In Selected Writings on Race and Difference, editors Paul Gilroy and Ruth Wilson Gilmore gather more than twenty essays by Stuart Hall that highlight his extensive and groundbreaking engagement with race, representation, identity, difference, and diaspora. Spanning the whole of his career, this collection includes classic theoretical essays such as “The Whites of Their Eyes” (1981) and “Race, the Floating Signifier” (1997). It also features public lectures, political articles, and popular pieces that circulated in periodicals and newspapers, which demonstrate the breadth and depth of Hall's contribution to public discourses of race. Foregrounding how and why the analysis of race and difference should be concrete and not merely descriptive, this collection gives organizers and students of social theory ways to approach the interconnections of race with culture and consciousness, state and society, policing and freedom.

Race: the sliding signifier -- Ethnicity and difference in global times -- Nations and diasporas

It is impossible to overestimate the importance of Stuart Hall’s work in shaping the field of racial and ethnic studies for nearly five decades. From his groundbreaking work Policing the Crisis through to his paradigm shattering ‘New Ethnicities’, Hall’s writing has redefined how race research is thought and done, while Hall himself stands as an exemplar of the public and politically engaged intellectual. This collection of essays, from established and emerging scholars, critically engages with Hall’s legacy across this body of work, from the foundations of cultural studies as a field of enquiry, through his work on race and articulation, to his insights into ‘the politics of difference’ and diaspora identities. These essays both reflect back on Hall’s interventions and locate them within some of the key spaces and questions of our time – from the ‘political theology’ of race in South Africa to the terrain of the contemporary city, from reflections on memory, nationhood and belonging to new ethnicities online and the formation of postcolonial subjectivities. The collection includes an in-depth conversation between Les Back and Stuart Hall, in which Hall reflects on his career and explores the challenges facing contemporary multicultural, multifaith societies in a globalised world. This book was published as a special issue of Cultural Studies.

"Sometimes I feel myself to have been the last colonial." This, in his own words, is the extraordinary story of the life and career of Stuart Hall—how his experiences shaped his intellectual, political, and theoretical work and how he became one of his age's brightest intellectual lights. Growing up in a middle-class family in 1930s Kingston, Jamaica, still then a British colony, the young Stuart Hall found himself uncomfortable in his own home. He lived among Kingston's stiflingly respectable brown middle class, who, in their habits and ambitions, measured themselves against the white elite. As colonial rule was challenged, things began to change in Kingston and across the world. In 1951 a Rhodes scholarship took Hall across the Atlantic to Oxford University, where he met young Jamaicans from all walks of life, as well as writers and thinkers from across the Caribbean, including V. S. Naipaul and George Lamming. While at Oxford he met Raymond Williams, Charles Taylor, and other leading intellectuals, with whom he helped found the intellectual and political movement known as the New Left. With the emotional aftershock of colonialism still pulsing through him, Hall faced a new struggle: that of building a home, a life, and an identity in a postwar England so rife with racism that it could barely recognize his humanity. With great insight, compassion, and wit, Hall tells the story of his early life, taking readers on a journey through the sights, smells, and streets of 1930s Kingston while reflecting on the thorny politics of 1950s and 1960s Britain. Full of passion and wisdom, Familiar Stranger is the intellectual memoir of one of our greatest minds.

"Stuart Hall, in whose honour this volume is compiled, has made significant contributions to contemporary social and political discourse. Constantly praised for his scholarly prescience, he was at the helm of the forging and definition of the discipline of Cultural Studies and nurtured an entire cadre of young intellectuals who continue to make remarkable contributions in the fields of Cultural Studies and Social Criticism. The essays that constitute this collection, all, in different ways, contend with Hall's methodology, his philosophy, as well as many other dimensions of his rich and textured intellectual career. More importantly however, they serve to reconnect his work to the social context of his island of birth, Jamaica, and the wider Caribbean. "

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Selected Political Writings gathers Stuart Hall's best-known and most important essays that directly engage with political issues. Written between 1957 and 2011 and appearing in publications such as New Left Review and Marxism Today, these twenty essays span the whole of Hall's career, from his early involvement with the New Left, to his critique of Thatcherism, to his later focus on neoliberalism. Whether addressing economic decline and class struggle, the Cuban Missile Crisis, or the politics of empire, Hall's singular commentary and theorizations make this volume essential for anyone interested in the politics of the last sixty years.