In the Thickets: Stuart Hall in 1983

A Theoretical History, a transcription of the eight seminars presented by Stuart Hall at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, for the Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture summer school, has been widely recognized as a summary statement of Hall's conception of cultural studies at that moment (Carrington; Munro; Rodman).With his additional lecture for the concluding conference-"The Toad in the Garden: Thatcherism amongst the Theorists" (published five years later in a volume edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg)-and his contributions to events in Australia that same year, 1983 is recognized as a moment of internationalization for British cultural studies, in which Hall disseminated to the Anglosphere academy a particular version of cultural studies, thus consolidating the field (Curthoys and Docker; Wellman). 1 This can be true, without illuminating much about Hall's own intentions.As Grossberg and Jennifer Daryl Slack point out, if the seminars of Cultural Studies, 1983 were a "theoretical history" of cultural studies, that history necessarily excluded as much as it included-the seminars "underplayed" the empirical research undertaken at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) in Birmingham, the institutional praxes that enabled that work, and the political "debates and diversity that constituted a vital part of the everyday life of the Centre and often connected it with political and artistic activities in Birmingham" (ix).Additionally, though Hall was