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

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.

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 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.

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/

In episode 4 of Living Archives, Ajamu and Bernice Mulenga bend time reflecting on their respective approaches to photography, intimacy and working with large institutions.

Conversation transcript available here. Listen to more episodes here.

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

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

Hosted by Jessica Taylor

Edited by Chris Browne

Designs by Yolande Mutale

Music by LOX

Bios

Ajamu [Hon FRPS] is a fine art studio based / darkroom led photographic artist and scholar. His work has been shown in Museums, galleries and alternative spaces worldwide. In 2022, Ajamu was canonised by The Trans Pennine Travelling Sisters as the Patron Saint of Darkrooms and received and honorary fellowship from the Royal Photographic Society. Work appears in private abd public collections worldwide.

Bernice Mulenga is a British-Congolese photographer with a distinct aptitude for archiving, documenting and interrogating the world around them. Mulenga’s work centres on their community and the experiences within it—most notably in their ongoing photo series #friendsonfilm. Their work also explores reoccurring themes surrounding identity, sexuality, grief, darkness and family.

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

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.