Imperial Intimacies: A Tale of Two Islands - Softcover

Hazel V. Carby

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1788735102 ISBN 13: 9781788735100

Publisher: Verso, 2021

Synopsis

Where are you from? was the question hounding Hazel Carby as a girl in postWorld War II London. One of the so-called brown babies of the Windrush generation, born to a Jamaican father and Welsh mother, Carbys place in her home, her neighbourhood, and her country of birth was always in doubt. Emerging from this setting, Carby untangles the threads connecting members of her family to each other in a web woven by the British Empire across the Atlantic. We meet Carbys working-class grandmother Beatrice, a seamstress challenged by poverty and disease. In England, she was thrilled by the cosmopolitan fantasies of empire, by cities built with slave-trade profits, and by street peddlers selling fashionable Jamaican delicacies. In Jamaica, we follow the lives of both the white Carbys and the black Carbys, as Mary Ivey, a free woman of colour, whose children are fathered by Lilly Carby, a British soldier who arrived in Jamaica in 1789 to be absorbed into the plantation aristocracy. And we discover the hidden stories of Bridget and Nancy, two women owned by Lilly who survived the Middle Passage from Africa to the Caribbean. Moving between the Jamaican plantations, the hills of Devon, the port cities of Bristol, Cardiff, and Kingston, and the working-class estates of South London, Carbys family story is at once an intimate personal history and a sweeping summation of the violent entanglement of two islands. In charting British empires interweaving of capital and bodies, public language and private feeling, Carby will find herself reckoning with what she can tell, what she can remember, and what she can bear to know.

About this title

About the Author

Hazel V. Carby is a co-author of The Empire Strikes Back and author of Cultures in Babylon, Race Men, and Reconstructing Womanhood. For three decades she taught at Yale University as the Charles C. and Dorothea S. Dilley Professor of African American Studies and Professor of American Studies.

Edition details

• Publisher: Verso
• Publication date: 2021
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1788735102
• ISBN 13: 9781788735100
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 416