Date
November 10, 2022

Location

Heyman Center Common Room


Time
6:15 pm – 8:00 pm

Event Organizer

Institute for Comparative Literature and Society


Event Sponsor

Event Co-Sponsor(s)

Institute for Research in African-American Studies;
Department of African American Studies and African Diaspora Studies


Hazel Carby (LSE/Yale) discusses “Imperial Sexual Intimacies” with respondent Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (CU) in Heyman Center Common Room on November 10th, 2022.

In-person only; registration required here. 

HAZEL CARBY, Centennial Professor, International Inequalities Institute, London School of Economics/Charles C. and Dorathea S. Dilley Professor Emeritus of African American Studies and Professor Emeritus of American Studies, Yale University, is the author of the recently published and highly acclaimed, Imperial Intimacies: A Tale of Two Islands (Verso, 2019).

Verso on Imperial Intimacies:
“Where are you from?” was the question hounding Hazel Carby as a girl in post-war 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 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,” including 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 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.

Carby is also the author of Cultures in Babylon: Black Britain and African America (1999); Race Men (1998); Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (1987); and the co-author of The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in 70s Britain (1982).

GAYATRI CHAKRAVORTY SPIVAK is University Professor and a founding member of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University.

 

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