Policing The Crisis

V&B: Stuart Hall

Listen back to our Views and Brews discussion from December 13, 2016 with KUT’s Rebecca McInroy, along with sociologist Ben Carrington, art historian Cherise Smith, and journalist Steven Thrasher of The Guardian.

They talk about the life and legacy of Stuart Hall and take audience questions.

Who was Stuart Hall? What can his ideas teach us about populist politics, the importance of the visual arts, and the role of the media in our current social and political moment?

Roderick Ferguson (Ep. 6)

In this interview, Ben Carrington, Professor of Sociology at the University of Texas at Austin, interviews Roderick Ferguson, Professor of African American and Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago, about his relationship to the work of Stuart Hall.

In the words of Ferguson, he was introduced to Stuart and Catherine Hall when he was 22 under the advisement of George Lipsitz at UC San Diego. During this meeting, Ferguson was struck by Hall’s openness to what cultural studies could be; that Hall was not a patriarch “trying to lay down the law and determine the discipline” but was instead able to separate his ego from doing his scholarly work.

Ferguson’s commitment to treat culture as something important to study – in relation to both race and capital – was something that Hall’s work inspired him to do despite the lack of reception that this kind of work had within the field of American sociology.

That the discipline is painfully far removed from the influence of Stuart Hall was evidenced for Ferguson by his failure to be accepted to the annual American Sociological Association meeting with a panel that was intended to honor Stuart Hall.

This rejection speaks not just about the relationship between American sociology and the work of Hall, but also about the discipline’s marginalization of scholars of color more generally. The loss for sociology in not incorporating the influence of Hall is that the discipline is practiced as “one-dimensional sociology” where neither culture nor race are given the attention they deserve.

While Hall understood all analytical categories to be complex and historically contingent, Ferguson argues that American sociology focuses on an illusion of one-dimensional objectivity at the expense of having real political stakes.

Ferguson pays gratitude to Hall by claiming that his book, The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference (2012) would not have been possible without Hall’s influence.

Steven Thrasher (Ep. 5)

Steven Thrasher is a writer for the guardian and a PhD student in American Studies at New York University. In this conversation with University of Texas Sociology Professor Ben Carrington, Thrasher discusses his first encounter with Stuart Hall’s work.

The interview provides insight into Hall’s intellectual reach. Thrasher shares how his engagement with Hall comes from a journalistic perspective. Having first read the British intellectual in his American Studies classes, Thrasher discloses feeling initially confused about why a British scholar would be relevant to American Studies. However, he found Policing the Crisis to be especially important for his thinking about covering the aftermath of Michael Brown’s shooting and the ongoing Black Lives Matter movement.

The conversation includes a discussion of how being a public intellectual is not limited to the academy, but also how Hall created a space in which black people can take up the space of public intellectual. Likewise, Thrasher and Carrington comment on the importance of popular media as a “gatekeeper of intellectual space” and Twitter is posited as a useful platform for making intellectual interventions in the public sphere.

-Anima Adjepong

Imani Perry (Ep. 4).

Imani Perry is a Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University. In this conversation with University of Texas Sociology Professor Ben Carrington, Perry discusses Hall’s work as foundational for her own intellectual trajectory as a cultural theorist.

Likewise, Perry addresses Hall’s relevance for understanding a U.S. context by noting that the questions Hall asks around political economy, the rise of neoliberalism, race, class, and culture are important for making sense of what is happening in the United States because “we are all grappling with legacies of empire and capitalism and racialization.”

Perry argues that although we see different iterations of these issues as they move around the world, Hall’s theorizing is prescient for making sense of questions of globalization. The conversation also addresses Hall as a model for being a public intellectual who neither postures nor self-aggrandizes but rather is about conversation and engagement with and a responsibility to different public.

Carrington and Perry discuss how Hall’s work is useful for understanding not only Brexit, but also the rise of Donald Trump in the U.S. Perry explains that she understands these issues as part of an “anxiety about the growth of precarity, globalization, and neoliberalism, and the kind of vulnerability that [these issues] produce for whiteness,” as well as an appeal for a return to conventional imperial relations. Hall’s work, which addresses the intersection of historical forces that produce these anxieties, helps us to think about these issues, although he does not necessarily give us the answers. Hall provides a model for how to read the world around us ethically.

-Maggie Tate

Suzanne Moore (Ep. 3)

In her interview with University of Texas Professor Ben Carrington, Guardian columnist Suzanne Moore reflects on her experience with Stuart Hall while she wrote for Marxism Today, a British political magazine published under the editorship of Martin Jacques from 1977–1991.

Moore explains that she came to the magazine having completed a cultural studies degree but was dissatisfied with the narrow reach of academia. Through her experience with Stuart Hall, who also wrote for the magazine, she was able to see first-hand his ability to connect the social, political and economic. Most notably, she points to Hall’s analysis of Thatcherism as an ideological project he termed “authoritarian populism.”

As an “absolutely engaged” intellectual who “didn’t just sit there with books,” Hall’s influence on Marxism Today made it both a supportive environment but also not an easy place to work. It was a “way of life,” she states. Despite that her interests around “feminism came second place sometimes,” Hall inspired her with his genuine ability to include people and his quiet support without being a domineering presence.

Moore notes Hall’s ability to reach a wide range of people who didn’t fit into certain categories because he was an engaged intellectual who “had hinterland to spare.”

Moore further states that while Stuart’s work was located in a particular time and place, the bigger analysis holds up now. This is especially true of Policing the Crisis in relation to police brutality in America. Given his core principles around inequality and dispossession he would also have much to add to the discussion around the Syrian refugee crisis, as he “always understood people who didn’t have a place.”

What Hall leaves behind for Moore is both “a little bit of sadness and loss” but also “the ability to point you in a new direction.”

-Maggie Tate