Introducing the Stuart Hall Archive Project at the University of Birmingham

Stuart Hall was born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1932, moving to Britain in 1951. He lived and worked in Birmingham from 1964–1979, when he was a part of the University of Birmingham, Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS). Throughout his life, Hall was a powerful critic of colonialism, capitalism, and racism, and he pioneered the study of popular and folk cultures to understand the politics and practices of resistance to those systems of oppression. Following his death in 2014, Hall’s personal papers were deposited by his family at the Cadbury Research Library, University of Birmingham. It is a large collection: 102 archive boxes, containing a large range of different kinds of material—handwritten notes, typed scripts, diaries, a few letters and photographs, cassette tapes and video tapes. Hall also kept material that he referred to in his work: newspaper clippings, magazines, leaflets, and pamphlets. Many of these speak to the long history of anti-racist struggle in Birmingham and the West Midlands, particularly in the 1970s. Anyone can use the archive, and all are welcome at the Cadbury Research Library. Find details here: https://stuarthallarchive.bham.ac.uk/resources-and-links/

The Stuart Hall Archive Project

The Stuart Hall Archive Project is a three-year programme. The project has two aims, first to explore the history of Hall’s intellectual and political development; second, to forge a new space for dialogue between his work and contemporary questions arising from communities today. That is why it is so important for the Project that BRIG are engaged with us in exploring these questions with communities. 

Details about the project can be found here: https://stuarthallarchive.bham.ac.uk/ and you can join our mailing list https://stuarthallarchive.bham.ac.uk/mailing-list/ or email us direct: sharchiveproject@contacts.bham.ac.uk

The Project has three strands, ‘Readings’ will recover unseen/unpublished work by Hall and make that accessible for the first time; ‘Dialogues’ will explore ways in which Hall’s archive can be made digitally accessible. We would like to highlight the ‘Conjunctures’ strand, led by Professor Patricia Noxolo, with Dr Rita Gayle.

Conjunctures

Conjunctures is a programme of engagements concerned with the extended Caribbean cultural and social diasporas, and minority communities, to platform the new questions, knowledges, practices, and methods of teaching that are informed by the work of Hall, the Jamaican scholar whose insights were rooted in Black and Caribbean scholarship.

The scope of Conjunctures will focus upon the world around us and the existential challenges facing communities in the 21st century. It will utilise the critical lens of Hall’s conjunctural approach to not only identify the issues but to work with individuals and organisations already working in response to similar critical questions.

Pat Noxolo is a Birmingham-born scholar who is interested in re-centring the city of Birmingham at the heart of this project, to reflect the city’s key role in the development of Cultural Studies as an academic field of research through the formation of the CCCS, and the impact its people have had through informing the ideas of Hall and his peers.