Hall’s papers were deposited at the Cadbury Research Library in 2018 and opened in 2019. Consisting of 102 boxes of materials relating to Hall’s teaching, research, his involvement with Black arts, and other personalia (including correspondence, appointment diaries, and honorary degrees). Details can be found here.
The collection includes unpublished reports, essays, scripts and speeches; teaching material; correspondence; editorial material; notes; ephemera and cuttings; and both audio recordings and video cassettes; covering a period from c.1950 to 2014. While the Stuart Hall Archive is only a medium-sized archive, it is incredibly rich in content, with potential to impact academics and others across the globe.
Structuring Hall’s archive has involved a great deal of difficult decision-making; the archive has been in a state of flux over the past few years as materials have needed to be reorganised under new themes and headings. Hall’s research is notoriously wide-ranging, and spans an array of interests and subject matter across several decades. Much of Hall’s work shifted between forms, (e.g. many works first produced as conference papers were only eventually published in periodicals such as The New Statesman), and this can cause issues in determining how certain material should be catalogued, such as deciding whether a document should be classed as a publication, public talk or annotated draft.
Stuart Hall is an incredibly well-known academic and cultural theorist and due to his work on cultural studies, race and politics, many researchers are excited to view Hall’s archives and utilise new discoveries in their own work. The expectations and interests of researchers can vary widely. Data protection and copyright - especially with regards to digitised material produced by The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) - can hinder the accessibility of much of the material within the collection which can be frustrating for researchers. Despite such obstacles, there is a wealth of new knowledge to be found in Hall’s archive , including a huge array of exceptional documents such as draft material, correspondence, and Hall’s own notebooks, which have been digitised for the public to peruse.
The archive also provides an opportunity to explore Hall’s relationship to the Caribbean, his research and collaborations with academics from the region throughout his decades-long career, as well as writings and collected material from his travel and connections with the Caribbean diaspora. Ephemera, magazine clippings, handwritten notes, conference attendance and correspondence with Caribbean intellectuals provide insights into the influence Hall’s identity had on his work throughout his life as well as articulations of the Black British experience through the archive.
Hall’s connections to Birmingham are also apparent in the archive evidence of his time as Director of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) in the 1970s and many of his other local connections and interests. The archive documents some of Hall’s most influential texts created during his time in Birmingham, such as ‘Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order’ (1978) which was produced out of the ‘Mugging Group’ seminars at the CCCS and analysed a moral panic relating to mugging in Handsworth, Birmingham. A photograph of Stuart Hall hangs in The Exchange (a university-owned building in Centenary Square, Birmingham City Centre), which shows Stuart Hall at his desk in the Muirhead Tower (University of Birmingham) in the 1970s. The photo was taken by Vanley Burke, a British-Jamaican photographer based in Birmingham whose iconic images present the images of Black community and everyday life in Handsworth Birmingham during the 1960s onwards and presents a vibrant image of life in Birmingham. Hall wrote about Burke on a variety of occasions in papers which can themselves be viewed in the archive. Another significant presence in the archive is Ten.8, a photographic journal founded in 1978 in Birmingham which aimed to provide a forum for photographers in the West Midlands. Stuart Hall was involved with the journal as a regular contributor of essays, and served as the editor of the 1992 edition: ‘Critical Decade: Black British Photography in the 80s’.
The visitors and researchers who have used the archives in a number of ways have provided me with a new understanding of how archives can be used to inspire, express emotions and expand the ‘living archive’ Hall describes in his 2001 essay ‘Constituting an Archive’. The living archive does not remain stagnant but is instead always subject to change due to reinterpretations of the archive, including through the work of archivists. Artists and poets have used the archive to think about their own connections to particular global and local histories and their identities through their creative media, showing how archives can present new ways of relating a historical moment to our own histories and present conjuncture. The legacy of Hall’s archive is one that will continue to grow and change as further work is undertaken and discoveries made over the decades to come.
-Rebecca Adams, SHAP Archivist, Cadbury Research Library