Familiar Stranger: A Life Between Two Islands

“Stuart Hall analyzes the complexities of migration that left all British Commonwealth citizens puzzled by the political character of the word Black in the recent construction: British Black. He argues that race, which was always there, meaning difference, is now given a surprising interpretation in the social relations that define all people who are not white. This is a miracle of a book constructed by different hands but carrying always the dominant critical signature of Stuart Hall.”

“Compelling. Stuart Hall’s story is the story of an age. He was a pioneer in the struggle for racial, cultural, and political liberation. He has transformed the way we think.”

“The publication of Familiar Stranger is truly an event. Contemplative and incisive, heart-wrenching and hilarious, profound and thought-provoking, the book demonstrates why Stuart Hall was our most brilliant thinker on identity and struggle, and why in the age of Brexit and Trumpism he is sorely missed. He embodied a capacious understanding of race, nation, and diaspora, and drew on his own life to reveal the conjunctural relationships between structures of oppression and the spaces of possibility, between lived experience and modalities of power. For those unfamiliar with Hall, this book ought to be the starting point.”

“This extraordinary book tells us something of how Stuart Hall, this remarkable thinker, teacher, and theorist of a renewed Left, came to be. We see how his exceptional ability to weave together politics, history, depth psychology, and cultural identity is rooted in the never fully resolved displacements, tensions, and conflicts of his life. This work, fascinating and engaging as the story of his early life, is also immensely instructive as an account of an evolving theory, wide and many-facetted, capable of doing something like full justice to the important changes of our time.”

From Chapter 1
“I was born and formed in the closing days of the old colonial world. They are my conditions of existence. This is, as I see it, the starting point for narrating my life, the source of a curious, unreachable, and abiding unease. . . . As the great Trinidadian C. L. R. James once said of Caribbean migrants to the U.K., we are “in, but not of, Europe.” . . .In Jamaica, I wasn’t of course an exile. But there is a sense in which, although I belong to it, Jamaica worked to “other” me. As a consequence, I experience my life as sharply divided into two unequal but entangled, disproportionate halves. . . . 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.”

“Much more than a memoir, Familiar Stranger is a fascinating insight into how a life shapes a brilliant mind.”