Hazel V. Carby is the multi-award-winning author of Imperial Intimacies and Reconstructing Womanhood, and co-author of The Empire Strikes Back. For three decades she taught at Yale University as the Charles C. and Dorothea S. Dilley Professor of African American Studies and Professor of American Studies.

• IntroductionWomen, Migration and the Formation of a Blues Culture 1. The Sexual Politics of Women's Blues2. Policing the Black Woman's Body in an Urban Context3. Black Women's Blues, Motown and Rock and Roll4. They Put a Spell on YouBlack Feminist Interventions5. White Woman Listen! Black Feminism and the Boundaries of Sisterhood6. Race and the Academy: Feminism and the Politics of Difference7. National Nightmares: The Liberal Bourgeoisie and Racial Anxiety8. America Inc. - The Crisis at Yale: A Tale of Two WomenFictions of the Folk 9. Reinventing History/Imagining the Future10. Proletarian or Revolutionary Literature? C.L.R. James and the Politics of the Trinidadian Renaissance11. Ideologies of Black Folk: The Historical Novel of Slavery 12. On Zora Neale Hurston's Seraph on the Suwanee 13. The Politics of Fiction, Anthropology and the Folk: Zora Neale HurstonDispatches from the Multicultural Wars 14. Schooling in Babylon15. Multiculture 16. The Racism behind the Rioting17. The Blackness of Theory18. The Canon: Civil War and Reconstruction19. The Multicultural Wars, Part One 20. The Multicultural Wars, Part Two 21. Imagining Black Men: The Politics of Cultural IdentityAcknowledgmentsIndex

At every turn, Carby refuses to tell a tidy or convenient story and instead produces an account of empire that is as expansive as it is heartbreaking.