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Cultures in Babylon

Black Britain and African America

Part of Haymarket Series

Author Hazel V. Carby
Paperback
$34.95 US
Verso Books | Verso
0"W x 0"H x 0"D   | 18 oz | 24 per carton
On sale Aug 17, 1999 | 288 Pages | 978-1-85984-281-2
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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
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

About

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.

Praise

"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

Author

Hazel V. Carby View titles by Hazel V. Carby

Table of Contents

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

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