Hallmarks: The Cultural Politics and Public Pedagogies of Stuart Hall

Leslie Roman, Leslie G. Roman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138391796
• eBook ISBN: 9781317276180
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This provocative, interdisciplinary, and transnational collection delves deeply into the educational and public intellectual hallmarks of Stuart M. Hall, a core figure in the development of the post-War British New Left, of Cultural Studies at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies and later, of the Open University. It opens new vistas on both critical educational studies and cultural studies through interviews with, and essays by, leading writers, shedding light on the under-appreciated public pedagogical and cultural politics of the New Left, of Thatcherism, and of Rightist, neo-colonial, diasporic, and neo-liberal formations in Jamaica, the UK, Australia, North America, and Brazil.

Intimate and moving, the contributors describe Hall's diasporic formation as a courageous 'artist' and educator of cultural politics and social movements, showing both the reach and the relevance of his public pedagogies in the construction of alternatives to essentialist racial politics and the despairing cynicism of neo-liberalism. With contributors and interviewees including Leslie G. Roman, Michael W. Apple, Avtar Brah, John Clarke, Annette Henry, Lawrence Grossberg, Luis Gandin, and Fazal Rizvi, Hallmarks: The Cultural Politics and Public Pedagogies of Stuart Hall reveals that neither cultural politics nor public pedagogies are stable or self-evident constructs. Each legitimates and requires the other as part of a longer radical democratic project for social justice. This book was originally published as a special issue of Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education.

Understanding and interrupting hegemonic projects in education: learning from Stuart Hall

Michael W. Apple^a,b

^aDepartment of Curriculum and Instruction, University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA

^bDepartment of Educational Policy Studies, University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA

Stuart Hall had a significant impact on critical analyses of rightist mobilizations in education. This is very visible in my own work, for example, in such volumes as Official Knowledge (2014) and Educating the ‘Right’ Way (2006). After describing an important series of lectures that Stuart Hall gave at the Havens Center for Social Structure and Social Change at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, I detail the nonessentialist position that served as the grounding of Hall’s own discussion of race, ideology, and conjuncture, and how it affected so much of the critical examination of neoliberal and neoconservative reconstructions of education. In the context of laying out the tasks of the ‘critical scholar/activist in education,’ I then portray what we can learn from Hall about the role of the organic intellectual.

Experiencing Stuart Hall

I need to start this essay with a personal and institutional story about the University of Wisconsin that bears directly on my experiences with Stuart Hall.¹ As you will see, there are not only personal reasons for doing this, but also political and theoretical reasons. The story also serves as a grounding for much of what I say in the later parts of this article.

The Havens Center for Social Structure and Social Change is the progressive academic center at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. One of its functions is to sponsor lectures by well-known radical scholars and activists, who spend from one to two weeks giving large lectures, doing intense seminars, and meeting with individual faculty members, students, and activists. The list of people who have been invited includes powerful figures in the social sciences, political economy, literature, gender studies, critical education, cultural studies, critical legal studies, critical race theory, post-colonialism, radical science, ecology, Native American activists, and the list goes on. If I were to include even a partial list of these figures, many of them would be more than a little familiar to the readers of this journal.

I mention all of this for one particular reason. In the nearly four decades that the Havens Center has been in existence, no one has given a more popular and influential set of lectures and seminars than Stuart Hall.² This is an important point, for this is definitely what performers would call a ‘tough crowd.’ It is filled with people who are both intellectually and politically demanding and who thoroughly enjoy the give and take that accompanies serious work. And they can be very challenging.

Let me give an example. When the late and deservedly highly respected sociologist Pierre Bourdieu came to Wisconsin to give a lecture a number of years before he too passed away, for some reason he seemed to take his audience less seriously than many people expected, perhaps because he was not familiar with the long radical intellectual and political tradition associated with Wisconsin. Yet, it was an audience made up of some of the most powerful figures in class analysis, political economy, social theory, gender studies, critical educational studies, and the like in the entire nation. Perhaps it was his ‘habitus,’ his body ‘hexus,’ or his ‘style,’ but a considerable number of people, people who respected his work immensely, were more than a little critical of both the content of his lecture and how he presented it – and they made their criticisms clear.

This was decidedly not the case for Stuart Hall. The rich mix of academic excellence and political commitment created a powerful environment for serious discussion. Just as importantly, Hall’s way with words, his exceptional ability to take some of the most difficult cultural and political theory and use these resources to illuminate the realities and struggles in which actors and social movements of various kinds were involved was unparalleled. He was able to publicly think through the relationship among culture, economy, and the state; the relationship between empire and race; the connections between Marxist, neo-Marxist, and post-structural approaches; how and why the Right was successful; how to think structure and agency at the same time; and how ‘race’ was an irreducible dynamic.

When I look at this list, I am immediately reminded of the range of his concerns and of his synthetic abilities. But having been in the audience when he gave those lectures and having been fortunate enough to spend some more personal time with him, I am also struck by his pedagogic ability. These were difficult issues, ones that divided – and still divide – people. And yet he brought nearly everyone in and created something for which I have called for in my own work. I (and others of course) have been deeply worried that the Left has not worked hard enough to form the ‘decentered unities’ that are absolutely essential to counter rightist attacks (Apple, 2006, 2013, 2014).

Yet Stuart Hall made it seem nearly ‘easy.’ But of course there was nothing easy about it. It was the result of his individual talent, obviously. But it was something more than this. It was an instance of Gramscian theory in practice. Hall understood the ways in which the Left was facing a ‘war of position’ as well as a ‘war of maneuver.’ He also understood, profoundly, Gramsci’s emphasis on the elements of ‘good sense’ as well as ‘bad sense’ in those positions with which one might have significant disagreements and how the Right worked assiduously to connect its arguments to the elements of good sense that actors had (Apple, 2006; Gramsci, 1968, 1992, 1996). He took these theoretical/political principles seriously, employed them, and engaged in the kind of pedagogic work that created space for a critical unity to be created. It was mindful of ‘difference’ but at the same time demonstrated the ways in which what Nancy Fraser (1997) has called the politics of redistribution and the politics of recognition could work together against the relations of exploitation and domination in the larger society.

This was not my first experience with Stuart Hall’s work. I had followed it for a very long time. Indeed, when I was writing two of my books that centered on the issues surrounding how we might both understand and interrupt the Right (Apple, 2006, 2014), Hall’s analysis of Thatcherism and of the ways in which race operated at both the discursive/ideological and structural levels had a distinct impact on me. He provided some of the essential insights when I argued that behind a good deal of the Right’s ideological assemblage was the creation of a constitutive outside, a set of ‘raced others’ who were seen as a form of pollution and danger for which only the neoliberal market could provide an answer.

This, for example, continues to be clear in the USA, where neoliberal proposals for marketization and privatization in education such as voucher plans may be couched in the language of escaping from bad state-supported schools, but the reality is that they constitute an attack on the state and on the entire public sphere. While the implications of these attacks are deeply troubling, the reality is that they have been more than a little successful in changing our common sense and in offering what are seemingly workable alternatives to even dispossessed groups. The power of the neoliberal agenda is visible in the hard and partly successful work that the Right has done in convincing many people, including some Black and Latino/Latina activist groups, that neoliberal policies offer a more realistic hope for the future of their children than, say, existing state-supported schools (see Apple, 2006; Apple & Pedroni, 2005; Pedroni, 2007).

Of course, in the face of this set of desocializing policies, the radical transformation of the public sphere into simply one more extension of the private is of no little concern. But, having said this, one should never romanticize the public sphere, as some people in critical education and elsewhere may do, since the public sphere has always been classed, gendered, and raced, with many groups being seen as less than persons and thus unable to participate in what counted as the public (Fraser, 1987; Mills, 1997). In fact, this may be one of the reasons that some aspects of neoliberal policies, with their vision of empowering the rational economic actor, may be attractive to racialized groups.

In societies where, say, Black people are tragically seen by dominant groups as irrational and dangerous – in essence as forms of pollution – the very idea of a set of policies that provides an identity as fully rational is partly counter-hegemonic. Thus, the reappropriation of neoliberal ideologies by oppressed people of color is actually a fascinating, and contradictory, example of the ways in which dispossessed groups disarticulate ideological positions from these positions’ original site and then rearticulate them for use for their own purposes (Apple & Pedroni, 2005; Pedroni, 2007). For those of you who are familiar with Hall’s work on the ways in which discourses and movements can be pulled under the umbrellas of groups that are very different from their origin, this very process of disarticulation and rearticulation sits at the heart of much of his political theory, and in large part because of his influence, certainly my own. One thing can be certain, this is not the only instance where Hall paid attention to the real world.

Hall has written critically about the complexities of all of this personally when he reflects on what being schooled around colonial forms of understanding meant to him, how the study of what were seen as the great western literary works helped create complex identities for those scholars of color who ‘came home’ to England (see Meeks, 2007). Hall is not reductive about any of this and points, as usual, both to contradictions and fissures that create alternative and oppositional readings of the formal corpus of ‘great literature’ and to the ways in which identities are partly formed around them. In this, he creatively extends a Gramscian understanding of the contradictory spaces such works provide and of the possibilities of counter-hegemonic reading and practices that are possible (see also Apple, 2014). Like all of his writings, political commitments are mixed with subtlety and a sense of complexity but always in the service of a politics of interruption of dominant structures, processes, and understandings.

Michael Ruskin (2007) captures this aspect of Hall’s subtle understanding of the nature of the structures we face when he says that:

Unless one took full note of the creative and inventive capacities of the system one was basically opposed to, one had no chance of generating an effective oppositional response to it. This has been an almost universal principle in his political writings. (p. 22)

This may be one of the reasons I personally have responded so well to Hall’s writings over the years. All too much of the Left has dealt with the very real crises we are experiencing in a largely rhetorical way, but with a less than satisfactory understanding of the balance of forces we face and a none too subtle analysis of the strategic actions and alliances that the Right has built and of the counter-hegemonic actions and alliances that need to be built to interrupt them (Apple, 2006, 2013; see also Wright, 2010).

This is one of the reasons that over the past two decades I have focused a good deal of my attention on a Gramscian-inspired project that is best thought of as ‘understanding and interrupting the Right.’ I have argued that if you want to counter the Right’s hegemonic project look very carefully at how they became hegemonic. What did they do? How did they do it? Like Hall, I want us to take very seriously the fact that ‘conservative modernization’ has involved a vast, and partly successful, social/pedagogic project of changing common sense, a project in which not only class but also race plays a constitutive part.³ Only by taking ‘full note of the creative and inventive capacities of the system one was basically opposed to,’ only then could those of us in education begin to think through what was possible (Apple, 1996, 2006, 2014).

As Hall showed early on in his critical analyses of the rise of Thatcherism, issues of ‘law and order’ and the repressive forms of authoritarian populism that they spawned and that were spawned by them had much of their grounding in ‘race.’ Economic anxieties were dialectically connected to an entire history of racializing discourses and practices. They were not the automatic workings of economic dynamics, although they were clearly connected to these dynamics. They were both produced by and themselves produced a creative ideological process of disarticulation and rearticulation, a process that required hard political and ideological work on the part of rightist movements.

But even given the power of his arguments about race and the growth of the Right, Hall was very clear here as well about his commitment to avoid essentializing categories. For there was not one kind of racism, always static, always predetermined. Rather, racism was plural. Once again historical specificity must be recognized. As he puts it:

Racism [should not be] dealt with as a general feature of human societies, but with historically specific racisms. Beginning with an assumption of difference, of specificity rather than of a unitary, transhistorical or universal ‘structure’ … one cannot explain racism in abstraction from other social relations …. One must start, then, from the concrete historical ‘work’ which racism accomplishes under specific historical conditions – a set of economic, political and ideological practice, of a discursive kind, concretely articulated with other practices in a social formation. (Hall, quoted in Brah, 2007, p. 76)

Or as he says elsewhere:

No doubt there are certain general features to racism. But even more significant are the ways in which these general features are modified and transformed by the historical specificity of the contexts and environments in which they become active. (Hall, quoted in Grossberg, 2007, p. 105)

Hall is not a romantic here, nor does he see the world in only discursive terms. Racism(s) can be and are utterly damaging and murderous. But the key for any concrete analysis of the current balance of forces is how racism is constructed and employed in supporting dominance in a specific historic conjuncture. And here the resonances with previous generations of anti-colonial writings are present, with their focus on the specifics of empire, identity, and subaltern struggles. Such a conjunctural understanding provided much of the grounding for the analysis I noted earlier that Tom Pedroni and I did of the ways neoliberalism was partly taken up by racialized groups as a strategic form of identity construction and interruption.

Lawrence Grossberg, one of the wisest of the commentators on Hall’s corpus, catches Hall’s methodological impulses perfectly when he says that in Hall’s critical interrogations of race, like in all of his writings:

[T]he appropriate level of analysis – and theorizing – is always at the level of specific contexts, or what he sometimes calls conjunctures. It is the level at which any social reality is overdetermined, existing as a configuration of relationships that are constantly open to re-articulation. At this level of the concrete, relations are themselves articulated, not into ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• PREFACE – A remarkable gift and a daunting challenge: Stuart Hall’s life and work
• INTRODUCTION – ‘Keywords’: Stuart Hall, an extraordinary educator, cultural politics and public pedagogies
• 1. Understanding and interrupting hegemonic projects in education: learning from Stuart Hall
• 2. Conjunctural thinking – “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will”: Lawrence Grossberg remembers Stuart Hall
• 3. Making and moving publics: Stuart Hall’s projects, maximal selves and education
• 4. ‘Nostalgia for what cannot be’: an interpretive and social biography of Stuart Hall’s early years in Jamaica and England, 1932–1959
• 5. Diasporic reasoning, affect, memory and cultural politics: An interview with Avtar Brah
• 6. Stuart Hall on racism and the importance of diasporic thinking
• 7. Stuart Hall and the theory and practice of articulation
• 8. The contribution of Stuart Hall to analyzing educational policy and reform
• Index