Hazel V. Carby - Böcker

This cultural history of nineteenth-century narratives of slave and free women traces the ways in which these writings began to resist dominant literary conventions and to offer the first alternative versions of black womanhood. Covering the period between the 1850s and the turn of the century, it depicts an era of intense cultural and political activity when Afro-American women first began to emerge as novelists. Why black women wrote novels, and what they thought novels could do, are among the questions discussed.

With the 1987 publication of Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Black American Woman Novelist Hazel Carby produced a groundbreaking cultural history of nineteenth-century African American women, and an unapologetic black feminist intervention. The work proved that literature was itself a key site for the development of cultural and political ideas that would come to dominate later thinking. The women whose lives and work are here documented, celebrated, and commemorated refused to be intimidated or silenced by a nation that sought to exploit their labor and reproductive power, and to deny their humanity. Reconstructing Womanhood proved an excoriating critique of the era's focus on “great men” in African American literary and cultural criticism that obscured the work of their female contemporaries. It revised the period of Jim Crow and Booker T. Washington, depicting a time of fervent cultural and political activity by such figures as Ida B. Wells, Anna Julia Cooper, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and Pauline Hopkins. With updated text and a new preface by the author, an introduction by Sarah Haley, and afterword by Robert Reid Pharr, the book remains as impactful today as it was in 1987, ready for a new generation of scholars and thinkers.

With the 1987 publication of Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Black American Woman Novelist Hazel Carby produced a groundbreaking cultural history of nineteenth-century African American women, and an unapologetic black feminist intervention. The work proved that literature was itself a key site for the development of cultural and political ideas that would come to dominate later thinking. The women whose lives and work are here documented, celebrated, and commemorated refused to be intimidated or silenced by a nation that sought to exploit their labor and reproductive power, and to deny their humanity. Reconstructing Womanhood proved an excoriating critique of the era's focus on “great men” in African American literary and cultural criticism that obscured the work of their female contemporaries. It revised the period of Jim Crow and Booker T. Washington, depicting a time of fervent cultural and political activity by such figures as Ida B. Wells, Anna Julia Cooper, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and Pauline Hopkins. With updated text and a new preface by the author, an introduction by Sarah Haley, and afterword by Robert Reid Pharr, the book remains as impactful today as it was in 1987, ready for a new generation of scholars and thinkers.

Who are the “race men” standing for black America? It is a question Hazel Carby rejects, along with its long-standing assumption: that a particular type of black male can represent the race. A searing critique of definitions of black masculinity at work in American culture, Race Men shows how these defining images play out socially, culturally, and politically for black and white society—and how they exclude women altogether.Carby begins by looking at images of black masculinity in the work of W. E. B. Du Bois. Her analysis of The Souls of Black Folk reveals the narrow and rigid code of masculinity that Du Bois applied to racial achievement and advancement—a code that remains implicitly but firmly in place today in the work of celebrated African American male intellectuals. The career of Paul Robeson, the music of Huddie Ledbetter, and the writings of C. L. R. James on cricket and on the Haitian revolutionary, Toussaint L’Ouverture, offer further evidence of the social and political uses of representations of black masculinity.In the music of Miles Davis and the novels of Samuel R. Delany, Carby finds two separate but related challenges to conventions of black masculinity. Examining Hollywood films, she traces through the career of Danny Glover the development of a cultural narrative that promises to resolve racial contradictions by pairing black and white men—still leaving women out of the picture.A powerful statement by a major voice among black feminists, Race Men holds out the hope that by understanding how society has relied upon affirmations of masculinity to resolve social and political crises, we can learn to transcend them.

'Where are you from?' was the question hounding Hazel Carby as a girl in post-World War II London. One of the so-called brown babies of the Windrush generation, born to a Jamaican father and Welsh mother, Carby's place in her home, her neighbourhood, and her country of birth was always in doubt. Emerging from this setting, Carby untangles the threads connecting members of her family to each other in a web woven by the British Empire across the Atlantic. We meet Carby's working-class grandmother Beatrice, a seamstress challenged by poverty and disease. In England, she was thrilled by the cosmopolitan fantasies of empire, by cities built with slave-trade profits, and by street peddlers selling fashionable Jamaican delicacies. In Jamaica, we follow the lives of both the 'white Carbys' and the 'black Carbys', as Mary Ivey, a free woman of colour, whose children are fathered by Lilly Carby, a British soldier who arrived in Jamaica in 1789 to be absorbed into the plantation aristocracy. And we discover the hidden stories of Bridget and Nancy, two women owned by Lilly who survived the Middle Passage from Africa to the Caribbean.Moving between the Jamaican plantations, the hills of Devon, the port cities of Bristol, Cardiff, and Kingston, and the working-class estates of South London, Carby's family story is at once an intimate personal history and a sweeping summation of the violent entanglement of two islands. In charting British empire's interweaving of capital and bodies, public language and private feeling, Carby will find herself reckoning with what she can tell, what she can remember, and what she can bear to know.

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.