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London. — One of Britain’s leading intellectuals, the sociologist and cultural theorist Stuart Hall, has died age 82. Known as the “godfather of multiculturalism”, Hall had a huge influence on academic, political and cultural debates for over six decades. Jamaican-born Hall was professor of sociology at the Open University from 1979 to 1997, topping off an academic career that began as a research fellow in Britain’s first centre for cultural studies, set up by Richard Hoggart at the University of Birmingham in 1964.
Hall would later lead the centre and was seen as a key figure in the development of cultural studies as an academic discipline.
But his impact was felt far outside the realms of academia. His writing on race, gender, sexuality and identity, and the links between racial prejudice and the media in the 1970s, was considered ground-breaking.
Later he wrote for and was associated closely with the journal Marxism Today in the 1980s. The journal’s critique of Thatcherism challenged traditional left-wing thinking that held that culture was determined purely by economic forces, a view that would come to influence the Labour party leaders Neil Kinnock and Tony Blair.
In one of Hall’s last interviews, with the Guardian two years ago, he expressed pessimism about politics generally and the Labour party specifically.
“The left is in trouble. It has not got any ideas, it has not got any independent analysis of its own, and therefore it has got no vision.
“It just takes the temperature: ‘Whoa, that’s no good, let’s move to the right.’ It has no sense of politics being educative, of politics changing the way people see things.”
Hall received a traditional “English” schooling in Jamaica before winning a scholarship to Oxford University in 1951.
He took a degree in English but later abandoned a PHD on Henry James to concentrate on politics, setting up the Influential New Left Review journal with the left-wing academics Raymond Williams and EP Thompson.
A documentary about his life by the film-maker John Akomfrah, called The Stuart Hall Project, was shown in cinemas in September.
Writing in the Observer, the journalist Tim Adams wrote of the film: “You come to see how pivotal his (Hall’s) voice has been in shaping the progressive debates of our times — around race, gender and sexuality — and how an increasingly conservative culture has worked lately to marginalise his nuanced understanding of this country.”
Hall had been suffering ill health for some time, and had retreated from public life. — The Guardian.
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