… I think that anyone seriously engaged in cultural studies, as intellectual practice, must feel, in the skin, its transience, its unsteadiness, how little they register, the bit we accomplish to change or to encourage throughout (to) action. If you do not feel it as a tension in the work they produce is because the theory has left him in peace. Stuart Hall (2003a, p. 213).

I encountered the writings of Stuart Hall in the mid-1990s. At the time, I was pursuing my master’s degree in Education in the Graduate Program of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, under the advisement of Professor Maria Lucia Castagna Wortmann. At that time, I experienced the period of the creation of the above referenced program, as well as the research area “Cultural Studies in Education”. I remember that the circulation of Stuart Hall texts between teachers and students triggered an enthusiastic movement of research articulation in education with cultural analyses stemming from the Birmingham group, an anthropophagic movement of absorbing concepts, modes of writing and researching. We came to see our own questions and contexts with other eyes.

Studying the writings of Stuart Hall in the 1990s, in a Department of Education, opened up an enormous potential range of investigation that put into action educational research in a broader more visible manner with regards to cultural issues of ethnicity, race, gender, sexuality, identity and consumption. With this, the focus on categories (strongly inspired by Marxist theories) such as those related to social class, labor, production and social reproduction, had their centrality challenged.

It is impossible to forget the poor translations (made ​​only for internal circulation among students and teachers) of Hall’s texts and the texts of other authors and researchers at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS). I have been involved with the translation effort, together with other colleagues, for a book by Paul du Gay, Stuart Hall, Linda Janes, Hugh Mackay and Keith Negus titled, “Doing Cultural Studies: the Story of Sony Walkman”. We studied these materials and many others through a seminar taught by Professor Tomaz Thaddeus. The year was 1996. At the time, my English was not strong enough for such a difficult task. This weakness, however, allowed me to anticipate the scale of the effort devoted to studies of the texts that motivated us, driving new questions and new paths of research. That book marked a turning point in my training as a researcher able to articulate, in an engaging language, discussions about culture, media and identity. The notion that we negotiate our identities daily, in asymmetric networks of knowledge-power, (re) inventing them incessantly, without this process ending or being defined, impacted me deeply at the time. I had previously imagined carrying around an essence, an identity that was entirely mine, forever housed in my “soul”.

Stuart Hall (2000) taught me that the identities have to do “with the question of using the resources from history and language, as well as from culture, to produce not what we are, but what we become” (p.109). Thus, the construction of identities may be linked to a process of “invention of tradition” and, therefore, whatever we become has little connection with a pretentious possibility  ‘back to the roots.’ Such a process would be thus linked to “a negotiation with our routes“, in other words, with everything that went into constructing ourselves at different times in our history.

In the words of Hall (2000), identity is a concept “under erasure”, that is, inappropriate, unstable and non-necessary. Thus, according to this thought-provoking author, the concept of identity needs to be questioned as a problem on its essentialist and deterministic productions, and also with regard to its own development, in order to widely mark its provisional character as well as its political character. Hall (2003a) argues that it was racial issues, along with feminism, that checked the work of British cultural studies, while (until the 1980s) they were mostly “struggling” with Marxist theories. At a time in which issues related to race, sexuality, and gender in culture came to the foreground, cultural studies took a “linguistic turn”, that is, such studies, under the influence of Hall’s work, began to highlight the “crucial importance of language and linguistic metaphor for any study of culture” (HALL, 2003a, p. 211). According to the intellectual, “racial issues were important extrinsic sources in the formation of cultural studies” (p. 210), this “necessary deviation” from the field to the discovery of textuality, being then configured as key axes of cultural practices for those who have been interested in cultural studies while committed to a political agenda in tune with minorities (in terms of symbolic power).

I would also like to briefly focus on the question of the subject in the theories of Stuart Hall, approximating him to Michel Foucault, because for both of them the subject is taken in articulation with the discursive and non-discursive formations. Although Hall (2000), follows the theories of Michel Foucault with respect to the notion of the subject, he problematizes the thinking of the philosopher – both in its archaeological stage (centered on studies of discursive practices) as well as genealogical dimension (centered on the study of the relationship of knowledge-power) – with respect to limited discussion about the ways by which to interrupt, impede or disturb “the quiet insertion of individuals in positions of-subject constructed” by discourses (p.122). For Hall, it will be in his last phase (ethics) that the philosopher, concerned about the “technologies of the I”, emphasizes the practices “that might prevent this subject becomes, forever, just a docile, sexualized body” (p.125). Hall points out that the decentering of the subject does not mean its destruction, and, according to that, proposes that we think about it as articulated to discursive practices. The author seeks then, to highlight an active role of the subject in negotiation, transformation and reconstruction of meaning, assuming, according to Foucault, the notion of a historical subject (not a person who would be the source of all knowledge, or even transcendental) that is linked in a contingent way to the discursive practices of his time.

It is interesting to note, also, that Hall’s texts were important not only for my research papers, but also for the initiation and continued education of teachers of science and biology. I activated, through Hall (1997), an understanding of cultural practices that infinitely increased all articulatory possibilities starting with the thematic ones, until then seen as “the property” of biology and its teaching. This meant assuming the understanding that different cultural institutions or contexts (cinema, school, television, newspaper, advertising, literature), producers of artifacts (films, textbooks, television programs, newspaper articles, brochures) that we consume daily are also implicated, far beyond the science that takes place in laboratories, in the ways in which we learn to see, to read and to narrate the living world. In fact, Hall’s very own biology began to be seen by me as a cultural practice.

Finally, I would now like to point out some brief notes I made in pencil (at different moments during my professional career) in two texts by Stuart Hall (2003a and 2003b) that I greatly enjoy, “Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms” and “Cultural Studies and its Theoretical Legacies.” Both were published in the book “From Diaspora: Identities and Cultural Mediations,” organized and compiled by Liv Sovik. The first edition appeared in Brazil in 2003, quite a distance from when I initially encountered the works.

In the first, I noted in the text’s margins, “it is interesting to see how Hall’s focus is on the relations”; “he runs away from an approach of causes and effects”; “the culture becomes ordinary”; “there is a deliberate escape from Marxism.” In the second, I sketched: “there is a rejection of meta-narratives”; “the project of cultural studies is open to the unknown, and there is a desire to connect and an involvement with the choices one makes”; “it’s amazing the idea that the theory that is worth retaining is the one that we have to contest and not that one that we speak with fluency”; “what would we like to stop within ourselves?”; “structuralism spoke about the institutional role of language, but with post-structuralism the issue of power and its effects were emphasized ;” “there is a recognition in Hall of the production of social movements”; “Something always escapes” …

What seems not to escape is the actuality, the political relevance, the effects upon us and in our practices that make so captivating the texts of one of the most exciting and challenging authors of the second half of the twentieth century: Stuart Hall.

Florianopolis/Brazil, April 1^st, 2014.

The post A Brazilian Take on the Writings of Stuart Hall appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

The first piece I read by Stuart Hall was Cultural Identity and Diaspora, published in 1990.[1] His call to analyze the subject positions from which we speak resonated deeply with me, especially as I could easily draw parallels between that and feminist calls to situate oneself vis-à-vis our research and our praxis in order to challenge the assumption of neutrality. Hall writes, “We all write and speak from a particular place and time, from a history and a culture which is specific. What we say is always ‘in context,’ positioned,” (1990, 223). He then went on to talk about his own cultural and racial background[2], and how this impacted his work. While this may seem commonplace within postcolonial and feminist writing, I remember being quite taken aback by his decision to share such personal information in an academic space. Having had a background in sociology—which has been described by some as a collection of writings based on the work of men from five European countries —Hall’s insistence on openly situating oneself as both a product and agent of culture seemed to go against most of what I thought to be “good academic writing.” And yet, it made complete sense.

The second time I came across Stuart Hall was in a class I took for my MA in Gender Studies. This time the focus was on his work on representation: the ways in which power relations construct and reproduce the kinds of knowledges we have about specific places, peoples, and so on. Through the lens of representation, Hall addressed the extreme trauma of colonialism: “The ways in which black people, black experiences, were positioned and subjected in the dominant regimes of representation were the effects of a critical exercise of cultural power and normalization,” (1990, 225). He goes on to draw on Edward Said’s conceptualization of the colonized being constructed as different and Other, as well as Foucault’s reminder that every regime of representation is a regime of power/knowledge. What struck me at the time, and continues to register as extremely relevant to the field of postcolonialism, is Hall’s emphasis on how these representations of the colonized were internalized by the colonized: “They had the power to make us see and experience ourselves as ‘Other’,” (Ibid). This is similar to Fanon’s work on the psychological effects of colonialism, a subject that unfortunately remains somewhat understudied in the field of postcolonialism. As Hall writes, “It is one thing to position a subject or set of peoples as the Other of a dominant discourse. It is quite another thing to subject them to that ‘knowledge’,” (Ibid). It seems to be that we are still struggling with the effects of these legacies, as well as the reality that neocolonial processes continue to produce and reproduce these representations, and that these representations have very material effects. One only needs to be reminded of the ways in which Orientalist[3] representations of Afghan women served to partly justify the American invasion and occupation of Afghanistan.

When I began researching Antonio Gramsci and his work on hegemony, I was especially excited to find that Stuart Hall had written an article on how Gramsci relates to studies of race and ethnicity.[4] Hall unsurprisingly finds some affinity with Gramsci, as Gramsci also drew largely on his experiences and his connections to society and the worker’s movement. In other words, he situated his theorizing within these lived experiences, as did Hall by constantly positioning and contextualizing himself in relation to his work. Hall rightly points out that Gramsci did not write on the colonial experience. Nevertheless, the concepts he developed can be applied to several pertinent questions in the field. One example is the way in which Gramsci theorizes the state as exercising moral and educative leadership. “It is not a thing to be seized, overthrown or ‘smashed’ with a single blow, but a complex formation in modern societies which must become the focus of a number of different strategies and struggles because it is an arena of different contestations,” (Hall 1996 435). Hall rightly goes on to apply this to the postcolonial context, where it is clear that revolutionary movements need to conceptualize the state in a more complex manner if they want to truly disrupt hegemony. This resonated with me particularly in relation to the 2011 Egyptian uprising, and the complex ways in which the Egyptian state is imbricated with specific social forces and economic interests, and the extremely complicated and layered nature of the state apparatus itself. Another example is Gramsci’s conceptualization of ‘common sense,’[5] which presents itself as truth but which is in fact a product of historical processes. Common sense is fluid and constantly shifting, and yet has immense ideological power. Again, it is clear that this can be linked to questions of race, representation, and the postcolonial conditions. Hall’s work on representation, for example, attempts to unpack some of these ‘truths’ and situate them as historically produced. Importantly, Hall concludes the piece by showing that despite Gramsci’s Eurocentrism, many of his formulations remain invaluable to the field of postcolonialism and race studies.

Years later, I find myself returning to Stuart Hall and still finding new concepts and ideas to consider. As my own research interests shift and grow, it seems as if the knowledge found in Hall’s work and life provide endless inspiration. Thinking about current events in Egypt and the role of nationalism made me once again revisit Hall and his work on cultural identity, and its explicit link to anti-colonial struggles, as “Our cultural identities reflect the common historical experiences and shared cultural codes which provide us, as ‘one people,’ with stable, unchanging and continuous frames of reference and meaning, beneath the shifting divisions and vicissitudes of our actual history. Such a conception of cultural identity played a critical role in all the postcolonial struggles that have so profoundly shaped our world,” (Hall 1990, 223). He links this to Fanon’s work on culture and the anti-colonial struggle, and I find both of these extrapolations extremely pertinent today as we see nationalist rhetoric become increasingly visible in multiple postcolonial settings.

In writing this piece, I found myself repeatedly going back to my childhood experiences of watching specific television shows (Disney movies come to mind straight away), viewing film,, and reading specific kinds of literature, and am keenly aware of how my exposure to this Westernized body of media conditioned certain representations of who I was. Looking back, I can somewhat delineate what I thought the Netherlands was and what I thought Egypt was, and by extension, what I thought it was to be Dutch or Egyptian, despite growing up in Zambia and only visiting both countries once or twice a year. Yet these representations were so strong that I continue to struggle with them today as I attempt, consciously and unconsciously, to unlearn both the positive representations of the Netherlands and the negative representations of Egypt, both of which lacked nuance. This is precisely what Stuart Hall speaks of when he says that representations are powerful because they not only are imposed by a dominant force, but become internalized and almost constitutive of the ways in which being dominated conceptualize themselves and the world. Moreover, these representations do not just have effects on personal identification. They also have deep and lasting material consequences that are expressed economically, politically and socially.

I will conclude with a final quote from Stuart Hall on the Caribbean, to emphasize just how important his work is to postcolonial studies across regions as well as to the millions of people around the world who have been touched by colonial process:

“Where Africa was a case of the unspoken, Europe was a case of that which is endlessly speaking—and endlessly speaking us. The European presence interrupts the innocence of the whole discourse of ‘difference’ in the Caribbean by introducing the question of power. In terms of colonialism, underdevelopment, poverty and the racism of colour, the European presence is that which has positioned the black subject within its dominant regimes of representation: the colonial discourse, the literatures of adventure and exploration, the romance of the exotic, the ethnographic and traveling eye, the tropical languages of tourism, travel brochure and Hollywood, and the violent, pornographic languages of ganja and urban violence. How can we stage a dialogue with Europe so that we can place it, without terror or violence, rather than being forever placed by it?” (Italics mine. 1990, 233).

The post Theorizing Lived Experiences: A Personal Reflection on Stuart Hall appeared first on The Postcolonialist.