‘Where are you from?’ was the question hounding Hazel Carby in postwar. London. One of the so-called brown babies of the Windrush generation, born to a Jamaican father and Welsh mother, Carby’s place in her home and her country of birth was always in doubt.  Carby untangles the threads connecting members of her family to each other in a web woven by the British Empire. In England, she was thrilled by the cosmopolitan fantasies of empire, by cities built with slave-trade profits, and by street peddlers selling fashionable Jamaican delicacies. In Jamaica, we follow the lives of the `white Carbys’ and the `black Carbys’, as Mary Ivey, a free woman of colour, whose children are fathered by Lilly Carby, a British soldier who arrived in Jamaica in 1789 to be absorbed into the plantation aristocracy.

Moving between the Jamaican plantations, Devon, the port cities of Bristol, Cardiff, and Kingston, and the working-class estates of South London, Carby’s family story is a personal history and a summation of the violent entanglement of two islands.

Hazel V. Carby is a co-author of The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in 70s Britain and author of Cultures in Babylon: Black Britain and African America, Race Men, and Reconstructing Womanhood. For three decades she taught at Yale University as the Charles C. and Dorothea S. Dilley Professor of African American Studies and Professor of American Studies.

Chaired by Viji Kuppan

In association with Verso Books

Tickets: £4.00 (£2.00 students). We expect this event to sell out so booking essential through events@fiveleaves.co.uk