22nd August 2023
Stuart Hall portrait by Claudette Johnson unveiled in Oxford
When Professor Stuart Hall said in a talk that black artists of her generation would astound audiences, it made painter Claudette Johnson feel “valued, validated and seen”. Now both Johnson and Hall will be seen by the students and staff of Merton College, Oxford, where a new portrait of Hall by Johnson has been unveiled. Johnson was speaking at the celebration event for the painting on May 25, in the college’s TS Eliot lecture theatre.
Hall came to Oxford from Jamaica as a Rhodes scholar in 1951, and read English at Merton. While there, he established personal and political ties that would last a lifetime. His widow Catherine Hall, emerita professor of history at University College London, thanked Johnson and all those involved in the commission, including Dr Julia Walworth, who is Fellow Librarian at Merton and led the project. Becky Hall, Stuart’s daughter and a psychoanalyst, shared her first impression of Johnson’s picture, which was at the artist’s London studio over mugs of ginger tea. She said she had been “completely unprepared for the impact of this portrait” and by the realisation of how much it might matter to her and her family to see Stuart Hall, who died in 2014, represented in this way.
Johnson, who was born in Manchester and studied art at Wolverhampton Polytechnic, had an exhibition at Modern Art Oxford in 2019. She usually works in pastels and gouaches and doesn’t consider herself a portraitist. Producing this work in oils was a challenge, she said, as a likeness of the subject emerged and then slipped away as she applied and removed layers of paint.
Other speakers at the celebration event were Prof Irene Tracey, who is the vice-chancellor of Oxford University, Gilane Tawadros, the chair of the Stuart Hall Foundation, Prof Jennifer Payne, Ruth Ramsden-Karelse, and Dr David Dibosa.
For more information, visit the Merton College, Oxford website.

Image: (left to right): David Dibosa, Ruth Ramsden-Karelse, Becky Hall, Catherine Hall, Claudette Johnson, Gilane Tawadros, Julia Walworth.
Related
7th January 2021 / Video
Stuart Hall: Through the Prism of an Intellectual Life | Thinking About Thinking
By: Media Education Foundation
7th January 2021 / Video
Stuart Hall: Through the Prism of an Intellectual Life | Thinking About Thinking
By: Media Education Foundation
Originally Published by the Media Education Foundation The Media Education Foundation presents a newly discovered recording of a seminal...
7th January 2021 / Video
Stuart Hall: Through the Prism of an Intellectual Life | Thinking About Thinking
By: Media Education Foundation
Originally Published by the Media Education Foundation
The Media Education Foundation presents a newly discovered recording of a seminal lecture now available for viewing. The late cultural theorist Stuart Hall was one of the great intellectual and political figures of recent history. His voice is more necessary than ever in these unprecedented times. In this 2004 lecture – the basis of one of his most important essays – he demonstrates what made his theoretical contributions so relevant to contemporary events. As Professor Susan Douglas of the University of Michigan says, “Here we see a stunning (and exemplary) display of Stuart’s brilliant ability to move between the theoretical and the often quotidian examples he would use to illustrate theory, and make it more clear. With virtually no notes and barely a pause, Stuart offers, by turns, an astute, dexterous, probing and, as always, humble disquisition about the relationship between biography and intellectual work. His reflections on the processes – the work, the struggles, the misrecognitions – that go into thinking are inspiring and comforting. For those of us who have always thought that hearing Stuart speak brought his written work to life, and who deeply miss, still, his brilliance and his humanity, Through the Prism of an Intellectual Life is a blessing. This tour de force is a must watch.”
“Stuart Hall was a great intellectual freedom fighter and theoretical genius as manifest in this famous lecture! Don’t miss it.”
– Cornel West
“What a phenomenal gift! This recording of Stuart Hall’s talk at the Caribbean Reasonings conference offers us exceptional insight into the person, the politics, the method, the vision, and their profound interconnectedness. Those who already know his work will be awe-struck and those for whom this serves as an introduction will surely want more.”
– Angela Davis
“Stuart Hall was always a uniquely gifted lecturer, but he never spoke more eloquently than he does in this magnificent talk, given at a crucial biographical moment for him, on a late return to the Caribbean. We see and hear him in inspirational mood, weaving together an astonishingly fluent synthesis of the key ideas from all the different stages of his work. Here is that astonishing combination of personal warmth, rhetorical splendour and intellectual seriousness which characterised his manner – which is so engaging as to make one want to stand up and join in the ovation he receives at the lecture’s end.”
– David Morley
“In these extraordinarily challenging times, Stuart Hall remains, even after his death, a unique voice for “the vocation of the intellectual life.” In this emblematic lecture, he both elaborates and demonstrates how to be a political intellectual, how to understand the complexity and contingency of the present conjuncture in ways that will enable people to more effectively resist the forces at work, the systems of power, injustice and inequality. Hall challenges us to think what it means to think, and how to make thinking matter.”
– Larry Grossberg
16th June 2022 / Article
Introduction to Special Preview: 'The Conversation Continues: We Are Still Listening'
By: Becky Hall
16th June 2022 / Article
Introduction to Special Preview: 'The Conversation Continues: We Are Still Listening'
By: Becky Hall
On 9th June 2022, the Stuart Hall Foundation hosted Special Preview: 'The Conversation Continues: We Are Still Listening', launching Trevor...
16th June 2022 / Article
Introduction to Special Preview: 'The Conversation Continues: We Are Still Listening'
By: Becky Hall
On 9th June 2022, the Stuart Hall Foundation hosted Special Preview: ‘The Conversation Continues: We Are Still Listening’, launching Trevor Mathison‘s newly commissioned audio-based artwork exploring the legacy of Stuart Hall (1932-2014) and the radical thinkers laid to rest at Highgate Cemetery. Following a preview of the soundscape experience on-site, the event featured a conversation between artist Trevor Mathison and lecturer Aasiya Lodhi, a reading from actor Joseph Black and introductions from Ian Dungavell, Chief Executive of the Friends of Highgate Cemetery Trust, and Becky Hall, child psychotherapist, psychoanalyst and trustee of the Stuart Hall Foundation. Becky Hall’s introduction to the evening presenting the commission is published in full below:
And so it was that I held the watering can and my mother the secateurs as we briskly set about the now familiar route through our much-loved Highgate Cemetery. The task in hand: some midsummer graveside weeding and pruning, straightening, and sorting out, making my father look respectable. It was an inclement morning, thick with the tang of wet, earthy smells. Not a morning for pausing at the huddles of Hellebores clustered in their melancholy colours between ancient stones or marvelling at the unruly parties of forget-me-nots running riot through the trees. A cool, sad June morning, in 2020, London locked down and locked into a new reckoning with the ghosts of Empire, rattling their chains in syncopated time with the beat across the Atlantic where fault lines shuddered at the murder of George Floyd.
This is where the conversation began. Turning right at Marx, straight on to The Mound where, on a sunny day the warmth of the stone at Stuart’s grave still gives one a temporary brush with his vitality. What would he have made of it all? What turn will this dialogue with history take, what are the stakes and the conditions of belonging to the new territories being claimed? And so it was that we joined the community of Highgate visitors who talk, sometimes aloud, to their loved ones lost – words alighting in the trees, nestling under stones, settling in the soil – fragments of conversation given a new home in the extraordinary palimpsest of sounds and states and feeling that artist Trevor Mathison has brought for our attention today. I would like to thank him and his assistant editor Beverley Bennet on behalf of the family and the Stuart Hall Foundation for this work, and for the invitation to pay attention. I would like also to thank Ian Dungavell and the Friends of Highgate Cemetery Trust for listening, to the Arts Council and Elephant Trust for their funding, to Ben Cook and LUX for their collaboration, Caro Communications for their PR support and to Gilane, the Trustees, Harriet, Orsod and Ilze (our team at the Stuart Hall Foundation) for pulling this off. Thanks to everyone who has contributed and supported this project.
Stuart was never going to be buried ‘back home’ in Jamaica. There was no such ‘home’ place to return to. In the end one has to find a position, he always said, and it was the once strange Lyme trees of North West London, not the glade of an illusory mango grove or the dusty yards of Constant Spring which finally felt most familiar: the home he made with my mother, the family, friendships, political projects, Cultural Studies, collectives of Birmingham and Kilburn, The Open University, black British artists, generations of students, at his typewriter, teaching, through intellectual enquiry and always, in conversation. Perhaps it could have been anywhere – Stuart really was a modest man – but his choice of Highgate Cemetery was a rare admission that his life, his contribution, had earned him a proper place and that he wished, in death, to claim it. He described on film in later life the lonely feeling of being out of sync with the times – not out of touch – but no longer quite in step. I think the prospect of being re-settled in the company of old friends, in this beautiful place, among the traditions of radical thought, near enough to home and in British soil must have felt a good place to rest.
Highgate is most likely filled with venerable ghosts, the serious nature of radical tradition setting the tone amongst its residents – it’s not easy to get a place here after all. I trust then that Stuart has smartened up his act since his hammy performance as the Ghost of McPhail in a piece of family theatre on a damp Scottish holiday – an eerie home-made soundtrack on the tape recorder as he stepped forth from the dusty drapes of a high windowsill, swathed in an ancient eiderdown and holding forth a kipper (to the great alarm of the younger members of the audience). I hope there is room for such high spirits in Highgate and suspect that it was Stuart’s mischievous, Midsummer sprite, his rebellious insistence on using as many exclamation marks as he fancied, that conjured up in me, on that cool, June morning – in the grim gloom of racialised violence, the disgrace of the un-welcomed Windrush arrivals and those without leave to remain – the wish to rattle, the urge to make a stink – “You have a black body here, make it matter.”
“I feel an email coming on,” I said, rousing a smile in my mother at the prospect of me rolling my terrible eyes and gnashing my terrible teeth, putting in a spirited performance as the high-minded custodian of my father’s reputation. And so it was that at 3 minutes past 9 on Midsummer day 2020, I wrote an email to The Friends of Highgate Cemetery Trust imperiously entitled ‘Query’. At 11.53 on that same morning, Ian Dungavell (the Chief Executive) wrote back, and an old-fashioned telephone conversation began.
We last stood in this chapel to bury Stuart and never thought at that time that the Miles Davis blues and greens that my brother chose to play us out, would ever bring us back in new dialogue with such old tunes. Trevor has chosen Familiar Stranger, the unfinished, posthumously recovered text that Stuart was working on until he died – his late life efforts to lay out and lay down the unrest of his own history – to speak in a new arrangement. It is the book in which the uneasy rhythm of Stuart’s lifelong preoccupation with what it was he left behind sings out, like his love of the Blues, as it always did, with what he made of his arrival. And so it is that we come here in memory and with the necessity of new things, the thrust and verdant greens of new shoots; a soundscape that speaks with the past to the urgency of the times.
Photo: Jessica Emovon
"...intellectuals whose indispensable work one returns to over and over again."
"...intellectuals whose indispensable work one returns to over and over again."
21st July 2021 / Article
The Impossibility of the Black Intellectual
By: Sindre Bangstad
...intellectuals whose indispensable work one returns to over and over again.
"...intellectuals whose indispensable work one returns to over and over again."
Stuart Hall, the British-Jamaican cultural theorist, would have been open to and pragmatic about the ideas of the younger generations of anti-racists now in the making.
There are some scholars and intellectuals whose indispensable work one returns to over and over again. For me, as for so many others, it is the late Cultural Studies’ founding father, professor Stuart Hall (1932-2014). For though much of Hall’s rich oeuvre came in response to concerns in the context of Black and anti-racist struggles in his adopted homeland of the UK in a period spanning from the 1950s until his death in 2014, it still feels remarkably prescient and relevant to the present conjuncture.
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