Imperial Intimacies: A Tale of Two Islands by Hazel V. Carby (review)

Imperial Intimacies: A Tale of Two Islands by Hazel V. Carby is an intricate and complex work, starting with the book cover. The hardcover edition’s black cloth shows a white rectangle in the centre, framing a black and white collage of four trimmed photographs. On top in the middle is a photograph of a 1930s street scene in Kingston, Jamaica, cut in the shape of the island. Below this scene on the lower right-hand side emerges the sceptical gaze of a young girl in a white dress, socks, and shoes. It is a photograph of the author, Hazel Carby, at the age of two, standing in “a typical London back yard” (100). In the upper section of the collage, on both sides of the street scene, is the portrait of the author’s father, Carl Carby. The collage only reveals his left eye confronting the viewer directly: he looks friendly, bold, and inescapable. Considering position and size, the collage centres on the father’s portrait. Yet this portrait is covered by the daughter on the right, the Kingston street scene in the centre, and an old manuscript on the left. The manuscript, written in English round hand, notes Lilly Carby’s last will, in which the early nineteenth-century relative refers to “his goods and chattel which, of course, included his most valuable property, enslaved people” (Hazel Carby 2021, personal communication). While the black and white colouring, picture frame, and portrait evoke the nostalgia often associated with memorabilia, the collage and content complicate this sentimental reading as the book cover critically assembles personal, historical, and archival documents. Carby’s text moves beyond forms of nostalgia by dispensing with a “yearning for a different time” (Boym xv) while meticulously connecting fragments from past centuries with the present, Jamaica with England, the personal with the historical and the political. Indeed, Imperial Intimacies combines several different, even contradictory genres. On the front-page flap, the publisher, Verso Books, categorises the text as “History/Biography.” This classification is further complicated by a third term that appears in the book title and again in the text, describing it as a “tale” (232). The book thus shifts between story, biography, and history to create a hybrid genre that has provoked questions and comments prior to its publication and after, for instance, from Marisa J. Fuentes (Fuentes 168), Patrick Sullivan (Carby, “Knowing Yourself ”), and Jeffrey Williams (Carby, “Reconstructing Culture” 103). In an interview with the philologist Williams, Carby states: “It’s not just a memoir; it’s trying to use memory and history to play off each other” (Carby, “Reconstructing Culture” 103). Just as the collage on the book cover is a composition of fragments, Imperial