In his review of John Akomfrah’s experimental documentary The Stuart Hall Project (2013), Adam Elliott-Cooper highlights the growing necessity to revisit Hall’s scholarly and activist legacy today. Elliott-Cooper takes issue with the contemporary left for failing to properly respond to a persistent institutional racism during neoliberalism and particularly argues that the 2011 English riots, following the shooting of Mark Duggan by police in Tottenham, are proof that an approach informed by Hall’s theoretical and activist work on race, ethnicity and policing is now more needed than ever in order to come to terms with the problems underlying the riots. In fact, the years after the riots have seen an increase in scholarship indebted to the “political and critical tradition of British cultural studies best exemplified by the work of Stuart Hall”, functioning as a “backlash against [...] current forms of post-ideological scholarship”, as Imogen Tyler describes her own current work on social abjection (2013: 215).
In the following argument, I regard the English riots as a test case that can shape a dialogue between Hall’s work on ethnicity and difference, and younger currents in cultural studies. In particular, I will focus on the interplay of race and class that seems to be at the heart of the riots, and which has surfaced in many responses to them, most infamously historian David Starkey’s statement about the looters and rioters who, in his words, were “whites [who] have become black” (BBC 2011).
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:DRESDEN/oai:qucosa:de:qucosa:32268 |
| Date | 29 November 2018 |
| Creators | Schmitt, Mark |
| Publisher | Universität Leipzig |
| Source Sets | Hochschulschriftenserver (HSSS) der SLUB Dresden |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion, doc-type:article, info:eu-repo/semantics/article, doc-type:Text |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
| Relation | urn:nbn:de:bsz:15-qucosa2-322633, qucosa:32263 |
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