Stuart Hall (cultural theorist)

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 that is now known as British Cultural Studies or the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies.

Stuart Hall

Quotes

• The problem of ideology ... has especially to do with the concepts and the languages of practical thought which stabilize a particular form of power and domination; or which reconcile and accommodate the mass of the people to their subordinate place in the social formation.
  • "The Problem of Ideology-Marxism without Guarantees," in Marx:100 Years On (London: 1983), p. 59

Familiar Stranger (2018)

• Much of my professional life has been concerned with the politics of who we think we are. I've been riveted by the question of how we can understand the chaos of identifications which we seek to reach somehow, 'ourselves'. Of course this arrival never occurs; we'll never be ourselves, whatever that could mean.
  • p. 63