What do you think?
Rate this book
Imperial Intimacies: A Tale of Two Islands
A haunting, 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 neighborhood, 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.
416 pages, Hardcover
Published September 24, 2019
50 people are currently reading
1255 people want to read
About the author
Hazel V. Carby
18 books32 followersHazel Vivian Carby is a professor of African American Studies and of American Studies. She serves as Charles C & Dorathea S Dilley Professor of African American Studies & American Studies at Yale University.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 26 of 26 reviews
June 18, 2020
Imperial Intimacies is a profound unpacking of the deep strands of association that weave their way through British history, its claims to nationhood and its personal, familial and national articulations of and to Empire. Hazel Carby and I are contemporaries, our mothers born in the same year although she was born at the beginning of the ‘post war baby boom’ and me at its end with our lives deeply woven through with Empire, although those of a profoundly different type. Carby was born in England not long after the end of WW2 to a Jamaica father and English/Welsh mother; she disrupted a sense of appropriate Englishness or Britishness. My interweaving with Empire is different, the white son of settlers in the outer reaches of Empire. Yet for both of us and our broadly similar class upbringings, in deeply different ways, our lives are woven through with the politics of ‘race’ – although it is not quite as simple as black and white.
The very point of this superb book is to unravel that ‘not quite as simple’, and in doing so Carby has extended the conventions, expectations, terms and forms of life writing. She weaves together family history, class and social history and histories of empire, tracing her mother’s family back to the south west England and south Wales, to Bath, Bristol, Cardiff and rural Somerset. This search takes in Great Western Railway, Somerset’s gentry and aristocracy (not as family members I might add, but as employers), and workers providing services to Bath’s and Bristol’s well to do. In this tracing she draws out the strands of empire embedded in those localities, those occupations, those families’ aspirations.
Alongside this she locates and tracks back her father’s immediate family in Jamaica, with his upbringing in working class Kingston but with aspirations to do better, with his patronage that took him to high school and eventually to the wartime RAF, and Worcester where Carl met Iris, the airman and the civil servant – not that Iris could stay in the civil service when they married after the war; no married woman could. While Carl’s aspirations were hindered by race, Iris’s were limited by gender and that goal of respectability remained elusive.
Carby paints a picture of two proud people, frustrated at these limitations, who at times have to live apart rather than seek accommodation as a mixed race couple – and once Hazel is born Iris becomes marked as delinquent, as the mother of a ‘coloured’ child. It is not a picture of a happy family life in south London, as ‘the girl’ – Hazel as child – seeks her places of retreat from parental frustration, but seems extremely lonely, the ‘where are you from?’ question never far away. It’s a richly cast, insightful, in places extremely difficult, tale of post-war British ‘raced’ life that is not framed as Windrush, and as such a welcome tale that gets beyond that metaphor that has become monolithic.
Both families are traced back several generations – an impressive feat for some working class families – and in the Jamaican case back to the Lincolnshire soldier who becomes the source of the Carbys, acknowledging three of his children born of exploitation at best – rape hidden behind the niceties of respectability. Carby is refreshingly and unsettlingly blunt about the realities of the lives of the enslaved, all the while making powerfully the point that these tendrils of empire stretch across the seas but are deeply rooted in the everyday lives of Britons, black and white, rich and poor.
Alongside these family histories she builds an impressive historical narrative shaping and contextualising both families’ existence – in Jamaica, the passage and plantations, rebellion, repression and community and identity building, in England and Wales urban and industrial growth, marginalisation and aspirations. This comes also with explorations of the infrastructure of Empire, of laws and practices, of institutions and wealth. It also comes with explorations intellectual life – of double entry book-keeping as tool and product of enslavement, of children’s homes and the cultural networks and hierarchies of colonial power.
Through all of this Carby has an eloquent and in places moving authorial voice – as a literature scholar she has developed an evocative style. Most moving, for me (as one who rummages in archives) is the experience of finding her father, including his letters seeking financial and study support, in the archives and of the challenge of reading him, herself and their family narrative. Most unsettling, but perhaps least surprising, is the recurrent subtle, not so subtle and horrific experience of racist and sexist practice, of emotional, physical and sexual violence that pervades these family histories. Most important though is the careful way Carby integrates the Imperial with the familial, the everyday with the geopolitical.
Not only is this a fantastic piece of life writing, it is also an outstanding piece of historical analysis – to the extent that they can be separated. It is an exceptional exposition on the multifaceted politics of power as lived, experienced and managed in the everyday.
The very point of this superb book is to unravel that ‘not quite as simple’, and in doing so Carby has extended the conventions, expectations, terms and forms of life writing. She weaves together family history, class and social history and histories of empire, tracing her mother’s family back to the south west England and south Wales, to Bath, Bristol, Cardiff and rural Somerset. This search takes in Great Western Railway, Somerset’s gentry and aristocracy (not as family members I might add, but as employers), and workers providing services to Bath’s and Bristol’s well to do. In this tracing she draws out the strands of empire embedded in those localities, those occupations, those families’ aspirations.
Alongside this she locates and tracks back her father’s immediate family in Jamaica, with his upbringing in working class Kingston but with aspirations to do better, with his patronage that took him to high school and eventually to the wartime RAF, and Worcester where Carl met Iris, the airman and the civil servant – not that Iris could stay in the civil service when they married after the war; no married woman could. While Carl’s aspirations were hindered by race, Iris’s were limited by gender and that goal of respectability remained elusive.
Carby paints a picture of two proud people, frustrated at these limitations, who at times have to live apart rather than seek accommodation as a mixed race couple – and once Hazel is born Iris becomes marked as delinquent, as the mother of a ‘coloured’ child. It is not a picture of a happy family life in south London, as ‘the girl’ – Hazel as child – seeks her places of retreat from parental frustration, but seems extremely lonely, the ‘where are you from?’ question never far away. It’s a richly cast, insightful, in places extremely difficult, tale of post-war British ‘raced’ life that is not framed as Windrush, and as such a welcome tale that gets beyond that metaphor that has become monolithic.
Both families are traced back several generations – an impressive feat for some working class families – and in the Jamaican case back to the Lincolnshire soldier who becomes the source of the Carbys, acknowledging three of his children born of exploitation at best – rape hidden behind the niceties of respectability. Carby is refreshingly and unsettlingly blunt about the realities of the lives of the enslaved, all the while making powerfully the point that these tendrils of empire stretch across the seas but are deeply rooted in the everyday lives of Britons, black and white, rich and poor.
Alongside these family histories she builds an impressive historical narrative shaping and contextualising both families’ existence – in Jamaica, the passage and plantations, rebellion, repression and community and identity building, in England and Wales urban and industrial growth, marginalisation and aspirations. This comes also with explorations of the infrastructure of Empire, of laws and practices, of institutions and wealth. It also comes with explorations intellectual life – of double entry book-keeping as tool and product of enslavement, of children’s homes and the cultural networks and hierarchies of colonial power.
Through all of this Carby has an eloquent and in places moving authorial voice – as a literature scholar she has developed an evocative style. Most moving, for me (as one who rummages in archives) is the experience of finding her father, including his letters seeking financial and study support, in the archives and of the challenge of reading him, herself and their family narrative. Most unsettling, but perhaps least surprising, is the recurrent subtle, not so subtle and horrific experience of racist and sexist practice, of emotional, physical and sexual violence that pervades these family histories. Most important though is the careful way Carby integrates the Imperial with the familial, the everyday with the geopolitical.
Not only is this a fantastic piece of life writing, it is also an outstanding piece of historical analysis – to the extent that they can be separated. It is an exceptional exposition on the multifaceted politics of power as lived, experienced and managed in the everyday.
December 8, 2019
This is an extraordinary book about the dynamics of race, family, and empire. Race and empire are all stories we tell ourselves, or that are told to us; and they become particularly fraught as "the girl" grows up in postwar England. The empire is dissolving, but the myth of the British must be maintained at all cost, and that myth is a co-traveler with myths about whiteness and ethnic purity. I never realized the extent to which Great Britain's colonial history erased and rewrote its involvement with slavery (though looking at parallels in the United States, it's not surprising).
Imperial Intimacies tells the story of "the girl," who is and who isn't Hazel Carby. As such, it's an unexpected combination of fiction and history: much more historical than the most historical novel, but also more novelistic than the most narrative history. We see the trials of a bi-racial girl growing up; but we also see what's behind those trials. The British understood as well as the Americans that they could keep their white underclass under control by seeding tension and resentment against blacks and multi-racial people. The purity narrative means that there's always someone beneath you--even if you are both victims, rather than beneficiaries, of the class system.
This history is imaginative because it has to be. There are no records of the slaves on the coffee and sugar plantations in Jamaica, aside from names in census ledgers. There are few records of the poor in Britain; their dwellings and their lives have likewise been erased. What remains are stories: some handed down from person to person and entangled in narratives of race and empire, some imagined and filling in the absences. What was it like to walk the Jamaican hills as a slave laborer? What was it like to take in laundry as a poor woman in an English resort town? How are those experiences the same and different? We will only know through imagination.
Imperial Intimacies tells the story of "the girl," who is and who isn't Hazel Carby. As such, it's an unexpected combination of fiction and history: much more historical than the most historical novel, but also more novelistic than the most narrative history. We see the trials of a bi-racial girl growing up; but we also see what's behind those trials. The British understood as well as the Americans that they could keep their white underclass under control by seeding tension and resentment against blacks and multi-racial people. The purity narrative means that there's always someone beneath you--even if you are both victims, rather than beneficiaries, of the class system.
This history is imaginative because it has to be. There are no records of the slaves on the coffee and sugar plantations in Jamaica, aside from names in census ledgers. There are few records of the poor in Britain; their dwellings and their lives have likewise been erased. What remains are stories: some handed down from person to person and entangled in narratives of race and empire, some imagined and filling in the absences. What was it like to walk the Jamaican hills as a slave laborer? What was it like to take in laundry as a poor woman in an English resort town? How are those experiences the same and different? We will only know through imagination.
January 29, 2023
I'm trying to figure out why Imperial Intimacies didn't quite work for me - I thought I'd be all in! But I think, basically, the issue is that is tries to merge two genres and ends up straddling them. It's a deeply informative book, but as a memoir it is not very compelling.
I haven't read loads of Carby's scholarship, but I've read enough to know she's a lively writer as well as a fearsome scholar. And yet, the sentences here are a slog, the mood is unvarying, the other people in the book are objects of contemplation. They seem to disturb her - and no wonder! But they are objects, in that she invents their subjectivity and so much of it is "speculative," meaning there are a lot of rhetorical questions. And rhetorical questions are cheating.
Still, one learns a lot about post-war Britain and post-European-invasion history of Jamaica. It is interesting to hold this book alongside Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture and Haiti: The Aftershocks of History.
I haven't read loads of Carby's scholarship, but I've read enough to know she's a lively writer as well as a fearsome scholar. And yet, the sentences here are a slog, the mood is unvarying, the other people in the book are objects of contemplation. They seem to disturb her - and no wonder! But they are objects, in that she invents their subjectivity and so much of it is "speculative," meaning there are a lot of rhetorical questions. And rhetorical questions are cheating.
Still, one learns a lot about post-war Britain and post-European-invasion history of Jamaica. It is interesting to hold this book alongside Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture and Haiti: The Aftershocks of History.
September 25, 2024
This is how I want to read history–woven with narrative and different perspectives that help it seep in. I never expected to read something that led from cricket clubs to historical accounting practices to the accounting of enslaved humans, and the picture it painted was vivid and chilling.
The only reason that I am giving 4 stars is because I listened to the audiobook (read by the author which I always love!) and I was really missing some visual aids to understand the familial connections and such. Again, it is beautifully woven and wonderfully detached from linear, simplified timelines (and of course touches on the complex racialisation of family trees), but I did struggle to remember names and connections which felt crucial to understanding.
The only reason that I am giving 4 stars is because I listened to the audiobook (read by the author which I always love!) and I was really missing some visual aids to understand the familial connections and such. Again, it is beautifully woven and wonderfully detached from linear, simplified timelines (and of course touches on the complex racialisation of family trees), but I did struggle to remember names and connections which felt crucial to understanding.
January 29, 2024
ended this sobbing - the identity of it all.. so close to home yet so unfamiliar. this is one of my favourite books ever
January 2, 2023
11/10. i actually have no idea how hazel carby did this insane level of research. an incredible personal history of the British Empire through one woman's family. such an innovative way to do history. i love women.
April 24, 2022
I had to read this memoir for my history class and it was wonderful. It was beautiful written and thoughtfully explained everything.
October 20, 2019
Critical fabulation in action. Absolutely brilliant.
Want to read
March 8, 2020Saving this review for later
https://www.thenation.com/article/cul...
https://www.thenation.com/article/cul...
November 17, 2021
I’ve returned this to the library, so not a review just some random thoughts.
As a dabbler in genealogy, with a close relative whose British-Jamaican pedigree mirrors Carby’s, I found this a stimulating and confronting read. The intensity of British racism in the 1950s-1960s is appalling. My relative (almost exactly Carby’s age, and growing up in London within about 5 miles of her) is not at all dark, so this person may have passed under the radar of British racial prejudice. That’s a conversation I’d be interested to have sometime soon. The discovery of Jamaican paternity was, I believe, a revelation, but it’s been embraced with some enthusiasm. I was told it explained the curly hair, but at least one of my relative’s progeny had the same blond blond hair with Shirley Temple curls I remember seeing in photos of my mother and uncle as children that hung on a bedroom wall in my grandparents’ house. Curly hair genes ain’t unique to Africans.
I left Britain in 1960, when I was a child. With hindsight, I came to regard the attitudes of my own family as a kind of innocence: with little or no experience of other races, which I think was true of a great many untravelled English, they were inclined to accept whatever was said by persons seemingly better informed than themselves. What is evident from this book is that such “innocence” has the potential to turn toxic when it comes in contact with the black-skinned “other” living in Britain. I’m inclined to attribute that more to fear of the unknown than malice, but I’ve already betrayed a natural partiality so it’s salutary to hear the perspective of someone who doesn’t share that partiality.
The work I’ve done on my relative’s Jamaican paternity has been fascinating. An island population will almost inevitably entail a high degree of endogamy (marrying within your group), so 4th cousins can match one at levels you would expect for 1st cousins or half-siblings; you will have to take my word for that because I can’t explain it succinctly - that’s just how it is. There are lots of Jamaican cousins, and many have been very willing to talk online about their families. However Jamaican official records have yet to go online so it’s very hard to sift fact from family tradition without visiting Jamaican archives in person. Carby’s chapters about Jamaican history (slave history, mostly pretty harrowing) and her Jamaican father’s family are welcome as social and historical background to my relative’s story.
Carby’s mother came from poor rural “stock” (a term Carby deprecates, if I remember aright), like my own mother. Her depiction of rural poverty made me reflect on the lives of the overwhelming majority of my mother’s ancestors. The characters in Thomas Hardy’s novels are representative of such people. By far the commonest male occupation to be found in the parish and census records is “Agricultural Labourer” or just “Ag Lab”. The designation “Farmer” is uncommon enough. Precarity was the norm. Families were often large and meanly housed. Life expectancy was short. I’ve a few ancestors who ended their days in an asylum or the poor-house. For Carby’s mother’s people, work on the railway was the means of escape from rural servitude but that was servitude of another sort. Young women among my mother’s people usually went into service. The more I think about it the more it seems that for most people English liberty was more of a dream than reality. Poverty and class were forms of bondage.
Imperial intimacies won’t be everyone’s “cup of tea”. It’s not written for a popular audience, and much of its content is pretty dark (no pun intended). If you’re a history warrior on the side that deplores airing Britain’s dirty linen in public, then it’s definitely not for you.
As a dabbler in genealogy, with a close relative whose British-Jamaican pedigree mirrors Carby’s, I found this a stimulating and confronting read. The intensity of British racism in the 1950s-1960s is appalling. My relative (almost exactly Carby’s age, and growing up in London within about 5 miles of her) is not at all dark, so this person may have passed under the radar of British racial prejudice. That’s a conversation I’d be interested to have sometime soon. The discovery of Jamaican paternity was, I believe, a revelation, but it’s been embraced with some enthusiasm. I was told it explained the curly hair, but at least one of my relative’s progeny had the same blond blond hair with Shirley Temple curls I remember seeing in photos of my mother and uncle as children that hung on a bedroom wall in my grandparents’ house. Curly hair genes ain’t unique to Africans.
I left Britain in 1960, when I was a child. With hindsight, I came to regard the attitudes of my own family as a kind of innocence: with little or no experience of other races, which I think was true of a great many untravelled English, they were inclined to accept whatever was said by persons seemingly better informed than themselves. What is evident from this book is that such “innocence” has the potential to turn toxic when it comes in contact with the black-skinned “other” living in Britain. I’m inclined to attribute that more to fear of the unknown than malice, but I’ve already betrayed a natural partiality so it’s salutary to hear the perspective of someone who doesn’t share that partiality.
The work I’ve done on my relative’s Jamaican paternity has been fascinating. An island population will almost inevitably entail a high degree of endogamy (marrying within your group), so 4th cousins can match one at levels you would expect for 1st cousins or half-siblings; you will have to take my word for that because I can’t explain it succinctly - that’s just how it is. There are lots of Jamaican cousins, and many have been very willing to talk online about their families. However Jamaican official records have yet to go online so it’s very hard to sift fact from family tradition without visiting Jamaican archives in person. Carby’s chapters about Jamaican history (slave history, mostly pretty harrowing) and her Jamaican father’s family are welcome as social and historical background to my relative’s story.
Carby’s mother came from poor rural “stock” (a term Carby deprecates, if I remember aright), like my own mother. Her depiction of rural poverty made me reflect on the lives of the overwhelming majority of my mother’s ancestors. The characters in Thomas Hardy’s novels are representative of such people. By far the commonest male occupation to be found in the parish and census records is “Agricultural Labourer” or just “Ag Lab”. The designation “Farmer” is uncommon enough. Precarity was the norm. Families were often large and meanly housed. Life expectancy was short. I’ve a few ancestors who ended their days in an asylum or the poor-house. For Carby’s mother’s people, work on the railway was the means of escape from rural servitude but that was servitude of another sort. Young women among my mother’s people usually went into service. The more I think about it the more it seems that for most people English liberty was more of a dream than reality. Poverty and class were forms of bondage.
Imperial intimacies won’t be everyone’s “cup of tea”. It’s not written for a popular audience, and much of its content is pretty dark (no pun intended). If you’re a history warrior on the side that deplores airing Britain’s dirty linen in public, then it’s definitely not for you.
July 9, 2020
Carby's book traces the history of her family and their relationship to the British Empire. The child of an English woman and a Jamaican man who met because of the mobilization in WWII, she looks at the history of both sides of her family to explore how imperialism and colonialism intersected with racism and how that manifested in her life.
"Identity is not only a story, a narrative which we tell ourselves about ourselves, it is stories which change with historical circumstance. And identity shots with the way in which we think and hear them and experience them. Far from only coming from the still small point of truth inside us, identities actually come from outside, they are the way in which we are recognized and then come to step into the place of the recognitions which others give us. Without the others there is no self, there is no self-recognition. Stuart Hall." Preface
"The starting point of critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is, and is 'knowing thyself' as a product of the historical process to date which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory. Such an inventory must therefore be made at the outset. Antonio Gramsci." 5
"Shades of skin colour are foundational to the composition of class formation in Jamaica: Stuart Hall referred to it as a pigmentocracy." 41
"Race is not a material object, a thing; it has to do not with what people are but with how they are classified. It is a practice or series of practices, a technology that calculates and assigns differences to peoples and communities and then institutionalizes these differences. It is a vern not a noun." 65
"As Anne Anlin Cheng as argued, "racial signification has always come into its fullest play precisely at the intersection between materiality and fantasy, between history and memory. At these intersections', she continues, 'the racial body acquires it most prominent outlines-and requires its greatest camouflage." 105
"The girl was the sole audience for her mother's stories but she felt as if Iris was talking to a different daughter in the kitchen, the daughter who fulfilled her ideal of the perfect daughter." 117
"To do your first works over means to reexamine everything. Go back to where you started, or as far back as you can, examine all of it, travel your road again and tell the truth about it. Sing or shout or testify or keep it to yourself: but know whence you came. James Baldwin, The Price of the Ticket." 145
"We were admonished to be respectable. Respectability was defined as keeping up appearance, cleanliness of body and mind, having respect for the self, and for the hierarchies of class. It was important to obey those with greater social standing for, without a ladder of ascension, how could we climb and gain the respect of those below us?" 152
"From the late nineteenth-century until the 1920s, overseas agents of the Canadian Department of the Interior travelled through the United States and Europe promoting migration to the dominion with a missionary zeal, bombarding populations with billboards, and posters, publicizing free land grants, distributing literature, and giving lectures in cities and towns." 197
"Identity is not only a story, a narrative which we tell ourselves about ourselves, it is stories which change with historical circumstance. And identity shots with the way in which we think and hear them and experience them. Far from only coming from the still small point of truth inside us, identities actually come from outside, they are the way in which we are recognized and then come to step into the place of the recognitions which others give us. Without the others there is no self, there is no self-recognition. Stuart Hall." Preface
"The starting point of critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is, and is 'knowing thyself' as a product of the historical process to date which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory. Such an inventory must therefore be made at the outset. Antonio Gramsci." 5
"Shades of skin colour are foundational to the composition of class formation in Jamaica: Stuart Hall referred to it as a pigmentocracy." 41
"Race is not a material object, a thing; it has to do not with what people are but with how they are classified. It is a practice or series of practices, a technology that calculates and assigns differences to peoples and communities and then institutionalizes these differences. It is a vern not a noun." 65
"As Anne Anlin Cheng as argued, "racial signification has always come into its fullest play precisely at the intersection between materiality and fantasy, between history and memory. At these intersections', she continues, 'the racial body acquires it most prominent outlines-and requires its greatest camouflage." 105
"The girl was the sole audience for her mother's stories but she felt as if Iris was talking to a different daughter in the kitchen, the daughter who fulfilled her ideal of the perfect daughter." 117
"To do your first works over means to reexamine everything. Go back to where you started, or as far back as you can, examine all of it, travel your road again and tell the truth about it. Sing or shout or testify or keep it to yourself: but know whence you came. James Baldwin, The Price of the Ticket." 145
"We were admonished to be respectable. Respectability was defined as keeping up appearance, cleanliness of body and mind, having respect for the self, and for the hierarchies of class. It was important to obey those with greater social standing for, without a ladder of ascension, how could we climb and gain the respect of those below us?" 152
"From the late nineteenth-century until the 1920s, overseas agents of the Canadian Department of the Interior travelled through the United States and Europe promoting migration to the dominion with a missionary zeal, bombarding populations with billboards, and posters, publicizing free land grants, distributing literature, and giving lectures in cities and towns." 197
February 15, 2021
Carby uses extensive historical research and family folklore to imagine conversations, reconstruct the unfolding of events and create a picture of her family history, and that of two islands. A history that pits her British ancestors, as beneficiaries of imperial theft and privileges, against her black Jamaican ancestors. She weaves a tale that is confronting in examining the cost of white privilege and how it became ingrained in every facet of British life, even for those who themselves struggled with a life of poverty.
It is also her reckoning with a difficult family life and childhood and the prejudices placed on her parent’s marriage. As a ‘brown’ child stigma and pressures were placed on herself and her mother while her father faced continual resistance in his attempts to achieve recognition of his place in British society ( as a war veteran and citizen) and employment commensurate with his ability.
“ From the depths of her melancholia my mother would summon Beatrice (-her mother) into her kitchen as if recruiting an ally in her battle to forge a perfect daughter. But the daughter Iris yearned for was not meant to be a writer who strayed beyond the tales she received: I was not meant to be curious; I was not meant to burrow beneath their plots; and I was not meant to undermine their narrative foundations, disrupting their silences, excavating what had been so assiduously hidden,”
This book has some brilliant and insightful writing on colonialism and the ‘power’ of empire.
“British political, social and economic generosity was understood to have been embodied first in the abolition of the slave trade and, second, in the unstinting imperial labour to bring civilization and enlightenment to a third of the globe. This selfless mission was undermined when the empire came home. Boatloads of coloured immigrants, who had the nerve to think they were British, betrayed the spirit and practices of English liberalism. Having landed on the shores of a kind-hearted and generous-spirited Island, they just didn’t know how to behave like decent English people.”
There were a couple of chapters I didn’t find quite so compelling- the descriptions of double entry accounting (for obvious reasons!). I also found the recount of Carby’s Jamaican family a bit difficult to follow. It wasn’t as fleshed out (probably due to lack of available evidence) and I got confused with all the different family names and connections. It became a bit ‘list like’ rather than a narrative.
I can’t remember where I saw a recommendation for this book - perhaps on a list by Bernadine Evaristo? Anyway it is definitely worthwhile and recommended if you are interested in the impact of empire, colonialism or the slave trade.
It is also her reckoning with a difficult family life and childhood and the prejudices placed on her parent’s marriage. As a ‘brown’ child stigma and pressures were placed on herself and her mother while her father faced continual resistance in his attempts to achieve recognition of his place in British society ( as a war veteran and citizen) and employment commensurate with his ability.
“ From the depths of her melancholia my mother would summon Beatrice (-her mother) into her kitchen as if recruiting an ally in her battle to forge a perfect daughter. But the daughter Iris yearned for was not meant to be a writer who strayed beyond the tales she received: I was not meant to be curious; I was not meant to burrow beneath their plots; and I was not meant to undermine their narrative foundations, disrupting their silences, excavating what had been so assiduously hidden,”
This book has some brilliant and insightful writing on colonialism and the ‘power’ of empire.
“British political, social and economic generosity was understood to have been embodied first in the abolition of the slave trade and, second, in the unstinting imperial labour to bring civilization and enlightenment to a third of the globe. This selfless mission was undermined when the empire came home. Boatloads of coloured immigrants, who had the nerve to think they were British, betrayed the spirit and practices of English liberalism. Having landed on the shores of a kind-hearted and generous-spirited Island, they just didn’t know how to behave like decent English people.”
There were a couple of chapters I didn’t find quite so compelling- the descriptions of double entry accounting (for obvious reasons!). I also found the recount of Carby’s Jamaican family a bit difficult to follow. It wasn’t as fleshed out (probably due to lack of available evidence) and I got confused with all the different family names and connections. It became a bit ‘list like’ rather than a narrative.
I can’t remember where I saw a recommendation for this book - perhaps on a list by Bernadine Evaristo? Anyway it is definitely worthwhile and recommended if you are interested in the impact of empire, colonialism or the slave trade.
Read
August 19, 2023A very important read with many thought-provoking questions. Hearing about the experiences of a child with a black father and white mother was something I’d not read much about before, and the fact Carby is a historian made it even more interesting to see her going through archives with a professional and personal view. Some parts will really stay with me, I’m sure. I initially read snippets of this book for uni, which was 2 years ago, and I still remembered certain segments from back then.
Carby’s own experiences were fascinating, so when she moved the perspective I noticed myself skimming entire chapters. I get portraying her grandmother’s history makes way to discuss the effects of colonialism in how she’s perceive her son in law, for instance, but it felt like this could be done in just a few sentences or so. The Carby family having a ‘white’ side (and ‘white’ history) is very interesting, but I personally wouldn’t need an elaborate description of the abolishment of slavery in Britain to accompany this. The perspective kept changing too and went back in forth in time, which made it a bit confusing.
Still, if anyone wants to know why ‘where are you from?’ is such an awful question, or what it’s like to grow up with a British/Welsh mum and a Jamaican/British dad, I’d definitely point them towards this book.
Carby’s own experiences were fascinating, so when she moved the perspective I noticed myself skimming entire chapters. I get portraying her grandmother’s history makes way to discuss the effects of colonialism in how she’s perceive her son in law, for instance, but it felt like this could be done in just a few sentences or so. The Carby family having a ‘white’ side (and ‘white’ history) is very interesting, but I personally wouldn’t need an elaborate description of the abolishment of slavery in Britain to accompany this. The perspective kept changing too and went back in forth in time, which made it a bit confusing.
Still, if anyone wants to know why ‘where are you from?’ is such an awful question, or what it’s like to grow up with a British/Welsh mum and a Jamaican/British dad, I’d definitely point them towards this book.
January 23, 2025
3.5
To quote the Beatles "She's so heavy," damn, Hazel Carby, you have a a complex life and family relationships (and I'm glad you finally felt comfortable enough to share your story). This is not a celebrity memoir; Carby is an academic and it's very obvious in the way she writes about sources. Also finding out she was an English professor also explains the symbolism and metaphors she uses for her childhood. This book taught me a lot about what it means to be both Black and British in the far past and not so recent far past. I am happy to have read it to be more knowledgeable on a subjectI lacked. However, this book could be very deep and dry (especially in the genealogy chapters) which keeps the score from being higher. Also the chapter lengths were all over the place and that annoyed me.
To quote the Beatles "She's so heavy," damn, Hazel Carby, you have a a complex life and family relationships (and I'm glad you finally felt comfortable enough to share your story). This is not a celebrity memoir; Carby is an academic and it's very obvious in the way she writes about sources. Also finding out she was an English professor also explains the symbolism and metaphors she uses for her childhood. This book taught me a lot about what it means to be both Black and British in the far past and not so recent far past. I am happy to have read it to be more knowledgeable on a subjectI lacked. However, this book could be very deep and dry (especially in the genealogy chapters) which keeps the score from being higher. Also the chapter lengths were all over the place and that annoyed me.
September 12, 2021
5 stars - Imperial Intimacies is written like a novel with immersive imagery and careful language while attending to the depth of analysis that imperial legacies demand. Carby manages to craft a deeply compelling argument about genealogies and empire through her own family history and her own reckoning with its ramifications. This book was especially interesting to me since I’ve never read much about the experience of Black Britons, and she really brilliantly creates a truly diasporic narrative.
December 15, 2021
Strongly lived and researched and very, very dense. I'm going to differ from the consensus on this one, as I find it somewhat overwritten in parts to its detriment. Still, it is thoughtful, bracing, and a welcome memoir and history of the Jamaica/Wales nexus - read: "English" - read through the experience of Carby's parents and grandparents. An indictment on empire is nothing new, but the merging of personal autobiography and historical research feels very fresh with Carby. An undeniably strong read.
March 25, 2023
Overall a very good and important read. However, the last third of the book gets muddled by how the history of slavery and racism in England is approached. Instead of approaching it a linear way like the first two-thirds of the is done, the last part is told in more of a thematic way. The result is a confusing back and forth between different dates and events. The important message that she’s trying to convey about slavery and British racial politics is lost in a multitude of repeat time jumps back and forth from the 18th and 19th centuries to present day.
October 31, 2022
Could have been shorter
The history of the author's family from RAF member to present Black British race relations would have been interesting, but the she went all over the place.
I would have loved to learned more of these citizens and how it impacted Britain's Caribbean and African communities from RAF to Windrush to present day.
Too jam-packed with 18th century history.
The history of the author's family from RAF member to present Black British race relations would have been interesting, but the she went all over the place.
I would have loved to learned more of these citizens and how it impacted Britain's Caribbean and African communities from RAF to Windrush to present day.
Too jam-packed with 18th century history.
Read
March 13, 2024i find hazel carby's ability to imagine life into logs & accounts & tables remarkable. here's how many enslaved people were registered under the carby land; here's how heavy each load of laundry felt.
March 6, 2020
Exceptional!!!!!!!
February 16, 2023
I had to read this for class. There is some really great writing in here but unfortunately, it suffers from the dry history lessons scattered throughout.
March 1, 2024
very interesting and thorough dive into a black english woman’s complicated family history. i learned a lot
May 20, 2024
“Writing is a partial substitute for return.”
September 19, 2025
Wanted to like this more than I did.
*The choice of referring to herself as "the girl," TERRIBLE and ALMOST UNREADABLE.
*The DEEP GENEALOGY was A SLOG and UNNECESSARY.
*Dad disappears, as does the Caribbean FOR STRETCHES SEEMINGLY INTERMINABLE
*The choice of referring to herself as "the girl," TERRIBLE and ALMOST UNREADABLE.
*The DEEP GENEALOGY was A SLOG and UNNECESSARY.
*Dad disappears, as does the Caribbean FOR STRETCHES SEEMINGLY INTERMINABLE
March 19, 2022
A worthy contribution to life writing about the Black Atlantic, this memoir breaks the conventions of the form to offer a sweeping account of colonialism, empire, capitalism, and the construction of racialized subjects that relies as heavily on archival evidence as it does on personal and familial memory. Roving from suburban London to Bristol and Kingston and back to Britain again, Carby’s narrative shows how both strands of her family—proletarianized Welsh farmers displaced from their lands and mixed-race Jamaicans who ended up on the wrong side of the line that divided “white” Carbys from “black” Carbys—were conscripted into the British Empire’s race-making project, some as slaves, some as working-class whites in Bristol who came to identify themselves as proud subjects and beneficiaries of empire even as it brutally extracted their labor.
The book is above all an eloquent elegy for Carby’s parents, a bookish, soft-spoken Jamaican and a white Englishwoman from a hardscrabble background whose lives were destroyed, Carby makes clear, when they crossed forbidden racial boundaries during a period of illusory wartime sexual freedom. That their half-caste daughter also paid a severe penalty for their transgression is made clear in Carby’s narrative of her own childhood, which was evidently so painful that she refers to herself in the book in the third person as “the girl,” and then only glancingly (she does not, however, spare the reader the details of her rape by a white neighbor). Imperial Intimacies concludes with a perfectly cadenced sentence of stinging irony that encapsulates the entire book and returns the reader to the beginning pages.
The book is above all an eloquent elegy for Carby’s parents, a bookish, soft-spoken Jamaican and a white Englishwoman from a hardscrabble background whose lives were destroyed, Carby makes clear, when they crossed forbidden racial boundaries during a period of illusory wartime sexual freedom. That their half-caste daughter also paid a severe penalty for their transgression is made clear in Carby’s narrative of her own childhood, which was evidently so painful that she refers to herself in the book in the third person as “the girl,” and then only glancingly (she does not, however, spare the reader the details of her rape by a white neighbor). Imperial Intimacies concludes with a perfectly cadenced sentence of stinging irony that encapsulates the entire book and returns the reader to the beginning pages.
October 25, 2023
I was recommended this book by one of my professors at university, when I shared with him my experiences of not knowing my identity that well. I knew where I came from, but did I really? This book is a haunting, provocative, intimate and heart-wrenching yet heart-warming political-life memoir/writing? Hazel V. Carby, your writing on the Great Western railway to lichens to your curious and intimate imaginations of what Norseman’s would look like sailing near the village of Coleby fulfilled my curious soul. This book inspired me to explore who I was, through the stories of my ancestors, through the archives, and piecing it bit by bit with empathy and inquisitiveness. Thank you for this book, it forever will be the book that has had a significant impact on who I am today. It has shaped my understandings of history, of racial identity: of how brutal legacies and histories have made and changed individuals and their families.
Displaying 1 - 26 of 26 reviews