Currently, Black Studies departments are using a single, plain index card. Stuart Hall’s main concepts—encoding and decoding, representation, hegemony, and cultural identity—are condensed into a brief synopsis that a student could tape inside a notebook. However, if you look around a few seminar rooms this semester, you’ll see that the same card keeps appearing, being passed between students like a successful recipe.
More than thirty years after leaving Jamaica for Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship, Hall passed away in London in 2014. He devoted a large portion of his career to deciphering how culture and the media subtly carry out political tasks, such as how racial and power-related presumptions can be carried by sitcoms or news reports without ever being explicitly stated. It’s a theory designed for close reading, and it seems to work with flashcards as well.
The encoding and decoding model, which Hall introduced in 1980 as a remedy for sluggish thinking about media influence, appears to be the primary source of the card’s appeal. Messages with a desired meaning are encoded by producers. They are not always decoded by audiences. A dominant reading is that some people accept the message as intended. Others bargain over it, taking some parts and rejecting others. Some completely turn it into an oppositional interpretation. For something intended to explain how millions of people interpret the same broadcast in radically different ways, it’s a neat framework that is almost suspiciously simple.
It may be resurfacing because of its simplicity. Before delving into something more complex, like Policing the Crisis, a 1978 study by Hall and his Birmingham colleagues that looked at how British media created a moral panic around “Black youth crime,” professors teaching media representation, particularly with regard to coverage of protest and policing, can give their students a shorthand. It’s difficult to ignore how frequently that decades-old argument is repeated, nearly verbatim, in contemporary op-eds, and the similarities to today’s crime coverage practically write themselves.
Students are drawn to Hall for biographical reasons as well. Growing up in colonial Jamaica, he was surrounded by lighter-skinned relatives and knew that his own family had benefited from slavery in previous generations. For a generation that is already at ease talking about identity as layered and situational, his writing about identity as something constructed and shifting rather than fixed strikes a different chord. His 1990 essay on diaspora and cultural identity is frequently brought up when discussing having several, sometimes incompatible, possessions at once.
It’s important to be open about the limitations of the card. Hall’s writing is qualitative, recursive, and dense. He was infamously suspicious of anyone condensing his thoughts into a catchphrase, including a study card’s slogan. Years of debate, the unresolved conflict with Marxism he struggled with throughout his career, and his unease about ever claiming to speak for an entire field, let alone an entire race, are all eliminated when the encoding and decoding model is condensed into three bullet points. Some professors seem to be secretly concerned that the card is taking the place of reading him.
It’s still doing something, though. Before the first seminar even begins, students in departments that had trouble making 1970s British media theory seem relevant to American undergraduates now arrive with at least a working vocabulary, such as hegemony, preferred meaning, and moral panic. That’s the kind of debate he probably would have liked to have himself, whether it qualifies as comprehending Hall or simply using his words.
