Author: Bruce Robbins

One thing people mean when they call something “great” is that it may not be nice. That great and nice don’t get along well together is the point of a scene toward the end of Gabriel García Márquez’s novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. Long after the death of Colonel Aureliano Buendía, soldiers of the Conservative regime come searching for his grandson, who is the last surviving witness of the banana worker massacre committed by that same regime. As they are leaving, one soldier politely asks if he can take as a souvenir one of the little golden fish...

  The feminists of the 1970s, who pioneered the now classic idea that the personal is political, probably also devoted some attention to those of us who wish that our personal had been political, or more political. If so, I didn’t get the memo. But there must be many who would have to confess, with Nora Ephron, that we were wallflowers at the orgy. As we enter our 70s, not having missed the news about climate change and the general dimming of hopes for anything better than human survival, there comes a moment for retrospection, whether intro- or not....

The following was delivered as a talk at a roundtable on June 30, 2021, organized by the Stuart Hall Foundation and Duke University Press, to mark the publication by Duke of Gregor McLennan’s “Stuart Hall: Selected Writings on Marxism.” The event was moderated by Catherine Hall and also featured Brett St Louis and Angela McRobbie as well as Gregor McLennan.   Gregor McLennan describes Stuart Hall as a mediator. Hall “can best be appreciated,” he says, “as a peerless dialectical mediator… He mediated within Marxism—structuralism/ culturalism; economism/ideologism; class/ nonclass social forces—and he mediated between Marxism and various non- and...