Familiar stranger

Stuart Hall's Legacy: Life History as the Politics of the Cultural He was a shrewd, highly confident storyteller, the internationally famous sociologist Stuart Hall - this book clearly reveals that. As a left-wing theorist, he always focused on the social whole. Hall was a founder of cultural studies to make everyday life visible as a contested place where people's minds and hearts are fought over. He analysed the interplay of ideology, identity and representation, questioned left-wing attempts at politics, scrutinised the modes of action of hegemony, wrote studies on media and mass culture, on racism and on the New Right. Here now comes his autobiographically linked examination of life and the world, which received rave reviews in England. The leap from Jamaica to England, the appropriation of literature and jazz, the roots of political existence: a series of interviews laid the dialogical foundation on which Stuart Hall developed this book. His interlocutor, friend and editorial companion for the entire project was Bill Schwarz, who completed the work posthumously. The result is an energetic symphony of 20th century political colonial and cultural history and autobiographical narrative. It shows the life journey of an earnest seeker, never uplifted, a life between two islands in every sense. Stuart Hall narrates warmly and smoothly, with the charismatic gesture of a sovereign, sharply political researcher and teacher, oscillating between experience and enlightenment, theorising and historically conscious prose.