David M. Smith Lecture

11 February 2025

As co-lead for University of Birmingham’s Stuart Hall Archive Project, Pat Noxolo has been reading papers in Stuart Hall’s archives and focusing on conjunctural analysis. How is it in use now (who is using conjunctural analysis and what for), and how is it responding to the “antagonisms and contradictions” (Gramsci, cited in Hall et al, 2019, p. 368) of the current conjuncture? Given Stuart Hall’s focus on crisis (in particular, through his early work with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, on the existential crises of his time) it is certainly time to deploy conjunctural analysis as a means of understanding the existential crisis of our time, climate catastrophe. So conjunctural analysis needs now to be understood as more-than-human, not just by bolting climate concerns on to cultural, economic, social and political ones, but with a clearer sense that every human activity happens in interaction with the materiality of the non-human, and that this understanding is much more widespread and explicit as society becomes more concerned about the environment (Soper, 2021).

In working towards a fleshing out of the more-than-human conjuncture, this paper briefly returns to Hall et al’s (2019) Policing the Crisis, links it with his comments on the urban uprisings 40 years ago, and applies it to a close reading of two recent novels by young Black writers – Natasha Brown’s (2021) Assembly, and Caleb Azumah Nelson’s (2021) Open Water – each of which eloquently expresses aspects of Black British life “in the teeth of the pressure” (Hall, 1985).

References

Brown, N. (2021) Assembly. London: Hamish Hamilton

Hall, S (1985) Riots not as ‘surprising’ as media suggests, in Open House, November 5th, p. 7 (available in the Stuart Hall Archive, University of Birmingham, cataloguing in process)

Hall, S., Critcher, C., Jefferson, T., Clarke, J., and Roberts, B. (2019) Policing the Crisis: Preface to the 35th Anniversary Edition, in Morley, D. (ed.) Stuart Hall: Essential Essays Volume 1: Foundations of Cultural Studies. Durham: Duke University Press

Nelson, C.A. (2021) Open Water. London: Viking

Soper, K. (2021) The Environmental Conjuncture, Culture, Power and Politics: an Open Seminar. Available at: https://culturepowerpolitics.org/2021/10/23/the-environmental-conjuncture/ . Date last accessed: 26/01/24

Speaker bio: Professor Patricia Noxolo’s research brings together the study of international culture and in/security, and uses postcolonial, discursive and literary approaches to explore the spatialities of a range of Caribbean and British cultural practices. Key publications include (2022) Geographies of race and ethnicity 1: Black Geographies, in Progress in Human Geography, 46, 5, pp. 1232-1240, and (2022) Noxolo, P, Patten, H and Stanley Niaah, S. (eds.) Dancehall In/securities: Perspectives on Caribbean Expressive Life. London: Routledge. She was awarded the 2021 Royal Geographical Society (RGS) Murchison Award, and is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. Pat has led two international teams exploring Caribbean in/securities and creativity – CARISCC (funded by Leverhulme: https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/research/activity/cariscc/index.aspx ) and CARICUK (funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council:
https://ww.youtube.com/channel/UCpVvZEqrkhdlK21SkWvkNmw ), and is co-lead of University of Birmingham’s Stuart Hall Archive Project: https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/research/stuarthall/index.aspx . She also commissioned the report ‘Supervising Black Geography PhD Researchers in the UK’ (2021, available here: https://raceingeography.org/2021/09/22/report-supervising-black-geography-phd-researchers-in-the-uk/ ), and is co-founder of the Fi Wi Road internships for Black Geography undergraduates (https://fiwiroad.blackgeographers.com/our-interns ). Pat is a committee member of the RACE group of the RGS, former chair of the Society for Caribbean Studies, and former co-editor of Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers.

Chair: Professor Kavita Datta
This event is organised by the School of Geography, Queen Mary University of London.
The lecture will be followed by a drinks reception.

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