Stuart Hall Texts
Through reading and watching Stuart Hall’s pieces for this week’s task, I picked out a few points that I thought were interesting.
One point that Stuart Hall made in his interview on Policing the Crisis was ‘what happens to a society when it starts to disintegrate [..] are senses of threat [begin to appear]’. Hearing Stuart Hall say this during his interview instantly made me think about the political situation in the United States since the 2016 presidential election campaigns started, but is more prominent now. Since the coronavirus pandemic hit the United States, there has been a greater distrust and question of Donald Trump’s leadership, and in response to this Trump has been making greater threats towards people who act out against his leadership.
One of the assigned readings was about Enoch Powell’s 1968 speech “Rivers of Blood” in which Powell created a lot of controversy with his plans to send immigrants back ‘home’. Through reading Stuart Hall’s piece ‘Cultural Identity and Diaspora’ it is clear to make links between this piece and the reasons why people took an issue to Enoch Powell’s speech. One of these links is through the notion of identity. Powell’s speech was seen and felt like an attack on people’s sense of cultural identity as he regarded all immigrants as the same and also made people from other countries feel as though they and their cultures don’t belong in the United Kingdom.
Texts looked at in this piece –
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/04/enoch-powell-rivers-of-blood/558344/
