His writing on race, gender, sexuality and identity was considered groundbreaking
Stuart Hall, One of UK’s leading intellectuals, the sociologist and cultural theorist has died on Monday age 82, the Guardian reports.
Hall had been suffering ill health for some time, and had retreated from public life.
Known as the “godfather of multiculturalism”, Hall had a huge influence on academic, political and cultural debates for over six decades.
Jamaican-born Hall was professor of sociology at the Open University from 1979 to 1997, topping off an academic career that began as a research fellow in Britain’s first centre for cultural studies, set up by Richard Hoggart at the University of Birmingham in 1964. Hall would later lead the centre and was seen as a key figure in the development of cultural studies as an academic discipline.
But his impact was felt far outside the realms of academia. His writing on race, gender, sexuality and identity, and the links between racial prejudice and the media in the 1970s, was considered groundbreaking.
Hall received a traditional “English” schooling in Jamaica before winning a scholarship to Oxford University in 1951. He took a degree in English but later abandoned a PhD on Henry James to concentrate on politics, setting up the Influential New Left Review journal with the leftwing academics Raymond Williams and EP Thompson.
A documentary about his life by the film-maker John Akomfrah, called The Stuart Hall Project, was shown in cinemas in September.
Source: Dhaka Tribune
