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
She was not a white woman. She was not a Greek... Until the emergence of the doctrine of white superiority, Cleopatra was generally pictured as a distinctly African woman, dark in color.
John Henrik ClarkeRead
No city in the world, not even Athens or Rome, ever played as great a role in the life of a nation for so long a time, as Jerusalem has done in the life of the Jewish people.
David Ben-GurionRead
Remember, remember, the Fifth of November, the Gunpowder Treason and Plot. I know of no reason why the Gunpowder Treason should ever be forgot... But what of the man? I know his name was Guy Fawkes and I know, in 1605, he attempted to blow up the Houses of Parliament.
Alan MooreRead
An historian should yield himself to his subject, become immersed in the place and period of his choice, standing apart from it now and then for a fresh view.
Samuel Eliot MorisonRead
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
Your ancestors came to Macedonia and the rest of Hellas [Greece] and did us great harm, though we had done them no prior injury. I have been appointed leader of the Greeks, and wanting to punish the Persians I have come to Asia, which I took from you.
Alexander The GreatRead