Writings on Media: History of the Present

by Stuart Hall, Charlotte Brunsdon (Editor)

Overview

Writings on Media gathers more than twenty of Stuart Hall's media analyses, from scholarly essays such as “Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse” (1973) to other writings addressed to wider publics. Hall explores the practices of news photography, the development of media and cultural studies, the changing role of television, and how the nation imagines itself through popular media. He attends to Britain's imperial history and the politics of race and cultural identity as well as the media's relationship to the political project of the state. Testifying to the range and agility of Hall's critical and pedagogic engagement with contemporary media culture—and also to his collaborative mode of working—this volume reaffirms his stature as an innovative media theorist while demonstrating the continuing relevance of his methods of analysis.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781478022015
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	09/10/2021
Series:	Stuart Hall: Selected Writings
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	352
File size:	18 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Stuart Hall (1932–2014) was one of the most prominent and influential scholars and public intellectuals of his generation. Hall taught at the University of Birmingham and the Open University, was the founding editor of New Left Review, and was the author of Cultural Studies 1983: A Theoretical History, Familiar Stranger: A Life between Two Islands, and other books also published by Duke University Press.

Charlotte Brunsdon is Professor of Film and Television Studies at the University of Warwick. Her most recent book is Television Cities: Paris, London, Baltimore, also published by Duke University Press.

Table of Contents

Editor's Note on the Text  vii
Acknowledgments  ix
Introduction: A History of the Present / Charlotte Brunsdon  1
Part I. The Photograph in Context
Introduction to Part I  15
1. Preface to Black Britain: A Photographic History  23
2. Media and Message: The Life and Death of Picture Post  26
3. The Social Eye of Picture Post  34
4. The Determinations of New Photographs  54
5. Reconstruction Work: Images of Post-war Black Settlement  78
6. Vanley Burke and the "Desire for Blackness"  95
Part II. Media Studies and Cultural Studies
Introduction to Part II  101
7. Film Teaching: Liberal Studies  111
8. The World of the Gossip Column  122
9.  A World at One with Itself  131
10. Introduction to Paper Voices  141
11. Down with the Little Woman  155
12. Mugging: A Case Study in the Media  162
13. Introduction to Media Studies at the Centre  169
14. The Whites of Their Eyes: Racist Ideologies and the Media  177
Part III. Television
Introduction to Part III  201
15. Television as a Medium and Its Relation to Culture  209
16. Watching the Box  237
17. Gogglebox Gigolos  242
18. TV Types  245
19. Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse  247
20. Media Power: The Double Bind 267
21. Will Annan Open the Box?  276
22. Which Public, Whose Service?  281
23. Black and White in Television  297
Coda  315
24. Stuart Hall's Desert Island Discs  317
Index  331
Place of First Publication  343

Editorial Reviews

How refreshing and urgent to revisit Stuart Hall’s formative ideas about racism, identity, ideology, and media at the very moment that media has become such a contested site and source of ideological work. Hall’s searing and critical insights about what media does, how it works, and why it matters have never been as pressing as they are today. In our global and national media ecologies where disputes over facts, epistemological turmoil, fake news, and ideological rigidities are routine, Charlotte Brunsdon’s curated collection of Hall’s essays on the media is a remarkable and indispensable gift.

Herman Gray

Stuart Hall revolutionized the critical study of media, positioning them—newspapers, photographs, television—as key sites of struggle over cultural meaning and power, and thus as central to the project of cultural studies. Above all, however, Hall did not just write about media but used them prolifically as outlets for critical intervention in the world. This superb set of essays testifies to the uniquely powerful voice of one of the most important public intellectuals in postimperial Britain.

Ien Ang

"This series is a veritable motherlode for Hall devotees and neophytes alike. . . . As Brunsdon points out, ensures that even the older or more micro-focused pieces in this volume still have ample value for current scholarship in media, film and cultural studies, and for the broader intersections around the analysis of politics, race, identity and ideological formation."

Screen - Bill Yousman

"Brunsdon . . . gifts us with the evolution and contours of Hall’s thought(s) about media more broadly in work he produced mostly in the decade of the 1970s or thereabouts: about photography and the visual arts, about the press, about radio and broadcasting, and finally about television. . . What the American reader learns from this collection is this: Hall was a prescient, energetic thinker of specificity and generality at the same time. . . ."

Critical Studies in Television - Amy Villarejo

"This is the true magic here: what Hall furnished for us during the course of his life, and what Brunsdon has collected and contextualized in Writings on Media, is an invitation into Hall’s world—to see the world as he did. This vision is bright eyed, and delighted, and serious, and humble. . . . In all of his prose, it is unmistakable just how much Hall absolutely wants you in it with him, and to share his questions, and to identify possible answers, and to figure it out with you. And, that is a very precious gift indeed."

College & Research Libraries - Max Wiggins