural studies,” Sedlmayr told SWAN. “But there’s often no
deeper engagement. He seems to be canonized, yet no one deals with his ideas
anymore.”
The conference will not only address this anomaly, but some
participants will offer theories on how Hall would have viewed the rampant
development of social media, or the current political language in Europe, where
governments are struggling to develop a coherent and humane response to the
refugee crisis.
One scholar - Nina Power of London’s Roehampton
University - will look particularly at “why the 21st century needs
Stuart Hall”. - A.M.
