"Where are you from?" Hazel Carby was continually asked as a girl, at a time when being Black and being British was understood to be an impossibility.
To answer that question properly, eminent scholar Hazel Carby finds she needs to trace not just the family history of her Jamaican father and her Welsh mother, but to untangle knots the British Empire created across the Atlantic. Tracing the skeins of this knotted past through the method of "autohistory," Imperial Intimacies charts empire's violent interweaving of lives and states, Jamaica and Britain, capital and bodies, public language and private feeling. In so doing, Carby will find herself reckoning with what she can tell, what she can remember, and what she can bear to know.
