Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices

Since 1997 Representation has been the go-to textbook for students learning the tools to question and critically analyze media texts and images. This long-awaited third edition has been updated throughout to engage with the impact of digital technology and culture, and the changes in political culture, social movements and the cultural industries. The new edition includes:

A new preface by Sean Nixon, focusing on digital media, and theories of representation. A new Afterword by Kobena Mercer to Stuart Hall’s classic chapter on ’The Spectacle of the Other’ Revised chapters with additional content on digital media, de-westernising culture, imperialism and BLM, and new readings tying contemporary issues of race, gender and power A new chapter by Nancy Thumim exploring digital forms of self-representation and representation in/of Politics, looking at media spectacle, political imagery, the Me Too movement and Black Lives Matter.

Stuart Hall was born and raised in Jamaica and arrived in Britain on a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford in 1950. In 1958, he left his PhD on Henry James to found the New Left Review, which did much to open a debate about immigration and the politics of identity. Along with Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart he established the first Cultural Studies programme at a British university in Birmingham in 1964, bringing the study of popular culture into the understanding of political and social change.

After spending more than four decades as one of the UK′s leading public intellectuals, Hall had retired from formal academic life in 1997 and since then continued to devote himself to questions of representation, creativity and difference. He became the chair of two foundations, Iniva, the Institute of International Visual Arts, and Autograph ABP, which seeks to promote photographers from culturally diverse backgrounds, and championed the opening of Iniva′s new Rivington Place arts complex in east London in 2007.