Familiar Stranger: A Life Between Two Islands by Stuart Hall

Familiar Stranger: A Life Between Two Islands Reviews

• 
  Udeni

  Stuart Hall was, amongst many other impressive things, the editor of the New Left Review and founder of Cultural Studies as a serious academic discipline. His position, radical at the time, was that British identity had to incorporate "blackness" if it was ever to survive. "Familiar Stranger" is his account of the period from his childhood to 1964. Mo Farah can now appear wrapped in the British flag and anyone who accuses him of not being British is howled down as a racist. But when Hall arrived in Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, racism was acceptable in Britain, and overt racism continued to be the norm for many decades.
  
  "Familiar Stranger" is an account of his intellectual development: from an angry child, through teenage rebellion, to isolation at Oxford, and then, through socialism and cultural studies, to a place of relative peace. Hall comes across as a genuine radical while also being a kind and humble man. He is prescient on the self-destructive tendency of the Labour Party to only elect white, English, well-educated men to their ranks: something that has contributed to the destruction of the Labour party. The working class favour UKIP, who (falsely) appear to be a more genuinely working class party. Other non-white working class people do not vote at all. He covers a wealth of Caribbean writers and thinkers: from Derek Walcott to Michael Manley. The bibliography of black British, American, and Caribbean writers is worth the price of the book alone. I enjoyed his wry comments about other, less supportive writers: he meets V.S. Naipaul at Oxford and is scathing of his "genteel abhorrence of Negroes". Hall is, touchingly, devoted to the great Trinidadian writer and cricketer, C.L.R.James.
  
  While beautifully written, this is nevertheless an ntellectual history. The book is full of terms such as "phenomenology", "epistemology", "indexical". There are frequent, but patiently explained, references to Levi-Strauss, Foucault, Gramsci, Bourdieu, Saussure, and Weber. Not a book that is easily accessible to many. This is a shame. Hall's ideas are all about reducing inequality and making popular culture a worthy subject of study.
  
  My only criticism is that I would have liked to have seen beyond 1964: Hall was a passionate hater of Thatcherite politics and what they did to the fabric of Britain. What did he make of the New Labour election? Of the election of Barack Obama? The book ends with Hall coming to terms with his new homeland:
  "Even though I never felt England was mine I was learning to find my way around it, both the formal artefacts of its civilization and its informal, lived aspects. There was, however, much to do. As there still is."
  
  Indeed there is. Hall notes that "innovative consumer and managerial forms of capitalism" had effectively destroyed the working class as an revolutionary force against capitalism. New social groupings, the endemic racism of the police and the refusal to accept the unexceptional observation that Britain remains a many ways a racist society. These attitudes still exist. This means that many non-white people are only superficially tolerated. Racism is never far beneath the surface. As Hall says "The old reflexes are hard to dislodge"''
  
  Hall died in 2014. I would have liked to have read his insights on Trump, Le Pen and Brexit. He would not, I think, have been surprised.
• 
  Tara Brabazon

  Oh Stuart Hall is intoxicating. An extraordinary speaker. A seductive writer. He could charm the CND pin off a Marxist. This book is a memoir, but offers passionate explorations of the diaspora and moving between two 'worlds' - or indeed, islands.
  
  The challenge for Hall - and the scholars that follow him - is one of class. His first experience of the United Kingdom was Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship. He married a young, beautiful and brilliant woman - yes, a white woman - with well educated and comfortably middle class parents.
  
  With Hall, we are left managing the paradoxes of race and class, self and society. But what makes this memoir powerful and deeply moving are two factors. Firstly, Hall demonstrates how books - key moments of reading in his life - built his intellectual architecture. In a time where books - particularly in the Australian higher education system - are irrelevant, meaningless and an inconvenience, it is joyous to see a celebration of the book in building a life.
  
  But secondly, Hall re-tells his meetings with Raymond Williams. For me, it has always been Williams who is my hero, not Hall. Hall was too beautiful and seductive. The political content of his words worried me in their trajectory. But Williams has remained a shadow in the stories of the British left. Yet he is the punctuation for all scholars of politics and popular culture.
  
  While Stuart Hall remains the X Factor of Cultural Studies, Raymond Williams remains our conscience.
• 
  Jacob Wren

  Stuart Hall writes:
  
  
  "Contrary to common-sense understanding, the transformations of self-identity are not just a personal matter. Historical shifts out there provide the social conditions of existence of personal and psychic change in here. What mattered was how I positioned myself on the other side - or positioned myself to catch the other side: how I was, involuntarily, hailed by and interpellated into a broader social discourse. Only by discovering this did I begin to understand that what black identity involved was a social, political, historical and symbolic event, not just a personal, and certainly not simply a genetic, one.
  
  From this I came to understand that identity is not a set of fixed attributes, the unchanging essence of the inner self, but a constantly shifting process of positioning. We tend to think of identity as taking us back to our roots, the part of us which remains essentially the same across time. In fact identity is always a never-completed process of becoming - a process of shifting identifications, rather than a singular, complete, finished state of being."
• 
  Sara Salem

  What a stunning and brilliant man.
• 
  Félice

  I wish I could've read this book for leisure, but it was required reading for my social theories class. Hall is a sharp thinker with excellent observations and incredibly in-depth analysis, so much so that I felt very lost in the text at times. The chapters did not read very coherently, more like a jumble of very complex thoughts. Hall's understanding of his own life, and his place in the world and post-colonial is fascinating, and this book is certainly a valuable read, as a social theory and a memoir.
• 
  Taylor Hughson

  Beautiful and poignant, I learnt a lot about the Caribbean pre-Independence, about England and the Black experience in the 50s, about politics, and perhaps most of all about psychic longing, for places and for states of affairs that exist outside of your grasp
• 
  Yasmine Kherfi

  I was particularly struck by the humility in stuart hall's writing, which made me think of how important it is to not put public intellectuals on a pedestal, or to idolize them. perfect balance between sharing knowledge and not taking himself too seriously - a trait that's humbling/inspiring coming from a prolific writer and thinker. Even though it's a personal memoir, stuart hall was really committed to making the book an engaging conversation with the reader, on how personal life and political ideas interacted at different stages/milestones for him - between his life Jamaica and England, grad school, home, through family dynamics, professional relationships, etc - while always weaving his personal accounts with analysis of colonialism, diaspora, migration, class politics, etc. The book really inspires the reader to think about the messiness of the personal and the political in their own lives too, and challenges the tendency to separate the two. the book also feels like an invitation/reminder to include the rich and complex ways we situate ourselves and our thinking when we write.
• 
  Kel

  covers everything up to his involvement in the birmingham school--would have loved more about cultural studies.
• 
  Justin Waerts

  Fascinating memoir.
• 
  Michele Wallace

  One of the most wonderful memoirs I have ever read. I guess extraordinary people write extraordinary memoirs. This one contains everything I ever wanted to know about Stuart’s extraordinary way of viewing the world and his place in it. He was born in Jamaica as was my father around the same time. Why were they so different and yet in some ways so much alike? He is no longer alive but this book makes me feel as though I was in his presence once again. It is just brilliant.
• 
  Gizmo

  In college, Stuart Hall's essays on cultural studies, particularly those about articulation, popular culture, race, and visual culture, opened up new ways of thinking about the political dimensions of cultural production and consumption. I was definitely changed by these works, and looked forward to reading this memoir about his life from his birth to about 1965. The book is not a memoir in a traditional sense. On the one hand, it does chronicle his early days in Jamaica, his relationship with family, his experience in school and then later at Oxford in England. On the other hand, the memoir is also an excavation of Hall's theorizing. He uses his theories and the theoretical work that informs his own in order to explain and comprehend his experience. What the memoir provides, then, is an account of his early life that is less focused on how he experienced moments than on how he came to understand them later in life as a result of the thought that he later came into contact with and formulated. The result is a memoir that provides a satisfying picture of his early life and that allows us to again encounter the theory that probably brought us to this book in the first place. The early focus on his days in Jamaica and in a growing sense of West Indianness when we arrived in England provides an opportunity to explore the different ways race and racialization affected Hall's arguments throughout his career. If Hall opened up ways of thinking about the world for you, the memoir will be a satisfying return to his work and expose you to new details about his life.
• 
  Emily

  Stuart Hall is the father of cultural studies and in this memoir of sorts, you see how his own personal experiences shaped his intellectual position. With his personal identification flitting between being a middle-class Jamaican during British colonial rule, to being an othered and colonial subject at Oxford, to being a semi-exile from both of these worlds, Hall explores the multitude of ways in which he struggled to define himself, and by extension, how colonial subjects are stuck in the same manner. A very interesting and sometimes hilarious account of how his political activism came about in conjunction with his attempt to shape his own identity; the only part that I could have done without was the references to (what seemed like) some very specific jargon within 1950s/60s Leftist British politics - or at least a more elaborate explanation of them. This book otherwise made me want to go back to my academic roots and read more on what latest cultural critical theory has to offer.
• 
  Julian Dones

  A marvelous book that tells the story of how Stuart hall became the person who he was. It counts the take of what is to be a colonial subject, from Jamaica to Britain. The book encompasses the ideas of what it means to be a colonial subject in the light of diaspora. It draws history from Jamaica and it’s culture and the influences that it had in Hall, his move to Oxford and how he became immerse in The British life although he very well knew he didn’t belong there.
  
  A fascinating book I recommend to anyone who is interested in knowing more about this extraordinary individual. Be ready to look up tons of names if important people that he references in his memoir. Enjoy!
• 
  Mythili

  Impulse buy at the bookstore down the road after I took Darshan to the library but couldn’t find anything I wanted to read there and was feeling envious of his stack of new books. I keep stumbling across Stuart Hall’s work and so was curious about him. This was altogether lovely, very conversational but still filled with the occasional passage of beautiful observations (especially when it came to Hall’s early years in the UK). Overall a rich personal account of one man’s journey through an era of enormous change in the UK as well as a very accessible history of the genesis of an important branch of modern British cultural/political thinking.
• 
  Tom

  This is a little dense and academic in places, but Hall's brilliant insight into the complexities of racial identity and belonging in (post)colonial Britain makes it well worth it. I was surprised by the time covered - basically, Hall's life up until he moved to Birmingham to join the Centre for Cultural Studies in 1964 - but there are plenty of issues covered and it doesn't feel lacking. What a shame we will not get to read a second volume that continues from there.
• 
  Peggy Dyer

  I met Stuart Hall when I did my OU undergraduate degree. His enthusiasm for learning was infectious and his writings and lectures were a constant for me in my 20s. I was nervous about reading this...I didn’t want him to posthumously disappoint me...he didn’t. A great read by a great man.
• 
  Clare Russell

  This is fantastic. Hall weaves his autobiography with his politics, colonialism and the issues facing 1950s England and Jamaica. Fantastic on race and class, giving 4 stars as gender was such a strong omission
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  Nellie farrow

  Very interesting and informative about colonial Jamaica and the black British diaspora. The academic language wasn’t too dry but it definitely felt like a workout for my brain. Took me forever to read!
• 
  Fernanda

  What a wonderful book this is. It connects Hall’s incredible intellectual, professional and personal lives with striking sincerity and self-reflection.
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  Rémi

  3 stars, which is again pretty good for a course-book
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  Claire Woodbridge

  An interesting look at a life divided between two cultures of distant times. Very relatable and eloquently written