Private Worlds by Jeremy Seabrook: a response

Abstract

This year, 2023, marks the sixtieth anniversary of Jeremy Seabrook’s authorial career as one of our finest and most impassioned writers on the nexus of the personal, the political and the global. And, it is just over three decades since he first wrote in Race & Class. With a depth and range that spans the life situation of the poor in Britain, the underprivileged and precariat of the Asian sub-continent, the impact of imperialism and consumerism on the psyche, the meaning of work, the impact of environmental disaster and the essence of what it is to be human – and a gift for striking prophecy – Seabrook’s career has been marked by the telling of beautifully expressed but often deeply uncomfortable and challenging truths. Yet always with immense feeling for the other at their heart. As expressed in his seminal piece, ‘The soul of man under globalism’ (Race & Class 43, no. 4, 2002), ‘There are many macro-economic accounts of globalisation, but we rarely learn how it affects the psyche and sensibility of lives uprooted and radically reshaped by the penetration of their world by the market economy.’ We are therefore delighted to publish in this issue and this anniversary year, not only Jeremy Seabrook’s latest article for us, ‘The present imperium’, but also this response, by a contemporary, to his recently published autobiography, Private Worlds: growing up gay in post-war Britain (Pluto Press, 2023) which raises not only fundamental themes relating to the gay community in the UK and its history, but also profound, wider societal issues.