Literacy–its uses, abuses and lack thereof–is once again a headliner. While many in T&T reflect on the passing of ANR Robinson, or the latest round of child murders, one section at least of an imagined community, is reflecting on the recent death of English working class hero Richard Hoggart, whose 1957 book The Uses of Literacy profoundly challenged the elitist British education system, as well as notions of high, low and mass culture.
Closer to home, literacy and the same egalitarian access to education which Hoggart championed is being challenged in the Dominican Republic, where not content with rendering the descendants of Haitian migrants stateless, schools are now refusing them entrance.
If the death of a 95-year-old British academic seems of little relevance to life in the fast lanes of Trinidad, it's worth mentioning that it was Hoggart who appointed the Jamaican-born sociologist Stuart Hall as first director of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in 1964. Hall himself, who takes credit for pioneering the field of Cultural Studies along with Hoggart, died back in February. If any of this fails to register on the strictly local scale, we could take a brief look at two things.
http://www.guardian.co.tt/digital/new-members