Phoebe Braithwaite, 'Through the Prism of an Intellectual Life: The Life and Work of Stuart Hall'

Phoebe Braithwaite, 'Through the Prism of an Intellectual Life: The Life and Work of Stuart Hall' Stuart Hall had a long and varied career; his work has meant many different things to different people. Through Oxford, the New Left, the Birmingham Center for Cultural Studies, UNESCO, the Open University, Marxism Today and the Black British Arts Movement of the 1980s and 90s, he inscribed himself into the contested post-war history of the United Kingdom. On his BBC Desert Island Discs in 2000, Hall reflected: “I can’t ever be English in the full sense, though I know and understand the British from the inside, like the back of my hand.” Through the Prism follows the chronology of Hall’s life and assesses his major influences to introduce his work and lines of thought to a new generation of readers and to set out in detail how these earlier incursions into ‘identity’ live on in the present. This book project also asks about Hall’s relationship to the Jamaica he left in 1951. Never returning to the Caribbean to live, he negotiated his relationship to his place of birth through the displacements of the “diasporic,” and the creations of this younger generation of artists and makers. This project recuperates the ebb and flow of these currents, understanding precisely the calibration of Hall’s ambivalent experience at the heart of the metropole; in the belly of the beast. The story we find in archives, interviews and by reading the work afresh is more interesting and unruly than the dominant narrative most often given since his death in 2014. It shows a charismatic figure who was nonetheless at the hinge of every environment he entered, a thinker with a powerful, synthesizing cast of mind, suturing together discrepant discourses: post-Marxist, post-structuralist, post-modern, critical-theoretical, literary and artistic. It also shows a person coming to terms with the different strands of their identity, as a black person, a Jamaican, an exile, and a man, whose later decades saw him return however obliquely to his original love of creative work, “redeeming,” as he wrote of the second generation, “through image and sound the breaches and terrors of a broken history.” Phoebe Braithwaite completed a PhD on the work of Stuart Hall at Harvard University. In 2022-2023 she was a visiting student at UCL’s Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Racism and Racialisation. Her critical and academic writing has been published in Wasafiri, Media Theory, Key Words, Dissent, New Statesman, The Baffler, frieze, ArtReview, and The Times Literary Supplement. HIPHOP ARCHIVE & RESEARCH INSTITUTE AT THE HUTCHINS CENTER, 104 MOUNT AUBURN STREET, FLOOR 2R, CAMBRIDGE, MA Part of the W. E. B. Du Bois Research Institute Colloquium Series