Imperial Intimacies

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"Where are you from?" was a persistent question for Hazel Carby in post-war London. As a brown baby of the Windrush generation, born to a Jamaican father and Welsh mother, her identity was always uncertain. Carby explores her family's connections, revealing a complex web woven by the British Empire across the Atlantic. We meet her working-class grandmother Beatrice, a seamstress facing poverty and disease, who was captivated by the empire's cosmopolitan allure, as well as the cities built on slave-trade profits and street vendors selling Jamaican delicacies. In Jamaica, we encounter the "white Carbys" and "black Carbys," including Mary Ivey, a free woman of color whose children were fathered by Lilly Carby, a British soldier integrated into the plantation elite in 1789. The hidden stories of Bridget and Nancy, two women owned by Lilly who survived the Middle Passage, also emerge. Carby's narrative spans Jamaican plantations, Devon's hills, and the port cities of Bristol, Cardiff, and Kingston, intertwining her personal history with the broader violent legacy of colonialism. Through this journey, she grapples with memory, identity, and the weight of her family's past.