Cultures in Babylon

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“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

Twenty-fifth-anniversary edition of a transatlantic Black feminist classic

Bringing together multi-award-winning author Hazel Carby’s most important and influential essays, Cultures in Babylon addresses the political dilemmas of representing Black women as sexual subjects, considers how far female sexuality is exploited by consumerism, and traces the contradictions Black women in the culture industry navigate. Carby’s writing is invariably sharp and provocative, her political insights shrewd and often against the grain. A powerful intervention, Cultures in Babylon quickly became a standard reference point in debates over race, ethnicity, and gender.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”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 SublimeHazel 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.GB

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