Hazel Carby

Hazel V. Carby is professor of African American Studies and of American Studies at Yale University. Before joining the Yale University faculty, she taught English at Wesleyan University for seven years. She currently teaches courses on issues of race, gender and sexuality through the culture and literature of the Caribbean and its Diaspora; through transnational and postcolonial literature and theory; through representations of the black female body; and through the genres of science fiction. Identified as a Marxist feminist, her work primarily deals with detecting and probing discrepancies between the symbolic constructions of the black experience and the actual lives of African Americans.

Dr. Carby is considered a pioneer in black feminism 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, Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins, Anna Cooper, and Ida B. Wells among others. Carby followed this book with Race Men: The Body and Soul of Race, Nation, and Manhood (1998). Race Men, is a six essay collection of critiques on historical sites of black masculinity. Carby’s first chapter, “Souls Of Black Men” is a critique of the gender bias in W.E.B. Du Bois’ Souls of Black Folk. She argues that Double Consciousness is an erasure of Black female subjectivity. Carby does not question the importance of this text in black scholarship, she recognizes that it is because of the seminal status of Du Bois and Souls that 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, Stanford University, the University of Paris, and the University of Toronto.

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