Stuart Hall‘s Familiar Stranger - deportation and different lives lived between two islands

ABSTRACT

My piece is not a review as such, but rather a set of reflections from reading Familiar Stranger in light of my own work on deportation. Hall notes that he was lucky to arrive with a navy-blue passport, and as far as I know he never substantively theorised immigration controls. My point is at this juncture we need to. I argue that questions around race, racism and multiculture cannot proceed without careful analysis of the contemporary border regime. There is a danger that Hall’s theorisations on identity, contingency and complexity get ‘stripped of much of their transformative and unsettling potential’, and I argue that centering the border in studies of race and racism provides one way of carrying forward Hall’s tireless emphasis on the specifics of the present, on the need to reckon with how the contemporary always reveals new sites of political contestation and struggle

KEYWORDS:

• Deportation
• Jamaica
• racism
• immigration control
• multi-status Britain
• identity

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Sivamohan Valluvan for profoundly helpful comments on an earlier draft.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Gurminder Bhambra (2016) argues that Brexit represents a later instantiation of this pattern of ‘turning citizens into migrants’.

2. Perhaps this is why he does not mention deportees, even though they far outnumber the returning residents who retire to live in the hills of Jamaica, whom he mentions twice.

3. Notably, Hall was in his late years when the deportation of people like Chris developed as standard practice. Hall will certainly have been aware of the significant number of deportations to Jamaica in the 1990s and early 2000s (from the UK, Canada and the US), but he may not have been aware of the emerging deportation of people who present as ‘Black Britons’ – which emerged in the wake of a ‘foreign prisoner crisis’ in 2006.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council [n/a].