Abstract

This article offers an analysis of Stuart Hall’s Gramscian moment. Its basic assumption is that in order to understand the Gramscian turn in Stuart Hall’s thought, several factors must be taken into account: first, the political and economic transformations that have taken place in Britain since the 1980s. His focus on Gramsci cannot be divorced from processes such as the decline of the British Empire on the international scene, the rise of Thatcherism, neoliberalism, securitarism, «state racism» and cultural nationalism as responses to the economic stagnation of the period. Secondly, we should consider his Althusserian background, whose limitations played a decisive role in the search for a more open and less determinist Marxism, namely what he called «a complex Marxism», but above all, it was the increasingly opening of the racial question within British society itself that had extreme relevance in his theoretical work. Hall’s most original uses of the Gramscian archive are to be found in his various texts on race, racism and the relationship between capitalism, neoliberalism and the racial question.