Godfather Of Multiculturalism’ Stuart Hall Dies Aged 82
Stuart Hall, a renowned British sociologist and cultural theorist, has passed away at the age of 82. A professor of sociology at the Open University from 1979 to 1997, Hall was a leading intellectual, writer, and politician who greatly influenced academic, political, cultural, and progressive debates for over six decades. Born in Jamaica, he began his academic career as a research fellow at the University of Birmingham’s first centre for cultural studies under Richard Hoggart in 1964. He later led the centre and contributed immensely to the development of cultural studies as an academic discipline.
Martin Bean, the vice-chancellor of The Open University, commended Hall as a committed and influential public intellectual of the new left who epitomized the values of openness, accessibility, social justice and education. Hall’s impact extended far beyond academia as his groundbreaking works on race, gender, sexuality, identity, and the links between racial prejudice and the media in the 1970s became widely known.
Diane Abbott, the Labour MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington, revered him as a hero and praised him for transcending the racial barriers and becoming one of the leading cultural theorists of his generation. He also wrote for and had a close relationship with Marxism Today journal in the 1980s, whose critique of Thatcherism, a term he coined, challenged the traditional left-wing beliefs that culture was determined solely by economic forces.
David Lammy, MP for Tottenham, described Hall as a "cut-through" academic who wrote in an erudite way that could also be grasped by the general public. He recounted how Hall, despite his ill health, would often visit and provide advice to him at the House of Commons. In a 2019 interview with The Guardian, Hall appeared pessimistic about politics in general and the Labour party’s lack of ideas, debate, analysis, and vision.
Hall’s traditional British education in Jamaica led to a scholarship at Oxford University in 1951, where he obtained a degree in English before concentrating on politics, setting up the New Left Review journal with Raymond Williams and EP Thompson. The Stuart Hall Project, a documentary of his life by filmmaker John Akomfrah, was released in September and showed how Hall’s voice had shaped the progressive discussions of our time, particularly on race, gender, and sexuality.
Hall had been suffering from ill health and had retired from public life recently. His passing marks the end of an era for those who had been inspired by his groundbreaking ideas and intellectual rigour.
