From his arrival in Britain in the 1950s and involvement in the New Left, to founding the field of cultural studies and examining race and identity in the 1990s and early 2000s, Stuart Hall has been central to shaping many of the cultural and political debates of our time. Essential Essays—a landmark two-volume set—brings together Stuart Hall's most influential and foundational works. Spanning the whole of his career, these volumes reflect the breadth and depth of his intellectual and political projects while demonstrating their continued vitality and importance. Volume 2: Identity and Diaspora draws from Hall's later essays, in which he investigated questions of colonialism, empire, and race. It opens with “Gramsci's Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity,” which frames the volume and finds Hall rethinking received notions of racial essentialism. In addition to essays on multiculturalism and globalization, black popular culture, and Western modernity's racial underpinnings, Volume 2 contains three interviews with Hall, in which he reflects on his life to theorize his identity as a colonial and diasporic subject.

The Protest Makers: The British Nuclear Disarmament Movement of 1958-1965, Twenty Years On explores the political and ideological dimensions of the Movement and the problems posed for achieving radical change in modern Britain. This book is divided into four parts that analyze the attitudes and activities of Movement supporters some 20 years later. The first part deals with the rise and decline of the Nuclear Disarmament Movement in Britain. The second part defines and analyzes the complexity of the Movement's composition and then discusses the differing conceptions and motivations of activists between 1958 and 1965. This part contains ordinary supporters' recollections and views of the Movement. The third part outlines the various "tendencies" within the Movement as characterized by the leadership figures themselves. The fourth part draws together some of the main themes emerging from empirical and theoretical examination of the Movement. This part focuses the importance and political significance of the Movement.

Any life story, whether a written autobiography or an oral testimony, is shaped not only by the reworkings of experience through memory and re-evaluation, but also art. Any communication has to use shared conventions not only of language itself but also the more complex expectations of 'genre': of the forms expected within a given context and type of communication. This collection of essays by internationl academics draws on a wide range of disciplines in the social sciences and the humanities to examine how far the expectations and forms of genre shape different kinds of autobiography and influence what messages they can convey. After investigating the problem of genre definition, and tracing the evolution of genre as a concept, contributors explore such issues as: * How far can we argue that what people narrate in their autobiographical stories is selected and shaped by the reportoire of genre available to them? * To what extent is oral autobiography shaped by its social and cultural context? * What is the relationship between autobiographical sources and the ethnographer? Narrative and Genre presents exciting new debates in an emerging field and will encourage international and interdisciplinary debate. Its authors and contributors are scholars from the fields of anthropology, cultural studies, literary analysis, psychoanalysis, social history, and sociology.

This book draws together social, cultural, and political history to show us how we came to have a moral, political, and social responsibility toward the hungry. Vernon forcefully reminds us how many perished from hunger in the empire and reveals how their history was intricately connected with the precarious achievements of Britain’s welfare state.

Marxism and Ethics is a comprehensive and highly readable introduction to the rich and complex history of Marxist ethical theory as it has evolved over the last century and a half. Paul Blackledge argues that Marx's ethics of freedom underpin his revolutionary critique of capitalism. Marx's conception of agency, he argues, is best understood through the lens of Hegel's synthesis of Kantian and Aristotelian ethical concepts. Marx's rejection of moralism is not, as suggested in crude materialist readings of his work, a dismissal of the free, purposive, subjective dimension of action. Freedom, for Marx, is both the essence and the goal of the socialist movement against alienation, and freedom's concrete modern form is the movement for real democracy against the capitalist separation of economics and politics. At the same time, Marxism and Ethics is also a distinctive contribution to, and critique of, contemporary political philosophy, one that fashions a powerful synthesis of the strongest elements of the Marxist tradition. Drawing on Alasdair MacIntyre's early contributions to British New Left debates on socialist humanism, Blackledge develops an alternative ethical theory for the Marxist tradition, one that avoids the inadequacies of approaches framed by Kant on the one hand and utilitarianism on the other.

First published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

A key component of social life, discourse mediates the processes of class formation and social conflict. Drawing on dialogic theory and building on the work of E. P. Thompson, Marc W. Steinberg argues for the importance of incorporating discursive analysis into the historical reconstruction of class experience. Amending models of collective action, he offers new insights on how discourse shapes the dynamics of popular protest. To support his thesis, he presents studies of two English trade groups in the 1820s: cotton spinners from Lancashire factory towns and London silk weavers.For each case, Steinberg closely examines the labor process, industrial organization, social life, community politics, discursive struggles, and collective actions. By describing how workers shared experiences of exploitation and oppression in their daily lives, he shows how discourses of contention were products of struggle and how they framed possibilities for collective action. Embracing work in literary theory, sociocultural psychology, and cultural studies, Fighting Words claims a middle ground between postmodern and materialist analyses.

These essays gather together Gellner's thinking on the connection between philosophy and life and they approach the topic from a number of directions including a discussion of individuals including Chomsky, Piaget and Eysenck.