Stuart Hall’s work on culture, politics, race, and media is familiar to readers throughout the world. Equally important was his decades-long commitment to visual art. As the first collection to bring together Hall’s work on the visual, this volume assembles two dozen of Hall’s essays, lectures, reviews, catalog texts, and conversations on art, film, and photography. Providing rare insights into Hall’s engagement with the “radically different” intellectual and aesthetic space of the visual imaginary, these works articulate the importance of the visual as a site of contestation at the same time as it is a space in which Black artists and filmmakers reframe questions about diaspora, identity, and globalization. Selected Writings on Visual Arts and Culture demonstrates the breadth and range of Hall’s thinking on art, film, photography, archives, and museums. In so doing, it enables us to arrive at radical and innovative ways of understanding the world.
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction. Detour to the Imaginary: Stuart Hall’s Writings on the Visual Arts and Culture / Gilane Tawadros 1
Prologue. Subjects in History: Making Diasporic Identities [1998] 19
Part I. Thinking-With/In the Image
1. Isaac Julien’s Workshop [2013] 31
2. Democracy, Globalization, and Difference [2001] 39
3. The Way We Live Now [2004] 55
Part II. The New Politics of Representation: Black Film/British Cinema
4. New Ethnicities [1988] 65
5. Threatening Pleasures: A Conversation between Homi Bhabha, Paul Gilrory, and Stuart Hall [1991] 77
6. A Rage in Harlesden [1998] 86
7. Cultural Identity and Cinematic Representation [1992] 93
Part III. Fanon, Creolization, and Diaspora
8. The After-Life of Frantz-Fanon: Why Fanon? Why Now? Why Black Skins, White Masks? [1996] 111
9. CrÉolitÉ and the Process of Creolization [2003] 132
10. Legacies of Anglo-Caribbean Culture: A Diasporic Perspective [2007] 148
Part IV. Assembling the 1980s
11. Minimal Selves [1988] 173
12. Assembling the 1980s: The Deluge-and After [2005] 180
Part V. Photography, Representation, and Black Identity
13. The Vertigo of Displacement: Shifts within Black Documentary Practices [1992] / David A. Bailey and Stuart Hall 203
14. Preface to Different [2001] 213
15. “Speak Easy”: Black in the Seventies [2012] 223
Part VI. Reconstruction Work: Histories, Archives, and Diaspora
16. Reconstruction Work: Images of Post-war Black Settlement [1984] 239
17. The “West Indian” Front Room [2009] 250
18. Constituting the Archive [2001] 260
19. Whose Heritage: Unsettling “The Heritage,” Reimagining the Post-Nation [1999] 268
20. Modernity and Its Others: Three “Moments” in the Post-war History of the Black Diaspora Arts [2006] 283
Part VII. Museums, Modernity, and Difference
21. Museums of Modern Art and the End of History [2001] 309
22. Modernity and Difference: A Conversation between Stuart Hall and Sarat Maharaj [2004] 322
Part VIII. Dreaming in Afro
23. Chris Ofili in Paradise: Dreaming in Afro [2003] 341
24. Maps of Emergency: Fault Lines and Tectonic Plates [2003] 349
Place of First Publication 367
Index
Stuart Hall (1932–2014) was one of the most prominent and influential scholars and public intellectuals of his generation. Hall taught at the University of Birmingham and the Open University, was the founding editor of New Left Review, and was the author of Cultural Studies 1983: A Theoretical History, Familiar Stranger: A Life between Two Islands, and other books also published by Duke University Press.
Gilane Tawadros is Director of the Whitechapel Gallery, Chair of the Stuart Hall Foundation, and author of The Sphinx Contemplating Napoleon: Global Perspectives on Contemporary Art and Difference.
