霍尔与文化研究《霍尔与文化研究》英文序言1----英国伯明翰大学马丁•史尊雅(M

Preface 26th Jan. 2008

It is a great honour as a Professor in the University of Birmingham England to be asked to write a Preface for a book about Stuart Hall whose own connections with Birmingham are expressed so clearly in this text. It is an even greater honour to be writing a preface for a book by Jennie Guijie Wu with whom I had the pleasure of working for some months in Birmingham.

It is particularly appropriate that Jennie should be writing about Hall and that this the first serious study of Hall’s work in China should be published at this time. While being the ‘father of Cultural Studies’ Hall was always aware of the importance of his own diasporic background with his early years in Jamaica and his seminal experience as an immigrant within the UK. Hall was one of the earliest writers to recognise what we now call ‘globalisation’ and the importance of movement and trans-nationalism to the understanding of culture in all contexts. It was his own very significant experience of difference within the British context that enabled him to develop his theories of difference within the study of culture and cultural artefacts and it is this understanding of the politics of difference which has as Jennie so clearly demonstrates informed all of his work both before and after his coining of the phrase.

This sense of difference and the politics of difference should not stop however at the study of British culture or the interaction and experience of immigrant communities in Britain. It is of itself a global concept and one which as demonstrated in this book has applications across the world including in contemporary China. I have found the concept useful in my own studies of festivals including that of the Chinese New Year in British cities and Jennie shows how it can be developed in the understanding of the role of the media in contemporary China . We are all living diasporic lives to a greater or lesser extent. No society is immune from the movement of people and no country can ignore the fact that it will be to a greater or lesser extent multi-cultural. What is important to recognise however is that the nature of that multi-culturalism is going to be very different in different countries and different parts of the world. Hall’s ideas therefore cannot be simply lifted off the shelf from his time in Birmingham or in his subsequent work and applied to China to the States or to any other space. His work like that of all theorists needs to be understood and reworked we could perhaps say ‘translated’ for different societies and that is why this particular work is so important. In this text we have Jennie’s attempt to rework Hall’s theories for a contemporary Chinese context and that is also part of the work of globalisation and so important for the development of a truly international scholarship.