Stuart Hall was born in the suburbs of Kingston, Jamaica into a middle call family in 1932. He grew up with continuous negotiations of different cultural spaces especially between colonial and Jamaican origins. Though his father didn’t like him to go to England, he moved there in 1951 and began to study in Oxford. He felt ‘diasporic’ and humiliated by the dominant British culture of the university. But he chose to stay in Britain and studied literature and politics for three years. He involved in the movement of Caribbean Independence and contributed and advocated for The New Left but never took a membership.
His meeting with Raymond Williams, Raphael Samuel, Richard Hoggart and Charles Taylor remained fruitful for his intellects and renowned. He taught adult extra-mural classes that helped him gain a strong supportive community beyond the college life. When Russia invaded Hungary in 1956 and Anglo-French force entered Egypt to regain control of Suez Canal, Hall left his study and involved in politics opposing the interference. Along with other friends Hall campaigned for forming the New Left movement. This new left movement is also known as ‘Marxism without guarantees.’ It doesn’t assume an all-determining economic base. This belief says that all history cannot be explained through a linear, progressive Marxist trajectory.
Hall’s Philosophy
Hall is a Marxist but believes that it should be reformatted and based on the real ground. His thought of belief is called ‘Marxism without Guarantees’. According to Hall ‘ideology’ is the mental
framework – the languages, the concepts, categories, imagery of thought and the system of representation which different classes and social groups deploy to make sense of, define, figure out and render intelligible the way society works (Hall, 1986 p.26). Although these mental frameworks have ‘material force’, they cannot be reduced only to a function of class.
Articulation
Articulation is the process of by which different ideas can be ideologically linked together. It is the form of the connection that can make a unity of two different elements under certain conditions. Such a link can’t be absolute and essential for all the time because elements can be rearticulated to constitute other linkages as well. The articulation can be different at a certain historical moments. In this sense we can say that his idea is different from that of Marxist which believes the rigid and fixed relation between the entities. Hall’s concept of ‘articulation’ reveals us that teaching items must be presented with other related items so that they can be understood as a whole. Teaching methods can be integrated to achieve the maximum learning outcomes.
The Popular Culture
In the book ‘The Popular Arts’ published in 1964 Hall and Whannel mainly redefine the standard of media language and content. They reject the rigid (prescriptive like that of BBC) format and structure of language and content of the media (especially TV) programs. They believe that popular culture is much more important site to learn than traditional school settings. By popular culture they mean the teenage culture of pop and jazz. They believe that it is an authentic part of media language. One of chapters of this book ‘The Curriculum and the Arts’ has been presented as a teacher resource. There are different thematic modules like Society and the Hero, ‘Young People’ and ‘The World of Pop’ etc.
Encoding and Decoding
Hall has been remained highly interested in contemporary cultural studies and the relation between youth and media culture. He has talked about the range of youth sub
cultures that has been rapidly growing in England in the mid-20th century in his book ‘Resistance through Rituals’ published in 1976. In his famous article ‘Encoding and Decoding’, he has discussed the circuits or stages (encoding and decoding) through which media messages travel. Particular meanings are tried to be encoded from the media production and these meanings are decoded by audiences. Hall has said that the decoding of meaning is not necessarily as similar as it was encoded by the media person. Each stage has its own relative autonomy. Neither ‘encoding’ determines ‘decoding’ nor ‘decoding’ determines ‘encoding’.
New Ethnicities
In this article ‘New Ethnicities’ (1989) Hall has discussed the so-called burden of representation facing ‘blacks’ in England. Traditionally, the political struggle around the race have been linked to the monolithic notions of blackness and to media forms in promoting messages of racial up-liftment. Hall defines ‘race’ as a socially constructed form open to multiple manifestations. The term ‘black’ consists of diversity of subjective positions, social experiences and cultural identities. He further argues that ‘black’ is essentially a politically and
culturally charged category which cannot be grounded in a set of fixed trans-cultural or transcendental racial categories. The same notion of ‘black’ has also been extended in his another essay ‘What Is This Black in Black Popular Culture’.
Hall’s Contribution
He believes that ‘class’ and ‘race’ have relation to culture in general and popular culture more specifically. ‘Economics’ only can’t define ‘class’ as advocated by Marx. Hall and his works clearly show that he is highly influential in cultural studies of education. The book ‘The Popular Arts’ is clearly pedagogical and is recommended as a teachers’ resource by themselves. Giroux, in this regard, says that Hall has made political pedagogical. Hall believes ‘recognizing that how we come to learn and what we learn is immanently tied to strategies of understanding, representation and disruption. He rejected both left and right view of ‘culture’ and explained the complexities of cultural politics. Hall focuses on the lived realities of young people today than the traditional multicultural approaches to education.