Familiar Stranger: A Life between Two Islands

Stuart Hall: Selected Writings

by Stuart Hall

"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 Hall 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.

Genres: Nonfiction, Biography, Memoir, Race, Sociology, History, Cultural Studies

320 pages, Paperback

First published April 12, 2017

About the author

Stuart Hall was an influential Jamaican-born British sociologist and cultural theorist. He was Professor of Sociology at the Open University, the founding editor of New Left Review, and Director of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham.

Reviews

[Udeni · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stuart Hall was, amongst many other impressive things, the editor of the New Left Review and founder of Cultural Studies as a serious academic discipline. His position, radical at the time, was that British identity had to incorporate "blackness" if it was ever to survive. "Familiar Stranger" is his account of the period from his childhood to 1964. Mo Farah can now appear wrapped in the British flag and anyone who accuses him of not being British is howled down as a racist. But when Hall arrived in Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, racism was acceptable in Britain, and overt racism continued to be the norm for many decades.

"Familiar Stranger" is an account of his intellectual development: from an angry child, through teenage rebellion, to isolation at Oxford, and then, through socialism and cultural studies, to a place of relative peace. Hall comes across as a genuine radical while also being a kind and humble man. He is prescient on the self-destructive tendency of the Labour Party to only elect white, English, well-educated men to their ranks: something that has contributed to the destruction of the Labour party. The working class favour UKIP, who (falsely) appear to be a more genuinely working class party. Other non-white working class people do not vote at all. He covers a wealth of Caribbean writers and thinkers: from Derek Walcott to Michael Manley. The bibliography of black British, American, and Caribbean writers is worth the price of the book alone. I enjoyed his wry comments about other, less supportive writers: he meets V.S. Naipaul at Oxford and is scathing of his "genteel abhorrence of Negroes". Hall is, touchingly, devoted to the great Trinidadian writer and cricketer, C.L.R.James.

While beautifully written, this is nevertheless an ntellectual history. The book is full of terms such as "phenomenology", "epistemology", "indexical". There are frequent, but patiently explained, references to Levi-Strauss, Foucault, Gramsci, Bourdieu, Saussure, and Weber. Not a book that is easily accessible to many. This is a shame. Hall's ideas are all about reducing inequality and making popular culture a worthy subject of study.

My only criticism is that I would have liked to have seen beyond 1964: Hall was a passionate hater of Thatcherite politics and what they did to the fabric of Britain. What did he make of the New Labour election? Of the election of Barack Obama? The book ends with Hall coming to terms with his new homeland:
"Even though I never felt England was mine I was learning to find my way around it, both the formal artefacts of its civilization and its informal, lived aspects. There was, however, much to do. As there still is."

Indeed there is. Hall notes that "innovative consumer and managerial forms of capitalism" had effectively destroyed the working class as an revolutionary force against capitalism. New social groupings, the endemic racism of the police and the refusal to accept the unexceptional observation that Britain remains a many ways a racist society. These attitudes still exist. This means that many non-white people are only superficially tolerated. Racism is never far beneath the surface. As Hall says "The old reflexes are hard to dislodge"''

Hall died in 2014. I would have liked to have read his insights on Trump, Le Pen and Brexit. He would not, I think, have been surprised.

[Tara Brabazon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh Stuart Hall is intoxicating. An extraordinary speaker. A seductive writer. He could charm the CND pin off a Marxist. This book is a memoir, but offers passionate explorations of the diaspora and moving between two 'worlds' - or indeed, islands.

The challenge for Hall - and the scholars that follow him - is one of class. His first experience of the United Kingdom was Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship. He married a young, beautiful and brilliant woman - yes, a white woman - with well educated and comfortably middle class parents.

With Hall, we are left managing the paradoxes of race and class, self and society. But what makes this memoir powerful and deeply moving are two factors. Firstly, Hall demonstrates how books - key moments of reading in his life - built his intellectual architecture. In a time where books - particularly in the Australian higher education system - are irrelevant, meaningless and an inconvenience, it is joyous to see a celebration of the book in building a life.

But secondly, Hall re-tells his meetings with Raymond Williams. For me, it has always been Williams who is my hero, not Hall. Hall was too beautiful and seductive. The political content of his words worried me in their trajectory. But Williams has remained a shadow in the stories of the British left. Yet he is the punctuation for all scholars of politics and popular culture.

While Stuart Hall remains the X Factor of Cultural Studies, Raymond Williams remains our conscience.

[Jacob Wren · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stuart Hall writes:


"Contrary to common-sense understanding, the transformations of self-identity are not just a personal matter. Historical shifts out there provide the social conditions of existence of personal and psychic change in here. What mattered was how I positioned myself on the other side - or positioned myself to catch the other side: how I was, involuntarily, hailed by and interpellated into a broader social discourse. Only by discovering this did I begin to understand that what black identity involved was a social, political, historical and symbolic event, not just a personal, and certainly not simply a genetic, one.

From this I came to understand that identity is not a set of fixed attributes, the unchanging essence of the inner self, but a constantly shifting process of positioning. We tend to think of identity as taking us back to our roots, the part of us which remains essentially the same across time. In fact identity is always a never-completed process of becoming - a process of shifting identifications, rather than a singular, complete, finished state of being."

[Sara Salem · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a stunning and brilliant man.

[Félice · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wish I could've read this book for leisure, but it was required reading for my social theories class. Hall is a sharp thinker with excellent observations and incredibly in-depth analysis, so much so that I felt very lost in the text at times. The chapters did not read very coherently, more like a jumble of very complex thoughts. Hall's understanding of his own life, and his place in the world and post-colonial is fascinating, and this book is certainly a valuable read, as a social theory and a memoir.

[Taylor Hughson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful and poignant, I learnt a lot about the Caribbean pre-Independence, about England and the Black experience in the 50s, about politics, and perhaps most of all about psychic longing, for places and for states of affairs that exist outside of your grasp

[Keen Reader · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 Stars!

This reads well enough and Hall and Schwarz do a fine job of evoking the spirit and times of Hall growing up in Jamaica, detailing all the contours and textures of the good, the bad and the many spaces between them. This also reminds you how pervasive racism and snobbery are and how in places like Jamaica and other former British colonies it can actually manifest in many cruel and bitter ways.

Hall comes across as incredibly affable and humble, though rarely did I feel we were getting anything more than surface details and so often I was longing for something just that bit more deeper and revelatory. We do get the occasional glimpses into more profound areas, but not consistently, so as enjoyable as this was it just felt like they were quite a number of gaps in here and as a result this had a real inconsistent and unsatisfying feel to it, but still a fine and interesting man.

[Wendy Liu · Rating 5 out of 5]

<3

[Yasmine Kherfi · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was particularly struck by the humility in stuart hall's writing, which made me think of how important it is to not put public intellectuals on a pedestal, or to idolize them. perfect balance between sharing knowledge and not taking himself too seriously - a trait that's humbling/inspiring coming from a prolific writer and thinker. Even though it's a personal memoir, stuart hall was really committed to making the book an engaging conversation with the reader, on how personal life and political ideas interacted at different stages/milestones for him - between his life Jamaica and England, grad school, home, through family dynamics, professional relationships, etc - while always weaving his personal accounts with analysis of colonialism, diaspora, migration, class politics, etc. The book really inspires the reader to think about the messiness of the personal and the political in their own lives too, and challenges the tendency to separate the two. the book also feels like an invitation/reminder to include the rich and complex ways we situate ourselves and our thinking when we write.

[Kel · Rating 4 out of 5]

covers everything up to his involvement in the birmingham school--would have loved more about cultural studies.

[Michele Wallace · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most wonderful memoirs I have ever read. I guess extraordinary people write extraordinary memoirs. This one contains everything I ever wanted to know about Stuart’s extraordinary way of viewing the world and his place in it. He was born in Jamaica as was my father around the same time. Why were they so different and yet in some ways so much alike? He is no longer alive but this book makes me feel as though I was in his presence once again. It is just brilliant.

[Alexandra Sinclair · Rating 3 out of 5]

Stuart Hall is fucking cool

[R.J. Gilmour · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hall who was born in Jamaica & who was educated in Britain during the post-war period is an important cultural theorist who has written a memoir that looks at his life & how it informed his own research. It is a fascinating look at how individuals in this period were forced not only to navigate the problems of imperialism & colonialism but also how the identities that were formed helped develop post-colonial studies.

"You could say I have lived, metaphorically speaking, on the hinge between the colonial and post-colonial worlds: 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." 11

"Neal Ascherson calls them [Scots], with his usual precision, 'the non-commissioned office of empire." 15

"So for my generation of Jamaicans, 'colonial' was not something you chose to be. It was an attribute of being, formative because it framed your very existence. As Michel Foucault suggested, it positioned you as a subject-author as well as subjecting you to its discourse." 21

"...Yoruba-born, artist-photographer Rotimi Fani-Kayode...My identity', he said, 'has been constructed from my own sense of otherness.' Identity is never singular but is multiply constructed across intersecting and antagonistic discourses, practised and positions." 23

"This fusion of African, Christian and indigenous elements led to the formation of small Rastafarian communities. Reputedly the first of these, the Pinnacle, founded by Leonard Howell in 1940..."48

"I felt like a sort of internal exile." 57

"This mode of being, as I've explained, produced a profound nexus of silence, evasion and disavowal." 61

"When in 1713 the British broke the Dutch monopoly of the African Slave trade as a result of the Treaty of Utrecht-which gave Britain the right to sell slaves to Spanish colonies-they established a dominance in the Atlantic slave trade." 68

"In this sense, respectability as a social value has its reverse side: an attitude of simmering resentment, resistance and insubordination which smoulders beneath, but is never far from, the surface." 86

"There existed a social obsession with what Freud calls 'the narcissism of minor differences.'" 96-97

"This deep, troubled vein of male chauvinism in Jamaican society, matched by a correlative homophobia, is a disfiguring contemporary legacy of the racial past. The casual violence to women is another. Sexual prowess is one way for black men to affirm the masculine self in a world of dependencies, one of the few spheres of freedom and power that have not been abrogated." 103

"James Baldwin...they are telling us something of what it is like to be alive. It is not self-pity one hears in them [jazz musicians] but compassion...I am aiming at what Henry James called 'perception at the pitch of passion." 129

"As Michelle Stephens remakes, 'the journey to the metropole was also a journey towards seeing and mapping the bigger picture within which you are articulated, naming the structures to which your experience as a colonial subject were articulated." 132

"At the core of the diasporic experience is a variant of what W.E.B. Dubois called 'double consciousness': that of belonging to more than one world, of being both 'here' and 'there', of thinking about 'there' from 'here' and vice versa." 140

[Amanda Rosso · Rating 5 out of 5]

Familiar Stranger is an impressive and erudite example of autotheory—one in which the personal and the political are not simply intertwined, but are shown to be fundamentally inseparable. In this powerful and deeply reflective memoir, Stuart Hall draws on his life as a site of critical inquiry. The autobiographical becomes, in Hall’s hands, a rigorous method for interrogating the social, political, and historical forces that shaped both his own trajectory and that of the postcolonial world.

Though the book was left incomplete at the time of Hall’s death and was posthumously edited and introduced by his friend and collaborator Bill Schwarz, it does not feel fragmentary. Rather, it offers a coherent and compelling account of Hall’s formative years—from his childhood in colonial Jamaica to his early adult life in Britain—leaving the reader with a vivid sense of how history lives in the body, in language, in memory, and in the structures of feeling that define a generation. If anything, its incompleteness draws attention to the open-endedness that Hall himself so often championed: identity as process, history as contested terrain, theory as lived experience.

The book provides a unique and essential perspective on the first half of the twentieth century through the eyes of a Caribbean intellectual who never stopped questioning the forces that shaped him. Hall’s reflections are wide-ranging yet precise: from the racialised hierarchies of Jamaican society under colonialism to the class anxieties of his family, from the disorientation of arrival in postwar Britain to the gradual politicisation of his thought in the context of anti-colonial movements, migration, and the politics of race and belonging in the UK. At every turn, he insists that biography is never enough without context, and that theory must remain grounded in lived, historical realities.

Hall reads his own life the way a critic reads a text: carefully, self-reflexively, and with attention to the ideological frameworks that render some stories legible and others invisible. He does not seek resolution or purity. Instead, he embraces contradiction, uncertainty, and hybridity as the conditions of diasporic and postcolonial life. This is particularly evident in his treatment of identity as a constant negotiation between histories, locations, and subject positions.

There is a quiet radicalism in Hall’s refusal to perform a neatly cohesive self. His writing resists the traditional shape of autobiography and the romanticised narratives often imposed on diasporic figures. His interest is not in tracing a heroic journey or resolving the tensions of his past, but in understanding how power operates through culture, how colonial legacies persist in the present, and how the self is produced in relation to structures beyond its control.

Though Familiar Stranger only takes us up to the threshold of Hall’s work at the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, it already offers extraordinary insight into the intellectual formation of one of the twentieth century’s most important thinkers.

[W · Rating 5 out of 5]

In college, Stuart Hall's essays on cultural studies, particularly those about articulation, popular culture, race, and visual culture, opened up new ways of thinking about the political dimensions of cultural production and consumption. I was definitely changed by these works, and looked forward to reading this memoir about his life from his birth to about 1965. The book is not a memoir in a traditional sense. On the one hand, it does chronicle his early days in Jamaica, his relationship with family, his experience in school and then later at Oxford in England. On the other hand, the memoir is also an excavation of Hall's theorizing. He uses his theories and the theoretical work that informs his own in order to explain and comprehend his experience. What the memoir provides, then, is an account of his early life that is less focused on how he experienced moments than on how he came to understand them later in life as a result of the thought that he later came into contact with and formulated. The result is a memoir that provides a satisfying picture of his early life and that allows us to again encounter the theory that probably brought us to this book in the first place. The early focus on his days in Jamaica and in a growing sense of West Indianness when we arrived in England provides an opportunity to explore the different ways race and racialization affected Hall's arguments throughout his career. If Hall opened up ways of thinking about the world for you, the memoir will be a satisfying return to his work and expose you to new details about his life.

[TheWolvesDen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I finally finished reading all of Stuart Hall's Familiar Strangers and it was extremely emotionally satisfying. I resonate deeply with as a person who spent his life traveling. In particular how he highlights that the tension is rooted in the backdrop of colonialism and the unique realization that occurs to an oppressed people when they live with their oppressor directly. He talks about how being a part of Windrush the ways in how school operated as a mechanism to create folks aligned with a colonial attitude that finally visiting England was a an odd experience. On one hand, you are in a place you know from books and classes in the way Caribbean schools are designed for you to grasp but there are unscripted ways of being and cultural touchstones and things you cannot grasp as an outsider it makes the familiar/expected strange. You get the inverse where being away from home, being in the presence of the other, you become more hyper aware of who you are/the culture you are embedded in. I am so fond of how he highlights that the unifying experience of Caribbean folks in Britain built the West Indian identity, not even through just the similarities of who we are as islands but the similarities of what being a colonized person in England forces you through. I didn't connect with his ending on both how leftism and his family were avenues that he was able to resolve this tension but I think it's a read that I might really grasp new perspectives on as I grow. Great read.

[Teresa Casappa · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Familiar stranger: a life between two islands" talks about Stuart Hall's life "in betweenness": he was born and raised in Jamaica, then moved to Oxford in the 1960s on a Rhodes scholarship. The title of the book is representative of his diasporic experience of being "both here and there, at home - but never wholly - in both places" (W.E.B. DuBois). This book is not simply a biography nor a memorial - in fact, Hall himself wrote that his intention was not to write a memorial, although many people define it so - but it's a story of a lived life, of his parent's whispered words (they barely ever talked about politics, especially his mom, who refused to believe in a black consciousness and to whom the "other", poorer, darker Jamaica was invisible), of colonization, of the feelings of rebellion of a young Stuart and finally of his adulthood (more than 50 years!) in Britain.
I enjoyed this book because I resonated with Hall - although in different ways. I find myself and my own experience in his double belongingness, in feeling familiar and strange both in his homeland (both during his teenage years, but also when he came back as a "visitor") and in the place he moved to, full of illusions.
However, I found hard to read and understand some parts of the book, as I am not very familiar with Bourdieu or Gramsci, nor with the history of Jamaica.

[Robert Sharples · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a brilliant memoir of Stuart Hall's life. As suggested in the title, he talks about his feelings of living between Jamaica and Great Britain, and perhaps never feeling quite at home in either place - he quotes Edward Said's own biography 'Out of Place' a few times.

He talks about growing up in Jamaica, both his personal life and familial life and the historical influences on the country and his life leading to discussions of race and class in colonial Jamaica.

It's a great evocation of the times (roughly 1940 - 1965) - closing points of colonialism - conflicted feelings about his family middle-class and aspiring to white ruling class in Jamaica

The final 2 sections talk about his experience of coming to the UK on a scholarship and studying at Oxford - where he managed to find a group of like-minded 'outsiders'.

Finally, he discusses how he began engaging with political currents in the UK through editing newspapers and how he relates to other theorists in a similar vein to his own like Paul Gilroy and Raymond Williams. Well worth reading.

[Emily · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stuart Hall is the father of cultural studies and in this memoir of sorts, you see how his own personal experiences shaped his intellectual position. With his personal identification flitting between being a middle-class Jamaican during British colonial rule, to being an othered and colonial subject at Oxford, to being a semi-exile from both of these worlds, Hall explores the multitude of ways in which he struggled to define himself, and by extension, how colonial subjects are stuck in the same manner. A very interesting and sometimes hilarious account of how his political activism came about in conjunction with his attempt to shape his own identity; the only part that I could have done without was the references to (what seemed like) some very specific jargon within 1950s/60s Leftist British politics - or at least a more elaborate explanation of them. This book otherwise made me want to go back to my academic roots and read more on what latest cultural critical theory has to offer.

[DM · Rating 5 out of 5]

“It is one of the cruelest of ironies that, in trying to position oneself as different from what one has been made to be, one is condemned unconsciously to repeat elements of the old self one is trying to surpass. In that sense - one way or another, coming or going, positively or negatively - colonialism ‘got’ me, made me, unacceptably, who I came to think I was. What followed, however, was not the success story of grasping freedom. It was rather the less heroic one of finding, and coming to terms with, an alternative route to what could not be transcended.”

What a beautiful memoir. A wonderful reminder that scholars are people too and struggle to find their place in the world - and a mediation on how that struggle shapes their scholarly investments. I only wished it was longer and there was more on the later parts of his life.

[Julian Dones · Rating 5 out of 5]

A marvelous book that tells the story of how Stuart hall became the person who he was. It counts the take of what is to be a colonial subject, from Jamaica to Britain. The book encompasses the ideas of what it means to be a colonial subject in the light of diaspora. It draws history from Jamaica and it’s culture and the influences that it had in Hall, his move to Oxford and how he became immerse in The British life although he very well knew he didn’t belong there.

A fascinating book I recommend to anyone who is interested in knowing more about this extraordinary individual. Be ready to look up tons of names if important people that he references in his memoir. Enjoy!

[Mythili · Rating 4 out of 5]

Impulse buy at the bookstore down the road after I took Darshan to the library but couldn’t find anything I wanted to read there and was feeling envious of his stack of new books. I keep stumbling across Stuart Hall’s work and so was curious about him. This was altogether lovely, very conversational but still filled with the occasional passage of beautiful observations (especially when it came to Hall’s early years in the UK). Overall a rich personal account of one man’s journey through an era of enormous change in the UK as well as a very accessible history of the genesis of an important branch of modern British cultural/political thinking.

[William Pike · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first half in Jamaica was better than the second half for me because it resonated with our experience in Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania where Asians still occupy a curious position between whites and black Africans in the social order. Stuart Hall never truly resolved his dilemma of neither being Jamaican (because he was conflicted about his 'coloured' identity) nor British (although he was politically very active in leftwing politics). But I would still highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to reflect on race and class in the late British Empire.

[Tom · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a little dense and academic in places, but Hall's brilliant insight into the complexities of racial identity and belonging in (post)colonial Britain makes it well worth it. I was surprised by the time covered - basically, Hall's life up until he moved to Birmingham to join the Centre for Cultural Studies in 1964 - but there are plenty of issues covered and it doesn't feel lacking. What a shame we will not get to read a second volume that continues from there.

[Poli · Rating 3 out of 5]

a book I would usually never pick up, I picked it up by accident from my roommate's bookshelf, she's a sociology student.
But this book, nevertheless, gave me at least a little bit of comfort about the topic of immigration that I can relate to, even though not all the way through the racial concept of it, since my family immigrated from one white country to another.
and I learned a lot about Jamaica, its politics and England during the author's time there.

[Betzabe · Rating 5 out of 5]

First-time reading Stuart Hall and I love his writing style, his clear messages and political position, and his love for his partners (his love partner included whom he quoted several times). As a Chilean living in the UK, I could feel his sense of being there and here and the "learning to feel my way around" to "make sense of my own formation."
Probably my favourite read of 2023, and the year hasn't yet finished.

[Kai T]

A memoir but also a beginner's guide to British cultural studies. Stuart Hall is an inspirational thinker - particularly to my interest, his conceptualisation of identity, diaspora and new ethnicities is something that I have been thinking about for years but lacked the language to describe. This memoir adds depth to his thought process through personal experiences.

[Peggy Dyer · Rating 5 out of 5]

I met Stuart Hall when I did my OU undergraduate degree. His enthusiasm for learning was infectious and his writings and lectures were a constant for me in my 20s. I was nervous about reading this...I didn’t want him to posthumously disappoint me...he didn’t. A great read by a great man.

[Clare Russell · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is fantastic. Hall weaves his autobiography with his politics, colonialism and the issues facing 1950s England and Jamaica. Fantastic on race and class, giving 4 stars as gender was such a strong omission

[Nellie farrow · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very interesting and informative about colonial Jamaica and the black British diaspora. The academic language wasn’t too dry but it definitely felt like a workout for my brain. Took me forever to read!