Hazel Carby: “If it can’t actually cope with the entanglement of all these histories, then to me, it’s useless.”
In her latest book Imperial Intimacies, Hazel Carby confronts—and upends—the question: “Where are you from?” It’s a question familiar to those of us cast outside of whiteness, including Carby, who grew up in London with a Black Jamaican father and white Welsh mother. In her book, Carby moves between the “I” of the present and the “girl” of the past, tracing the “entanglements” between her Jamaican and Welsh family and the wider history of Jamaican slavery and British imperialism. By exploring the relations between working class Welsh life and the Jamaican colony, Bristol’s industrial center and the transatlantic slave economy, and the racial transgressions in the intimacies between her own parents, Carby’s critical project illuminates the histories of the British empire that are embedded in the spaces of our everyday lives.
Professor emerita of American and African American Studies at Yale University, Carby is part of an intellectual genealogy (along with Paul Gilroy and her mentor, Stuart Hall) that has broadened African American Studies to explore questions of race, gender, and identity formation within the wider context of geopolitics, diaspora, and colonialism across the Caribbean. In Imperial Intimacies, Carby delicately balances the critical distance of the scholar with the profound subjectivity of the memoirist. Like all of Carby’s work, it also dismantles the ”fictions of racial logic” that enforce binaries such as white and Black, colonial subject and citizen. It is these fictions, she suggests, that establish the conditional terms of who gets to inherit more than the family name. I spoke to Carby from my apartment in Brooklyn, while she was at home in Connecticut. Talking to her about researching, writing, and unearthing ancestors across two islands in this moment of powerful uprisings gave me hope that our entangled present may finally reckon with our entangled pasts, rescuing history from its totalizing logic of whiteness.
1. “The language that Black and brown bodies somehow are contagious is never very far away.”
Sabrina Alli: I’ve had a lot of nervous energy since the pandemic started, and I don’t really know how to spend my days sometimes. How have you been spending your time?
Hazel Carby: Lately, I’ve been researching seventeenth and eighteenth-century torture by crushing. I want to think about those eight minutes and forty-six seconds in detail. I want to parse out those minutes and seconds, but also give a historical background about the United States and torture. But I’ve either not been able to
