Why Stuart Hall Mattered

The Marxist intellectual revolutionized how we think about pop culture. But the U.S. media barely noted his death.

BY Susan J. Douglas

In these Times - March 14, 2014 

Imagine the unimaginable for just a minute. A towering Marxist public intellectual—who influenced multiple generations of professors and their students—dies, and the U.S. press is filled with encomia about what he meant.
When Stuart Hall died February 10, the outpouring in the British press over an avowedly left-wing, anti-racist, anti-imperialist activist and theorist of the highest order served as just another reminder of the impoverishment of intellectual life in the United States. Here, Hall was known primarily in academic circles; the New York Times reported his passing seven days late.
As one of the founding figures of cultural studies, Hall’s contributions to academic discourse cannot be overemphasized. It’s hard to imagine now,
 with communication studies one of the most popular majors in the United States, that in the 1960s and early 1970s, studying the media was regarded as beneath contempt. There was an elitist hierarchy affirming “high” culture as possessing quality, rigor and virtuosity, and “low” or popular culture as being banal, trashy and hardly worth academic attention. Hall, as the director of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University, changed that.

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