num_pages: 416
description:  A haunting evocative history of British Empire told through one womans family storyWhere 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 Carbys 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 Carbys 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 Carbys family story is at once an intimate personal history and a sweeping summation of the violent entanglement of two islands. In charting British empires 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.
language: English
title: Imperial Intimacies: A Tale of Two Islands
publisher: Verso