Professor Stuart Hall

Speaker 30:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

Speaker 30:08

The programme was originally broadcast in the year two thousand, and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

Presenter0:30

My Castaway this week is a writer and teacher. A fervent advocate of multiculturalism, he spent a lifetime challenging racial prejudice. He arrived in England just about fifty years ago from Jamaica to take up a Rhodes scholarship in Oxford. He never went back. His family were traditional in their attitudes and aspired to British values, but he found himself in a country where attitudes to race were changing. As editor of the New Left Review, a teacher of cultural studies, a professor of the Open University, and as the author of many essays on race, politics and cultural identity, his life encompasses the history of modern black settlement in Britain. If I have one hope, he says, it is that it could be possible to be black and British the same way as it is now to be Scottish and British. He is Stuart Hall.

Presenter1:19

The Scottish example is the perfect model, really, of what you aspire to, isn't it, Stuart? To be part of the whole British, but but recognised as different.

Professor Stuart Hall1:27

Yes, this is a funny combination to aspire to, I suppose. People either want to be uh something or sort of universally open to everything. And I don't think either of those things work. I think we have very strong but different attachments and we need our differences recognized, but of course at the same time we need to feel that we can belong and are recognized in a much wider

Presenter1:51

But you could argue that that technically, anyway, that obtains today. We have British Asians, we have British Muslims, you know, but you look forward

Presenter1:59

To much more than that, don't you to to the day when when British denotes as well as Westminster Abbey denotes mosques?

Professor Stuart Hall2:06

Yes, I think when British denotes all these different things I mean, I don't want them to congeal into a sort of homogeneous, undifferentiated mass. I want it to be differentiated. But I I it's an asp funnily enough, it's an aspiration for Britain, not for me. I think that British, you know,

Professor Stuart Hall2:24

Have a future only if they can come to terms with the fact that Britishness is not one thing and has never been one thing. There have been a million different ways of being British, and there have been a million different struggles about Britishness, which you know only retrospectively are then sort of smoothly accommodated into the story as if it's unfolding seamlessly from beginning to end. But it isn't like that.

Presenter2:45

But don't you think he's coming to terms with that?

Presenter2:49

You laughed. A lot of people laughed. It has to be said when Norman Tebbit came up with his cricket test a couple of years ago when he said that you you could only test if you were truly English if you supported England when they played the West Indies, you know.

Speaker 12:54

Yeah.

Speaker 13:00

Yeah.

Professor Stuart Hall3:00

Yeah.

Presenter3:00

Uh

Professor Stuart Hall3:00

Uh

Presenter3:00

I mean, you were able to laugh. I mean, a couple of decades ago that would really have hurt.

Professor Stuart Hall3:03

The deck

Professor Stuart Hall3:06

Yes, of course. But I mean, if you think of last year, you know, the two celebrations. First of all, there's the celebration of the Windrush arrival, which is fifty years since the first post-war migrants. On the other hand, there's the McPherson inquiry into the death of Stephen Lawrence. And it seems to me that Britain is kind of facing these two possibilities as an alternative future. And I want them to I want the British to consciously move towards, in a more concerted and open way, towards a more cosmopolitan idea of themselves.

Professor Stuart Hall3:39

Tell me about your first record.

Professor Stuart Hall3:41

Well, the first record is uh from uh my first listening to modern jazz. You know, as a young uh student in in in Jamaica, I listened to a lot of kinds of music. My brother played Forties American Swing and we s played Jamaican folk music and so on. But none of that music belonged to me. The first musical sound that I felt really belonged to me was the first sound of modern jazz. It felt it's kind of opened up a new world. I mean I knew that it was a world from the margins, but it opened up the possibility of really experiencing modern life to the full. And it it formed in me the aspiration to to go and get it wherever it was.

Presenter5:21

Miles Davis playing Sids ahead with Julian Aderley, John Coltrane, Red Garland, Paul Chambers, and Philly Joe Jones. That was, Stuart Hall, part of your youth in Jamaica, where your brother and sister were some years older than you. Theirs was big band, this was yours, modern jazz.

Presenter5:37

Is that difference also symbolic of another difference between you, that they were accepting of the colonial society you wanted something different, new?

Professor Stuart Hall5:45

Yes, I suppose so. I mean, that was certainly the difference between us. Uh there's a lot of there's a big age difference, but I think it was more than that. Um you know, curiously, uh, I'm the blackest member of my family. That's an odd thing to say, but you know, these mixed families produce children of all colours. And in Jamaica, uh the question of exactly what shade you were in colonial Jamaica, that was the most important question because you could read off class and education and status from that. I was aware and conscious of that from the very beginning. You know, this is colonial Jamaica. My my uh my families were quite mixed. My father was from lower middle class, country family.

Professor Stuart Hall6:23

um, r respectable, his father was a chemist, etcetera, but not much money. My mother was from uh uh uh had been adopted by her uncle and aunt and lived most of her life on a small plantation, very close to the English. Indeed, her cousins were educated in England and never came back. She had, you know, grandparents who were white. And she brought into our family all the aspirations of a

Professor Stuart Hall6:49

Of a young plantation woman, as it were.

Presenter6:52

To be British or to behave like the Brit.

Professor Stuart Hall6:53

To behave like the people. To pull the whole society toward, you know, nothing Jamaican was really any good. I mean, everything was to aspire to be English, to be like the English, or be like the Americans. You know, the ideals in our family were somewhere else. So I've heard this tension throughout my life between what I thought I was.

Speaker 17:09

Uh

Professor Stuart Hall7:14

a young, bright Jamaican with aspirations for a growing independence movement in Jamaica, you know, Jamaica would be free one day and my f this this refusal of my family really to live in that world at all.

Presenter7:28

And presumably what you could see and I don't want to put words into your mouth, but was that that they, in a sense, in taking on these aspirations were living in a bit of a fool's paradise because they were aspiring to something that they were never going to be able to do.

Professor Stuart Hall7:39

They were aspiring to something we could never be, so in a sense the ideal was an impossible one, it's a kind of fantasy.

Presenter7:46

Did you see them being patronised?

Professor Stuart Hall7:48

I saw I watched my father being patronized, I watched my mother not being quite as uh you know well off and as uh respectable and as uh lauded by other people as she wanted to be. Uh it it's kind of con constant lack of fulfilment, of ambition in this

Presenter7:55

And that's a

Speaker 17:55

Yeah.

Professor Stuart Hall8:06

family situation. And this was dramatized for me when I was about seventeen my sister fell in love with a black doctor. She was in her twenties. My mother said, Absolutely not.

Professor Stuart Hall8:18

Within about three months she had had a serious nervous breakdown, was being treated with electric shock therapy.

Professor Stuart Hall8:26

She's never really ever recovered.

Presenter8:28

So he had to get out.

Professor Stuart Hall8:29

I had to get out, I thought, if I stay here.

Professor Stuart Hall8:32

It'll get me.

Presenter8:34

Tell me about your second record.

Professor Stuart Hall8:36

Well, it's Bob Marley, uh and uh this is the sound that saved a lot of second generation black West Indian kids from just, you know, falling through the a hole in the ground because they didn't know who they were, they'd never been taught that they were s they had a slave background, they'd never been taught they came from Africa, you know, the British didn't want them, and suddenly in their transistor sets they heard this voice from a place called Trenchtown, which became universally known throughout the world. It's an astonishing thing.

Speaker 19:07

Some say it's just a part of it, We've got to fulfill the bull.

Speaker 19:16

Won't you help to sing?

Speaker 19:21

These songs of freedom.

Speaker 19:24

Cause all I ever have.

Speaker 19:29

Redeem Sean Song

Speaker 19:33

Dear Shong Song

Presenter9:37

Bob Marley and Redemption Song.

Presenter9:39

So nineteen fifty-one, you'd have been nineteen, you set sail for England on the Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford. With your with your mother?

Professor Stuart Hall9:43

Peace.

Professor Stuart Hall9:49

My mother delivered me with in a felt hat and a Czech overcoat and a steamer trunk.

Professor Stuart Hall9:55

to my scout in Merton College, Oxford. Heaven only knows what he made, either of her or of us or of me. I don't know what I ever did with the steamer trunk. I think I persuaded him to take it into the basement of the college, and just lost it, really.

Presenter10:10

But from what you say, she'd have been incredibly proud. I mean, this was a very good question.

Professor Stuart Hall10:13

So she thought this was the the apotheosis of everything she had wanted for me and for her family.

Presenter10:19

And did it come up to expectations? Did it look like it was supposed to look?

Professor Stuart Hall10:22

Well, it looked like it was supposed to look. It didn't quite feel like it was supposed to feel after a while. Why not? Well, Oxford was a bit of a shock, as you can imagine. No. I mean, Oxford uh what I realized the moment I got to Oxford was that someone like me could not really be part of it. I mean, I you know, I could make a success there. I could even be perhaps uh accepted into it. But I would never feel it was my place.

Presenter10:46

Why not?

Professor Stuart Hall10:49

It's the summit of something else. It's it is the uh the the it is distilled Englishness. It's the peak of the English education system. I mean, the the an Oxford education there works only because you already know ninety percent of it in your

Professor Stuart Hall11:05

Bones. You know, you've absorbed the culture in a way in which you can't learn those things. You know, I I I st could study English literature.

Professor Stuart Hall11:14

But the cultural buzz that made each text live as part of a whole way of life was just not me, just not me.

Professor Stuart Hall11:22

Next piece of music.

Professor Stuart Hall11:24

Well, at Oxford I I had a lot of West Indian friends.

Speaker 111:25

Uh

Professor Stuart Hall11:28

Um, I became a West Indian in England, because before that I'd only been in a Jamaican. I'd never met anybody really from Barbados or Trinidad or Gao. I met them all in London and at Oxford. So I had a lot of West Indian friends. I had a lot of American friends, because there were a lot of American Rhodes Scholars.

Professor Stuart Hall11:44

Uh um one

Professor Stuart Hall11:46

had a wonderful range of uh classical music and so for the first time I really listened very seriously to classical music and he taught me a lot about it.

Presenter12:56

The English Chamber Orchestra conducted by Benjamin Britton playing the opening of Bach's Brandenburg Concerto, number two in F major.

Presenter13:03

You behaved, it said, and and and looked very British when you were at Oxford, you were sort of tweedy and sober and well behaved, all those things. But what about, you know, all that argument and frustration that had built up in you in Jamaica? You can't just have offloaded that'cause you'd got out.

Professor Stuart Hall13:20

Oh, no, it far from it. I mean, what I realized in Oxford was that, um

Professor Stuart Hall13:24

I I couldn't really escape it. I mean that I had to go through it, but I couldn't just leave it behind. I couldn't become something else.

Professor Stuart Hall13:33

So it it was a period really of kind of coming to terms with myself and much more.

Speaker 113:37

Much more.

Professor Stuart Hall13:38

Well, I became involved in politics with people in the Labour Party and young Communists and people from the Third World. I played in a group in Oxford, which kind of saved my soul some of the time, and we debated furiously, reading, literature, and so on.

Presenter13:56

But you talk about becoming politicized. I mean, was there a moment after all, you know, you when we get into the fifty well you get to fifty six and you've got the invasion of Hungary, you've got Suez and so on. Did all of these events have an effect on on where you were coming from politically?

Professor Stuart Hall14:09

Well, there was a there was really a a big argument going on amongst the circle that I had at Oxford, who were Oxford people but really trying to find alternative ways of living, really, not really at one with the sort of dominant image of the university.

Professor Stuart Hall14:28

And then the the Soviets moved into Hungary, and the the British and the French moved into the Suez Canal.

Professor Stuart Hall14:35

And this was the beginning of my so called New Left experience. And for the New Left what it meant for me was that space wi in politics which was defined by, on the one hand,

Professor Stuart Hall14:47

The Soviet invasion of Hungary, which I thought was, you know, told us all one needed to know about the totalitarianism of that system.

Professor Stuart Hall14:55

And on the other hand, the invasion of Egypt, which I thought told us that.

Professor Stuart Hall15:00

The imperial legacy was not dead, as people were saying. It hadn't gone away. It was very long lasting sort of uh reaction or response within the English mentality. And one would have to struggle against it, not just sort of uh think that it would fade away with the winds of change, so to speak. Somewhere in between there, the idea of a democratic, socialist, anti-imperial politics was born, and that's the moment of the New Left.

Presenter15:26

That's the

Presenter15:28

And the New Left Review, the magazine you edited.

Professor Stuart Hall15:30

Yes, we started in Oxford a small journal called Universities of Left Review and then there was another journal started mainly by people who had left the Communist Party called the New Reasoner and these two journals came together to form New Left Review and people who ought to have edited really important politicians and political figures like the historian E. Pete Thompson and so on had really exhausted themselves in the struggles around to found these journals and so me in my early twenties found myself

Professor Stuart Hall16:00

Editing these uh

Professor Stuart Hall16:03

Grand figures.

Presenter16:05

Record number four.

Professor Stuart Hall16:06

I I had a friend, Patty Wannell, who was the Education Officer of the British Film Institute, and uh there was there was no teaching of film in universities, there were no you know, there was no formal study of film at all.

Professor Stuart Hall16:18

But uh through the aid of the British Film Institute we started to do lectures on both film as a serious art form, but also on popular cinema.

Professor Stuart Hall16:28

And we got involved in trying to write for teachers who wanted to teach this stuff in classrooms but didn't know how on earth to do it. We decided to write a sort of book, How to Do It book, which was called The Popular Arts. But this was really an excuse for reading popular novels and looking at television and listening to rock music and listening to jazz again, just steeping oneself in popular culture.

Professor Stuart Hall16:51

And one of the things I discovered in that period was the voice of Billie Holiday.

Speaker 116:58

Away from the city that hurts and mobs.

Speaker 117:04

I'm standing alone by the desolate docks In the still and the chill of the night

Speaker 117:16

I see the horizon, the great unknown, my heart has an ache.

Presenter17:25

Billie Holiday and I Cover the Waterfront, preceded as she was by Bach, if you like, two examples of the different cultures, the the the classical and and and the popular.

Presenter17:35

As you say, until you came along, things like that weren't on the agenda. Film, television, pop music weren't things that people studied. What made you realize they ought to be?

Professor Stuart Hall17:48

Well, I think mainly because I thought the culture itself was being transformed by these forces. You know, I mean, Britain was an old class society becoming a mass society.

Professor Stuart Hall17:59

This is the period of the coming of television, it's the coming of youth culture, it's you know rock around the clock, it's it's it's it's just the explosion of the twentieth century in a sort of pre-twentieth century society. And we wanted to say school was a place on which in which you can reflect on life as you know it, not you know another thing, a sort of empty space that you have to enter and do a special thing with. It's about you and about the life you're living and about the changes that are going on in front of you.

Speaker 118:18

Not

Presenter18:29

What you got accused of, of course, to use a 90s phrase, was dumbing down, really, in effect, wasn't it? That you were saying.

Professor Stuart Hall18:33

Yeah he

Presenter18:35

You know, John Ford Westerns were as important to Shakespeare.

Professor Stuart Hall18:39

Yes, that is the argument, and it's still going on.

Professor Stuart Hall18:42

And what's the answer to the argument?

Professor Stuart Hall18:44

Well, the answer to the argument is this, that really um there isn't one kind of literary or cultural value.

Presenter18:46

Please

Speaker 118:47

Yeah.

Professor Stuart Hall18:51

There are many kinds. Actually, you don't go to Shakespeare with the same things you go to Tolstoy or J or George Eliot. These are different values. You might say that certain works express these things, these values and meanings, at a level of complexity and refinement. That's one thing. That's quite true.

Professor Stuart Hall19:10

But they're not different from, and uh there are certain kinds of uh emotions and uh and experiences which can't be expressed in that form, which are best expressed in another form.

Presenter19:20

But there's not high and low. Those are the adjectives.

Professor Stuart Hall19:20

It's not hard.

Professor Stuart Hall19:22

Well, I think high high culture is really the very selective appropriation of a certain limited range of cultural forms and the investment in that of a kind of social value. It's it's not that people you know are really responding to what there is in King Lear, but they're appropriating Shakespeare as a kind of badge of I am an educated person.

Presenter19:46

Can you watch Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?

Professor Stuart Hall19:48

Well

Presenter19:49

Well

Professor Stuart Hall19:49

Um, I I knew you would

Professor Stuart Hall19:51

Find the limit point, the breaking point. I can't watch that. But I if you ask me what I'm doing.

Presenter19:57

Why not? It's great.

Professor Stuart Hall19:58

If you ask me if I watch soap operas, I do.

Presenter20:01

But I mean, again, it's exactly what you're talking about, isn't it? It's what turns people on, it's what shows all kinds of things about human beings.

Professor Stuart Hall20:05

On its

Professor Stuart Hall20:08

Oh yes, I think that's quite true.

Presenter20:10

It's it's it's got it all.

Professor Stuart Hall20:11

Uh uh you asked me whether I watch it and you know uh there there are limits to my taste, but if you ask me whether we should study it, I think we should study it. I mean it is it comes right out of well, everything that has happened in economic life in Britain and the and the Western world in the last ten years. It's this kind of a p it's the earth story of the free market.

Presenter20:34

Next piece of music.

Professor Stuart Hall20:36

Well, this is Marvin Gay, and Marvin Gay stands for all the music I listened to in the 70s. You know, by then I was at the Center for Cultural Studies. It was a very heady time because we were involved in building this new area of study. I was working with very bright graduate students. We were making it up as we went. There was no discipline to study, so it was hardly a relationship of teacher and taught. There were my friends, my students, my apprentices, and so on. I was just married. My wife was a historian, very involved in the early feminist movement. And one of the things we used to do was to dance.

Speaker 121:16

I bet you want to ho I bet

Speaker 121:20

Outro Mansion

Speaker 121:23

With some of the time

Speaker 121:26

Knew before

Speaker 121:28

Two of us guys, you know I love you more

Speaker 121:31

It took me by surprise, I must say

Speaker 121:36

And I found my castle face. Don't you know that I have

Presenter21:43

Marvin Gay, and I heard it through the grapevine. You said, Stuart Hall, that we can't leave a multicultural society to chance. You indicated that when we were talking at the outset.

Presenter21:53

What more should we do? We have our race relations laws. We we have laws governing equality of race, sex, opportunity. What more are you saying we should do, we could do?

Professor Stuart Hall22:05

I think it's much more a question of trying to reimagine what Britain is. I think Britain has much more diverse origins, much more uh plural strands in its culture, much more mixes. I think it's got to learn to love mixture. You know, at one point uh Simon Rushdie says mixture is how newness enters the world, which is very different from the idea that you know it comes from a society that has been stable from stable roots and been the same throughout time. Who wants to be the same throughout time? What you want to do is to be different throughout time. It's a process of becoming, not of being. It's of roots, R O U T S. It's the various uh pathways that have brought you to where you are that matter.

Presenter22:50

But isn't that exactly what's happening?

Professor Stuart Hall22:52

Well, that is multiculturalism, but and I think it's happening as a what I would call a sociological process. It's what I call multicultural drift. The society is kind of drifting into this. But what it doesn't yet it's not yet able to say to itself is

Professor Stuart Hall23:08

Difference is good. There's something positive about people being different from oneself. What is exciting is that they bring another way of being modern to the way in which we have been modern in the past.

Presenter23:19

And you don't think that's our attitude?

Professor Stuart Hall23:21

Well, I not not yet. I think we are on the edge of that. And I think what threatens is the possibility of feeling modernity is too difficult for us. Let us uh withdraw behind a kind of cit into a sort of little England citadel. I think that is also on the cards. I think Britain is the very important kind of historical turning point.

Presenter23:40

I mean, I don't want to sound complacent. I mean, I'm just being the devil's advocate, as it were, in all of this. I mean, you know, we do accept in as far as we can that we the traditions of minority cultures, you know, we but we we say no to them when they offend our natural respect for the freedom of the individual. So we say yes if you like to

Professor Stuart Hall23:44

As it were, it

Presenter24:00

Sikhs not wearing crash helmets, as it were, but we say no to arranged marriages or female circumcision. I mean, isn't that a perfectly laudable and acceptable standpoint there?

Professor Stuart Hall24:10

Yes, I I don't deny at all that we are much closer to what I would think of as the multicultural ideal than we have been in the past. But I I do think that the minorities are just on the edge of feeling that they're they've stopped being people from somewhere else which who didn't really have anything intrinsic to do with English and British history. And they're just on the edge of feeling we have been a part of this story from the beginning.

Professor Stuart Hall24:40

So I think, you know, for instance, the i the the heritage industry.

Professor Stuart Hall24:44

Or the teaching of history in schools, you know, has to go back and re-read the history of empire, not as some sort of dangling appendage out there which you can or cannot know about, but as something which is absolutely deep at the heart of English identity. It's right, you know, my wife works on the connections between Britain and England and Jamaica in the 19th century. Every English middle-class provincial abolitionist family, you know, had a connection with the empire, knew about the empire, watched lantern slides about the empire, read about it, heard it preached in the pulpits. You know, it's an inside part of Englishness, not an outside bit which we have a choice about knowing about. So it's not a question of are you nice to us, it's a question of we are part of you.

Professor Stuart Hall25:36

And

Professor Stuart Hall25:38

There could come a time when Britain would be proud of saying, This is as much intrinsic to who we are.

Professor Stuart Hall25:46

as you know ten sixty six

Presenter25:49

Record number six.

Professor Stuart Hall25:51

I've always uh um you know kept going back and listening to the music of my youth.

Professor Stuart Hall25:58

But I like to hear that music rephrased in a more modern idiom.

Presenter27:04

Winton Marsalis and his quartet playing the piece that Duke Ellington made famous, Caravan.

Presenter27:09

So how long does it take, Stuart Hall, to create the the something fresh you describe? How long does your multicultural utopia take to come about?

Professor Stuart Hall27:19

it takes as long as uh transformations of culture. I mean the reason why I'm interested in culture is because culture is you know, culture is the meanings that are inscribed in our actions, in our behavior, in our everyday conduct.

Professor Stuart Hall27:35

And not until those ideas uh take root in everyday practice. You know, not a matter of conscious consciously being good to the others, as it were.

Speaker 127:46

Yeah.

Professor Stuart Hall27:46

But as it were, n naturally, organically, in our actions, you know, we just think that difference is what is really exciting about the world.

Presenter27:49

Yeah.

Presenter27:55

And it has to happen, doesn't it? It's it's it is just a matter of time. But wh what do you think? Is it another two generations? What is it? How long does it take before you naturally

Presenter28:06

breed out, as it were, that kind of inherent racism that you indicated.

Professor Stuart Hall28:11

I think this is an interesting moment because, you know, curiously

Professor Stuart Hall28:15

Just as the British are sort of giving up on Britishness, we are just discovering it. You know, devolution, I think, puts a sort of question mark over, you know, whether people aren't going to just be happy by being Welsh and Irish and Scottish and, you know, let the Britishness go hang. And those of us from outside who could never be English and are never going to be European in any deep and profound sense for a good long time, we nevertheless know that our fates and histories have been connected with this part of the world just forever, irrevocably. And we're British in that sense. And there's a very long time, nearly fifty years, in which I think very few people from the Caribbean or from Asia would ever dream of calling themselves British, even in a hyphenated way. And it's just happening now. These are one of the ironies, quirks of history, you know, which is that as you brought down the flag of empire, we came to find the mother country. And just as you desert Britishness, we discover that we're really pretty British after all, black and British.

Presenter29:20

But what? Give us fifty years and that's absolutely not.

Professor Stuart Hall29:22

You even have fifty years.

Presenter29:23

Hmm.

Presenter29:25

Record number seven.

Professor Stuart Hall29:27

Well, I suppose when uh I was about twenty, nineteen or twenty,

Professor Stuart Hall29:33

I I would say Myers Davis put his finger on my soul. Uh the various moods of Maes Davies has re uh uh have matched.

Professor Stuart Hall29:42

The sort of evolution of my own feelings. They are.

Professor Stuart Hall29:47

continued to be a regret for the loss of a life which I might have lived but didn't live. I could have gone back, I could have been a Caribbean person I'm not that any more. I I can't ever be English in the full sense, though I know and understand the British from the inside, like the back of my hand.

Professor Stuart Hall30:06

So I'm a sort of diaspora person.

Professor Stuart Hall30:08

And the uncertainty, the restlessness, and some of the um

Professor Stuart Hall30:14

Some of the nostalgia for what cannot be.

Professor Stuart Hall30:18

is in the sound of Myles Davis's trumpet.

Presenter31:14

Miles Davis with Art Blakey, Percy, Heath and Jill Coggins, and I Waited for You. Nostalgia for what cannot be be perhaps it could just be, to some small extent, anyway, on your desert island, Stuart.

Professor Stuart Hall31:27

Yes, there's a funny way in which, um, you know, because

Professor Stuart Hall31:31

I can never go home again. Uh, Jamaica is a kind of

Professor Stuart Hall31:36

Fantasy Island for me. When I go there I love it. I know what it's like. Uh but it's not me any longer.

Presenter31:43

And when you sit there, you know, looking back across it all, your life, um, uh the part that you carved out for yourself, as it were, in this

Presenter31:52

displaced position, this diaspora you chose to inhabit.

Presenter31:56

What will you be proudest of having done or achieved or said or been?

Professor Stuart Hall32:02

I felt I was a good teacher. I loved my time at the Open University. When I left the center, I wanted to go not to a place where I taught very bright students who'd already had many of the opportunities. I wanted to take those ideas into teaching people who had no formal educational background, etc. I loved being a teacher. I love working collectively with people. I work in arts organizations, black arts organizations now with filmmakers and people in the visual arts. I'm a sort of enabler of other people doing things. I work best collectively. I work best with a group.

Professor Stuart Hall32:39

So, I don't think of these as a sort of sense of with a sense of personal achievement, really. I feel as if.

Professor Stuart Hall32:46

My life is a journey which many people have taken. I it's a sort of paradigm of

Professor Stuart Hall32:52

all those people who got on the windrush and came to try and f you know find another life.

Presenter32:57

Last record.

Professor Stuart Hall33:00

Well, I want to music that will take my soul and just make it sore. And I've uh started to listen to to opera. I never wanted to go to opera very much. I don't like the ambiance so much, those all those heads nodding through uh Don Giovanni. But I love the music, you know, the archetypal the Ala Verde and Puccini.

Speaker 133:16

Giovanni.

Speaker 134:05

Hallelujah.

Presenter34:24

Mirella Freini singing Unbell di Vedremo from Puccini's Madam Butterfly with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Herbert von Karrian. If you could only take one of those eight records, Stuart, which one would you take?

Professor Stuart Hall34:35

Miles Davis.

Presenter34:36

Which which, Miles Davis?

Professor Stuart Hall34:38

I waited for you.

Presenter34:38

What about your book as well as the Bible and Shakespeare?

Professor Stuart Hall34:41

Well, the book is a problem because I would be terrified of running out of things to read, so that always pushes you towards, you know, collected works and encyclopedias.

Presenter34:49

But you're not allowed to do it.

Professor Stuart Hall34:50

But I'm not in love though. So uh I want to take a book which uh is the language is so complex and the sensibility and feelings are so refined that y you could spend a paragraph, you know, uh would take your whole day really.

Professor Stuart Hall35:04

And that's Henry James's Portrait of a Lady.

Presenter35:08

And your luxury.

Professor Stuart Hall35:10

Well, the luxury I want really is my grandson, Noah, who's only fourteen months, so he's not really a proper person. We have long conversations, but he doesn't yet speak, but I know you're not going to allow that.

Presenter35:19

Well no, he's animate all the same.

Professor Stuart Hall35:22

So, uh I better take a piano and I'd really try for the first time to teach myself to play the piano properly.

Presenter35:29

Professor Stuart Hall, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your desert island discs.

Professor Stuart Hall35:33

Great pleasure.

Speaker 335:42

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co. uk slash radio four.