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Cultures in Babylon

Feminism from Black Britain to African America

Part of Feminist Classics

Author Hazel V. Carby

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Verso Books | Verso

On sale Mar 12, 2024 | 288 Pages | 9781804295731

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For a decade and a half, since she first appeared in the Birmingham Centre’s collective volume The Empire Strikes Back, Hazel Carby has been on the frontline of the debate over multicultural education in Britain and the US. This book brings together her most important and influential essays, ranging over such topics as the necessity for racially diverse school curricula, the construction of literary canons, Zora Neale Hurston’s portraits of “the Folk,” C.L.R. James and Trinidadian nationalism and black women blues artists, and the necessity for racially diverse school curricula.

Carby’s analyses of diverse aspects of contemporary culture are invariably sharp and provocative, her political insights shrewd and often against the grain. A powerful intervention, Culture in Babylon will become a standard reference point in future debates over race, ethnicity and gender.

"At every turn, Carby refuses to tell a tidy or convenient story and instead produces an account of empire that is as expansive as it is heartbreaking."
—Saidiya Hartman

"Carby disrupts fixed notions of racial identity that contort our understanding of Britain’s colonial and postcolonial history."
—Paul Gilroy, author of Darker Than Blue and The Black Atlantic

"Hazel Carby is a foundational scholar of race, class, and empire as critical lenses for understanding culture."
—Elizabeth Alexander, author of The Light of the World and American Sublime

Hazel V. Carby is a co-author of The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in 70s Britain and author of Cultures in Babylon: Black Britain and African America; Race Men; and Reconstructing Womanhood. For three decades she taught at Yale University as the Charles C. and Dorothea S. Dilley Professor of African American Studies and Professor of American Studies.

Hazel V. Carby View titles by Hazel V. Carby

Introduction

Women, Migration and the Formation of a Blues Culture
1. The Sexual Politics of Women's Blues
2. Policing the Black Woman's Body in an Urban Context
3. Black Women's Blues, Motown and Rock and Roll
4. They Put a Spell on You

Black Feminist Interventions
5. White Woman Listen! Black Feminism and the Boundaries of Sisterhood
6. Race and the Academy: Feminism and the Politics of Difference
7. National Nightmares: The Liberal Bourgeoisie and Racial Anxiety
8. America Inc. - The Crisis at Yale: A Tale of Two Women

Fictions of the Folk
9. Reinventing History/Imagining the Future
10. Proletarian or Revolutionary Literature? C.L.R. James and the Politics of the Trinidadian Renaissance
11. Ideologies of Black Folk: The Historical Novel of Slavery
12. On Zora Neale Hurston's Seraph on the Suwanee
13. The Politics of Fiction, Anthropology and the Folk: Zora Neale Hurston

Dispatches from the Multicultural Wars
14. Schooling in Babylon
15. Multiculture
16. The Racism behind the Rioting
17. The Blackness of Theory
18. The Canon: Civil War and Reconstruction
19. The Multicultural Wars, Part One
20. The Multicultural Wars, Part Two
21. Imagining Black Men: The Politics of Cultural Identity

Acknowledgments
Index