Stuart Hall Essay: The Finale

The finale part of my essay.  Enjoy!

V: Conclusions and Assessments

            Stuart Hall tackled Thatcherism in a book spanning over ten years of his carefully researched and well thought out essays dealing with Britain in that precarious time.  Present below are some smug assessments done by a person born after Thatcher's reign, born in a different country from her reign, and also by somebody who read his book during bouts of chronic insomnia.  Are you ready? 

Stuart Hall’s ideas are all correct.  To his point on the GLC; change starts at a local level.  He is right to assume that seeing something work positively on a local level will accrue it support on a national level.  When people see something or a system working for them and coming up with positive, concrete ideas against a divisive administration, it makes it hard to side with the administration at hand.  His ideas of party modernization are also very correct.  The evidence is over in that unruly country, America.  The party that speaks and connects to the younger generation and is able to project a view of modernization usually wins the election at hand.  Take the past presidential election in America.  The Democrats effectively used social media and displayed progressive and inclusive politics that appealed to a younger, more liberal populous.  The Republican trotted out a guy who made the dad from Leave It To Beaver look cool.  The Republicans played like a Labour campaign in Stuart Hall’s time and used slogans and policies from the past rather than using ones from the current century.  His views on identity and spectatorship are fascinating and his article on "the other" is must read for anybody in the cultural studies department.  He helped father the cinema and cultural studies major (with an assist from the late Walter Benjamin, who had a thirty year jump on Dr. Hall) which many unfortunate students join because they think they will be able to just watch movies all day long.  Oh how wrong they are.  Stuart Hall is truly a great mind and deserves to live out his golden years the way he pleases.  He has done enough for his fields and it is time for others to pick up the slack.  Yes, this is a threat.  But it is a threat from the heart.  The heart that respects the work of Stuart Hall.

Works Cited

Adams, Tim. "Cultural Hallmark." The Guardian. Guardian News and Media, 22 Sept. 2007. Web. 20 Apr. 2013.

Hall, Stuart. The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left. London: Verso, 1988. Print.

Phillips, Caryl, and Stuart Hall. "Stuart Hall." BOMB 58 (1997): 38-42. Jstor. Web. 21 Apr. 2013. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/40426392>.

"Scholar Stuart Hall Named among the Most Important Black Britons of All Time." The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education 43 (204): 59. Jstor. Web. 20 Apr. 2013. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/4133554>.