About the Book
“Where are you from?” Hazel Carby was continually asked as a girl, at a time when being Black and being British was understood to be an impossibility.
To answer that question properly, eminent scholar Hazel Carby finds she needs to trace not just the family history of her Jamaican father and her Welsh mother, but to untangle knots the British Empire created across the Atlantic. Tracing the skeins of this knotted past through the method of “autohistory,” Imperial Intimacies charts empire’s violent interweaving of lives and states, Jamaica and Britain, capital and bodies, public language and private feeling. In so doing, Carby will find herself reckoning with what she can tell, what she can remember, and what she can bear to know.
About the Author :
Hazel V. Carby is the Charles C. and Dorothea S. Dilley Professor of African American Studies, Professor of American Studies, and Director of the Initiative on Race Gender and Globalization at Yale University. Her books include Reconstructing Womanhood, Race Men, and Cultures in Babylon.
Review :
An elegant memoir which pivots beautifully around those twin imposters, 'belonging' and 'home'. Richly suffused with a love of people and place, Carby's familiar intellectual rigor never lets us drift off course towards nostalgia.
A heartbreaking and beautiful account of growing-up in the impossible space between mutually exclusive terms-Black and British. The history of empire, slavery and colonialism unfolds in the exquisite and painful details of this unflinching auto-portrait. Carby deftly captures the ways that relations of power are lived, intimately, quietly, destructively, and profoundly. What an achievement.
This beautifully written book raises the bar for political life-writing. Hazel Carby invites readers to follow a reconstructive quest propelled by memory, archive and imagination. It is a journey of discovery that forcefully contextualises the injustice dished out by British governments to the 'Windrush generation' and their rebel offspring. Carby disrupts fixed notions of racial identity that contort our understanding of Britain's colonial and postcolonial history.
Hazel Carby is a foundational scholar of race, class, and empire as critical lenses for understanding culture. In Imperial Intimacies she shares the way that stories-often difficult to mine and face-are at the core of how her indispensable world view was formed. Imperial Intimacies is an epic, generous book that illuminates black Britain as never before and shows us how a great thinker and educator was formed. It is beautifully told, a treasured look into how a girl came to believe that reading and critical thinking could help mend a broken world and give us tools not only for living in it, but for understanding it. I'll treasure this book forever.
Hazel Carby assembles a sprawling account of how imperialism--a web of social relations, labor markets, and trade networks-conditions private feeling. The resulting narrative is something like an affective history of the British Empire.
Carby's book lies somewhere between what is recorded in official archives, what is remembered in family lore, and what is considered an affective draw to intellectual questions. The spiny precision of the historical...allows the reader to feel erudite, but Carby's most captivating writing is when she feels on the page.
Captivating. . . offers interesting perspectives on the personal impact of capitalism and colonialism.
Exceptional...By using examples from her own background, she brilliantly demonstrates that 'the personal' is indeed political.
At every turn, Carby refuses to tell a tidy or convenient story and instead produces an account of empire that is as expansive as it is heartbreaking.
While the minotaur of the British imperial past is very far from dead and buried, Carby's memoir offers a course, a set of clues; it brings us a bit closer to the mouth of the maze.
An arresting, courageous, and urgently needed memoir that doubles as social, cultural, and political history.
The poignancy in this moving and patient memoir-Carby writes with equal eloquence about work on the Great Western Railway, lichen and the neglected materiality of black British life-centres on her dedication to discovering (to paraphrase James Baldwin) from whence she came.
Imperial Intimacies is part of a well-established and growing body of literature that explores the margins and gaps in the historical record. ... For those interested in imperialism, postcolonialism, black studies, black British history, and archival studies, this is an essential book to consider.
In Imperial Intimacies, Carby delicately balances the critical distance of the scholar with the profound subjectivity of the memoirist. ... By exploring the relations between working class Welsh life and the Jamaican colony, Bristol's industrial center and the transatlantic slave economy, and the racial transgressions in the intimacies between her own parents, Carby's critical project illuminates the histories of the British empire that are embedded in the spaces of our everyday lives.
A magisterial excavation of black Britishness that threads personal and family memoir together with archival history...Moving back and forth between Britain and Jamaica, capturing moments spanning nearly three hundred years, Carby shows how the being of (British) blackness has always been a kind of becoming, something in the making.
Carby tells the 'tale' of the complex bonds of kinship between Britain and Jamaica through the encounter between her Welsh mother, Beatrice's daughter Iris, and her Jamaican airman father, Carl Collin Carby ... Imperial Intimacies is in part a work of mourning for those people whose memories are beyond reach.
Imperial Intimacies is nothing short of a narratological masterpiece. The assemblage of various historical archives - family photographs, product advertisements, registers of the enslaved - coupled with the rhetorical force of a writer who incisively narrates at the threshold of her own voice and story, produces a book that is itself an archive of the fractal, boundary-bending connections that have forged Empire and its far-flung subjects.
