The Context of Intellectual Friendship
DAVID SCOTT INTERVIEWED IN THE NEW INQUIRY
Anthropologist and Department Chair David Scott was interviewed in an extensive piece for The New Inquiry regarding his book Stuart Hall’s Voice: Intimations of an Ethics of Receptive Generosity.
An interview with David Scott about his book Stuart Hall’s Voice: Intimations of an Ethics of Receptive Generosity
By TIANA REIDMARCH 1, 2018
One of the most striking features of Stuart Hall’s Voice is the epistolary form. I noticed that in 2012, years before the book was published, you also wrote that short piece “Stuart Hall at Eighty,” published in Small Axe, as a letter. Where and when did the idea of the book as a series of letters take shape?
When Stuart died there was something quite precipitous about the sense of his absence, and the seeming void around the lectures that I had given at the University of the Western Cape in 2013, which are the basis of Stuart Hall’s Voice. The revision of the lectures was going nowhere. I don’t know exactly when it occurred to me that I had already been thinking about another way of continuing a conversation with him, namely, in the letter form that I had first used in “Stuart Hall at Eighty.” It occurred to me that the letter form would be a way of retaining a sense of Stuart as an addressee, an addressee with whom I was engaged—not in disagreements so much as in a kind of friendly divergence. We were always trying to work out not just what we shared but what we didn’t.
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