Author: Bruce Robbins

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...

The 60s as Founding: On David Bromwich’s How Words Make Things Happen Many years ago, David Bromwich and I conducted a brief correspondence. You can tell how many years ago by the fact that the correspondence took the form of letters, with stamps. The immediate subject, as I remember it, was politics. As I remember, I remarked on the surprising respect that David seemed to have for the lasting political wisdom of the Founding Fathers and the Constitution as guides to present political judgments, a respect which (so soon after the 60s) I found implausible. As I remember, David...