by Jagdish Patel

The death of Stuart Hall on the 10th February was marked by worldwide praise for ‘Britain’s leading cultural theorist’. (2014. Stuart Hall – obituary, Daily Telegraph, 10th February,) It is rare for an academic to receive accolades in the mainstream press, and this perhaps reflects how Hall presented his ideas, not only through academic books, but through newspaper articles, periodicals, on television, conference talks and by attending ordinary public meetings.

My own introduction to Stuart Hall was made by staying up after midnight to watch him present Open University talks. This was in my teens, and even though I didn’t really understand his talks, what I wanted to watch was a radical perspective on black lives in Britain, a perspective that was not articulated in the mainstream television programs.

Stuart Hall would be the first to point out that using the term ‘black’, in…