Reaction 4

Volume 50 Issue 4 Article 14

2005

Cultural Studies, Critical Race Theory and Some Reflections on Cultural Studies, Critical Race Theory and Some Reflections on

Methods Methods

Imani Perry

Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.law.villanova.edu/vlr

Part of the Law and Society Commons

Recommended Citation Recommended Citation Imani Perry, Cultural Studies, Critical Race Theory and Some Reflections on Methods, 50 Vill. L. Rev. 915 (2005). Available at: https://digitalcommons.law.villanova.edu/vlr/vol50/iss4/14

This Symposia is brought to you for free and open access by the Journals at Villanova University Charles Widger School of Law Digital Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Villanova Law Review by an authorized editor of Villanova University Charles Widger School of Law Digital Repository.

20051

CULTURAL STUDIES, CRITICAL RACE THEORY AND SOME REFLECTIONS ON METHODS

IMANI PERRY*

F OR scholars, method is paramount. Outside of choosing the subject of inquiry, how one asks the question and pursues the answer are per-

haps the two greatest choices to be made. Before I was a legal academic, I

was a student and scholar of cultural studies. Because I was trained by professors educated in the Birmingham School,' the tastes, politics, chal- lenges and products of communities of peoples, defined by class, race,

nationality, region and the like, provided the methodological roughage for my intellectual development. And when I, through my experience as a law student of color and later as a legal academic, was introduced to Criti-

cal Race Theory and LatCrit, I immediately began to envision new pos- sibilities for my methodology. 2 This methodology was the examination of race in the law that understood both (race and law) as part of the fabric of

culture, subject to the kinds of cultural inquiry pursued in the cultural

studies method. In this piece I will reflect upon the usefulness of cultural studies to

studies of race and the law, and then make several methodological argu- ments about how to approach such work. The parallels between the move- ments, cultural studies, Critical Race Theory and LatCrit, are suggestive of their appropriateness for interdisciplinary sharing. All emerged as schol- arly movements out of political movement. These scholarly movements encourage scholars to reflect upon the significance of their work with re- spect to the material conditions of people's lives. These movements are

* Associate Professor of Law at Rutgers Law School Camden. In the fall of 2005, she is serving as a Visiting Associate Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. Perry is the author of the book PROPHETS OF THE HOOD: POLITICS AND POETICS IN Hip Hop (2004) as well as editor of The Narrative of Sojourner Truth published by the Barnes and Nobles Classics Series. She is also the author of a number of articles on race, cultural studies and the law in the post- Reconstruction and contemporary periods.

1. The Birmingham School is the designation given to British Cultural Stud- ies, so named for its foundation at the University of Birmingham (UK) Centre for Cultural Studies. The Birmingham School has made significant to major contribu- tions in a wide range of academic fields including: literary theory, historical theory, anthropology and ethnography, popular culture studies, media studies, women's studies, area studies and ethnic studies. The school, with a Marxian foundation, responded to the social movements of the 1960s and developed a set of critical approaches for the interpretation of cultural artifacts.

2. There are numerous legal scholars doing interdisciplinary work in law and culture, many of whom also do work that falls within or is sympathetic to Critical Race Theory. So while I do not mean to suggest that I am doing something new in the field of Critical Race Theory, I am arguing for a more central role for cultural studies work within the movement.

(915)

VILLANOVA LAW REVIEWo.

penetrating, concerned with critiquing the ideological underpinnings of injustice and marginalization, and interpreting the relationship between belief and how people live.

In cultural studies, interpreting the relationship between belief and the material conditions of people's lives is best exemplified by the theoret- ical canonization of Antonio Gramsci 3 and his notion of hegemony.4 It is in fact through Gramsci that we find one of the most powerful early un- ions of cultural studies and law. Further, in Eugene Genovese's classic work, Roll, Jordon, Roll,5 Chapter 22: The Hegemonic Function of the Law, Genovese is one of the earliest scholars to bring Gramsci to bear on United States race and culture. Genovese exposes how race and racism were codified in ante-bellum slave law, and how racism dizzyingly echoed back and forth between law and the popular culture. The ideology crafted by the planter class evolved into a set of hegemonic structures (law, family culture, religious institutions) which reinforced the belief in black and slave inferiority. For me, as an undergraduate, reading this chapter opened my eyes to the application of cultural studies to law for the first time, something that would become a professional fixation. My dedica- tion to such issues is demonstrated in my dissertation, Dusky Justice: Race in U.S. Law and Literature 1878-1914, and in my first book, Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop, that includes a chapter on the Glorious Out- law, and on to the present moment with articles and a forthcoming book on metanarratives of race in law and culture. Law, as I have come to un- derstand it, is not simply a set of rules through which power is exercised, but a cultural and epistemological insitution.

But let us begin with the cultural studies method. In cultural studies, the world is read as a series of texts. Every piece of cultural production, a song, a film, a ditty, a style of dress, is a text. We read these texts, not simply alone, but in context, in relationship with other texts. We also read them intertextually, that is to say, we are concerned with how texts "speak" to each other. What is the cultural conversation being had between and within different sorts of texts?

Amongst the myriad subjects of inquiry for cultural studies scholars, there is law. Law is but one, particularly powerful, arm of cultural produc-

3. Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) was a leading Italian Marxist scholar and ac- tivist. He was an intellectual, journalist and theorist who died in one of Mussolini's prisons. His most famous work, Prison Notebooks, was written during his imprison- ment. ANTONIO GRAmsci, PRISON NOTEBOOKS (Valentino Gerratana ed., 1975).

4. Gramsci's notion of hegemony holds that dominant groups in a society maintain their dominance by the persuasion and consent of subordinated groups. This consent is garnered through the persuasion of nonmembers of the dominant class into the moral, political and cultural values of the ruling class. These ideas may dominate as powerfully as physical force and operate as a kind of normative cultural universe in which the dominant ideology is practiced and taught.

5. See EUGENE GENOVESE, ROLL, JORDAN, ROLL: THE WORLD THE SLAVES MADE

25-49 (Vintage Books 1976) (1974) (discussing race and racism in laws created by slaveholders).

[Vol. 50: p. 915

2005] CULTURAL STUDIES, CRITICAL RACE THEORY & METHODS 917

tion and life. For legal scholars, to adopt the cultural studies method is almost to step outside one's field to see it with fresh eyes, and in broader context. The Working Group on Law, Culture and the Humanities, a col- lective of academics, has fostered such an understanding of how law oper- ates. In this vein, one way we legal academics can continue to use textual analysis and social theory, effectively, is to read social practices and forms of consumption (television, church, film, games) as they relate to the structural power of law, and the underlying ideologies of constitutional and private law.

Importantly, in reading social practices we must not simply read them anecdotally, but systematically. This is necessary in order to understand what values and messages have been transmitted through these social prac- tices and forms of consumption and how these impact the ideology pre- sent in law (opinions and legislation), or shaped by it. Reading social practices in this fashion marks a departure from the legal academic pro- clivity in recent years of adopting literary theory's close reading practice, in favor of readings of broad practice. I am not advocating an absolute departure from close reading per se, but rather relegating close reading to spaces in which a legitimate case can be made, on a scholarly level, for generality, or evidence of systemic truth, at least with respect to making broad claims about race. 6

For example, one of my interests is in television talk shows. In partic- ular, I am fascinated by the "paternity test" shows. On these shows, a wo- man, often young, poor and of color, will invite men on the program and have these men take DNA tests in order to determine whether one of these men is the father to the woman's children. At times, there are wo- men who test eight or more men, without ever finding "the father." My interpretation of the cultural work of these shows is that, as a discourse about the sexuality of young women of color, it argues that their plight as impoverished single women is justified because "women like that" are li- centious and promiscuous.

Moreover, the shows argue that women in such circumstances are "bad mothers," in a way that reinforces the racist ideas of maternal deficit we see within the family law system. 7 I only come to these conclusions,

6. Of course, it is often useful to do close readings of an individual case that may have racial implications. However, in order to abstract from the individual case an observation about how race works or manifests, demonstration of some broader evidence may be required.

7. See DOROTHY ROBERTS, KILLING THE BLACK BODY: RACE, REPRODUCTION, AND THE MEANING OF LIBERTY (1997) (discussing race, gender and law); DOROTHY RoB- ERTS, SHATTERED BONDS: THE COLOR OF CHILD WELFARE (2002) [hereinafter RoB- ERTS, SHATTERED BONDS] (same); DOROTHY ROBERTS ET AL., WOMAN AND THE LAW

(2004) (same); Dorothy E. Roberts, Punishing Drug Addicts Who Have Babies: Women of Color, Equality, and the Right of Privacy, 104 HARv. L. REv. 1419 (1991) (same); Dorothy E. Roberts, The Genetic Tie, 62 U. CHI. L. REv. 209 (1995) (same); Dorothy E. Roberts, Welfare and the Problem of Black Citizenship, 105 YALE L.J. 1563 (1996) (book review) (same).

VILLANOVA LAW REVIEW [l0

however, through repeated watching of shows with this format within the context of a larger cultural framework of media and law. The individual show is no more than a personal saga, interesting, heartbreaking, compel- ling. But, it is with repeated watching, alongside the grotesquely painful parade of neglected brown and black children on the evening news, that the narrative emerges (widespread promiscuity, insanity, irresponsibility). And, as the show format is copycatted by more and more talk shows com- peting for sensational popularity, we learn that this show topic, and the picture of young women of color it shows, attracts vast numbers of people. It is in the systematic observation, in the cultural fabric, that we see how the shows affirm and recodify stereotypes already existing in American cul- ture. Likewise, it is through the kind of empirical work done by Dorothy Roberts that we understand the racial bias as evidenced in the family law system, which is rooted in the same ideological framework as the paternity test shows.8

We must be cognizant ofjudiciously balancing the qualitative and the quantitative. The empirical process of collecting all cases on a given topic, which includes knowing what happens and with what frequency, whether it be before a given judge, in a state or in the nation, in a short span or over a long one, is important. Such information is also inextricably linked to the qualitative processes of interpretation and analyses of these materials.

But the project of race, law and cultural studies is more than empiri- cal, although the empirical is often the most immediately dramatic. If we are to conduct a kind of structural analysis in which we attempt to under- stand patterns present in law and culture that are part of a web, which communicates values and ideas, then we need theory too. The norms of law, articulated in ourjurisprudence and our economic structure, must be revealed to see how race operates and cooperates with them. Social theo- rists whose work animates cultural studies also provide useful means of interrogating norms that provide bases for the structure of power.

And so, we can turn to Raymond Williams9 to assist us in understand- ing how culture is a site of contestation as well as power. We can read An- tonio Gramsci to consider how the lawyer may be an intellectual, but also

8. See generally ROBERTS, SHATTERED BONDS, supra note 7. 9. Raymond Williams (1921-1988)-critic, theorist, historian and journalist-

"was an early pioneer" in, and prime consolidator of, the field of cultural studies. See Definitions & Discussions of Culture, available at http://www.wsu.edu:8001/ vcwsu/commons/topics/culture/culture-definitions/raymond-williams.html (last visited Feb. 18, 2005). Williams is said to have generated the first important shift into a new way of thinking about the symbolic dimensions of our lives. See id. He argued that culture was not simply the world of arts, "high culture," but also the everyday. He deconstructed the boundaries between literature, culture and polit- ics and used the concept of culture to critique mechanization. See RAYMOND WIL- LIAMS, CULTURE AND SOCIETY (1958).

[Vol. 50: p. 915

2005] CULTURAL STUDIES, CRITICAL RACE THEORY & METHODS 919

how to think about the intellectual work of public lawyering. Stuart Hall' 0

and Charles Mills1 may be used to expose the operation of white

supremacy within democratic theory through police power. Paulo Friere 12 challenges the dominant epistemology that forms our ideas about

education and its policies and disserves oppressed communities. We turn

to John Dewey' 3 for thinking about political engagement, public life and democracy. We refer to Ferdinand Di Saussure 14 and Noam Chomsky15

for the ideology embedded in language as minute as the simple phrase or individual word. Lastly, Pierre Bourdieu 1 6 (without whom any conversa-

10. Stuart Hall, leader of the Birmingham School from the mid-1960s, brought questions of race and ethnicity to cultural studies, and further theorized how language use operates within institutional structures, politics and economics. He also explored the role of media in the maintenance of structures of power. A collection of Hall's essays and essays on Hall can be found in STUART HALL, CRTI- CAL DIALOGUES IN CULTURAL STUDIES (Kuan-Hsing Chen & David Morley eds., 1996).

11. Charles Mills, while a philosopher rather than a cultural studies scholar, has written work that resonates with the field, blending philosophy and race the- ory. See CHARLES W. MILLS, BLAcKNEss VISIBLE: ESSAYS ON PHILOSOPHY AND RACE

(1998); CHARLES W. MILLS, FROM CLASS TO RACE: ESSAYS IN WHITE MARXISM AND BLACK RADICALISM (2003); CARES W. MILLS, THE RAcIAL CONTRACT (1997).

12. Brazilian Paulo Friere (1921-1997) was perhaps the most influential thinker about education in the late twentieth century. He has been extremely in- fluential on critical pedagogues with his centralization of the cause of the op- pressed as his focus in dialogic process. See PAULO FRIERE PEDAGOGY OF THE

OPPRESSED (30th ed. 2000). 13. For a brief history on John Dewey, see the Technology Studies in Educa-

tion website, http://lrs.ed.uiuc.edu/students/janicke/Dewey.html (last visited Feb. 18, 2005).

John Dewey (1859-1952) was an American philosopher and educator whose writings and teachings have had profound influences on education in the United States. Dewey's philosophy of education, instrumentalism (also called pragmatism), focused on [learning via practice and experi- ence rather than memorization and repetition].

Id. 14. Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) was the founder of mod-

em linguistics. His work described the structure of language rather than the his- tory of particular languages and forms. The method of structuralism in literary theory is rooted in Saussure's work as well as the strategies of poststructuralism. See RONALD SCHLEIFER, FERDINAND DE SAUSSURE, THE JOHNS HOPKINS GUIDE TO LITER- ARY THEORY & CRITICISM (Michael Groden & Martin Kreiswirth eds., 1997).

15. Noam Chomsky is the most celebrated contemporary linguist who has combined a career of brilliant structural analyses of language with a political cri- tique of the social power accorded to languages of dominant nations. His role as a leftist political critic is more widely known than his linguistics scholarship; how- ever, they are deeply intertwined. NoAM CHOMSKy, THE CHOMSKY READER (1987).

16. Pierre-F6lix Bourdieu (1930-2002) was a renowned French sociologist. His empirically based work was a form of cultural sociology. He importantly ar- gued that taste and preferences were deeply aligned with social position and oper- ate as a kind of cultural capital upon which a person can trade for social access. See PIERRE BOURDIEU DISTINCTION: A SOCIAL CRITIQUE OF THE JUDGMENT OF TASTE

(1987); DAVID SWARTZ, CULTURE AND POWER: THE SOCIOLOGY OF PIERRE BOURDIEU (1998).

VILLANOVA LAW REVIEW

tion on affirmative action 17 should be considered incomplete) contributes an understanding of the power of normativity and the status quo for repli- cating the status quo.

When we read the abundant texts before us, it must be with an aware- ness of how we are measuring the social significance of what we read. The popular is what we live, and mass culture is what we are inundated with. And so something like a Maury Povich show may have as much, if not more, usefulness for race scholars as literature. In the life of the intellec- tual, a great pitfall is to discredit the pedestrian, the mundane and the pulse of life. The quotidian and "low brow" are instructive, particularly when we are making arguments about how people live. So, we must put aside arrogance with respect to the texts we consider. When we read them, we ask not simply what does it say, but to whom and to what end? And, moreover, is what is heard the same as what has been said?

Even the oft discredited, postmodern moment in cultural studies of- fers something profound to us, as it is concerned with audience. When we, legal academics and lawyers, think of how law is produced, we often discuss judicial decision-making or the roles of practitioners (their texts), or plaintiffs/defendants (their stories). However, we often fail to ade- quately consider jurors, or even more so, the complicity of the public with the actions of courts, the consent of the governed and the discontent of the governed. We must critically engage the practices of the audience to law, the citizens who live under it, and see how their ideological assump- tions serve to further marginalize people of color. Furthermore, we must discern how power is dispersed in such a way as to make it the case that that audience advocating our (read "people of color") oppression is some- times us. Incidentally, that comment is said in homage to Michel Fou- cault,' 8 who understood the disparate nature of power. It is a particularly important recognition now because it is abundantly apparent to those of us who study race in the law that we have a desperate need to complicate how racial discrimination is determined to exist (rarely intraracially, rarely accepted when there is a counter example of another person of color who is not being victimized). 19

Simply put, this means that we are called to see how forms of know- ing, ideology and dominant epistemologies about race are spread far broader and deeper than negative intent towards someone who looks dif- ferent from you. Charles Lawrence's landmark article, The Id, the Ego and Equal Protection: Reckoning with Unconscious Racism,20 heralded this move-

17. See generally Imani Perry, Holistic Integration: An Anniversary Reflection on the Goals of Brown v. Board of Education, in LEGACIES OF BROWN'. MULTIRACIAL EQUITY IN AMERICAN EDUCATION (Dorinda Carter et al. eds., 2004).

18. See MICHEL FOUCAULT, THE FOUCAULT READER (1984). 19. See the work of Rutgers-Newark law professor Tanya K. Hernandez for a

brilliant discussion of some of these issues. 20. See, e.g., Tanya K. Hernandez, Multiracial Matrix: The Role of Race Ideology in

the Enforcement of AntiDiscrimination Law, A U.S. Latin America Comparison, 87 COR-

[Vol. 50: p. 915

2005] CULTURAL STUDIES, CRITICAL RACE THEORY & METHODS 921

ment for us. We must further map the patterns and structures of uncon- scious racism by, amongst other things, reading cultural texts of various sorts alongside each other. For example, we should analyze film next to cases, family courts next to talk shows or music next to senate hearings.

Admittedly, I have made broadly drawn calls to the kind of work I believe should be pursued in race, law and cultural studies. Delving more specifically is perhaps best left to the actual particular inquiries. Painstak- ingly, I attempt to do work that meets my own methodological calls. But now, I want to very briefly turn to several suggestions about how we actu- ally compose such interdisciplinary work.

Despite its reputation, good interdisciplinary work has rigorous prac- tical demands. It must maintain a structure through which coherent ob- servations can be made out of widely divergent materials. There are at least several ways of organizing such projects I can think of, the most com- pelling being the delineation of interdisciplinary structural analogies, in which ideological consistencies across fields of inquiry are described, or are the lens through which sites or subjects of contestation between texts and contexts can be highlighted. If one is able to make a strong case for intertextuality, that it somehow illuminates or explains in a unique way both qualitative and quantitative discoveries, the work becomes that much more compelling. For example, we might gather materials on race and rates of incarceration, media depictions of people of color and police sur- veillance within communities of color. But then, to produce work that is useful, we have to attempt to ask and answer whether there is a thread that connects these bodies of information. Is there a theory that makes them make sense together? Should there be a bridge text? Do we need to look at music or language to understand how the community under surveil- lance responds and makes sense of it?

We have to make decisions about the apparatus of these race based practices, and by that I do not mean the cop doing the cuffing (although perhaps I could). Instead, I ask where do we lay our understanding of how this all works? This is a theoretical question with enormous practical implications.

And so, these compositional questions are on the one hand aesthetic (we want clean, coherent work) and on the other hand quite meaningful (we want our work to be useful). Cultural studies, Critical Race Theory and LatCrit have all been movements that embrace a commitment to so- cial transformation. In cultural studies, the counter-hegemonic voice, the narratives of oppressed people and identity as a site of resistance were critical means by which social transformation was imagined. The very idea of Critical Race Theory and LatCrit as movements within legal academia is counter-hegemonic. I can hear the collective sighing of the nonbelievers. They say, "a bunch of law professors as oppressed people … tell it to

NELL L. REv. 1093 (2002); Charles R. Lawrence, III, The Id, the Ego, and Equal Protec- tion: Reckoning with Unconscious Racism, 39 STAN. L. REv. 317 (1987).

VILLANOVA LAVWA REVIEW

someone who will buy it." But of course, we bring voices from the mar- gins, from outlaw spaces, we are surveyed in our profession, we are marked physically, linguistically, ideologically, never normative, never able to dis- appear our bodies behind our objective legal minds even if we were to try to do something so bizarre.2 ' Critical Race Theory and LatCrit have a counter-hegemonic sensibility and there is no better evidence to be found than the hostility with which our voices have too often been met in main- stream legal scholarship.

Critical race theorists are often charged with being less than objective, or theoretically sound, because we are too crudely political. But I want to end by taking the critique of the political seriously, as a methodological challenge instead of a form of personal attack because it is a similar chal- lenge to that which has been faced by cultural studies and cultural theo- rists. I believe an essential way of responding to this challenge is to devote energy to not simply cultural analyses of law, but cultural theories of law with an ethical underpinning.

Politics are of course central to Critical Race Theory, LatCrit and many other important academic movements, and with them the idea that we argue against normative standards and ideologies that serve to marginalize and oppress peoples of color. A good deal of important work is done in exposing the norms that serve to marginalize us (notions of merit, color blindness without considering privilege, wealth versus in- come, etc.). But I would like to imagine a movement in emphasis from politics to ethics, or to say metaphorically, to building the dancehall as well as doing a dance.

The hubris of creating theory out of the vernacular of political life is what I am talking about. John Locke 22 did it, as did Henry Louis Gates, Jr.23 What if we built an ethical framework out of the political knowledge and experience thus far garnered in counter-hegemonic movements, a framework to guide our scholarly work and our political practice?

The move from emphasizing the political to emphasizing the ethical is in itself something of a political move. It seeks to do something which is on some level always a failing proposition, to create some objective stan- dards about what is good and right. Moreover, on some level the move to the ethical is inconsistent with the critical posture we have taken that sees usefulness in the critical space itself, the marginal, threshold, trickster exis-

21. See Patricia L. Williams, On Being the Object of Property, 1 SIGNS: J. WOMEN IN CULTURE & Soc'Y 14 (1988).

22. John Locke (1632-1704) was a British philosopher. For Locke's theory of the origins of property law in labor and desert, see JOHN LOCKE, SECOND TREATISE ON CML GOVERNMENT, Chapter 5 (1690).

23. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is the W.E.B. Du Bois Professor of the Humanities, Chair of African and African American Studies and Director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University. See HENRY Louis GATES JR., THE SIGNIrING MONKEY: A THEORY OF AFRO-AMERIcAN LIT- ERARY CRITICISM (1988) (1989 winner of American Book Award for his innovative African American vernacular literary theory).

[Vol. 50: p. 915

2005] CULTURAL STUDIES, CRITICAL RACE THEORY & METHODS 923

tence. But ethics are essential because they allow for the creation of a community of sentiment and ideas, of values, that is not fundamentally contingent. So, in this moment, perhaps we need a split. On the one hand, we should continue modifying, correcting, revising and critiquing the status quo. On the other hand, we need to continue to devote energy to the task of articulating ethical norms around which we can extend a theory and praxis. To the extent that we do the latter, it provides a means of using our work across multiple disciplinary and even national bounda- ries. We need a language of thought with multiple valences.

And the right hand should monitor the left (or better yet the left should monitor the right). Even as the ethical norms are created, they should be subject to the practices of critical social theory, a self-reflexive critique, as well as maintain a critical stance towards the social reality they evaluate. And so, a language of self critique must be provided within this ethical framework. It will be important for the critique of the institutions, practices and ideologies that are constitutive of the reality it comments upon, as well as the epistemological framework in which the ethical theory has evolved.

So I conclude with a call to practice on one level, using the methods of cultural studies (text, context, theories) to examine law and make argu- ments that speak to an audience that is of the world of law. On another level, I am making a call for more theory, a theory that has ethical norms as a branch of Critical Race Theory/LatCrit, which intellectually structures our political beliefs in racial justice. Those beliefs do have some norma- tive dimension. It is only logical, and it is good, for us to follow their force.

VILLANOVA LAW REVIEW [Vol. 50: p. 915

Thirty years ago, many academics considered the study of popular culture beneath them. Stuart Hall helped change that. Photograph by Eamonn McCabe / Camera Press / Redux

I

Page-Turner

Stuart Hall and the Rise of Cultural Studies

By Hua Hsu

July 17, 2017

n the summer of 1983, the Jamaican

scholar Stuart Hall, who lived and taught in England, travelled to the

University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign, to deliver a series of lectures

on something called “Cultural Studies.” At the time, many academics still considered

the serious study of popular culture beneath them; a much starker division

existed, then, between what Hall termed the “authenticated, validated” tastes of the

upper classes and the unre�ned culture of the masses. But Hall did not regard this hierarchy as useful. Culture, he argued,

does not consist of what the educated élites happen to fancy, such as classical music or the �ne arts. It is, simply, “experience lived, experience interpreted,

Save this story

experience de�ned.” And it can tell us things about the world, he believed, that

more traditional studies of politics or economics alone could not.

A masterful orator, Hall energized the audience in Illinois, a group of thinkers

and writers from around the world who had gathered for a summer institute devoted to parsing Marxist approaches to cultural analysis. A young scholar

named Jennifer Daryl Slack believed she was witnessing something special and decided to tape and transcribe the lectures. After more than a decade of coaxing,

Hall �nally agreed to edit these transcripts for publication, a process that took years. The result is “Cultural Studies 1983: A Theoretical History,” which was

published, last fall, as part of an ongoing Duke University Press series called “Stuart Hall: Selected Writings,” chronicling the career and in�uence of Hall,

who died in 2014.

Broadly speaking, cultural studies is not one arm of the humanities so much as

an attempt to use all of those arms at once. It emerged in England, in the nineteen-�fties and sixties, when scholars from working-class backgrounds, such

as Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams, began thinking about the distance between canonical cultural touchstones—the music or books that were supposed

to teach you how to be civil and well-mannered—and their own upbringings. These scholars believed that the rise of mass communications and popular forms

were permanently changing our relationship to power and authority, and to one another. There was no longer consensus. Hall was interested in the experience of

being alive during such disruptive times. What is culture, he proposed, but an attempt to grasp at these changes, to wrap one’s head around what is newly

possible?

Hall retained faith that culture was a site of “negotiation,” as he put it, a space of

give and take where intended meanings could be short-circuited. “Popular culture is one of the sites where this struggle for and against a culture of the

powerful is engaged: it is also the stake to be won or lost in that struggle,” he

argues. “It is the arena of consent and resistance.” In a free society, culture does

not answer to central, governmental dictates, but it nonetheless embodies an unconscious sense of the values we share, of what it means to be right or wrong.

Over his career, Hall became fascinated with theories of “reception”—how we decode the different messages that culture is telling us, how culture helps us

choose our own identities. He wasn’t merely interested in interpreting new forms, such as �lm or television, using the tools that scholars had previously

brought to bear on literature. He was interested in understanding the various political, economic, or social forces that converged in these media. It wasn’t

merely the content or the language of the nightly news, or middlebrow magazines, that told us what to think; it was also how they were structured,

packaged, and distributed.

According to Slack and Lawrence Grossberg, the editors of “Cultural Studies

1983,” Hall was reluctant to publish these lectures because he feared they would be read as an all-purpose critical toolkit rather than a series of carefully situated

historical conversations. Hall himself was ambivalent about what he perceived to be the American fetish for theory, a belief that intellectual work was merely, in

Slack and Grossberg’s words, a “search for the right theory which, once found, would unlock the secrets of any social reality.” It wasn’t this simple. (I have found

myself wondering what Hall would make of how cultural criticism of a sort that can read like ideological pattern-recognition has proliferated in the age of social

media.)

Over the course of his lectures, Hall carefully wrestles with forebears, including

the British scholar F. R. Leavis and also Williams and Hoggart (the latter founded Birmingham University’s in�uential Center for Contemporary Cultural

Studies, which Hall directed in the seventies). Gradually, the lectures cluster around questions of how we give our lives meaning, how we recognize and

understand “the culture we never see, the culture we don’t think of as cultivated.” These lectures aren’t instructions for “doing” cultural studies—until the very end,

F

they barely touch on emerging cultural forms that intrigued Hall, such as reggae

and punk rock. Instead, they try to show how far back these questions reach.

or Hall, these questions emerged from his own life—a fact that his memoir,

“Familiar Stranger,” published by Duke, in April, brings into sharp focus. Hall was born in 1932, in Kingston. His father, Herman, was the �rst nonwhite

person to hold a senior position with the Jamaican office of United Fruit, an American farming and agricultural corporation; his mother, Jessie, was mixed-

race. They considered themselves a class apart, Hall explains, indulging a “gross colonial simulacrum of upper-middle-class England.” From a young age, he felt

alienated by their cozy embrace of the island’s racial hierarchy. As a child, his skin was darker than the rest of his family’s, prompting his sister to tease,

“Where did you get this coolie baby from?” It became a family joke—one he would revisit often. And yet he felt no authentic connection to working-class

Jamaica, either, “conscious of the chasm that separated me from the multitude.” The mild sense of guilt that he describes feels strikingly contemporary. And he

had trouble articulating the terms of this discomfort: “I could not �nd a language in which to unravel the contradictions or to confront my family with

what I really thought of their values, behaviors, and aspirations.” The desire to �nd that language would become the animating spark of his professional life.

In 1951, Hall won a Rhodes Scholarship to study at Oxford. He was part of the “Windrush” generation—a term used to describe the waves of West Indian

migration to England in the postwar years. Although Hall came from a different class than most of these migrants, he felt a connection to his countrymen.

“Suddenly everything looked different,” he would later remember of his arrival in England. He clipped a newspaper photo of three Jamaicans who arrived

around the time he did. Two of them are carpenters and one is an aspiring boxer; they are all dressed to the nines. “This was style. They were on a mission,

determined to be recognized as participants in the modern world and to make it

theirs. I look at this photograph every morning as I myself head out for that

world,” he writes.

Hall found ready disciples in American universities, though it might be argued

that the spirit which animated cultural studies in England had existed in the U.S. since the �fties and sixties, in underground magazines and the alternative

press. The American fantasy of its supposedly “classless” society has always given “culture” a slightly different meaning than it has in England, where social

trajectories were more rigidly de�ned. What scholars like Hall were actually reckoning with was the “American phase” of British life. After the Second

World War, England was no longer the “paradigm case” of Western industrial society. America, that grand experiment, where mass media and consumer

culture proliferated freely, became the harbinger for what was to come. In a land where rags-to-riches mobility is—or so we tend to imagine—just one hit away,

culture is about what you want to project into the world, whether you are fronting as a member of the élite or as an everyman, offering your interpretation

of Shakespeare or of “The Matrix.” When culture is about self-fashioning, there’s even space to be a down-to-earth billionaire.

How did we get here, to this present, with our imaginations limited by a common sense of possibility that we did not choose? “Selected Political

Writings,” the other book of Hall’s work that Duke has published as part of its series, focusses largely on the lengthy British phase of Hall’s life. The centerpiece

essay is “The Great Moving Right Show,” his 1979 analysis of Margaret Thatcher’s “authoritarian populism.” Her rise was as much a cultural turning

point as a political one, in Hall’s view—an enmity toward the struggling masses, obscured by her platform’s projected attitude of tough, Victorian moderation.

Many of the pieces in this collection orbit the topic of “common sense,” how culture and politics together reinforce an idea of what is acceptable at any given

time.