"Hazel Carby is a foundational scholar of race, class, and empire as critical lenses for understanding culture."
–Elizabeth Alexander, author of The Light of the World

Twenty-fifth-anniversary edition of a transatlantic Black feminist classic

Bringing together multi-award-winning author Hazel Carby’s most important and influential essays, Cultures in Babylon addresses the political dilemmas of representing Black women as sexual subjects, considers how far female sexuality is exploited by consumerism, and traces the contradictions Black women in the culture industry navigate. Carby’s writing is invariably sharp and provocative, her political insights shrewd and often against the grain. A powerful intervention, Cultures in Babylon quickly became a standard reference point in debates over race, ethnicity, and gender.