Early in Familiar Stranger, Stuart Hall makes a curious claim regarding his legacy. After noting that neither teacher, intellectual, nor politics accurately captures his vocation, he reluctantly accepts cultural theorist as a somewhat apt label. Hall puts it this way: “Nowadays people say cultural theorist, but although I believe in theory as an indispensable critical tool, I have never been interested in producing theory and, in any case, I am not a theorist of any rank in this age of theory, so I regard the designation of cultural theorists more as a polite, convenient postponement, a holding operation, than a well-understood resolution. However, it’s close enough to stand” (13–14). One reads in wonder at Hall demurring his standing as a theorist. Surely he is aware of his importance to the last half-century of theory production, if by theory we mean the ensemble of conceptual frames, analytical innovations, and methodological...

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