Selected Writings on Visual Arts and Culture

“This collection corrects the widespread misperception that Stuart Hall’s late-career art writings were a mere add-on to the heavy lifting accomplished by his 1970s work on Marxism and sociology. Gilane Tawadros’s panoramic selection reveals how extensively Hall turned his attention to art, photography, film, museums, and architecture to examine questions of diaspora, identity, and globalization. This volume is of enormous significance.” - Kobena Mercer, author of Travel & See: Black Diaspora Art Practices since the 1980s

“Stuart Hall’s writings on visual arts and culture try to imagine what a genuinely emancipatory cultural practice would be like. How to think structures of feeling and imagination and dissolve the categories of race, representation, gender, and identity, categories that Hall did more than anyone both to advance and to problematize. Hall’s voice and image thread through several of my films and artworks. His focus on the distinctive voice of the Caribbean artist, his insistence on the fluidity of the diasporic imagination, were foundational for artists of my generation. Indeed, it is impossible to really think and experience Black British art without the keystones which this collection of writings presents.” - Isaac Julien

"A rich group of texts, addressing global capitalism, race and diaspora and how ‘the language of the imaginary’ can be a framework for developing new insights into political and economic relationships of power." - Marko Gluhaich, Frieze

"Gilane Tawadros . . . is an attentive and appreciative reader who assembled these essays that date back decades yet are still relevant and readable. . . . While every narrative of cultural studies acknowledges Stuart Hall’s importance, this is a good collection of his writing on visual art and a document of urban creativity he witnessed in the last three decades of the 20th century." - Mike Mosher, Leonardo

"This diverse compilation not only enhances Hall’s scholarly legacy but also challenges the logic of hierarchy in academic writing. . . . By expanding the field of politics to include perspectives from visual arts as a source of knowledge, the volume may, therefore, be fruitful for scholars, graduate students, and postgraduate students in political theory, cultural studies, migration studies, art theory, and art history, as well as for artists, curators, and art critics." - Tania Arcimovich, H-SHERA, H-Net Reviews

"The horizon of the imagination of the viewer expands wider than they were before reading this collection. . . . The volume is not a retrospection but rather a provocation." - Jhinuk Basu, Visual Studies