When Stuart Hall died in 2014, he was one of England’s best-known intellectuals, celebrated for his pioneering writings in cultural studies, a field he helped invent along with Raymond Williams, and for his work as a spokesman of the New Left. Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. described him as “the Du Bois of Britain,” and The Guardian called him the “godfather of multiculturalism.” During the six decades he lived in England, Hall appeared regularly on TV and radio (including on his own BBC series about the history of the Caribbean), popularized the term “Thatcherism,” co-wrote an influential book on race and policing, and helped found The New Left Review.

Hall took a more expansive view of popular culture than the previous generations of British leftists, who tended to deride it as a monolithic means by which the working-classes were subjected to upper-class hegemony. He saw pop culture as a field of struggle, which held the potential to bring about positive change, rather than simply oppression. As his thinking evolved, he came to insist on a larger vision of politics, one that ventured beyond traditional actors and institutions into more subjective realms. Politics, he argued, was not simply a matter of elections: Politics was everywhere, present in everything from soccer games to soap operas. “The conditions of existence,” he once remarked in an interview are “cultural, political and economic”—in that order.

Despite this reputation, Hall’s legacy was far from assured by the time he died. By 2014, his only single-author book had fallen out of print, and his essays were scattered across obscure journals and anthologies. In the London Review of Books, Terry Eagleton admonished Hall for his “frenetic recycling of theories in the realm of culture,” calling him “less an original thinker than a brilliant bricoleur, an imaginative reinventor of other people’s ideas.” Only recently have American publishers attempted to revive his legacy. Duke has launched a book series dedicated to his collected writings, edited by Catherine Hall and Bill Schwarz, as well as publishing a collection of essays by David Scott, a cultural anthropologist at Columbia who is working on a biography of Hall. Harvard is publishing a trifecta of lectures Hall delivered at the university in 1994 as The Fateful Triangle; MIT is releasing an anthology of essays about his work, and Routledge is putting out a conversation between Hall and bell hooks.

These efforts are well-timed: Hall’s work has become especially resonant as Britain has voted for a narrower identity and a more isolationist attitude to the rest of the world. Because of his own ancestry as “part Scottish, part African, part Portuguese-Jew,” Hall always saw identity as pluralistic, and rejected the notion that a person was strictly “English” or “Jamaican.” Towards the end of his life, Hall came to believe that the intransigence of cultural differences would not be able to mesh neatly with the government and conservative media’s increasing demands for “Britishness.” This was partly because of the “regressive modernization” Hall saw under Thatcher—which has echoes in Brexit and Donald Trump—but also because of the imaginative failure on the other side of the political divide; the way the left simply accepted a conservative vision of the world as the consensus on reality.

Hall was born in Jamaica in 1932 into the “brown middle class,” the child of a United Fruit worker and a light-skinned mother. His mother, whose family had once been wealthy, idealized the estate days of colonialism and prevented her son from playing with children she considered beneath them. As the darkest member of a family that insulated itself from the world of “black Jamaica,” Hall became, he writes, increasingly alienated at home and gravitated towards “the less-colour hierarchical Jamaica that was emerging.” Although independence was still decades away, Hall came of age at a time of burgeoning anti-imperialism. During his first term in high school, an older boy was suspended for throwing a book at a colonialist history teacher. That boy, Michael Manley, went on to become head of the leftist People’s National Party and, eventually, prime minister.