"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.
Industry 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 *
