Selected Writings on Visual Arts and Culture

Stuart Hall (1932–2014) was one of the most prominent and influential scholars and public intellectuals of his generation. Hall taught at the University of Birmingham and the Open University, was the founding editor of New Left Review, and was 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.Gilane Tawadros is Director of the Whitechapel Gallery, Chair of the Stuart Hall Foundation, and author of The Sphinx Contemplating Napoleon: Global Perspectives on Contemporary Art and Difference.

• Acknowledgments  xiIntroduction. Detour to the Imaginary: Stuart Hall’s Writings on the Visual Arts and Culture / Gilane Tawadros  1Prologue. Subjects in History: Making Diasporic Identities [1998]  19Part I. Thinking-With/In the Image1. Isaac Julien’s Workshop [2013]  312. Democracy, Globalization, and Difference [2001]  393. The Way We Live Now [2004]  55Part II. The New Politics of Representation: Black Film/British Cinema4. New Ethnicities [1988]  655. Threatening Pleasures: A Conversation between Homi Bhabha, Paul Gilrory, and Stuart Hall [1991]  776. A Rage in Harlesden [1998]  867. Cultural Identity and Cinematic Representation [1992]  93Part III. Fanon, Creolization, and Diaspora8. The After-Life of Frantz-Fanon: Why Fanon? Why Now? Why Black Skins, White Masks? [1996]  1119. CrÉolitÉ and the Process of Creolization [2003]  13210. Legacies of Anglo-Caribbean Culture: A Diasporic Perspective [2007]  148Part IV. Assembling the 1980s11. Minimal Selves [1988]  17312. Assembling the 1980s: The Deluge-and After [2005]  180Part V. Photography, Representation, and Black Identity13. The Vertigo of Displacement: Shifts within Black Documentary Practices [1992] / David A. Bailey and Stuart Hall  20314. Preface to Different [2001]  21315. “Speak Easy”: Black in the Seventies [2012]  223Part VI. Reconstruction Work: Histories, Archives, and Diaspora16. Reconstruction Work: Images of Post-war Black Settlement [1984]  23917. The “West Indian” Front Room [2009]  25018. Constituting the Archive [2001]  26019. Whose Heritage: Unsettling “The Heritage,” Reimagining the Post-Nation [1999]  26820. Modernity and Its Others: Three “Moments” in the Post-war History of the Black Diaspora Arts [2006]  283Part VII. Museums, Modernity, and Difference21. Museums of Modern Art and the End of History [2001]  30922. Modernity and Difference: A Conversation between Stuart Hall and Sarat Maharaj [2004] 322Part VIII. Dreaming in Afro23. Chris Ofili in Paradise: Dreaming in Afro [2003]  34124. Maps of Emergency: Fault Lines and Tectonic Plates [2003]  349Place of First Publication  367Index

“This collection corrects the widespread misperception that Stuart Hall’s late-career art writings were a mere add-on to the heavy lifting accomplished by his 1970s work on Marxism and sociology. Gilane Tawadros’s panoramic selection reveals how extensively Hall turned his attention to art, photography, film, museums, and architecture to examine questions of diaspora, identity, and globalization. This volume is of enormous significance.” - Kobena Mercer, author of (Travel & See: Black Diaspora Art Practices since the 1980s) “Stuart Hall’s writings on visual arts and culture try to imagine what a genuinely emancipatory cultural practice would be like. How to think structures of feeling and imagination and dissolve the categories of race, representation, gender, and identity, categories that Hall did more than anyone both to advance and to problematize. Hall’s voice and image thread through several of my films and artworks. His focus on the distinctive voice of the Caribbean artist, his insistence on the fluidity of the diasporic imagination, were foundational for artists of my generation. Indeed, it is impossible to really think and experience Black British art without the keystones which this collection of writings presents.” - Isaac Julien "A rich group of texts, addressing global capitalism, race and diaspora and how ‘the language of the imaginary’ can be a framework for developing new insights into political and economic relationships of power." - Marko Gluhaich (Frieze) "Gilane Tawadros . . . is an attentive and appreciative reader who assembled these essays that date back decades yet are still relevant and readable. . . . While every narrative of cultural studies acknowledges Stuart Hall’s importance, this is a good collection of his writing on visual art and a document of urban creativity he witnessed in the last three decades of the 20th century." - Mike Mosher (Leonardo)