Racial Fictions

For this erudite and probing essay collection, American studies scholar Carby (Imperial Intimacies) gathers two decades’ worth of her writings that challenge dominant narratives about the origins of race and racism. Arranged chronologically, the essays show how Carby’s own thinking about racial subject formation has developed over time (as has her tone, which evolves from thorny but passionate academese to precise, measured argument). Enlisting scholar-mentors like the Jamaican British theorist Stuart Hall, Carby dismantles the nationalist framework that’s shaped the academic study of continental American slavery and sidelined the ways race was formed and continues to function in the Caribbean and her native Britain. In biting critiques of largely celebrated Black Studies texts—like the 1619 Project and Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste—Carby argues against “intellectual imperialism” and for a global consciousness that traces chattel slavery’s effects well beyond the U.S. Elsewhere, she debunks received myths about her home country’s race troubles (or lack thereof), illustrating Europe’s own fraught “history of racialization” during and after WWII. Not every essay in these crackling pages earns its keep—an early piece considering the fascist-coded aesthetics of Michael Flatley’s Riverdance feels decidedly minor compared to the book’s stronger arguments. Still, Carby’s ferocious correctives exhilarate as she calls for dismantling parochial “racial fictions” and building a global response to racism. It’s a wise and unflinching work. (Nov.)