Quotes from Stuart Hall

I thought I might find the real me in Oxford. Civil rights made me accept being a black intellectual. There was no such thing before, but then it was something. So I became one.

I have a funny relationship to the British working class movement... I'm in it, but not culturally of it... I was aware that I'd come from the periphery of this process. I was reluctant to go canvassing for the Labour party. I don't find it easy to say, straight, face to face with an English working class family: 'Are you going to vote for us?'

What I realized the moment I got to Oxford was that someone like me could not really be part of it. I mean, I could make a success there, I could even be perhaps accepted into it, but I would never feel it was my place. It's the summit of something else. It's distilled Englishness.

Three months at Oxford persuaded me that it was not my home. I'm not English and I never will be. The life I have lived is one of partial displacement. I came to England as a means of escape, and it was a failure.

The very notion of Great Britain's 'greatness' is bound up with empire. Euro-scepticism and Little Englander nationalism could hardly survive if people understood whose sugar flowed through English blood and rotted English teeth.

My family belonged to a very particular formation - middle-class and coloured, not black. That meant it had a closer connection to the plantocracy than many other people did. So I didn't feel like an ordinary black Jamaican boy.

I sometimes fee like the spirit of the past resurrected... After all, didn't cultural studies emerge somewhere at that moment when I first met Raymond Williams or in the glance I exchanged with Richard Hoggart? In that moment, cultural studies was born. It emerged full grown from my head!

While every effort is being undertaken to make the memory of the Thatcher government disappear, Thatcherism is still working its way through the system.

If I have to read another cultural studies analysis of 'The Sopranos,' I give up. There's an awful lot of rubbish around masquerading as cultural studies.

The question of hegemony is always the question of a new cultural order.

Race is more like a language than it is like the way in which we are biologically constituted.

Popular culture is one of the sites where this struggle for and against a culture of the powerful is engaged: it is also the stake to be won or lost in that struggle. It is the arena of consent and resistance.

I came to the U.K. at the age of 19 and I didn't know anything about the working-class tradition, the Labour Party and the unions. I learned it. And in doing so, I came to appreciate that, if you're going to intervene politically, you'd better bloody well know something about the class on whose side you want to align yourself.

Politicians always think they know what people feel. It's a fallacy, because there is no such thing as 'the people.' It is a discursive device for summoning the people that you want. You're constructing the people, you're not reflecting the people.

The NHS is one of the most humanitarian acts that has ever been undertaken in peace time.

Identity is never singular but is multiply constructed across intersecting and antagonistic discourses, practices and positions.

Thatcherism, as an ideology, addresses the fears, the anxieties, the lost identities, of a people. It invites us to think about politics in images. It is addressed to our collective fantasies, to Britain as an imagined community, to the social imaginary.

The DuBois Institute in the heart of Harvard is an extremely important political intervention and I'm delighted to be invited to speak here.

Against the urgency of people dying in the streets, what in God's name is the point of cultural studies?...At that point, I think anybody who is into cultural studies seriously as an intellectual practice, must feel, on their pulse, its ephemerality, its insubstantiality, how little it registers, how little we've been able to change anything or get anybody to do anything. If you don't feel that as one tension in the work that you are doing, theory has let you off the hook.

Yesterday's deconstructions are often tomorrow's orthodox clichés.

culture comes into play at precisely the point where biological individuals become subjects, and that what lies between the two is not some automatically constituted 'natural' process of socialization but much more complex processes of formation

From this I came to understand that identity is not a set of fixed attributed, the unchanging essence of the inner self, but a constantly shifting process of positioning. We tend to think of identity as taking us back to our roots, the part of us which remains essentially the same across time. In fact, identity is always a never-completed process of becoming - a process of shifting identifications, rather than a singular, complete, finished state of being.

There is no understanding Englishness without understanding its imperial and colonial dimensions.

I have never worked on race and ethnicity as a kind of subcategory; I have always worked on the whole social formation which is racialised