Stuart Hall (cultural theorist)

Herman's direct ancestors were English, living in Jamaica for several centuries, tracing back to the Kingston tavern-keeper John Hall (1722–1797) and his Dutch wife Allegonda Boom.

Hall's direct paternal ancestors were implicated in the trans-Atlantic slave trade and slavery in Jamaica, being associated with the Grecian Regale Plantation, Saint Andrew Parish.

Hall's mother was descended through her mother from John Rock Grosset, a pro-slavery Tory MP.

According to the 1820 Jamaica Almanac, Stuart's great-great-great grandfather John Herman Hall owned 20 enslaved Black African people.

Hall was mixed-raced and it is claimed that he was of African, English, Portuguese Jewish, and likely Indian descent.

As a teen he had been baptized in an Evangelical Youth Group.

He attended Jamaica College, receiving an education modelled after the British school system.

In an interview, Hall describes himself as a "bright, promising scholar" in these years and his formal education as "a very 'classical' education; very good but in very formal academic terms."

With the help of sympathetic teachers, he expanded his education to include "T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Freud, Marx, Lenin and some of the surrounding literature and modern poetry", as well as "Caribbean literature".

Hall's later works reveal that growing up in the pigmentocracy of the colonial West Indies, where he was of darker skin than much of his family, had a profound effect on his views.

Stuart Henry McPhail Hall (3 February 1932 – 10 February 2014) was a Jamaican-born British Marxist sociologist, cultural theorist, and political activist.

Hall — along with Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams — was one of the founding figures of the school of thought known as British Cultural Studies or the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies.

Stuart Henry McPhail Hall was born on 3 February 1932 in Kingston, Jamaica, into a middle-class Jamaican family.

His parents were Herman McPhail Hall and Jessie Merle Hopwood.

In the 1950s Hall was a founder of the influential journal New Left Review.

In 1951, Hall won a Rhodes Scholarship to Merton College at the University of Oxford, where he studied English and obtained a Master of Arts degree, becoming part of the Windrush generation, the first large-scale emigration of West Indians, as that community was then known.

He originally intended to do graduate work on the medieval poem Piers Plowman, reading it through the lens of contemporary literary criticism, but was dissuaded by his language professor, J. R. R. Tolkien, who told him "in a pained tone that this was not the point of the exercise."

Hall began a PhD on Henry James at Oxford but, galvanised particularly by the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary (which saw many thousands of members leave the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) and look for alternatives to previous orthodoxies) and the Suez Crisis, abandoned this in 1957 or 1958 to focus on his political work.

In 1957, he joined the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) and it was on a CND march that he met his future wife.

From 1958 to 1960, Hall worked as a teacher in a London secondary modern school and in adult education, and in 1964 married Catherine Hall, concluding around this time that he was unlikely to return permanently to the Caribbean.

In 1958, the same group, with Raphael Samuel, launched the Partisan Coffee House in Soho as a meeting place for left-wingers.

After working on the Universities and Left Review during his time at Oxford, Hall joined E. P. Thompson, Raymond Williams and others to merge it with The New Reasoner journal, launching the New Left Review in 1960, with Hall as the founding editor.

Hall left the board of the New Left Review in 1961 or 1962.

At Hoggart's invitation, he joined the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at Birmingham University in 1964.

Hall's academic career took off in 1964 after he co-wrote with Paddy Whannel of the British Film Institute "one of the first books to make the case for the serious study of film as entertainment", The Popular Arts.

As a direct result, Richard Hoggart invited Hall to join the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham, initially as a research fellow at Hoggart's own expense.

Hall took over from Hoggart as acting director of the CCCS in 1968, became its director in 1972, and remained there until 1979.

While at the centre, Hall is credited with playing a role in expanding the scope of cultural studies to deal with race and gender, and with helping to incorporate new ideas derived from the work of French theorists such as Michel Foucault.

In 1968, Hall became director of the centre.

He wrote a number of influential articles in the years that followed, including "Situating Marx: Evaluations and Departures" (1972) and "Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse" (1973).

He also contributed to the book Policing the Crisis (1978) and coedited the influential Resistance Through Rituals (1975).

Hall left the centre in 1979 to become a professor of sociology at the Open University.

He was President of the British Sociological Association from 1995 to 1997.

He retired from the Open University in 1997 and was professor emeritus there until his death.

British newspaper The Observer called him "one of the country's leading cultural theorists".

Hall was also involved in the Black Arts Movement.

Movie directors such as John Akomfrah and Isaac Julien also see him as one of their heroes.

Hall was married to Catherine Hall, a feminist professor of modern British history at University College London, with whom he had two children.

After his death, Stuart Hall was described as "one of the most influential intellectuals of the last sixty years".

The Stuart Hall Foundation was established in 2015 by his family, friends and colleagues to "work collaboratively to forge creative partnerships in the spirit of Stuart Hall; thinking together and working towards a racially just and more equal future."