Hallmarks: The Cultural Politics and Public Pedagogies of Stuart Hall

Rethinking Stuart Hall neither strictly as a Cultural Studies scholar nor as a sociologist, this book instead understands him as an extraordinary educator of publics and counter-publics. A ‘gold standard’ for public intellectual work, Hall’s pedagogical and political legacy is our inheritance. Taking stock of Hall’s contributions to cultural politics and public pedagogies, the contributions probe his keywords for querying, contesting, and shifting the educational landscape and lexicon of culture – previously wed to hegemonic essentialist notions of race, nation, gender, and sexuality. This book was published as a special issue of Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education.

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 postwar British New Left, Cultural Studies at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies and, later, 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, Thatcherism and Rightist, neocolonial, diasporic and neoliberal formations in Jamaica, the UK, Australia, North America and Brazil. Cogently argued and beautifully written, the book looks to spark dialog about Hall''s under-appreciated educational contributions and illuminate important aspects of his work for students and scholars in many fields.

Intimate and moving, the contributors'' accounts describe Hall’s diasporic formation as a courageous ‘artist’ and educator of cultural politics and social movements. The book shows both the reach and the relevance of his public pedagogies in the construction of alternatives to essentialist racial politics and the despairing cynicism of neoliberalism. 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.