TY - JOUR
AU - Perry, Kennetta Hammond
AB - Even before turning the first page of Hazel Carby’s Imperial Intimacies: a Tale of Two Islands, one is confronted with the description of a book that, by design and necessity, upends many of the sensibilities associated with historical writing. Carby invites readers to enter into a history of the British Empire as witnessed and narrated from the position of a Black feminist writer, researcher and intellectual who is explicitly ‘reckoning with what she can tell, what she can remember, and what she can bear to know’ (jacket). As such, this is a book that recalibrates how one imagines and engages archives that map how empire is felt socially, politically, economically and emotionally. It grapples with that which remains intentionally unsaid. It dwells upon memories that are deliberately not shared or passed on. It interrogates records that purposely obscure an accounting of the violence of enslavement, coloniality and racial formation, and it introduces subjects that refuse to be reduced to the calculations, conscriptions and classificatory regimes of the imperial state. At its core, the book offers a very personal story about the experience of family – both its making and its unmooring. And from Carby’s view, stories of familial lives, memories, encounters, movements, expectations, aspirations and sacrifice are a requisite for laying bare the often nondescript and unremarkable, yet painstaking ways in which the relations of empire were constituted and lived. Reminiscent of Sonja Boon’s What the Oceans Remember, the (un)assuming question ‘where are you from?’ animates Carby’s retrieval of what she describes as the intimacies of imperial life.1 Yet while Carby begins with a question that haunts her memories of being a child whose claims to Blackness and Britishness were made illegible, refused and or denied, she carefully constructs a narrative that actively questions. Her work urges historians to query where and how we track and trace the imprint of empire. It requires us to notice how empire permeates daily life and creates the entangled relations that it remains dependent upon, relations which bind geographical spaces across England and Jamaica, from the rural landscapes of Devon, Lincolnshire and Swift River to the urban topographies of London, Bristol and Kingston. To be sure, the political implications of narrating British history as it emerges in and between these spaces cannot be underestimated. Carby’s view as a child of empire represents a challenge to visions of British history steeped in parochial notions of an island story divorced from the routines of empire, the realities of migration and the consequences of the particular racial calculus that made it impossible for her own mother to acknowledge her stories of racist bullying in primary school as she could not accept that her daughter could be ‘regarded as black’ (p. 81). Against the backdrop of an increasingly globalized Black Lives Matter movement, Carby’s book is a reminder that histories that reckon with and attempt to provide an accounting of the making of Black life in Britain are indeed instructive portals for exposing the myths of a provincial national past. Carby’s stories provide an urgent and essential counter history that disrupts the insular versions of British history often reinforced in popular culture and touted by politicos like Michael Gove and Boris Johnson, who would have school children learn to sing ‘Rule Britannia!’ without ever learning of the British subjects who most certainly had been slaves. This is just one of the many ways that this book functions as an irreverent history of empire, one that is unapologetically nonconformist in its approach to storytelling and iconoclastic in its portrayal of life in Britain through the perspectives and memories of unconventional subjects. It cannot be taken for granted nor overstated that Imperial Intimacies is a work of Black women’s history set within the specific spatial and temporal conditions that made the British empire possible and keep its legacy palpable in the present. In this regard, it is imperative to understand that Imperial Intimacies belongs to a canon of Black British feminist thought that includes Beverley Bryan, Stella Dadzie and Suzanne Scafe’s ground-breaking work, The Heart of the Race (1985) as well as more contemporary work by Shirley Anne Tate (2009), Lisa Amanda Palmer (2019), and Lola Olufemi (2020).2 Likewise, a reading of Imperial Intimacies cannot be divorced from Carby’s seminal chapter, ‘White Woman Listen!: Black Feminism and the Boundaries of Sisterhood’, which appeared in one of the foundational texts of Black/British cultural studies, Empire Strikes Back published in 1982 by Birmingham’s Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. This collection which included pioneering work by Errol Lawrence, John Solomos, Bob Findlay, Simon Jones, Pratibha Parmar and Paul Gilroy raised critical questions about the historical, political and discursive structures that made racism operable. The collection also set an intellectual agenda for understanding and analyzing how racialized communities in Britain have responded to the dynamics of the unfolding of the contemporary racial state in Britain.3 Within the first line of ‘White Woman Listen!’ Carby delineates a Black feminist praxis that is derived from and invested in a critique of ‘history’ that entails reckoning with absences. In doing so she imagines Black feminism as an intellectual agenda and a position of engagement that seeks ‘to rectify the ill-conceived presences’, and foregrounds how absences about Black women’s lives and acts of non-recognition are made viable while becoming entrenched in historical thought.4 Writing in the context of the racial politics of Thatcher’s Britain, Carby offered a stinging critique of white feminist thought that anticipated Imperial Intimacies’s portrayal of the symbiotic relationship between Black (women’s) history and the history of Britain as both nation and empire. In urging white women ‘to listen to the work of black feminists’ as opposed to simply seeing Black women as abstract sites of study, she made a compelling case about the methodological stakes of reimagining feminist praxis. She insisted, ‘Black women do not want to be grafted onto “feminism” in a tokenistic manner as colourful diversions to “real” problems. Feminism has to be transformed if it is to address us’.5 Reading Imperial Intimacies in Brexit(ing) Britain, in the context of the resurgence of longstanding debates about the narrative content, geographical scope, and social utility of British history, one is hard pressed not to see parallels between her demand for a reconstructed feminist praxis in the 1980s and those currently emanating from organizations like Black Curriculum who are seeking to decolonize the British education system writ large by making Black British history central to the work of developing anti-racist pedagogies and curriculum transformation. The vantage points of empire presented in Carby’s book provide a moving lesson in how Black history – the stories, encounters, movements, emotions and intimacies, voiced and unspoken, which account for the making of Black life – provide an essential point of entry for writing British history and understanding how the unsettled boundaries of Britishness have been invented, contested and reimagined historically. In locating Imperial Intimacies as part of a canon of Black feminist scholarship about Britain as an imperial nation, it is useful to dwell on Carby’s choice to frame the work around notions of intimacies. In her work The Intimacies of Four Continents (2015) Lisa Lowe invokes intimacies as a discourse of relationality to rethink siloed spatial histories of emancipation, colonial administration, racial formation, migration, labour exploitation and anti-colonialism.6 Lowe does not limit her understanding of intimacies to a more familiar conceptual frame bound to dichotomies of public and private. Rather, she offers a language for understanding the notion of intimacies as a way to imagine a set of entangled proximities, adjacencies and connections between geographies, people, and structures of power that function in and beyond the domestic realm, tethered to, but not reduced to notions of sexuality, interiority or ideas about familial relations. One can see this more capacious framing of intimacies at work in Carby’s book. However, it is important not to gloss over the critical intervention that Carby makes in positioning intimacies experienced, articulated and lived by a Black feminist writer whose intellectual formation was produced by way of living and observing the relations of empire as a conceptual framework for writing about the workings of British imperialism. As scholars including Daina Ramey Berry, Leslie Harris, and Carby herself have argued, the intimate lives of Black women as historical subjects are routinely ignored, dismissed or silenced.7 Over three decades ago Darlene Clark Hine theorized that a ‘culture of dissemblance’ defined Black women’s refusal to disclose their vulnerabilities and emotional lives as well as their sexual experiences and desires which then limited the capacity of historians to recover intimate histories of Black women’s interiorities.8 However, recent works by scholars including Saidiya Hartman, who it should be noted was a student of Carby’s at Yale, are employing unconventional methodological approaches to a reimagined archive of Black life to erect histories of intimacies that had previously been unutterable, muted or literally ‘unthought’.9 In this regard, Carby’s latest intervention in this transatlantic body of scholarship is especially revealing as it combines memoir, autoethnography and critical readings of the colonial ledger to create space for the reader to gain glimpses of the intimate imperial worlds inhabited by ‘someone of Jamaican Welsh ancestry’ (p. 2) who became British, yet still wrestles with what that means and how it came to be. It is virtually impossible to leave this book without thinking deeply about the ways in which the intimacies of familial bonds are made, sustained and at times, painfully ruptured. Carby’s work reminds us that these attachments are about more than genealogy and collective memory-making. They are also rooted in unacknowledgement, suppression, forgetting, intentional acts of denial and the inability to speak or emote. Rather than work around the silences, Carby embraces them and listens intently for the questions that they raise which may never produce satisfying or easily reconcilable answers. Carby may never affirmatively know what it meant for her father to have been raised in a colonial world that schooled him to be a ‘Little Black Englishman’ (p. 28), encouraged him to put his life on the line for the empire’s cause and later chipped away at his dignity while rejecting his claims to British citizenship. She may never be sure whether the narrative that she constructs of her grandmother, Beatrice, from the fragments of her mother’s frayed memories steeped in her own sense of sacrifice and vision of ‘daughterly devotion’ (p. 136), is grounded in a reality that her grandmother would have recognized. But in daring to narrate that which some historians might deem as ‘suspect’ (p. 142), Carby actually makes a compelling argument that exposes the limits of historical empiricism as a means of grappling with the complexities of empire’s histories. In her words, ‘Mapping the lives of the dead with the historian’s tools alone is insufficient’ (p. 157), as it forecloses possibilities of narration that might open alternative ways to make sense of the context in which people lived, made choices and in some instances left memories behind. One of the many treasures that Carby offers in Imperial Intimacies (and one often absent from historical writing) is a critical reflection on the affective aspects of the archival encounter. Carby invites the reader into her experience of doing what historians do routinely – making her way through files at an official repository, The National Archives. In writing of her encounter with a file on her father, Carl Carby, she openly admits her discomfort in having to confront an archive documenting painful and traumatic memories which she had spent her life trying to forget. In narrating some of the stories of her imperial past contained in the records, Carby is attentive to how they are felt in her present. At times she does not know why she continues to read the file as doing so unearths trepidation, anguish, sounds of violence and memories of a younger self who is still wounded by the scenes that the file recalled. Carby explains, ‘The schizophrenic experience in the archive left me exhausted’, to the point that she could only regain her composure and ‘historical perspective’ through an act that required her girlhood-self ‘to be reburied, forced down the throat with cold coffee, swallowed like distasteful medicine’ (p. 239). As a historian this passage left me pondering the notion of what Carby described as ‘historical perspective’. What does it mean? How do we know when we are deploying it in a sufficiently ethical manner and what are the implications of losing it as we seek to erect the thing that we call History? In narrating this archival encounter as part of the story of empire’s imprint on her life, Carby opens a broader and more challenging conversation about positionality and the archival encounter as a site of knowledge retrieval and production. As historians, our encounters with and engagements in the archive are not neutral epistemological domains. Despite our ‘training’ and espoused professional conventions our archival encounters are not automated, nor are they abstracted from the racialized logics that we bring to and seek to explore in the context of the archive. Carby’s work urges historians to acknowledge and interrogate our capacity for certain kinds of knowing and reckon with the limits of our own sensibilities around acknowledgement and narrating the past from the position of our present. For some, this type of acknowledgement is no doubt an unsettling proposition. But given that the colonial ledger conjures different and sometimes contradictory interpretations that at times may tell us more about the historian’s present than what might have constituted the past, as a form of historical praxis Carby demonstrates the utility of being openly reflective about the intimate and affective spaces that inform the histories that we desire to write, those which we are able to construct and in some instances, those which we can bear to tell. Aside from coming to terms with an archival record of her parents’ lives, Carby’s research in The National Archives as seen in dialogue with the memories of her childhood also opened up a space for critically reading the violence of the colonial archive and its enactments of disavowal. While she is not the first to write of the colonial archive as a site of violence and violation, her attention to the ways in which histories of violence contained within the ledger were ‘camouflaged by the cosmetic beauty’ (p. 230) of the penmanship of eighteenth-century script is an insightful argument that helps one to see the great care and consideration that so shaped the administration of empire (as still today) to distort and conceal its savagery and inhumanity. Carby explains, ‘Acts of gracious writing that account for empire are evidence of the bottomless depths of unacknowledged violence and brutality embodied in British character and values across the colonial and imperial landscape’ (p. 231). The gravity, mundaneness and persistence of that violence is made more apparent as Carby movingly describes her father’s deformed left hand, beaten and crushed into submission at a young age by teachers who aimed to instil British values by breaking each knuckle in an effort to enforce the conventions of proper English writing as part of his imperial education in the colonies. How does one hold that intimate memory while viewing records of enslaved people meticulously written into history as property using the same English standard script that punished her father for being left-handed nearly a century after slavery in the British Empire had been legally abolished? What type of interpretative space does that open up? When British schools to this day still associate inculcating ‘British values’ with making primary aged children like my own Black child believe that their educational success and value lies in gaining a ‘pen licence’, what does it tell us about empire’s unending? These are just some of the many questions that Carby’s work requires historians to linger upon in considering the intimacies of empire’s making and its enduring afterlives. Kennetta Hammond Perry (kennetta.perry@dmu.ac.uk ) serves as Director of the Stephen Lawrence Research Centre and is a Reader in History at De Montfort University, Leicester UK. She is the author of London Is the Place For Me: Black Britons, Citizenship and the Politics of Race (Oxford, 2016) and is currently writing about histories of state-sanctioned racial violence in Britain. Footnotes 1 Sonja Boon, What the Oceans Remember: Searching for Belonging and Home, Waterloo, Ontario, 2019. 2 Beverley Bryan, Stella Dadzie and Suzanne Scafe, Heart of the Race: Black Women’s Lives in Britain, Virago, London, 1985; Shirley Anne Tate, Black Beauty: Aesthetics, Stylization, Politics, London, 2009; Lisa Amanda Palmer, ‘Diane Abbott, Misogynoir and the Politics of Black British Feminism’s Anti-Colonial Imperatives: “In Britain Too It’s as If We Don’t Exist”’, Sociological Review 68: 3, 2019, pp. 508–23; Lola Olufemi, Feminism Interrupted: Disrupting Power, Pluto, London, 2020. 3 David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State, Malden MA, 2002. 4 Hazel Carby, ‘White Woman Listen! Black Feminism and the Boundaries of Sisterhood’, in Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in 70s Britain, London, 1982, p. 212. 5 Carby, in ‘White Woman Listen’, p. 232. 6 Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents, Durham NC, 2015. 7 Sexuality and Slavery: Reclaiming Intimate Histories of the Americas, ed. Daina Berry and Leslie Harris, Athens, Georgia, 2018. 8 Darlene Clark Hine, ‘Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle West: Preliminary Thoughts on the Culture of Dissemblance’, Signs 14: 4, 1989, pp. 912–20. 9 Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval, New York, 2019, p. xv. © The Author(s) 2021. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of History Workshop Journal, all rights reserved. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - Irreverent Histories of Empire
JF - History Workshop Journal
DO - 10.1093/hwj/dbab007
DA - 2021-07-27
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/irreverent-histories-of-empire-0n6ZUOsJA5
SP - 248
EP - 254
VL - 91
IS - 1
DP - DeepDyve
ER -