ABSTRACT
At the end of his Du Bois Lectures delivered at Harvard in 1994 Stuart Hall sought to capture the challenge faced by scholars who were trying to understand the transformations in the new cultural politics of race, ethnicity and nation when he argued:
The task of theory in relation to the new cultural politics of difference is not to think as we always did, keeping the faith by trying to hold the terrain together through an act of compulsive will, but to learn to think differently.
(Hall 2017: 174) Hall was, of course, writing in the aftermath of the intense debates about the cultural politics of race and ethnicity that had taken place during the 1980s and 1990s. He was particularly intrigued by the limitations of existing theoretical paradigms when it came to making sense of the new political formations around questions of difference such as race, ethnicity and nation (Henriques, Morley and Goblot 2017; hooks and Hall 2018). But more generally he wanted to explore more fully the relations of power that permeated these categories, both historically and in the present. It was on this basis that he used the Du Bois Lectures as an opportunity to explore both the opportunities offered by existing theories and the need to think differently.