FAMILIAR STRANGER

This is a miracle of a book George Lamming Compelling Stuart Hall s story is the story of an age Owen Jones Sometimes I feel I was the last colonial This is the story in his own words of the extraordinary life of Stuart Hall writer thinker and one of the leading intellectual lights of his age Growing up in a middle class family in 1930s Jamaica then still a British colony Hall found himself caught between two worlds the stiflingly respectable middle class in Kingston who in their habits and ambitions measured themselves against the white planter elite and working class and peasant Jamaica neglected and grindingly poor though rich in culture music and history But as colonial rule was challenged things began to change in Jamaica and across the world When in 1951 a scholarship took him across the Atlantic to Oxford University Hall encountered other Caribbean writers and thinkers from Sam Selvon and George Lamming to V S Naipaul He also forged friendships with the likes of Raymond Williams and E P Thompson with whom he worked in the formidable political movement the New Left and developed his groundbreaking ideas on cultural theory Familiar Stranger takes us to the heart of Hall s struggle in post war England that of building a home and