Stuart Hall writes:

"Contrary to common-sense understanding, the transformations of self-identity are not just a personal matter. Historical shifts out there provide the social conditions of existence of personal and psychic change in here. What mattered was how I positioned myself on the other side - or positioned myself to catch the other side: how I was, involuntarily, hailed by and interpellated into a broader social discourse. Only by discovering this did I begin to understand that what black identity involved was a social, political, historical and symbolic event, not just a personal, and certainly not simply a genetic, one.

From this I came to understand that identity is not a set of fixed attributes, the unchanging essence of the inner self, but a constantly shifting process of positioning. We tend to think of identity as taking us back to our roots, the part of us which remains essentially the same across time. In fact identity is always a never-completed process of becoming - a process of shifting identifications, rather than a singular, complete, finished state of being." ( )

Stuart Hall grew up in a middle-class family in Kingston, Jamaica, came to Britain on a Rhodes Scholarship in the early fifties, and stayed on for the rest of his life as an academic and left-wing political critic. He was one of the founders of cultural studies as an academic discipline (at Birmingham University) and later became what the Guardian once called "the progressive insomniac's icon" through his prominent role as (emeritus) professor of sociology in the Open University, in which he appeared in many late-night TV lectures and seminars.

Familiar Stranger - a slightly odd mixture of memoir and heavyweight cultural analysis - is an account of his life up to the point where he moved to Birmingham in the mid-1960s. There's a lot about the history and social structure of postcolonial Jamaica and where his particular kind of family fitted into that, and also about the experience of Caribbean people as migrants to England, mixed in with more personal memories of his own experiences and the people he knew, which of course gets especially interesting when he gets on to his days as a postgraduate student when he was editing the New Left Review and mixing with everyone who was anybody in CND, the communist party and the left wing of Labour. As you would expect, there are some very thought-provoking insights about the cutural legacy of colonialism and slavery and the condition of emigrant, but there's disappointingly little analysis about what went wrong with the British left. Perhaps that will be in the next volume.

According to Bill Schwarz's introduction, the book is the fruit of some 20 years of discussions and interviews between the two of them and was planned from the start as a collaborative effort (Hall was a big collaborator and rarely published anything as sole author). However, Hall died before they had really nailed the structure of the book, and the publishers vetoed the planned dialogue format and asked Schwarz to recast it as a first-person "ghosted autobiography", which presumably explains the slightly clumsy jumps between quite personal reminiscences and heavyweight academic prose that is clearly crying out for (absent) footnotes. Probably not everybody's taste, and I doubt that this will be in the Christmas bestseller charts, but definitely interesting. ( )