Escape attempt

Stuart Hall’s birthplace was pre-independence Jamaica and his world colonial. His family, like other religiously respectable middle-class colored families in the island, obsessed about differences in color and class, and steered clear of pan-Africanist, anti-colonial, and Rasta social movements that formed his immediate context in 1938. Describing how the imperial entered the private, Familiar Stranger moves through Hall’s long process of disidentifications, what he calls his ‘lifelong escape attempt” from secondariness. In Jamaica and in England, Hall nurtures his birthright capacity to see the world askew.