Library Archive - Stuart Hall Foundation

Ahead of the 9th Annual Stuart Hall Public Conversation in May 2026, our network of creative and intellectual practitioners gathered at Conway Hall for the SHF Peer Network Spring Workshop. Joined by cultural theorist, poet and teacher of performance studies, Fred Moten, together they spent the day discussing each others’ practices, exchanging ideas and building connections.

Hosted by the Stuart Hall Foundation and facilitated by SHF Associate Ruth Ramsden-Karelse, the workshop began with introductions from attendees: members of the SHF Peer Network and the CoDE ECR (Centre on the Dynamics of Ethnicity Early Career Researcher) Network. Fred Moten and Ruth Ramsden-Karelse led open discussions, breakout sessions and readings around Policing the Crisis (Hall et al), The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (Spillers) and more, prompted by a line of enquiry suggested by Moten:

“The aesthetics of common ground/policing the crisis (of the negro intellectual). On the one hand, let’s consider the problem of art and the artist in this particular moment in the history of our obligation to beauty; on the other hand, at this particular moment in the history of our commitment to truth, let’s consider the problem of the intellectual in an ongoing intensification and transformation of policing that turns out to be coterminous with a moment many of us have considered to be one of triumph. It might be especially to consider Stuart Hall’s work in relation to that of one of his great contemporaries, Hortense Spillers. What’s the relation between the refusal of personality and the refusal of the empiricist attitude?”

Workshop participants were also invited to attend the 9th Annual Stuart Hall Public Conversation with Fred Moten the next day. Written reflections on the Spring Workshop and Public Conversation were commissioned from Peer Network members Erinma Ochu, Researcher in Residence with Watershed and Professor in Immersive Media at UWE Bristol, and Konstantin Helm, researcher, lecturer, and PhD candidate at the Department for English and American Studies at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.

Supported by the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, the Hollick Family Foundation, the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, the Power of Pop Fund, Conway Hall and CoDE.

Thank you to the SHF Trustees and Associates whose contributions made this event possible: Ruth Ramsden-Karelse, Angela McRobbie, Giorgia Doná, Nick Beech and Roshini Kempadoo.

The Stuart Hall Foundation Peer Network online monthly forums provide a regular opportunity for members to connect, exchange ideas and support one another. SHF Associate and Peer Network member Ruth Ramsden-Karelse details her experience facilitating these forums below.

Since January 2023, I’ve facilitated virtual monthly forums for researchers and artists whose work has, like mine, been made possible by scholarships and fellowships that the Stuart Hall Foundation offers in partnership with institutions across the UK and beyond.

When I started my DPhil in 2017, I was honoured to receive a Stuart Hall scholarship. Four years later, on the eventual other side of that doctoral research, I was delighted to become one of the Foundation’s Associates: new roles designed to support the work of the Trustees and ensure input and representation across career stages. As an Associate, I’ve sat on the Foundation’s Academic Committee and worked with my colleagues to support our growing network of Stuart Hall scholars, fellows, and artists-in-residence.

As a member of that network myself, I formed connections that continue to shape and enrich my work in meaningful ways. Higher education is typically atomising, and for minoritised scholars and those invested in social justice, finding community is particularly important. Opportunities to gather and speak with other network members and Trustees always highlighted the Foundation’s biggest strength: a community of scholars, cultural workers, and organisers, spanning Master’s students to Professors, and ranging from child psychoanalysts and sociologists to poets and musicians, whose interests, investments, and political engagements reflect the rich diversity of Stuart Hall’s own.

Our monthly forums aim to harness precisely that strength. In addition to three annual in-person events, these virtual meetings offer network members a more regular space to gather, meet, and catch up with each other, with myself, and with our Director, Orsod. Attendees air challenges, share resources, and offer support and encouragement. Topics of discussion build on each other, and often relate to current events, ranging from abolition, to the connections between arts and academia, to what it might mean to be an organic intellectual. A few forums have taken the form of workshops facilitated by network members—by Lola Olufemi on writing as a response to political violence and by Subira Joy on killing the cop inside our heads, for example.

With these forums, we try to put into practice in some small way the model offered by Stuart Hall: by centring collaboration, knowledge sharing, and thinking and learning together; by committing to the necessary, continual practice of having the difficult conversations and acting on them; and by taking seriously our political commitments, while trying not to take ourselves too seriously.

– Ruth Ramsden-Karelse, July 2026

Ahead of the 9th Annual Stuart Hall Public Conversation in May 2026, our network of creative and intellectual practitioners gathered at Conway Hall for the SHF Peer Network Spring Workshop. There they were joined by keynote speaker, cultural theorist, poet and teacher of performance studies, Fred Moten, exchanging ideas around collectivity, individuality and oneness in intellectual pursuits.

Konstantin Helm, researcher, lecturer, and PhD candidate at the Department for English and American Studies at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, shares their reflections on these events below.

Before I go to the workshop with Fred Moten, I read one of his books in an air-conditioned coffee shop in central London. Outside, the morning sun has already turned the air into syrup. It feels surreal to step outside and walk to Conway Hall. This is in part because both the city and its inhabitants seem mildly dazed by the weather. Mostly, it is because both the Stuart Hall Foundation workshops I’ve already attended felt so different from what I’m used to in Germany. There is something unique both about the individual expertise of facilitators and participants as well as our shared currents of thought. This unpredictable intellectual meteorology always left me enriched, but I enter feeling quite nervous, not knowing if I prepared well enough or well at all.

Fred Moten thanks us for joining him inside despite the sunshine. When he begins to speak, it immediately becomes clear that he is inviting us to move alongside him. Fred Moten thinks out loud, not as a lecturer, but to lay the groundwork for an afternoon of thinking through something, of thinking together. He sketches the problem between the I and the we, between the intellectual whose job it is to think for others and the inherently collective nature of reflection. The problem is difficult to grasp because it resists the language of objective knowledge, and because, as Fred Moten says, the “’we’ resists object permanence”. For the rest of the workshop, we put these ideas into conversation with Policing the Crisis. In this 1978 work, Stuart Hall and his co-authors think about a crisis that affects society as a whole. However, the crisis erupts most violently where authorities assault the racialised, the marginalised, and – Fred Moten again – the “irrelevants.” We close with an acute awareness of the suffocating world outside this room. Still, I leave full of ideas, a renewed sense of responsibility, and feeling that my work is part of a long, communal project.

The next day, at the Public Conversation, Fred Moten’s keynote speech “The Physics of Political Economy” is a modular exploration of the tension between empirical and phenomenological modes of knowing. His reflections move from du Bois’ metaphysics of race to the calculated uncertainties of quantum mechanics, from Newtonian gravity to the cold mathematics of genocide. At times, I am daunted by the vast, associative and poetic trajectory Fred Moten is taking us on. But often he pauses, looks up from his notes, and brings us back to central London on a sweltering afternoon. In Stolen Life, Fred Moten describes Black Studies as the possibility of “walking in another world while passing through this one.” I am grateful for his guidance in navigating both.

– Konstantin Helm, June 2026

Ahead of the 9th Annual Stuart Hall Public Conversation in May 2026, our network of creative and intellectual practitioners gathered at Conway Hall for the SHF Peer Network Spring Workshop. There they were joined by keynote speaker, cultural theorist, poet and teacher of performance studies, Fred Moten, exchanging ideas around collectivity, individuality and oneness in intellectual pursuits.

We commissioned SHF Peer Network member Erinma Ochu – currently Researcher in Residence with Watershed and Professor in Immersive Media at UWE Bristol – to share their reflections following the event.

The Stuart Hall Foundation’s annual workshop and public conversation is a scholarly highlight. This year’s workshop with Fred Moten – yes, Fred Moten (!) – built on the spirit of the Foundation’s monthly online peer meet-ups, facilitated by Ruth Ramsden-Karelse, as a lightly held, joyous space for collective thinking.

Across two sunny days at Conway Hall, organisers offered material enactments of care that enabled participation, particularly for disabled and caregiving attendees. This infrastructural care is an ethical stance: accessibility and interdependence are practiced methods as much as values.

Into this deliberately crafted environment, Moten brought two texts: Stuart Hall et al.’s ‘Policing the Crisis’ and Hortense Spillers’ ‘The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual’. Between his generative, admittedly provisional reflections and Ruth’s carefully selected quotes we traced the historical and contemporary implications of moral panics, emphasising the shift from consensual to coercive state governance. Arriving at the ‘empiricist attitude’ – state and academic tendencies to privilege ‘hard facts’ over ideology – we discussed how this shapes discourse and determines which lives matter.

We recognised that the current democratic crisis was upheld by Big Tech, platform capitalism, institutionalised EDI, and moral panics around gender, disability, and immigration. More time – perhaps a second workshop (?!) – might have allowed us to share and imagine strategies for resisting such determinant forces. For me, this includes valuing mutual learning as a practice to build community and solidarity.

I really valued that we had space for critical difference and plurality. Staying with this critical yet affirmative tension, creates an essential line of flight for generating new horizons beyond the current status quo.

I am still distilling Moten’s public conversation which I watched at home, online. His story about New Orlean’s Felicity Street which questioned whether life might be richer outside sanctioned measures of value – stayed with me. As current pressures intensify, this line of inquiry question may open up space for indeterminacy and poetic alternatives.

A final note: seeing photos from the event – recognising some faces, wondering about those I am yet to meet – I felt the collective energy they hold as an archive of living resistance and solidarity.

– Erinma Ochu, June 2026

Reading the Crisis asks: what kinds of tools and strategies are needed to confront this conjuncture? The online conversation series returns for a third year in an expanded format featuring six in-depth engagements with economics, technology, democracy, migration, culture and climate respectively.

Hosted by senior lecturer and former BBC Radio senior producer Aasiya Lodhi and critic, media theorist and editor of Representology K Biswas, each conversation forms an online teach-in space dedicated to demonstrating how engaging in a conjunctural analysis can enrich artistic practice and deepen organising work and academic study.

The second conversation of this year’s series took place on Tuesday 14th July 2026 with host K Biswas joined by Wendy Liu, author of Abolish Silicon Valley: How to Liberate Technology from Capitalism (2020), for a discussion focusing on technology.

Read a transcript of the event here:
https://www.stuarthallfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/RTC-2026-2-transcript.pdf

Supported by the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, the Hollick Family Foundation, the Paul Hamlyn Foundation and the Power of Pop Fund.

Reading the Crisis is part of the Stuart Hall Foundation’s In Search of Common Ground programme. Learn more about In Search of Common Ground by clicking here.

The first conversation of this year’s series took place on Thursday 18th June 2026 with host Aasiya Lodhi joined by Laleh Khalili, author of Extractive Capitalism: How Commodities and Cronyism Drive the Global Economy (2025), for a discussion focusing on economics.

Read a transcript of the event here:
https://www.stuarthallfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/RTC-2026-1-transcript.pdf

Supported by the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, the Hollick Family Foundation, the Paul Hamlyn Foundation and the Power of Pop Fund.

Reading the Crisis is part of the Stuart Hall Foundation’s In Search of Common Ground programme. Learn more about In Search of Common Ground by clicking here.

The Stuart Hall Foundation welcomed cultural theorist, poet and teacher of performance studies, Fred Moten, as keynote speaker for the 9th Annual Stuart Hall Public Conversation. The event took place on Saturday 23rd May at Conway Hall in London and online via livestream broadcast as the first 2026 event in our In Search of Common Ground programme.

Moten’s keynote, drafted under the title ‘The Physics of Political Economy’ and delivered as ‘(Notes on Genocide:) Violence and the Physics of Political Economy’, used Stuart Hall’s critical engagement with Karl Marx as a point of departure to speak to the realities of practising the rejection of individuation.

The keynote was preceded by an address by Catherine Hall on the achievements of the Stuart Hall Essay Prize, and followed by a discussion between Moten and Angela McRobbie and an audience Q&A.

Following the event, attendees were invited to congregate in the hall for an informal reception with food catered by Goodness Gracious Feast and a DJ set from Anu Ambasna.

Skin Deep’s pop-up library of liberatory texts was set up in the hall throughout the day, offering attendees the opportunity to relax and flip through their back prints, works from collaborators and inspirations for their latest editions. Newham Bookshop hosted a stall with titles related to the programme available on sale throughout the event.

Supported by the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, the Hollick Family Foundation, the Paul Hamlyn Foundation and the Power of Pop Fund, in collaboration with Conway Hall.

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.

In April 2026, the 2nd Stuart Hall Essay Prize was awarded to Harriet Hillier for the essay “Choosing a Nation: Identity, Belonging, and Representation in International Sport”. The judging panel, composed of Catherine Hall, Jo Littler and Kennetta Hammond Perry, described the essay as “beautifully written… We appreciated its extrapolation of the hybrid histories of the sport, its grasp of the neoliberal dynamics shaping its present, and its deft threading through of personal experience to tell the story on multiple levels.”

Harriet Hillier’s prize-winning essay is published in full below.

Choosing a Nation: Identity, Belonging, and Representation in International Sport

The piste gleams under the strip lights, a narrow path of metal bordered by silence. Beyond the mask, my breath sounds like static. The referee’s “En garde!” cuts through the air, and I glance at the scoreboard: GBR flashes beside my name. The Union Jack stitched onto my sleeve glows under the glare, its threads slightly frayed from travel. It marks me as British, yet my body carries a different inheritance, Austrian roots, a Central-European rhythm that lingers in speech and stance. When I salute, mask off, blade raised, the gesture feels doubled: a British salute performed by someone not entirely British.

International sport demands clarity where life offers complexity. To fence for a nation, one must choose: one flag, one anthem, one allegiance. Bureaucratic forms leave no space for hesitation or hyphenation. Yet identity rarely fits so neatly. It is layered, shifting, relational. Stuart Hall reminds us that cultural identity “is a matter of becoming as well as of being.” His insistence that identities are historical, positional, and negotiated becomes palpable in the stillness before a bout.

This essay follows that tension. It adopts Hall’s conjunctural method, the practice of reading culture at the intersection of political, economic, and ideological forces, to examine international fencing as a stage on which nationality is not given but performed. Drawing on Hall’s concepts of articulation, encoding and decoding, and hegemony, I explore how sport under post-Brexit nationalism and neoliberal governance produces the “national athlete” as both emblem and contradiction. Fencing, with its lineage in military ritual and its strict codes of etiquette, renders this choreography visible: each salute, anthem, and uniform a small ceremony of belonging enacted rather than assumed.

Like Hall himself, born in Kingston, educated in Oxford, living between worlds, many athletes inhabit thresholds. The piste becomes a symbolic border where the global and the national, the personal and the political, meet under fluorescent light. Here, belonging is not something one has but something one does.

For Hall, the urgency of cultural analysis lay in connecting everyday experience to wider social structures. To read sport through this lens is to glimpse how private rituals echo public ideologies. The salute, the anthem, the stitched flag are not just symbols of allegiance; they are practices through which nations reproduce themselves. In a time when borders tighten and migration accelerates, these gestures become a language for negotiating who counts as British, and who remains peripheral. The piste therefore offers a concentrated image of the nation’s struggle to imagine unity in diversity.

In the wider conjuncture, this question of belonging extends far beyond the piste. Post-Brexit Britain continues to wrestle with migration, identity, and globalisation, and sport becomes one of the few stages where those tensions play out in public view. As Hall urged, culture is where “the political and the personal become the same terrain.” To read international sport through that lens is to see how our movements, across borders, disciplines, and histories, make visible the unfinished work of national identity. The piste becomes not just a sporting arena but a mirror of society’s attempt to define who is seen, who is valued, and who stands for the nation when its own sense of unity is in question.

To write about belonging in sport is to step into the terrain Hall mapped across a lifetime of border crossings. He called himself “an unhomely figure in the heart of the metropole,” and from that in-between vantage he argued that identity is always produced through history and power. When an athlete stands for a flag that half fits, Hall’s vocabulary becomes not theory but description.

Stuart Hall reminds us that cultural identity ‘is a matter of becoming as well as of being’ (Cultural Identity and Diaspora, 1990). Hall dismantled the notion of pure, self-contained identity: it is not essence but positioning. International sport demands the opposite, the passport as truth, the federation’s database as proof of belonging. The rulebook fixes what life keeps fluid. Signing the form that registers me as GBR performs exactly the stability Hall showed to be fiction. To step onto the piste is to embody identity as process, to enact the unfinished.

As Hall argues in The Work of Representation (1997), culture does not reflect meaning; it makes it. Symbols and gestures construct “Britishness.” The flag on my jacket, the crest on my mask, the anthem after a win, these do not merely express the nation; they produce it. Repetition gives form to an idea that would otherwise dissolve. Yet each time the gesture is made by a body both inside and outside the imagined community, the meaning shifts. The performance wobbles; the category strains.

Hall’s model of encoding and decoding helps clarify the spectacle. Institutions encode preferred meanings, unity, pride, meritocracy, through ceremony and media. Audiences and athletes decode from their own positions: some with pride, others with irony or quiet dissonance. When a teammate posts a bilingual caption or adds a hidden emoji flag, the official narrative is being read against the grain. The piste becomes a site of translation, where encoded nationalism meets lived hybridity.

Through Gramsci, Hall conceived hegemony as a process of consent continuously won. Sport is one of its most elegant instruments: it makes the nation feel natural through pleasure and ritual. Yet hegemony is never total. The same symbols that secure consent can be re-articulated toward new meanings. A dual-heritage athlete singing half an anthem, or none, occupies that fissure where power meets possibility. Such micro-gestures, hardly visible to spectators, are the moments when culture is rewritten from within.

Hall’s notion of diaspora replaces the purity of roots with the creativity of routes. The diasporic subject is not lost but productive, forging new meanings out of mixture. The international athlete, training in one country, speaking several languages, representing another, embodies this hybridity. The piste becomes a map of global migration condensed into motion, history channelled through footwork.

Hall’s thinking also sits in conversation with others who mapped the cultural topography of late twentieth-century Britain. Hall’s contemporary and collaborator Doreen Massey insists in For Space (2005) that space itself is political, “the product of interrelations,” always under construction. Her insistence on place as process complements Hall’s notion of identity as becoming: both reject fixity. If Hall gave us the vocabulary of articulation, Massey supplied its geography, reminding us that belonging is spatial as well as symbolic.

Paul Gilroy extended these insights into what he called the Black Atlantic (1993), a cultural formation that exceeds national borders while shaping British modernity from within. Gilroy’s emphasis on movement, music, and memory parallels Hall’s own trajectory from Kingston to London; together they expose how the nation’s sense of itself is forged through the very diasporas it tries to contain.

Nira Yuval-Davis later named this tension the politics of belonging (2011): the everyday ways states draw boundaries around who counts as “us.” Her work reframes Hall’s theory of representation for a post-9/11, post-Brexit era, where the border operates not only at the edge of territory but within citizenship law, social policy, and affect. Reading Hall through these interlocutors sharpens the lens for this essay: nationality in sport is not just an image but a spatial and political project, performed on and through the bodies that cross its lines.

Hall’s framework is not a toolkit but a method of living through contradiction. Culture is the ground where power operates through meaning, and where those meanings can be shifted. What follows traces how the modern nation, through sport, turns belonging into performance, each bout, anthem, and stitched flag a negotiation between self, symbol, and state.

Having outlined Hall’s approach to identity as becoming and representation as performance, I now turn to the nation itself, the historical stage on which these identities are enacted. To represent a nation, one must first understand what a nation is, not land but an imagined community continually performed into being. Since the late nineteenth century, sport has been one of its grandest theatres. Picture the 1908 London Olympics: the Union Jack flutters above colonial delegations marching behind the imperial flag. Coal smoke, brass bands, “God Save the King.” Empire reborn as spectacle. The nation becomes visible when the team walks out.

Modern sport and the modern nation grew together. The first Olympics and, later, the Commonwealth Games translated imperial hierarchies into athletic form: colonies supplied competitors; the metropole claimed medals. The promise of meritocracy disguised empire’s residue.

After empire, that spectacle re-articulated itself. “Team GB,” a banner adopted in the 1990s, offered a sleek image of post-imperial Britain, diverse yet united, multicultural yet disciplined. The slogan One Team GB performs a fantasy of harmony while smoothing over the frictions of class, race, and migration. Hall would recognise this as hegemony’s aesthetic: a feel-good image securing consent by making difference appear harmless.

Yet the nation remains unsettled. Globalisation has made training and talent more mobile than ever. Fencers switch federations; coaches circulate; dual passports multiply. The paradox: as sport grows more international, the policing of flags intensifies. Eligibility rules harden, bureaucracies multiply, and debates about “true representation” reignite. Each instance of hybridity triggers a compensatory performance of purity.

Standing beneath the same flag once raised above imperial subjects, I sometimes feel that residue stitched into my own uniform. The cloth is new, the design modern, but the meaning carries centuries of weight. The nation, as Hall would say, is an articulation of past and present, empire’s echo reshaped by global capital. When migrant or dual-heritage athletes compete for Britain, they expose that articulation; history flashes briefly in motion and muscle.

Post-Brexit Britain amplifies the contradiction. The rhetoric of “taking back control” seeps even into sport, where funding structures reward medal prospects while immigration policies restrict movement. The athlete who trains abroad but competes under the British flag becomes a small contradiction within a larger nationalist script. The piste, once a narrow strip of individual combat, mirrors the political moment: open borders in practice, closed ones in rhetoric.

The nation in sport is thus a continual rehearsal of belonging, repeated until believable. Each bout on that strip carries the echo of these histories: empire’s shadow, global capital’s gloss, the weight and promise of the flag.

If the previous section traced the nation’s spectacle across history, this one returns to the intimate level of experience, how those structures materialise on the piste itself. The piste looks the same everywhere: a narrow metallic strip bordered by silence and expectation. What changes is the flag beside your name. When I first fenced under GBR, the selection email arrived like a passport renewal, official, bureaucratic, sterile. The subject line read simply Team Announcement. No mention of heritage or home. Yet behind that message lay years of motion: childhood between languages, summers in Austria, flights back to London. Identity, Hall reminds us, is always “a matter of positioning.” That email positioned me, neatly, nationally, incompletely.

The selection ritual felt ceremonial: forms to sign, declarations to make, a small flag stitched over the heart. Representation here is productive, not descriptive; the bureaucracy manufactures nationality as much as it records it. The federation’s database encodes a version of me the nation wants to see. Even within that encoding, there is room for reinterpretation.

The first time I stood on a u17 World Cup podium, bronze medal around my neck, the photographer’s flash fixed me beneath the Union Jack. The caption read, Hillier wins bronze medal. A face, a flag, a headline, power working through image, fixing what is fluid. Yet within that frame, multiplicity persists. My Austrian grandmother asked, half-jokingly, if I might one day fence for her country; my British teammates reposted the image with emojis. Each decoding reflected a different reading position. Meaning, like identity, lives in that play of recognition and misrecognition.

Fencing’s language is hybrid, Italian footwork, French terminology, Hungarian rhythm. Every lunge is already international. To fence is to inhabit hybridity physically, coordination built from borrowed gestures. Hall’s notion of ‘new ethnicities’ (1989) names this condition: identity not as dilution but as creative recombination. The piste becomes a strip of global memory, history channelled through movement.

Among my peers, this negotiation is constant. Emma (not her real name), who fenced for Team GB at the Olympic qualifier, switched to Team France the following summer. Her parents are French, her training base Parisian, now she is at a university in Paris, her funding precarious with the dream of the 2028 LA Olympics. The switch required a three-year stand-down shortened only by federation consent, a bureaucratic dance between heritage and opportunity. Another teammate, Anna (not her real name), an American foilist with European roots, reversed the path, moving from Team GB to Team USA for funding, scholarship, as well as the best path for her to qualify for the 2028 Olympics in LA. Their choices are not betrayals but necessities for their survival in the sport as a career. Hall might call these acts “articulations”: temporary linkages between self, structure, and survival.

Each metallic clang makes theory audible, belonging rehearsed but never resolved, a flag meeting the breath of a body that knows more than one home.

Having explored identity as performance, I now turn to how nationalism itself is encoded and contested through sport’s imagery. International sport is a vast machinery of representation. Its images, sounds, and rituals translate the abstraction of “nation” into something visible and felt. Stadiums, podiums, and screens become what Hall once called “systems of meaning production”: sites where identity is encoded through colour, anthem, and slogan. Yet, as Hall showed, meaning never travels unchallenged. Each viewer, athlete, or replay participates in renegotiating what a flag, a face, or a victory can signify.

The encoding of nationalism in British sport is deliberate and polished. One Team GB campaigns frame athletes against cascades of Union Jacks and triumphant montages. Promotional videos splice medals, tears, and confetti into affective shorthand for belonging. The encoded message is clear: to represent Britain is to embody harmony, meritocracy, and pride.

Decoding occurs elsewhere, in locker rooms, on social media, within lived hybridity. Dual-heritage athletes scroll through those same images with affection laced with irony, aware of what they omit. On the piste, the meaning of a salute or a podium photo depends on who performs it and who watches. When I post after competitions, one flag, one caption, another language hums underneath. It is my way of decoding without erasure, translating the official message into something that fits.

Hall’s reworking of Gramsci explains why these rituals carry power. National sport reproduces dominant ideas of belonging by making them feel natural. Flags and anthems act as what Hall called “structures of feeling”: emotional technologies that secure consent. Ideology becomes pleasure, cheering, pride, the podium’s catharsis. The disciplined athletic body seems to prove the nation’s coherence.

But hegemony, Hall reminded us, is “a moving equilibrium.” It must adapt or fracture. The inclusion of multi-ethnic athletes in Team GB exemplifies this adaptability. Diversity becomes proof of benevolent modernity. Contradiction is repackaged as charm. One Team GB’s 2023 brand refresh, with its seamless gradient of skin tones and accents, embodies that logic: multicultural imagery that celebrates mixture while neutralising its political edge. The campaign encodes difference as decoration; resistance turned to design.

Cracks nonetheless persist. Athletes speak in their own idioms online: a caption in two languages, a brief pause before the anthem, a quiet refusal to mouth words that never fit. These micro-gestures are, in Hall’s sense, re-articulations, new linkages that shift meaning off-centre. They remind us that power never closes the circuit completely.

When Emma Raducanu slips between Mandarin, Romanian, and English interviews, or when Mo Farah narrates his Somali childhood on British television, each widens the vocabulary of belonging. Hybridity does not erase nationalism but unsettles its purity. On the piste, resistance lives in micro-rhythm: a multilingual cheer, a mixed-flag emoji, the heartbeat of hesitation before the anthem. Hegemony depends on seamless rhythm; hybridity introduces syncopation.

Under neoliberal governance, these rituals of belonging acquire new economic and bureaucratic dimensions. Selection emails speak the language of meritocracy, but behind them lies the market. To choose a nation is rarely a pure act of allegiance; it is also a negotiation with funding, visas, and opportunity. Under neoliberal sport, nationality becomes strategic capital. Hall described neoliberalism as the moment when individuals are remade as “entrepreneurs of the self.” The athlete no longer simply is national; they must manage nationality as brand.

The British state’s own funding architecture makes this logic visible. According to UK Sport’s published 2021–25 investment plan, roughly £352 million of National Lottery funding is distributed across Olympic and Paralympic disciplines, weighted toward those most likely to deliver medals. Fencing, ranked as “progress potential,” receives under £1 million, less than one-tenth of rowing or cycling. Each allocation is justified through a return-on-investment formula that measures national worth in podiums per pound. The system’s language, “world-class programme,” “performance pathway,” “strategic outcomes”, translates citizenship into metrics. Athletes internalise this calculus: value becomes measurable achievement, identity becomes data.

Commercial branding mirrors that calculus. The One Team GB campaign launched in 2016 boasted that 36% of the Tokyo squad identified as minority ethnic, the most “diverse in history.” (Team GB, 2021) The statistic was framed not as structural progress but as marketing proof of a tolerant nation. Diversity, aestheticised through graphics and soundtracks, sells unity back to itself. It is hegemony’s friendly face, the neoliberal smile of representation.

Policy shifts after Brexit add a harder edge. Since 2021, the International Sportsperson Visa has replaced free movement for European coaches and athletes (Home Office, 2021). Training camps once arranged by email now require sponsorship certificates and biometric checks; junior fencers from EU nations must apply for short-term “sporting event” permissions to compete in Britain. The bureaucratic friction literalises Hall’s claim that identity is “formed within the play of history and culture”: here, that play becomes paperwork.

I learned this between seasons. In an empty training hall, the smell of resin and sweat lingering, I scrolled through spreadsheets of flights and funding. Each cell represented a choice: which federation could pay, which coach was accessible, which flag made sense. Each decision felt personal yet was structured by inequality. Smaller nations offered freedom; richer ones promised stability. The flag became currency.

Hall warned that neoliberalism colonises not only institutions but souls, teaching us to measure even identity in returns. Under the global sports economy, fuelled by sponsorship and broadcast rights, flags and anthems circulate like logos; emotion becomes monetised content. The Union Jack on a tracksuit functions less as civic emblem than as brand tag in a crowded marketplace of televised identities. As Hall observed, neoliberalism commodifies culture itself, turning difference into saleable novelty.

This logic produces sharp hierarchies. Athletes from wealthier states train with better facilities; those from smaller nations often naturalise elsewhere. Fencing mirrors this global labour market: talent follows funding. At Tokyo 2020 (held in 2021), more than sixty athletes competed under new national flags (IOC, 2021), mobility rendered spectacle. Bureaucratically, the rules appear neutral: three-year waiting periods, proof of heritage, federation consent. In practice, they sort opportunity along lines of capital.

Hybridity here is double-edged. It can symbolise cosmopolitan progress, yet it also becomes a commodity to package and sell. Sponsors adore the bilingual athlete, the “bridge between cultures,” provided her story stays inspirational and apolitical. The moment hybridity turns critical, support evaporates. Neoliberalism survives by absorbing difference and reselling it as virtue.

My own experience sits uneasily in that economy. Representing Britain grants visibility; maintaining Austrian ties offers flexibility. Every choice feels voluntary yet is framed by structure. To be an athlete is to inhabit what Hall called “a conjuncture of constraint and agency”, freedom bounded by system.

Across global sport, strategic nationality has become ordinary. Fencers, footballers, sprinters shift allegiances for funding or access. Citizenship becomes instrument, not anchor. Hall’s analysis clarifies why: when all social goods are marketised, even belonging becomes transaction. The neoliberal athlete embodies that shift, the self as project, nationality as portfolio.

And yet within that calculation lingers a human question: what remains of identity when it becomes strategic? Choosing a nation feels less like affirmation than wager, a bet placed at the intersection of aspiration and constraint. Hall helps us read this not as personal failure but as symptom: evidence of how deeply neoliberalism has entered the intimate spaces of self-definition.

In contemporary Britain, these forces converge most visibly in the post-Brexit conjuncture, where nationalism, global mobility, and neoliberal selfhood collide. The crowd roars beneath a tangle of flags; the scoreboard flickers GBR in LED light. The smell of polish, the blur of colours, the anthem swelling through tinny speakers, this, too, is the conjuncture. To think conjuncturally, Hall wrote, is to grasp the relations between processes that define a moment. Ours is one such moment: the collision of nationalism, global mobility, and neoliberal individualism. In Britain, that collision is staged most visibly through sport, where the flag still promises unity even as the society beneath it fragments.

Since 2016, Brexit has revived an older language of sovereignty and border. Take back control migrates easily into sport’s idiom of pride and representation. Funding agencies invoke “British excellence”; tabloids praise “true Brit” medal winners. Yet many of these athletes are global citizens: born abroad, trained elsewhere, fluent in several languages. Their success depends on the very mobility that nationalist rhetoric condemns. Hall once wrote that the nation is “stitched together out of difference, not erased of it.” Watching a multicultural Team GB march behind a reclaimed imperial flag reveals that paradox in pageantry.

Globalisation has not dissolved nations; it has rearranged them into networks of flow and exclusion. Fencers share coaches, exchange footage, and train across continents, an economy of motion that renders patriotism both outdated and desperately necessary. The more borderless sport becomes in practice, the more fiercely institutions police its symbols. Nationality functions as affective control, securing meaning in a world that might otherwise feel unmoored. Hall’s insight that identity is formed “within the play of history and culture” clarifies this contradiction: we cling to flags precisely when their borders have blurred.

Brexit sharpened these contradictions materially. New visa regimes re-categorised European coaches as “International Sportspersons”; youth mobility schemes flickered on and off with diplomatic whim. Training camps once routine now require sponsorship letters and biometric appointments. The state reasserts its gatekeeping even as sport relies on transnational expertise. The piste becomes a border in more than metaphor.

Neoliberalism deepens the struggle by turning belonging into brand management. Athletes are urged to craft “authentic stories”, narratives of struggle and triumph that convert identity into content. Difference is celebrated only while it sells. Hall warned that under neoliberalism, culture becomes the terrain on which consent is won. The hybrid athlete is welcome so long as hybridity markets unity, not critique. Diversity becomes design: a poster, a hashtag, a campaign. In 2025, as Britain debates dual-citizenship policy even while fielding its most multicultural Olympic squad, the contradiction feels complete.

And yet hybridity carries potential. Hall’s New Ethnicities envisions belonging without purity, difference without hierarchy. Every athlete carrying more than one home rehearses that possibility. Their movement hints at a future where multiplicity is ordinary rather than exceptional. The present conjuncture is thus both crisis and opportunity: nationalism returns as anxious theatre; globalisation multiplies identities; neoliberalism commodifies them. But within that churn lies the chance to imagine belonging differently. Sport, because it makes identity visible, could model a more honest multiculturalism, one that acknowledges hybridity instead of disguising it. Hall taught that culture is never where difference ends but where it begins to speak.

This insight matters beyond sport. The politics of visibility that play out on the piste are mirrored across Britain’s classrooms, newsrooms, and stages. Questions of who is represented and on what terms continue to structure the cultural field. Each televised victory or anthem becomes a miniature referendum on belonging, testing how inclusive the nation’s story really is. Reading these rituals through Hall’s work reminds us that cultural analysis is a democratic act: a way of listening to how people, in their ordinary gestures, negotiate power. If culture is where meaning is made, then sport is one of its loudest laboratories, a place where the struggle over identity becomes legible, rhythmic, and collective.

The piste gleams again under the lights, the same narrow strip where this story began. My shoes click against metal; the air hums with anticipation. Opposite me stands another fencer, another flag, another translation of belonging. In that small, bounded space, everything traced in theory returns to motion: representation, hegemony, hybridity, neoliberal choice. They converge not as abstractions but as muscle memory. On the piste, identity is never settled. Each salute repeats a ritual of allegiance while revealing its fragility. Each anthem enacts a unity that lasts only as long as the music. Hall’s insight that cultural identity is “a matter of becoming as well as of being” becomes literal here: belonging must be continually rehearsed to exist at all. The athlete does not possess nationality; she performs it, sustains it, and sometimes resists it, all within a few measured steps.

Seen through Hall’s lens, the piste is a microcosm of the conjuncture itself. Nationalism asserts coherence; neoliberalism sells it; globalisation unsettles it; hybridity makes it visible. Yet within that choreography lies potential. Each hybrid athlete who stands beneath a flag while carrying more than one home enacts Hall’s “new ethnicities”: multiplicity without apology. They show that the nation’s story can be retold, not erased, but re-imagined. For Hall, culture was always the ground where power and imagination meet, where the old order shows its cracks and new meanings slip through. The piste, in that sense, is both battleground and rehearsal room: ideology embodied and reinterpreted in real time. Fencing taught me that representation is never innocent, that identity is not chosen once but continually negotiated between self and symbol.

This reflection returns us to Hall’s enduring question: what kind of nation do we want to be? If culture is where power and meaning meet, then sport becomes one of its most visible testing grounds. The stories told through flags and anthems shape who can speak for Britain, and whose voices remain unheard. The task, Hall would insist, is not simply to celebrate diversity but to transform the structures that decide which differences are permitted. Recognising hybridity as ordinary rather than exceptional allows the national imagination to move beyond tolerance toward genuine reciprocity. In that shift lies the promise of a more democratic cultural politics.

If we took Hall seriously, selection, funding and eligibility would change. Funding metrics would expand beyond medals to include access and mobility, so federations aren’t forced to treat nationality as currency. Eligibility rules would prioritise lived ties over purity tests, with transparent, timely pathways for dual nationals. Visa policy would recognise sport’s transnational labour, easing short-term camps and junior competitions. The national athlete would stop policing unity and start resourcing multiplicity, the only honest ground on which a twenty-first-century nation can stand. In choosing one flag, I discovered the impossibility of singular belonging. On the piste, identity becomes a movement, between languages, histories, and gazes, a rhythm of becoming that Hall teaches us to see. Each bout begins again, and so does the work of imagining who we might be together.

About the author

Harriet Hillier is a second year undergraduate Music student at the University of Manchester and an international épée fencer representing Great Britain at U20, U23, and senior level. In 2025, she was awarded the Royal Philharmonic Society Young Classical Writers Prize. She previously performed with the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain (2022–24) and has medalled at two U17 World Cups. She also represented Great Britain at the World University Games last year.

References

British Olympic Association (Team GB). Tokyo 2020 Diversity Report. London, 2021.

Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London: Verso, 1993.

Hall, Stuart. “New Ethnicities.” In Black Film, British Cinema. London: BFI, 1989.

Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” In Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, ed. Jonathan Rutherford. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990.

Hall, Stuart. “The Work of Representation.” In Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. London: Sage, 1997.

Home Office. International Sportsperson Visa Guidance. London: GOV.UK, 2021.

International Olympic Committee (IOC). Tokyo 2020 Athlete Nationality Data. Lausanne, 2021.

Massey, Doreen. For Space. London: Sage, 2005.

UK Sport. Investment Guidance 2021–25. London: UK Sport, 2021.

Yuval-Davis, Nira. The Politics of Belonging: Intersectional Contestations. London: Sage, 2011.

On Friday 17th October 2025, we invited new scholars, fellows and artists joining the SHF Peer Network to gather at Whitechapel Gallery, London, for our 2025 Welcome Event. This was an opportunity to develop connections between the new members and the Foundation, providing a space to meet and exchange ideas in person. Attendees were invited to introduce their research, area of study or practice, consider Stuart Hall’s thoughts on what it means to be a public intellectual, and learn more about the Foundation’s programme of events, workshops and opportunities available to them through the Peer Network.

Following the screening of clips from Hall’s lecture ‘Through the Prism of an Intellectual Life’, introduced by SHF Trustee Nick Beech, attendees participated in breakout and group conversations on what “an intellectual life” means to them and how it relates to their own pursuits.

The new Peer Network members were also invited to visit the Whitechapel Gallery’s retrospective on visual artist Joy Gregory, Catching Flies with Honey, which SHF Associate Roshini Kempadoo led a group discussion around afterwards. Later in the day, Joy Gregory met with attendees to share insights on her practice too.

In the afternoon, SHF Associate and Peer Network member Ruth Ramsden-Karelse hosted an introductory session to the SHF Forum, a regular online forum where the network collectively engages with wider social, cultural and political issues. A space for Peers to think with one another beyond their disciplines and institutional settings, this ad hoc in-person session invited discussions on what our political investments and aims are, in relation to the work that we do.

Thank you to the SHF Trustees and Associates whose contributions made this event possible: Nick Beech, Giorgia Doná, Roshini Kempadoo, Michael Rustin and Ruth Ramsden-Karelse.

The Stuart Hall Foundation Peer Network programme brings together SHF’s community of scholars, fellows, and artists to support their intellectual, creative and professional development. Through monthly forums, skills-based workshops, residencies, and peer-led exchanges, the programme provides a supportive space for underrepresented practitioners to share ideas, receive pastoral support and collaborate across disciplines. Grounded in Stuart Hall’s commitment to dialogue, interdisciplinarity and public engagement, the programme creates a space for participants to share ideas, while fostering a generous and connected community of intellectual and creative practitioners who are challenging inequality through their work.

The SHF Peer Network is comprised of successful applicants to the Foundation’s scholarship and fellowship opportunities in partnership with academic institutions, and artistic residencies in partnership with cultural organisations. These scholarship and fellowship opportunities are developed by the SHF’s Academic Committee, a group of Trustees and Associates who assess applications during the selection process and support delivery of the Peer Network programme. The Academic Committee includes Nasar Meer, Becky Hall, Catherine Hall, Michael Rustin, Nick Beech, Derron Wallace, Giorgia Doná, Kennetta Hammond Perry, Roshini Kempadoo, Ruth Ramsden-Karelse, Remi Joseph-Salisbury and Shamim Miah.

On Friday 23^rd May, 2025 University of Sussex Stuart Hall Fellow Bleue Liverpool presented new work at the Brighton Festival as part of her Fellowship. Bleue collaborated with musician and sound artist Ibukun Sunday to create ‘an unclassified syncretism’, an audio-visual intervention within the Meeting House Chapel at the University of Sussex. Through this event, the duo sought to composite metaphysical abstractions of Paul Gilroy with research into migration narratives and landscapes of south-east English Channel coastline port culture. The event was part of the Festival of Ideas, a collaboration between the Faculty of Media, Arts and Humanities at the University of Sussex and Brighton Festival.

Bleue Liverpool shares reflections on her experience of the collaboration below, alongside production photographs of the audio-visual work plus a new text building upon the themes of project.

– So what do we know ?
– You mean, what are we willing to tell ?

Well, we know that the practice of syncretism in the 18^th century Afro-Caribbean, enabled the subjugated to insurgently gather, speak, & remember – right under the gaze of the colonial eye. We’re aware that our ancestors, ambitious as they were, on the night of the 14^th of August 1791, came together in ritual that embedded West African Vodou resistance – a legacy of the Fon Kingdom – into appropriated Christian systems and iconography. Allegedly the appropriation of the Catholic Church’s appliances deeply disturbed colonial administrators, whom were utilizing the system to “civilize”, “assimilate”, “commodify” our ancestors’ dignity. Subsequently, this ritual and a carefully calculated eclipse brought on a rebellion – sugar everywhere – a rupture, in the politics, that made a case of Identity.

– But Ibukun, you’re from that port Lagos, in Nigeria… South North Atlantic?
– Yes
– Me too, from a port, in the North North Atlantic…
– Yes
– A Pan-African conversation when we gather, no? when we commune?
– Yep… it’s old & ongoing
– What is?
– The conversation

The ports of Calais, Dover, Newhaven Port and Dieppe have had a great deal of increased activity in the 21^st century. They are coming, the Others, moving from east to west, using container lorries in any attempt to flee civil rights atrocities, seeking employment, a better life than history. The border-industrial complex is having a field day, acquiring oxygen detectors, attempting to catch whomever before land. Asylum claims are easily accumulated, strategically neglected, and ultimately unclassified – leaving the politics to place the Others in Hotels. They stay in these hotels sometimes for years, a room for a family, unable to seek employment, without access to fundamental natural law actions e.g. cooking for oneself. These hotels, conduits, elongated liminal spaces forge new identities, the nature oscillates in spite of fixity.

– a form of syncretism?
– Yep

In a cafe around Waterloo, down a spiral staircase to a basement that could easily recreate London’s Great Fire of 1666, he comes to my table slowly but densely. “The word “race” was utilized in the same way that in our contemporary the word “culture” is used. That the project of cultural studies is a more or less attractive candidate for institutionalization. The national character ascribed to the concept of modes of production is a fundamental question, ethnohistorical specificity of dominant approaches of cultural politics. That what was initially felt to be a curse – the curse of homelessness or the curse of enforced exile gets repossessed. It becomes aﬃrmed and is reconstructed as the basis of a privileged standpoint.”^[1] I ask him if slavery was integral to the economic fruition of western civilization, how is the western world economically dependent on asylum seekers despite nationalism?

– Our inflections transfigure West to East, North to South.
– Yea… Of course.
– We need to find axis points.
– hmm
– Where do we gather to speak?
– They have Churches.
– Yes Ibukun, they have Churches.

As an Intermedia artist, collaboration has become an integral improvisational utility in circumventing a collective memory. By facilitating Pan-African conversations that take on unorthodox and unconventional mediums – such as sound and video artistic experimentation – new sonic-visual methodology is spontaneously generated that perhaps gives insight on not only acts of resistance but on cultural preservation. What was most appreciated on my side was that the Stuart Hall Foundation gave Ibukun and I the opportunity to come together finally for what will be a ongoing collaboration. In addition, the opportunity to wander, with naïveté, around the coast of South-East Sussex with nothing more than a handi-cam, generously provided by the media department of the University of Sussex, was pivotal. The camera gave me permission to wander, and that in itself from the position of my specific identity: revolutionary.

Image 1: Border Force agent escorting me “politely” out of a restricted area of Newhaven Port after he questioned my ability to read signs.

– Bleue Liverpool, November 2025

[1] Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Harvard University Press 1993)

View a video excerpt of ‘an unclassified syncretism’ below.

Our 2025 SHF Peer Network Welcome Event took place on Friday 17th October, inviting new scholars, fellows and artists joining the network to congregate at Whitechapel Gallery, London, and develop connections with the Foundation and each other. Attendees introduced their research, field of study or practice, reflected on excerpts from Stuart Hall’s lecture ‘Through the Prism of an Intellectual Life’, visited Whitechapel Gallery’s retrospective on Joy Gregory before meeting the visual artist and participated in an introductory session of the SHF Forum.

Feven Cofré Eyob, a PhD scholar supported by an SHF CHASE DTP studentship at SOAS, shares reflections on her experience attending the event below.

Bustling into the Whitechapel Gallery on that bright October morning with my trusted trio – a backpack, pushchair, and my baby – I half expected to be met with polite tolerance at my hefty load. There is, after all, quite a difference between being cordially invited as an academic and the deeper, rarer feeling of being genuinely welcomed into a fold, as both mother and researcher. To my delight, what awaited me felt like a homecoming. Each greeting came with warm introductions that flowed effortlessly into bubbling conversations.

This hum of conviviality set a purposeful undertone that carried us throughout the day. With the program of lectures and presentations, our earlier introductions percolated into reflections on what home means. How do we become at home without being at home? What might it mean to be “in but not of” the institutions in which we work? By the end of our meeting, I felt reassured in our camaraderie. All of us in the room were interested in questions of how to navigate being unsettled by unjust systems, by structures so vast they defy comprehension, and yet strive to still find something generative in our attempts to unpack their formations. As Stuart Hall conveyed to us from the archives: we may never speak the truth, but can commit to the ongoing task of seeking our best truths.

As these themes and ideas moved through our dialogues, we found ourselves deepening our engagement through reflections on Joy Gregory’s brilliant exhibition Catching Flies with Honey, as well as considering what an intellectual life means. Looking around the room, among peers who already felt familiar, I sensed a quiet cultivation of kinship – in our ideas, responses, and research praxis. Our shared academic genealogy became visible in our gathering and in our collective musings on the concepts articulated by our academic ancestor, Stuart Hall.

From far behind the veil, reverberating through the archives and coursing through the minds and hearts of the people in that room above the Whitechapel Gallery, Stuart Hall taught us about finding our way, about overcoming disillusionment and dislocation on our scholarly path and, in doing so, reassured us. That this journey need not be a burden, but an empowering trajectory: one that honours our mission, infuses us with purpose as we serve our communities, and invites us to find joy in the constellation of academic kinship that was fostered that day.

– Feven Cofré Eyob, November 2025

I
What does it Matter?

“…you don’t worry about dirt in the garden because it belongs in the garden, but the moment you see dirt in the bedroom you have to do something about it because it symbolically doesn’t belong there. And what you do with dirt in the bedroom is to cleanse it, you sweep it out, you restore order, you police boundaries, you know the hard and fast boundaries around what belongs and what doesn’t. Inside/Outside. Cultured/Uncivilised. Barbarous/Cultivated, and so on.”

– Stuart Hall discussing anthropologist Mary Douglas and her ‘matter out of place’ theory¹

I remember an empty seat next to me on a crowded train. I remember walking easy in a quaint French village before being interrupted by the wrinkled nose of a passerby; tu viens d’où, alors? reminding me that foreign follows me like an old cloak lugging around my neck. I remember the breeze in Kerry’s voice telling me, I don’t like the really dark black people, but you’re alright, the way horror grew in my chest like ivy that day (its leaves have still not withered). I remember Year 6, the way my teacher shuddered at a picture of my profile. How I first understood revulsion without knowing its name, tucking my lips into themselves to make them smaller, if only for a little while. I remember the pointing, questions of whether I could read whilst holding a book, being looked at too intently to be thought beautiful but blushing all the same. I think this is a love, but the kind we have been warned to run from. It owns a gun, yet will not speak of its terror; obsessive in every curl of my hair, the bloom of my nose, the peaks and troughs of my breath. I’d tell you who I am, but you do not ask for my voice. You’ve already made up your mind, haven’t you?

II
Hostile, a definition:

Bitter; windrush citizen: here until your skin is no longer needed
Cold; migrants sleeping rough will be deported
Malicious; Yarl’s Wood is locking away too many hearts, will not let them heal
Militant; charter flights, expulsion as a brutal secret in handcuffs
Warlike; the threat, the swarm, the takeover, the Black-Brown invasion
Inhospitable; send them to Rwanda
Resentful; immigration is, after all, a very ’serious problem’
Unwilling; to see the truth in one another
Standoffish; do not fall in love with the wrong passport
Unwelcoming; the number of refugees dying to reach you
Afraid;
Afraid;
Afraid;

***

how long must we make a case for migration? recount the times it has carried this country on its neck so this nation could bask in the glory of its so called greatness? how loud should we chant our stories of beauty of struggle of grit? write all the ways we are lovely and useful across our faces before we become a hymn sheet singing of desperation? what time left to find a favourite cafè and a hand to hold? to lie on the grass in the park and spot clouds whose shapes remind us of the things we’ve lost? the loves we can’t get back?

III
and so, a riot, and so the beast

The riots. August 2024. Did I dream it? The rage, the terror, the fire?

Already, it’s being remembered as the riots of the ‘far right’. Far away – like a beast on a leash scowling in the distance. But I’ve seen riots, routine and much closer. Riots on my tv screen in racist debates over who gets to be here, riots in politician’s mouths, chewing and spitting immigrants out like a dirty word. A riot to my presence in the rooms I walk in and out of, protest to any sign I’m here, surviving, even experiencing joy. After all, the rule, no necessity, is that we must always be on the losing end of life. The idea that actually everyone could survive and experience joy, is supposedly a fairytale for the naïve. Instead, we remain trapped in the game of it- someone must win and another lose.

Weeks, even days, after the fury of the race riots, all of its wrath was shoved back into a box. The beast, clawing and wailing in the struggle, muffled by the pleasantries of nothing to see here! racism is in the past! because we’re all very civilised around here, right?

Eventually we left our houses once again. Funny how we knew what to do, how we’ve been rehearsing for emergency and violence every day in the before and after. This is the silent trade-off of what it is to live here, to exist within a spooling well of anger, unchecked and always brimming beneath the surface, hot and ready to boil over, flip the box wide open.

The rioters claimed enough was enough, to stop the boats, that something has to end

And I wanted to ask them, what? What is too much? Whose boats first descended where? What has to end, and where did this all begin? Trace it to its exact point.

Whose story are you telling? At what point did you get lost? Trace it to its exact point. Meet me there.

I know the truth to these questions means nothing. White terror is an inheritance, and the need to assert dominance over others, an heirloom that is passed on and on and on. Those who accept it, must do so faithfully, despite any truths or pleas to change.

I wanted to tell the rioters of the time they’re wasting, that they can’t hate us on the way to their own happiness. That what degrades us, degrades them – we are bound to one another whether any of us like it or not, and maybe, just maybe the thing that oppresses you, oppresses us too. That the violence and rage within them, can be fuel for something else, something good.

IV
Who are we to one another: a dirty secret

Here’s the thing we forget as we age; we’re not so different. Yes, there are some people whose clothes will never start a riot, those who will never know the grief of having a face made synonymous with a thug (the trauma of this deserves its own word). It is true that the things we experience are wrapped up in the life we are given. But when it comes to who we are, down to our most intimate core, aren’t we all just a bit lonely, scared for the storms to come? Asking questions no one truly has answers for?

Consider this; many of us did not want to get up this morning, some of us couldn’t. There is that dazed place we all inhabit seconds before fully waking that has no border, needs no passport. When the temperature drops to a chill, a body becomes its own shelter, shoulders round into a cave protecting itself. Some of our worse fears will come true, others won’t. We are all still chewing on words we wish we’d said to someone, somewhere, and longing to swallow back the ones we’ve said in temper. A first love will make our bodies speak languages we didn’t know we were fluent in and we all carry the heaviness of loss. How did we forget that we’re all deeply connected on some level?

Every day my phone scrolls through a news feed of angry people drunk on their ability to put others back in their place. There is a growing army of the righteous who tell us that there is a correct language to speak, an exact way to love, one acceptable altar to pray on. That falling out of this line means the terror of brute force is to be expected.

I watch a video of a man on the top deck of a bus screaming at another with a boiled kettle rage. He is all fist, spit in your face, my-grand-dad-didn’t-win-the war-so-your-kind-could-piss-it-all-away. I’m not sure it matters who the person on the receiving end of this venom is. In the video he is a chilling quiet, the kind many people of colour will recognise. It is a calculated silence, the kind where you are bargaining for your survival (and this too needs its own word). It does not matter whether he has a job he works hard at, the taxes he does or does not pay, if he tips generously, whether he is kind. That’s the point, isn’t it? Racism does not look for nuance, only the audacity of our skin.

I wonder if with a different lens these two could be lovers, could be sitting next to each other as strangers on the same top deck. They’d realise they were listening to the same music and how this one track makes them each feel a particular kind of giddy as the bass drops, how as the bus jolts a headphone would fall from each ear and they would turn to look at each other and they would smile.

V
What words have been left for us?

Words tell lies. This is difficult pill to swallow for a writer, but it is true, I think. We’ve inherited childish terms that shape the way we interact with one another. The words Black and White are at their heart nonsensical, a carrier of symbols and signs artificially packed with history and too much meaning. And yet, still, these labels are seared onto our backs. How we ourselves are living in a language that equates our colour to a shipwreck where all hope is lost. It is, after all, a dark time. Blackness, with all its pain and apparent innate knowledge of knife crime and squalor embedded under its skin, stands with its back to whiteness, which in turn, knows fresh air and the best schools to get into. How boring, but these terms of reference are as scorched in our minds as a national anthem. How then, should we come to understand ourselves with the language we’ve been given? To find meaning and truth in words that are the scraps of the dictionary?

Give us back our tongues and we’ll give you an answer. It may not be a sound you’ll recognise but it will be ours, all ours.

***

The Audacity of Our Skin was originally commissioned by Counterpoints Arts as part of the Who Are We festival at the Tate Modern in 2018. This revisited version was commissioned by the Stuart Hall Foundation in 2025, supported by Comic Relief.

¹ https://www.mediaed.org/transcripts/Stuart-Hall-Race-the-Floating-Signifier-Transcript.pdf

The Reading the Crisis series asks: what kinds of tools and strategies are needed to confront this conjuncture? This online conversation series seeks to advance Stuart Hall’s thinking by analysing a curated selection of three texts in relation to present-day political formations. In alignment with our 2025 programme theme, In Search of Common Ground, we have chosen three Stuart Hall texts where Hall is in dialogue with Edward Said, CLR James and bell hooks. Each conversation, chaired by Aasiya Lodhi, aims to form an online teach-in space dedicated to demonstrating how engaging in a conjunctural analysis can enrich artistic practice, deepen organising work, and academic study.

The first conversation took place on Wednesday 4th June 2025, with Brenna Bhandar and Hashem Abushama considering the state of contemporary discourse on Israel-Palestine through Hall’s open letter to Edward Said, titled ‘For Edward Said’ (2004).

Read a transcript of the event here:
https://www.stuarthallfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/RTC-2025-1-Transcript.pdf

Supported by Comic Relief, the Hollick Family Foundation and the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, in collaboration with Words of Colour, Pluto Press, Soundings, and Taylor & Francis.

Reading the Crisis is part of the Stuart Hall Foundation’s In Search of Common Ground programme. Learn more about In Search of Common Ground by clicking here.

The Stuart Hall Foundation is pleased to be collaborating with Hackney Libraries to offer a reading list of books relating to the Reading the Crisis online conversation series. Feel free to access this list before, during or after the events to further explore some of the ideas that may be discussed:
https://www.lovehackney.uk/reading-lists/reading-the-crisis

The second conversation took place on Monday 28th July 2025, with Houria Bouteldja and Lola Olufemi focusing on themes relating to anticolonial thought and action through a 1986 exchange between Stuart Hall and CLR James.

Read a transcript of the event here:
https://www.stuarthallfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/RTC-2025-2-Transcript.pdf

Supported by Comic Relief, the Hollick Family Foundation and the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, in collaboration with Words of Colour, Pluto Press, Soundings, and Taylor & Francis.

Reading the Crisis is part of the Stuart Hall Foundation’s In Search of Common Ground programme. Learn more about In Search of Common Ground by clicking here.

The third conversation took place on Tuesday 9th September 2025, with Gary Younge and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor considering the nature of political organising using a discussion between bell hooks and Stuart Hall, published in the book, Uncut Funk: A Contemplative Dialogue (2017).

Read a transcript of the event here:
https://www.stuarthallfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/RTC-2025-3-Transcript.pdf

Supported by Comic Relief, the Hollick Family Foundation and the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, in collaboration with Words of Colour, Pluto Press, Soundings, and Taylor & Francis.

Reading the Crisis is part of the Stuart Hall Foundation’s In Search of Common Ground programme. Learn more about In Search of Common Ground by clicking here.

Writer, researcher, member of the Stuart Hall Foundation Peer Network and a speaker in this year’s In Search of Common Ground programme, Dr. Lola Olufemi shares insights and reflections on her experience participating in the Reading the Crisis conversation series.

I found the format of the Reading the Crisis series particularly generative – thinking about the present conjuncture through the threads left by an intellectual exchange between CLR James and Stuart Hall emphasised the importance of public dialogue as a means of combatting the anti-intellectualism of our increasingly fascist present. We must emphasise the connectivity of radical thinking across forms and arenas in order to reinvigorate the process of interpretative struggle that creates a culture. The dialogue allowed me to consider the creation of new strategies for attending to the present – particularly Houria’s insistence that notion of Gramsci’s notion of the ‘Integral State’, the relationship between the state and civil society as it operates in Europe is racialised and that this integral racial state “however tentacular, does not exhaust either the human being or their capacity to break the chains and enjoy their freedom.” Our conversation illuminated the responsibility of cultural workers, public intellectuals and academics to address the persistence of race as an ordering principle, a “floating signifier”, and the beating heart of the fascist project which is expressed through “common sense” objections to forms of migration in the United Kingdom. It also highlighted the affective dimensions of political education – if we can move people towards political consciousness, actions, affiliations and relationships which reject the myopic and alienated existence we have inherited from the neoliberal project of the last two decades through cultural interventions like this, we should not hesitate to do so. This is one part of a multi-pronged strategy.

I am always thinking about how we gain deeper understanding of the political legacies to which they belong and work in service to extend them in new ways. The necessity of making connections across time cannot be understated. My conversation with Houria made me realise that the exchange between CLR James and Stuart was not an archival relic, locked into the domain of the past; the insights they shared were pertinent to the present moment and were rearticulated in our conversation through a feminist lens. It reminded me of what I already know: we may live under different conditions but the political project remains the same.

– Lola Olufemi, September 2025

Ahead of the 8th Annual Stuart Hall Public Conversation in May 2025, our network of creative and intellectual practitioners gathered at Conway Hall for the SHF Peer Network Spring Workshop. Joined by Professor Françoise Vergès, together they spent the day discussing each others’ practices, exchanging ideas and building connections.

Eleanor Beaton, Stuart Hall Scholar at the University of Edinburgh (Scottish Graduate School of Social Sciences), shares her reflections on these events below, exploring themes of resilience, solidarity, and hope amid ongoing crises.

Wrapping up an afternoon spent thinking through how to build transnational solidarities across our differences in times of poly-crisis, Françoise Vergès drew upon the past to impart upon us a message of hope for the future – “the desire for emancipation,” she said, “will never die, across four centuries of slavery, there was always resistance.” In the present moment, marked by the genocide of the Palestinian people, by new and evermore violent wars waged in the name of U.S. imperialism, by the harshening of border regimes in Fortress Europe, and by the disastrous effects of climate breakdown, Françoise Vergès wove together the past and the present in order to imagine an alternative future, in order to teach us how we might continue in spite of it all, how we might, in her words, “confront finite disappointment with infinite hope.”

When I returned to Conway Hall this year to hear Françoise speak, one year after having joined Remi Joseph-Salisbury and Laura Connelly there for a workshop on anti-racist scholar activism, I was struck most clearly by a sense of déjà-vu. One year ago, I had come to London dejected, aimless, and confused. My work – with trans migrants, asylum-seekers, and refugees – had been derailed by institutional upsets which I no longer felt I had the energy to overcome. One year ago, I had all but given up. But in that room, filled to the brim as it was with like-minded thinkers, with academics, artists, and archivists, with my mentors and with my peers, with people who had faced the same challenges and setbacks as I had, and who, like myself, feel a burden of responsibility to the communities they work with, a burden which requires them to find paths forward, paths towards a better future. Last year, Erinma and Gabriel who sat either side of me, and all of my other peers in that room, they buoyed me, they reminded me of what it is we are trying to achieve with our work, they sent me back on the train home with the determination I needed to continue, and I did. A year on, I stepped into Conway Hall with new anxieties and new questions, as I prepare to start fieldwork in Germany, not entirely sure what I’m getting myself in for. Again, my fears were assuaged. Conversations with colleagues, with friends old and new, and with Françoise herself, they grounded me in the ‘why’ of the work, they brought back to the front of my mind that fickle affective drive which animates so much of what we do at the Stuart Hall Foundation, they kept me going, and they keep me going, in spite of it all.

– Eleanor Beaton, June 2025

Hosted by the Stuart Hall Foundation, the workshop began with lively introductions between the invited groups: members of the SHF Peer Network, the CoDE ECR (Centre on the Dynamics of Ethnicity Early Career Researcher) Network and scholars from YCEDE (Yorkshire Consortium for Equity in Doctoral Education). Françoise Vergès then led an open floor discussion on methods and strategies grounded in arts, history, activism, philosophy, postcolonial or feminist studies that may be deployed to address a broad, pertinent set of questions:

“How do the memories and history of past struggles for liberation and abolition help us to “build a politics that speaks to the specific moment in which we are working”? How do we formulate the common grounds that will build international solidarities and connect the struggles for climate justice, against racism, Islamophobia, imperialism, fascism and the rush to grab minerals and lands for extraction? How do we fight locally in a way that strengthen a transnational decolonial antiracist movement, without erasing differences?”

Workshop participants were also invited to attend the 8th Annual Stuart Hall Public Conversation with Françoise Vergès the next day. Eleanor Beaton, Stuart Hall Scholar at the University of Edinburgh (Scottish Graduate School of Social Sciences), shared her reflections on the experience here.

Supported by Comic Relief, the Hollick Family Foundation, the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, Conway Hall, CoDE and YCEDE.

Thank you to the SHF Trustees and Associates whose contributions made this event possible: Giorgia Doná, Michael Rustin and Nick Beech.

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/

In September 2024, we were pleased to meet new members joining the SHF Scholars, Fellows and Artists Network in person at a welcome event. We hosted this event, chaired by the Chair of the SHF Academic Committee, Professor Nasar Meer, with the aim to develop connections between the Foundation and the new members of its network, giving attendees the opportunity make each others’ acquaintance and share ideas directly. Attendees were invited to introduce their research, consider Stuart Hall’s thoughts on being a public intellectual, and learn about the Foundation’s programme of events, workshops, opportunities and support available to them.

Following a breakout session responding to clips from Hall’s lecture ‘Through the Prism of an Intellectual Life’, participants were joined by historian and writer Professor Robin D. G. Kelley for an informal group discussion, introduced by Professor Catherine Hall. Later, writer and researcher Lola Olufemi delivered a talk followed by a conversation with photographer, media artist and scholar Professor Roshini Kempadoo and the group, exploring Lola’s experience as a scholar and a member of the SHF Network.

Thank you to the SHF Trustees and Associates whose contributions made this event possible: Giorgia Doná, Catherine Hall, Roshini Kempadoo, Nasar Meer, Shamim Miah and Ruth Ramsden-Karelse.

In July 2000, Stuart Hall delivered a keynote lecture entitled ‘Diasporas, or the logics of cultural translation’ (or ‘Diásporas, ou a lógica da tradução cultural’) at a comparative literature conference in Salvador, the capital of Brazil’s northeastern state of Bahia (Hall, 2016). Beginning his lecture with an apology for ‘speaking in a foreign language’ and pledging to talk slowly ‘on pain of death by my translators’, Hall embarks upon a journey around the ‘Black Atlantic’s southern meridian’, interweaving the histories and fates of the Caribbean and Brazilian people – ‘translated societies’ whose experiences resonate with one another from colonisation to globalization (2016).

Hall took this opportunity – ‘the occasion of my very first ‘landfall’’ in Latin America’s largest country – to reveal to gathered scholars Bahia’s key role in the pre-history of cultural studies (2016). The discipline’s provenance was more commonly located at Birmingham’s Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS), founded in 1964 under the stewardship of Richard Hoggart. Yet Hall’s ‘Bahian moment’ took place during the previous decade, when between 1954 and 1957 he was diverted from his Oxford University studies by a burgeoning interest in the history of slavery and the making of the New World. First encountering the province through reading the work of Roger Bastide and Gilberto Freyre, he would later write in Familiar Stranger that ‘This diversion in the Rhodes House Library … really marks for me the origins of Cultural Studies’ (Hall, 2017, pp. 248–249).

The significance of the Black New World and Hall’s ‘first, heart-stopping visit to Afro-Brazil’, as noted in Familiar Stranger, are considered in a conversation which took place in August 2022 between the memoir’s co-author Bill Schwarz, Professor of English at Queen Mary University of London, and Liv Sovik, Professor of Communication at Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, who attended the Salvador conference (Stuart Hall Foundation, 2024). Their discussion – chaired by the Stuart Hall Foundation’s Director Orsod Malik and released in July 2024 to launch the ‘Stuart Hall in Translation’ project – took this appearance as a turning point, not only in the thinker’s intellectual trajectory, but also in the racial and cultural politics of the wider region.

Schwarz insists that ‘Brazil was inside Stuart Hall’ – his sole trip ‘meant a lot to him both emotionally and intellectually’, leading him to primarily believe himself to be a ‘theorist of the diaspora’. (SHF, 2024). Sovik, who would edit a collection of Hall’s writing translated into Brazilian Portuguese entitled Da diáspora: Identidades e mediações culturais (Hall and Sovik, 2003), believes Hall’s interjections always ‘laid out a terrain on which everyone could stand’ (SHF, 2024) – his ideas were inclusive, gaining traction in a time of growing public awareness of race at the intersections of Caribbean and Latin American life. They share memories of their own interactions with Hall but also their worries of accurately taking his thoughts and laying them out for public consumption. Certain concepts were yet to concretize in Hall’s mind (Schwarz recalls his friend asking him how long a ‘conjuncture’ might last); others were found to be broadly untranslatable (Sovik is bemused by his phrase ‘the unscripted nature of English culture’) (SHF, 2024).

Despite inevitable stretches and contortions, Hall’s work has been successfully translated into myriad languages – Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, Finnish, Hebrew, Italian, Korean, and Turkish to name a few (Henriques and Morley, 2018). The three articles that follow respond to the opening conversation of the ‘Stuart Hall in Translation’ series, and feature:

Eduardo Restrepo writing on the challenges of translating Hall into Spanish for a Latin American audience, retaining the nuance of complex arguments, and stimulating their relevance and accessibility for contemporary audiences.
Victor Rego Diaz and the editorial board of the Argument Verlag publishing house using passages from Familiar Stranger to illustrate contentions arising from translating Hall into German, particularly around race and its relationship with European fascist history.
Yutaka Yoshida introducing the concept of ‘conjunctural translation’, and the fractious relationships between colonialism and modernity in transatlantic and transpacific locations.

Far from focusing on knotty textual disputes, each writer is more concerned with the ways in which Hall’s ideas can be received, learned, and passed on. All have translated Hall’s written work, not simply into alternative documents but into diverse cultural settings, offering readers insights into decisions made during the process of translation, and demonstrating a real wish to provide audiences with sufficient contextual detail.

During the opening conversation of this series, Bill Schwarz claims that ‘Stuart hated finishing things’ (SHF, 2024), evoking the title of the acclaimed art installation celebrating Hall’s life and work ‘The Unfinished Conversation’, created by another of his long-standing collaborators John Akomfrah (2012). The 800 hours of archive recordings the film director considered and Hall left behind, alongside over half a century’s worth of published written material, may offer an air of finality about it: The Complete Stuart Hall, 1932–2014. And yet, as with Hall’s formative years or the time his ideas took flight at the height of globalization, in Bahia and elsewhere, his thinking was allowed to bend and adjust when translated into new contexts. A decade on from his death, as culture remains miraculously malleable, identities adaptable, histories contested, and nation-states unsettled, it is evident that Hall’s conversation with us has yet to finish.

Read and cite this introduction on the Taylor & Francis website.

About the author

K Biswas is a critic who has written for the New Statesman, New York Times, The Nation, Le Monde Diplomatique, The Baffler, and the Times Literary Supplement. He is the Editor of Representology: The Journal of Media and Diversity, Chair of the charity Heard, and Director of Europe’s largest community radio station, Resonance FM.

References

Akomfrah, J. 2012. ‘The unfinished conversation’ [exhibition].
Hall, S., 2016. Keynote lecture of VII Congress of the Brazilian Association of Comparative Literature (ABRALIC), “Terras & Gentes”, held in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil, July 24–27, 2000. Brazil: Cadernos Espinosanos, Universidade de São Paulo.
Hall, S., 2017. Familiar stranger. a life between two islands. London: Penguin Books.
Hall, S., and Sovik, L., 2003. Da diaspora: Identidades e mediacoes culturais. Belo Horizonte: Editora Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais.
Henriques, J.F., and Morley, D.G., eds. 2018. Introduction to Stuart Hall: conversations, projects and legacies. London: Goldsmiths Press.
Stuart Hall Foundation (SHF). 2024. Stuart Hall in Translation: Brazilian Portuguese, with Bill Schwarz and Liv Sovik.

Stuart Hall in Translation

The ‘Stuart Hall in Translation’ series observes Stuart Hall’s ideas in motion by tracing their resonances and transformations as they oscillate between languages, historical moments, and varying socio-political contexts. The series, produced in partnership with Cultural Studies journal, invites translators of Stuart Hall’s work from across the world to reflect on the following questions:

What can be lost and gained when texts are translated into different languages?
Can ideas form linkages across difference?
How can ideas transcend spatial and temporal boundaries?
What are the political implications associated with ideas moving across and between temporal and spatial boundaries?

To initiate the project, in August 2022 the Stuart Hall Foundation invited Bill Schwarz, co-author of Stuart Hall’s memoir Familiar Stranger, and Liv Sovik, professor of Communication at Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, to discuss the nuances of translating Familiar Stranger and Hall’s ideas into Portuguese for a Brazilian audience.

In 2024, the Foundation extended the invitation to other translators of Hall’s work, asking them to write about their own experiences, and addressing the disparities, challenges, and synergies of translating Hall’s ideas into a different language and national context. These new texts are now published in Cultural Studies and shared on the Stuart Hall Foundation website, featuring contributions from Victor Rego Diaz, Natascha Khakpour, Jan Niggemann, Ingo Pohn-Lauggas, Nora Räthzel, Yutaka Yoshida, Eduardo Restrepo and K Biswas.

Part of our ‘Catastrophe and Emergence‘ programme.

Supported by Taylor & Francis, Esmée Fairbairn Foundation and the Barry Amiel and Norman Melburn Trust.

Abstract

Translation is an intellectual endeavour that requires engagement with authors and conceptual frameworks from different times and worlds. It is not a neutral or simple task of converting linguistic codes but a situated, partial, and interested process that goes beyond mere intellectual activity. In translating Stuart Hall into Spanish for a Latin American audience, specific challenges and interests arise, as detailed in this article. Three main challenges are discussed: preserving the contextuality and complexity of Hall’s writings, resisting the temptation to simplify or academicize his work, and ensuring that translations facilitate meaningful cross-cultural exchanges. The article underscores the importance of understanding Hall’s work as an intellectual and political project, deeply rooted in specific historical and cultural contexts, and argues for an approach to translation that remains faithful to these dimensions while making his ideas accessible and relevant to contemporary Latin American readers. Finally, the paper reflects on the political significance of translation, highlighting how ideas can transcend boundaries and enrich local debates. Hall’s concepts, such as articulation, context, and conjuncture, are presented as valuable tools for understanding and intervening in the social and political realities of Latin America today. The article concludes by emphasizing the ongoing relevance of Hall’s intellectual and political contributions and the need for translations that honour his legacy while engaging with the specific challenges and opportunities of our present moment.

Read the article in full on the Taylor & Francis website.

About the author

Eduardo Restrepo. Anthropologist graduated from the University of Antioquia (Medellín, 1996), with a Master’s and Ph.D. in Anthropology with a focus on Cultural Studies from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He served as President of the Latin American Anthropology Association from 2015 to 2020. A founding member of the Network of World Anthropologies, he designed and directed the Master’s programs in Cultural Studies, in Latin American Cultural Studies (online), and Afro-Colombian Studies at Javeriana University, where he worked for 16 years. He is currently affiliated as an Associate Researcher at the Center for Research, Innovation, and Creation and as a visiting professor in the Ph.D. program in Anthropology at the Department of Anthropology, Catholic University of Temuco, Chile.

His research lines highlight studies related to Afro-Colombian populations, with a particular interest in the Colombian Pacific region. The processes of ethnization and racialization, as well as the politics of representation and Black political subjectivities, are some of the issues addressed in his publications. He has also taken an interest in the geopolitics of knowledge and the processes of placemaking that shape disciplinary fields such as anthropology or transdisciplinary fields such as cultural studies. His courses, talks, and publications can be found on his website.

Stuart Hall in Translation

What can be lost and gained when texts are translated into different languages?
Can ideas form linkages across difference?
How can ideas transcend spatial and temporal boundaries?
What are the political implications associated with ideas moving across and between temporal and spatial boundaries?

Part of our ‘Catastrophe and Emergence‘ programme.

Supported by Taylor & Francis, Esmée Fairbairn Foundation and the Barry Amiel and Norman Melburn Trust.

Abstract

This essay considers the possibility of what I would call conjunctural translation. While literal translation has accelerated cultural ethnocentrism as well as settler colonial violence, conjunctural translation seeks to glimpse the possibility of solidarity buried beneath the collaborative rule among the empires. This essay first retraces colonial modernity in the British Caribbean and Britain. Reading the selected chapters from Familiar Stranger, I propose that this memoir registers the three phases of colonial modernity: transatlantic slavery, migration to metropolis, and the prison-house of identity politics. In contrast to this, literal translation was at the core of cultural ethnocentrism that underpinned colonial modernity in Korea and Japan. The second part of this essay explicates the relationship between colonialism and modernity in East Asia that is punctuated by the following three phases: settler colonialism, migration to metropolises, and the curtailment of identity and citizenship. In this case, each phase appeared as deprivation of land, migration to Japan and the crises of security, and the loss of nationality during the Cold War era. The last part of the essay concerns unpredictable connections between colonial modernities. Though separately formed in the transatlantic and transpacific regions, these modernities create crosscurrents of thought, struggles, defeats and victories: conjunctures. Published in the early 1950s, the writings of Martin Carter and C. L. R. James differently refer to the Korean War. By comparing their work, this essay concludes that the future of solidarity comes from ‘the ability to be exposed’. As Hall unexpectedly encountered the Caribbean migrants in London in the key moments of his memoir, such conjunctural translation was undertaken by the Caribbean intellectuals of the 1950s. To expose oneself to these unexpected encounters is the very momentum that urges us to be vigilant to the dangers of literal translation.

Read the article in full on the Taylor & Francis website.

About the author

Yutaka Yoshida is an associate professor at Tokyo University of Science. His interests include Caribbean literature and comparative literature in the Cold War era. His monograph Literary History of the Destitute: Empire and the Crowds in Modernity was published in Japan (Getsuyo-sha, 2021) and South Korea (Bogosabooks, 2024). He has translated George Lamming’s In the Castle of My Skin, Stuart Hall’s memoir Familiar Stranger, and Uncut Funk by bell hooks and Stuart Hall. His articles on Caribbean literature have been published in Journal of Commonwealth Literature and Inter-Asia Cultural Studies.

Stuart Hall in Translation

What can be lost and gained when texts are translated into different languages?
Can ideas form linkages across difference?
How can ideas transcend spatial and temporal boundaries?
What are the political implications associated with ideas moving across and between temporal and spatial boundaries?

Part of our ‘Catastrophe and Emergence‘ programme.

Supported by Taylor & Francis, Esmée Fairbairn Foundation and the Barry Amiel and Norman Melburn Trust.

Abstract

The translation of Familiar Stranger by Stuart Hall into German was a particular challenge, especially with regard to the concept of race. Hall uses the term ‘race’ to fan out the countless cultural meanings, which are not covered by a homogeneous theoretical conception of race. The result is the ambivalent articulation of race – as well as of colour – which unites racist as well as emancipatory meanings in the same term. This ambivalent chain of meanings has no equivalent in the German language, as the conceptual history of race cannot be detached from the context of German fascism, either theoretically or in everyday language. Another requirement was the translation of gender, not because Hall problematizes this, but because the German language is a deeply rooted genus-typifying language. With some examples of translation, we want to show how we have tried, to consciously act in the space of the displacement of culture, to recognize the specific situatedness of the heterogeneous representations that Hall talks about in Familiar Stranger, and not to unify them in favour of a homogeneous German textuality.

Read the article in full on the Taylor & Francis website.

About the authors

We authors came together as an editorial board to revise the German translation of Stuart Hall’s Familiar Stranger. Our different working contexts stimulated controversial and productive discussions for an appropriate translation: Natascha Khakpour is interested in reflective teacher education, language(s), subject and educational relations. Jan Niggemann deals with educational theory, pedagogical authority and authorisation. Ingo Pohn-Lauggas researches culture, art and literature – in particular Gramsci. Nora Räthzel is a well-known researcher on racism and cultural studies, but also on gender relations and environmental labour studies. Victor Rego Diaz coordinated the editorial board and works on social transformation and learning processes.

Stuart Hall in Translation

What can be lost and gained when texts are translated into different languages?
Can ideas form linkages across difference?
How can ideas transcend spatial and temporal boundaries?
What are the political implications associated with ideas moving across and between temporal and spatial boundaries?

Part of our ‘Catastrophe and Emergence‘ programme.

Supported by Taylor & Francis, Esmée Fairbairn Foundation and the Barry Amiel and Norman Melburn Trust.

The Stuart Hall Foundation’s Reading the Crisis series asks: what kinds of tools and strategies are needed to address this conjuncture? This online conversation series seeks to advance Stuart Hall’s thinking by analysing a curated selection of three of Hall’s essays in relation to present-day political formations. Each conversation, chaired by Aasiya Lodhi, forms an online teach-in space dedicated to demonstrating how engaging in a conjunctural analysis can enrich artistic practice, deepen organising work, and academic study.

The third event in the series took place on Tuesday 23rd July 2024, featuring Gail Lewis and Roderick Ferguson responding to Stuart Hall’s 1990 essay ‘Cultural Identity and Diaspora’.

Read a transcript of the event here:
https://www.stuarthallfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/RTC-Episode-3-Transcript.pdf

In partnership with Duke University Press supported by Esmée Fairbairn Foundation and Barry Amiel and Norman Melburn Trust.

Reading the Crisis is 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/

For this year’s Autumn Keynote, the Stuart Hall Foundation invited internationally renowned historian and writer Professor Robin D. G. Kelley to respond to the theme of our Catastrophe and Emergence programme. The event took place on Thursday 5th September 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 as the pair sat in conversation following the keynote. An audience Q&A also took place, and Newham Bookshop held a stall with literature on sale.

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.

The ‘Stuart Hall in Translation’ series observes Stuart Hall’s ideas in motion. by tracing their resonances and transformations as they oscillate between languages, historical moments, and varying socio-political contexts. The series, produced in partnership with Cultural Studies journal, invites translators of Stuart Hall’s work from across the world to reflect on the following questions:

What can be lost and gained when texts are translated into different languages?
Can ideas form linkages across difference?
How can ideas transcend spatial and temporal boundaries?
What are the political implications associated with ideas moving across and between boundaries?

To initiate the project, we invited Bill Schwarz, co-author of Stuart Hall’s memoir ‘Familiar Stranger’, and Liv Sovik, professor of Communication at Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, to discuss the nuances of translating ‘Familiar Stranger’ and Hall’s ideas into Portuguese for a Brazilian audience.

You can listen here to the conversation with Bill Schwarz and Liv Sovik, which was recorded in August 2022, and is introduced and hosted by SHF Director Orsod Malik.

In 2024, we extended the invitation to other translators of Hall’s work, asking them to write about their own experiences, and addressing the disparities, challenges, and synergies of translating Hall’s ideas into a different language and national context. These new texts will be published in Cultural Studies Journal and on the Stuart Hall Foundation website in Autumn 2024.

A transcript of the conversation recording is available to view and download here: (read transcript)

Supported by Taylor & Francis, Esmée Fairbairn Foundation and the Barry Amiel and Norman Melburn Trust.

The speakers

Bill Schwarz is Professor of English at Queen Mary University of London. Bill’s many publications include his Memories of Empire trilogy and his contribution to Stuart Hall’s memoir Familiar Stranger. A Life between Two Islands (2017). With Catherine Hall, Bill is also General Editor of the Duke University Press series, The Writings of Stuart Hall.

Liv Sovik is a full professor at the School of Communication of UFRJ. She is a collaborating professor of the Ethnic and Racial Relations Masters, CEFET-Rio de Janeiro, and researcher of the PACC Advanced Program in Contemporary Culture, UFRJ. She edited a major collection of Stuart Hall’s works into Portuguese, Da Diáspora: identidades e mediações culturais (Editora UFMG, 2003), and is the author of Tropicália Rex (Mauad, 2018) andAqui ninguém é branco [Here No One is White] (Aeroploano, 2009).

The second event in the series took place on Monday 24th June 2024, featuring Aditya Chakrabortty and Jeremy Gilbert responding to Stuart Hall’s 2011 essay ‘The Neoliberal Revolution’ in order to better understand today’s political milieu.

Read a transcript of the event here:
https://www.stuarthallfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/RTC-Episode-2-Transcript.pdf

Coming up in the Reading the Crisis series:
23rd July – Cultural Identity and Diaspora
Learn more: https://www.stuarthallfoundation.org/events/

In partnership with Duke University Press supported by Esmée Fairbairn Foundation and Barry Amiel and Norman Melburn Trust.

In October 2023, we were pleased to host an event to welcome new members joining the Scholars, Fellows and Artists Network. The event was an opportunity to develop connections between new scholars and with the Stuart Hall Foundation, allowing them to meet and share ideas in-person. Attendees were invited to introduce their research, explore Stuart Hall’s thoughts on what it means to be a public intellectual, and learn more about the Foundation’s programme of events, workshops and opportunities available to them.

Following a group discussion responding to clips from Hall’s lecture ‘Through the Prism of an Intellectual Life’, participants were invited to visit the Courtauld Gallery’s major exhibition of artist Claudette Johnson’s work, Presence. Claudette Johnson later joined participants in a collective conversation around her career and the nuanced processes and decision-making in her approach to visual art.

On Friday 22nd March 2024, we invited members of the SHF Peer Network and the CoDE ECR (Centre on the Dynamics of Ethnicity Early Career Researcher) Network to join us at Conway Hall in London to participate in an Anti-Racist Scholar Activism Workshop. Led by Remi-Joseph Salisbury and Laura Connelly, authors of Anti-Racist Scholar-Activism (Manchester University Press, 2021), this dynamic forum explored anti-racist scholar activism amidst the confluence of crises scholars, artists and practitioners are navigating in their respective fields at this time.

We commissioned SHF Peer Network member CJ Simon – currently a PhD scholar with the White Rose Doctoral Training Partnership – to share his reflections following the event below:

In a time where it can feel quite lonely to be a Black academic, I am forever grateful for the work of the Stuart Hall Foundation. On 22nd and 23rd March, the foundation took over Conway Hall to host two exciting events; the first was an ‘Anti-Racist Scholar Activist’ workshop run by Dr Remi Joseph-Salisbury and Dr Laura Connelly, the second a Public Conversation between the acclaimed installation artist and filmmaker Isaac Julien and the incomparable writer and curator Gilane Tawadros. Whilst very different in form and substance, both events promised to bring together a wide network of scholars, artists, practitioners, and members of the public invested in producing a more equitable world. Boy, did it deliver. Over those two days there was an electric pulse of conversation between attendees stretching out from Conway Hall to the pubs and cafés dotted around London, all centred around our lived experiences, struggles, hopes, and plans for carving some kind of path forward. Lonely no longer.

As a theatre-maker and PhD researcher interested in understanding how communities can come together to shape political opinions and behaviours, there was something incredibly refreshing about a workshop so devoted to praxis: talking through how our theoretical work can and should lead to real-world practice. This conversation was perfectly contrasted with the screening of Isaac Julien’s ‘Once Again… (Statues Never Die)’, a film which very poignantly asks the audience to reflect on the colonial relationship between history, art, and intimacy. Vindicating the writing of Stuart Hall, Julien’s piece demonstrated to me just how crucial art is to the practical work of anti-racist activists. A lovely feeling for someone who came into academia through the world of poetry and theatre.

Surprisingly, the most exciting – and probably most radical – thing to come from this weekend hasn’t actually happened yet. In finding new friends, new peers, and new mentors to talk with, disagree with, and learn from, I know that the work has only just begun. The community is growing and expanding and finding a way to sustainably fight for an equitable world.

– CJ Simon, May 2024

SHF Peer Network Spring Workshop with Fred Moten (photos)

Choosing a Nation: Identity, Belonging, and Representation in International Sport

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