Box of delight

My first ever introduction to the work of Stuart Hall (1932-2014) came in the form of an enthusiastic invitation to watch a video of one of his lectures after Sunday dinner with my friend Aslam Fataar at his home in Cape Town in the late 1990s. The exigencies and attention required by my immersion in ethnographic fieldwork on Muslims in Cape Town at the time meant I paid scant attention to it, and that my real discovery of Hall’s work came years later in Norway. Yet, the circumstances of my initiation to Hall do not strike me as particularly surprising. Hall had many readers in various post-colonies, and the attraction of his thought and legacy, and not the least the appeal of his particular mode of engagement with the world in and outside of academia to intellectuals who share his formative experiences with both creolization and colonial and late-colonial subjugation, has long been apparent.

Three years on from Hall’s death