People have to have a language to speak about where they are and what other possible futures are available to them.
Stuart HallRead
The very notion of Great Britain's 'greatness' is bound up with empire. Euro-scepticism and Little Englander nationalism could hardly survive if people understood whose sugar flowed through English blood and rotted English teeth.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote highlights the connection between Britain's perceived greatness and its imperial history, suggesting that a deeper understanding of this linkage can challenge nationalist sentiments.
Stuart Hall's quote draws attention to the complex relationship between Great Britain's identity and its historical empire. He argues that the concept of 'greatness' is intrinsically linked to the exploitation and colonialism that enriched the nation at the expense of colonized peoples. By referencing how sugar, a product of exploitation, is connected to English lives, he critiques nationalism that ignores Britain's imperial past and its consequences. This suggests that understanding this history could lead to a reevaluation of national pride and skepticism toward isolationist sentiments.
Themes
GreatnessEmpireNationalismHistoryBritainIdentityColonialism
In practice
Example use cases
In a lecture on colonial history, this quote could illustrate how Britain's modern identity is influenced by its empire.
More from Stuart Hall
All quotes →I thought I might find the real me in Oxford. Civil rights made me accept being a black intellectual. There was no such thing before, but then it was something. So I became one.
Stuart HallRead
The question of hegemony is always the question of a new cultural order.
Stuart HallRead
I'm the blackest member of my family. You know, these mixed families produce children of all colors, and in Jamaica, the question of exactly what shade you were, in colonial Jamaica, that was the most important question. Because you could read off class and education and status from that. I was aware and conscious of that from the very beginning.
Stuart HallRead
The nature of power in the modern world is that it is also constructed in relation to political, moral, intellectual, cultural, ideological, sexual questions.
Stuart HallRead
Similar quotes
Glory to God in the highest, Ohio has saved the Nation.
Abraham LincolnRead
The search for a Jewish national home came about due to centuries of anti-Semitic pogroms, expulsions, discrimination and hate. The Holocaust was simply the evil culmination of all that came before it.
Edgar Bronfman, Sr.Read
I was 21 and looking for work in 1932, one of the worst years of the Great Depression. And I can remember one bleak night in the thirties when my father learned on Christmas Eve that he'd lost his job. To be young in my generation was to feel that your future had been mortgaged out from under you, and that's a tragic mistake we must never allow our leaders to make again.
Ronald ReaganRead
One might have thought that 70 years was time enough to work out what really happened in 1939. It isn't the case. Misunderstandings and misinformation abound.
Norman DaviesRead
My father was a Japanese prisoner of war, a survivor of the Thai-Burma Death Railway, built by a quarter of a million slave labourers in 1943. Between 100,000 and 200,000 died.
Richard FlanaganRead
When I read that the British army had landed thirty-two thousand troops - and I had realized, not very long before, that Philadelphia only had thirty thousand people in it - it practically lifted me out of my chair.
David McculloughRead