Wednesday, 9 October 2019
6:30pm
William P. Kelly Skylight Room (9100)
The Graduate Center, CUNY
365 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10016

“Where are you from?” was the question hounding Hazel Carby as a girl in post–World War II 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 to each other in a web woven by the British Empire across the Atlantic. Moving between the 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.

Please join us on the evening of October 9th, when Hazel V. Carby will be joined in conversation by Tina Campt to discuss Carby’s new book Imperial Intimacies: A Tale of Two Islands. Copies of the book will be available for purchase.

This event will start promptly at 6:30pm and will be held in the William P. Kelly Skylight Room (9100) at The Graduate Center.

The talk is free and open to the public. All are welcome.

Hazel V. Carby is a co-author of The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in 70s Britain (Routledge, 1982) and author of Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (Oxford University Press, 1989); Cultures in Babylon: Black Britain and African America (Verso Books, 1999); and Race Men (Harvard University Press, 2000). For three decades she taught at Yale as the Charles C. and Dorothea S. Dilley Professor of African American Studies and Professor of American Studies.

Tina Campt is the Owen F. Walker Professor of Humanities and Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. She is the author of three books, Other Germans: Black Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender, and Memory in the Third Reich (University of Michigan Press, 2004); Image Matters: Archive, Photography, and the African Diaspora in Europe (Duke University Press, 2012); and Listening to Images (Duke University Press, 2017). She has held faculty positions at the Technical University of Berlin, the University of California, Santa Cruz, Duke University, and Barnard College. Campt serves as a Research Associate at the Visual Identities in Art and Design Research Centre at the University of Johannesburg.

Above adapted from email announcement.