Stuart Hall Seminars – 28th and 29th June
Stuart Hall Seminars
Monday the 28th June 2021 from 10:30am to 5:30pm and Tuesday the 29th June from 11am to 5pm, taking place online (platform tbc)
These two days have been designed to offer alternative genealogies of Hall’s work. The first will focus mainly on his relationship to Marx and his development of the analytical concept of the conjuncture. The second will turn to his relationship to theories of race and racism and his interventions in art and culture. Nonetheless, there will inevitably be numerous overlaps and intersections between these perspectives, and we encourage participants to attend both days if possible.
Bookings will close at 12pm on Thursday the 25th June. There will be a maximum of 40 places available which will be allocated on a first-come, first-served basis.
Day 1: Hall, Marx & Conjunctoral Crises (28 June)
10.30am-11.00am – Tom Cornford: Who was Stuart Hall?
11.00am-1.00pm – Tony Fisher: Hall’s Political/Intellectual Formation and the Conjuncture
- How does Hall’s politics emerge from engagement with the new left?
- What are the key theoretical coordinates of conjunctural analysis? How did it emerge from Hall’s relationship to Marx, Gramsci and Althusser?
- What is Hall’s critique of Thatcherism and how did it develop?
1.00pm-2.30pm – Lunch
2.30pm-3.30pm – Natasha Bonnelame (Academic and Curator): Hall and the Caribbean
- Was Hall a Caribbean intellectual?
- How has his work been taken up in the Caribbean and in Caribbean studies?
- How is Hall’s work useful in researching the Caribbean and its diaspora and curating art works made by people of Caribbean heritage?
3.30pm-4.00pm – Coffee break
4-5.30pm – Jeremy Gilbert (Professor of Political and Cultural Theory, UEL): Stuart Hall and the Politics of Culture
- How and why is Stuart Hall’s work useful to cultural critics and political activists?
- How can conjunctural analysis illuminate our present political and cultural predicament?
What are the limits of Hall’s project, how and why has it been critiqued, and how did or would he respond to those criticisms?
Day 2 Race, Culture and Art (29 June)
11.00am-1.00pm – Tom Cornford: Hall’s Post-Colonial Turn
- How was Hall’s approach to questions of race and coloniality shaped by his formation as a colonial subject and by his political commitments?
- How did Hall’s work relate to the emerging Black movements of the 1970s and the development of critical race theory?
- What are the key features of Hall’s account of the politics of identity?
1.00-2.30 – Lunch
2.30pm-3.30pm – Kojo Koram: Stuart Hall and Post-War Britain (Lecturer in Law, Birkbeck, University of London)
- How does Hall’s work enable us to understand the politics of Britain’s post-war settlement?
- How can Hall help us to understand the formation of Britain as a post-imperial nation-state?
3.30pm-4.00pm – Coffee break
4.00pm-5.00pm – Q&A with Gilane Tawadros (Writer and Curator, Chair of the Stuart Hall Foundation)
- What is the Stuart Hall Foundation? How did it come about and what does it do?
- How did Hall come to engage with the Black Arts Movement and Black British cinema? What was the nature of his interest in critical art practices?
What is Hall’s main legacy for understanding ongoing developments in the sphere of critical art practices?