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Familiar Stranger : A Life Between Two Islands by Stuart Hall (2018, Trade Paperback)

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Publication Date: 2018-04-12. Language: English. Number of Pages: 320. Weight: 0.9 lbs. ISBN10: 0822371405. Publisher: Duke University Press.

About this product

Product Identifiers

PublisherDuke University Press

ISBN-100822371405

ISBN-139780822371403

eBay Product ID (ePID)240368643

Product Key Features

Book TitleFamiliar Stranger : Alife between Two Islands

Number of Pages320 Pages

LanguageEnglish

Publication Year2018

TopicCultural Heritage, Social Scientists & Psychologists, Black Studies (Global), General

GenreSocial Science, Biography & Autobiography

AuthorStuart Hall

Book SeriesStuart Hall: Selected Writings

FormatTrade Paperback

Dimensions

Item Height0.9 in

Item Weight16 Oz

Item Length9 in

Item Width6 in

Additional Product Features

Intended AudienceTrade

Dewey Edition23

ReviewsAn utterly engrossing and profoundly moving book. . . . A remarkable book, rich with the insights and eloquence that we have come to expect from Stuart Hall., 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., From Chapter 1 "I was born and formed in the closing days of the old colonial world. They are my conditions of existence. This is, as I see it, the starting point for narrating my life, the source of a curious, unreachable, and abiding unease. . . . As the great Trinidadian C. L. R. James once said of Caribbean migrants to the U.K., we are "in, but not of, Europe." . . .In Jamaica, I wasn't of course an exile. But there is a sense in which, although I belong to it, Jamaica worked to "other" me. As a consequence, I experience my life as sharply divided into two unequal but entangled, disproportionate halves. . . . Because of radically changing locations, I have belonged, in different ways, to both at different times of my life, without ever being fully of either.", 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., [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...., 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., The publication of Familiar Stranger is truly an event. Contemplative and incisive, heart-wrenching and hilarious, profound and thought-provoking, the book demonstrates why Stuart Hall was our most brilliant thinker on identity and struggle, and why in the age of Brexit and Trumpism he is sorely missed. He embodied a capacious understanding of race, nation, and diaspora, and drew on his own life to reveal the conjunctural relationships between structures of oppression and the spaces of possibility, between lived experience and modalities of power. For those unfamiliar with Hall, this book ought to be the starting point., Familiar Stranger provides a rewarding feast of history, sociology, theory, politics and--oh yes, biography., 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., Stuart Hall analyzes the complexities of migration that left all British Commonwealth citizens puzzled by the political character of the word Black in the recent construction: British Black. He argues that race, which was always there, meaning difference, is now given a surprising interpretation in the social relations that define all people who are not white. This is a miracle of a book constructed by different hands but carrying always the dominant critical signature of Stuart Hall., 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., Compelling. Stuart Hall's story is the story of an age. He was a pioneer in the struggle for racial, cultural, and political liberation. He has transformed the way we think., 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., This extraordinary book tells us something of how Stuart Hall, this remarkable thinker, teacher, and theorist of a renewed Left, came to be. We see how his exceptional ability to weave together politics, history, depth psychology, and cultural identity is rooted in the never fully resolved displacements, tensions, and conflicts of his life. This work, fascinating and engaging as the story of his early life, is also immensely instructive as an account of an evolving theory, wide and many-facetted, capable of doing something like full justice to the important changes of our time., 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., 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., 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., 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., 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., 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., Much more than a memoir, Familiar Stranger is a fascinating insight into how a life shapes a brilliant mind., 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.

Dewey Decimal301.092

Table Of ContentList of Illustrations xi Preface / Bill Schwarz xiii Part I. Jamaica 1. Colonial Landscapes, Colonial Subjects 3 2. The Two Jamaicas 25 3. Thinking the Caribbean: Creolizing Thinking 61 4. Race and its Disavowal 95 Part II. Leaving Jamaica 5. Conscripts of Modernity 109 Part III. Journey to an Illusion 6. Encountering Oxford: The Makings of a Diasporic Self 149 7. Caribbean Migration: The Windrush Generation 173 Part IV. Transition Zone 8. England at Home 203 9. Politics 227 Works Referenced in the Text 273 Index 285

Synopsis"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., 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.