Author(s): Stuart Hall; Bill Schwarz

History

With great insight and wit, Stuart Hall tells the extraordinary story of his early life and career-from the streets of colonial Kingston, Jamaica, to the thorny politics of postwar Britain-and how his experiences shaped his theoretical work. Growing up in a middle-class family in 1930s Kingston, the young Hall found himself uncomfortable in his own home. That unease helped propel him across the Atlantic in 1951 to study at Oxford, where he met and befriended the leading intellectuals with whom he would found the intellectual and political movement known as the New Left. With the emotional aftershock of colonialism still pulsing through him, Hall chose to remain in England, where he struggled to build a home, a life, and an identity in a postwar environment rife with racism. Exuding passion and wisdom, Familiar Stranger is the intellectual memoir of one of our greatest minds. Book jacket.