Stuart Hall was born and raised in Jamaica and arrived in Britain on a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford in 1950. In 1958, he left his PhD on Henry James to found the New Left Review, which did much to open a debate about immigration and the politics of identity. Along with Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart he established the first Cultural Studies programme at a British university in Birmingham in 1964, bringing the study of popular culture into the understanding of political and social change.

After spending more than four decades as one of the UK′s leading public intellectuals, Hall retired from formal academic life in 1997 and since then has continued to devote himself to questions of representation, creativity and difference. He became the chair of two foundations, Iniva, the Institute of International Visual Arts, and Autograph ABP, which seeks to promote photographers from culturally diverse backgrounds, and championed the opening of Iniva′s new Rivington Place arts complex in east London in 2007.

THE WORK OF REPRESENTATION - Stuart Hall
Representation, Meaning and Language
Making Meaning, Representing Things
Language and Representation
Sharing the Codes
Theories of Representation
The Language of Traffic Lights
Summary
Saussures Legacy
The Social Part of Language
Critique of Saussures Model
Summary
From Language to Culture: Linguistics to Semiotics
Myth Today
Discourse, Power and the Subject
From Language to Discourse
Historicizing Discourse: Discursive Practices
From Discourse to Power/Knowledge
Summary: Foucault and Representation
Charcot and the Performance of Hysteria
Where is the Subject?
How to Make Sense of Velasquez Las Meninas
The Subject of/in Representation
Conclusion: Representation, Meaning and Language Reconsidered
READING A: Norman Bryson, Language, reflection and still life
READING B: Roland Barthes, The world of wrestling
READING C: Roland Barthes, Myth today
READING D: Roland Barthes, Rhetoric of the image
READING E: Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, New reflections on the revolution of our time
READING F: Elaine Showalter, The performance of hysteriä
RECORDING REALITY: DOCUMENTARY FILM AND TELEVISION - Frances Bonner
Introduction
What Do We Mean By Documentary?
Non-fiction Texts
Defining Documentary
Types of Documentary
Categorising Documentary
Alternative Categories
Ethical Documentary Film-making
Dramatisation and the Documentary
Scripting and Re-enactment in the Documentary
Docudrama
Documentary - An Historic Genre?
Postdocumentary?
Docusoaps
Reality TV
Natural History Documentaries
Documenting Animal Life
Conclusion
READING A: Nichols Bill, The Qualities of Voice
READING B: John Corner, Performing the real: documentary diversions
READING C: Derek Bousé, Historia Fabulosus
THE POETICS AND THE POLITICS OF EXHIBITING OTHER CULTURES - Henrietta Lidchi
Introduction
Establishing Definitions, Negotiating Meanings, Discerning Objects
Introduction
What is a Museum?
What is an Ethnographic Museum?
Objects and Meanings
The Uses of Text
Questions of Context
Summary
Fashioning Cultures: The Poetics of Exhibiting
Introduction
Introducing Paradise
Paradise Regained
Structuring Paradise
Paradise: The Exhibit as Artefact
The Myths of Paradise
Summary
Captivating Cultures: The Politics of Exhibiting
Introduction
Knowledge and Power
Displaying Others
Museums and the Construction of Culture
Colonial Spectacles
Summary
Devising New Models: Museums and Their Futures
Introduction
Anthropology and Colonial Knowledge
The Writing of Anthropological Knowledge
Collections as Partial Truths
Museums and Contact Zones
Art, Artefact and Ownership
Conclusion
READING A: John Tradescant the younger, Extracts from the Musaeum Tradescantianum
READING B: Elizabeth A. Lawrence, His very silence speaks: the horse who survived Custers Last Stand
READING C: Michael OHanlon, Paradise: portraying the New Guinea Highlands
READING D: James Clifford, Paradise
READING E: Annie E. Coombes, Material culture at the crossroads of knowledge: the case of the Benin "bronzes"
READING F: John Picton, To see or Not To See! That is the Question
THE SPECTACLE OF THE OTHER - Stuart Hall
Introduction
Heroes or Villains?
Why Does Difference Matter?
Racializing the Other
Commodity Racism: Empire and the Domestic World
Meanwhile, Down on the Plantation ...
Signifying Racial Difference
Staging Racial Difference: And the Melody Lingered On...
Heavenly Bodies
Stereotyping as a Signifying Practice
Representation, Difference and Power
Power and Fantasy
Fetishism and Disavowal
Contesting a Recialized Regime of Representation
Reversing the Stereotypes
Positive and Negative Images
Through the Eye of Representation
Conclusion
READING A: Anne McClintock, Soap and commodity spectacle
READING B: Richard Dyer, Africä
READING C: Sander Gilman, The deep structure of stereotypes
READING D: Kobena Mercer, Reading racial fetishism
EXHIBITING MASCULINITY - Sean Nixon
Introduction
Conceptualizing Masculinity
Plural Masculinities
Thinking Relationally
Invented Categories
Summary
Discourse and Representation
Discourse, Power/Knowledge and the Subject
Visual Codes of Masculinity
Street Style
Italian-American
Conservative Englishness
Summary
Spectatorship and Subjectivization
Psychoanalysis and Subjectivity
Spectatorship
The Spectacle of Masculinity
The Problem with Psychoanalysis and Film Theory
Techniques of the Self
Consumption and Spectatorship
Sites of Representation
Just Looking
Spectatorship, Consumption and the New Man
Conclusion
READING A: Steve Neale, Masculinity as spectacle
READING B: Sean Nixon, Technologies of looking: retailing and the visual
GENRE AND GENDER: THE CASE OF SOAP OPERA - Christine Gledhill with Vicky Ball
Introduction
Representation and Media Fictions
Fiction and Everyday Life
Fiction as Entertainment
But is it Good For You?
Mass Culture and Gendered Culture
Womens Culture and Mens Culture
Images of Women vs. Real Women
Entertainment as a Capitalist Industry
Dominant Ideology, Hegemony and Cultural Negotiation
The Gendering of Cultural Forms: High Culture vs. Mass Culture
Genre, Representation and Soap Opera
The Genre System
The Genre Product
Genre and Mass-produced Fiction
Genre as Standardization and Differentiation
The Genre Product as Text
Genres and Binary Differences
Genre Boundaries
Signification and Reference
Cultural Verisimilitude, Generic Gerisimilitude and Realism
Media Production and Struggles for Hegemony
Summary
Genres for Women: Te Case of Soap Opera
Genre, Soap Opera and Gender
The Invention of Soap Opera
Womens Culture
Soap Opera as Womens Genre
Soap Operäs Binary Oppositions
Serial Form and Gender Representation
Soap Operäs Address to the Female Audience
Talk vs. Action
Soap Operäs Serial World
Textual Address and the Construction of Subjects
The Ideal Spectator
Female Reading Competence
Cultural Competence and the Implied Reader of the Text
The Social Audience
Conclusion
Soap Opera: A Womans Form No More?
Dissolving Genre Boundaries and Gendered Negotiations
READING A: Tania Modleski, The search for tomorrow in todays soap operas
READING B: Charlotte Brunsdon, Crossroads: notes on soap operä
READING C: Su Holmes and Deborah Jermyn Why not Wife Swap?
Index