Essential Essays, Volume 2: Identity and Diaspora

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 2: Identity and Diaspora draws from Hall's later essays, in which he investigated questions of colonialism, empire, and race. It opens with "Gramsci's Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity," which frames the volume and finds Hall rethinking received notions of racial essentialism. In addition to essays on multiculturalism and globalization, black popular culture, and Western modernity's racial underpinnings, Volume 2 contains three interviews with Hall, in which he reflects on his life to theorize his identity as a colonial and diasporic subject.

ISBN-13: 9781478001638

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: Duke University Press

Publication Date: 01-04-2019

Pages: 352

Product Dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.73(d)

Series: Stuart Hall: Selected Writings

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

What People are Saying About This

Robin D. G. Kelley

“Stuart Hall was our most brilliant thinker on identity and struggle.”

Hazel Carby

"Hall's writings make an extremely important contribution not only in our understanding of the past and the cultural, political, sociological, and theoretical formations that Hall analyzed, but as documents that provide us with powerful political and theoretical tools to understand our present and change our future."

Table of Contents

A Note on the Text  vii
Acknowledgments  ix
General Introduction  1
Part I. Prologue: Class, Race, and Ethnicity
1. Gramsci's Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity [1986]  21
Part II. Deconstructing Identities: The Politics of Anti-Essentialism
2. Old and New Identities, Old and New Ethnicities [1991]  63
3. What Is This "Black" in Black Popular Culture? [1995]  83
4. The Multicultural Question [1998]  95
Part III. The Postcolonial and the Diasporic
5. The West and the Rest: Discourse and Power [1992]  141
6. The Formation of a Diasporic Intellectual: An Interview with Kuan-Hsing Chen [1996]  185
7. Thinking the Diaspora: Home-Thoughts from Abroad [1999]  206
Part IV. Interviews and Reflections
8. Politics, Contingency, Strategy: An Interview with David Scott [1997]  235
9. At Home and Not at Home: Stuart Hall in Conversation with Les Back [2008]  263
Part V. Epilogue: Caribbean and Other Perspectives
10. Through the Prism of an Intellectual Life [2007]  303
Index  325
Place of First Publication  341 Show More