Culture, Identity, and Power.

In an earlier essay in the Reviewing Policy section of this journal, I documented the importance of the work of Stuart Hall in the development of critical theories in education, in our understanding of "race," and in the development of much more nuanced analyses of cultural politics. I focused on two books: Familiar Stranger, Hall's personal memoir of political and cultural commitment; and Cultural Studies 1983, his lectures that provided the conceptual and political basis for a good deal of critical and nonreductive social and cultural analyses of the relationship between economic dynamics and structures and the rest of society. The two new books I discuss in the current essay provide us with a selection of many of the core reasons why he has been so influential in an entire range of critically oriented work in sociology, cultural studies, theories of race, "multiculturalism," and identity, and increasingly in education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]