Cogut Institute for the Humanities

2.20.20 Imperial Intimacies

Panel discussion with Hazel Carby, Saidiya Hartman, Brian Meeks, Dixa Ramírez D'Oleo, and Deborah Thomas

Imperial Intimacies by Hazel V. Carby (Charles C. and Dorothea S. Dilley Professor of African American Studies and Professor of American Studies Emerita at Yale University) “untangles the threads connecting members of her family in a web woven by the British Empire across the Atlantic … Moving between 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.”

Hazel Carby participated in a panel discussion with Saidiya Hartman (English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University), Brian Meeks (Africana Studies, Brown University), Dixa Ramírez D’Oleo (American Studies and English, Brown University), and Deborah Thomas (Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania).