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(Received 13 August 2023; accepted 14 August 2023)
Serendipitously I found myself within the space of a few months reading the 1992 paper by Stuart Hall ‘New Ethnicities’ (Hall, 1992) for a journal club discussion, viewing the Tate Britain exhibition ‘Sixty Years: The Unfinished Conversation’ which tracks the work of Stuart Hall through the film work of Sir John Akomfrah, and sitting in the audience of ‘The 6th Annual Stuart Hall Public Conversation with Jaqueline Rose’ which happened to take place in the anniversary month of his birth and death. Perhaps it was not simple coincidence, this presence of Hall at this time. His work speaks of intersectionality, identity, diaspora and dislocation; finding a place where you can be yourself and equally be part of something wider, and these are fundamental themes for our current fractured political and social context.
The 6th Annual Stuart Hall Public Conversation began with a paper presented by Jacqueline Rose entitled ‘What is a Subject? Politics and Psyche after Stuart Hall’ and was followed by a discussion with Dr Sharon Numa, Psychoanalyst and Fellow of the British Psychoanalytical Society. Rose, who is a Professor of Humanities and co-director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, University of London and Associate Member of the British Institute of Psychoanalysis, gave a wide-ranging discourse on the work of Stuart Hall, starting with his early experience of witnessing the migrants from Jamaica and the Caribbean disembarking at Paddington station and tumbling out onto the streets of London not long after he himself had arrived in the UK. This gave him pause to reflect on his migrant identity and the things that tied him and distanced him from this group of hopefuls as they stepped into this new world. Rose highlighted the point that they carried with them the ‘Transgenerational Histories’ encrypted in their unconscious, those histories of colonialism, slavery and racism lying dormant ready to be re-enacted in t