Identities Global Studies in Culture and Power ISSN: 1070-289X (Print) 1547-3384 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/gide20 “The sociology of Stuart Hall” Marcus Anthony Hunter To cite this article: Marcus Anthony Hunter (2018) “The sociology of Stuart Hall”, Identities, 25:1, 29-34, DOI: 10.1080/1070289X.2017.1412141 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/1070289X.2017.1412141 Published online: 26 Mar 2018. Submit your article to this journal View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=gide20 IDENTITIES: GLOBAL STUDIES IN CULTURE AND POWER, 2018 VOL. 25, NO. 1, 29–34 https://doi.org/10.1080/1070289X.2017.1412141 ARTICLE “The sociology of Stuart Hall” Marcus Anthony Hunter Department of Sociology and African American Studies, University of California, Los Angeles, CA, USA ABSTRACT This brief essay animates two signature features of Stuart Hall’s sociology, diaspora and culture, to draw attention to not only the paradigms manifest in his work but also how they point to fruitful paths to guide the future of the field. To do so, I will combine Hall’s autobiographic account with key passages from his path-breaking essay ‘What is this “Black” in Black Popular Culture?’. Here, then, the intention is to amplify Stuart Hall’s place as a crucial innovator of sociological thought and research, while also drawing our attention to the path forward his work provides. ARTICLE HISTORY Received 16 September 2017; Accepted 10 October 2017 KEYWORDS Stuart Hall; sociology of Stuart Hall; chocolate city sociology; W.E.B. Du Bois; race; culture Identities, in the plural, are the means for becoming. Stuart Hall (1997, 63) 1951 was a formative year for Black sociology. That year, pioneering sociologist and activist W.E.B. Du Bois had been falsely accused, charged, arrested, finger printed and tried as a foreign agent by the United States government (Du Bois 1968). Splattered across the front pages of major news outlets, Du Bois was defamed, had his passport revoked and watched much of livelihood critically damaged following the February announcement of formal charges by Dean Acheson, United States Secretary of State. Ultimately acquitted of all charges, Du Bois soon after expatriated to his new home in Accra, Ghana where he would live until his death. At the same time Du Bois was in the mist of his own dusk, a new dawn was approaching for a young promising Jamaican student. Sailing the Atlantic for an elite scholarship, a middle class brown boy traveled from the capital city of the former British colony, Kingston, to the intellectual hub of the British Empire, Oxford University. Curious about all things Black, Stuart Hall arrived in the United Kingdom in 1951 ‘ready for a new life but CONTACT Marcus Anthony Hunter hunter@soc.ucla.edu Department of Sociology and African American Studies, University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90095 USA © 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group 30 M. A. HUNTER absolutely unsure how it would happen, or what it would look like if it did’ (1997, 149). Just as Du Bois seemed on the verge of breaking from the onslaught caused by the Cold War government scheme against him, Stuart Hall arrived in the UK upright, young and full of hope though also “as the product of a “diasporic” displacement’ (172). And so it was that in 1951 a mighty baton passed in the relay race of sociology, Black liberation, and the Black intellectual tradition. Especially attuned to the liminal or third space of the Caribbean, Hall was deeply invested in the differences and similarities of Black imaginaries based upon life across the many nodes of the African Diaspora. The world and experience of the Caribbeans was of especial prominence in his consciousness. ‘We were condemned to be out of place or displaced, transported to a phantasmatic zone of the globe where history never happened as it should’, Hall observes about the West Indian experience, ‘We were conscripted into modernity as peculiarly wayward footsoldiers’ (1997, 61); thus, embodied in and emergent from Hall’s magisterial repertoire is a creole sociological imagination built upon a global yet intersectional perspective. Admittedly informed by Du Bois’s (1903) theory of double consciousness, Hall’s lifelong experience traversing the Atlantic endowed him with a sociological imagination wherein race, place, culture, and diaspora are manifested in how people, space and things become Black (Hall 1997). Hall’s worldview emerges from an acute sense of being ‘an uneasy traveller between conflicting symbolic homes’ especially since ‘leaving Jamaica had not resolved the ambivalences [he] had about belongingness’ (172). ‘We need to consider how we are inserted into the social processes of history and simultaneously think about the mental means we’, Hall implores ‘as subjects, employ to explain to ourselves where, in history, we find ourselves’ (1997, 63). This brief essay animates two signature features of Stuart Hall’s sociology, diaspora and culture, to draw attention to not only the paradigms manifest in his work but also how they point to fruitful paths to guide the future of the field. To do so, I will combine Hall’s autobiographic account (1997) with key passages from his path-breaking essay ‘What is this “Black” in Black Popular Culture?’ (1993). Here, then, the intention is to amplify Stuart Hall’s place as a crucial innovator of sociological thought and research, while also drawing our attention to the path forward his work provides. The sociology of Stuart Hall That Stuart Hall performed great acts of sociology is indisputable (e.g. Hall 1973, 1990, 1992, 1993, 2001, 1997). Such facts, however, do not mean that when the great conclave of the social sciences meet that his name will make it into the canon or even receive some version of disciplinary sainthood (see e.g. sociological curricular embrace of Michel Foucault). Over his career, Hall IDENTITIES: GLOBAL STUDIES IN CULTURE AND POWER 31 was often noted as a ‘cultural theorist’ and though a longtime faculty in a sociology department his work has not yet made its way into as much of the curriculum as ought to be. ‘I regard the designation of cultural theorist more as a polite’, Hall confesses, ‘convenient postponement, a holding operation, than a well-understood resolution’ (1997, 13–14). This ‘convenient postponement’ of his disciplinary designation belies Hall’s sociological imagination, especially as revealed when he discusses the orienting concerns at the heart of his prolific scholarship. ‘Much of my professional life has been concerned with the politics of who we think we are’, a pensive Hall intimates, “I’ve been riveted by the question of how we can understand the chaos of identifications which we assemble in order to navigate the social world and also how we seek to reach, somehow, ‘ourselves’“ (1997, 63). As a result, the sociology of Stuart Hall is always already concerned with broad notions of a Black diaspora and cultural production–how and why Blackness travels globally and manifests as a political category, identity, and cultural product. To answer the questions that emerge from this perspective, Hall’s sociology emphasizes the African diaspora as the geography of Black knowledge and migration. To see this intellectual convergence in action we need only look to his provocative ‘What is this “Black” in Black Popular Culture?’ essay. In it, Hall offers critique of sociology while illustrating the crucial role of the nexus of race, media analysis and popular culture. Hall asserts early in the essay that Black public and popular culture are best understood as ‘site[s] of strategic contestation’, although ‘the study of which is absent in sociological understandings of black folks in cities’ (1993, 106). He was not incorrect. Indeed, sociological analyses of popular culture, and even its complementary area, public sociology, remain marginalized topics in the discipline. Studying something popular, especially when produced en masse commercially, is for many academics the opposite of rigorous scholarship. Issues of intentionality and unintended consequences abound when querying the ideas and interests that converge in order to produce a popular cultural product. Yet, in his life and observations, from the bashments of working class Black Brits in London to the jazz of Charlie Parker, Hall found Black culture pregnant with empirical, political insights and possibility. Like nation states, local governments, and communities, Hall knew and took seriously that popular culture is produced by people, often collectives of varied interests: ‘[P]opular culture always has its base in the experiences, the pleasures, the memories, [and] the traditions of people. It has connections with local hopes and local aspirations, local tragedies, and local scenarios that are the everyday practices and the everyday experiences of ordinary folks’ (1993, 106–107). 32 M. A. HUNTER Once popular culture is inflected with Blackness, deeper connections between Black people here, there and across the African diaspora are brought into sharp relief. ‘In its expressivity, its musicality, its orality, in its rich, deep, and varied attention to speech, in its inflections toward the vernacular and the local, in its rich production of counternarratives, and above all, in its metaphorical use of the musical vocabulary’, Hall reminds us, ‘[B]lack popular culture has enabled the surfacing, inside the mixed contradictory modes even of some mainstream popular of elements of a discourse that is different – other forms of life, other traditions of representation’ (1993, 107–109). Hall rightly locates the potential of Black popular culture as a site of data on Black resistive practices, invention, and artistic and political representation. As Hall recalls for us, black public culture – including music, writings, speeches, radio, and news – is data that can allow us to gauge how Blackness travels and traverses regional, national and even international boundaries. This is both an observation and challenge to broaden the sociological imagination and abandon the unhelpful dubiousness that prevents sociologists from gathers clues and information even if buried in a hit song or play or poem. For example, using Hall’s insight as a springboard my collaborator and I conjure the framework of chocolate city sociology (Hunter and Robinson 2016, 2017), a race conscious approach wherein the perspectives, cultural practices and sites of critical Black density are where a more emancipatory and intersectional sociological imagination emerges. That Erykah Badu, Queen Ifrica and Lil’ Kim are artists is clear, but as Hall reminds there are messages in the music. Black messages that sometimes cut across the sheet music of Duke Ellington laying deep within the crystalline falsetto of Whitney Houston or pulling at the roughest roots of Bob Marley’s locks. What Hall does then, just as in all of his work (see e.g. Hall 1973, 1993, 1980, 2001), is to invite, empower and give permission to scholars, especially people of color, to take stock in and analyze the data of their peoples. For the music of Stevie Wonder, Miriam Makeba and Thelonious Monk, or the literary prowess of Gayl Jones, Derek Walcott or Lorraine Hansberry are critical forms of resistance, intraracial intra-Diasporic dialogue, and evidence of the process entailed in the making, becoming and unmaking of Blackness. The sociology of Stuart Hall is, then, a constant invitation and affirmation of the empirical resonance and ontological imports of being Black, seeing Black, singing Black, writing Black, thinking Black, organizing Black and mobilizing Blackness. To be sure, culture, media and diaspora are intertwined concepts that are in constant flux. Nation states split (e.g. Sudan and South Sudan), people disindentify with Blackness (e.g. All Lives Matter), and music surely travels with time, shape-shifting to catch the changing ears of popular audiences IDENTITIES: GLOBAL STUDIES IN CULTURE AND POWER 33 (e.g. the long journey in Black music from Bebop and the Blues to Trap and Bounce). For Hall, it is the responsibility of the sociologist to decode, search for coded sounds and message bubbling just beneath the surface (see e.g. Hall 1973). The sociology of Stuart Hall has at its core a working and powerful assumption that if it is true that slavery and colonization sought to silence Black subjects, then it must also be true that where there is Black noise Black messages, debates, politics and thus social scientific data abound (see e.g. Rose 1994; Butler 2009; Hunter and Robinson 2017). ‘For example, I still think the best way to analyse the ideological dimensions of a media statement is not only in terms of the so-called bias of its overt content, or the material interests which it serves’, Hall advises, ‘but also in terms of the deep propositional structure, inner logics, structures of inference and interpretive schemas which ground the discourse’ (1997, 208). The souls of black sociologists ‘I wanted to change British society, not adopt it’, Hall soberly admits at the memoir’s conclusion. ‘This commitment enabled me’, Hall continues, ‘not to have to live my life as a disappointed suitor, or a disgruntled stranger. I found an outlet for my energies, interests and commitments without giving my soul away’ (1997, 271). That outlet was sociology, and his soul endured because it melded with the creole-Jamaican-colonial-Cold War-Blackness from which it was born. In an increasingly globalized and interconnected society, the sociology of Stuart Hall offers a path we can follow into the future of the many fields that abound, especially sociology. Hypermedia alongside the abundance of social media platforms has not only democratized some ladders of success and debate, but also unleashed new forms of data, new dialogues of resistance and activism. Where others maintain that evidence looks and appears as surveys and interviews and field notes, Stuart Hall reminds us that data is not anything if it does not emerge from people. And for those whose identities are formed in a context of being marginalized, colonized, oppressed and undocumented, traditional forms of data may be at the very least unreliable if not opaque and imprecise. Stuart Hall’s oeuvre is one where the personal is political and sociological with many lessons. Sometimes objectivity creates a distance that obscures rather than uncovers facts. Even more, sometimes the dubious researcher who avoids ‘the popular’ in favor of traditional data sources is ignoring the critical role that broad forms of culture have as they travel and translate experiences for Black people across the African Diaspora. That we might prevent our discipline from a deep dive into the depths of obscurity while also moving our society towards broad liberation is enticing already; that 34 M. A. HUNTER taking Black folk ‘here’ and ‘there’ seriously might help get more people free and save your soul at the same time is the promise and fundamental call of the sociology that Stuart Hall has bequeathed us all. As it turns out, then, 1951 was not just an influential year for Black sociology; it was also an auspicious one for the many fields of social science, with the Atlantic Ocean again serving as the backdrop for Black peoples’ quest for freedom. Du Bois’s final transatlantic adventure provided him asylum until he found his place in the Sun, just as new adventures awaited an island boy who too would become a sociologist. And for this and many other things, we are eternally indebted to the magical mind of Professor Stuart Hall. Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author. References Butler, P. 2009. Let’s Get Free. New York: New Press. Du Bois, W. E. B. 1903. The Souls of Black Folk. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Du Bois, W. E. B. 1968. The Autobiography of W.E.B. Du Bois: A Soliloquy on Viewing My Life from the Last Decade of Its First Century. New York: International. Hall, S. 1973. “Encoding and Decoding in the Media Discourse.” Occasional Paper 7. Centre For Contemporary Cultural Studies, Birmingham University. Hall, S. 1980. “Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms.” Media, Culture & Society 2 (1): 57–72. doi:10.1177/016344378000200106. Hall, S. 1990. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” In Identity: Culture, Community and Difference, edited by J. Rutherford, 222–237. London: Lawrence & Wishart. Hall, S. 1992. “The West and the Rest: Discourse and Power.” In The Indigenous Experience: Global Perspectives, 165–173. Hall, S. 1993. “What Is This ‘Black’ in Black Popular Culture?” Social Justice 20 (1): 104–114. Hall, S. 1997. “The Local and the Global: Globalization and Ethnicity.” Cultural Politics 11: 173–187. Hall, S. 2001. “Encoding/Decoding.” In Media and Cultural Studies: Keyworks, edited by M. G. Durham, and D. M. Keller, 166–176. Oxford: Blackwell. Hunter, M. A., and Z. Robinson. 2016. “The Sociology of Urban Black America.” Annual Review of Sociology 42: 385–405. doi:10.1146/annurev-soc-081715-074356. Hunter, M. A., and Z. Robinson. 2017. Chocolate Cities: The Black Map of American Life. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Rose, T. 1994. Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America. Middle Town, CT: Wesleyan.