Hazel Vivian Carby (born 15 January 1948 in
Okehampton
Okehampton ( ) is a town and civil parish in West Devon in the English county of Devon. It is situated at the northern edge of Dartmoor, and had a population of 5,922 at the 2011 census. Two electoral wards are based in the town (east and west) ...
, Devon) is Professor Emerita of
African American Studies and of
American Studies
American studies or American civilization is an interdisciplinary field of scholarship that examines American literature, history, society, and culture. It traditionally incorporates literary criticism, historiography and critical theory.
Schol ...
. She served as Charles C & Dorathea S Dilley Professor of African American Studies & American Studies at
Yale University
Yale University is a Private university, private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Established in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the List of Colonial Colleges, third-oldest institution of higher education in the United Sta ...
.
Early life and education
Hazel Carby was born of Jamaican and Welsh parents in
Okehampton
Okehampton ( ) is a town and civil parish in West Devon in the English county of Devon. It is situated at the northern edge of Dartmoor, and had a population of 5,922 at the 2011 census. Two electoral wards are based in the town (east and west) ...
,
Devon
Devon ( , historically known as Devonshire , ) is a ceremonial and non-metropolitan county in South West England. The most populous settlement in Devon is the city of Plymouth, followed by Devon's county town, the city of Exeter. Devo ...
, UK, on 15 January 1948. She earned a BA degree in English and history from
Portsmouth Polytechnic
The University of Portsmouth is a public university in Portsmouth, England. It is one of only four universities in the South East England, South East of England rated as Gold in the Government's Teaching Excellence Framework. With approximately 28 ...
in 1970, then a
PGCE in 1972, at the
Institute of Education
IOE, UCL's Faculty of Education and Society (IOE) is the education school of University College London (UCL). It specialises in postgraduate study and research in the field of education and is one of UCL's 11 constituent faculties. Prior to ...
,
London University
The University of London (UoL; abbreviated as Lond or more rarely Londin in post-nominals) is a federal public research university located in London, England, United Kingdom. The university was established by royal charter in 1836 as a degree- ...
. She taught high school from 1972 to 1979, then went back to university, at
Birmingham University
, mottoeng = Through efforts to heights
, established = 1825 – Birmingham School of Medicine and Surgery1836 – Birmingham Royal School of Medicine and Surgery1843 – Queen's College1875 – Mason Science College1898 – Mason Univers ...
Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies
Center or centre may refer to:
Mathematics
*Center (geometry), the middle of an object
* Center (algebra), used in various contexts
** Center (group theory)
** Center (ring theory)
* Graph center, the set of all vertices of minimum eccentricit ...
, where she gained a M.A (1979) and a Ph.D (1984).
Career
In 1981, Carby was appointed as a lecturer in the English Department at
Yale University
Yale University is a Private university, private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Established in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the List of Colonial Colleges, third-oldest institution of higher education in the United Sta ...
(1981–82), after which she taught English at
Wesleyan University
Wesleyan University ( ) is a private liberal arts university in Middletown, Connecticut. Founded in 1831 as a men's college under the auspices of the Methodist Episcopal Church and with the support of prominent residents of Middletown, the col ...
(1982–89), and rejoined Yale University in 1989. She is now Yale's Charles C & Dorathea S Dilley Professor of African American Studies & American Studies.
Her teaching focuses on race, gender and sexuality in Caribbean and diasporic culture and literature; in transnational and postcolonial literature and theory; in representations of the black female body; and in genres of science fiction.
Identified as
Marxist feminist
Marxist feminism is a philosophical variant of feminism that incorporates and extends Marxist theory. Marxist feminism analyzes the ways in which women are exploited through capitalism and the individual ownership of private property. Accordin ...
, her work primarily deals with detecting and probing discrepancies between the symbolic constructions of the black experience and the actual lives of
African Americans.
Carby is considered a pioneer in
black feminism
Black feminism is a philosophy that centers on the idea that "Black women are inherently valuable, that lack women'sliberation is a necessity not as an adjunct to somebody else's but because our need as human persons for autonomy."
Race, gen ...
and is also known as one of the world's leading scholars on race, gender, and African-American issues. One of her most influential contributions to African Diaspora studies came with her first book, ''
Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist'' (1987). ''Reconstructing Womanhood'' offers one of the earliest and most comprehensive studies on black female writers including
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (September 24, 1825 – February 22, 1911) was an American Abolitionism in the United States, abolitionist, suffragist, poet, Temperance movement, temperance activist, teacher, public speaker, and writer. Beginning in 1 ...
,
Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins,
Anna Cooper
Anna Julia Haywood Cooper (August 10, 1858February 27, 1964) was an American author, educator, sociologist, speaker, Black liberation activist, and one of the most prominent African-American scholars in United States history.
Born into slavery ...
, and
Ida B. Wells
Ida B. Wells (full name: Ida Bell Wells-Barnett) (July 16, 1862 – March 25, 1931) was an American investigative journalist, educator, and early leader in the civil rights movement. She was one of the founders of the National Association for ...
, among others. Carby followed this book with ''
Race Men: The Body and Soul of Race, Nation, and Manhood'' (1998), a six-essay collection of critiques on historical sites of black masculinity. Her first chapter, "Souls Of Black Men", is a critique of the gender bias in
W. E. B. Du Bois' seminal work ''
Souls of Black Folk'' (1903). Carby argues that
Double Consciousness
Double consciousness is the internal conflict experienced by subordinated or colonized groups in an oppressive society. The term and the idea were first published in W. E. B. Du Bois's autoethnographic work, '' The Souls of Black Folk'' in 190 ...
is an erasure of Black female subjectivity. She does not question the importance of this text in black scholarship; she recognizes that because of the crucial status of Du Bois and ''Souls'' it is important that she undertakes this critique. After ''Race Men'', she penned ''Cultures in Babylon: Black Britain and African America'' (1999). Currently she is working on her forthcoming book, ''Child of Empire''. Carby has lectured at numerous colleges and universities worldwide including the
University of Notre Dame
The University of Notre Dame du Lac, known simply as Notre Dame ( ) or ND, is a private Catholic university, Catholic research university in Notre Dame, Indiana, outside the city of South Bend, Indiana, South Bend. French priest Edward Sorin fo ...
,
Stanford University, the
University of Paris
, image_name = Coat of arms of the University of Paris.svg
, image_size = 150px
, caption = Coat of Arms
, latin_name = Universitas magistrorum et scholarium Parisiensis
, motto = ''Hic et ubique terrarum'' (Latin)
, mottoeng = Here and a ...
, and the
University of Toronto
The University of Toronto (UToronto or U of T) is a public university, public research university in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, located on the grounds that surround Queen's Park (Toronto), Queen's Park. It was founded by royal charter in 1827 ...
.
Carby serves on the advisory board of multiple feminist academic journals, including ''
Differences'', ''
New Formations'', and ''
Signs''.
Awards
Carby's 2019 book ''Imperial Intimacies: A Tale of Two Islands'' (
Verso
' is the "right" or "front" side and ''verso'' is the "left" or "back" side when text is written or printed on a leaf of paper () in a bound item such as a codex, book, broadsheet, or pamphlet.
Etymology
The terms are shortened from Latin ...
) won the
British Academy
The British Academy is the United Kingdom's national academy for the humanities and the social sciences.
It was established in 1902 and received its royal charter in the same year. It is now a fellowship of more than 1,000 leading scholars spa ...
's 2020
Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize for Global Cultural Understanding.
Personal life
Carby married fellow Yale professor
Michael Denning
Michael Denning (born 1954) is an American cultural historian and William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of American Studies at Yale University. His work has been influential in shaping the field of American Studies by importing and interpreting the w ...
on 29 May 1982.
Bibliography
Books
* ''Multicultural Fictions'', Birmingham: Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, University of Birmingham, 1980. ,
* ''
Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist''. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. ,
* ''Race Men: The W. E. B. Du Bois Lectures.'' Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 1998. ,
* ''Cultures in Babylon: Black Britain and African America''. London and New York: Verso, 1999.
* ''Imperial Intimacies: A Tale of Two Islands''. London: Verso, 2019.
Selected articles
* "Figuring the future in Los(t) Angeles." ''Comparative American Studies'', 1.1 (2003): 19–34.
* "What is This 'Black' in Irish Popular Culture?" ''
European Journal of Cultural Studies
The ''European Journal of Cultural Studies'' is a peer-reviewed academic journal that covers the field of cultural studies in areas such as migration, post-colonial criticism and consumer cultures. The journal's editors-in-chief are Joke Hermes (U ...
'', 4.3 (2001): 325–349.
* "Can the Tactics of Cultural Integration Counter the Persistence of Political Apartheid? Or, The Multicultural Wars, Part Two." In
Austin Sarat (ed.), ''Race, Law and Culture: Reflections on Brown v. Board of Education.'' New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. 221–28.
* "National Nightmares: The Liberal Bourgeoisie and Racial Anxiety." In Herbert W. Harris, Howard C. Blue and
Ezra E. Griffith (eds), ''Racial and Ethnic Identity: Psychological Development and Creative Expression.'' New York: Routledge, 1995. 173–91.
* "Race and the Academy: Feminism and the Politics of Difference." In Isabel Caldeira (ed.), ''O Canone Nos Estudos Anglo-Americanos.'' Coimbra, Portugal: Livraria Minerva, 1994. 247–53.
* "'Hear My Voice, Ye Careless Daughters': Narratives of Slave and Free Women before Emancipation." In William L. Andrews (ed.), ''African American Autobiography: A Collection of Critical Essays.'' Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1993. 59–76.
* "The Multicultural Wars." ''
Radical History Review
''Radical History Review'' is a scholarly journal published by Duke University Press.
The journal describes its position as "at the point where rigorous historical scholarship and active political engagement converge". '', 54.7 (1992): 7–18.
* "Imagining Black Men: The Politics of Cultural Identity." ''
Yale Review
''The Yale Review'' is the oldest literary journal in the United States. It is published by Johns Hopkins University Press.
It was founded in 1819 as ''The Christian Spectator'' to support Evangelicalism. Over time it began to publish more on hi ...
'', 80.3 (1992): 186–97.
* "Policing the Black Woman's Body in an Urban Context." ''
Critical Inquiry
''Critical Inquiry'' is a quarterly peer-reviewed academic journal in the humanities published by the University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Department of English Language and Literature (University of Chicago). While the topics and historic ...
'', 18.4 (1992): 738–55.
* "The Politics of Fiction, Anthropology, and the Folk: Zora Neale Hurston." In Michael Awkward (ed.), ''New Essays on Their Eyes Were Watching God''. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. 71–93.
* "Re-inventing History/Imagining the Future." ''Black American Literature Forum'', 20.2 (1989): 381–87.
* "Proletarian or Revolutionary Literature: C. L. R. James and the Politics of the Trinidadian Renaissance." ''South Atlantic Quarterly'', 87 (1988): 39–52.
* "Ideologies of Black Folk: The Historical Novel of Slavery." In
Deborah E. McDowell and
Arnold Rampersad
Arnold Rampersad (born 13 November 1941) is a biographer, literary critic, and academic, who was born in Trinidad and Tobago and moved to the US in 1965. The first volume (1986) of his ''Life of Langston Hughes'' was a finalist for the Pulitzer ...
(eds), ''Slavery and the Literary Imagination''. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989. 125–43.
* "The Canon: Civil War and Reconstruction." ''
Michigan Quarterly Review
The ''Michigan Quarterly Review'' is an American literary magazine founded in 1962 and published at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
The quarterly (known as "MQR" for short) publishes art, essays, interviews, memoirs, fiction, poetry, and ...
''. 28.1 (1989): 35–43.
* "It Jus Be's Dat Way Sometime: The Sexual Politics of Women's Blues." ''Radical America'', 20 (1987): 9–22.
* "'On the Threshold of Woman's Era': Lynching, Empire, and Sexuality in Black Feminist Theory." ''Critical Inquiry'', 12.1 (1985): 262–77.
* "Schooling in Babylon". ''The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in Seventies Britain''. London: Hutchinson, 1982. 182–211.
* "White Woman Listen! Black Feminism and the Boundaries of Sisterhood." ''The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in Seventies Britain''. London: Hutchinson, 1982. 212–235.
Other work
*
The Limits of Caste. ''London Review of Books''. Vol. 43 No. 2 · 21 January 2021. Related interview for the LRB Podcas
here.
References
External links
Bio at StanfordInterview from The Minnesota Review
{{DEFAULTSORT:Carby, Hazel
Black studies scholars
American Marxists
African-American feminists
Marxist feminists
Wesleyan University faculty
Yale University faculty
Living people
1948 births
Alumni of the UCL Institute of Education
British feminists
Black British women academics
African-American historians
Gender studies academics
American women historians
20th-century essayists
British emigrants to the United States