Abstract

Stuart Hall sought to internationalise theoretical debates and to create Cultural Studies as interdisciplinary. We chart his theoretical journey through a detailed examination of a series of lectures delivered in 1983 and now published for the first time. In these lectures, he discusses theorists such as E.P. Thompson, Raymond Williams, Louis Althusser, Levi Strauss and Antonio Gramsci, and explores the relationship between ideas and social structure, the specificities of class and race, and the legacies of slavery. We note his turn towards metaphors of divergence and dispersal and highlight how autobiographical and deeply personal Hall is in these lectures, especially in his ego histoire moment of traumatic memory recovery.