Stuart Hall as a criminological theorist-activist

Theory as a detour to somewhere ‘more important’

A seeming paradox of labelling Hall as a theorist-activist is that he said ‘I don’t regard myself as a theorist in the sense that that is my work’. While Hall is widely discussed as a cultural and social theorist it is more accurate to refer to his theorizing, rather than a specific theory to which he can be linked. In the words that run on from the previous quotation he added:

I am interested always in going theorising about the world, about the concrete but [. . .] not in the production of theory in its own right. And therefore I use theory in strategic ways [. . .] because I think my object is to think the concreteness of the object in its many different relations.

For critics, such as Rojek (2003), Hall was an intellectual butterfly switching from Althusserian to Gramscian Marxism and later into post-structuralism. Yet for many others (e.g. Procter, 2004; Rustin, 2007) it is his intellectual signature to be a sort-of theoretical ‘bricoleur’ using theory strategically to excavate contemporary phenomena. Or, as Clarke (2015: 282) puts it, Hall was engaged in ‘discovering necessary elements in many different places and seeing what might happen if they were put together to illuminate pressing analytical and political issues’.

The engagement with ‘the concrete’ points the way towards the activist engagements this article considers. For Rustin (2007) Hall’s interest was less in particular events or in abstract theories than in finding ways of connecting them. At one level this is evident in what he actually did throughout his career such as Hall’s contributions on race for UNESCO (Hall, 1980a) and the CRE ³ (Hall, 1978); his analyses of Thatcherism (Hall, 1988); his development of the idea of new ethnicities in the 1980s; his various essays on questions of the post-colonial and globalization (Hall, 1991) in the 1990s; and his critiques of New Labour (Hall, 1998), and of neo-liberalism (Hall et al., 2015) in later decades. In all these cases Hall’s acuity was focused on theorizing the present or, to put it another way, he was always concerned with specific moments of which he seeks to make sense by using and developing theory.

Hence, thinking ‘the concrete’ is not just an abstraction but a rather a modus operandi, a kind of deep-seated, even foundational stance towards engaging the present. This is a form of agile or strategic theorizing—or what Procter (2004) refers to as theory as action or intervention, or Grossberg calls ‘theorized empiricism’. It aims to retain the specificity and details of the concrete or empirical moment without making it just empiricist. It does this not just by intertwining the theoretical and the empirical, but also reading across and connecting the epistemological and the historical (Grossberg, 2007). This is theory done not for its own sake, or in exchange with social theorists in an academic forum, but theory as a practice or an activity. It ‘is a detour on the road to somewhere more important’ (Hall, cited in Procter, 2004: 54) that helps to ‘ground our engagement with what newly confronts us and to let that engagement provide the ground for retheorizing’ (Slack, 1996: 114). It is a tool to make sense of specific moments, to place them in context analytically by understanding the ways in which cultures, ideologies, structures are drawn on, involved and combined in the concrete. Hall (cited in Alexander, 2009: 462) stated it in this form:

I do think you have to analyse the things that are in front of you and try to understand how they really are and not how you would like them to be. And then try to find out what the possibilities are for change and work with those. Yes, that is my strategy.

For current purposes I want to draw on two ideas or concepts that Hall utilized—conjuncture/context, and articulation. On the former, in a discussion with Doreen Massey, Hall outlined ‘two distinct conjunctures, separated by the crisis of the 1970s’: ‘the post-war period dominated by the welfare state, public ownership and wealth redistribution through taxation was one conjuncture; the neoliberal, market-forces era unleashed by Thatcher and Reagan was another’. While this identifies a conjuncture as akin to an era, in the more refined sense that Hall uses, it identifies the ‘specific and distinctive shape’ when ‘different social, political, economic and ideological contradictions [. . .] come together’ (Hall and Massey, 2010: 57). In criminology, the fullest account of this is of course in Policing the Crisis. Hall sees that book as one of the first texts in English to use conjunctural analysis, even though he notes that in it, ‘almost casually, almost by chance, we hit on the moment of transition between two major conjunctures’ (in Jhally, 2016: 336). Policing the Crisis analysed the moment of mugging in the generation of public consent through the media to the emergence of law and order society and authoritarian populism. Mugging, and law and order, condensed or symbolized the crisis, which is understood in the context of social anxiety about race and migration, combined with British economic and imperial decline and the changing role of the state. While Hall never called this a multicultural conjuncture, I contend that in Policing the Crisis and in his other writings on race and policing, he reads crises as centrally framed by and through race. As he noted himself, the 1978 book was:

one of the first moments in cultural studies when the question of race and culture really came to the centre [. . .] [It] raise[s] the questions of the mugger to a more general level. It starts to say, this is about the crisis around the questions of race [. . .] it gives the centrality to racial distinctions, which are usually thought of as separate from class distinctions.

Among sympathetic readers of Hall there is a degree of disagreement about the relationship between conjuncture and context. For Grossberg conjunctural analysis is a critical practice that is about more than ‘mere context’ as he puts it. In this formulation a context seeks to understand an event as the product of histories that precede the event—it is ‘the beginning and the end of our researches. The trajectory from the beginning to the end provides the measure of our success at mapping, at arriving at a better description/understanding of the context’ (Grossberg, 2006: 3). A conjuncture is a moment or a period where knowledge can be articulated in relation to political struggles (Grossberg, 2007). This latter point is key because while Hall’s public interventions are too short to develop conjunctural analysis, and could be seen as ‘just’ contextualizing, their purpose in an applied or public arena is clearly to intervene in the politics of race and policing narrowly, as well as raising wider concerns about law and justice, and race and nation. Slack (1996: 126, emphasis in original), however, makes a stronger case for contextualizing in arguing that what a cultural study does is to ‘map the context—not in the sense of situating a phenomenon in a context, but in [. . .] mapping the very identity that brings the context into focus’.

The other key theoretical resource is articulation. For Slack (1996) this is both a theory and a method in Hall’s work; as a theory it seeks to avoid either reductionism and/or essentialism while as a method it suggests ways of contextualizing. Hall (cited in Clarke, 2015: 277) put it this way himself:

By the term ‘articulation’, I mean a connection or link which is not necessarily given in all cases, as a law or a fact of life, but which requires particular conditions of existence to appear at all, which has to be positively sustained by specific processes, which is not ‘eternal’ but has to be constantly renewed, which can under some circumstances disappear or be overthrown, leading to the old linkages being dissolved and new connections—re-articulations—being forged.

Importantly, this speaks to the contingent nature of articulations in the ideological and cultural spheres—they require work to construct and to maintain; they are not given for all time, they are not ‘guaranteed’ to have effects and, in particular, they can be dis- and re-articulated (Clarke, 2015). ⁴

In his public interventions Hall is concerned with a radical focus on contextualization/re-contextualization, combined with dis- and re-articulation. In his UNESCO essay Hall (1980a) used articulation in the dual sense of ‘joining together’ as well as ‘giving expression to’. Without using words such as theory, or concepts like conjuncture and articulation, this is what he is ‘operationalizing’ through his public activities in race and policing. That is, he underscores how things are or can be ‘joined together’ in a different frame, in order to raise questions about the operation of state power and legitimacy, and of imperial and colonial histories, as well as how race ‘gives expression’ to those things. A crucial point is that the particular is not just framed within the general; rather the two are seen as intricately and necessarily linked. Extensions of this line of thinking are evident in various works such as Hillyard’s (1985) analysis of the colonial roots of policing in Northern Ireland, Ryan’s (2013) stress on ‘pressure from below’ through family campaigns for justice or Scraton’s (2016) account of the independent Hillsborough inquiry. These showcase a critical criminological perspective that seeks to bring the state and history back into an analysis of what might otherwise be treated as just particular cases.

Reconfiguring race and policing

Although Hall had multiple public engagements in race and policing cases, for present purposes I focus only on two of those. In one he is named as an adviser to a local inquiry on Policing in Hackney. This is the report of an Independent Committee of Inquiry (1989) established by the Roach Family Support Campaign (RFSC). The campaign followed from the death of Colin Roach, a 21-year-old black man, in Stoke Newington (North London) police station in January 1983.When in late 1983 an inquest jury decided by a majority of 8–2 on a verdict of suicide, the RFSC appealed for a public inquiry. They also wrote to the Home Secretary criticizing the way the police had treated Colin’s parents, whose complaint was referred to the Police Complaints Board, though in 1984 it decided that there would be no disciplinary action against any of the police officers involved. In 1985 the campaign group set up its independent inquiry, with the support of the local Labour council, Hackney, after repeated refusals by the Home Office for a public inquiry. ⁵ The format of the independent inquiry, which was launched in 1985, seems to have been modelled on National Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL) ⁶ type inquiries, entailing an expert and diverse panel taking evidence in an investigative manner to arrive at reasonable inferences and conclusions. Why Hall was an adviser to the inquiry, rather than a panellist, is not known, though it is possible his then recent or ongoing work with another inquiry into the 1985 riots in Handsworth, Birmingham could have limited his time. Hall provides a foreword to the published report of the RFSC inquiry (Independent Committee of Inquiry, 1989). As this is one of the few instances in the range of public engagements he had where he is a sole author, it provides a valuable insight into the way he articulated theory in a concrete or specific case.

The second case is the much better known major public inquiry into the death of Stephen Lawrence. This took evidence in 1998 and produced a widely discussed report in 1999 (Macpherson, 1999). Yet it is perhaps typical of Hall’s public activities across decades that the document he co-wrote is nowhere cited in Macpherson (1999), is not listed among the evidence and there is no copy of it in the official records of Macpherson in the UK National Archive. Hall came into this work through a commission by the lawyers for Duwayne Brooks (the friend of Stephen Lawrence who was with him on the night he was killed in South London in 1993), and they told me they invited Hall because, ‘[h]e may just be the best known person [on race]’. They felt they needed his expertise due to a concern that:

It was clear the inquiry panel didn’t have a grip on race. There wasn’t a structure in place to explain this [how Duwayne was treated by the police] to the inquiry [. . .] to explain why the police had acted in a racist way towards Duwayne—so we decided that the way to do this was to gather expert evidence. ⁷

In 1998 Hall worked with two colleagues then at the Open University, Eugene McLaughlin and Gail Lewis, to produce a short report for the legal team for Brooks. While it was not officially evidence to Macpherson, it was important for the legal team who found it ‘very impactful [. . .] [it] gave us an enormous confidence because we were really small in this massive inquiry, while the main teams had lots of representation [. . .] [It had] a dual role—it gave us confidence and a steer.’ ⁸

Hall was called into both inquiries because of his renown as a pre-eminent public intellectual, such as his work on the BBC, and numerous public speaking roles, all of which seem to have been better known than his academic work, including Policing the Crisis. By the time of both inquiries he had already been active in public meetings on policing issues in Birmingham in the 1970s, while he was based at the University of Birmingham. He had also delivered a public lecture for the Cobden Trust in 1979 that was published as Drifting into a Law and Order Society (Hall, 1980b) and served as a member of two independent inquires. However, even in Hall’s voluminous writings all these activities are barely mentioned and went largely ‘under the radar’. ⁹ Thus, it appears that Hall was asked to assist in Hackney and in Macpherson (1999) not because he was known as having given his time in other similar roles but mainly due to his public reputation as a critical thinker.

Hall’s public roles exemplify his desire to intervene in political issues and debates, rather than treat such matters at only a theoretical level. Intervention is a key word in this. In the introduction to Policing the Crisis the authors declare it to be an intervention in the battleground of ideas, and David Scott saw it as one of Hall’s key contributions in commenting that Hall is ‘less the author of books than the author of interventions’ (cited in Alexander, 2009: 459, emphasis in original). In mapping or understanding the context of race and policing in and since the 1970s Hall was intervening in a politically charged arena in academia and beyond, as is evident in Gilroy (1987), for example. In the specific setting or context of London, Hall was of course fully aware of the specific geographies as well as wider histories of race and place. In the 1970s and 1980s Hackney was one of the main areas regarded as a ‘symbolic location’ in London (Keith, 1993). This term and such places were key sites that carried different meanings—as ‘no go’ areas for the police, or as places of black community life and counter-culture. The local police stations in such areas, such as Stoke Newington in Hackney, attained a reputation of notoriety as locations where black people were framed by the police, or even died in custody. This is the context in which the death of Colin Roach is placed in Policing in Hackney. It is also part of the frame for the Macpherson (1999) report’s finding of institutional racism in the police and the police’s failures in the case of racist murders such as those of youngsters Rolan Adams in 1991 and Rohit Duggal in 1992 in South London, neither of which received any notable mainstream media coverage. ¹⁰

While several witnesses, as well as Stephen’s mother, mentioned the term stereotyping to Macpherson, the main echo between the Hall et al. (1998) report and Macpherson is, unsurprisingly, in the chapter on Brooks. Hall et al. combined a structural analysis with a psychosocial inflection to account for the persistent stereotyping of black men. Both elements reflect the interests of the three authors though it is clear that the former draws on Hall et al.’s (1978) analysis, ¹¹ while the latter reflects some of Hall’s other work at the time, such as his contribution to Open University teaching on representation and stereotyping (Hall, 1997). The 1998 report maintains that the stereotyping process was evidenced by police descriptions of Brooks as ‘aggressive’, ‘intimidating’ and ‘excitable’. Hall et al. (1998: 9) conclude that the police treated a distressed person as intimidating, a potential mugger or as unreliable and un-cooperative; all of these bear the hallmark of the racial stereotyping of a young black man because he was part of a category of people who are ‘never publicly conceptualised as victims of crime’. Macpherson (1999) reached a similar view in deciding that the police treated Brooks poorly because they saw him as a young black man involved in a gang fight rather than as a victim and a key witness. The police failed to see him as a traumatized victim. Thus the inquiry was ‘driven to the conclusion that Mr Brooks was stereotyped as a young black man exhibiting unpleasant hostility and agitation’ (Macpherson, 1999: para. 5.12).

Hall et al. (1998) did contextualize racial stereotyping in a policing context, but another source better fits the argument of this article about Hall’s use of theory—an article he wrote around the same time for the History Workshop Journal (Hall, 1999). Written more as historical contextualization and to some extent a commentary, the 1999 article does not necessarily use terms such as conjuncture or articulation, but it reflects the deployment of theoretical tools that reveal the nature of his theorist-activist engagement. This is evident on the first page. While it is titled ‘From Scarman to Stephen Lawrence’, the article (1999) begins by seemingly undermining or calling into question its own title. It proposes that the appropriate analytical periodization of events is not, as the title indicates, from around 1980/1981 to the late 1990s, or even from one public inquiry into race and policing to another. Rather it locates, or contextualizes the murder of Stephen Lawrence and the Macpherson report in relation to the arrival of the SS Windrush in Tilbury in 1948. The 50th anniversary of that was celebrated in 1998 as the dawn of the supposedly multicultural era in Britain, with the arrival of West Indian migrants to the ‘mother country’. In reconfiguring the perspective in this way Hall alters and re-articulates the context, making the case of Stephen Lawrence something broader than just policing, or even race and policing, as it largely is in the Hall et al. (1998) report.

In making this move Hall effectively recontextualizes the case of Stephen Lawrence as part of a longue duree that reveals or exposes the relation of citizens to the state and in particular the ways in which supposedly equal (legal) citizens are treated, or regarded unequally by the state. The racist attack on Stephen Lawrence is one instance of the under-protection of black citizens. Significantly, writing many years before the Black Lives Matter campaign, Hall is already outlining a perspective along those lines by making both lateral and vertical connections to multiple black deaths across time and space in Britain. In locating the murder of Stephen Lawrence within a spate of deaths of black people—mostly men, often young—sometimes in connection with the police, sometimes in violent racist attacks—he stretches the temporal context beyond the two decades from Scarman to Macpherson, and the spatial context from South London to Great Britain. Consequently, Hall’s analysis is belied by the title he used. Instead he narrates a wider story of the limits of multiculturalism, and its difficulties—though in a manner quite different from the ‘backlash’ against diversity prominent since the 1980s—to locate it as a failure on the part of the state to view and treat black people as equal citizens.

This is about more than the police, and relations between police and black communities, though that has continued to be ‘a catalogue of disasters, marked by mistrust, prejudice and disrespect, often leading to tragedy’ (Hall, 1999: 188). Policing and the rule of law have what he calls a ‘symptomatic value’ about the relation of citizens to the state. In that vein it illuminates how racialized difference is ‘being negotiated at a deeper level’ (1999: 189) that challenges claims of Britain drifting into a tolerant multicultural society (recall this is the time of New Labour’s celebration of a new inclusive Britain), a view that cannot hold because of severe, sometimes fatal, racialized effects of the logics of racism and exclusion. This includes policing but stretches beyond that when Hall (1999: 192) presciently identifies a persistent and unresolved ‘English nationalism that feels beleaguered and abandoned’. In this framing there is a gesture at the wider conjuncture that straddles and stretches beyond the two eras or periods of the post-war welfare state and the neo-liberalism of the 1980s that he identified in another context. Race, nation and empire are bound together in the British social fabric, and national psyche, in ways that systematically neglect the precarity of black lives and the experience of violent racism. Again, while Hall did not call this a multicultural conjuncture by centring race as the place or the moment where contradictions in law, history, nation and society are condensed, that is what I think he is pointing to.

One of the reasons for focusing on these two engagements is to highlight a parallel between them that he made but did not labour in his subsequent writings, though it again reveals how perceptive his analyses look in retrospect. Various authors have argued that the reason that the case of Stephen Lawrence became the focus on a public inquiry is because the media and the police could not simply pigeonhole Lawrence within the gallery of racialized/criminalized black demonology, from mugging in the 1970s to yardies in the 1990s (Gilroy, 1987; Hall et al., 1978; Keith, 1993). In Holohan’s (2005) media analysis the ultimately different treatment of Stephen shows how some black people can be ‘whitened’ in media discourse if they can be fitted into tropes that separate them from the racialized stereotype of unruly and dangerous black men. Yet in his foreword Hall (1989) was already drawing attention to the differential value placed on black lives, such as that of Colin Roach. Suggesting that the official account is so ‘fishy’ as he calls it, he adds: ‘[i]t is open to doubt, for example, whether any Home Secretary in his right mind would calmly and quietly acquiesce in such an implausible story as an adequate explanation of the death of his own son in similar circumstances’ (Hall, 1989: 12). In making Colin Roach into someone who could have been anyone’s son Hall is clearly posing the question of whether law and justice do apply equally to black people. His comment anticipates the ways that the case of Stephen Lawrence was treated as ‘different’ because he was a young black man who could not be stereotyped—he wished to train as an architect and had a ‘conventional’ family background. Reinforced by the prominent campaign by the Daily Mail he could not just be reduced to a ‘ragamuffin’ (as Brooks seems to have been seen and treated). Thus, it seems unlikely to be just a coincidence that Hall had already made just that point to the Macpherson inquiry (Hall et al., 1998).

In the case of Colin Roach Hall did something different. He recontextualized it by simultaneously localizing and nationalizing it by setting the specific story of Hackney within the frame of black community experiences of policing, and of racism. He points to the short-term history of policing in Stoke Newington and the multiple complaints of over-policing of black people locally, and makes it an issue of trust and confidence of the local population in the police:

The death of Colin Roach did not take place in a vacuum. It happened in a place, in a community, in a context which has its own history. This history is part and parcel of ‘the Colin Roach story’. Stoke Newington police station has a notoriously poor reputation in relation to the policing of the Black community and the handling of legitimate grievances and protests in the Hackney area.

He nationalizes it by pointing out that the Policing in Hackney ‘Report is well aware that this is not an isolated story. It could be repeated in any inner-city area with a significant Black population in Britain today’ (Hall, 1989: 13–14). Consequentially, his intervention makes a wider claim about police and legitimacy (even though he does not use that term here). He underlines that no one in authority has any idea or explanation of how Colin Roach died. Policing in Hackney also cannot offer an explanation, but nor can it provide an alternative narrative because the official one is so implausible. Moreover, the police aside, Hall suggests that this one death calls into question the inquest/coroner’s role in the UK legal process because it also was unable to provide any satisfactory account or findings of facts. As before, in putting his finger on these issues Hall is highlighting concerns that were the subjects of regular protests in the 1970s and 1980s—police accountability and the coroners’ courts (Ryan, 2013). Then, as now, the echoes around justice and accountability are clear, such as the shooting of Mark Duggan in Tottenham in 2011, or the deaths at Hillsborough in 1989 (Scraton, 2016). These lend weight to Hall’s (1999: 188) comment on relations between the police and black communities: ‘[v]ery little seems to have changed’.

In these moves Hall articulates and, more importantly, dis- and re-articulates a series of relationships. At one level, in constructing Colin Roach as an everyman he shifts the gaze away from stereotyped black masculinity (‘mad and bad’). By making an individual case an emblem about justice he re-sets or re-articulates the question as an innately political one about race, state and nation in quite blunt terms:

The present Government seems to believe that the ‘rule of law’ (which obliges the state itself to be bound and constrained by the law) is the same as ‘law and order’ (which is nothing but a convenient political catch-phrase meaning that the police and the courts should support the state, whatever it does, and protect it against any inconvenience).

In addition, he commented that inner-city areas like Hackney are:

places in which the state itself, and administrations and authorities of various kinds, constantly intervene, always in the interest of influencing what happens on the ground in the direction which suits them, but rarely in order to strengthen justice and equality for the ordinary citizens who live in these harassed communities.

Conclusion

The two instances of Hall’s public engagements discussed above show how he intervened in the politics of crime, policing and race by recontextualizing and dis- and re-articulating a set of relations around them. It would be facile to see Hall’s contextualizing strategy as always seeking to widen the canvas—that is, as setting particular instances within a larger frame or conjuncture. His analysis was subtler than that. He simultaneously and strategically widened and sometimes narrowed the frame. Thus, the death of Colin Roach is about the rule of law and police accountability, but it is also a local story about policing in Hackney. Hall does not simply blur the local into the national; he draws out specifics as well as generalities. In making both cases into narratives about race, state and nation—of Englishness or Britain—he centres race into the national story. While his frequent use of biographical and personal illustrations is less in evidence in the two examples discussed here, Hall interweaves the personal and the political in a ‘post-colonial’ outlook or perspective. This is well captured in this passage when he noted that:

people like me who came to England in the 1950s have been there for centuries; symbolically we have been there for centuries. I was coming home at the bottom of the English cup of tea [. . .] There are thousands of others besides me that are you know, the cup of tea itself. Because they don’t grow it in Lancashire, you know [. . .] there is no English history without the other history.

Although he did not spell it out as such, Hall’s approach underscores that Colin Roach and Stephen Lawrence are also part of both ‘the other story’ and of English history, and they are essentially intertwined.

My claim is that Hall’s strategizing points the way to what anti-racism in criminology might entail or require. Race and culture are not ‘add ons’ but form the fabric in which crime and policing are to be thought about. However, while race is central it is never ‘just’ race in a narrow sense. In engaging in a cultural politics of articulation, or more accurately of dis- and re-articulation, Hall offers clues on what an anti-racist criminology might do, without any noticeable concern as to whether he was ‘in’ criminology or not, or what its boundaries are. His work on public cases and contributing to inquiries could be part of the criminology ‘from below’ that Ryan (2013) invokes. Yet Hall’s theorizing of the concrete is not about ‘above’ or below’, ‘top–down’ or ‘bottom–up’, ‘national’ or ‘local’. Rather, he transcends and cuts across all of those and fuses them in a distinctive way. Nonetheless this does not mean that one can simply divine how to ‘apply Stuart Hall’. Contextualizing is a concrete and radical tactic, not a superficial exercise (Grossberg, 2006). Alongside this attention to the concrete, Hall’s use of concepts like conjuncture and articulation call for the analysis and linking of specificities into the appropriate and convincing frame, and for finding ways to dis- and re-articulate connections between race, crime and policing.