Bringing together multi-award-winning author Hazel Carby's most important and influential essays, Cultures in Bablyon analysed diverse aspects of US and British culture. Carby's writing is invariably sharp and provocative, her political insights shrewd and often against the grain. A powerful intervention, Culture in Babylon quickly became a standard reference point in debates over race, ethnicity and gender. With a new introduction by Saidiya Hartman and a new afterword by the author.

The Colored American Magazine, first published in 1900, was a pioneering forum for black literary talent. Pauline Hopkins was not only a prolific contributor, but one of its powerful editorial forces. These stories reveal her commitment to fiction as a vehicle for social change, weaving themes such as white oppression, the heroism of black women, and the need for organized resistance to persecution, into the narrative formulas of popular fiction.

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 women blues artists, and the necessity for racially diverse school curricula. 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.

First published in May 1900, the Colored American Magazine provided a pioneering forum for black literary talent previously stifled by lack of encouragement and opportunity. Not only a prolific writer for the journal, Pauline Hopkins also served as one of its powerful editorial forces. This volume of her magazine novels, which appeared serially in the journal between March 1901 and November 1903, reveals Hopkins' commitment to fiction as a vehicle for social change. She weaves important political themes into the narrative formulas of nineteenth-century dime-store novels and story papers, which emphasize suspense, action, complex plotting, multiple and false identities, and the use of disguise. Offering both instruction and entertainment, Hopkins' novels also expose the limitations of popular American narrative forms when telling the stories of black characters.

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.