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Introduction: ‘Wrestling with the Angels’

Stuart Hall, who passed away in February 2014, was one of the founding figures of what is known today as ‘cultural studies’ and long-time director of the renowned Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham. In addition, he was a central figure of the British New Left, founding editor of the journal New Left Review, and one of Britain’s most charismatic public intellectuals. Crucially, for Hall, intellectual practice was a politics, and questions of culture were political questions. His was a thinking that was inquisitive, flexible and open-ended, regularly moving across disciplinary boundaries and synthesising different theoretical outlooks. It was rigorously contextual, extremely attentive to complexity, dedicated to the concrete, activist, committed and practical, and driven by a curiosity that constantly led onto new – and frequently largely uncharted – theoretical terrain. The subjects covered by Hall’s work include topics as diverse as popular culture and mass media; representation and signifying practices; subcultures; questions of power, ideology and resistance; ‘race’ and ethnicity; globalisation; multiculturalism and diaspora; cultural and personal identity; Thatcherism; New Labour; and neoliberalism. The present issue of Coils of the Serpent endeavours to contribute to the timely exploration of the legacy of Stuart Hall’s highly influential and multi-faceted work.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:DRESDEN/oai:qucosa:de:qucosa:32265
Date29 November 2018
CreatorsCord, Florian, Sedlmayer, Gerold
PublisherUniversität Leipzig
Source SetsHochschulschriftenserver (HSSS) der SLUB Dresden
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
Typeinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion, doc-type:article, info:eu-repo/semantics/article, doc-type:Text
Rightsinfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
Relationurn:nbn:de:bsz:15-qucosa2-322633, qucosa:32263

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