2019 - Hazel Carby

Hazel V. Carby is the Charles C. and Dorathea S. Dilley Professor of African American Studies, Professor of American Studies, and Director of the Initiative on Race, Gender, and Globalization at Yale University. She is one of the most influential scholars of culture and cultural politics of the past forty years. A major force in bringing cultural studies—especially as it descends from her extremely important teacher, Stuart Hall—to the United States, she has shaped generations of scholars through her writing and teaching. Recipient of the Jay B. Hubbell Medal for Lifetime Achievement in American Literary Studies from the Modern Language Association, she is the author of four books. In 1987, Carby published Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (Oxford University Press), which charts the rise of black woman intellectuals in the 19th and 20th centuries along with “the forms in which [they] made political as well as literary interventions in the social formations in which they lived.” This was followed in 1998 by Race Men (Harvard University Press), which interrogates the cultural politics of black masculinity in the 20th century. A collection of essays, Cultures in Babylon: Black Britain and African America (Verso), came out in 1999; it includes writing on, among other topics, blues, gender, and migration, and race, multiculturalism, and the academy. Imperial Intimacies: A Tale of Two Islands will be published by Verso in 2019. In it, Carby explores the vexed history connecting Great Britain and Jamaica through not only the story of her Welsh mother and Jamaican father, but also extensive research in the national archives of both countries related to the deep roots—and extensive routes—of that story. A powerful speaker, Carby is unflinchingly committed to confronting issues of race, gender, sexuality, and class, including those that the University of Rochester currently faces as a major site of research and education located in a city with its own richly complicated history around these issues.

DAY 1: Thursday, January 31, 2019

4:30-6:30: Black Studies Now: A Roundtable with Hazel Carby (Humanities Center Room D) Open to the public.

What is the state of black studies at the University of Rochester—and in the world? What shape should black studies take at UR? What does it mean to study race and racial formations at this point in political and intellectual history—and to do so in Rochester? Central to making African & African American Studies a world-renowned department at Yale University, Professor Carby will discuss these questions with UR faculty and the audience.

Led by Jeffrey Tucker (English), with William Bridges (Japanese; Modern Languages & Cultures), Cory Hunter (Frederick Douglass Institute; Music), Cilas Kemedjio (French; Modern Languages & Cultures; Director of the Frederick Douglass Institute), Kathryn Mariner (Anthropology; Visual & Cultural Studies), Darren Mueller (Eastman; Musicology), and Matthew Omelsky (English).

DAY 2: Friday, February 1, 2019

9:30-11:00: From Kingston to Bristol and Back Again: In the Imperial Archives with Hazel Carby (Plutzik Room/Special Collections) RSVP required to both Joel Burges (jburges@ur.rochester.edu) and Madeline Ullrich (mullrich@ur.rochester.edu) to secure a place at the event and obtain the reading for it.

Led by Pablo M. Sierra Silva (History) and Miranda Mims (Special Collections), this session will explore a series of questions based on selections both the discussants and participants will have read in advance from Professor Carby’s forthcoming book Imperial Intimacies: A Tale of Two Islands (Verso 2019): How does one do archival research on the culture, politics, and history of race, gender, and empire? What is at stake in doing so? What stories emerge? And how do those stakes and stories differ—and perhaps even conflict—depending on one’s intellectual position? In what ways does the archive work differently for the cultural studies scholar, the historian, and the archivist?

4:00-6:00pm: Public Lecture: “Difficult Times” (Hawkins Carlson Room) Open to the public. 

This lecture is drawn from Professor Carby’s forthcoming book, Imperial Intimacies: A Tale of Two Islands (Verso 2019). It describes her father’s coming of age in the tumultuous years of the 1930s in Jamaica. Professor Carby will be introduced by President Richard Feldman (Philosophy) and Joel Burges (English; Visual & Cultural Studies).