ABOUT THIS BOOK

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.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

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.

REVIEWS

“This collection corrects the widespread misperception that Stuart Hall’s late-career art writings were a mere add-on to the heavy lifting accomplished by his 1970s work on Marxism and sociology. Gilane Tawadros’s panoramic selection reveals how extensively Hall turned his attention to art, photography, film, museums, and architecture to examine questions of diaspora, identity, and globalization. This volume is of enormous significance.”

-- Kobena Mercer, author of Travel & See: Black Diaspora Art Practices since the 1980s

“Stuart Hall’s writings on visual arts and culture try to imagine what a genuinely emancipatory cultural practice would be like. How to think structures of feeling and imagination and dissolve the categories of race, representation, gender, and identity, categories that Hall did more than anyone both to advance and to problematize. Hall’s voice and image thread through several of my films and artworks. His focus on the distinctive voice of the Caribbean artist, his insistence on the fluidity of the diasporic imagination, were foundational for artists of my generation. Indeed, it is impossible to really think and experience Black British art without the keystones which this collection of writings presents.”

-- Isaac Julien

"A rich group of texts, addressing global capitalism, race and diaspora and how ‘the language of the imaginary’ can be a framework for developing new insights into political and economic relationships of power."
-- Marko Gluhaich Frieze

"Gilane Tawadros . . . is an attentive and appreciative reader who assembled these essays that date back decades yet are still relevant and readable. . . . While every narrative of cultural studies acknowledges Stuart Hall’s importance, this is a good collection of his writing on visual art and a document of urban creativity he witnessed in the last three decades of the 20th century."
-- Mike Mosher Leonardo

"This diverse compilation not only enhances Hall’s scholarly legacy but also challenges the logic of hierarchy in academic writing. . . . By expanding the field of politics to include perspectives from visual arts as a source of knowledge, the volume may, therefore, be fruitful for scholars, graduate students, and postgraduate students in political theory, cultural studies, migration studies, art theory, and art history, as well as for artists, curators, and art critics."
-- Tania Arcimovich H-SHERA, H-Net Reviews

"The horizon of the imagination of the viewer expands wider than they were before reading this collection. . . . The volume is not a retrospection but rather a provocation."
-- Jhinuk Basu Visual Studies

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Black Skins, White Masks

Créolité

Different

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