Abstract
Over the last forty years, Stuart Hall, the prominent British cultural studies theorist, has produced an impressive body of work on the relationship between culture and power, and culture’s formative role as a political and educational practice produced and mediated within different social contexts, spatial relations, and historical conjectures.1 Refusing to confine culture to narrow epistemological categories, the exclusive study of texts, or to matters of taste, Hall argues that cultural power is what distinguishes cultural studies from other disciplines and academic areas.2 Cultural politics in his view “combin[es] the study of symbolic forms and meanings with the study of power,” or more specifically what he calls the “insertion of symbolic processes into societal contexts and their imbrication with power.”3 According to Hall, culture is central to understanding struggles over meaning, identity, and power. He has written extensively on the importance of the political force of culture and the diverse ways in which culture deploys power to shape identities and subjectivities within a circuit of practices that range from the production and distribution of goods and representations to an ever growing emphasis on regulation and consumption.4
We all want to do the very best for our children. But what is education if it is not the process by which society inculcates its norms, standards and values—in short, its “culture”—into the next generation in the hope and expectation that, in this way, it will broadly guide, channel, influence and shape the actions and beliefs of future generations in line with the values and norms of its parents and the prevailing value-system of society? What is this if not regulation—moral governance by culture?
—Stuart Hall, “Centrality of Culture: Notes on the Cultural Revolutions of Our Time” in Media and Cultural Regulation
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Notes
An excellent bibliography of Stuart Hall’s work can be found in a collection of his writings compiled by David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen: Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 1996).
Stuart Hall cited in Julie Drew, “Cultural Composition: Stuart Hall on Ethnicity and the Discursive Turn,” Journal of Composition Theory 18:2 (1998), p. 184.
Hall elaborates his theory of culture best in a series of books designed for the Culture, Media, and Identities Series at Open University and published by Sage in the United States. See, for example, Stuart Hall, Paul du Gay, Linda Janes, Hugh Mackay, and Keith Negus, Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1997);
Stuart Hall, Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1997);
Stuart Hall, “The Centrality of Culture: Notes on the Cultural Revolutions of Our Time,” in Kenneth Thompson, ed., Media and Cultural Regulation (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1997).
For an excellent analysis of Stuart Hall’s work, see Lawrence Grossberg, “History, Politics, and Postmodernism: Stuart Hall and Cultural Studies,” Bringing It All Back Home: Essays on Cultural Studies (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997), pp. 174–194. See also Morley and Chen, eds., Stuart Hall.
Harold Bloom, The Western Canon (New York: Riverhead Books, 1994);
Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth Century America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998);
Richard Rorty, “The Inspirational Value of Great Works of Literature,” Raritan 16:1 (1996), pp. 8–17;
Todd Gitlin, Twilight of Our Common Dreams (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1995).
Lawrence Grossberg, “Identity and Cultural Studies. Is That All There Is?” in Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay, eds., Questions of Cultural Identity (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1996), p. 102.
Lawrence Grossberg, “Toward a Genealogy of the State of Cultural Studies,” in Gary Nelson and Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, eds., Disciplinarity and Dissent in Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 142.
Stuart Hall, “Race, Culture, and Communications: Looking Backward and Forward at Cultural Studies,” Rethinking Marxism 5:1 (Spring 1992), pp. 17–18.
I critique the conservative attack on political correctness in Henry A. Giroux, Fugitive Cultures (New York: Routledge, 1996), esp. pp. 165–184.
Matthew Arnold, “Sweetness and Light,” in The Complete Prose of Matthew Arnold, Vol. 5, ed. R. H. Super (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960–1977), p. 113.
See Gitlin, Twilight of Our Common Dreams; Michael Tomasky, Left for Dead: The Life, Death and Possible Resurrection of Progressive Politics in America (New York: Free Press, 1996);
Jim Sleeper, The Closest of Strangers (New York: Norton, 1990).
Judith Butler, “Merely Cultural,” Social Text 15:52–53 (Fall/Winter, 1997), p. 266.
Francis Mulhern, “The Politics of Cultural Studies,” journal title 47:3 (July 1995), pp. 31–40.
See Ian Hunter, Rethinking the School (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994).
This position is also argued for in Tony Bennett, “Out in the Open: Reflections on the History and Practice of Cultural Studies,” Cultural Studies 10:1 (1996), pp. 133–153.
A particularly telling but theoretically sloppy version of this position can be found in Maria Koundoura, “Multiculturalism or Multinationalism?” in David Bennett, ed., Multicultural States (New York: Routledge, 1998), pp. 69–87. Most of these critics appear to have little or no knowledge of the long history of debates within American educational circles over issues of reproduction, resistance, and the politics of schooling.
Koundoura is especially uninformed on this issue, citing one article to defend her attack on “border pedagogy.” For a review of the resistance literature, see Stanley Aronowitz and Henry A. Giroux, Education Still Under Siege (Westport, Conn.: Bergin and Garvey Press, 1994).
An interesting critique of the work of Tony Bennett and Ian Hunter and the limits of governmentality as they apply it can be found in Toby Miller, Technologies of Truth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998),
and in Alan O’Shea, “A Special Relationship? Cultural Studies, Academia and Pedagogy,” Cultural Studies 12:4 1998, pp. 513–527.
Alan O’Shea, “A Special Relationship?” Another challenge to the governmentality model can be found in the brilliant article on pedagogy and cultural studies by Richard Johnson, “Teaching Without Guarantees: Cultural Studies, Pedagogy and Identity,” in Joyce Canaan and Debbie Epstein, eds., A Question of Discipline (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1997), pp. 42–73.
One of the most incisive commentaries on the meaning and importance of Hall’s theory of articulation can be found in Lawrence Grossberg, “On Postmodernism and Articulation: An Interview with Stuart Hall,” Journal of Communication Inquiry 10:2 (Summer 1986), pp. 45–60.
Stuart Hall and David Held, “Citizens and Citizenship,” in Stuart Hall and Martin Jacques, eds., New Times: The Changing Face of Politics in the 1990s (London: Verso, 1990), pp. 173–188.
Herman Gray, Watching Race (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), p. 132.
John Beverly, “Pedagogy and Subalternity: Mapping the Limits of Academic Knowledge,” in Rolland G. Paulston, ed., Social Cartography (New York: Garland, 1996), p. 352.
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© 2000 Henry A. Giroux
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Giroux, H.A. (2000). Stuart Hall and the Politics of Education. In: Stealing Innocence. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-10916-3_7
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