Stuart Hall and the Conjuncture of 1956

“During the fellowship year, I will be working on a biography of Stuart Hall (1932-2014), the Jamaican-British cultural theorist. Specifically, I will be focusing on the “conjuncture” of 1956, the crisis (precipitated by the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian uprising, on the one hand, and the Anglo-French invasion of the Suez Canal Zone, on the other) that led to the formation of the British New Left. Hall, still a student at Oxford writing a dissertation on Henry James, was a central figure in the emergence of the New Left. He was a founding editor of two of the defining journals of the moment — the student-led Universities and Left Review and subsequently the New Left Review, the latter created out of the merger between Universities and Left Review and the ex-Communist-led New Reasoner. My talk will try to craft a story of Hall’s journey from 1956 up until the end of 1961 when he resigned his editorship of the New Left Review.” David Scott

David Scott teaches in the Department of Anthropology, Columbia University. He is the author of Formations of Ritual (1994), Refashioning Futures (1999), Conscripts of Modernity (2004), Omens of Adversity (2014), Stuart Hall’s Voice (2017), Irreparable Evil: An Essay in Moral and Reparatory History (forthcoming 2024), and (with Orlando Patterson) The Paradox of Freedom (2023). Scott is the founder and editor of the journal Small Axe and director of the Small Axe Project.

Host or Publisher Institute for Ideas and Imagination