From his arrival in Britain in the 1950s and involvement in the New Left, to founding the field of cultural studies and examining race and identity in the 1990s and early 2000s, Stuart Hall has been central to shaping many of the cultural and political debates of our time. Essential Essays-a landmark two-volume set-brings together Stuart Hall's most influential and foundational works. Spanning the whole of his career, these volumes reflect the breadth and depth of his intellectual and political projects while demonstrating their continued vitality and importance.
Volume 2: Identity and Diaspora draws from Hall's later essays, in which he investigated questions of colonialism, empire, and race. It opens with "Gramsci's Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity," which frames the volume and finds Hall rethinking received notions of racial essentialism. In addition to essays on multiculturalism and globalization, black popular culture, and Western modernity's racial underpinnings, Volume 2 contains three interviews with Hall, in which he reflects on his life to theorize his identity as a colonial and diasporic subject.
Industry Reviews
"Anyone whose work is informed, 'in the last instance,' by Cultural Studies will find much that is helpfully familiar in it as well as new connections, new applications, new ways of '[penetrating] the disorderly surface of things to another level of understanding,' as Hall says, invoking Marx, in the epilogue. This seems especially urgent as the ascendancy of the far Right coincides with the wholesale neoliberalization of the humanities, as Hall predicted in his 'Theoretical Legacies' lecture. It is obviously not a question of 'going back' to Hall for a truer or more 'authentic' form of Cultural Studies than that in practice today. But there is much in his legacy that illuminates the dynamics of the present, and much to put into dialogue with contemporary scholarship and practice. Morley's collection reminds us how important it is for genuine intellectual work to articulate competing and contradictory paradigms together, to work, as Hall did, from the points of contestation and conflict rather than seek solace in abstractions. This, finally, is the 'essential' in the essays assembled here." -- Liane Tanguay * American Book Review *
"Along with the other volumes that Duke University Press has published, these two books of collected essays are to be welcomed. They allow us to see a fertile mind in action, engaged in and with the real world. It is a model well worth emulating." -- Michael W. Apple * Educational Policy *
"I have also narrated the effort it took for me to access his work to illustrate the importance of the Selected Writings now being released by Duke University Press. It is an event of profound historical significance that a new generation will be able to begin its political and theoretical education with systematic access to Hall's writing. . . . The two-volume Essential Essays shows the broad scope of his work." -- Asad Haider * The Point *
"It was one of Hall's unique gifts to offer analysis of the moment as it unfolded before our eyes. I am sure I am not alone in having found his talks exhilarating in ways I could never quite understand, given that the news he relayed with such energy was almost unremittingly dire. Hall offered his readings as interpretation and self-commentary, tracing his own intellectual path." -- Jacqueline Hall * New York Review of Books *
