Writing History: Thinking Beyond the Past in the Present

As a collaborative work that reflects on Stuart Hall’s early life in colonial Jamaica and his experience of the transitions that shaped the making of postcolonial Britain, Familiar Stranger offers a number of provocations about the meaning and methods of history and their relationship to present. This essay explores how both the form and key themes of the text provide a generative space to think critically about approaches to historical writing. Likewise, it examines how Familiar Stranger offers a means of conceptualizing the relationship between histories of Britain’s racialized colonial past and its afterlives in the present.
Keywords: Race; (Post)Coloniality; Archive; Black Britain