Books by Hazel Carby
Imperial Intimacies: A Tale of Two Islands
by Hazel Carby
***Winner of the 2020 British Academy Prize for Global Cultural Understanding***
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.
“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
Interviews where books by Hazel Carby were recommended
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1
Imperial Intimacies: A Tale of Two Islands
by Hazel Carby -
2
Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent
by Priyamavada Gopal -
3
Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power
by Pekka Hämäläinen -
4
Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century
by Charles King -
5
All Our Relations: Indigenous Trauma in the Shadow of Colonialism
by Tanya Talaga
The best books on Global Cultural Understanding: the 2020 Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize, recommended by Patrick Wright
The best books on Global Cultural Understanding: the 2020 Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize, recommended by Patrick Wright
Every year the British Academy's Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize is awarded to the best nonfiction book that has contributed to 'global cultural understanding.' This year, the legacies of colonization and empire loom large. Patrick Wright, Emeritus Professor at King's College London and chair of this year's panel of judges, talks us through the books shortlisted for the £25,000 prize.
