Author(s): Stuart Hall

Politics

'Sometimes I feel I was the last colonial'.

Stuart Hall grew up in a middle-class family in 1930s Jamaica, still then a British colony. He found himself caught betweentwo worlds: the stiflingly respectable middle class in Kingston, who, in their habits and ambitions, measured themselves against the white planter elite; and working-class and peasant Jamaica, neglected and grindingly poor, though rich in culture, music and history. But as colonial rule was challenged, things began to change in Kingston and across the world.

When, in 1951, a scholarship took him across the Atlantic to Oxford University, Hall encountered other Caribbean writers and thinkers, from Sam Selvon and George Lamming to V. S. Naipaul. He also forged friendships with the likes of Raymond Williams and E. P. Thompson, with whom he worked in the formidable political movement, the New Left. In post-war England, Hall faced a new struggle: that of building a home and a life in country where, rapidly, radically, the social landscape was transforming, and urgent new questions of race, class and identity were coming to light.

This, in his own words, is the extraordinary story of the great writer and thinker Stuart Hall, one of the leading intellectual lights of his age. Told with passion and wisdom, it is a story of how the forces of history shape who we are.