Familiar Stranger: A Life Between Two Islands

Stuart Hall

Published by Duke University Press 2017

Familiar Stranger

A Life Between Two Islands

Stuart Hall
Edited by: Bill Schwarz

In the series Stuart Hall: Selected Writings

https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822372936

Overview
Contents

About this book

With great insight, compassion, and wit Stuart Hall (1932–2014) tells how his experiences—from growing up in colonial Jamaica and attending Oxford to participating in the thorny politics of 1950s and 1960s Britain—shaped his intellectual and political work to become one of his age's brightest intellectual lights.

Author / Editor information

Stuart Hall (1932–2014) was one of the most prominent and influential scholars and public intellectuals of his generation. He was a prolific writer and speaker and a public voice for critical intelligence and social justice who appeared widely on British television and radio. He taught at the University of Birmingham and the Open University, was the founding editor of New Left Review, and served as the director of Birmingham’s Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies during its most creative and influential decade. He is the author of Selected Political Writings: The Great Moving Right Show and Other Essays and Cultural Studies 1983: A Theoretical History, both also published by Duke University Press.

Bill Schwarz is Professor of English at Queen Mary University of London, author of Memories of Empire, Volume I: The White Man's World, and an editor of History Workshop Journal. Schwarz and Catherine Hall are Stuart Hall's literary executors.

Reviews

"Hall, characteristically, refused such easy identifications, as either deracinated man of the New Left or postcolonial black theorist. Nowhere is this clearer than in Hall’s own ego-histoire, Familiar Stranger. . . [which], like the two volumes in the series already published by Duke, reminds us that for Hall thinking historically was essential to understanding ourselves and the conditions in which we live."

-- James Vernon Public Books

"Familiar Stranger is a homecoming of sorts, a hybrid of memoir and meditation, a spirited voyage around the complexities of race, colour and class. . . . Familiar Stranger reads as a subtle and subversive memoir of the end of empire."

-- Colin Grant The Guardian

"[T]he most significant figure on the British intellectual left over the course of the last 50 years. . . . Reading this book is to be reminded of the quiet rigour of his conversation...."

-- Tim Adams The Guardian

"In Hall’s case, as a mixed-race or 'coloured' Jamaican, his journey to the imperial core involved a very particular kind of disenchantment. This posthumously published memoir tells that story with a thoughtful fair-mindedness that illuminates not only his own struggles with identity and a sense of place in the world, but also those of postwar Britain and its seemingly endless efforts to come to terms with class, race and empire."

-- Maria Misra Financial Times

"[A] rich resource of Hall’s swift, lucid and beautifully turned theories of black identity...."

-- Fred Inglis Times Higher Education

"Hall is a key thinker. His analysis remains profound. In these days of Brexit we need his nuanced view of identity more than ever. When his voice comes through in this book it is rich with longing and the constant stretching of asking how we think about who we are and where we come from. Hall in full flow was quite something. He remains one of the best speakers I have heard."

-- Suzanne Moore New Statesman

"There has never been a better time, in the context of the re-emergence of racialized modes of thinking, racism and discrimination across vast swathes of the Western world, to read and re-read Hall."

-- Sindre Bangstad Africa is a Country

"This is a compelling portrait of Hall’s own struggle to forge his own identity and sense of belonging as well as a grim history of slavery, colonialism and racism in modern Jamaica and Britain. Hall’s humanity and honesty pour from every page as he connects the ideas that formed his thinking to his own life."

-- Angela Cobbinah Camden New Journal

"Readers of Familiar Stranger expecting a purely personal traditional memoir will instead find themselves reading a much more rewarding intellectual autobiography, through which Hall s life is threaded.... Familiar Stranger succeeds in casting his life as a conduit to a larger discussion about race, history, and politics."

-- Gretchen Gerzina TLS

"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.... There is a generosity and literary imagination in his writing—a recognition that humans are complex, contradictory creatures shaped by, among other things, what they believe, where they live, how they shop, and who they sleep with."

-- Jessica Loudis The New Republic

"This is an extremely rich and fascinating memoir.... The centrality of race, of colonialism, and Familiar Stranger’s account of the forces which go make a diasporic intellectual will, I think, fill out a lot of the gaps in readers' conceptions of Stuart Hall."

-- Graeme Turner Europe Now

"Hall presents a portrait of a divided self, of what it meant to be not merely an object but a damaged subject of racial thinking."

-- Gaiutra Bahadur Dissent

"Familiar Stranger adds substantially to our knowledge of the way Hall’s origins informed his work. . . . What emerges from the memoir is how much Hall’s preoccupations came from his experience, and were forged in the heat of constant argument with that experience."

-- Nikil Saval New Left Review

“Familiar Stranger provides a rewarding feast of history, sociology, theory, politics and—oh yes, biography.”

-- Lawrence Grossberg American Book Review

"Schwarz’s voice is silently present, his deft editorial hand evident. . . . A work of richness and depth that stands as worthy testament to [Hall's] life and ideas."

-- James Epstein American Historical Review

"An utterly engrossing and profoundly moving book. . . . A remarkable book, rich with the insights and eloquence that we have come to expect from Stuart Hall."

-- Winston James New West Indian Guide

"It was one of Hall’s unique gifts to offer analysis of the moment as it unfolded before our eyes. I am sure I am not alone in having found his talks exhilarating in ways I could never quite understand, given that the news he relayed with such energy was almost unremittingly dire. Hall offered his readings as interpretation and self-commentary, tracing his own intellectual path."

-- Jacqueline Rose New York Review of Book

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
List of Illustrations Publicly Available Download PDF	xi
Preface Bill Schwarz Publicly Available Download PDF	xiii
PART I. Jamaica
1. Colonial Landscapes, Colonial Subjects Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	3
2. The Two Jamaicas Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	25
3. Thinking the Caribbean: Creolizing Thinking Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	61
4. Race and Its Disavowal Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	95
PART II. Leaving Jamaica
5. Conscripts of Modernity Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	109
PART III. Journey to an Illusion
6. Encountering Oxford: The Makings of a Diasporic Self Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	149
7. Caribbean Migration: The Windrush Generation Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	173
PART IV. Transition Zone
8. England at Home Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	203
9. Politics Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	227
Works Referenced in the Text Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	273
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	285

Language: English
Publisher: Duke University Press
Audience: General/trade;
Pages
- Main content: 336
Illustrations
- Other: 12 illustrations

eBook

Published: March 30, 2017
ISBN: 9780822372936