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Title details for Imperial Intimacies by Hazel V. Carby - Available

Imperial Intimacies

A Tale of Two Islands

by Hazel V. Carby
ebook
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Winner of the British Academy’s Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize for Global Cultural Understanding 2020
Highly commended for PEN Hessell–Tiltman Prize 2020
A haunting and evocative history of British empire, told through one woman’s family story
“Where are you from?” was the question hounding Hazel Carby as a girl in post-war London. One of the so-called brown babies of the Windrush generation, born to a Jamaican father and Welsh mother, Carby’s 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 in a web woven by the British Empire across the Atlantic. We meet Carby’s 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,” including 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 Jamaican plantations, the hills of Devon, the port cities of Bristol, Cardiff, and Kingston, and the working-class estates of South London, Carby’s family story is at once an intimate personal history and a sweeping summation of the violent entanglement of two islands. In charting British empire’s 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.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    September 24, 2019

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Read

      • ISBN: 9781788735124

    • EPUB ebook

      • ISBN: 9781788735124
      • File size: 5474 KB

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Library Journal

      August 9, 2019

      Carby (African American studies, Yale Univ.; Cultures in Babylon) takes readers deep into her experience as a multiracial woman growing up in England and offers a thorough examination of her family history in Britain and Jamaica. The book's first three parts are the strongest, sharing personal anecdotes from the author's life. Carby also explores her parents' lives before, during, and after World War II, illustrating the challenges and opportunities they faced at the time. She then traces how the lives of her Jamaican father and Welsh mother impacted her own upbringing, and how they reflected on British society. The remaining sections delve into the author's study of her family histories, from ancestors who were railroad workers in Britain to slave owners in Jamaica. While these examinations are thorough and offer great insight, they occasionally lose the narrative power present in the work's first half. VERDICT This moving memoir exploring race, gender, childhood, colonialism, marriage, and immigration will be valuable for readers interested in learning more about these subjects through a personal lens.--Sarah Schroeder, Univ. of Washington Bothell

      Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Formats

  • OverDrive Read
  • EPUB ebook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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