Stuart Hall (cultural theorist)
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Stuart Hall is a cultural theorist from the United Kingdom. He was born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1932. He has contributed to key works on culture and media studies, as well as politics.
In 1951 he moved to Bristol where he lived before studying at Oxford. He was a Rhodes Scholar at the University of Oxford, and holds an M.A. from Merton College. He used to work at the University of Birmingham where he was the leading light of the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies. He held a post with the Open University between 1979 and 1997.
In the 1950s Stuart Hall joined E. P. Thompson, Raymond Williams and others to launch two radical socialist journals: The New Reasoner and the New Left Review. His career took off after co-writing The Popular Arts in 1964. As a direct result, Hall was invited by Richard Hoggart to join the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham.
In 1968 Stuart Hall became director of the unit at Birmingham University. He wrote a number of influential books in the years that followed, including: Situating Marx: Evaluations and Departures (1972), Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse (1973), and Policing the Crisis (1978).
After his appointment as a professor of sociology at the Open University in 1979, Hall published further influential books, including: The Hard Road to Renewal (1988), Resistance Through Rituals (1989), The Formation of Modernity (1992), Questions of Cultural Identity (1996) and Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (1997). He retired from the Open University in 1997.
Hall's work covers issues of hegemony and cultural studies taking a post-Gramscian stance. He regards language use as within a framework of power, institutions and politics/economics. This view presents people as producers and consumers of culture at the same time. Hegemony refers to the willingness of one social group to dominate and control other social groups.
Stuart Hall is one of the main proponents of reception theory. This approach to textual analysis focuses on the scope for negotiation and opposition on part of the audience. This means that a text — be it a book or a movie — is not simply passiviely accepted by the audience, but there is an element of activity involved. The person negotiates the meaning of the text. The meaning depends on the cultural background of the person. The background can explain how some readers accept a reading of a text while others reject it.
These ideas are further developed in Hall's model of encoding and decoding of media discourses. The meaning of a text is located somewhere between the producer and the reader. Even though the producer encodes the text in a particular way, the reader will decode it in a slightly different manner. What Hall calls the margin of understanding. This line of thought is linked to social constructionism.
His works are widely accepted as influential, such as studies showing the link between racial prejudice and media, and are important as foundational texts for contemporary cultural studies.
Bibliography
- Hall, Stuart. Cultural Studies: two paradigms in Media, Culture and Society 2 (1980): 57-72.
- Hall, Stuart. Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices.
- Hall, Stuart. Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse.de:Stuart Hall