Imperial Intimacies: A Tale of Two Islands

Imperial Intimacies: A Tale of Two Islands

"Imperial Intimacies weaves the history of British imperialism together with the history of her family. Carby assembles a sprawling account of how imperialismâ€”a web of social relations, labor markets, and trade networksâ€”conditions private feeling. The resulting narrative is something like an affective history of the British Empire." â€”New Yorker

â€œWhere are you from?â€ 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, Carbyâ€™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 Carbyâ€™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 â€œwhite Carbysâ€ and the â€œblack Carbys,â€ 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, Carbyâ€™s family story is at once an intimate personal history and a sweeping summation of the violent entanglement of two islands. In charting British empireâ€™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.
Country USA
Brand Verso
Manufacturer Verso
Binding Hardcover
ItemPartNumber 54846409
Color Black
ReleaseDate 2019-09-24
UnitCount 1
EANs 9781788735094

Country	USA
Brand	Verso
Manufacturer	Verso
Binding	Hardcover
ItemPartNumber	54846409
Color	Black
ReleaseDate	2019-09-24
UnitCount	1
EANs	9781788735094

Imperial Intimacies: A Tale of Two Islands

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