Returning to America in 1905 after a 20-year absence, Henry James describes himself as an alien in a familiar land: the ‘initiated native’ and the ‘inquiring stranger’ to the American scene he had long left behind. Mapping different ways of ‘coming home’, this talk engages with James Baldwin’s and Stuart Hall’s responses to James as a fellow transatlantic figure and how their use of a cultural and historical ‘Henry James’ informs their ambivalence about being a stranger and/or at home. I will discuss the ways in which Hall and Baldwin (re)position themselves in relation to exile, home and homecoming in their own ‘stranger’ texts, including Hall’s memoir Familiar Stranger and Baldwin’s essays in Notes of a Native Son.