125th Anniversary Scholarship for Black British Researchers - Stuart Hall, Racism and Capitalism in Postcolonial Britain

This PhD project examines the relationship between race and capitalism in postcolonial Britain through the work of Stuart Hall. With an interdisciplinary outlook, the PhD project will contribute to contemporary debates in fields such as political theory and political economy.

Scholars and activists are now engaged in fierce debates over the relationship between ‘race’ and class, between practices of racialized domination and the systemic imperatives of capital. Stark disagreements remain over how best to understand the entanglement of capitalism and racism — i.e., whether that relation is a necessary one, or whether it reflects the contingent developments of the modern economic order. This PhD project will intervene in these discussions by returning to the work of Stuart Hall. While often known for his thinking on diasporic Caribbean identity and for his critique of Thatcherism, Hall spent decades grappling with Marxism’s inattention to the problems of ‘race’ and racism. In particular, he argued that the breakdown of the social-democratic consensus in 1970s Britain could not be understood without reckoning more deeply with the colonial relations that fuelled industrialization and continued to shape British politics through its imperial decline. Yet many of Hall’s insights on this front remain unpublished and understudied, in part because he preferred to write a series of “interventions” in existing debates rather than stand-alone monographs. 

The PhD researcher will fill this gap by drawing on Stuart Hall’s archive and on the papers of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. Both archives are hosted by the University’s Cadbury Research Library, where they were recently made publicly available.

In particular, the PhD researcher would seek to answer the following questions: 

RQ1: How did Stuart Hall’s thinking about the intersections of ‘race’ and ‘class’ develop through his career? 

RQ2: How did Hall’s work on the Caribbean inform his account of British capitalism? 

RQ3: Which aspects of Hall’s writings, if any, might help us to understand and diagnose contemporary capitalist formations structured in racial dominance? 

Methodology

This project will require extensive archival research. The PhD researcher will critically evaluate the theoretical toolkit that Hall developed to understand colonial capitalism, postwar British capitalism, and the racisms that they mobilized in discrete historical conjunctures. Finally, they will also offer preliminary thoughts on how Hall’s analyses might “intervene” in contemporary debates about racial capitalism.

Training Support and Development Opportunities

The PhD researcher will have the full support of the supervision team. They will also be encouraged to get involved with the Stuart Hall Archive Project, including with the project’s fulltime archivist and with their regular seminar series and events. In addition to departmental training courses, they will benefit from a vibrant research environment in POLSIS.

The Supervisory Team

Sarah Bufkin is an Assistant Professor in Political Theory who works on racialization and racisms. She has written on racism and ideology critique, whiteness and inequality in racialized markets. Ruben Gonzalez-Vicente is an Associate Professor in Political Economy who researches the international political economy of the Caribbean, with a focus on the region's relations with China.

Funding Details

The University of Birmingham is proud to celebrate its remarkable 125-year journey and announce the launch of a groundbreaking scholarship initiative designed to empower and support Black British researchers in their pursuit of doctoral education.

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