Essential Essays, Volume 2

Stuart Hall (1932–2014) was one of the most prominent and influential scholars and public intellectuals of his generation. Hall appeared widely on British media, taught at the University of Birmingham and the Open University, was the founding editor of New Left Review, and served as the director of Birmingham's Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. He is the author of Cultural Studies 1983: A Theoretical History; Familiar Stranger: A Life Between Two Islands; and other books also published by Duke University Press.David Morley is Professor of Communications, Goldsmiths, University of London, and coeditor of Stuart Hall: Conversations, Projects, and Legacies.

• A Note on the Text  viiAcknowledgments  ixGeneral Introduction  1Part I. Prologue: Class, Race, and Ethnicity1. Gramsci's Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity [1986]  21Part II. Deconstructing Identities: The Politics of Anti-Essentialism2. Old and New Identities, Old and New Ethnicities [1991]  633. What Is This "Black" in Black Popular Culture? [1995]  834. The Multicultural Question [1998]  95Part III. The Postcolonial and the Diasporic5. The West and the Rest: Discourse and Power [1992]  1416. The Formation of a Diasporic Intellectual: An Interview with Kuan-Hsing Chen [1996]  1857. Thinking the Diaspora: Home-Thoughts from Abroad [1999]  206Part IV. Interviews and Reflections8. Politics, Contingency, Strategy: An Interview with David Scott [1997]  2359. At Home and Not at Home: Stuart Hall in Conversation with Les Back [2008]  263Part V. Epilogue: Caribbean and Other Perspectives10. Through the Prism of an Intellectual Life [2007]  303Index  325Place of First Publication  341

"Anyone whose work is informed, 'in the last instance,' by Cultural Studies will find much that is helpfully familiar in it as well as new connections, new applications, new ways of '[penetrating] the disorderly surface of things to another level of understanding,' as Hall says, invoking Marx, in the epilogue. This seems especially urgent as the ascendancy of the far Right coincides with the wholesale neoliberalization of the humanities, as Hall predicted in his 'Theoretical Legacies' lecture. It is obviously not a question of 'going back' to Hall for a truer or more 'authentic' form of Cultural Studies than that in practice today. But there is much in his legacy that illuminates the dynamics of the present, and much to put into dialogue with contemporary scholarship and practice. Morley's collection reminds us how important it is for genuine intellectual work to articulate competing and contradictory paradigms together, to work, as Hall did, from the points of contestation and conflict rather than seek solace in abstractions. This, finally, is the 'essential' in the essays assembled here."  - Liane Tanguay (American Book Review) “Along with the other volumes that Duke University Press has published, these two books of collected essays are to be welcomed. They allow us to see a fertile mind in action, engaged in and with the real world. It is a model well worth emulating.” - Michael W. Apple (Educational Policy) "I have also narrated the effort it took for me to access his work to illustrate the importance of the Selected Writings now being released by Duke University Press. It is an event of profound historical significance that a new generation will be able to begin its political and theoretical education with systematic access to Hall’s writing. . . . The two-volume Essential Essays shows the broad scope of his work." - Asad Haider (The Point) "It was one of Hall’s unique gifts to offer analysis of the moment as it unfolded before our eyes. I am sure I am not alone in having found his talks exhilarating in ways I could never quite understand, given that the news he relayed with such energy was almost unremittingly dire. Hall offered his readings as interpretation and self-commentary, tracing his own intellectual path." - Jacqueline Hall (New York Review of Books) "Hall’s essays discern the shape that contending forces of history take in the moment. . . . Reading Essential Essays, Volume 2 at the confluence of these crises-not as the sensational subjects of moral panics but as the decisive and turning points in the planetary future of life and social justice-confirms the necessity of, once again, going back to Stuart Hall and learning from him the art of cultivating what I will call the conjunctural imagination." - Gökbörü Sarp Tanyildiz (SX Salon)