Cultures in Babylon: Black Britain and African America.

Hazel V. Carby. Cultures in Babylon: Black Britain and African America. New York: Verso, 1999. 282 pp.

Readers of Hazel Carby will be delighted to have available this collection of her previously published essays, and so too will readers who have but casual knowledge of her work. Cultures in Babylon brings together essays written over the last twenty years and published in a variety of venues from The Michigan Quarterly Review to The Empire Strikes Back and Critical Inquiry. The essays are collected under four subheadings: "Women, Migration and the Formation of a Blues Culture,". "Black Feminist Interventions," "Fictions of the Folk," and "Dispatches from the Multicultural Wars." These headings broadly suggest to readers the subject matter of the essays contained in each of the four sections. And as readers might imagine, more issues are discussed in this volume that any reviewer could possibly acknowledge. What is important here, though, is that, as with all of Carb's writings regardless of the subject matter or the density of the prose, readers sense that they are involved in a pleasant intellectual conversa tion rather than a strident polemic. Consequently these essays allow readers to settle in and enjoy the pleasures afforded them by Carby's exquisite execution of cultural studies methodologies.

Whether she is writing about a workers strike at Yale or Zora Neale Hurston or Alberta Hunter, Carby's readers benefit from her almost inexhaustible knowledge of the subject at hand. No reader can put down this book without having learned something. And if the reader happens to disagree with the conclusions reached by the author, Carby's clear style and straightforward, uncontorted argumentation invites the reader to respond. Committed to her conclusions, Carby nonetheless seems undisturbed by the possibility of disagreement because she has her research to support her argument. So when she writes about Henry Louis Gates, Jr., or Richard Wright, readers might disagree with Carby, but they are challenged to do so in the same reasoned and erudite manner.

For this reader the most thoroughly entertaining section of this book is "Women, Migration and the Formation of a Blues Culture." The essays here focus on significant contributions of African American women in shaping the urban culture of America from the period of the Great Migration until the present. Surely readers will sense the author's joy in doing this research, for she makes you want to stop reading so you can search your recordings for that Dinah Washington or Bessie Smith CD you haven't listened to in a while.

Some of the more topical essays, especially those on contemporary literary theory, may seem dated because so much has happened in this area since the first essays in the volume were written. But these too are well worth reading because of Carby's thoughtful engagement with literary texts.

The organization of the book unfortunately creates two minor irritants. While the subheadings provide useful organizing strategies, the book's structure is not without problems. Needless repetition of information occurs from one essay to another, reminding readers that these are collected essays and not chapters of a monograph. Therefore there is not an organic sense of the whole. The second irritant is the fact that the essays do not appear in chronological order, and readers find themselves jostled from time to time by issues that require a moment's reconsideration. For instance, readers might wish to revisit the 1996 essay "America Inc.--The Crisis at Yale: A Tale of Two Women" (116-26) after reading the 1991 essay "The Politics of Fiction, Anthropology and the Folk: Zora Neale Hurston" (168-85). Both essays deal with women's economic issues and economic privilege, but readers must consider the author's evolving position over a period of five years. While these do not represent flaws in logic or contradic tions, they do nettle the reader who desires a greater sense of wholeness. This problem obviously creates a lose-lose situation for the author, who had to settle on some way of organizing this collection. But for readers who find themselves thoroughly engaged and engrossed in the arguments of an essay, the desire for the pleasure of the monograph will disrupt the reading.

I found one other minor irritant in this otherwise enjoyable and thought-provoking book. The author states on page 2 of the introduction that we African Americans viewed the world from a limited perspective, unlike our British cousins "who took for granted the importance of the concept of the black diaspora." I always wonder how to account for Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Marcus Garvey, Claude McKay, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Langston Hughes in this context. But again, this is just a minor disagreement between cousins, each claiming to have grandma's authentic recipe for sweet potato pie. Cultures in Babylon, like sweet potato pie, is a lot more nourishing than ordinary desert, regardless of the recipe.