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Familiar Stranger: A Life Between Two Islands

af Stuart Hall

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'Sometimes I feel myself to have been the last colonial.' This, in his own words, is the extraordinary story of the life and career of Stuart Hall�how his experiences shaped his intellectual, political, and theoretical work and how he became one of his age's brightest intellectual lights. Growing up in a middle-class family in 1930s Kingston, Jamaica, still then a British colony, the young Stuart Hall found himself uncomfortable in his own home. He lived among Kingston's stiflingly respectable brown middle class, who, in their habits and ambitions, measured themselves against the white elite. As colonial rule was challenged, things began to change in Kingston and across the world. In 1951 a Rhodes scholarship took Hall across the Atlantic to Oxford University, where he met young Jamaicans from all walks of life, as well as writers and thinkers from across the Caribbean, including V. S. Naipaul and George Lamming. While at Oxford he met Raymond Williams, Charles Taylor, and other leading intellectuals, with whom he helped found the intellectual and political movement known as the New Left. With the emotional aftershock of colonialism still pulsing through him, Hall faced a new struggle: that of building a home, a life, and an identity in a postwar England so rife with racism that it could barely recognize his humanity. With great insight, compassion, and wit, Hall tells the story of his early life, taking readers on a journey through the sights, smells, and streets of 1930s Kingston while reflecting on the thorny politics of 1950s and 1960s Britain. Full of passion and wisdom, Familiar Stranger is the intellectual memoir of one of our greatest minds.--publisher.… (mere)

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Stuart Hall grew up in a middle-class family in Kingston, Jamaica, came to Britain on a Rhodes Scholarship in the early fifties, and stayed on for the rest of his life as an academic and left-wing political critic. He was one of the founders of cultural studies as an academic discipline (at Birmingham University) and later became what the Guardian once called "the progressive insomniac's icon" through his prominent role as (emeritus) professor of sociology in the Open University, in which he appeared in many late-night TV lectures and seminars.

Familiar Stranger - a slightly odd mixture of memoir and heavyweight cultural analysis - is an account of his life up to the point where he moved to Birmingham in the mid-1960s. There's a lot about the history and social structure of postcolonial Jamaica and where his particular kind of family fitted into that, and also about the experience of Caribbean people as migrants to England, mixed in with more personal memories of his own experiences and the people he knew, which of course gets especially interesting when he gets on to his days as a postgraduate student when he was editing the New Left Review and mixing with everyone who was anybody in CND, the communist party and the left wing of Labour. As you would expect, there are some very thought-provoking insights about the cutural legacy of colonialism and slavery and the condition of emigrant, but there's disappointingly little analysis about what went wrong with the British left. Perhaps that will be in the next volume.

According to Bill Schwarz's introduction, the book is the fruit of some 20 years of discussions and interviews between the two of them and was planned from the start as a collaborative effort (Hall was a big collaborator and rarely published anything as sole author). However, Hall died before they had really nailed the structure of the book, and the publishers vetoed the planned dialogue format and asked Schwarz to recast it as a first-person "ghosted autobiography", which presumably explains the slightly clumsy jumps between quite personal reminiscences and heavyweight academic prose that is clearly crying out for (absent) footnotes. Probably not everybody's taste, and I doubt that this will be in the Christmas bestseller charts, but definitely interesting. (

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thorold | Apr 19, 2017 |

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Familiar Stranger: A Life Between Two Islands

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'Sometimes I feel myself to have been the last colonial.' This, in his own words, is the extraordinary story of the life and career of Stuart Hall�how his experiences shaped his intellectual, political, and theoretical work and how he became one of his age's brightest intellectual lights. Growing up in a middle-class family in 1930s Kingston, Jamaica, still then a British colony, the young Stuart Hall found himself uncomfortable in his own home. He lived among Kingston's stiflingly respectable brown middle class, who, in their habits and ambitions, measured themselves against the white elite. As colonial rule was challenged, things began to change in Kingston and across the world. In 1951 a Rhodes scholarship took Hall across the Atlantic to Oxford University, where he met young Jamaicans from all walks of life, as well as writers and thinkers from across the Caribbean, including V. S. Naipaul and George Lamming. While at Oxford he met Raymond Williams, Charles Taylor, and other leading intellectuals, with whom he helped found the intellectual and political movement known as the New Left. With the emotional aftershock of colonialism still pulsing through him, Hall faced a new struggle: that of building a home, a life, and an identity in a postwar England so rife with racism that it could barely recognize his humanity. With great insight, compassion, and wit, Hall tells the story of his early life, taking readers on a journey through the sights, smells, and streets of 1930s Kingston while reflecting on the thorny politics of 1950s and 1960s Britain. Full of passion and wisdom, Familiar Stranger is the intellectual memoir of one of our greatest minds.--publisher.

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