Description
Book SynopsisWritings on Media collects Stuart Hall's most important work on the media, reaffirming his stature as an innovative media theorist while demonstrating the continuing relevance of his methods of analysis.
Trade Review“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, Emeritus Professor of Sociology, University of California, Santa Cruz
“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, Distinguished Professor of Cultural Studies, Western Sydney University
"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. . . ." -- Amy Villarejo * Critical Studies in Television *
"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." -- Max Wiggins * College & Research Libraries *
"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." -- Bill Yousman * Screen *
Table of ContentsEditor'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
