MLA 2027 Los Angeles

The last few years have seen growing interest in theorist Stuart Hall’s work and its relation to psychoanalysis. Jacqueline Rose devoted a lecture to the topic (later reprinted in The New York Review of Books as “The Analyst”). More attention has been given to what Hall had to say about psychoanalytic thought between the lines in his work, but also in more direct ways, such as in his 1987 paper “Psychoanalysis and Cultural Studies.” Further, psychosocial theorists like Stephen Frosh have commented on Rose’s reflections on Hall and offered their own takes on why thinking about Hall vis-à-vis psychoanalysis may be overdue and worthwhile.

Since Hall’s death in 2014, there has been a concerted effort to rethink and reread his corpus. Already around that time, journals such as Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society began to consider Hall’s “influence on psychoanalytically oriented social and cultural inquiry.” The work of connecting Hall to psychoanalysis (not without tensions and complications) is among the more interesting efforts afoot to engage his work in fresh ways, and to draw upon it for contemporary theory and criticism. What would it mean to extend such work? How do available understandings of Hall's work change through the prism of psychoanalytic thought, and in what ways do varieties of psychoanalytic thought themselves change when hybridized with Hall's thinking?

A sampling of topics relevant for a panel on Hall and psychoanalysis: Hall’s autobiographical writings; Hall on Fanon; points of intersection between Hall and British psychoanalysis; meta-commentaries on Hall and psychoanalysis (Rose, Frosh and others); the psychoanalytic registers of John Akomfrah’s film, The Stuart Hall Project; re-readings of key Hall texts that work with notions of the subject and subjectivity, in particular; the role of psychology in Hall’s theorizations of authoritarian populism.

We invite 250-word abstracts (by March 6, 2026) for a panel about Stuart Hall’s work and psychoanalytic inquiry as a nexus of thought. Topics may address any phase of his theoretical production. Email: jg197@nyu.edu