Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices

Since 1997 Representation has been the key go-to textbook for students learning the tools to question and critically analyze institutional and media texts and images. This long-awaited Second Edition:

• update and refreshes the approach to theories of representation by signalling key developments in the field

• addresses the emergence of new technologies and formats of representation, from the internet and the digital revolution to reality TV

• includes an entirely new chapter on celebrity culture and personalisation, to debates about representation and democracy, and involve illustrations of an intertextual nature, cutting across various technologies and formats in which ′the real′ or the authentic makes an appearance

• offers new exercises, new readings, new images and examples for a new generation of students

This book will once again prove an indispensible resource for students and teachers in cultural and media studies.

Stuart Hall was born and raised in Jamaica and arrived in Britain on a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford in 1950. In 1958, he left his PhD on Henry James to found the New Left Review, which did much to open a debate about immigration and the politics of identity. Along with Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart he established the first Cultural Studies programme at a British university in Birmingham in 1964, bringing the study of popular culture into the understanding of political and social change.

After spending more than four decades as one of the UK’s leading public intellectuals, Hall retired from formal academic life in 1997 and since then has continued to devote himself to questions of representation, creativity and difference. He became the chair of two foundations, Iniva, the Institute of International Visual Arts, and Autograph ABP, which seeks to promote photographers from culturally diverse backgrounds, and championed the opening of Iniva’s new Rivington Place arts complex in east London in 2007.

Jessica Evans is Senior Lecturer in Cultural & Media Studies at the Open University.

Professor Sean Nixon is Head of the Department of Sociology and Director of MA Advertising and Marketing and the Media. at the University of Essex.