A Personal Tribute to Jamaican “Interventionist” <PERSON> · Global Voices
As tributes to late Jamaican cultural theorist <PERSON> keep coming, Jamaica-based blogger <PERSON> posts a personal and stirring acknowledgement.
Titled “A <PERSON>-shaped hole in the universe…”, she begins by saying:
When I saw <PERSON> at his home in London on December 14, 2013, I knew he wouldn’t last much longer. He had been ill for years and his health had deteriorated considerably since the previous year when we celebrated his 80th birthday at Rivington Place, the art centre born of his inspiration and hard work. All the same his departure comes as a blow. It’s too early for me to come to terms with this loss, for <PERSON> has been a close friend and mentor since 1996 when he came to the University of the West Indies to speak at the Rex Nettleford Conference.
<PERSON> chooses to share some of her own photographs in the post, which alone makes it extraordinary – snapshots of <PERSON> with <PERSON> herself; with <PERSON>, the editor of Small Axe magazine; a few pics of him both in England and in Jamaica. These are rare glimpses into the ordinary days of an extraordinary man. <PERSON> says:
<PERSON> was such an extraordinary thinker that his work ranged over a broad field of interests including visual art which was the one thing we truly bonded over. It was a preoccupation that didn’t get much coverage in other interviews which tend to focus more on his activism, his Marxism, and his political interventions.
<PERSON> at Good Hope Estate, Trelawny, Jamaica, 2004 – Photo by <PERSON>
She links to a post she wrote in November 2013, in which she reviews The Stuart Hall Project, the <PERSON> film about him, which she hopes will be screened in Jamaica soon. In it, she says:
One of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century, <PERSON>, was born and brought up here, made his career in Britain, become an intellectual powerhouse there, and is virtually unknown in the land of his birth. 192
So true what <PERSON> said: A prophet is not without honour, save in his own country. Ah well.
Still, she shares links about his life and work in an effort to make “young people here realize that Jamaicans excel not only in track and field and music but also in the intellectual arena…”
Another piece of memorabilia <PERSON> shares in the post is one of her “treasures”:
…a letter <PERSON> wrote to the Librarian at Birmingham U so that I could gain access to their inner sanctum.
She ends with an upload of an interview she did with <PERSON>, titled The Ironies of History:
The Ironies of History:An Interview with Stuart Hall by <PERSON>
The interview (read it, above) begins by quoting Professor <PERSON> of Duke University:
Such was <PERSON>’s impact on the US, British, Euro pean and Australian academy via cultural studies, mainly through a range of essays he published during the 1980s, that by the 1990s he became one of the preeminent intellectuals in the world. In truth, because of the international rise of cultural studies, <PERSON> came to be regarded as an academic star, an intellectual celebrity, and a philosophical guru: he became the incarnation of cultural studies, first in Britain and then in the United States, widely anointed as the spokes man for the politics – and the endemic politicization – of the popular, the theorist in the fore front of politicizing (all) identity.
In it, <PERSON> discusses with <PERSON> everything from immigration and deportation to dancehall music, black masculinity and homophobia. He talks about art, architecture and visual culture. He even talks about himself and his work:
I was an interventionist, my writing is interventionist ok? That is to say I write in order to intervene in a situation, to shift the terms in which it’s understood, to introduce a new angle, to contest how it has been understood before; it’s an embattled form of writing…a kind of intellectual interventionism.
This is a kind of politics in theory, because it’s interested in struggling thought – struggling in thought. Not interested in the production of pure truth, absolute truth, universal truth. It’s interested in the production of better ideas than the ones we used to have. So it’s a kind of struggle in thought, a struggle with thought and a struggle inside thought, struggle inside thinking to change the terms of reference with which we’re thinking. 216