Overrunning the capacity of the ‘narrative “I”’: Stuart Hall writes himself

Journal article

In this essay, I consider how Stuart Hall’s interest in and relationship to Henry James influences his conceptualisation of the variable, unknowable and contingent ‘self’. I argue that Hall’s formulation of Jamesian aesthetics informs his political discourse on the multiplicity and impossibility of ‘identity’ – whether personal, racial, cultural – through the process of writing. In and through Hall’s interest in James, from his unfinished Oxford PhD on James and the ‘international theme’ to his later ruminations, I trace the ways in which literary style and the momentous shifts within it draw from and on the understanding of a ‘self’ as relational. Through the lens of Stuart Hall’s ‘Henry James’, I read how Hall’s thoughts on authorship and authority develop from what he describes as the conjuncture between literary modernism’s destabilized and dissolved representations of the individual. Driven by readings of Familiar Stranger, published as a first-person memoir in 2017, and ‘Displacements’, the dialogic transcript held in the Stuart Hall archives at the University of Birmingham, alongside Hall’s more overtly political works, I argue that the destabilized point of view Hall appreciates in James shapes his thinking about identity as well as his own textual voice.

Authors: Wensley, C

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Taylor and Francis Group
• Journal: Textual Practice
• Publication date: 2026-04-30
• Acceptance date: 2026-03-18
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/0950236X.2026.2663431
• EISSN: 1470-1308
• ISSN: 0950-236X
• Language: English
• Keywords: Stuart Hall; Henry James; cultural studies; familiar stranger; narrative theory