Conversations with Stuart Hall: The inheritors of '68

Abstract

I n January 1968, the South Vietnamese Chief of Police shot dead a young man in a check shirt, at point blank range, in the streets of Saigon. For me, at nineteen, the photograph of this event had a double meaning. Of course, it showed starkly the casual brutality of the regime which the Americans were propping up. But it showed something else. The young man in the check shirt was not an innocent bystander, caught up in a stop and search raid. He was an officer in the National Liberation Front. He had been fighting and killing as part of the NLF’s Tet (New Year) offensive, which had fought its way to the outskirts of the US Embassy itself, threatening the headquarters of the mightiest military machine on earth.