Includes bibliographical references (pages 351-393) and index.
Contents:
Part One: Inventories : Where are you from? -- Becoming British: Iris -- Becoming British: Carl -- Lost -- Part Two: Calculations : Fictions of racial logic -- Contagion -- Brown babies -- Half-caste -- Part Three: Dead Reconing : Home : The moth -- The bathroom -- The kitchen -- The hamlet -- The sacrifice -- Family registers : Arrival -- Rebecca -- Rose -- Bristol -- Dreaming empire -- Maud, Walter and Charles -- Part Four: Accounting : Writing by hand -- Correspondence -- Bookkeeping -- Political arithmetic -- Executors of empire -- Part Five: Legacies : What's in a name? -- Lincoln Settlement, Jamaica -- Who inherits? -- Swift River -- An English village -- War.
Summary:
"A haunting and evocative history of British empire, told through one woman's family story 'Where are you from?' Hazel Carby was continually asked as a girl, at a time when being Black and being British was understood to be an impossibility. To answer that question properly, eminent scholar Hazel Carby finds she needs to trace not just the family history of her Jamaican father and her Welsh mother, but to untangle knots the British Empire created across the Atlantic. Tracing the skeins of this knotted past through the method of 'autohistory, ' Imperial Intimacies charts empire's violent interweaving of lives and states, Jamaica and Britain, capital and bodies, public language and private feeling. In so doing, Carby will find herself reckoning with what she can tell, what she can remember, and what she can bear to know"-- Provided by publisher.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.