Writings on Media

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.

“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)

• Editor's Note on the Text  viiAcknowledgments  ixIntroduction: A History of the Present / Charlotte Brunsdon  1Part I. The Photograph in ContextIntroduction to Part I  151. Preface to Black Britain: A Photographic History  232. Media and Message: The Life and Death of Picture Post  263. The Social Eye of Picture Post  344. The Determinations of New Photographs  545. Reconstruction Work: Images of Post-war Black Settlement  786. Vanley Burke and the "Desire for Blackness"  95Part II. Media Studies and Cultural StudiesIntroduction to Part II  1017. Film Teaching: Liberal Studies  1118. The World of the Gossip Column  1229.  A World at One with Itself  13110. Introduction to Paper Voices  14111. Down with the Little Woman  15512. Mugging: A Case Study in the Media  16213. Introduction to Media Studies at the Centre  16914. The Whites of Their Eyes: Racist Ideologies and the Media  177Part III. TelevisionIntroduction to Part III  20115. Television as a Medium and Its Relation to Culture  20916. Watching the Box  23717. Gogglebox Gigolos  24218. TV Types  24519. Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse  24720. Media Power: The Double Bind 26721. Will Annan Open the Box?  27622. Which Public, Whose Service?  28123. Black and White in Television  297Coda  31524. Stuart Hall's Desert Island Discs  317Index  331Place of First Publication  343