Cultures in Babylon Black Britain and African America

by Carby, Hazel V.

• ISBN13: 9781859842812
• ISBN10: 185984281X
• Edition: 00
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1999-08-17
• Publisher: VERSO

Summary

Multiculturalism. No term has seen more varied, or more heated, debate during the past decade. Partisans and opponents alike, while they rarely concur in what the term means, agree that it is among the central intellectual and political topics of the current period. 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 female blues artists. 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.

Author Biography

Hazel V. Carby is Chair of African American Studies at Yale University.

Table of Contents

Introduction	p. 1
Women, Migration and the Formation of a Blues Culture
The Sexual Politics of Women's Blues	p. 7
Policing the Black Woman's Body in an Urban Context	p. 22
Black Women's Blues, Motown and Rock and Roll	p. 40
They Put a Spell on You	p. 51
Black Feminist Interventions
White Woman Listen! Black Feminism and the Boundaries of Sisterhood	p. 67
Race and the Academy: Feminism and the Politics of Difference	p. 93
National Nightmares: The Liberal Bourgeoisie and Racial Anxiety	p. 100
America Inc. -- The Crisis at Yale: A Tale of Two Women	p. 116
Fictions of the Folk
Reinventing History/Imagining the Future	p. 129
Proletarian or Revolutionary Literature? C.L.R. James and the Politics of the Trinidadian Renaissance	p. 135
Ideologies of Black Folk: The Historical Novel of Slavery	p. 146
On Zora Neale Hurston's Seraph on the Suwanee	p. 160
The Politics of Fiction, Anthropology and the Folk: Zora Neale Hurston	p. 168
Dispatches from the Multicultural Wars
Schooling in Babylon	p. 189
Multiculture	p. 219
The Racism behind the Rioting	p. 229
The Blackness of Theory	p. 232
The Canon: Civil War and Reconstruction	p. 237
The Multicultural Wars, Part One	p. 245
The Multicultural Wars, Part Two	p. 256
Imagining Black Men: The Politics of Cultural Identity	p. 264
Acknowledgments	p. 273
Index	p. 275
Table of Contents provided by Syndetics. All Rights Reserved.