How Families Navigate Empire

In this reflective essay, Gloria Wekker engages with Hazel Carby’s Imperial Intimacies, blending personal narrative with scholarly critique. Carby’s memoir, rooted in her British Jamaican heritage, explores the legacies of empire through familial and archival lenses, revealing the persistent racial and gendered structures of postwar Britain. Wekker, drawing from her Surinamese Dutch background, parallels Carby’s experiences with her own migration story, highlighting the psychic and social burdens of navigating Dutch colonial legacies. She underscores the importance of Black feminist scholarship and intersectional analysis in challenging Eurocentric academic norms. Wekker also reflects on the gendered pressures her family faced in the Netherlands and the pride instilled by her parents to resist assimilationist expectations. Through an intimate dialogue with Carby’s work, Wekker illuminates how empire permeates domestic life and personal memory. Her essay is both homage and critical intervention, emphasizing the transformative potential of Black feminist autoethnography in confronting imperial histories.