“Orphan threads”: Figures of auto-history in Hazel V. Carby’s Imperial Intimacies

Abstract

In the preface to Imperial Intimacies: A Tale of Two Islands (2019), Hazel V. Carby declares that fragments of her historical account — what she calls “orphan threads” — “have been left broken because I do not know how to make them connect”. This article offers a sustained reading of the use of “adoption” and “orphan” throughout Carby’s work of auto-history. It uncovers a surprising preoccupation with figures without parents — a preoccupation that initially appears at odds with Imperial Intimacies’ interest in the excavation of Carby’s family history across the UK and Jamaica. With reference to histories of unparenting and to discourses of colonial paternalism, this analysis foregrounds how Carby implicitly associates orphancy with moments of fraught historical recovery, Black and brown identity (within the context of British history), and experiences at the cusp of legibility. The orphan thus assists her text’s programme of subverting standard forms of history- and life-writing.

Ultimately, the essay argues that orphancy works as a catachresis in Imperial Intimacies; Carby borrows and adapts the term to describe the experience of racialized exclusion and abjection during and after British colonialism. In the course of my analysis, I address how the dense literary form of Carby’s work contributes to overlapping political concerns in the fields of postcolonial autotheory, Black feminism, and critical adoption studies. In the case of critical adoption studies, where histories of unparenting and adoption are paramount, I draw on John McLeod’s theorization of “adoptive being” to illustrate how Carby, despite being raised by her birth parents, develops an alternative expression of social being that is detached from the naturalism of the nation-state and family.