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.

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

1. Akomfrah, J. 2012. ‘The unfinished conversation’ [exhibition].
2. 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.
3. Hall, S., 2017. Familiar stranger. a life between two islands. London: Penguin Books.
4. Hall, S., and Sovik, L., 2003. Da diaspora: Identidades e mediacoes culturais. Belo Horizonte: Editora Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais.
5. Henriques, J.F., and Morley, D.G., eds. 2018. Introduction to Stuart Hall: conversations, projects and legacies. London: Goldsmiths Press.
6. 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.