In December 2023 the Readings Seminar hosted Bill Schwarz, who discussed the genesis, process and outcome of his collaboration with Stuart Hall that resulted in the memoir Familiar Stranger. In reflecting on Familiar Stranger, Bill revealed the ‘emotional and political’ conditions of its making, as much as any ‘technical or textual’ conditions—that the decision, for example, to edit the text out of the dialogue between them, into the first person, was more than a literary decision. Bill challenged us to think carefully about that decision in light of another demand—to take into account Hall’s statement ‘I cannot become identical with my self’, concluding that Hall was deeply uncomfortable with the memoir as a form, because it might seduce (the author and the reader) into ‘fixing’ the self, when that self is always in a process of making and remaking as we navigate the social, political and cultural worlds that confront and condition us.
Bill further provoked us by challenging the valence of ‘conjuncture’ as an analytic framing for our consideration of Familiar Stranger—that whilst the book may include reflections on specific conjunctures (the 1938 labour rebellions in the Caribbean and Jamaica; the events of 1956, including the invasion of Egypt by Britain, France and Israel, and the invasion of Hungary by the Soviets) –Hall’s examination of interior life takes a different form – registering an epochal change: that is, decolonisation and post-colonialism. As Bill argued, epochal changes are neither punctual, nor do they follow a linear path, and the whole of Hall’s life, and our own, may be encompassed by that epochal moment. In the book Hall registers absences – and what is made unspeakable—in the commitments required of a colonial, racialised cultural formation.
A recording of this seminar will be made available here in the coming months.