Imperial Intimacies: A Tale of Two Islands

“That was a terrific book, and a great winner for us too. I suppose the reason we found it so striking was partly because it is a family story, although family is a very cute way of describing the experience that Carby and her parents went through. It is an exploration of personal history that engages a much larger world. Carby is digging where she stands, she’s investigating where she comes from and who she is. But what the book also has, which makes it different from many family stories, is a quite steely analytical perspective.” Read more...

The 2021 British Academy Book Prize for Global Cultural Understanding

Patrick Wright, Historian

“It is a moving as well as interesting book, because it’s a combination of life-writing and historical and political analysis. These two don’t always go together, but this book really manages to combine them effectively. Family histories can be quite soft, but this one revisits a background that was full of stress, disappointment and difficulty as well as dreams and aspirations. Carby’s approach is quite steely in places, but her book is also a story of discovery, which combines judgement with sympathetic testimony as it explores the two large worlds squeezed into her small childhood home in South London. Hazel Carby has, as you say, taught at Yale for many years, but she grew up in the Croydon area and also worked as a schoolteacher in East London.” Read more...

The best books on Global Cultural Understanding: the 2020 Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize

Patrick Wright, Historian

This is a book by Hazel Carby, who was born in the UK but went on to become a professor at one of the top universities in the US,  Yale. This is a very personal book by a serious historian, using her family history to explore Black British history, its relation to the Empire and in turn understand some of the contradictions and tensions within her own family. One take-home of the book: the shocking way people like Carby’s father—who came from Jamaica to fight in World War II—were treated by the British government after the war was over.

Books for Black History Month