Essential Essays, Volume 1: Foundations of Cultural Studies

by Stuart Hall, David Morley (Editor)

Overview

From his arrival in Britain in the 1950s and involvement in the New Left, to founding the field of cultural studies and examining race and identity in the 1990s and early 2000s, Stuart Hall has been central to shaping many of the cultural and political debates of our time. Essential Essays—a landmark two-volume set—brings together Stuart Hall's most influential and foundational works. Spanning the whole of his career, these volumes reflect the breadth and depth of his intellectual and political projects while demonstrating their continued vitality and importance.

Volume 1: Foundations of Cultural Studies focuses on the first half of Hall's career, when he wrestled with questions of culture, class, representation, and politics. This volume's stand-out essays include his field-defining “Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies"; the prescient “The Great Moving Right Show,” which first identified the emergent mode of authoritarian populism in British politics; and “Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse,” one of his most influential pieces of media criticism. As a whole, Volume 1 provides a panoramic view of Hall's fundamental contributions to cultural studies.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781478000938
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	01/04/2019
Series:	Stuart Hall: Selected Writings Series
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	424
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

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 UniversityPress.

David Morley is Professor of Communications, Goldsmiths, University of London, and coeditor of Stuart Hall: Conversations, Projects, and Legacies.

Table of Contents

A Note on the Text  vii
Acknowledgments  ix
General Introduction: A Life in Essays  1
Part I. Cultural Studies: Culture, Class, and Theory
Introduction  27
1. Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy, and the Cultural Turn [2007]  35
2. Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms [1980]  47
3. Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies [1992]  71
Part II. Theoretical and Methodological Principles: Class, Race and Articulation
4. The Hinterland of Science: Ideology and the Sociology of Knowledge [1977]  111
5. Rethinking the "Base and Superstructure" Metaphor [1977]  143
6. Race, Articulation, and Societies Structured in Dominance [1980]  172
7. On Postmodernism and Articulation: An Interview with Stuart Hall by Larry Grossberg and Others [1986]  222
Part III. Media, Communications, Ideology, and Representation
8. Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse [originally 1973; republished 2007]  257
9. External Influences on Broadcasting: The External/Internal Dialectic in Broadcasting—Television's Double-Blind [1972]  277
10. Culture, the Media, and the "Ideological Effect" [1977]  298
Part IV. Political Formations: Power as Process
11. Notes on Deconstructing "the Popular" [1981]  347
12. Policing the Crisis: Preface to the 35th Anniversary Edition [2013] (with Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke, and Brian Roberts)  362
13. The Great Moving Right Show [1979]  374
Index  393
Place of First Publication  411

What People are Saying About This

The Guardian - Tim Adams

"[T]he most significant figure on the British intellectual left over the course of the last 50 years.”

Wendy Brown

“Stuart Hall was one of the great political intellectuals of our time—learned, perspicacious, provocative, and wise.”

Artforum - Okwui Enwezor

“The late Stuart Hall was more than an intellectual giant of postwar Britain. He was the great illuminator, whose far-reaching insights into how the world is constructed show us why cultural studies is not about the manners learned from the masters, but a way of examining and understanding social reality as made by the people themselves.”

Editorial Reviews

"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 UniversityPress. 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."
 

The Point - Asad Haider

"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."

New York Review of Books - Jacqueline Hall

"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" (8/31/2023 12:00:00 AM)

"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" (8/15/2021 12:00:00 AM)

"As one of the foremost intellectuals of his generation, [Hall] has made an enormous contribution to cultural and political thought, and his work has had a lasting impact in both social sciences and the humanities.... This collection is a treasure trove of Hall's intellectual and political offerings; I recommend it highly."--Avtar Brah "New West Indian Guide" (11/25/2020 12:00:00 AM)

"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" (5/1/2020 12:00:00 AM)

"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" (11/1/2019 12:00:00 AM)

From the Publisher

"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." 

American Book Review - Liane Tanguay

"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 Tanguayn Book Review

As one of the foremost intellectuals of his generation, [Hall] has made an enormous contribution to cultural and political thought, and his work has had a lasting impact in both social sciences and the humanities…. This collection is a treasure trove of Hall’s intellectual and political offerings; I recommend it highly.

New West Indian Guide - Avtar Brah

Along with the other volumes that Duke UniversityPress 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.

Educational Policy - Michael W. Apple