For the 8th Annual Stuart Hall Public Conversation, the Stuart Hall Foundation welcomed political theorist, writer, activist, independent curator and political educator, Prof. Françoise Vergès as the keynote speaker. Taking place on Saturday 17th May at Conway Hall in London and online via livestream broadcast, the event inaugurated our 2025 programme, In Search of Common Ground.

Vergès’ keynote, titled ‘There Will Be No Future Without Seizing the Present’, considered how we might think across difference to construct a life-affirming politics in times of poly-crisis. The writer and activist posited that building common ground is building transnational solidarity, and urged against despair: “Let us think defeat as a chapter in the long fight for liberation and freedom.”

The keynote was preceded by a video excerpt from Stuart Hall’s Race, The Floating Signifier (1997) and an introductory address from SHF Executive Director Orsod Malik. After the keynote, Vergès was joined by Mohammed Elnaiem, Director of the Decolonial Centre, for a discussion and audience Q&A which further considered how we might understand Hall’s thinking on “a politics without guarantees”.

The event also featured the premiere screening of ‘The Audacity of Our Skin’. Featuring poet and essayist Selina Nwulu reading her newly revisited version of the titular work to camera, the filmed performance was shot and edited by videographer Alice Kanako and commissioned by the Stuart Hall Foundation supported by Comic Relief.

Following the event, attendees were invited to congregate at an informal reception, where they discussed ideas with programme contributors and with each other. Plant-based South Asian food catered by Goodness Gracious Feast and drinks from the bar were made available, while Newham Bookshop held a stall with titles related to the programme on offer.

Skin Deep hosted a pop-up library at the back of the hall, continuing their efforts to make space for creative thinking in service of and beyond racial justice. The library of liberatory texts offered attendees the opportunity to relax and flip through back prints of the Skin Deep magazine, pick up their latest issue and delve into their sources of inspiration.

Read a transcript of the event recording.

View photography from the event.

Supported by Comic Relief, the Hollick Family Foundation and the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, in collaboration with Conway Hall, Words of Colour and Pluto Press.

For the 2024 Autumn Keynote, the Stuart Hall Foundation invited historian and writer Professor Robin D. G. Kelley to respond to the theme of our Catastrophe and Emergence programme. The hybrid event took place at Conway Hall, London, as well as online. Professor Kelley’s keynote was organised around reflections on anniversaries marking key moments of Catastrophe and Emergence. Tracing the colonial dialectic and the many different chapters and phases of resistance to it, his keynote framed resistance – ever in motion, ever in a state of emergence – within the current conjuncture. “Abolition and revolution are not the same thing,” he noted. “The meanings of abolition and revolution are both contested. But I would argue today’s abolitionists are revolutionaries.” Abolition continued to be a focus of the discussion between Professor Kelley and interdisciplinary writer, artist, editor and curator Imani Mason Jordan following the keynote. The event concluded with an audience Q&A, and Newham Bookshop held a stall with literature on sale. Read a transcript of the event here: https://www.stuarthallfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/Autumn-Keynote-2024-Transcript.pdf In partnership with Conway Hall Ethical Society supported by Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, Barry Amiel and Norman Melburn Trust, Cockayne Grants for the Arts, a donor-advised fund held at the London Community Foundation, and Words of Colour. Part of the Stuart Hall Foundation’s Catastrophe and Emergence programme. Learn more about Catastrophe and Emergence here: https://www.stuarthallfoundation.org/projects/catastrophe-and-emergence/

The Stuart Hall Foundation’s Annual Autumn Keynote with Arundhati Roy, September 2022. In the twenty-five years since the release of her world-renowned Booker Prize winning novel, The God of Small Things (1997), Arundhati Roy has consistently interrogated the meaning of justice in all its complexity, social, economic and ecological. Her last novel was The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017) which has been translated into more than 40 languages. Her latest collection of essays is Azadi: Freedom, Fascism, and Fiction in the Age of the Virus (2020). As we endure an unprecedented global pandemic, governmental inaction in response to the climate crisis, and the intensification of authoritarian practices across the global north and south alike, Arundhati Roy reflects on how we have arrived at this conjuncture and what might come next. In her keynote titled ‘Things That Can and Cannot Be Said: The dismantling of the world as we knew it’, Roy discusses the local and global dimensions of these crises and the ongoing resistance to them. Roy is then joined in conversation with Farzana Khan, Executive Director and Co-founder of Healing Justice London, and responds to questions from the audience.

The Stuart Hall Essay Prize

The Stuart Hall Essay Prize was launched in August 2023, inviting new and unpublished writing that connected with Stuart Hall’s ideas and impacted broad public discourse. The prize was intended for a selected writer whose essay engaged with and offered originality and value to a field of debate with which Hall engaged throughout his life, and contributed to a radical critique of contemporary society.

At the 7th Annual Stuart Hall Public Conversation in March 2024, the inaugural Stuart Hall Essay Prize was awarded to Hashem Abushama for the essay “a map without guarantees: Stuart Hall and Palestinian geographies”. The judging panel, composed of Catherine Hall, Jo Littler and Kennetta Hammond Perry, described the essay as “a powerful, politically important and theoretically nuanced piece of work written in lyrical prose… that elicits an urgent reckoning with ongoing realities of violence of dispossession, but with an eye toward imagining more just futures.”

Hashem Abushama’s prize-winning essay is published in full below. The author would like to thank Haya Zaatry for her indispensable help with this essay, particularly for her design of the countermaps.

 

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a map without guarantees: Stuart Hall and Palestinian geographies

   

 

I could not locate the entrance of al ‘Arub refugee camp, where I grew up. The settlement was to my right. Driving on the main carriageway, shared between the Israeli settlers and Palestinians, I expected to get to the camp’s entrance without any turns. This was the map I had known. To my surprise, the carriageway took an elevation as if one was suddenly driving towards the sky. It then cut into the hill to the south of the camp. There was a new right turn marked by a red sign in Arabic and Hebrew, clearly declaring this territory as Palestinian and warning Israeli settlers against entering it. After a roundabout, I got to the camp’s entrance where an Israeli checkpoint was in place. My house is the first in the camp, so near the checkpoint that I eavesdrop to the soldiers’ conversations and music.

This is the 60-Route, a 146-mile running from al Nasira (Nazareth) in northern historic Palestine (today’s Israel) all the way to Beer Saba’ (what Israel calls Beersheba) to the south. The road stretches from the north to the south because of historic/continuous dispossession, restricting the Palestinians’ right to movement. Changing the fabric of life around al ‘Arub is part of a wider Israeli project that aims to better connect Tel Aviv and Jerusalem to Jerusalem’s surrounding settlements and to the settlements in southern West Bank. The project unfolds in a particular historical conjuncture defined by intensified privatization of the Israeli economy since 1985 (see Hanieh 2003; 2013), the introduction of the self-ruling Palestinian Authority in 1993 (see Rabie 2021), and the fragmentation of Palestinian geography and polity (Salamanca et al 2012).

Despite the increasing reliance on capital to exact the control, management, and elimination of the Palestinian population, colonial relations remain the most constitutive. While in this conjuncture the dispossession of the Palestinians may take forms that directly exploit or contradict the capitalist relations, the unfolding of such relations happens against the backdrop of what Glen Coulthard (2014, 15) calls the “inherited background field” of colonial relations. This already begs the question of how we understand the frictions and mediations between the different levels of a social formation: between a privatising market and a settler colonial road, a Zionist ideology and a settler colonial state, a consumerist subjectivity and an arts organization.

I came of age at a time when taking loans, purchasing private cars, and aspiring to move to ‘the city’ (i.e., Ramallah) were becoming a norm in the West Bank (see Harker 2020). This is capital making a larger claim on defining the horizon of possibilities for the colonized Palestinian subjects. This is capital unfolding alongside patterned axes of difference: what capital makes available to you is eclipsed by structured patterns informed by gender, race, class, and nationality. If capital is increasingly playing a primary role in Palestine and across the world, how do we make sense of its relations to settler colonialism and its mediation through those axes of difference? This is the question that brought me to Stuart Hall and his writings.

Settler colonialism is a complex set of relations, practices, and processes that get condensed into durable yet historically contingent institutions, eliminatory spaces, and ideologies. It seeks to implant a settler way of life in place of the indigenous. As Wolfe (2006, 387) argues, settler colonies are “premised on displacing indigenes from (or replacing them on) the land.” They do so through positive (e.g., recognition and assimilation) and negative (e.g., genocide and disenfranchisement) mechanisms. Writing on settler colonialism, Coulthard (2014) shows how, in its economic reductionism and developmentalism, orthodox Marxism fails to consider the constitutive and continuous role of dispossession, particularly in settler colonial contexts. This contradicts Marx’s idea of ‘primitive accumulation,’ which relegates violence to a bygone historical moment (see Levien 2015). Given the continuous use of brute violence by settler colonial states to dispossess the indigenous, including Israel’s latest genocide in Gaza and the United States’ attempt to dispossess indigenous communities in Standing Rock (see Estes 2019), there arises the political and conceptual necessity to understand dispossession as contemporarily constitutive.

Starting with space gives us a generative entry point into the ‘concrete historical work’ that settler colonialism achieves in each spatio-historical conjuncture: “as a set of economic, political, and ideological practices, of a distinctive kind, concretely articulated with other practices in a social formation” (Hall 2021, 236). Doreen Massey (2000, 225), citing a regular lift to work with Stuart Hall, proposes we understand space as produced by interrelations. Space is not fixed. “You are not just travelling across space; you are altering it a little, moving it on, producing it. The relations that constitute it are being reproduced in an always slightly altered form” (Massey 2000, 226).

The settler road is concrete, a material and spatial manifestation made possible through practices (stealing the land from the indigenous, building the road, and surveilling it with military watch towers), institutions (the military and supreme courts, municipality, and corporates), and processes (e.g., capitalism and colonialism). The settler state and the corporates get to decide how and where the road passes through. But that does not mean they are the only ones producing that space; such a view, Massey (1994, 40) suggests, ‘deadens space.’ I, a subject of military occupation and an afterlife of refugees displaced in 1948, produce the road as a space by passing on and living alongside it.

If space is made up of multiple intersecting relations, then there is a multiplicity in this production which unfolds within an open system and on an unequal terrain. The result is neither total incorporation of the native Palestinians into settler colonial spaces, nor a total reclaiming of space. It is a “continuous and necessarily uneven and unequal struggle” (Hall 2021, 354). This is a map without guarantees^[1], one that sees processes and things as constituted by relations; relations as historically contingent and particular; and relations as prone to rupture and transformation. This is a map without guarantees, where settler colonialism may, one day, cease to exist.

In this essay, I write a theoretical diary, informed by Stuart Hall’s writings, that traverses the refugee camp, the village, and the city. It is part of a wider project that animates Stuart Hall’s thought by examining its remits and limits when thinking about settler colonialism across historic Palestine. In particular, I use Stuart Hall’s insistence on ‘conjunctural analysis’ to demonstrate how 1) there exists multiple Palestinian geographies; 2) how such geographies stand in relations of domination and subordination vis-à-vis one another and the Israeli state; and 3) how such geographies remain prone to rupture and transformation. I use countermaps designed for the essay by Palestinian architect and musician Haya Zaatry as well as photographs I have taken of the different geographies. I use ’48 territories to refer to Palestinian territories that had been occupied in 1948, ’67 territories to refer to the lands occupied in 1967, and ‘historic Palestine’ to refer to the entire land, engulfing both the ’48 and ’67 territories. This is not only consistent with how Palestinian communities, scholars, and activists name these territories, but also integral to any attempt to understand the continuous yet differentiated logics of dispossession across historic Palestine.

 

1. The camp

“In recounting the story of someone born out of place, displaced from the dominant currents of history, nothing can be taken for granted. Not least the telling of a life.” (Stuart Hall 2017, 95)

 

Nothing can be taken for granted. Is not the space of the refugee camp in and of itself a spatialization of a political demand? It is a space of waiting for an eventual return. And in that space of waiting lies the everyday politics—what Hall termed the “social transactions of everyday colonial life” (Hall 2017, 93). Nothing can be taken for granted when the street you live on is named after a village you have always imagined but never visited. When the entrance to the camp is controlled by checkpoints meticulously designed as life valves. When the Gush Etzion settlements lie at the hilltop, vividly lit up and ferociously surrounded by barbed wires, surveillance cameras, and watch towers. Palestinian novelist, Hussein Barghouthi (2022), once described the settlement as “if hanging from space, perhaps because of the lighting too, without touching the ground, or history, yet.”^[2] This is the ‘colonial sector’ as Fanon (2004, 4), writing on colonial Algeria, once dubbed it: “it is a sector of lights and paved roads, where the trash cans constantly overflow with strange and wonderful garbage, undreamed-of leftovers.”

 

 

Al ‘Arub is a refugee camp in northern Hebron in the West Bank. It houses ten thousand Palestinian refugees mostly displaced from villages nearing Gaza and Hebron after the establishment of Israel in 1948. The camp is surrounded by settlements—Gush Etzion to the north, Karmei Tzur to the south, and another, recent settler outpost to the north. To its north and northwest, the camp is fully engulfed by the 60-Route (see Figure 3), a highway built by Israel and shared—though with differentiated access—between Palestinians and the Israeli settlers. The most recent settler outpost was imposed atop a historic hospital (see Figure 4) built under Jordanian rule in the 1950s. In 2015, settlers moved into the building, kicking out the Palestinian family guarding it. They have since turned it into a wedding hall that was officially conjoined with the Gush Etzion Municipality in 2016. Stealing this building meant the gradual seizure of the land surrounding it. The road, cutting nearby the hospital before ascending towards the southern hill, continues this erasure; its completion was contingent on the seizure of Palestinian lands. Roads, as Salamanca (2020) argues, are part of a wider project of dispossession that serves the long-term domination of the settlers.

 

 

The colonial relations serve as the inherited background field within which capitalist, patriarchal, and racist relations converge to create, sustain, and perpetuate a settler way of life. But these relations as well as their convergence are historically contingent. This is the ‘historical premise’ that Hall (2021, 217) always insisted on: the forms of historical relations and their convergence with one another cannot be schematized a priori, for they are historically and geographically specific. “And, that this, in turn, requires attention to class-race (and other) articulations forged through situated practices in the multiple arenas of daily life” (Hart 2002, 31). So, what is the historical context in which dispossession takes place around a refugee camp in the West Bank in the current moment?

The current historical conjuncture in the West Bank is defined by a particular articulation (i.e., linking) between colonial and capitalist modes of accumulation, crosscut by gender, race, and class. In 1985, the Israeli state issued the Economic Stabilization Plan (ESP), which effectively neoliberalized the Israeli economy. The plan meant more intensified privatization of publicly-owned lands and companies, and further plugging of the Israeli economy into global circuits of capital (see Sa’di-Ibraheem 2021; Karkabi 2018). In 1993, the Oslo Accords were signed between the Palestinian Liberation Organization and the Israeli state, officially establishing the Palestinian Authority as a self-ruling government in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The Accords were followed with the Protocol on Economic Relations (also called the Paris Protocol) in 1994, which integrated the Palestinian economy into Israel’s through a ‘customs union.’ Not only are the entry and exit ports controlled by the settler state, but also the inflow of international aid and the entire land of the West Bank (even when it is juridically categorized as areas A, B, and C with different levels of Israeli control). Both the Accords and the Protocol were supposed to be temporary until the final negotiations. However, they remain in effect until today.

Through those agreements, the Palestinian economy is locked in a relation of dependency. Adam Hanieh (2003, 18) argues that the Oslo Accords have aimed to outsource the costs of the military occupation to international aid and cantonize Palestinian geography. Writing on housing and the reconfiguration of Palestinian space in the post-Oslo conjuncture, Rabie’ (2021) argues that the accords became a way of managing and sustaining the inequality between the Israeli and Palestinian economies. The neoliberalization of the Israeli economy and the Oslo Accords set in motion a new coupling of capital and colonial relations, whereby the former comes to play a more direct role in dispossession. That coupling is mediated through multiple levels of determination: it triggers changes in the political, cultural, economic, and social spheres.

This brief mapping of the set of economic, political, and social relations that define the post-Oslo conjuncture already points to economic systems that stand within relations of domination and subordination. Writing on South Africa, Hall (2021, 229) proposes that the inequalities between different economies imply the existence of multiple forms of political representation. In the post-Oslo conjuncture, there exists a hierarchy of representation that reaches the entire map of historic Palestine. Palestinians living within the ’48 territories (such as Haifa) are positioned as citizens of the Israeli state. In contrast, Palestinians living within the ’67 territories are subjects of martial and administrative law. Israeli civil law too, as Rabie’ (2021) argues, is weaponized to entrench colonial hierarchies and domination. While the Palestinian Authority was meant to operate across the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, a political split occurred between Fatah (a secular, nationalist party) and Hamas (an Islamist party) after the 2006 Palestinian Legislative Council elections. Though internationally monitored, the elections’ results were rejected by the European Union, Israel, and the United States. While Hamas came to control the Gaza Strip, the Palestinian Authority (ruled by Fatah) came to control the West Bank.

The international delegitimization of Palestinian electoral politics meant more entrenched neoliberalization of the Palestinian economy. Neoliberalism aims to lower the barriers of trade and smoothen out the pathways for capital circulation while entrenching political, economic, and social inequalities. It is a general global phenomenon, but it actually exists as a historically determined phenomenon. Writing on post-Apartheid moment in South Africa, Hart (2002, 33) notes how the African National Congress led by Thabo Mbeki tried to balance the advancing of neoliberal agenda with liberation symbols and ideas. The Palestinian Authority embodies a similar conundrum. It mobilises a history of armed resistance to advance a neoliberal agenda that further entrenches colonial hierarchies. Such agenda have nurtured a Palestinian capitalist class, a Palestinian capitalism that exploits, rather than resists, the contradictions of the colonial reality. The Palestinian Authority led by Mahmoud Abbas, the head of the Palestinian Authority since 2005, has witnessed a noticeable harmonization between the Authority’s structures and the Israeli settler colonial state. In effect, this has meant close security coordination with the settler state, economic cooperation that selectively benefits a Palestinian bourgeoisie while impoverishing the rest, and intensified suppression of dissent.

Fanon (2004, 24) notes that compromise is the nationalist bourgeoisie’s attempt to reassure themselves and the colonists not to jeopardize everything. As Glen Coulthard (2014) notes, settler colonies revert to a ‘colonial politics of recognition,’ which aims to incorporate, and therefore annul, indigenous demands for self-determination through legal circuits that only serve the long-term dominance of the settlers. The result of this compromise in the West Bank has meant a hollowing of Palestinian institutional politics, a professionalization of grassroots politics through NGOization (see Hamammi 1995), and a proliferation of consumerist and indebted subjects enduring a military occupation while being tied by loans. This is the impossible promise of Oslo: to consume and dream of a better life within the structural constraints of a settler colonialism insistent on eliminating you from the land.

The camp in the West Bank is a constant reminder that dispossession remains active and constitutive across Palestine. That the settlement has eaten up the fabric around the refugee camp is an eloquent reminder that dispossession did not stop in 1948. But that does not mean dispossession has unfolded since then unabatedly, in the same shape and manner. The neoliberalization of the Israeli economy, followed by the Oslo Accords, demonstrates how capital and dispossession “adapt themselves to the contemporary imperatives of colonial domination” (Bhandar 2018, 14), ushering in new mechanisms of control, management, and erasure. In the post-Oslo conjuncture, dispossession continues but through new mechanisms, delivering a ‘transformed settler colonialism.’^[3] Given their contingency, such mechanisms may be transformed, subverted, resisted, worked upon, or overthrown.

 

2. The village

“It’s difficult, too, to work through the question of how these pasts inhabit the historical present. Via many disjunctures—filaments which are broken, mediated, subterranean, unconscious—the dislocated presence of this history militates against our understanding of our own historical moment” (Hall 2017, 71).

 

The Israeli state was established through an event of dispossession that turned more than 750,000 Palestinians into refugees. At that time, the newly established state organized committees, institutions, and processes to turn such an event into a sustainable juridical, political, cultural, and economic formation (see Robinson 2013). It also relied on Zionist institutions and agencies established prior to 1948, including the Histadrut (the General Organization of Workers in Israel; see Zureik 1979). Between 1948 and 1953 in particular, the state experimented with multiple ad hoc processes to institutionalize the theft of Palestinian land and property. The efforts culminated in the establishment of the Custodian of Absentee Property, a governmental agency responsible for handling stolen buildings and lands. That period also witnessed the establishment of Amidar National Housing Company in 1949 and the Development Authority in 1951.

Using Stuart Hall’s (2021, 232) register, the bringing together of practices of dispossession into sustainable juridical institutions constitutes an act of “connotative condensation.” Settler colonialism is constituted by processes and practices that become linked in ways particular to each historical conjuncture. In the first two decades following the establishment of the settler state, it played a major role in organizing the shape and form of these processes and practices as well as the linkings (articulations) between them to maintain a system of domination that favours the long-term development of the settler.

In 2018, my family and I enacted a rehearsal of return. Three generations (my grandmother, my father, and I) went through an Israeli checkpoint near Bethlehem. The fragmentation of Palestinian geographies means restrictions on the right to movement for Palestinians, so that the 60-Route, for example, is lived through different maps: one for settlers, and another for Palestinians. We arrived to al Safiriyya, which was once a Palestinian village ten kilometres to the east of Yafa (Jaffa). My grandparents owned a bakery here. And that bakery was demolished in 1937 by the British colonial forces as a punitive measure against the family’s participation in the Palestinian Great Revolt of 1936-39. When looking through Palestinian newspapers predating 1948, I found a call from the people of al Safiriyya in al Difa’ Newspaper, denouncing the demolition of Abdulmosen Abushama’s (my grandfather) house and bakery. If memory is “a means by which history is lived” (Hall 2017, 78), it is also a means by which space is reimagined and relived. This was my grandmother’s first visit back to al Safiriyya since 1948.

 

 

Many Palestinians I know attempted such a return: a necessary rehearsal that breaks the heart and reorients return towards the future. Return, then, becomes a constant process and practice of questioning the interlocking relations that structure dispossession as well as of weaving together the moments, acts, and movements of resistance against it.

The dispossession that had occurred in al Saifiryya, alongside another 450 Palestinian villages and the cities, serves as the event of condensation. The theft of property, and its articulation to economic and political institutions, was meant to create the settler subject as property-owning and the native Palestinian as propertyless. When discussing juridical forms and property under slavery, Hall (2021, 235) suggested that it was not just attitudes of racial superiority that precipitated slavery. Slavery, too, “produced those forms of juridical racism which distinguish the epoch of plantation slavery.” Again, this is an analysis that starts with ‘concrete historical work’ of a particular structure, asking: “what are the specific conditions which make [a particular] form of distinction socially pertinent, historically active?” (236)

It is the Zionist ideology, vouched in terra nullius logics of conquest that selectively repurpose secular and religious ideas to serve the particular social group of European settlers, that activates a constitutive distinction between the settler and the native. The state is a site of cohesion, the result of tendential articulations (particular, favoured linking) between ideology, subjectivity, and property. The state played the primary role in the erasure of al Safiriyya. Is not the erasure of al Safiriyya a primitive accumulation, an accumulation by dispossession, where the State and ideology (not only the economy, as Harvey (2004) might put it) play a primary role? As afterlives of that violence, the residents in al ‘Arub refugee camp experience violence differently in the post-Oslo historical conjuncture: violence mediated through the Israeli army as an agent of the state, the settler as an agent of Israeli civil law, and the Palestinian Authority as a native agency aimed at nurturing bourgeois interests while suppressing anti-colonial and social dissent. Settler colonialism is contingent on these historically determined practices and processes. And it is vulnerable to the rehearsals of return.

 

3. The city

 

 

On a cold day in January 2020, we drove around the city of Haifa.^[4] We first went to Wadi Salib, which stands in the eastern part of the city with old homes—some neglected, others renovated—that belonged to Palestinian refugees before 1948. In al Burj neighbourhood stood the houses of Abdellatif Kanafani and Abed Elrahman El Haj (mayor of Haifa, 1870-1946). The house of the Kanafanis (Figure 7)—appropriated by the Israeli state in 1948, sold to the state-owned housing company Amidar in 1953 and then to four real estate companies in recent years (Sa’di-Ibraheem 2021, 698)—has been renovated and turned into law offices. The old and partially destroyed shops below the houses had a large poster in Hebrew by Ilan Pivko architects, showing the vision for their renovation. The old fronts would be polished and renovated, and atop of them, large ‘modern’ residential places would be built. These are all part of market-led, municipality-facilitated efforts to reshape what remains of Haifa.

Wadi Salib is a site of layered dispossession. The Israeli state forcibly drove out the Palestinian residents of the neighbourhood in 1948. While all the remaining Palestinians in Haifa were relocated to Wadi Nisnas neighbourhood and placed under strict military rule, arriving Arab Jews were placed in the Palestinian vacant homes. The Arab Jews were racialised as natural proprietors of these places as they were presumed to come from similar ‘mellah’^[5] living conditions in Morocco (Weiss 2011). The racial hierarchy of the newly-established Israeli state was already being woven and mediated through space. The unbearable living conditions resulted in an Arab Jewish rebellion in 1959, leading to the evacuation of the neighbourhood (Shohat 2017, 72).

Contemporary attempts by the Haifa municipality and Israeli and international capital to refashion the neighbourhood as authentic real estate not only rely on but also perpetuate this layering of dispossession: firstly of the Palestinians, and secondly of the Arab Jews. The tendential articulation solidified in 1948, which favoured the white European settler as the archetypical proprietor of stolen Palestinian property, was accompanied by a sedimentation of other articulations, including the dispossession of the Palestinians and the racialization and precarization of the Arab Jew. The gradual, neoliberal refashioning of space within the ’48 territories, including Haifa, since 1985, occurs within the parameters of this inherited background field of colonial relations.

Indeed, as Milner (2020) shows in her discussion of the Arab Jewish Giv’at-Amal neighbourhood, built atop the depopulated Palestinian village of Jamassin in 1948, private capital feeds on this layering of dispossession by completely denying Palestinian claims to the land as well as contesting the precarious Arab Jewish settler’s title to it. Though included in the settler society as Jews whose religious lineage entitles them to a ‘right of return’ to stolen Palestinian lands (as per the 1950 Law of Return), Arab Jews are racialized as lesser settlers whose entitlement to the land is questioned. It is no surprise, then, that in 1986 the land of Jamassin-Giv’at Amal—along with the right to evict its Arab Jewish residents—was sold to several private entrepreneurs. Some of the Arab Jewish settlers, Milner tells us, weaponize their settler subjectivity and their participation in the dispossession of the Palestinians in order to substantiate their claim to the land. Capital, and its coupling with the colonial relations, constitute historical relations that are crosscut by race.

If, following Massey (2000) and Ajl et al (2015), we view the city as a condensed vantage point into articulated practices and processes (i.e., not a thing that precedes the process), the city becomes one socio-spatial form amongst many other possible and imagined ones. Furthermore, the city is a constellation of power relations determined by the particular historical conjuncture under examination. In the post-Oslo conjuncture, Palestinians living in Haifa face a new coupling of capital and colonial dispossession, crosscut by race, gender, and class, whereby capital takes a more primary role while feeding on the raw contradictions unleashed by the colonial relations. Although Palestinians within the ’48 territories are included as citizen subjects of the state, that inclusion is structured as an exclusion that remains reliant on a layering of dispossession that denies the Palestinian right to self-determination across the map.

 

Conclusion

 

 

I write at a time of turmoil and intensified, genocidal violence. Thus far, Israel has killed more than fifteen thousand Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. Israeli airstrikes have targeted hospitals and schools, erasing entire neighbourhoods. Entire Palestinian families have been wiped out of the civil registry. Israeli officials have waved the idea of the permanent displacement of Gazans to the Sinai desert. While Western media outlets and political establishments rush to obscure this as rational self-defence, taking a historicist and geographic approach to Gaza shows how Israel’s targeting of the Strip is a brutal manifestation of the settler colonial intent to eliminate the native Palestinians. This is the same intent that takes the shape of settlers and military watch towers in the West Bank and that targets what remains of Palestinian urbanity in Haifa through urban renewal projects. In Gaza, this intent takes the shape of a brutal siege that has been imposed since 2007, followed by a series of wars that aim at de-developing the Strip (see Roy 1995). When viewed from al ‘Arub refugee camp, al Safiriyya, Jamassin, and Haifa, it becomes clear that the Gaza Strip faces another layering of dispossession. Gaza lies at the bottom of a hierarchy of life and violence that Israel imposes across the map of historic Palestine.

Settler colonialism is a whole constituted by historically determined parts—parts that are, in turn, constituted by a historically determined whole (see Hart 2018, 375-376). And so is capitalism. The local, such as al ‘Arub camp, is not a mere unilateral manifestation reflective of an all-encompassing global process. It is a nodal point of articulation—specific, differentiated, contingent. This is Hall’s (1986) Marxism without guarantees: there is no guaranteed correspondence or noncorrespondence between the different levels of a social formation; structures do not pre-date relations; and the global process of capitalist accumulation and that of Israeli settler colonialism take differentiated iterations that rely on the relations constituting each spatio-historical conjuncture.

As such processes unfold across the map of Palestine, they take particular shapes and forms, resulting in various historically determined settler colonial paradigms: the military occupation in the West Bank, the besiegement, de-development, and targeting of human life in the Gaza Strip, the administrative law in Jerusalem, and the inclusion through exclusion in the ’48 territories. This is a map without guarantees: there is neither a guarantee that settler colonialism’s intent to eliminate the Palestinians will succeed, nor a guarantee that Palestinians will take up a particular form of resistance. This is a map without guarantees: it is a map that takes very seriously the structural constraints shaping the fragmented Palestinian geographies but also one that animates the pressures that Palestinian practices and modes of resistance exert on such historical forces. This is a map without guarantees, where settler colonialism may, one day, cease to exist. A map without guarantees, where rehearsals of return will, one day, cease to be rehearsals.

   

About the author

Hashem Abushama is a Departmental Lecturer and Career Development Fellow at St John’s College and the School of Geography and the Environment (SoGE) at the University of Oxford. He is a human geographer with interests in urban studies, cultural studies, critical development studies, and postcolonial geographies. He holds a DPhil in Human Geography from the School of Geography and the Environment and an MSc in Refugee and Forced Migration Studies from the Department of International Development at the University of Oxford, and a BA in Peace and Global Studies from Earlham College in the United States. His PhD dissertation won the runner up for the Leigh Douglas Memorial Award for the Best Dissertation in British Middle East Studies. His forthcoming monograph looks at settler colonialism, capitalism, dispossession, and arts in contemporary Palestine. His writings have appeared in Refuge: Canada’s Journal on Refugees, the Jerusalem Quarterly, Jadaliyya, and Palestine Square.

   

Footnotes

[1] I am here paraphrasing Stuart Hall’s (1986) powerful essay ‘The Problem of Ideology—Marxism without guarantees,’ where he criticizes orthodox Marxism’s tendency to presume a necessary correspondence between the different levels of social formations. He argues that presuming a functionalist understanding whereby, for example, those occupying a working-class subjectivity are presumed to be revolutionary by virtue of that subjectivity leads to a determinism that deadens politics. There are no guarantees that such a subjectivity will be revolutionary for that depends on the actual, concrete struggles.

[2] Translated from Arabic by the author.

[3] Here, I am extending Stuart Hall’s concept of ‘transformed racisms’ (see Hall 2021). I explore this in greater length in an article titled ‘Articulations: a relational comparison of settler colonial dispossession and cultural practices in Haifa and Ramallah’ submitted to the Annals of the American Association of Geographers Journal.

[4] That day, I was taken on a tour around Haifa by Palestinian geographer Yara Sa’di-Ibraheem and her partner, Hisham, whom I would like to thank for their knowledge and time.

[5] Mellah is an Arabic term that refers to Jewish neighbourhoods in Morocco.

   

Bibliography

Ajl, Max, Hillary Angelo, Neil Brenner, Neil Brenner, John Friedmann, Matthew Gandy, Brendan Gleeson, et al. 2015. Implosions /Explosions: Towards a Study of Planetary Urbanization. Berlin: JOVIS Verlag GmbH. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783868598933

Barghouthi, Hussein. 2022. Among the Almond Trees: A Palestinian Memoir. Translated by Ibrahim Muhawi With an Introduction by Ibrahim Muhawi. The Arab List. Seagull Books. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/A/bo124470392.html.

Bhandar, Brenna. 2018. Colonial Lives of Property: Law, Land, and Racial Regimes of Ownership. Global and Insurgent Legalities. Durham [North Carolina: Durham North Carolina : Duke University Press.

Coulthard, Glen Sean. 2014. Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. Indigenous Americas. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

‘Difa’ Newspaper 1937’. n.d. Accessed 6 November 2023. https://www.nli.org.il/ar/newspapers/difaa/1936/09/23/01/.

Estes, Nick. 2019. Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance. London ; Verso.

Fanon, Frantz. 2004. The Wretched of the Earth: Frantz Fanon ; Translated from the French by Richard Philcox ; with Commentary by Jean-Paul Sartre and Homi K. Bhabha. New York: Grove Press.

Hall, Stuart. 1986. ‘The Problem of Ideology-Marxism without Guarantees’. The Journal of Communication Inquiry 10 (2): 28–44. https://doi.org/10.1177/019685998601000203.

———. 2017. Familiar Stranger: A Life between Two Islands. London: Allen Lane.

———. 2021a. Selected Writings on Race and Difference. Durham: Duke University Press.

———. 2021b. ‘Race, Articulation and Societies Structured in Dominance [1980]’. In Selected Writings on Race and Difference, edited by Paul Gilroy and Ruth Wilson Gilmore, 0. Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478021223-014.

Hammami, Rema. 1995. ‘NGOs: The Professionalisation of Politics’. Race & Class 37 (2): 51–63. https://doi.org/10.1177/030639689503700200.

Hanieh, Adam. 2003. ‘From State-Led Growth to Globalization: The Evolution of Israeli Capitalism’. Journal of Palestine Studies 32 (4): 5–21. https://doi.org/10.1525/jps.2003.32.4.5.

———. 2013. Lineages of Revolt: Issues of Contemporary Capitalism in the Middle East. Chicago, Illinois: Haymarket Books.

Harker, Christopher. 2020. Spacing Debt: Obligations, Violence, and Endurance in Ramallah, Palestine [Electronic Resource]. Durham: Duke University Press. https://ezproxy-prd.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/login?url=http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/9781478012474.

Hart, Gillian. 2018. ‘Relational Comparison Revisited: Marxist Postcolonial Geographies in Practice’. Progress in Human Geography 42 (3): 371–94. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132516681388.

Hart, Gillian Patricia. 2002. Disabling Globalization: Places of Power in Post-Apartheid South Africa. Berkeley: University of California Press. http://bvbr.bib-bvb.de:8991/F?func=service&doc_library=BVB01&local_base=BVB01&doc_number=009887163&line_number=0001&func_code=DB_RECORDS&service_type=MEDIA.

Harvey, David. 2004. ‘The “New” Imperialism: Accumulation by Dispossession’. Socialist Register 40.

Karkabi, Nadeem. 2018. ‘How and Why Haifa Has Become the “Palestinian Cultural Capital” in Israel’. City & Community 17 (4): pp1168-1188. https://doi.org/10.1111/cico.12341.

Levien, Michael. 2015. ‘From Primitive Accumulation to Regimes of Dispossession: Six Theses on India’s Land Question’. Economic and Political Weekly 50 (22): 146–57.

Massey, Doreen. 2000. ‘Travelling Thoughts’. In Without Guarantees: In Honour of Stuart Hall, edited by Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, Lawrence Grossberg, and Angela McRobbie, 225–32. London: Verso.

Massey, Doreen B. 2005. For Space. London: SAGE.

Milner, Elya Lucy. 2020. ‘Devaluation, Erasure and Replacement: Urban Frontiers and the Reproduction of Settler Colonial Urbanism in Tel Aviv’. Environment and Planning. D, Society & Space 38 (2): 267–86. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263775819866834.

Rabie, Kareem. 2021. Palestine Is Throwing a Party and the Whole World Is Invited: Capital and State Building in the West Bank [Electronic Resource]. E-Duke Books Scholarly Collection. Durham: Duke University Press. https://ezproxy-prd.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/login?url=http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/9781478021407.

Robinson, Shira. 2013. Citizen Strangers: Palestinians and the Birth of Israel’s Liberal Settler State. Stanford Studies in Middle Eastern and Islamic Societies and Cultures. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.

Roy, Sara M. 1995. The Gaza Strip: The Political Economy of de-Development. Washington, D.C: Institute for Palestine studies.

Sa’di-Ibraheem, Yara. 2021. ‘Privatizing the Production of Settler Colonial Landscapes: “Authenticity” and Imaginative Geography in Wadi Al-Salib, Haifa’. Environment and Planning. C, Politics and Space 39 (4): 686–704. https://doi.org/10.1177/2399654420946757.

SALAMANCA, OMAR JABARY. 2016. ‘Assembling the Fabric of Life: When Settler Colonialism Becomes Development’. Journal of Palestine Studies 45 (4): 64–80. https://doi.org/10.1525/jps.2016.45.4.64.

Salamanca, Omar Jabary, Mezna Qato, Kareem Rabie, and Sobhi Samour. 2012. ‘Past Is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine’. Settler Colonial Studies 2 (1): 1–8. https://doi.org/10.1080/2201473X.2012.10648823.

Shohat, Ella. 2017. On the Arab-Jew, Palestine, and Other Displacements: Selected Writings. London: Pluto Press.

Weiss, Yfaat. 2011. A Confiscated Memory: Wadi Salib and Haifa’s Lost Heritage. New York: Columbia University Press.

Wolfe, Patrick. 2006. ‘Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native’. Journal of Genocide Research 8 (4): 387–409. https://doi.org/10.1080/14623520601056240.

Zureik, Elia. 1979. The Palestinians in Israel: A Study in Internal Colonialism. International Library of Sociology. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

 

In the final episode of Living Archives, Alberta Whittle and Sekai Machache think together about freedom, urgency and slowness, their many transnational and international collaborations, and their feelings about edges.

Conversation transcript available here. Listen to more episodes here.

Living Archives is an oral histories project co-produced by the Stuart Hall Foundation and the International Curators Forum. The project is made up of six intergenerational conversations. Each conversation considers an alternative history of contemporary Britain through the testimony of UK-based diasporic artists working between the 1980s and the present-day. The project will form, what Stuart Hall calls, a “living archive of the diaspora” which maps the development, endurance, and centrality of diasporic artistic production in Britain.

Hosted by ICF’s Deputy Artistic Director, Jessica Taylor, practitioners reflected on the reasons they became artists, the development of their practices, the different moments and movements they bore witness to, and the beautiful reasons they chose to be in conversation with each other.

Hosted by Jessica Taylor

Edited by Chris Browne

Designs by Yolande Mutale

Music by LOX

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Bios

Alberta Whittle is an artist, researcher, and curator. She was awarded a Turner Bursary, the Frieze Artist Award, and a Henry Moore Foundation Artist Award in 2020. Alberta is a PhD candidate at Edinburgh College of Art and is a Research Associate at The University of Johannesburg. She was a RAW Academie Fellow at RAW Material in Dakar in 2018 and is the Margaret Tait Award winner for 2018/9.

Her creative practice is motivated by the desire to manifest self-compassion and collective care as key methods in battling anti-blackness. She choreographs interactive installations, using film, sculpture, and performance as site-specific artworks in public and private spaces.

Alberta has exhibited and performed in various solo and group shows, including at Jupiter Artland (2021), Gothenburg Biennale (2021), The Lisson Gallery (2021), MIMA (2021), Viborg Kunstal (2021), Remai Modern (2021), Liverpool Biennale (2021), Art Night London (2021), The British Art Show – Aberdeen (2021), Glasgow International (2021), Glasgow International (2020), Grand Union (2020), Eastside Projects (2020), DCA (2019), GoMA, Glasgow (2019), Pig Rock Bothy at the National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh (2019), 13th Havana Biennale, Cuba (2019), The Tyburn Gallery, London (2019), The City Arts Centre, Edinburgh (2019), The Showroom, London (2018), National Art Gallery of the Bahamas (2018), RAW Material, Dakar (2018), FADA Gallery, Johannesburg (2018), the Apartheid Museum, Johannesburg (2017), FRAMER FRAMED, Amsterdam (2015), Goethe On Main, Johannesburg (2015), at the Johannesburg Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale, Venice (2015), and BOZAR, Brussels (2014), amongst others.

Her work has been acquired for the UK National Collections, The Scottish National Gallery Collections, Glasgow Museums Collections and The Contemporary Art Research Collection at Edinburgh College of Art amongst other private collections.

Alberta is representing Scotland at the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022. And over 2021, Alberta will be sharing new work as part of the British Art Show 9, RESET at Jupiter Artland, Right of Admission at the University of Johannesburg, Art from Britain and The Caribbean at Tate Modern, Sex Ecologies at Kunstal Trondheim, Norway, In The Castle Of My Skin (MIMA) and Gothenburg Biennale (2021).

Alberta’s writing has been published in MAP magazine, Visual Culture in Britain, Visual Studies, Art South Africa and Critical Arts Academic Journal.

Sekai Machache (she/they) is a Zimbabwean-Scottish visual artist and curator based in Glasgow, Scotland. Her work is a deep interrogation of the notion of self, in which photography plays a crucial role in supporting an exploration of the historical and cultural imaginary.

Aspects of her photographic practice are formulated through digital studio-based compositions utilising body paint and muted lighting to create images that appear to emerge from darkness.

In recent works she expands to incorporate other media and approaches that can help to evoke that which is invisible and undocumented. She is interested in the relationship between spirituality, dreaming and the role of the artist in disseminating symbolic imagery to provide a space for healing against contexts of colonialism and loss.

Sekai is the recipient of the 2020 RSA Morton Award and is an artist in residence with the Talbot Rice Residency Programme 2021-2023.

Sekai works internationally and often collaboratively, for and with her community and is a founding and organising member of theYon Afro Collective (YAC).

 

Produced with funding from the Centre on the Dynamics of Ethnicity (CoDE) and Arts Council England.

 

In the sixth and final episode of Locating Legacies, series host Gracie Mae Bradley speaks to Ruth Wilson Gilmore. Often dismissed or set aside as a US-based movement, Gracie and Ruth sit down together to explore how we can think about the histories, legacies and politics of abolition in the British context and beyond. They map how local instances of political organising express themselves globally, as well as interrogating how past struggles express themselves in the present. Ruth Wilson Gilmore is the Director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics and professor of geography in Earth and Environmental Sciences and American Studies at the City University of New York. She is the co-founder of many grassroots organisations, including the California Prison Moratorium Project, Critical Resistance, and the Central California Environmental Justice Network. She is also the author of Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California, and Abolition Geography.

About the Series:

Locating Legacies is a fortnightly podcast created by the Stuart Hall Foundation, co-produced by Pluto Press and funded by Arts Council England. The series is dedicated to tracing the reverberations of history to contextualise present-day politics, deepen our understanding of some of the crucial issues of our time, and to draw connections between past struggles and our daily lives.

Get 40% off books in our ‘Locating Legacies’ reading list: plutobooks.com/locatinglegacies 

 

This project was made possible through funding from Arts Council England.

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Listen to more episodes here.

A discussion celebrating the publication of Stuart

Hall, Selected Writings on Marxism, chaired by

Catherine Hall

This article is an edited and abridged version of a discussion organised by the Stuart Hall Foundation in partnership with Duke University Press (June 2021). Transcribed and published by Lawrence Wishart’s Soundings Journal (Volume 2021, Issue 79).

Introduction

Catherine: This book is one in a series of edited volumes of Stuart’s work over the years, edited by Bill Schwarz and myself. Stuart and I shared a life for fifty years, and as a personal note, I could say that I witnessed, at second hand, the writing of these essays, from the incessant clacking of the typewriter keys in the long nights of the 1970s to the quieter work at the computer in the later decades – a quiet that was frequently interrupted with despairing exclamations as to the horrors of new technology … There are many different kinds of memories associated with this body of work. I’d like to ask Greg to open our session by telling us something of his thinking about the book, the issues he wanted to focus on, and the selection he made.

Gregor: As Catherine said, there’s this mega series that she and Bill Schwarz have edited, coming from Duke, but there are other publications too, which testify to Stuart Hall’s increasing, indeed remarkable, renown these days, and his repute, and the spread and reach of his work continue to grow all the time. But I meet a lot of people, maybe especially students or younger colleagues and readers, who seem surprised when I say that for the prime middle years of his career and life, which I would point out is the period in other thinkers’ work that Stuart himself often most liked, he was unquestionably – and I’m talking about at least fifteen years – centrally and deeply engaged in the question of Marxism. Now, I nearly entitled this volume, ‘Stuart Hall on the Question of Marxism’, rather than ‘On Marxism’, because I think it’s fair to say that even if you want to conclude he’s a neo-Marxist, in my view that’s still a form of Marxism that’s of vital significance to the life and nature of Marxism as a discourse. So, Hall was constantly wrestling in a very intense way with Marxist concepts, problems and readings.

Of course, this volume just testifies to something – it can’t contain all his relevant writings – but I hope it gives a good flavour of the different ways in which Hall engaged with central questions of Marxism and indeed transformed them in his distinctive way of handling them. So, I’m seeking to encourage everyone to read and engage with Hall engaging with Marxism. It’s an absolutely central dimension of his overall trajectory. This might be particularly relevant now, because, although Marxism declined amongst left theoretical and political circles in the 1990s and the early part of the Noughties, since the so-called global financial crash of 2008 there’s no doubt that Marxism has achieved a certain wider understanding, attraction and readership than those decades where it was rather out of fashion. Neither Marx nor Marxism has been, as it were, fully rehabilitated, but that just poses the question even more sharply: what kind of Marxism or neo-Marxism seems important to the contemporary era? And how crude, subtle, or complex do we think it needs to be to continue to have an intellectual life, and distinctive consequences?

I hope, then, that the volume poses that kind of general issue, not least because my sense of appreciation of Hall is that if you want a complex Marxism, a subtle Marxism, an agonistic Marxism where nothing is taken for granted in any corner of debate, then there’s no one that embodies that spirit of enquiry and engagement better than Stuart Hall. That’s the fundamental rationale for the volume.

Secondly, within that, I wanted to illustrate the different ways in which Hall articulated his evolving sense of Marxism and the type of text and context in which he did that. That’s reflected in the structure of the book, so that Part 1, the longest part, features four sustained theoretical encounters where Hall’s working with Marx – in Marx, for Marx – against some aspects of Marx himself and against other kinds of Marxism. I stress that these are theoretical ‘readings’, and I bring this out in the commentary, because this is something about Stuart Hall’s method of understanding that’s very important to him. He likes to work with the grain of thinkers through careful textual progression, even if in due course he wants to take some distance from them. And this naturally applies to Marx as well, along with later thinkers, not least Louis Althusser and Antonio Gramsci – his favourite Marxist, and the most politically consequential for Hall. So that’s the first part of the book.

Part 2 is more ‘applied’, for want of a better term; it’s more thematically focused and organised, offering slightly more concrete overviews of problem fields. So, for instance, the writings I excerpt from there include classic ‘Birmingham Cultural Studies’ work – Policing the Crisis, a long and complex book, and Resistance through Rituals, a canonical volume on subcultures and youth, together with one of his many, extraordinary Open University set textbook overviews, this one being on Liberalism as the quintessential political discourse of modernity itself.

We’re coming down the levels of abstraction here, if you like, even if Stuart Hall is still taking things in a big sweep, and many readers over the years have found these works of huge ‘conjunctural’ value without any very specific implications concerning Marxism as a whole. But I’ve edited these readings to show that, especially in retrospect, these ‘Birmingham School’ era works represent committedly Marxist framings, albeit, as always with Hall, in broad and encompassing style.

The third part of the book then brings along a little light relief, if you like. Its pieces are shorter and slightly more polemical, directly involved in encounters with other thinkers in the Marxist tradition, bringing out with some clarity what Hall thought about the business of theory and theorising, about core questions of culture, structure and ideology. Those exchanges are with E.P. Thompson, the great historian, with political and cultural economy scholar Bob Jessop and associates, and with Nicos Poulantzas, the Greek Marxist structuralist thinker.

Towards the end, in the last two chapters, I tackle the issue that many people familiar with Hall’s overall work and persona will want to pose, which is, ‘Hey, yes, a kind of Marxist, but come on, surely Hall pulled right away from Marxism in the1980s so that certainly by the early Noughties he couldn’t really be thought to be a Marxist in any serious sense?’ Well, that’s a valid and challenging question and I address it by selecting two readings from Hall which pinpoint two different ways in which this question of his departure from Marxism emerges quite sharply. One is in relation to postcoloniality/post-colonialism, and that’s essential because not only is the essay I’ve chosen excellent in itself and worthy of a place in these volumes of his most distinctive papers, but of course the main observational and political fact is that it was postcoloniality, ethnicity, race, identity, that steadily came to the very centre of Hall’s attention, substantively and politically constituting ways of thinking that indeed represented a point of departure from the earlier Marxist or neo-Marxist Hall. At least in important respects. Yet, without denying that shift of focus and emphasis, my selection and commentary is meant to remind us that, as so often with Hall, this is a fascinatingly complex matter, and that while he works through the issues with typical astuteness and eloquence, there are telling tensions within his discourse too.

And then the other point of departure from Marxism I try to bring out in the selection is based on a thesis Hall put forward in the later 1990s to do with the increasing centrality of culture to both the social formation that we live in, and also to our analytical categories of understanding. And I try to indicate that there are important ways in which the ostensibly bold headline thesis turns out to be somewhat misleading or compromised, simply because Hall never quite lets go – never quite wants to let go – of a residual Marxist commitment, the residual Marxist commitment of his earlier period, of the Part 1 readings in this book. Those who knew Stuart Hall well will I’m sure acknowledge – and it’s there in his writings – that whilst he could be among the first to radically question older positions and styles of thinking, he was most reluctant to ever actually abandon anything or anyone that he considered useful or important. Raymond Williams would be a key instance of this: Hall developed some quite profound reservations about Williams, but he never deserted his general project and example. He (Hall) was a wonderfully inclusive persona and thinker.

Okay, but here comes another thing I wanted to get across, something that hasn’t been talked about much, at least directly. It seems to me that just because Stuart Hall was a radiant, charismatic personality, we tend to assume that his distinctiveness as a thinker needs no further explanation; it just comes down precisely to that compelling winningness of his, especially perhaps as a great speaker. Without wishing to deny all that – it was of formative importance for my own development – I develop the slightly more theoretical notion of Hall as mediator. Now this idea of mediator probably needs a bit of upgrading – it can sound too soppy, a bit of this and a bit of that, ‘getting to yes’, tension-less intellectual cuddling. Well, no, that’s not what I mean. Mediation includes hard work and hard arguing by way of synthesising inclusivity in the journey of ideas, respecting aspects of a position without endorsing whole positions; and in so doing transforming the problem under consideration. In other words, it’s an intellectual style, a modality, and not (only) a personal characteristic. In suggesting this I draw a little bit from Bruno Latour, who is certainly not a Marxist, and a bit more from Jean-Paul Sartre, who I’m not otherwise a tremendous fan of. But in Sartre’s short book The Problem of Method – which Hall liked – there’s a stimulating series of reflections about what it means to be a mediator and why Marxism in particular needs to be seen as a series of mediations rather than a propositional philosophy. And Hall exemplifies both that mode and that location brilliantly, mediating within Marxism – structuralism versus culturalism; economism versus ideologism; class and non-class phenomena relative to the cultural and ideological spheres – and between Marxism and other discourses, mediations that constitute ongoing zones of engagement. For Hall, of course, this meant ethnicity and race, cultural studies itself, feminism, psychoanalysis in various ways, post-Marxism in the form of Foucauldian thinking, and so on. None of these formations and interventions are ‘Marxist’ as such, in fact they can often be posed as anti-Marxist and not just non-Marxist; but Hall wanted them all to be part of the same universe of discourse and progressive horizon, to be as closely intertwined with Marxism as possible.

In sum: I wanted to illustrate from the selected texts, and bring out in the commentaries, that Hall was a peerless, dialectical (neo-)Marxist mediator; also to suggest that, in a strange kind of way, although he critiqued and revised and drew away somewhat from Marxism, Hall needed Marxism too. It gave him a kind of anchor, some consistent terms of reference, without which his notably pluralistic mediations might have risked slipping into mere eclecticism, with a loss of ultimate coherence and integrity.

Catherine: Thank you so much, Greg. I completely agree that Marxism did indeed do a lot for Stuart, and not only did he never abandon it as some kind of anchor, it also became increasingly important to him in the last years in the context of neoliberalism and his thinking around that. We’ll now welcome Bruce Robbins to the discussion.

Bruce: Greg’s description of Stuart Hall as a mediator seems to me spot on – like all the commentary in this brilliantly edited volume. But I want to put a slightly different spin on the idea of mediation. In fact, I’m going to do some of the upgrading that Greg just mentioned. I want to tug this idea of mediation gently in the direction of a concept that may seem played out, or closer to flattery than to serious analysis – Gramsci’s concept of the organic intellectual.

The obvious objection to describing Stuart Hall as an organic intellectual – aside from his own repudiation of the idea – is that what Gramsci had in mind was intellectuals thrown up by the working class and helping to organise both the class’s consciousness and the activities of the political party that represented it. It’s in this sense, I assume, that Stuart Hall says, speaking with his signature modesty about his work at the Birmingham Centre, ‘We were organic intellectuals without any organic point of reference’ – ‘organic point of reference’ meaning, I assume, class and party. In order to make the concept of the organic intellectual work under such different circumstances, the premise we would have to accept is that what defines the concept – relationship with, accountability to, a given political constituency – can be stretched beyond class and party so as to cover the diverse social collectivities that composed the new left. In other words, the non- and post-Marxist discourses that Greg sees Hall as mediating between. So, no assumption of a shared class, no assumption of a shared party – though you might indeed have both.

Mediation in the case of the collectivities that animated these discourses and movements was obviously a challenge. The idea of serving them as an organic intellectual is an even greater challenge. It would entail trying to discover or impose a political unity on collectivities that didn’t just happen to be diverse – for many of them diversity or difference was arguably a principle of self-definition. This kind of mediation is a bigger job than trying to bring together the so called class fractions that were the potential components of the unified working class. In the context of race, gender, sexuality and so on, the very idea of political unity can no longer be taken for granted. As Hall says in the essay in the book on the Post-Colonial: ‘Isn’t the ubiquitous, the soul-searing lesson of our times the fact that the political binaries do not (any longer) – did they ever – either stabilise the field of political antagonism in any permanent way or render it transparently intelligible’ (p295). It’s the challenge posed by the multiplicity of the post-60s movements. If political antagonism can’t be defined in binary terms, do you still have political antagonisms?’ My point here is not to give my blessing to the idea of Stuart Hall as the godfather of multiculturalism, but to be more precise about both the multiplicity of multiculturalism, and about the Marxism that is, after all, what we’re here to discuss.

On the one hand, difference was not the exclusive defining principle of the 1960s movements. It was certainly not the defining principle of the anti-war movement, the anti-imperialist movement, the environmental movement; and – as comes out in this collection – even the movements associated with race, gender and sexuality were not committed in any absolutist way to identity, subjectivity or culture: this is why, when Hall expressed his impatience with those who’d like to replace an economic reductionism with an exclusive or overriding concern with identity, subjectivity or culture, as he does in the passage just quoted, he knew he had an audience. Where was he trying to take that audience? That’s the point on which the concept of the organic intellectual adds something to the concept of mediation.

As Greg says, the idea of mediation may suggest asking everyone to compromise a little in the interest of peace and tranquillity, asking them to listen to everyone else, asking them to play nice. But what Hall means by mediator corresponds, more or less, to what Bruno Latour means by it: it does not mean an intermediary who takes the social and its problem fields as given – let’s say takes identities as given. True mediators ‘reconstitute the very concerns being addressed, in effect, they propose and co-produce a new social in and through their acts of problematisation and the network effects they trigger’ (p342, ‘Editor’s discussion of the Part III writings’). In this sense, Latour says, mediators are game changers. One might also say, as Latour would not, that the work of mediation Stuart Hall did was the work of a Gramscian organic intellectual. It was doing something to the players and the identities, helping to create a collective self-consciousness, reconstituting them in order to prepare them to take power.

For Gramsci, an organic intellectual was defined by ‘a capacity to be an organiser of society in general, including all its complex organisms of services right up to the state organism, because of the need to create the conditions most favourable to the expansion of their own class’. The function to which such an intellectual aspired, in other words, was ‘organising social hegemony and state domination’. The phrase ‘state domination’ is not sloppy or accidental. Gramsci’s abstract description of the working class is ‘any group that is developing toward dominance’. The phrase ‘any group’ may have been there only to avoid censorship – he couldn’t say ‘class’. But it also leaves the door open for us to shift the notion of the organic intellectual from class to the 1960s constituencies, including class. The problem is that most, if not all, of the 1960s constituencies did not see themselves as developing toward dominance. Dominance was what they suffered from, not what they were seeking. That’s where Stuart Hall’s Marxism comes in, in my view. For better or worse, his Marxism does not come in the form of an insistence that the other constituencies should follow the lead of the working class. And it does not come in as an insistence on economic determination in the last instance, though there are certainly places in this volume where that’s what Hall seems to assert, and maybe rightly so. It comes in as the simple, if mainly unarticulated, proposition, that there must be a coalition, that the eventual goal of the coalition is to take power, and that in order for this to happen, no one can rest content with their own given identity, their own given subjectivity, their own given experience. There would have to be some reconstituting.

When Hall defends theory against E.P. Thompson, and in particular against Thompson’s invocation of historical experience, I can’t help feeling that behind Thompson’s reliance on experience Hall is seeing all the present-day social collectivities that are putting a great deal of weight on their experience. If so, then theory would stand in for the necessary coerciveness, or, if you prefer, the impoliteness, not of Marxism as such, but of Marxism as the reminder that the goal of the project, however delayed, is taking power – something that can only be imagined at the eventual result of a successful coalition of collectivities that have no single antagonist and no pre-given form of unity. Bowing down to the sacredness of anyone’s experience is inconsistent with the project of developing toward dominance.

The project of developing toward dominance also makes sense, retrospectively, of Hall’s trademark concern with the state. The prospect of successfully taking over the state was, of course, never close enough to make the articulating of that goal seem like anything other than a bad joke. But as a long-term goal, the putting together of a coalition that would be capable of governing and capable of governing differently, seems a better way of understanding Hall’s career than, say, his concern for culture, which has frequently sucked all the oxygen out of the discussion. About the state, there was no established Marxist orthodoxy in the name of which Hall could be dismissed as a shameless revisionist. There was controversy, as Greg points out, and he contributed meaningfully to it.

There was also controversy, maybe even more of it, on the other side of his mediating efforts. The philosopher who was most consistently affirmed by the new social movements was Foucault, who, as Greg says, refused to trace power back to any single organising instance such as the state. Whether you think of Foucault as anti-statism, as sinister and neoliberal, or as anarcho-libertarianism – which could also be seen as sinister – there is no doubt that his position was utterly alien to the project of developing toward domination. Which means, in effect, that Hall was fighting Foucault for the soul of the movement.

As this volume brings out, it was in wrestling with Nicos Poulantzas’s theory of the state, especially what Poulantzas called authoritarian statism, that Stuart Hall came up with the alternative formula, authoritarian populism. I think he was fascinated by authoritarian populism – maybe there was even some excess in that fascination beyond his epoch-making insight into its extraordinary political success. If so, the obvious reason is that, like Gramsci, he thought the left could learn from the right’s capacity to bring popular feeling into a new ruling coalition, riding it into state power. So, yes, the idea of taking state power and governing might have seemed to him grandiose, ruled out for the moment, both because it was too far from the immediate goals and concerns of the new social movements and because of the weakness of the organised working class, but I don’t think he was ever not informed by that idea.

And under present circumstances I cannot help adding that even at non-revolutionary moments there is nothing reprehensibly reformist or revisionist about saying that we need the state to take on certain functions that private individuals and local collectivities cannot take on for themselves. One does not need the world historical incompetence of Donald Trump, and the hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths that resulted from it, to bring that point home. It’s not just in the US that you have to factor in the importance of the state to the anti-war movement – which was obliged to come to some understanding of military violence – or the importance of the state as an interlocutor for the women’s movement and the civil rights movement, which were trying to get their constituencies protected by legislation. Do we really think this was a mistake? If not, then the fury over culture and culturalism fades somewhat into the background.

It’s possible that everything I have been saying is shameless, special pleading for my own generation. Call it the 60s generation. What Stuart Hall called ‘generational consciousness’ is obviously not the soul prerogative of youth. At the same time, I’m consciously trying to balance Stuart Hall’s powerful and uncompromising commitment to the present conjuncture – to what could be done and had to be done here and now – with his commitment to the historical long term, which is a signature move of Marx and of Marxism.

For Stuart Hall it mattered that patriarchy, racism and military violence all have non-capitalist sources, and pre-capitalist as well as capitalist trajectories. It’s that long term as well as the generational short term that permitted him and permits us to entertain the unfashionable idea of progress – an idea that the new social movements have been reluctant to acknowledge. Stuart Hall ends the piece on Edward Thompson by focusing on ‘the complex moment of 1968, a contradictory inheritance which has to be neither simply revived nor simply denigrated, but reckoned with’. As usual, I think he was too modest here. He was not merely reckoning with that inheritance but reconstituting it, teaching the movements of 1968 a Gramscian lesson. Getting the generation to acknowledge what he called, in a significant phrase, ‘theoretical gains’. I think it’s fair to say that not all the gains were purely theoretical.

Catherine: Thank you so much, Bruce. How pertinent your comments are to now and to the decades that have gone. We’re now going hear from Angela. We look forward very much to what you have to say.

Angela: Re-reading the work which Greg has so meticulously gathered and so judiciously edited has been a great pleasure. One can see the threads of a ‘complex unity’ (a phrase favoured by Stuart) across the breadth of the work here, just as one can also see Stuart immersed in the process of working with and wrestling with Marx in a quite sensuous way, as a kind of intellectual craftsmanship. But I would also say that there is a sense of excitement which pervades the volume. There is a clear project that Stuart was constantly working on. And it was also risky work dedicating such time and energy to Marx’s writings, in a context where such endeavours did not win friends in the academy. (I must say however I depart from Greg’s emphasis on Stuart’s engagement with Sartre, which I would say was fleeting. Rather I would suggest Stuart was looking, quite far and wide, for writing which would permit a fuller phenomenological engagement with everyday life and with questions of subjectivity after the various ‘culturalist’ dialogues with Hoggart, Williams and indeed E.P. Thompson. He then quite quickly shifted in favour of European structuralism, language and the politics of meaning.)

One of the first points I was thinking about was who were Stuart’s interlocutors within the left in the early 1970s when he was preparing the first article in this volume. What was the constituency for this particular body of work? Was it the New Left Review crowd still? Was it his colleagues in the anti-imperialist movement? Or was it just himself and some students and a few academic scholars here and there across the world? It was different with the works that make up the middle section of the new volume. Resistance through Rituals and Policing the Crisis, when they were first published, had an immediate readership within what were seen as exciting new debates in sociology including the so-called New Criminology. Stanley Cohen in the UK had published his very well-known work Folk Devils and Moral Panics, and there was also, of course, the long tradition in youth cultural studies of the American Chicago School of Sociology.

What made Policing the Crisis and Resistance Through Rituals (which were joint-authored within the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies) distinctive, was that both books foregrounded Stuart’s insistence on a study of the historical conjuncture, something that did not go down well in sociology at the time. I remember this quite distinctly, the charge being that attempting some sort of historical analysis meant that the work could not be considered as properly sociological. But for the CCCS writers there was a need to look more widely over the years and to try and grasp something of the ‘social totality’. Policing the Crisis paved the way for Hall’s subsequent work on Thatcherism, and the scale of the study allowed him the space to rehearse a full range of concepts. In each of these studies, the authors (myself included, re Resistance through Rituals) introduced a specifically Marxist vocabulary, including elements of continental Marxism in the form of Althusser’s theory of ideology and, of course, Gramsci’s notion of hegemony.

Greg’s choice of chapter from Policing The Crisis ‘Black crime, black proletariat’ is laudable for the reason that here we see Stuart reflect on the position of black unemployed youth in the UK in the 1970s within a neo-Marxist historical frame which refutes their being understood as simply a ‘reserve army of labour’ at capital’s disposal and hence part of the lumpenproletariat, pulled in when capital might have some need for them and expelled when no longer needed. Hall writes:

The ‘wage-less’ are not to be equated with the traditional disorganised and undisciplined ‘lumpenproletariat’. This false identification arises only because the black working class is understood exclusively in relation to British capital. But, in fact, black labour can only be adequately understood, historically, if it is also seen as a class which has already developed in the Caribbean – vis-à-vis ‘colonial’ forms of capital – as a cohesive social force. In the colonial setting ‘wage-lessness’ was one of its key strategies. It is not surprising that this wage-less sector has reconstructed in the metropolitan ‘colony’ a supporting institutional network and culture.

Hall provides a historical gloss on the importance of a cultural politics of race and resistance on its own terms. And then in a move I found surprising, Hall digresses to reflect further on the Race Today writing and its engagement with the autonomist strand of Italian Marxism. Actually this is surprising only for reasons of my own amnesia. I had entirely forgotten that at Birmingham in the mid to late 1970s (albeit in this instance percolated through debates in the journal Race Today) there had been animated discussion about this writing, particularly for its emphasis on work, labour and industrial action. The Italians had drawn on Volume 3 of Capital to develop a fuller understanding of capitalism’s post-war expansiveness across so many institutions. Hall explains how this brought to attention the idea of ‘reproduction’,0 with ‘the transformation of the whole of society into a sort of “social factory” for capital’. This ‘massive concentration of capital’ which is smoothed over and ‘harmonised’ by the state leads to a mass proletarianization effect and the degradation of labour. This envisages popular alliances and forms of class and race struggles beyond the factory floor. Stuart shows how the idea of the recomposition of the working class, especially as understood with reference to the black working class in 1970s Britain, can portend new forms of resistance. Hall is especially prescient here, suggesting that there has been a progressive integration of labour into low skill jobs such that the boundaries between unemployment and ‘hustling’ almost break down.

This is of course more fully developed in his later writing on Thatcherism, but he hints early on that this situation (the degradation of labour) prompted Capital to ramp up the ideological work being undertaken ‘in the superstructures’ to disguise the pervasiveness of low skill work, and instead to decoratively re-brand and upskill such work with a constellation of aspirational and lifestyle values, especially at that point where women fully enter and remain in the labour market. (We might think about what used to be called pink collar work.) Back in the late 1970s Hall is envisaging a breaking down of the boundaries between unemployment, under-employment, zero hours jobs etc. He uses the word proletarianization (as does Maurizio Lazzarato writing on ‘immaterial labour’ many years later), which points to a potential for alliances and new forms of resistance, and there were indeed glimmers of this in the punk-n-reggae youth cultures of the 1980s including Rock Against Racism and the Anti-Nazi League.

Stuart was at the forefront of a group of thinkers (often in dialogue with Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe) who were developing a neoMarxism, in his case without grandiosity, and which later into the 1980s and 1990s became a Marxism ‘without guarantees’ which also insisted on moving away from meta-categories of political economy to look forensically downwards to the politics of language and the vernacular of everyday life. It was this that allowed Hall later to warn the left about the ways in which the working class was being successfully wooed by the right. His methodologies relied on an open-ended mode of inquiry, including a non-directive, self-questioning, de-centred, non-authorial, template for future work and study. In short, a kind of ‘ecriture’ which has Marxism at its centre but which pulls into play and foregrounds a post-structuralist sensibility, with no absolute beginnings, no linear narratives and no tight conclusions, and a search for a theoretical mode which gives depth and shape to empirical details and history. In many ways his distinctive post-structuralist Marxism is more fully displayed in the later writings published in Marxism Today, where he in effect invented what is nowadays referred to by the new and alt right (we can assume Steve Bannon read and took notes from Hall) as ‘cultural Marxism’. This too was among his major achievements.

I want to conclude, then, by pointing to the power of ideology – the way Hall’s writing from the mid-1970s engages with the right’s deployment of so many ideological strands in the form of popular vernacular, and how these are organised, orchestrated, assembled and reassembled in determinate ways, while at the same time they also seem to be loose and free-floating. Analysing the orchestration of these elements – which have accumulated over time so that they become sedimented as common sense – has helped us to understand the popular hegemony of the right over the decades. In the Aftermath of Feminism, published in 2008, I very consciously adopt a kind of Hallian conjunctural analysis, looking at the relationship between the New Labour government in the decade 1997 to 2007 and the thematics of that time as genres in popular culture – where young women were being brought forward as subjects of ‘female success’ but on the grounds that feminism had to be repudiated. Tony Blair reportedly could not abide the ‘f word’.

In my most recent book (Feminism and the Politics of Resilience, published in 2020) I turned to Hall’s phrase which he reclaimed from the title of a right-wing pamphlet from the 1980s, i.e. the slogan ‘breaking the spell of the welfare state’. Hall then used it as an analytic for decoding some of the key elements of the Thatcher agenda. I use it to understand the media attacks on welfare through the idea of poverty-shaming. Then shortly before his death in his writing on neoliberalism, Hall referred to the use of the vernacular by George Osborne, then the Chancellor of the Exchequer, to further turn the tide against the welfare society by describing recipients as ‘sleeping off a life on benefits’.

My final point this evening is to slightly challenge Greg’s comment at the very end of the volume, where he refers to Stuart, with characteristic modesty, conceding some ground in reflecting that he and others like him ought perhaps to have paid more attention to the economic. He was maybe referring to the attacks from various quarters arguing that cultural studies had been ‘merely cultural’. Stuart reflects and thinks, ‘Well, maybe we should have spent more time with the economic’. But, at the same time, when Stuart took part in Isaac Julien’s film Kapital in 2013, he absolutely took a stand against David Harvey, to a huge sigh of relief on my own part and many in the audience. Harvey said that we should have stuck to his particular kind of economistic Marxism all the way along, and Stuart opposed that in a characteristically polite and eloquent way. So I would suggest that we might benefit also from looking at Isaac Julien’s Kapital.

Catherine: Thank you Angela. We turn now to our final speaker, Brett St Louis.

Brett: The structure of what I want to do in my fifteen minutes is to first of all briefly sketch two of the main issues that jump out at me in relation to this volume, and then to offer some remarks that seek to bring these points together, and to say something about their significance to our present moment.

The first of the two main themes I want to discuss concerns the methodology of theory – the methodology of theory in the sense of theory in its social, political, cultural and critical formulations. I want to say something about the nuanced valances of understanding the social in its complexity that is crucial in relation to this volume.

Then I want to say something about what I see as an implicit – perhaps more implicit than explicit – humanistic and ethical intervention at play within this volume. One of the things that it is possible to see, to read, in this collection, is the way in which it pulls together various analytical commitments and practical concerns in relation to the deprivations and affirmative potential of human social lives. I think that there’s a humanistic and ethical intervention running throughout the volume that’s worth considering.

I also want to offer a few personal framing comments, and to say that my own intellectual preoccupations and concerns are largely focused on sociological questions of racialisation and racism, and on these questions as they emerge within and across given social situations. It seems to me obvious that Hall’s work is important in this regard, and indeed, as Greg points out in his introduction to the book, the distinction sometimes suggested between Hall’s ‘earlier’ Marxist work and the later work on ethnicity, on representation, on cultural politics, is somewhat of a misunderstanding: the concerns with ethnicity, with representation, with cultural politics, in their elegant critical theoretical formulations, cannot be considered or dismissed as idealist theoretical abstractions, even when one takes into account their occasional psychoanalytic flavour. Rather, we can see them as empirically informed, and with a material referent – and I’ll say more about this shortly. It’s in that sense, then, that Hall’s Marxism constitutes an ongoing thread in his work, albeit one that takes different forms at different times.

I’d like to also agree about the wonderful work that Greg has done, not just in collecting these chapters together but also in the commentary that he offers. One of the important aspects of Greg’s commentary is that it situates Hall’s work within its formative context in a way that is suggestive of its continued relevance and its applicability – though I don’t mean applicability in the literal sense of utility, but more in terms of a style of thought and a style of engagement. And this question of thought and engagement is what I want to focus my brief observations on, particularly in relation to what Greg has characterised as Hall as mediating Marxism.

So first I’ll say a few words on the methodology of theory, and the interface between the social, political, cultural and critical dimensions of theory. I want to look at two examples, starting with the ‘Subcultures, cultures, and class’ chapter, an extract from Resistance through Rituals. What we see in that chapter is an attention to the distinctiveness of youth culture and the cultural aspects of youth. Youth is characterised as emergent within a given social moment and relations; and it is understood as being reflective of a distinction between dominant and subordinate social classes. There’s this sense of youth as subject to hegemony and struggle over cultural power. And subcultures are understood as emergent, and in a certain sense as solutions to problematic social class experience; and as being distinct from, and yet linked to, ‘parent cultures’. And there is that key idea of subcultures as formed through the activities of groups – their rituals, the ways in which they occupy space, their embodied and expressive styles, modes of relations, and so on. In short, what we have here is the foregrounding of social context, of social relations, social interests, social agendas, social processes.

To move on to a different example, let’s look at the excerpt taken from Policing the Crisis, the ‘Black crime, black proletariat’ chapter, which Angela also discussed. And this chapter, for me, is notable in terms of the thoroughgoing discussion that it offers of the debate over the position of the ‘criminal’ classes in relation to labour, largely in terms of the extent to which they might be understood as outside of, and without, class consciousness; it discusses the argument that the lumpenproletariat could possibly constitute a counterrevolutionary force, that they have been incorporated by capitalism; and the issue of the criminalised sector of the social class, as well as how that corresponds to both the waged and the unwaged members of the black labour force. And this question is then used to stage a distinction between, and discuss the relationship between, a sectoral (black and antiracist) struggle perspective, and a social-class (that is, working class, workerist and class conscious) struggle perspective.

What I see here, in terms of the methodology of theory, is Hall undertaking a balancing act, combining commitments to both analytic and practical observation, combining the explanatory and the critical, being prescriptive but also seeking accord and consensus building, if that’s at all possible. And there is a sense also of being cautious of the dangers of reductivism, scientism, historicism, obscurantist idealism but also wary of sense, experiential, impressionism, intuitive speculation – what might be characterised in some quarters as mysticism. So, one of the key things that’s happening in this work is Hall addressing the problem, assuming the challenge, of conceptualisation regarding social description.

I want to say a little something about what I understand to be a humanistic and ethical intervention – and I think sometimes, within debates seeking to understand race, ethnicity, racism, within a Marxist framework, this kind of humanistic and ethical intervention can be overlooked. One of the things that is clear, to me at least, is that Hall’s work is populated by people, by subjects, by actors, so there’s a concern with agents, a concern for their lives, which are impacted by economic, social and cultural forces. While this is not a soft moralism, for me there’s nonetheless an underlying sense of human immiseration and resistance animating Hall’s concerns and works, and as such there’s a humanistic undercurrent and ethical thrust. So, if we think of the ‘Subcultures, cultures, and class’ chapter, there’s this sense of subcultures taking shape through collective activity, and that there are these key areas of education, work, leisure, which give rise to the generational specificity of youth subcultures. So in terms of generational consciousness, a wonderful way in which Hall phrased this is to say that ‘Youth felt, and experienced itself, as different’.

So, there’s this humanistic undercurrent and ethical thrust, and within ‘Black crime, black proletariat’, we have a rehearsal of the significance of Marx’s hierarchy of labour powers but done in relation to black youth, and this discussion is framed within a debate over, on the one hand, their self-activity, and on the other hand, their subjugation. But notably here, black youth are not simply a social category or a process in relation to labour: they are also agents expressing themselves, or having that capacity actively suppressed. It’s this understanding of them as agents, with their own self-activity, or collective activity, that demands attention.

For my last few points, I want to try to draw this together, and it seems to me that there are two key issues here. First is the careful and detailed exposition that Hall offers, that he’s acutely appreciative of authorial context and intent. Second, that there’s a measured and balanced approach, giving disparate positions what we might characterise as a ‘fair hearing’, and I think this is really important, that the theoretical work undertaken by Hall engages in the question of how to conceptualise groups, not as empirical and demographic facts, or as normative and nominalist, but with a regard for formative complexity, and it goes beyond simply being an intellectual ambition, it is something that is achieved through the work. So there’s a constant attention to how groups emerge and exist within given social contexts and relations, and consideration of the impacts of those groups’ individual and collective experiences of those social contexts and relations, as well as how groups respond, and their own individual actions.

And I’m also struck then, lastly, by the issue of debate and tone, and this, I think, is crucial in terms of the point about Hall’s measured and balanced approach, giving disparate positions a fair hearing.

That ‘Black crime, black proletariat’ piece is deeply significant – in that chapter Hall very carefully rehearses the distinction between the Race Today and Black Liberator positions. The Race Today position focused around the refusal to work, while the Black Liberator position focused on the question of the reserve army of labour as super-exploited, as an underclass. But both of these positions are presented fairly. They’re presented in a nuanced and balanced manner, and I think this is an important commitment and undertaking. Angela made the point about the open and generous character of Hall’s work, and its being in a non-didactic formulation that serves as an invitation, and I think that’s a crucial point that I would also want to take away here. That this is something we can reflect on in relation to our own approach – and when I say ‘our’, I mean progressive, leftist political culture, which can be deeply adversarial and antagonistic. To say this isn’t to preclude discussion and debate, but rather to consider the register of our discourse and communication, and I think this is also part of the discourse of mediation that Greg refers to: how Hall’s mediation brings together the analytical, practical and polemical commitments of left politics.

Panel discussion

Gregor: All three speakers have made me think that I haven’t brought out enough that Stuart’s investment in the cultural is not simply an academic, or a cultural studies priority. It is a political project, and I’m wondering if I brought that out enough. After all, one of the chapters in the book is a response to Bob Jessop and colleagues’ arguments about ideologism, which have been more or less repeated in a recent essay by Perry Anderson in New Left Review called ‘Heirs of Gramsci’. In which Hall is 4th on a list of 4, really, in terms of getting all the ticks. Whereas I think what you’ve all brought out, in different ways, that that’s really not right. Hall’s investment in culture is deeply political, including in the way that Brett suggests, in his notion of group life, and humanist self-constitution, which goes beyond class.

That’s why Hall’s not an orthodox Marxist. That these are political cultural forms of bringing things into existence. In my commentary I try to draw attention to Sartre’s idea that part of Marxism, should be, not just respecting, but bringing to light, the profundity of the lived as a political impulse. And Hall had that in bags, and all three colleagues here have brought that out very nicely.

There’s so much to talk about, I just wanted to say about method, which Brett and Angela particularly touched upon. And Angela’s mentioned this before in a very stimulating way in her chapter on Hall, in my view the best book on cultural studies, where she talks about the importance, in general, as well as the importance to Hall, of a certain kind of creative messiness. Not bringing things to a rounded, validity-seeking coherence, but leaving some strands open, partly because who the hell can solve everything in the head? Stuart was very clear that he didn’t, but no-one else can either. So that’s another invitation for everyone reading him to join in the project of keeping debate open.

And I think one self-criticism in the book is when I discuss Hall’s reading of the 1857 introduction, I’m so fascinated by the intellectual and philosophical multiplicity and tensions in it, that I don’t think I actually simply say what a marvellous, creative, ongoing, unfinished thing it is, and it’s great partly because of that. He’s got this marvellous ability to come back at the end and round things off, remind us of what he’s done and what he’s not done. But there is something constitutively open about his thinking. And I think my commentators here have reminded me of a few things, so maybe I didn’t bring that out quite well enough.

Angela: I also wanted to ask you about what I saw as perhaps a slight glossing-over in the text of issues that I remember, or think of, as being formative on Stuart’s work, for example, his debates with Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. I thought – but you seem to disagree – that their book Hegemony and Socialist Strategy was enormously influential on the way that Stuart’s path through neo-Marxism developed – through the chains of equivalence, through alliances, coalitions, through contingency. But you suggest in your notes that Stuart was actually much more influenced by the earlier work of Ernesto and Chantal.

Gregor: Yes, that’s really interesting. When I revisited some of the work, I was surprised by how firmly Stuart says I want the early stuff, and I don’t really want the later stuff so much. Which was not my perception. I thought the later stuff, or the mid-1980s, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy influenced and troubled him quite profoundly, but he seems to just hold the line a bit, in terms of his own recounting of it, rather more firmly than I remember. And of course, we all have our views on these things, and I’ve already included quite a lot of commentary in there, and a few little critical comments of my own. Because you know, the great classics – which Hall now is – should never be simply admired, and left at that. But I couldn’t really go into it too much, because if I did there would be too much of me in the book. But I take your point, and I agree with it as well.

Catherine: I think, Angela, you’re right about the chain of equivalences. Stuart really used that in his analysis in The Fateful Triangle, which of course wasn’t published until much, much, later than the time when the talks were given. It was very important to him in his analysis of how race works. And it’s interesting that these things he wrote were then published decades later – of course one of the reasons that happened was that he never wanted it to be complete, he never thought it was finished, he was always revising. So, Greg, you say when you went back you found that he was clear on this, but on another occasion he might not have been, and he might have said something different about Laclau and Mouffe.

This is part of what all of you are talking about – the openness, the conviction that he would never have finished, that he’d never have it all right, and nobody else would have it all right either. That the whole point is to be engaged in critical dialogue. That’s what’s valuable, that’s what’s important.

I agree with Bruce that the work was about ‘how might we ever win power? – which was always something far off in the future, as it is for us now. But that has to be the question: how are coalitions going to be made, how are alliances going to happen? Once you no longer have any certainty about class, how is that going to change? How is the new common sense to be secured? And I think that’s the question that always underpinned what he was thinking about.

Questions from the audience

In Hall’s work in the 1970s and 1980s, did he fundamentally change his reading of Marx via Gramsci, alongside his reading of race and blackness? And I ask this deliberately to think across this wonderful volume, and the volume on Hall and Race?

Catherine: I’d like to say something on this. One of the points that Paul Gilroy and Ruth Gilmore Wilson make so central to their volume is a refutation of the idea that Stuart wasn’t thinking about race until the 1980s, which of course, is absolutely not true. He was thinking about race from the moment he was born, when he experienced what it was to be in a colonial family, and what it was to be a colonial subject in Jamaica. And he wrote about it in different ways, from that moment onwards, and some of the writing that hasn’t appeared anywhere yet is his writing when was in Oxford. His fiction, his poetry. A lot of it was about race. So, it’s there as part of what he’s thinking about, from the very beginning, and I think it’s very important to know that, and to see how the particular kind of turn to questions of race and ethnicity in the 1980s is, of course, in response to what was happening in Britain, and the politics of race in Britain at the time.

Gregor: I think that’s true, and you can see it in the chapter that others have highlighted, taken from Policing the Crisis, ‘Black crime, black proletariat’. Retrospectively, I was bowled over by the fact that Stuart is not just, as it were, adding a dimension of black politics to an underlying Marxist analysis. He’s transforming the categories themselves, as Brett brought out, in terms of wage labour, wagelessness, and the politics of that. There’s a lot of reasoning going on in that essay that’s giving a different reading of the economic categories, such that it becomes much more culturally open to the politics of race, and the politics of gender. There’s a lot in it on the categories of production and reproduction. And Hall didn’t just make those arguments up on the spot, they must have been with him a long time, and he finally found a way of articulating all those dimensions. It’s just a terrific piece in that regard. But he didn’t then make a big deal of that. He didn’t then say, ‘And by the way, don’t you see what I’m doing, I’m actually transforming, extending, modifying and, in a way, critiquing Marxist economic categories’. Why? Well, because he’s never been a polemicist for the sake of it. He’s keeping all the relevant political audiences together under one space.

Catherine: One of the reasons that Gramsci was so important to Stuart was Gramsci’s analysis of the South, and the way in which that brought up a whole set of different questions about region and regional culture, which then opened up Marxism in a different way, and gave him other kinds of access to thinking with different categories.

Can Brett say a little more about the emotional and relational nature of Hall’s mediating the complexity of a hostile British post-war society?

Brett: I’d like to to say something in relation to that but combine it with another audience question: I’d love to hear a reflection on how Hall might’ve turned to this moment in time, seeing Covid as a conjuncture that might be a point for the left to change the conversations, specifically in terms of neoliberal economics.

One of the things I have been trying to think through in relation to Covid-19 is ethnicity and risk, and this offers us a useful illustrative example of some of the key interventions that are staged in this volume. One of the issues that is really coming out is that we are seeing the central issue of where and how people live and work. Even when we think we’re talking about race – which we are – we’re also talking about how people live, how people labour. A report from the Runnymede Trust, Overexposed and Under-protected: the devastating impact of COVID-19 on black and minority ethnic communities in Great Britain, published in August 2020, details how people from UK black and minority ethnic populations are more likely to work outside of home, to use public transport, to be in key-worker roles, to have poor access to PPE; and to be more likely to live in overcrowded, intergenerational homes, making it harder for them to shield, harder for them to self-isolate. So, in terms of the social conceptualisation of Covid-19, ethnicity and risk, we have seen that ethnicity is a key marker of Covid-19 risk, but it’s not a causal determinant in and of itself.

But at the same time – and this is where it links to the question about the emotional and relational nature of Hall’s writing – it reminds us that when we are thinking about the experience of risk, it is an experience, it is felt by individuals, by groups and by communities. We might consider these risks as embodied, but they also involve multiple factors. And another point here is that the Public Health England report of June 2020, Disparities in the risk and outcomes of Covid-19, pointed out that black, minority ethnic, people reported low levels of satisfaction with their experiences of healthcare provision.

So, that account of the experiential, and emotional, understanding of risk is as important as the social context within which people live and work. And the bringing together of these different facets of social, individual and collective life comes through in many of the analytical and practical commitments that are staged within the book.

Angela: One of the things that I found interesting in Greg’s commentaries was his reference to Stuart finding Raymond Williams’s concept of ‘structure of feeling’ unsatisfactory, perhaps because of wanting to get the balance right between structuralism and culturalism. I wondered about that – in the light, for example, of feminist theories of affect, and the attention given to emotion within more recent cultural studies, as in the work of the late Lauren Berlant. So I wondered, Brett, if there was more that you would like to say about feeling and emotion in Stuart’s Marxism?

Brett: In some debates emotion and feeling are seen as something that is incompatible with theory, as irrelevant. But thinking back to those responses from interviewees in the Public Health England report – these are people’s stories, they are accounts of experiences. They aren’t simply woolly and intuitive impressions. And these experiences have an impact on the decisions people make in relation to how they access healthcare, and how they treat public health advice. That’s what’s important, and that’s why there’s an ethical aspect here, insofar as it’s not the story, or the narrative, in itself, that is significant or meaningful; it’s its political and social reference. It is not a question of wanting to validate any kind of intuitive, sense-experience commentary. Something outside of the experience, outside of the account, has to have some kind of political and social relevance.

Gregor: Angela and Brett are right that Stuart does later move away from an Althusserian dismissal of experience as a dubious, empiricist, resort, compared with the higher realms of correct theory, etc. But then, later on again, his critique of Williams takes a slightly different turn. If experience is seen as a holistic thing – if people are ‘Bespeaking’ their worlds, where the worlds seem to have a kind of precious and perhaps even inviolable meaning-making status – then that is something we’ve got to be careful about. There’s an aspect of Williams’s resort to ‘structure of feeling’ that Stuart later sees as validating a rather narrow, parochial fight – British or Welsh culture. So, either way, you can’t go all the way with affect, because of the dangers of a purely self-reaffirming notion of one’s identity.

And yet, of course, you’re entirely right, Brett, Stuart’s humanistic sensibility, and his sense of what Sartre called ‘the profundity of the lived’, meant that he never bought into a hard-nosed Marxism of the ‘if it’s not class experience, what use is it?’ kind. He has to be sensitive to the power and the potential of transformative agency, which if it lacks an affect dimension, goes nowhere.

An essential question for Marxism in the twenty-first century has been how to reconcile the question of ecology with the ongoing struggle for social and political emancipation. A pivotal moment in Stuart’s own political engagement was an engagement with an environmental movement, namely, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. How can we use Stuart’s thought for theorising the current eco-social impasse?

Catherine: I would immediately recommend a book by Mark Harvey that’s coming out at the end of next month, which is on the climate emergency and which is absolutely about the relation between the social, the ecological and the climate. The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament was certainly a huge commitment of Stuart’s, for many years. And he kept me waiting for many hours while he attended long, and difficult, and dialogic, meetings of the committee of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. And it was a critical moment of politicisation for many people of my generation certainly. But that doesn’t really speak to this moment. Can any of you comment on that?

Angela: I would suggest that we can fruitfully re-read Stuart’s work from the viewpoint of the politics of contemporary protests and activism, and his attention to the intersections and alliances that emerge across different social movements, in ways that can be contingent, but can also be expansive. We’re living in an incredibly interesting moment of new and diverse forums of struggle and activism, including, for example, the new feminist politics from the global south, which has had very different perspectives on issues such as violence against women, femicide and neoliberalism from those, say, of traditional feminists in the global north. I think Stuart would absolutely be interested in that. We’re all the time learning from diverse and different experiences, from across the globe. And obviously the climate movement is one of the best examples of that.

Bruce: The environmental question is a really good one to raise at this point, because it’s the point that all the movements feel they have to be committed to, and this is a movement where different movements are exploring their commitments to other movements. I have been very moved for example by the way Black Lives Matter in the US came out very strongly in favour of Palestinians. I don’t think that ever would have happened in the same way before. In a sense, it’s a very Stuart Hall moment, because the movements are communicating with each other, and passionately so, in ways that he must be smiling upon as he looks down from the heaven we don’t believe in.

Gregor: I think something to hang onto is that, if Hall had a complex Marxism back in the 1970s, it would have been bound to have been even more super-complex today, when what we’ve called the zones of mediation between Marxism and non-Marxism, different angles of politically important things, have become compounded. And his underlying, very simple message is, in some way or another, that these things are all connected, and we should never give up the integrative pluralism of political thinking. The great danger is fragmented pluralism, where the politics of difference, wherever the differences are, leads to political de-alignment, rather than to what Angela’s called coalitional unity. No matter how complex the world got – and perhaps, like most of us, he didn’t feel that he had the answer to it – the project of integrative, progressive pluralism would, I think, be one his fundamental emphases.

Catherine: I think that seems a really good thought to end on. It refers back to different aspects of what all of you have said, very helpfully. And that sense of the connections that make up the whole – we don’t understand it in a simple way, it’s extremely complex, but the struggle to try and make the connections between one arena and another, one side and another, one movement and another, has to be the political project for all of us.

About the Speakers

Catherine Hall is Emerita Professor of History and Chair of the Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery, University College London. She has published extensively on questions of race, gender and empire. She is co-editor (with Bill Schwarz) of the Duke University Press series of specialist collections of Stuart Hall’s work.

Gregor McLennan is Professor of Sociology at the University of Bristol. He was a graduate student in the 1970s at the Centre of Contemporary Studies in Birmingham, and was a close colleague of Stuart’s at the Open University through the 1980s and early 1990s. He is the author of several books on Marxism, pluralism and social theory, and is editor of the Selected Writings of Stuart Hall on Marxism.

Bruce Robbins is Old Dominion Foundation Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University, and he previously taught at the universities of Geneva, Lausanne and Rutgers. His most recent books are The Beneficiary, published by Duke, and Cosmopolitanism, co-edited with Paulo Horta. He’s also the director of two documentaries, Some of My Best Friends are Zionists and What Kind of Jew is Shlomo Sand?.

Angela McRobbie is professor of cultural studies at Coventry University and a emeritus professor at Goldsmiths University of London. She studied, as Greg did, at the Birmingham Centre in the mid-1970s, and her research on girls’ magazines was widely seen as path breaking. Her most recent books include, Be Creative: Making a

Living in the New Cultural Industries, and Feminism and the Politics of Resilience.

Brett St Louis is senior lecturer in sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London, having previously been lecturer in sociology at Bristol University and assistant professor in ethnic studies at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of C.L.R. James’ Critique of Modernity: Race, Politics and Poetics (2007) and is currently completing a book on racial eliminativism that develops a critical genealogy and analysis of post-racial thought.

Notes

1. Stuart Hall, Selected Writings on Marxism, edited by Greg McLennan, Duke University Press 2021: open access introduction by Gregor McLennan.
2. The series also includes: Cultural Studies 1983, edited by Lawrence Grossberg and Jennifer Slack (2016); Selected Political Writings, copublication with Lawrence & Wishart (2017); Essential Essays (two-volume set) (2018), edited by David Morley; Selected Writings on Race and Difference (2021), edited by Paul Gilroy and Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Writings on Media (2021), edited by Charlotte Brunsdon.
3. For more on Gramsci’s conception of intellectuals, including organic intellectuals, see David Forgacs (ed), The Antonio Gramsci Reader, L&W 1988, pp300-301.
4. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed and trans Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, L&W 1971, pp5-6.
5. In chapter 9, ‘In Defence of Theory’.
6. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, Verso 1985, re-issued 2013.
7. Stuart Hall, The Fateful Triangle, Race Ethnicity, Nation, edited by Kobena Mercer, Harvard University Press 2017.
8. See note 2 for details.
9. Mark Harvey, Climate Emergency. How societies create the crisis, Emerald Bingley 2021.

The Stuart Hall Foundation welcomed renowned public intellectual Jacqueline Rose for our 6th Annual Stuart Hall Public Conversation at Conway Hall, London, on Saturday 11th February 2023. She delivered a lecture entitled ‘What is a Subject? Politics and Psyche After Stuart Hall’. Stuart Hall’s work can be read as a perpetual searching, however difficult or painful, for the linchpins which entangle intimate personal history to global political relations. It’s through this approach to reading Hall that Rose began to realise how deeply embedded his work was within psychoanalytical thought. In this lecture, Rose tracks the key aspects of Hall’s thinking, and questions how, through its prism, he might have reached out to some of the most anguished political and cultural realities of our current times. Following Rose’s keynote and a brief intermission, she is joined by psychotherapist Sharon Numa in conversation. Jacqueline Rose recently adapted this lecture into an essay on Stuart Hall at The New York Review. Read it here: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2023/09/21/the-analyst-stuart-hall-jacqueline-rose/