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Selected Writings on Visual Arts and Culture

Detour to the Imaginary

Stuart Hall author Gilane Tawadros editor

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Duke University Press

Published:2nd Aug '24

£95.00

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Selected Writings on Visual Arts and Culture cover

Stuart Hall’s work on culture, politics, race, and media is familiar to readers throughout the world. Equally important was his decades-long commitment to visual art. As the first collection to bring together Hall’s work on the visual, this volume assembles two dozen of Hall’s essays, lectures, reviews, catalog texts, and conversations on art, film, and photography. Providing rare insights into Hall’s engagement with the “radically different” intellectual and aesthetic space of the visual imaginary, these works articulate the importance of the visual as a site of contestation at the same time as it is a space in which Black artists and filmmakers reframe questions about diaspora, identity, and globalization. Selected Writings on Visual Arts and Culture demonstrates the breadth and range of Hall’s thinking on art, film, photography, archives, and museums. In so doing, it enables us to arrive at radical and innovative ways of understanding the world.

“This collection corrects the widespread misperception that Stuart Hall’s late-career art writings were a mere add-on to the heavy lifting accomplished by his 1970s work on Marxism and sociology. Gilane Tawadros’s panoramic selection reveals how extensively Hall turned his attention to art, photography, film, museums, and architecture to examine questions of diaspora, identity, and globalization. This volume is of enormous significance.” -- Kobena Mercer, author of * Travel & See: Black Diaspora Art Practices since the 1980s *
“Stuart Hall’s writings on visual arts and culture try to imagine what a genuinely emancipatory cultural practice would be like. How to think structures of feeling and imagination and dissolve the categories of race, representation, gender, and identity, categories that Hall did more than anyone both to advance and to problematize. Hall’s voice and image thread through several of my films and artworks. His focus on the distinctive voice of the Caribbean artist, his insistence on the fluidity of the diasporic imagination, were foundational for artists of my generation. Indeed, it is impossible to really think and experience Black British art without the keystones which this collection of writings presents.” -- Isaac Julien
"A rich group of texts, addressing global capitalism, race and diaspora and how ‘the language of the imaginary’ can be a framework for developing new insights into political and economic relationships of power." -- Marko Gluhaich * Frieze *
"Gilane Tawadros . . . is an attentive and appreciative reader who assembled these essays that date back decades yet are still relevant and readable. . . . While every narrative of cultural studies acknowledges Stuart Hall’s importance, this is a good collection of his writing on visual art and a document of urban creativity he witnessed in the last three decades of the 20th century." -- Mike Mosher * Leonardo *

ISBN: 9781478026105

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: 862g

392 pages