The 2024 “Stuart Hall: Positions and Trajectories” conference

I presented a paper (title and abstract below) at the “Stuart Hall: Positions and Trajectories” conference, which took place between 31 October – 2 November 2024 at The Exchange, University of Birmingham.

On Stuart Hall’s Reception in French Academia: Belatedness, Misreadings, Occlusions

In this paper, I explore the reception of Stuart Hall’s work and the Birmingham strand of cultural studies in France to advance a three-pronged interconnected argument regarding French intellectual/academic culture in the twenty-first century. I start by mapping and contextualising the very few of Hall’s texts that have, belatedly, made their way into French academia. Then, I engage with some works by those very few French academics that have taken cultural studies and Stuart Hall’s work seriously, and in which I identify a number of misreadings and/or occlusions, of Hall’s work, specifically, and of the Birmingham strand of cultural studies, more broadly. These misreadings and occlusions, I claim, derive from, first, a traditional disciplinary rigidity that simultaneously emerges from and reinforces a cultural and academic conservatism that manifests itself variously across ideological lines. Second, the resurgence of deeply reactionary (i.e., counter-revolutionary) intellectual undercurrents whose spearheads, since the 1970s, have supported themselves on Totalitarian theory (and its emphasis on centrism as the sole answer to the extremes) to make of sanitised liberalism in academia not just hegemonic, but an incontestable dogma. Third, a selective and performative ‘anti-americanism’ that contributes to stoke imperial nostalgia across the political spectrum given that chauvinism is a significant element of the French ‘structure of feeling’. If among the intellectual right this nostalgia emerges as Western colonial entitlement and white supremacy, among the intellectual left—still stubbornly attached to classical Marxism—it does so as humanist universalism, which is in fact metonymy for a mythologised French Republicanism.

Keywords: Stuart Hall; French chauvinism; French intellectuals; repressed imperial unconscious; hegemony.