Black Skins, Black Masks : Hybridity, Dialogism, Performativity 9781315261508, 1315261502, 9781351955249, 1351955241

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Routledge

ZZZURXWOHGJHFRP

BLACK SK INS, BLAC K M ASK S

Black Skins, Black Masks Hybridity, Dialogism, Performativity

SHIRLEY ANNE TATE The M anchester M etropolitan U niversity, UK

First published 2005 by Ashgate Publishing Published 2017 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon 0X14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint o f the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © Shirley Anne Tate 2005 Shirley Anne Tate has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Tate, Shirley Anne Black skins, black masks : hybridity, dialogism, performativity 1. Women, Black - Great Britain - Social conditions 2. Blacks - Race identity - Great Britain 3. Miscegenation 4. Discourse analysis I. Title 305.4'8896041 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Tate, Shirley Anne. Black skins, Black masks: hybridity, dialogism, performativity / by Shirley Anne Tate p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7546-3641-0 1. Blacks—Race identity. 2. Women, Black—Race identity. 3. Women, BlackCommunication. 4. Hybridity (Social sciences) 5. Discourse analysis. I. Title. HT1581.T37 2004 305.896—dc22 2004021037 ISBN 13: 978-0-7546-3641-0 (hbk)

Contents

Acknowledgements

vi

1

Introduction

2

Foucault, Bakhtin, Ethnomethodology

13

3

Critical Ontologies and Racialized Gender

31

4

Storied Hybridity and Gendered Readings of ‘Race’

58

5

Beyond Hybridity: Bodily Schema and ‘theThird Space’

77

6

Resisting Black Skin

105

7

Hybridity, Dialogism, Performativity

125

8

Fetishizing Community: A Politics of Skin, Homes andBelonging

146

9

Conclusion

162

Bibliography Index

1

169 178

Acknowledgements

To my father, Herbert and my mother Beatrice who showed me that anything was possible. Thanks to Encama for her insightful comments on drafts of the book and my children, Soraya and Damian, for their support. I also want to thank the women without whom this would not have been possible.

Chapter 1

Introduction

D People feel like if you have a Black identity it’s got to be like you know rice and peas and chicken on a Sunday S Oh tell me I know every Sunday as well you can’t have a break D And Nutriment1 S And peas soup on Saturday and all that D Yeah yeah and you know if you don’t do that you know? S Yeah I know D And it’s like awareness of identity to them is based on how dark you are so like me I have to prove myself all the time S Mhm I know what’s wrong with them? This extract is an interaction between Dana and myself as two ‘light-skinned’ Black women on Black identity. It places me very firmly within the concerns of this book rather than sitting somewhere outside it. Above, Dana and I speak our experience of some of the boundaries of identity created by a Black collective. The first of these is the fixed cultural practices of food12 being used to read off Black identity. Food here is presented as a weekly menu, a ritual, with rice and peas on Sunday and soup on Saturday being necessities if one is to claim Blackness. Second, there is also the idea that awareness of identity is based on shade. Here the darker you are supposedly the more conscious you are of having a Black identity.3 So Dana always has to prove herself all the time. We also show something else though by placing ourselves outside of the Black ‘them’. We show the possibility for the critique of discourses of Black authenticity. This critique is done from a position of ‘an-other Black’ whilst we are simultaneously imbricated by discourses of the Black same. We show the agonistic struggle for identification with which I am concerned here. Through talk on Black womanhood I theorize a space beyond 1 This is a ‘plain’ Standard English transcript for ease of reading at this point. A fuller version is in the endnote for this chapter and illustrates the more conversation analysis type of transcription on which the analysis is based. 2 For more on food and Black British identity see Tate, S. (2003). 3 This is reminiscent of Frantz Fanon’s (1986, p. 112) ‘racial epidermal schema’. However, here we see a different take on this within the voices of postcolonial Black women. It is about an Afrocentricity based on skin as a mark of authenticity, of Black pride, rather than the abjection of Fanon. This Afro-centricity also leads to exclusions and to situations in which light-skinned Black people like Dana have to constantly assert their Blackness in order to counter their abjection from Blackness itself because of their shade.

2

Black Skins, Black Masks

hybridity in which Blackness as a category is constantly recouped, transformed and reformed. Our critique, as others in this book, introduces a space for the interjection of the voices of Black women in my exploration of hybridity as a negotiation o f identity positions in talk. In this negotiation women perform themselves as producers of the identity of an-other Black in opposition to positionings within discourses of Blackness. The identity of an-other Black is at one and the same time then, both fluid and dependent on a contingent essentialism. I made these observations after listening to and transcribing taped conversations between groups of friends, colleagues and family members about their life experiences. Based on these conversations I sought to develop my argument that hybrid Black identities are constructed in talk on lived experience. One part of my argument was to develop a method for looking for hybridity in talk (Chapter 2). I also brought together a range of ideas about identity, hybridity, reflexivity and talk, to foreground a neglected dimension of the debate on hybrid identities. That is, how in everyday conversation hybridity is orchestrated and fashioned. My concern first of all is to look at how Black women’s talk helps us to think through hybridity. I am also concerned with how thinking through hybridity helps us to think ‘race’, ‘a politics of skin’ and ‘community’. Why though am I using talk from which to theorize about hybridity?

Talk-in-interaction, discourse and theorizing hybridity My question on why use talk to theorize hybridity was based on another question of mine. That is, could any claim about hybrid identities be made without looking at talk from Black women? I asked this question of course because of my own ethnomethodological orientation. I also asked it because it seemed to me that sociologists, postcolonial critics and cultural theorists were unprepared to describe the methods that speakers use to account for their actions and the actions of others.4 Thus, I came to this research on Black women’s identities with two related concerns. One of them was that much of the theorizing in Black British Cultural Studies on identity and otherness (eg., Mercer, 1994), the development of ‘new ethnicities’ (eg., Hall, 1992) and hybridity (eg., Bhabha, 1990), focuses on the demise of the essential Black subject. Such theorizing also does not begin from the standpoint of Black women’s gendered readings of ‘race’ in order to support this claim. Part of my project here is to show through women’s talk that at the level of everyday interactions and politics ‘race’, gender and agency still count, embodiment still matters. Further, other work on Black identity with which I was familiar (Mama, 1995; Alexander, 1996; Baumann, 1996 and 1997; Ifekwunigwe, 1999), although using research participants’ voices, did not to look at the process of identity construction in talk-in-interaction. I will look briefly at this latter work on Black identity here. 4 Through these ethno-methods which are the subject of ethnomethodological enquiry, members’ common-sense knowledge becomes a topic of study rather than simply a resource (Hutchby and Wooffitt, 1998, pp. 30-31).

Introduction

3

The psychologist, Amina Mama’s (1995) view is that Black women’s subjectivities move along a continuum from ‘colonial integrative’ to ‘Black radical discourse’. Although she imposes binaries on her data, none the less she recognizes the multiplicity of identity positions individuals occupy. She also recognizes the place of discourses within identities as individuals move along this continuum. The anthropologist, Gerd Baumann’s (1996) account of identity in Southall is also centrally concerned with the manipulation of discourses in identity construction. In his view Southallies, including African Caribbeans, command and make use of a dual discursive competence. ‘This means that they disengage the equation between culture and community that underpins the dominant discourse’ (Baumann, 1996, p. 34). Individuals engage ‘not only in the dominant discourses about ethnic minorities, but also in an alternative, non-dominant or demotic discourse about culture as a continuous process and community as a creation’ (Baumann, 1996, p. 36). He recognizes then, that people occupy a double consciousness as they negotiate identity discourses and that culture and community are themselves constructed. However, I take issue with his assertion that African Caribbeans have a ‘perceived need to “find” a culture that is not yet “known”’ and that this ‘is reflected in a view that African Caribbeans do not even “have” a culture’ (Baumann, 1996, p. 126). In this assertion he seems to be reproducing the debate within the dominant discourse on African Caribbean Blackness. This could have been the place for him to look at the making of this myth of African Caribbeans’ lack of culture through dominant discourses on Black identity. Indeed, this might have alerted him to his own part in keeping this myth in circulation. As well as this he might also have begun to think about how such a ‘search for culture’ subverts his own point of view that individuals construct cultures. Further, African Caribbeans as ‘in search of culture’ implies that something fixed and essentialized can be found. Baumann maintains that four approaches can be distinguished in the search for an African Caribbean culture. These are the religious, the political, the historical and the musical. By choosing these approaches he denies the existence of differences of gender, sexuality, class, ability, kinship and location and how these would crosscut any unified putative search for culture. The examples he chooses to illuminate the approaches are just as limiting. Rastafarianism is not the only religion that could be said to ‘house’ African Caribbean culture as can be shown, for example, by the rise in the membership of The Nation of Islam in recent years. Pan-Africanism is not the only basis for Black politics within Britain as the past impact of Black Power, anti-colonial movements for liberation and the continuing pan-ethnic Black Movement show. The impact of reggae around the world cannot be disputed. However, what he outlines seems to essentialize culture and homogenize Black experiences in his own search for aspects of a demotic discourse on identification. Claire Alexander (1996) takes an ethnographic approach to look at how culture is continuously created and invented. For her, there is a cultural battle for the ideological space to be Black in which ‘identities were both fluid and transiently essentialized’ (Alexander, 1996, p. 194). This is a significant point but she does not show this occurring in the process of talk-in-interaction. Also whilst

4

Black Skins, Black Masks

acknowledging double consciousness, she does not look at this fluidity and transience in terms of hybridity. She comments on the interplay between ‘race’ and hybridity when she says that ‘race’ ‘becomes one in a complex of factors through which identities are formulated and contested; part of the interplay of disparate elements in a “process of hybridity” (Bhabha, 1990, p. 211) through which culture and identity are continually reworked and re-created’ (Alexander, 1996, p. 192). However, hybridity as an interactional process in which Black identities are constantly created and recreated remains unexamined. The sociologist, Jayne Ifekwunigwe (1999) discusses biological and cultural hybridities. She does this in order to structure her claim for metisse as a way of describing ‘mixed race’ women’s experiences in Britain. Ifekwunigwe (1999, pp. 9-10) warns of an uncritical use of the term ‘hybridity’ which does not locate its historical connection to the ‘race’ science fiction of biological hybridities. In her view there has not been a culturally hybrid rupture which transforms the meaning of place and belonging. However, her work does not look in detail at talk to show how hybridity arises at the everyday level, or the place of dialogism or performativity in this. She also does not fully acknowledge the possibility for Black identifications within a ‘mixed race’ one. This is the recent work on African Caribbean identity in Britain that uses informants’ voices that forms the backdrop for this book on hybridity. In common with my work they look at identity as multiple, the interaction between discourses and identity and the making of identity discourses at the local level. However, what they do not have is any way of describing the dynamism of Black identity. My view is that looking at hybridity as a process in talk-in-interaction would enable such dynamism to become more apparent. A focus on talk means that interactions with data are essential in the engagements I make with theory. I move below to look at how this ‘method as process’ informed the development of both questions and answers in peeling the layers of the onion that I came to call ‘a hybridity of the everyday’.

Method as process In order to look at hybridity as an everyday interactional phenomenon I had to use different theoretical approaches throughout my interactions with talk and theory (Chapter 2). It was clear to me that these perspectives do use different approaches to power, agency, structure and identity. For my purposes though, what I could gain from them in terms of understanding hybridity as a process in talk was more important than these differences. Therefore I am not trying to reconcile these theories, but rather using them to facilitate my analysis of emergent themes in the extracts of talk. Themes of pride/shame; abjection/acceptance; belongingness/ otherness; authenticity/in-authenticity; same/different. What I am trying to do is to create an approach for looking at hybrid identifications in talk-in-interaction. This approach, based on using what I call an ethnomethodologically inclined discourse analysis, brings Linguistics into dialogue with Cultural Studies to account for the possibility of a hybridity o f the everyday.

Introduction

5

Through this approach I seek to address the general failure within Cultural Studies to use everyday talk as a focus of theorizing.5 By shifting the focus to hybridity as a process in talk, I am engaging with the literary critic Homi Bhabha’s (1990, p. 211) writing on hybridity as ‘The Third Space’. Here he asserts that hybridity both denies essentialism as well as carrying the traces of discourses because of the intervention of cultural translation: the act of cultural translation [..] denies the essentialism of a prior given original or originary culture [..] hybridity is to me the ‘third space’ which enables other positions to emerge [...] the importance of hybridity is that it bears the traces of those feelings and practices which inform it, just like a translation so that hybridity puts together the traces of certain other meanings or discourses.

Usefully Bhabha here talks about identity positions, essentialism, translation, discourses and the ‘third space’ as an enabler of otherness. These all became central themes in my exploration of hybridity. Extracts from conversations though led me to question how essentialism could be denied in identifications performed by Black women. This question arose for me because in talk women translate the cultural meanings and discourses of their racialized skin and use these as locations of identifications. Blackness means that skin is ‘a site and a primary means of communicating with others, of establishing signifying relations; it is moreover an “inscribing surface” for the marks of those others’ (Anzieu, 1989, p. 40). As racialized skin signifies, how can hybridity as identification6 not have recourse to essentialism? This question led me to look at the possibility for the emergence of hybridity in talk, based on a number of themes to which I now turn, beginning with talk as a ‘third space’.

Talk as a ‘third space’ Importantly Bhabha (1990, p. 211) locates hybridity within the ‘third space’ of the negotiation of identity positionings.7 This location is analytically helpful in terms of how hybridity as a ‘third space’ of negotiation can be looked for within talk-ininteraction. In Bhabha’s (1994a, p. 178) view enunciation opens up the possibility for the emergence of other cultural meanings and narrative spaces.8 The enunciatory present for him is important because it provides ‘a process by which 5 An exception to this is Barker and Galasinski (2001). 6 See Bhabha, 1990, p. 211. 7 For Bhabha (1996a, p. 204) ‘in [..] cultural translation there opens up a “space-inbetween”, [..] both the return to an originary “essentialist” self-consciousness as well as a release into an endlessly fragmented subject in “process’” . Hybridity thus does not allow for endless fragmentation: there are boundaries to the subject, some essence that remains even while it is being remade. g Bhabha (1994a, p. 178) talks about the enunciative as a more dialogic process which enables the subversion of ‘the rationale of the hegemonic moment [by] relocating alternative, hybrid sites of cultural negotiation’.

6

Black Skins, Black Masks

objectified others may be turned into subjects of their own history and experience’ (Bhabha, 1994a, p. 178). At the everyday level talk assumes significance in the emergence of such agency as the ‘very question of identification only emerges inbetween disavowal and designation’ (Bhabha, 1994b, p. 50). This space between designation and disavowal is the space within talk that is significant for my purposes. Its significance arises from the fact that it is here that we can see the emergence of hybrid identifications. This in-between space provides a location for ‘elaborating strategies of self-hood - singular or communal - that initiate new signs o f identity’ (Bhabha, 1994c, pp. 1-2). So, through talk we can see ‘the third space’ as lived, deciphered, negotiated and transformed interactionally. Talk as a ‘third space’ allows us to see Black women’s identifications in process: as multiple, dynamic, fleeting with each passing word, whilst at the same time reproducing a contingent essentialism. It also allows us to see the negotiation of identity positionings and simultaneity of sameness and difference so central to hybridity.9 Hybridity then leads us to the necessity to think Black identities as texts of social practice.

Black identities as texts of social practice For Bhabha (1990, p. 211) the traces of discourses and meanings are important for hybridity. Such a claim made me turn to the conversations for a way of understanding what this meant for identity. This proved to be quite complex as individuals did not tend to say ‘I am Black because . .. ’, or ‘I think Black identity is ...’ Rather, what they did was tell stories of their life experiences and those of others, through which it became apparent what identifications they were making at that point in time. These identifications became clear as interactants produced their own and others’ definitions of Blackness and applied or disavowed these in talk. Each disavowal produced difference within Blackness. As texts o f social practice10 performed in talk, Black women’s identifications reflect the interplay of discourses in identity construction as they spoke about their lives. This is significant because it makes it possible to see the negotiation of positions in which speakers engage when they translate and apply/disavow discourses. In Chapter 3, I explore the construction of racialized gender discourses which arise from Blackness and their impact on Black women’s identifications. Here I look at critical ontologies of the self and the govemmentality of the discourse of Black womanhood alongside the agentic struggle involved in these ontologies. This chapter highlights the continuing salience of discourses on g

Hybridity ‘makes difference into sameness and sameness into difference but in a way that makes the same no longer the same, the different no longer simply different’. Instead what we have is ‘difference and sameness in an apparently impossible simultaneity’ (Young, 1995a, p. 26). 10 ‘Texts o f social practice’ is my conceptualization o f Black identities. This term attempts to attend to the dialogic construction o f identities as speakers negotiate discourses but also to acknowledge interpersonal interaction as discourse. See also Sebba and Tate (2002).

Introduction

1

Blackness in a context in which ‘race’ still matters and the impact that this must then have within any discussion of what I call a hybridity o f the everyday.

A hybridity of the everyday Chapter 4 looks at storied hybridity. That is, how Black women’s talk on lived experience can help us to think hybridity through their gendered readings of ‘race’ and identity. This attends to the fact that hybridity has been articulated in academic literature without reference to how real-time phenomena are oriented to in social11 life and in talk. I draw out hybridity’s conceptual threads and discontinuities by looking at the work of Robert Young, Homi Bhabha, Paul Gilroy, Stuart Hall, Gayatri Spivak and Franz Fanon. My understandings of hybridity gleaned from this body of work are looked at alongside extracts from Black women’s talk about their positioning within Blackness. The extracts reveal the persistence of essentialism in the talk even whilst interactants produce an-other Black woman identification. What this alerts us to is the simultaneity of the ‘same’ and ‘different’ in Black identification talk as women translate from discourses of ‘race’, ‘culture’, ‘politics’ and ‘community’, for example, and then transfer this to practices on/of the body to produce difference. Hybrid identifications then are about constructing the meaning of ‘different’ from the ‘same’ of authentic Black womanhood: of identifying with and through an object of otherness in talk-in-interaction. The construction of this meaning illustrates the dialogical interaction that occurs between individuals and discourses of Black woman identity as discourses are reflexively translated in the making of identifications. Chapter 5 is concerned with translation, racialized and racializing bodily schema’ and ‘the third space’. In this chapter I explore the connections between the Black other in colonial/postcolonial discourse and difference, diaspora and hybridity within postcolonial Britain. I also look at the place of translation in hybrid identifications.

Translation as reflexivity Bhabha (1990, p. 211) makes a link between translation and hybridity whilst focusing on the importance of discourses and meanings (Chapter 5). As I looked at extracts of Black women’s talk it became obvious that there are more than just traces of other meanings and discourses in the talking into being of identifications. Difference has its alterity, essentialism in talk and in some cases, essentialism focused on notions of originary culture. Looking at how women translate discourses of what is Black and what is not, I began to notice that there was a positioning and repositioning occurring as individuals translated and applied notions of authentic Blackness to themselves and others in talk. It was at this point 11 A notable exception to this is Paul Gilroy’s (1993a) ‘The Peculiarities o f the Black English’.

8

Black Skins, Black Masks

that it became apparent that reflexivity was involved in this negotiation of positions as women negotiated discourses of Blackness as skin, culture, ‘race’, community, consciousness and politics. Translation emerged from this for me as a way of describing the negotiation of personal and group meanings within identity discourses. Reflexivity is necessarily linked to translation because of the critical awareness of self and others in which interactants engage in the production of identifications using these discourses. Simply put, this occurs in the talk at the point at which the speaker makes herself known to her interlocutor as a visible-seer. That is, when she comments on or critiques her discursive positioning before entering into a new identity positioning. Translation as reflexivity as a dialogical analysis emerges as quite pivotal to the development of a hybridity o f the everyday. Translation as reflexivity became for me a dialogical analysis (Chapters 5 and 6) that stands at the border between designation and disavowal, between identity positioning and repositioning. Hybridity emerged in the identity repositioning, so translation as reflexivity is productive of a hybridity o f the everyday. How do I account for a hybridity of the everyday?

Accounting for a hybridity o f the everyday The interactions were replete with examples of the impact of identity discourses on speakers’ lives. These particular examples and my idea of translation as reflexivity enabled me to understand how hybridity as a performative and dialogical process could be present in conversation. This understanding had to draw from Foucault and Bakhtin, because of the positioning and repositioning apparent in the talk (Chapter 3). Following Foucault, diagrams of Blackness produce statements that position subjects (Chapter 3). In his later work Foucault (1986 and 1987) developed agency through the ‘care of the self, when the self recognizes herself as a subject involved in ‘self-constitution, recognition and reflection. As such, agency for Foucault can be said to be a subject position within discourse’ (Barker and Galasinski, 2001, p. 45). Foucault thus allows for the translation and reflexivity which for me are so central to a hybridity o f the everyday. For him through reflexivity individuals come to understand themselves within the context of culturally determined notions of identity. Through conversations women both speak from within the discourses of ‘the Black woman’ and construct counter-discourses on being Black women in their identification stories. I did not think though that Foucault’s idea about subjugated knowledge fully accounted for the repositioning which was occurring in the talk as speakers produced critical ontologies of the self. I turned to Bakhtin to see what dialogism could contribute to my ideas on hybrid agency as a catalyst for change to the identarian totality of the same. Using talk about the Black body as marked by discourses of ‘shade’- ‘the voice of the other within’- I follow Kristeva (1982) to equate this marking with an abject which has to be ejected from the Black body (Chapter 6). Through the translation as reflexivity implicit in dialogical critique

Introduction

9

speakers construct themselves as radically other in their stories to counter abjection. Abjection assumes an important role then in identity repositioning because speakers produce different addresses in their critiques of ‘race’ categories as the effect of discourses as well as the ‘natural’ ground for identity. I take these different addresses to be hybrid identifications. Dialogics in the form of co-being and addressivity therefore helped me to account for hybrid agency. In Chapter 7 I continue the discussion I began in Chapter 3, by looking at how speakers negotiate biopower and govemmentality in the production of hybrid identifications. The understanding I draw from Foucault, Bakhtin and the talk is that of hybrid identities as being a continual process of statement - translation as reflexivity - addressivities. Here statements are discursive identity positionings of the Black same and addressivities are hybrid identity re-positionings of an-other Black. This provides the basis for the examination of a hybridity o f the everyday as a process of the negotiation of positions in talk in which there is interplay between abjection and the making of new addressivities. This means then that the rules of recognition have now changed from ‘the instantiation of an economy of power which produces objectified and subjugated subjects’ (Yar, 2002, p. 57). They have changed to one in which the other’s perception of the subject is deemed to be invalid and is, therefore, not granted recognition. Hybrid identifications at the level of the everyday emerge as dialogical performative constructions in which there is a simultaneity of the same and difference.12 They are at once new but also un­ recognizable. In Chapter 7 I use a variety of examples to look at the production of hybrid positionings through a negotiation of ‘the Black woman same’. I argue that the radical otherness produced in hybrid identifications is simultaneously a radical sameness, as tellers both inscribe and produce discourses of ‘the Black woman’ in talk-in-interaction. Speakers’ interactions provide an opportunity to interrogate Paul Gilroy’s (1997) idea of Blackness as a ‘changing same’ in which essence is maintained and modified in a decidedly non-traditional tradition as well as leading to a discussion of hybridity and performativity. Through using extracts from Black women’s talk I examine Bhabha’s notion of ‘translated hybrid subjects’ who function within a ‘third space’ of hybridity. I argue that ‘the Black same’ remains within translation and hybridity and that the ‘third space’ is constructed within interactions in which speakers show their awareness of discursive positionings, make these abject and negotiate an-other positioning. Further, I claim that Bhabha’s cultural translation as a process is better thought of as translation as reflexivity in order to describe its role in the performativity involved in the process of making hybrid identifications in talk. It is through translation as reflexivity that interactants engage in an agency that is a double movement of being constituted in and by a signifier and a relocation within an identity positioning of an-other Black woman. What though does this hybridity mean for the wider Black collective?

12

See Robert Young (1995a).

Black Skins, Black Masks

10

Going beyond hybridity In Chapter 8, I look at an often-repeated theme in the women’s talk. That is, the Black community as something which is given reverence as a location of home and belonging. I look at what hybridity means for the possibility of the continuation of Black community and what could be the possible meanings of community. The women show us that community cannot be taken for granted. On the contrary, there has to be a continual engagement in translating what ‘the Black community’ is and could be. This engagement is important because of the continuing necessity for solidarity and anti-racist politics. I look at Black community as a dialogical performative construction within the intersubjective encounter. Through this I argue that ‘the Black community’ now functions as a fetish. As a fetish it is a form of knowledge that allows for origins as well as articulations of difference. Within the politics of skin signified by the interaction of same and different, community needs to be re-imagined so that difference is recognized as the same. Without this recognition an inclusive Black anti-racist politics becomes impossible. In the Conclusion (Chapter 9) I look at the significance of Black skins, Black masks by beginning a discussion of the rethinking that now needs to be done in terms of ‘translated hybrid subject’, ‘the cultural hybrid’ and ‘hybrid cultural rupture’ within the time and space of a new politics of skin. A call to and a simultaneous dis-identifkation from, Black essentialism as ‘race’, ‘culture’, ‘community’, ‘politics’, consciousness - a politics of skin - provides a variety of possible positionings of different from ‘the changing same’ within talk. This means that as hybridity becomes an everyday interactional phenomenon within talk itself, the ‘translated hybrid subject’ becomes the ‘translating hybrid subject’. Meanwhile, the ‘cultural hybrid’ and ‘hybrid cultural rupture’ becomes a possibility for everyone, not just border crossers and migrants. Further, within a new politics of skin in which dark skin can no longer be taken to signify Black authenticity, women live within and negotiate the tensions of being both inside and outside Blackness. Such radical otherness allows them to deconstruct the always already known of Blackness and to create new identifications as ‘different from the changing same’ of Black womanhood. These are the identifications that strive to be located within community, to belong to a home.

Conclusion I hope that in exploring the intertwined nature of ‘the same’ and ‘difference’ in hybridity within the coming chapters that some of the ideas that emerge will be useful for others interested in hybridity and Black identity. That is that:1 1) 2) 3) 4)

Black identities are texts of social practice; hybridity is an everyday interactional phenomenon in talk; hybridity is strategic and dialogical; translation as reflexivity and abjection are central to the negotiation of positions in talk in which hybrid identifications arise;

Introduction

11

5) hybrid identifications emerge in talk through the performativity involved in the process of statement - translation as reflexivity - addressivity ; 6) new addressivities are hybrid identifications; 7) hybrid identifications are arrived at through essentialisms as speakers develop critical ontologies of the self 8) the essentialism which Black women call on is that of Blackness as ‘a politics of skin’- for example, discourses on ‘shade’, ‘culture’, ‘race’, ‘community’, ‘consciousness’ and ‘politics’; 9) and, community though contingent and contested because of a hybridity of the everyday continues to be important in racialized contexts. I will, of course, expand on these in the book. First, though, let us look at the issues of theory and method with which I had to grapple in order to arrive at these ideas.

Endnote D People feel like if you have a BLACK identity it’s GOT to be: like you know? Rice and peas and chicken [ on a Sunday, and- ] S [ Oh tell me ] I know (.7) every- every Sunday as well you can’t- you can’t [ have a brea:k ] D [And Nutriment] = S =Yeah= D =You know? (.6) S And PEAS SOUP on Saturday [ and all that ] D [ Yeah ] yeah and and you know? [ .hhh if ] S [ Yeah ah know] D you DO:N’T do that you know? and it’s like AWA:RENESS of identity to THEM is based on how dark you are= S =Mhm: I kno:w= D =So like ME: [ I have to PRO:VE ] myself all the time S [What’s wrong with them?]

Transcription conventions

.hhh = [ ] (•) (.6) “quiet0 »

? -

BUT

lengthening of the sound in-breath latched turns overlapped talk micro-pause pause in tenths of a second quietly produced talk medium rise in pitch high rise in pitch cut-off on the word capital letters indicate loudness

12

((.hhh))

((*))

>me< ((Ame))

Black Skins, Black Masks

laughter smiley voiced talk speedily produced talk talk with laughter bubbling through

Chapter 2

Foucault, Bakhtin, Ethnomethodology

Introduction Homi Bhabha (1983) illustrates how enunciation demonstrates the operation of a subject because of the repertoire of conflictual positions that constitute the subject in colonial discourse (Young, 1995a). Through stories of lived experience we see the operation and meanings of conflictual positions. These are the conflictual identity positionings I use to construct an argument for a hybridity o f the everyday in talk.1 My approach to analyzing the talk is based on two concepts through which I embed the analysis of the transcribed extracts into a sociological understanding: texts o f social practice and translation as reflexivity. In my view Black women’s identities are texts of social practice.12 This notion implicates discourses in the performance of identities as interactionally meaningful. I did not approach the talk with a particular question about hybridity or Blackness for that matter, as I was trying to let the talk speak to me rather than me speak to it. As I listened to the tapes I was trying to engage in ‘unmotivated looking’ (Hutchby and Wooffitt, 1998, p. 94). My initial approach to the talk was to transcribe it in detail using the conventions of conversation analysis. I then looked at these transcripts and listened to the tapes in order to draw out themes that were emerging in terms of Blackness, for example, ‘shade’. These themes helped to generate collections of sequences of talk in which Black identity was being constructed through the use of discourses of Blackness. Such discourses in the talk positioned speakers and those being spoken about socially, politically and ‘racially’ as ‘the same’ or ‘the other’. Once I noticed this basic pattern of discourses of positioning, I began to look for instances of a hybridity o f the everyday in the sequential organization of the talk. I had to do this because it is a given in conversation analysis that analyzing ‘patterns in this way enables the analyst to make robust claims about the “strategic” uses of conversational sequences: the ways in which culturally available resources may be methodically used to accomplish mutually recognizable interactional tasks’ (Hutchby and Wooffitt, 1998, p. 93). What I also noticed in the data was a talking into being of discourses of positioning. One of these discourses could be described as hegemonic as it 1 See Tate, S. (2000a). Sebba, M. and Tate, S. (2002) ‘“Global” and “Local” identities in the discourses of British-born Caribbeans’. Also see Tate, S. (2000b).

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positions speakers. There was also an-other discourse that sought to subvert the dominant discourse. I began to see that Bhabha’s (1996b, p. 58) assertion that hybridity is about a space of negotiation of discourses made sense at the level of the everyday. As a result of this I started to look at the talk for sequences in which positioning and re-positioning occurred. What I have come to call an ethnomethodologically inclined discourse analysis began to emerge. This approach was transcribing the data in detail using a conversation analytic transcription; locating the subject positions which were being talked into being; looking at the sequential organization of subject positioning and re-positioning; and, naming the process which facilitates this movement in talk. That is, I noticed the contradiction, construction and practice (Parker, 1999, p. 6) in talk in which a hybridity o f the everyday emerged through speakers’ engagement in: 1) 2) 3)

discursive positioning; translation as reflexivity; and, identity re-positioning.

Recognizing the sequence itself was only a partial look however, because I then had to link issues of theory and method together. The talk first made hybridity dialogical because of the tum-by-tum rhythm of conversations. Second, it situated hybridity within discourses. Third, it also showed agency in the identity re-positionings. This is how an ethnomethodologically inclined discourse analysis arose from the interaction of theory and method. This approach is necessary in my attempt to show the dynamism of identifications in interaction alongside the subtlety involved in the hybridity of the everyday in talk. I will chart some of the convergences and tensions between Foucault, Bakhtin, ethnomethodology and discourse analysis mediated through my engagement with conversations on Black women’s identities. Let us move to looking at an example to illustrate some of what I have been discussing. Tape 1 Side A LF: 54 L To me a:hm (.6) especially elderly white peiople o:h you (.4) first they’ll ask what you are= Sh =Mhm (1.0) L So the me:re fact that they a:sk you what you are means that they can see that you’re [different] that you’re not like them= Sh [ Yeah ] =[ Yeah that’s true ] L [((.hhh .hhh .hhh)) ] And then when you say I’m Blaxk (.4) Sh Yeah (.8) L But you kno:w (.) what I’ve said is I’ve got a white parent and a B laxk parent but I’m Blaxk then they’ll say well you’re not Blaxk re:ally

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This conversation follows talk in which Laura has been sharing with me the problems that she has in being seen to be Black by other Black people because her skin marks her as ‘mixed race’.3 In the extract she illustrates the interaction of Bhabha’s conflictual positions in the space of talk. In her first turn she shows us that because of her skin, what she is, is often questioned by whiteness. That is the nature of her negation as a woman who is ‘not quite white’. This ‘not quite white’ is the Black mask that the elderly white people she is speaking about want her to keep in place so that she will be meaningful as a ‘mixed race’ person to them. It is a Black mask within which Blackness must be denied as Laura shows us in her talk. After my ‘Mhm’ and a pause, Laura translates the relevance of her experience in terms of being marked as different from whiteness irrespective of having a white mother. I agree with her, she laughs in overlap with the agreement and then begins talk that disavows the place of ambiguity in which she has been placed by whiteness. Within this disavowal she repositions herself as someone who claims Blackness, explains her ancestry and then claims Blackness again. Her talk then continues based on even her claim not being seen to be enough as the elderly white people she is speaking about still say ‘well you’re not Black really’. Laura illustrates the interaction of discursive positioning, translation as reflexivity and repositioning in talk where, as an-other Black identity position emerges she removes the Black mask of ‘mixed racedness’ to reveal an-other Black skin. The conversations I draw on are characterized by a diversity of voices in dialogue. A layering of different ‘voices as speakers’ in the talk, in reported speech and in translation, where the speaker’s voice critiques and undermines the talk of others. The movement between voices in the extract as Black skins, Black masks is performed, illustrates Laura reflexively positioning herself in dialogue with another. There is a movement from a discursively positioned self, translation and speaker re-positioning so that an-other Black emerges through talk-in-interaction. This reading is my understanding of how a hybridity of the everyday arises and shows particular orientations to the connections between theory and method when talk-in­ interaction is used as data.

Talk-in-interaction as data ‘The term “talk-in-interaction” was coined by Schegloff and used over a number of writings’ (Boden, 1994, p. 236). Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson isolated and analyzed a turn-taking model, ‘a very general yet specific system for handling turns, topics, and speakers in the most pervasive of all social activities: talk. Although the original work led to the name conversation analysis, it is clear that what is at stake is talk-in-interaction’ (Boden, 1994, p. 73). Further in Boden’s view, talk-in­ interaction can be everyday and institutional. For the literary critic Homi Bhabha 3 Speakers use this term as a description of themselves and others. However, it reifies ‘race’ in my view.

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(1983), the question of enunciation is an important one because of the agonistic constitution of the subject in colonial discourse (Young, 1995a). I want to extend Bhabha’s idea of colonial discourses to discourses of domination generally in order to make it possible to see the negotiation of these conflictual positions in the construction of identities within stories of lived experience. History is always ambiguous and people remember and construct the past in ways that reflect their present need for meaning (Ang, 1994). Identities are based on selective remembering as speakers confer new meanings on experiences (Freeman, 1993). What becomes meaningful for the analysis is that the earlier experience ‘is being predicated in retrospect, in narrative, as I gaze back and try to understand how I have gotten to be here, doing what I am’ (Freeman, 1993, p. 14). Stories of lived experience link both the past and the present and are a good source of data on identifications as within these stories speakers reproduce positional identities in terms of ‘relations of hierarchy, distance or perhaps affiliation’ (Holland et al, 1998, p. 128). However, using stories of lived experience necessitates a debate about data collection and ethical considerations.

Data collection I started from three premises in the collection of data. Two of these will be mentioned below in terms of ethical dilemmas, which is that Black communities are suffering from research fatigue and therefore there was a need for empowering research. The third premise is that as a Black woman researcher I should think through for myself what I would see as empowering data collection interactions. Whilst considering this, I began to realize that if I was going to ask individuals to reveal aspects of their lives and their identifications, then I should expect that the talk would also be about trauma. Given this, ‘empowering data collection methods’ meant in interactional terms that participants should be able to explore traumatic experiences and differences comfortably. Further, whatever re-stimulation of trauma that emerged during the conversations would be left for the participants to work through, unless they specifically asked for intervention from other interactants. They should have the opportunity to begin from where they chose, to speak their life as it made sense to them, to stop wherever they wanted, to build their own ‘gestalt’. That is, as they ‘speak their life’ the researcher should not interrupt what is being constructed through introducing her concerns, but should listen attentively and, if she wanted to follow-up anything or encourage more talk, to use participants’ talk as a resource for doing that. Last, the participants should know what theme the researcher was interested in pursuing and how what they had contributed would be used. These concerns impacted on my sampling and collection methods. I used audio and videotapes to record interactions in contrastive story telling settings. The participants were of Caribbean heritage, bom in Britain and living in London, the Midlands and Yorkshire. This involved 36 participants and 58.5 hours of tape. I also decided that the sample should be made up of people who knew each other as

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friends, colleagues and family members so that an immediate sharing of experiences would be comfortable. Many of the participants had been or were still actively involved in Black community politics. The collection methods used over a two-year fieldwork period varied according to the circumstances and the wishes of the participants. However, they shared the common features of individuals being aware that I was interested in looking at Black identity. There were no interview questions as I was interested in what they wanted to say. They could also turn off the tape recorder at whatever point they wished. I got the tape recordings through using a variety of collection methods. For those people easily tempted by a meal, I prepared dinner and invited groups of my friends over to my house. Some of the after-dinner conversations, as I call them, include me in them. At that point in the research I was particularly interested in what reminiscences could reveal about identity. So they started with stories of their childhoods in Britain and later produced general stories from their lives. There were some participants who chose to speak to me in a one-to-one, as they felt better able to talk about their experiences in this way. I asked questions only about what was being said, as one would in a conversation, and tried to listen attentively. I also asked questions as prompts if people said T don’t know what to say’, and disclosed aspects of my own experience, thoughts and feelings. An issue that emerged as a result of starting from whatever the individual needed to talk about, is that speakers spent time attending to problems within their lives. Another issue is that of ‘leaving the field’. Interestingly, this arose in a situation in which I did not see myself as entering any ‘field’ as a researcher. However, what happened in these conversations is that speakers saw them as cathartic and wanted to continue the work on themselves. I was invariably told ‘come back and we’ll do some more’ or ‘I really enjoyed that, when are we going to do it again?’ This was after we had sat for three or more hours talking! Working with a group of five people from London and Birmingham who knew each other, sharing my research theme and brainstorming possible areas that they could speak about. I then left them with the tape recorder for seven months to decide where, when, how and with whom they would record their contributions. They had complete control over what was spoken about as I was not involved after the initial brainstorming. I need to acknowledge the central role of Dana as a gatekeeper in getting me access to this group of people and, in fact, being the person a lot of people spoke to. I also recorded a lunchtime conversation on the theme of Black identity between management committee members of a Black not-for-profit project in a town in West Yorkshire. I had access to this organization because I was also a management committee member. These different collection methods made very little difference in terms of the richness of the conversational data. What was important about these different methods of data collection was that they enabled me to collect talk in contrastive story telling settings. This is relevant because I was mindful of the fact that speakers’ talk about their lives can be a product of the relationship between conversational interactants. Contrastive story telling settings could then produce multiple perspectives in which differing, complementary and even contradictory data could emerge. These settings made it possible to see if similar themes emerged

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across speakers and interactions. Leaving the tape recorder and thereby the responsibility for making the recording with individuals was a useful approach. Through this, speakers felt very much more a part of the research process and felt empowered to ‘lead’ the development of the research. A number of ethical considerations impacted on my approaches to sampling, data collection and analysis. First, my awareness of a point of view in the Black community that we are currently over-researched and that this research is bringing no improvement to our lives. Second, my attachment to research that seeks to ‘empower’ participants by enabling them to lead the development of the research question. Third, my focus on the necessity to listen to women, understand and represent their lives on their own terms (Mauthner and Doucet, 1998). Last, the need to look at reflexivity and power, voice and authority (Mauthner and Doucet, 1998). Haraway’s (1991) view that accountability, positioning and partiality are important aspects of feminist objectivity is central in order to see how my research could be seen to be empowering. To take account of empowerment ‘the researched’ must not be reproduced in ways which re-inscribe inequality. This means that the research report must attend to the micro-political processes involved in the research and, questions of difference must be dealt with in the design, conduct, write-up and dissemination of the research study. These issues also became important considerations in the ‘research on’ and ‘research with’ involvements with participants. To negotiate some of these issues, I made the recordings of interactions overt. I also offered all of the participants a copy of the recording to listen to and told them to contact me if there were any aspects of it that they were uncomfortable with. However, problems still arise in terms of representation as ‘when the researcher produces representations for an outside audience, control of the data and its meanings shift very much towards the researcher [..] so even the most deliberate discourses are likely to be re-interpreted’ (Cameron et al, 1992, p. 132). The idea of empowering research could also be about platitudes. This was graphically illustrated to me when people I was approaching to be participants asked me a simple question. ‘What is in it for me?’ This question for one potential participant was framed within the context of being unemployed for five years and, therefore, only being willing to participate if she was paid. Awakening to Black community realities such as this made me see myself as a Black woman researcher in a privileged position, unable to say that my research was really empowering because it would go no way towards changing the lived realities of the participants. On the other hand they provided me with innumerable examples of identification talk through which to theorize discourses and Black identity.

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Discourses, translation as reflexivity and dialogism in identification talk In analyses we have to be mindful of what speakers do with their talk and the discursive resources they draw on. A focus on what speakers do with talk allows in an ethnomethodological preoccupation with constructing and claiming Blackness in interaction. Looking at the discursive resources drawn on allows us to explore ‘the role of discourse in the construction of objects and subjects including the “self” (Willig, 1999, p. 3). This means that we can ‘identify subject positions which may constrain or facilitate particular actions and experiences’ (Willig, 1999, p. 2). Subject positions that is, that speakers construct in their dialogical stories through a layering of voices (Giinthner, 1998). Translation as reflexivity is my conceptual tool for analyzing speaker negotiations of the identity positionings and re-positionings through which hybridity is accomplished. Although I will return to translation later, at the level of the talk, I mean the critique involved in the deconstruction, reconstruction and application of discourses by interactants. Reflexivity refers to how portrayals of social realities both describe and constitute these realities, so that these portrayals cannot be separated from what they describe or the language used to describe them (Garfinkel, 1967). This view of reflexivity as both describing and constituting realities is similar to Bakhtin’s idea that ‘it is not only being addressed, receiving others’ words but the act of responding, which is already necessarily addressed, that informs our world through others. Identity as the expressible relationship to others is dialogical at both moments of expression, listening and speaking’ (Holland et al, 1998, p. 172). In Bakhtin’s terms because the self is the nexus of a flow of activity in which it also participates, it cannot be finalized. Identities then are reflexive and dialogical as what one means to others and oneself is interconnected: the view of others is necessary for ‘authoring the s e lf. The self authors itself and is thus made knowable, in the words of others. If to be perceptible to others we cast ourselves in terms of the other, then we do that by seeing ourselves from the outside. That is we assume a position of transgredience4 or outsideness (Holland et al, 1998, pp. 173-174). As speakers put themselves into the texts they produce outsideness and through this translation as reflexivity becomes dialogical critique. In dialogical critique the meaning of verbal interaction depends upon the organization of actions and interactions in time and space. This links in to conversation analysis because interaction is produced and understood as ‘responsive to the immediate, local contingencies of interaction’ (Pomerantz and Fehr, 1997, p. 69). The contributions of interlocutors are understood in relation to 4 For Holquist (1991, pp. 32-33), ‘“transgradientsvo” is reached when the [..] existence of others is seen from outside [..] their own knowledge that they are being perceived by somebody else, [and] from beyond an awareness that such an other exists. [In] dialogism [..] there is [..] no way “I” can be completely transgredient to another living subject, nor can he or she be completely transgredient to me’.

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the prior, such that each contribution provides a new context for the next contribution (Pomerantz and Fehr, 1997). Further, identifications ‘are part of producing and understanding conduct but that [..] conduct helps to constitute the identities of the participants’ (Pomerantz and Fehr, 1997, pp. 69-70). Conversation analysis is, for me, an analysis of dialogism in action. The juxtaposition of multiple plots and voices of ‘the same7‘other’ arrayed across time and space leads to a questioning of the notion of a unified self that narrates itself. Further, Bakhtin’s theory of the transgredience of identity challenges the concept of the interiority of selfhood by reinterpreting ‘boundary’ (de Peuter, 1998, p. 38). Boundary ceases to be exclusive of otherness and becomes, instead, a site of the dialogical definition of the self. Identity becomes a dialogue on the boundary of same and other, a continuing dialogue between real or imagined interlocutors in which ‘the voices of others are equal partners in self­ dialogues’ (de Peuter, 1998, p. 38) within lived experience so that: The dialogical-narrative self is not a fixed text, but is a multitude of situated dialogic reinterpretations, reordered with each telling and hearing in changing social contexts (de Peuter, 1998, p. 45).

Through the interactions of voices in Black women’s talk what we see is the Timinal self: the self on the border of identity and difference’ (de Peuter, 1998, p. 45). In this voice generated third space a hybridity o f the everyday emerges where, as Black masks are removed we see a re-versioning of Black skins. Discourse and conversation analyses as methods and translation as reflexivity as process, are important as they allow us to see the essentialist identities of Black masks unveiled as monologic voices of domination and the emergence of discourses of difference of Black skins as lived, in talk. Such dynamic interaction with discourses fits into my point of view that Black identities are texts o f social practice. They are, in effect, critical ontologies of the self, produced during interaction. Following Schutz, these texts are ‘social’ because they are ‘other-oriented’ and intend the other as a conscious intelligent being, who can be affected to produce a response which is oriented back to the self (Crossley, 1996, p. 79). Identity is produced through and reflexively embedded in language use and it is in looking at how experience is described and oriented to by interactants, that we might get a glimpse of how identifications are made by speakers within their milieus. Meaning is an important part of this production and reproduction of identifications. In speaking of meaning I do not want to focus on the mind ‘but rather [on] interaction, or social groups, or societal structures’ (Van Dijk, 1997a, p. 9), as there is no authentic subject whose identity is independent of, or prior to, culture.5 Further for Black identities as texts o f social practice to 5 For example, Foucault persuasively details the historical process of ‘subjedification by discursive practices, and the politics of exclusion which all such subjectification appears to entail’ (Hall, 1996a, p. 2). While for Holquist (1991, pp. 28-29), ‘the Bakhtinian just-so

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be useful we have to think discursively as, ‘the notion o f social practice usually implies a broader dimension of discourse than [the] various acts accomplished by language users in interpersonal interaction’ (Van Dijk, 1997b, p. 5). In other words, we must engage in blurring the analytic line between theory and story.

Blurring the line between theory and story Whether data are called stories, narratives or autobiographies, the ‘telling about yourself and your experiences is the assembly of life episodes that the researcher can use to show how individuals see themselves and place their understanding of social life’ (Birch, 1998, p. 178). Individuals retell power and knowledge structures and place themselves in relation to these structures. Black women face the ‘biographic disruption’6 of racism and Black community exclusions but rebuild coherent selves in their identification talk. As women perform identifications through their stories, they create texts that are partial and selective representations of experience. These texts cannot be interpreted without reference to discourses such as those power/knowledge systems of ‘race’, class, gender, sexuality and ability within which tellers live. Stories are interpretative, but also require interpretation by interlocutors (and analysts). In these acts of interpretation, interactants produce theory in the Schutzian (1967) sense, of knowledge found in the thinking of people in everyday life. As I look for these theories, a focus on both process and content is important because whilst talking about themselves and others, individuals demonstrate their dialogical relationship with their milieus, which they also contribute to, interpret and change. Such a focus on process and content is also important, first because the construction of identifications has a sequential and interactional basis. This is as a result of our involvement in interactions where our talk is produced for specific others. Second, because the speakers in these interactions are involved in relations with ‘the social’. Identities are social products, results of the identification work in which speakers engage when they interact (Boden, 1994; Widdicombe and Woffitt, 1995). Based on this I set myself two clear analytical tasks to account for a hybridity o f the everyday: story of subjectivity is the tale of how I get myself from the other [..]. I see my self as I conceive others might see it. In order to forge a self, I must do so from outside. In other words, I author myself [..] [but] in existence that is shared there can be nothing absolute, including nothing absolutely new’. 6 For Riessman (1993, p. 2), a biographic disruption arises in respondents’ narrativizations of ‘particular experiences in their lives, often where there has been a break between ideal and real, self and society’.

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1) 2)

to look at the fine, sequential, tum-by-tum detail of talk-in-interaction; and, to look at the use of discourses in talk-in-interaction.

As a result it is necessary to develop an approach to link a Foucaultian concept o f discourses, Bakhtinian dialogics and ethnomethodological and discourse analytic concerns. The analytic interest is in both discourse in terms of specific interactions and how a discourse, or a set of ‘statements’ constitutes self and others. In trying to make this link between Foucault, Bakhtin, ethnomethodology and discourse analysis, I am not interested in ‘discover[ing] indisputable facts about a single social reality’ (Miller, 1997, p. 25). Rather I am interested in setting up a dialogical relationship between theoretical perspectives on the subject and methodological strategies. I blur the line between theory and story in order to understand how hybridity is present in the everyday, mundane activity of identity storytelling. How though do Foucault and Bakhtin contribute to looking at a hybridity of the everyday?

Foucault and Bakhtin - discourses and dialogics In Bakhtin’s view language is not a system of abstract grammatical categories but a world that is ideologically saturated. ‘Thus a unitary language gives expression to forces working towards [..] ideological centralization which develop in vital connection with the processes of sociopolitical and cultural centralization’ (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 271). Heteroglossia is a way of conceiving the world as constituted by a multiplicity of languages each with its own distinct formal markers (Holquist, 1991, p. 69). The subject is surrounded by a myriad of responses, each of which must be framed in a specific discourse chosen from this available multiplicity. Heteroglossia reflects Bakhtin’s preoccupation with the double or multiple voicedness of human experience. However, his ‘dialogism is primarily oriented to the canonical spheres of “verbal” art and this prevented Bakhtin from theorizing heteroglossia as a general paradigm for all social and cultural formations’ (Sandywell, 1998, p. 209). However, in Holquist’s (1991, p. 70) view the concept of heteroglossia ‘comes as close as possible to conceptualizing a locus where the great centripetal and centrifugal forces that shape discourse can meaningfully come together’. The space between centripetal and centrifugal forces therefore represents a ‘third space’ within Bakhtin in which heteroglossia allows for agency in the production of Black women’s identities in talk-in-interaction. Bakhtin’s unitary language as opposed to the possibility of heteroglossia is reminiscent of the Foucaultian notion that in any era there is a deep-seated set of discursive regularities which determine what it is possible to see, think and experience alongside subjugated knowledges. At the level of language there is also a connection between Foucault and Bakhtin in terms of ‘the word’. For Bakhtin, ‘the word’ in living conversation is oriented towards an answer word and forms

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itself within the time and space of the already spoken and the as yet unsaid.7 ‘The word in language is half someone else’s’ (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 293). Indeed, ‘all words have the “taste” of a profession, a genre, a tendency, a party, an age group, the day and hour’ (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 280). One must take the word from other people’s mouths and make it one’s own (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 294). Heteroglossia disrupts the centripetal forces and allows the emergence of hybridity in terms of the development of agency through talk. Methodologically what this means is that it ‘is possible to give a concrete and detailed analysis of any utterance, once having exposed it as a contradiction ridden, tension filled unity of two embattled tendencies [..]’ (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 272).8 So although Bakhtin operates in abstraction from the institutional sites in which the complex relations of discourse and power are negotiated (Pechey, 1989, p. 52), and allows for hybrid agency, we can draw parallels between his thoughts on ‘the word’ and Foucaultian discourses. This is so as ‘in any period, it is only possible to speak a few things, [..] because the rarefaction9 of discourse is crucially linked to the reproduction of relations of social domination through the control of meaning’ (McNay, 1996, p. 75). What it is possible to say in any time and space cannot be considered in isolation from power and asymmetrical social relations (McNay, 1996, p. 75). Discourses and meanings are the sites of struggle as hegemonic social relations fix meanings. The construction of ‘racial’ identity through the stereotype or through ‘race’ is an example of this fixation of meaning. To resist such hegemonic meaning entails the disruption of naturalized forms of discourse. Bakhtin’s heteroglossia shows us the possibility for such a disruption. Although Bakhtinian heteroglossia contains the possibility for struggle, Foucault’s assertion of the anteriority of discourse forecloses this as ‘power is transferred from the realm of the non-discursive into a formal principle of discursive regulation’ (McNay, 1996, p. 74). Such discursive regulation means ‘discursive subject positions become a priori categories which individuals seem to occupy in an unproblematic fashion’ (McNay, 1996, p. 77). For McNay (1996), the archaeological approach does not explain how individuals do not experience the dispersion of subject positions in discourse. Indeed, ‘archaeology brackets off a consideration of how ideology and meaning is mobilized to maintain asymmetrical social relations through the suturing of dissonant subject positions and the effacement of contradiction’ (McNay, 1996, p. 77). 7 The word forms itself within the context of ‘the already spoken, the word is at the same time determined by that which has not yet been said but which is needed and in fact anticipated by the answering word’ (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 280). 8 Interestingly, contradiction is a part of a discourse analytic approach to looking at texts. 9 ‘The principle of rarefaction is offered as an explanation of why it is that in any era [..] in relation to the wealth of possible statements that can be formulated in natural language, only relatively few things are actually said [..] rarefaction must not be understood as a principle of repression, that is that at any given time there is a great unsaid waiting to be uttered’ (McNay, 1996, p. 74).

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Post-colonial and feminist theorists praise the post-structuralist dissolution of the subject (McNay, 1996, p. 79). However, for these theorists problematizing the unified self also means the total rejection of any substantive notion of the self as a by-product of the archaeological method. The stress on the fragmentation of the subject denies groups excluded from mainstream discourse the space in which to construct alternative identities. So while acknowledging the fictional nature of the self they also recognize the centrality of the idea of the subject in political identities (McNay, 1996, p. 79). Post-colonial feminist thought problematizes Foucault’s assertion that in the analysis of discourse it does not matter who is speaking because the ‘question of who speaks and the issues of power and communication it raises are as important as how it is that subjects are positioned in a discursive structure’ (McNay, 1996, p. 79). Further, the lack of a fuller analysis of the role of the subject in the discursive formation creates difficulties in terms of Foucault’s conceptualization of ‘the other’. There is no interconnection or dialectical relation between the dominant and its others and ‘difference and alterity can only be thought in the problematic form of an epistemic break’ (McNay, 1996, p. 80). Thinking of otherness as a radical epistemic break replaces the subject of resistance with a subjectless practice. Resistance cannot be initiated from below at the level of ordinary everyday interactions but must come from above in the form of an elite poetic practice (McNay, 1996, p. 82). Foucaultian discourses then need to also be supplemented by a Bakhtinian approach that sees the possibility for resistance in everyday talk. Such a resistance carries the presence of a hybridity of the everyday. How then can we synthesize Foucault, Bakhtin, ethnomethodology and discourse analysis?

Foucault, Bakhtin, ethnomethodology and discourse analysis Although different, these approaches focus on the role of reflexivity in talk as simultaneously describing and making realities, the multiplicity of social realities, and language in the social construction of realities. An ethnomethodologically inclined discourse analysis goes from local interactions to global discourses by looking at how discourses are built from the bottom up. More Foucaultian based approaches look at how culturally standardized discourses impact on the ‘reality constructing activities of everyday life’ (Miller, 1997, p. 27). In combination these approaches offer ‘standpoints from which concrete, empirical aspects of social life may be seen and analyzed’ (Miller, 1997, p. 26). Foucault’s work also undermines the distinction between the public and the personal because of his emphasis on how public discourses become inscribed in our subjectivities (Edwards and Ribbens, 1998, p. 12). This construction of the self is mirrored somewhat in the work of Bakhtin and his collaborators as they tried to account for Marx’s view that ‘the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual [...] in its reality it is the ensemble of social relations’ (Holland et al, 1998, p. 35). Bakhtin accounts for this by conceptualizing individuals as always existing in a state of being ‘addressed’ and in the process of ‘answering’. He

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presents us with the possibility for discourse and power characterized by the inscription of the social in linguistic hegemony in ‘discourse in life’, rather than discourse in the novel (Pechey, 1989, p. 49). In self-other relations the subject is translated into linguistic terms over which she has no control because the other determines meaning. Dialogism allows us to look at the dynamic movement to the identity position o f an-other Black that exists in the extracts as women negotiate discourses through translation as reflexivity when they attempt to exert control over meaning. Foucault allows us to see how speakers construct versions of public discourses and how they use or disavow these in identification construction. So, whilst concentrating on statements, I will be using the Foucaultian notion of discourses slightly differently, that is, in a much more ethnomethodological way through looking at how ‘subjugated knowledges’ come into being through talk. The focus is on different power/knowledge forms rooted in social settings and experiences in which women speak about their interpersonal relationships and the broader social, structural and cultural contexts within which they live. This is where Bakhtin’s work on addressivity10 assumes significance. Addressivity implies that meaning is negotiable because of the intervention of the addressee. Two questions central to ethnomethodology point to the instability of meaning in everyday life. That is, what are the circumstances in which socially constructed identities change and, in what ways do socially constructed identities change? This focus on the instability of meaning is important given my orientation towards looking at a hybridity o f the everyday as being about a Blackness in which the same and different are simultaneous. This hybrid Blackness draws on and re-makes discourses of Blackness because: We enter into discourses as we go about the practical activities of our lives. The discourses are conditions of possibility that provide us with the resources for constructing a limited array of social realities, and make others less available to us. We enter into discourses and use the resources that they provide to construct concrete social realities by engaging in discursive practices that are similar to the interpretive methods and conversational procedures analyzed by ethnomethodologists [and discourse analysts]. Realities so produced are reflexive, because the discourses that we enter into in order to describe social realities also constitute those realities (Miller, 1997, p. 33).

Hybridity is seen within this book as an identification that arises in the struggle over position within discourses. It is constituted by discourses of self/other and also comes to constitute those discourses. Hybridity as discursive, dialogical and 10 ‘An essential (constitutive) marker of the utterance is its quality of being directed to someone, its addressivity [..] This addressee can be an immediate participant-interlocutor in an everyday dialogue, a differentiated collective of specialists in some particular area of cultural communication, a more or less differentiated public, ethnic group, contemporaries [..] and it can also be an indefinite, unconcretized other’ (Pearce, 1994, pp. 73-74). New addressivity here denotes the repositioning within discourses accomplished by speakers.

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performative means that I must be alert to the ways in which speakers move between and manipulate different discourses in making identifications in terms of ‘assumptions, categories, logics and claims - the constitutive elements of discourses’ (Miller, 1997, p. 34). The focus must therefore be on the detail of speakers’ interactions. This is where discourse analysis with its concentration on the ways in which identities are constituted in interaction assumes significance. Why this emphasis on identities as constructed in interaction? It is important because it looks at what people say in order to accomplish social, political or cultural acts in interaction locally. As, ‘language users engaging in discourse accomplish social acts and participate in social interaction, typically so in conversation and other forms of dialogue. Such interaction is in turn embedded in various social and cultural contexts [..]’ (Van Dijk, 1997b, p. 2). My focus then, is on the strategic performance of speakers who work to make the discourses within which they are embedded coherent and meaningful, which has the reflexive function of constructing and displaying their identifications as Black women. So women ‘are using their language to construct versions of the social world’ (Potter and Wetherall, 1992, p. 33). Interactants are actively engaged in the selection of accounts that are then used to ‘construct’ the reality of their Black womanhood in the sequential organization of talk. To speak of construction implies that these versions are strategic and intentional, which makes us also look at how these versions emerge and what they achieve for the speakers. This bears in mind the idea that the ‘self is [..] articulated in discourse in ways that will maximize one’s warrant or claim to be heard’ (Potter and Wetherall, 1992, p. 108). As an ethnomethodologically inclined researcher listening to the talk and reading the texts, my task is to look at a participant’s display of ascription to/disavowal of, the membership category ‘Black woman’. I need to see what features this category carries as an identification and how they are used in identification talk. This becomes obvious to me through looking at interlocutor understandings as: membership of a category is ascribed (and rejected), avowed (and disavowed), displayed (and ignored) in local places and at certain times, and it does these things as part of the interactional work that constitutes people’s lives. In other words [..] it [is] not that people passively or latently have this or that identity which then causes feelings and actions, but that they work up and work to this or that identity, for themselves and others, there and then, either as an end in itself or towards some other end (Antaki and Widdicombe, 1998, p. 2).

To look at the representations of discourses in language means that I am mindful that people operate in and against discursive constructions that attempt to fix boundaries and that these discourses reflect power relations. Issues of power and inequality cannot therefore be erased from the analytic enterprise but making them transparent lies at the heart of analysis. For ethnomethodologists and more conversationally oriented discourse analysts, power is something achieved through work done by participants. What must be central is to look at the distinctive

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knowledge and power relations that interactants speak in their identification stories. For example, how they resist these relations and construct different power/knowledge relations in their construction of hybrid identity positionings. This is reminiscent of Garfinkel’s argument that ordinary members of society are ‘capable of rationally understanding and accounting for their own actions in society. Indeed it is precisely in this rational accountability that members come to be treated and see themselves as members of society’ (Hutchby and Wooffitt, 1998, p. 30). A key notion of discourse analysis is that ‘by selecting [..] vocabulary from available cultural themes and concepts, and by its choice of their arrangement [a speaker] makes positive claim to a certain vision of the world’ (Antaki, 1994, p. 7). Speakers, then, are strategic in their construction of reality through talk. As she reads texts the discourse analyst focuses on three key aspects of language: contradiction, construction and practice (Parker, 1999, p. 6). She does not seek to uncover an underlying theme that will explain the real meaning of the texts. Rather she seeks contradictions between different significations and the way different pictures of the world are constructed. It is then possible to identify dominant and subjugated meanings and highlight processes of resistance (Parker, 1999, p. 6). Discourse analysts do not take meaning for granted but rather, try to look at how meaning has been socially constructed (Parker, 1999, p. 7). In terms of practice as discourse analysts ‘we are concerned with issues of power and we also want to open up a place for agency, as people struggle to make sense of texts. This is where people push at the limits of what is socially constructed and actively construct something different’ (Parker, 1999, p. 7). Stories of lived experience thus contribute to defining what Black womanhood and, more broadly, what Black identities are because they are latched to the outer world’s culturally available accounts. It is within this dialogical tension between accounts in interaction and culturally available accounts, that we can see the emergence of ‘the third space of hybridity’ in talk as women produce their own ‘critical textwork’.11 How can I be sure though that as a discourse analyst, I am not ‘discovering’ something that isn’t really there? In this vein, Widdicombe and Wooffitt (1995, p. 65) remind us of the negative consequences of discourse analysis as being that: although analysts may wish to use discourse analysis on behalf of powerless and marginalized groups, their analytic concerns do not give these groups a voice.

So by looking at talk only to evidence the influence of discourses, analysts deny interactants voice by not looking at what they may be doing through their talk. A focus purely on discourses has as its corollary that language becomes a resource for theorizing rather than a topic in itself. Using language as a resource means that we* For Parker (1999, p. 7) ‘critical textwork’ in Discourse Analysis arises from our ‘attention to contradiction, construction and practice combined with an attention to the position of the researcher’. My point of view is that speakers use these same approaches in their ethnomethods in talk so that both speaker and researcher are engaged in critical textwork.

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can easily overlook the ways in which speakers construct and negotiate the meaning of the identifications that they make, in and through talk. My approach to discourse analysis has to include the sequential practices through which Black women’s identities are negotiated in interactions. As I look at identifications made in talk I take account of identity constructions and the meanings held in common about this. I also look at accounts of individuals’ views of Black womanhood, and themselves within that, as people struggling towards their own versions of authenticity, autonomy and difference. Asserting that women struggle for their own versions of Blackness means that I am also saying that meanings are transformed in interaction, so there is an on-going process of construction and change within the dialogical process of identity making. I see discourse at the local interactional level as continually made relevant by interactants trying to make sense of it. I say this because it seems to me from looking at the interactions that the making of identifications in action are ‘intentionally accomplished in order to realize or bring about something else, that is, other actions, events, situations, or states of mind: they have goals that make these actions meaningful or have a “point”, and that make their actors appear purposeful’ (Van Dijk, 1997b, p. 8). So, as I look at the emergence of Black women’s identifications in talk I am looking at ‘the social reasoning that people go through to make sense of their worlds, and (perhaps) impose that sense on other people’ (Antaki, 1994, p. 1). I am looking at talk on identification as dialogical, focused on speakers’ social practices rather than what is in their heads. For Bakhtin talk is never a mere reflection of something already existing and outside of it, which is given and final (Shorter and Billig, 1998, p. 13). ‘It always creates something that has never existed before, something absolutely new and unrepeatable, and, moreover, it always has some relation to value (the true, the good, the beautiful, and so forth)’ (Bakhtin, 1986, pp. 119-120). Hybrid identities arise in these dialogical moments as we reshape the already existing historical and ideological influences that form our ways of relating to each other. ‘Value’, though, always reintroduces essentialism, so hybridity simultaneously replays this in talk.

Conclusion The nature of the talk has meant that I have to look in a detailed way at the interplay between theory, ways of knowing about the social world, methodology and practice for looking for a hybridity o f the everyday. This has evolved into looking at the intersections and divergences between Foucault and Bakhtin on the subject, identity and discourses. First, with regard to what insights Foucault and Bakhtin offer in terms of looking at the speaking subject. Second, having a focus on ethnomethods and critical textwork. Third, in terms of how I listen to the talk, read the transcriptions and give meaning to the texts of social practice, the Black women identities, which speakers perform. I have said that Foucault does not adequately account for the speaking subject at the ordinary everyday level of interaction. Neither does his work account for the

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possibility of otherness: the difference so central in the production of hybridity in talk. Bakhtin’s work on the self as other, the self as multiple and in process and addressivity is needed to account for such a subject constituted in talk-in­ interaction. Foucault’s focus on discourses in the construction of subjects allows us to see discourse analysis as an important tool which ‘allows the researcher to identify subject positions which may constrain or facilitate particular actions and experiences’ (Willig, 1999, p. 2). That is, to take a more ethnomethodological perspective, the subject positions which speakers themselves identify as having this effect. If we remember that subjugated knowledges have a place within Foucaultian thought, then we can see that he allows for a discourse analysis that focuses on contradiction, construction and practice. That is, the discourse analyst Ian Parker’s (1999) ‘critical textwork’. A more Bakhtinian view of the self as dialogical is that there is always a possibility for challenge. The self as agentic and dialogical means that I have to look for the readings and translations of discursive positioning made by speakers and the production of alternative self-positionings in talk. The multiplicity of selves and the intimate interaction with otherness which this involves entails that hybridity as a process in talk-in-interaction need not imply a total break with discursively constructed essentialisms. Rather, what should be looked at is how essentialism interacts with difference in talk-in-interaction. Extrapolating from the work of Bakhtin onto analysis has meant several things. A tum-by-tum transcription allows the entrance of dialogics into the analysis. This transcription shows the dynamic movement in the talk from positioning to repositioning: the negotiation of discourses of identity positionings that constitutes a hybridity o f the everyday. Further, Bakhtin’s heteroglossia allows an orientation to the talk based on ethnomethods. So I look at speakers’ translations of identification discourses focused on their constructions of addressivity in the tumby-tum performance of identifications. The strength of this analytic approach is that it allows us to see the subject in process in talk-in-interaction as interactants speak their negotiations of identification discourses. I want to say something briefly about doing research on / with / through friends or intimates. This raised the ethical issue about the relational spaces of friendship in research. Friendship as such, has to do with reciprocity, mutuality, a sharing in common, intimacy and affect. By being involved in conversations with my friends I was trading my intimate connection with them as ‘friend’ for that of ‘distant / though present’ researcher. As an ‘outsider within’ I could look at the conversations as no-one else could as I had recorded them and frozen them in time. After the intimacy of friendship there is a ‘making strange’ which has to be entered into in the analytical process. Such intimate distance is facilitated through ethnomethods and critical textwork. Like participants who then asked their friends and intimates to become involved in the research, I also traded on the pull of intimacy: on thinking that attachment necessarily entailed a willingness to participate. There were instances where questions were asked about me, the friend not held in common who was demanding

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the intimacy of the conversations of friends. As a stranger there was no possibility for the mutuality, reciprocity or intimate attachment of friendship with me to ever be extended to these women. In the research process I entered intimate relational spaces without giving much thought to the impact of the research on these emotional attachments. For my friends I can say that they saw the encounter as sharing with someone who always listened. I hope that those women who I will never know continue to approach each other with mutual openness and trust. I can only address them with my words of thanks in the Acknowledgements. The next chapter on critical ontologies of Black womanhood and racialized gender takes forward the themes of positioning, othering, agency and hybridity raised in this chapter.

Chapter 3

Critical Ontologies and Racialized Gender

Introduction Laura’s talk in the last chapter shows the power of white discourses on Blackness to define and constrain identifications. What now needs to be spoken about are the racialized gender discourses which spring from Blackness itself and their impact on Black woman identifications. As others (cf. hooks, 2000; Hill Collins, 1990; Jarrett-Macauley, 1996; Mirza, 1997) have said, maintaining the invisibility of Black women or, making us visible in a derogatory way in terms of theorizing, is an integral part of our oppression. A recent example of this is Stephen Small’s (2002, p. 178)1 paper ‘Black People of Mixed Origins and the Politics of Identity’ in which he acknowledges the difference that gender can make to Black identity without then going on to spell out what this could be. For him: when people talk of Black identity it usually means to express through attitudes or behaviour an identification with people and cultures of African descent [..]There are, of course, important variations by gender [..] To people in the community, expressing a Black identity might mean behaving in radical political ways. But it is not always clear and the matter of who is to decide what a Black identity actually is, who is to adjudicate over what behaviour it might entail, is also far from clear at the dawn of a new millennium.

Not withstanding his gender blindness, what Small usefully does here is to point to the (im)possibility of Black identity even at the dawn of the new millennium. This (impossibility is a theme taken up by Stuart Hall (1995), who asserts that the question of Caribbean identity has always been a difficult one if it is assumed that identity involves a search for origins. This is so because it is difficult to locate in the Caribbean an origin for its people. Origin is difficult as Africa, Europe, India, China, Lebanon and the Jewish diaspora are the historical sources for Caribbean people (Hall, 1990). Further, at the level of culture, ‘Black popular culture’: has come to signify the black community, where these traditions were kept, and whose struggles survive in the persistence of the black experience (the historical 1 In Christian, M. (ed.) (2002), Black Identity in the 20th Century: Expressions of the US and UK African Diaspora.

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Black Skins, Black Masks experience of black people in the diaspora), of the black aesthetic (the distinctive cultural repertoires out of which popular representations were made), and of the black counter-narratives we have struggled to voice (Hall, 1996b, p. 471 ).2

Hall again does not look at the specificities of racialized gender within Blackness itself. By this I mean that there is a performative discourse of Black womanhood which produces an always already said about what a Black woman identity is, what culture and behaviour is entailed and what exactly is a Black woman. This chapter will begin the unpicking of this performative discourse that will continue throughout the book. I will use instances in talk of the construction of ‘the authentic Black woman’ in order to look at the process of identity positioning and re-positioning which occurs in talk-in-interaction. Within this process women speak the impact of discourses of containment3 on their lives as they reproduce these discourses in talk on identity. They also produce counter-narratives through translation as reflexivity, in the performances of their identifications in the flow of the talk. I will also think through this process in the talk to see how Black women’s identities are critical ontologies of the self. Here I will focus on the agentic struggle involved in these ontologies against the govemmentality of the discourse of ‘the authentic Black woman’ by looking at how this discourse itself is used to produce difference. How though can I link the macro of the performative discourse of Black womanhood to the micro of the agency of identity re-positionings in talk?

Racialized gender, discourses and agency Through interactants’ accounts the performative discourse of ‘the authentic Black woman’ can be understood from the bottom up by looking at the micro-physics of power. Such a micro-physics is relayed in women’s stories of lived experience. A focus on lived experience is based on the understanding that ‘structures, systems, cultures and so on are “occasioned” phenomena which exist [..] in the practices of participants’ (Watson, 1992, p. xx). Women constitute what they see as ‘the system’ in interaction with others. Having constituted this system, they orient themselves to it as if it had an objective existence prior to and independent of their interaction. So constraint and agency are to be found in the interactional practices of individuals in which they conjoin the macro and the micro (Watson, 1992, p. xx). What does this mean for racialized gender? Racialized gender is in ordinary meanings. This is so as speakers produce knowledge of and about ‘the social’ alongside the political economy and culture of their milieus. These latter inform the knowledge being produced (Goldberg, 1993).4

2 Hall, S. (1996b), ‘What is this “black” in black popular culture’ in D. Morley and K. Chen (eds.), Stuart Hall - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies. 3 By discourses of containment I mean those monologic discourses on identity to which people are required to conform by friends, family, colleagues and society. 4 Goldberg speaks only about racialization.

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The discourse of ‘the authentic Black woman’ provides the frame for Black women’s identifications through its assumptions, values and goals. Black womanhood as a category frames ‘the known’. It provides ways to think about ‘the social’. It is basically about the constitution of power. Black womanhood is a racialized gender knowledge which establishes differences that come then to be taken as givens. Power is also apparent as practices of naming/refusing to name deny any autonomy to the named. The other of Black womanhood is what racialized gender knowledge knows. This knowledge knows what is best for its other. Further, racialized gender government has detailed ‘facts’ about the nature and character of ‘the Black woman’. Such ‘facts’ construct an archive of reifications which come to be seen as basic and unalterable. There is a silencing of difference as those made other are also made invisible. They are excluded from personhood and representation because to admit the other’s subjectivity is to give up power. Within these universal claims to knowledge of Black womanhood, the Black woman must for example be, dark-skinned, centred on Black/African/Caribbean culture, politics and community, involved in inscribing Blackness on the body, anti-racist and reproducers of ‘the race’. In order to be placed within the home of Black community, difference has to be denied, sameness must be naturalized. This is the agonistic struggle at the heart of a Black woman body politic with which we will see women engaging in their conversations. How will the performative discourse of Black womanhood become susceptible to analysis in terms of the sequential organization of conversation? Paul Gilroy’s (1997, pp. 335-336) ‘the changing same’ of Black diaspora identities gives us a possibility for such an analysis when he says: This ‘changing same’ is not some invariant essence that gets enclosed subsequently in a shape shifting exterior with which it is casually associated. It is not the sign of an unbroken, integral inside protected by a camouflaged husk [..] The same is present but how can we imagine it as something other than essence generating the merely accidental? The same is retained without needing to be reified. It is ceaselessly reprocessed. It is maintained and modified in what becomes a determinedly non-traditional tradition, for this is not tradition as closed or simple repetition.

This puts us in a space of flux because of the impossibility of a once and for all definitive Black woman identity. However, it also locates the possibility for a contingently essentialized ‘Black woman same’ to be talked into being fleetingly, as the instability of ‘Black woman’ is briefly halted for meaning to emerge in interaction. How can I make this claim? As we have seen in earlier chapters and will see later, Black women talk about themselves and others as though Black is the sign of an unbroken integral inside. They speak ‘Black’ as invariant essence because of the intervention of ‘race’ in their lived experiences. It would seem then that ‘the same’ cannot be re-processed without recourse to the reifications of ‘race’ and ‘culture’. It is the maintenance and modification o f ‘the sam e' in talk that is of particular interest here in terms of

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looking at discourses. This is so as, if my analysis of the talk focuses on that which is critiqued, then ‘the same’ of the discourse of Black womanhood should become clearer. In order to look at ‘the same’ of Black womanhood and the possibility for counter-narratives in interaction, I am going to integrate Foucault’s work with my own thinking. What I will take from Foucault first of all is his idea of ‘diagrams’ and ‘statements’. Following Foucault, there is a diagram of monologic Black womanhood on which racialized gender statements are based. These statements are expressive of the diagram’s relations of force and knowledge. The translation as reflexivity in which speakers engage in talk, shows their awareness of statements. This awareness is either used or contradicted in identity positionings. The analysis that I will develop centres on how Black women negotiate the govemmentality of bio-power in the production of a critical ontology of the self. In producing this, they demonstrate their participation at the local level in discursive constructions through their talk, by using translation as reflexivity as a process to link the macro to the micro in interaction. Their critical ontologies therefore also include the agency of difference. Translation as reflexivity will be taken to be that point of critique in the talk in which individuals show their identification through, with and against the subject positions constructed for them by discourses. Translation as reflexivity makes obvious the meanings of Blackness which women identify/dis-identify with, as they subject themselves to the discourse’s rules and become the subjects of its power/ knowledge. In identifications against the discursive positionings of Black woman, translation as reflexivity is productive of a hybridity of the moment, producing spaces of ‘different from the changing same’.5 This shows how hybrid identities are grounded in ‘real-life’ language use and locates culture itself within the daily interactional construction of meanings.

Culture as daily practices In Alfred Schutz’s (1967, p. 10) view: [••] the world is an intersubjective world of culture [..] because from the outset the world of everyday life is [.. ] a texture of meaning which we have to interpret in order to find our bearings within it and come to terms with it [..] This texture of meaning, however, [..] originates in and has been instituted by human actions, our own and our [..] contemporaries and predecessors.

I have started with Schutz for a number of reasons. First, he stresses the intersubjective nature of culture and its constitution of the world. Second, his point of view that the world is a ‘texture of meaning’ which has to be interpreted. Third,

5 That is, bearing in mind that ‘the changing same’ also includes discursive reifications of Blackness.

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his idea that meaning originates through and is instituted by human actions through time and space. This view links closely to my own position that Black identities are texts of social practice which have to be given meaning in interaction. Further, Schutz also hints at the centrality of translation as reflexivity by speaking about the importance of interpretation in coming to terms with a world which we ourselves make. Foucault would feel that it is through this interpretation that individuals come to understand themselves. They understand themselves within the context of culturally determined notions of identity as large-scale cultural patterns manifest themselves at the level of individual identity. This happens through a process of mediation: [..] in which the subject constitutes himself in an active fashion by the practices of the self, these practices [..] are patterns that he finds in his culture and which are proposed, suggested and imposed on him by his culture, his society and his social group (McNay, 1996, p. 154).

In my view Foucault also focuses on translation as reflexivity through this mediation process. He also notes the centrality of culture/society/social group in identities. He, thus, usefully juxtaposes the micro-level of practices of the self against the macro-level of the determining social horizon (McNay, 1996, p. 155). In his work on the history of sexuality Foucault (1984a, pp. 333-334) treats ‘sexuality as the correlation of a domain of knowledge, a type of normativity and a mode of relation to the self; it means trying to decipher how [..] a complex experience is constituted from and around certain forms of behaviour: an experience which conjoins a field of study [..], a collection of rules [..], a mode of relation between the individual and himself. For both Schutz and Foucault, therefore, the ‘study of forms of experience can thus proceed from an analysis of “practices’” (Foucault, 1984a, p. 335). ‘Practices’ here are conversations in which women both speak from within discourses and construct counter-discourses. This is their micro-strategy for dealing with the same and the different of Black womanhood in constructing identifications through talk. Constructing identifications is therefore done by the complex interplay between forms, meanings and actions of discourse.

Discourses and analyzing daily practices To speak of forms, meanings and actions of discourse points to a link between daily practices and what Foucault (1995, p. 74) calls a ‘system of formation’. This is: [..] a complex group of relations that function as a rule: it lays down what must be related, in a particular discursive practice, for such and such a concept to be used [..] To define a system of formation [..] is therefore to characterize a discourse or a group of statements by the regularity of a practice.

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Black womanhood as a discourse is a system of formation which arises through the regular quotidian practices of constructing it through statements. The system of formation is not atemporal and involves transformation of discourses over time. This is where Gilroy’s (1997) ‘changing same’ is ceaselessly re-processed. ‘Discourse and system produce each other’ through ‘rules that are embodied as a particular practice by discourse’ (Foucault, 1995, p. 76) to the extent that ‘one remains within the dimension of discourse’ (Foucault, 1995, p. 76). A question though remains. If we are within discourse and rules become embodied in daily practices, what does this mean for agency? By agency I mean here translation as reflexivity within identification talk. That is, the space in talk that introduces the possibility for a construction of an identification as ‘different from, but the same as’, the discursively constructed Black womanhood. The introduction of difference is the agentic moment that asserts the possibility for other ontologies. It is clear that ‘the subject position delivered to us by modernity is not an ontological necessity, other subject positions will be historically possible in terms of the contingencies of the present moment’ (Schrift, 1994, p. 198). The construction of hybridity in stories of lived experience is one site where such a contingent construction arises through reflexivity. This ‘encourages us to consider the way a text [..] is a version, selectively working up coherence and incoherence, telling historical stories, presenting, and indeed, constituting an objective out-there reality’ (Potter, 1997, p. 146). This ensures that there can be no foundational unified discourse. Rather: ‘discursive discontinuity becomes primary and constitutive’ in as much as the ‘identity’ of the democratic subject is always in process, producing itself in response to and being produced by the contingent antagonisms and alliances that constitutes the social (Laclau and Mouffe (1985) quoted in Schrift, 1994, p. 199).

Deleuze (1988) in Foucault points to discursive discontinuity when he looks at Foucault’s ideas on a spatio-temporal multiplicity in the concept of a diagram. Diagrams are intersocial and evolving to produce new kinds of reality, new models of truth (Deleuze, 1988, p. 35). Diagrams make ‘history by unmaking preceding realities and significations, constituting hundreds of points of emergence or creativity, unexpected conjunctions or improbable continuums’ (Deleuze, 1988, p. 35). As well as being a connector of points, diagrams also contain relatively free or unbound points, points of creativity, change and resistance. In their role as a connector of points, diagrams are ‘the presentation of the relations between forces unique to a particular formation [..] the distribution of the power to affect and the power to be affected’ (Deleuze, 1988, pp. 72-73). So whilst there is the presence of hybridity produced in the points of creativity, change and resistance, subjects are affected by the power/knowledge forces of the diagram. ‘Foucault’s fundamental idea is that of a dimension of subjectivity derived from power and knowledge without being dependent on them’ (Deleuze, 1998, p. 101). He rejects a uni-directional and repressive notion of power. Instead he re-conceives power as a positive force, permeating all levels of society, producing a multiplicity

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of relations besides those of domination (McNay, 1996, p. 90). Power circulates, is exercized through a net-like organization and individuals circulate between its threads simultaneously undergoing and exercizing power (Foucault, 1980a, p. 98). So ‘if power generates a multiplicity of effects, then it is only possible to discern these effects by analyzing power from below, at its most precise points of operation - a “microphysics of power”’ (McNay, 1996, p. 91). A ‘microphysics of power’ in itself implicates an analytical focus on daily practices. I would like to turn to Foucault’s idea that statements are the building blocks of discourse. I would also like to begin to establish a link between statements and stories of lived experience which build an ‘out there’ reality. For Foucault the analysis of statements does not pose the question of the speaking subject, rather ‘it is situated at the level of the “it is said” [..] we must understand by it the totality of things said, the relations, the regularities, and the transformations that may be observed in them, the domain of which certain figures [..] indicate the unique place of a speaking subject and may be given the name of author. “Anyone who speaks”, but what he says is not said from anywhere. It is necessarily caught up in the play of an exteriority’ (Foucault, 1995, p. 122). The speaking subject is an author of statements located somewhere. Through reading and deciphering the traces of memory reproduced in stories a speaker ‘makes it possible to snatch past discourse from its inertia and, for a moment, to rediscover something of its lost vitality’ (Foucault, 1995, p. 123). So, a statement is susceptible to analysis at the local level as for Foucault (1995, pp. 86-87) it is: [..] a function of existence which properly belongs to signs and on the basis of which one may then decide, through analysis or intuition, whether or not they ‘make sense’, according to what rule they follow one another or are juxtaposed, of what they are the sign, and what sort of act is carried out by their formulation (oral or written) [..] it [..] is [..] a function that cuts across a domain of structures and possible unities, and which reveals them, with concrete contents, in time and space.

The ‘repeatable materiality’ of statements means that they are ‘[..] one of those objects that men produce, manipulate, use, transform, exchange, combine, decompose and recompose, and possibly destroy [..] the statement circulates, is used, disappears, allows or prevents the realisation of desire, serves or resists various interests, participates in challenge and struggle, and becomes a theme of appropriation or rivalry’ (Foucault, 1995, p. 105). At base then, the statement is about social practices. In terms of identifications these are specifically practices of positioning which can be investigated at the local enunciatory level ‘by the analysis of the relations between the statement and the spaces of differentiation, in which the statement itself reveals the differences’ (Foucault, 1995, p. 92). Foucault then, provides us with a way of looking at ‘authentic Black womanhood’ as a performative discourse, that is, as a statement which functions to produce positions for speakers. For my purposes these positions would be ‘the same’ and ‘the

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different’ within Black womanhood and would be negotiated through translation as reflexivity in talk. Reflexivity is central to Foucault’s theory of the self. It is central because autonomy can only be affirmed through the reflexive self-monitoring of the construction of oneself. However, he undercuts this idea’s importance by arguing that the establishment of analytical links between the self and the social context must be rejected (McNay, 1996, pp. 160-161). This arises because of his concern to escape the regimes of truth imposed on the body and its pleasures by the juridicomoral codes of Christianity, psychoanalysis and science (Sarup, 1996, p. 90). In effect he does not want an ethics of the self to become a reverse essentialism (Sarup, 1996, p. 90). The analytical links I am trying to make in terms of reflexivity are important ones. They are important if one bears in mind Alfred Schutz’s view that practices of the self are mediated by social and symbolic structures and in turn affect them, and indeed, by the view that an author is located somewhere. In fact, it is important for us to remember that these structures have a place in helping individuals to acquire some insight into the implications of their actions (Sarup, 1996, p. 90). Maybe for Foucault, then, the ‘possibility that is not admitted is that the process of reflexivity may never be fixed and complete, but may nevertheless involve a systematic interrogation of the way in which self representation is imbricated in wider cultural dynamics’ (McNay, 1996, p. 161). This systematic interrogation of the arrangement of self-representation within the everyday practices of culture is about translation as reflexivity. Here matters of identification are managed in the sequential organization of the talk itself. Let us now look at some talk from Laura. What I want us to see is how she makes a link between daily practices of self-representation and at the same time interrogates the performative discourse of Black womanhood. As we look at what she says we can also get a glimpse of the ceaseless reprocessing that occurs within talk that produces the modification and maintenance of the changing same of Black womanhood. Example 3.1 Tape 1 Side A LF: 2-3 1 Sh You say your wraps then I’m interested in your African wraps because like (.) 2 Lo .hhh 3 Sh I’ve never [seen you with one before you know,] 4 Lo [ I t ’s funny you should say that ] oh I wear them all the time 5 now [you know] yea:h I wear them to work now yeah = 6 Sh [ Really? ] =Ohright= 7 Lo =Yea:h I wear them to work = 8 Sh =°Oh right°= >9 Lo =Fm MAKING a STATEMENT (.) I’m going back to my a:h: .hhh 10 CULTURAL IDENTITY= 11 Sh=Mh[ m ] >12 Lo [ I’m] SICK of WESTERN influences and stuff like that [°Shirley°] I

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13 Sh [ Mhm ] 14 Lo just want to .hhh I WANT TO BE ME I DON’T WANT TO HAVE TO 15 CONFORM TO WHAT SOMEONE’S CONSTRUCTED FOR ME:= 16 Sh =Mhm= >17 Lo =AND I THINK OUR CULTURE IS SO: BEAUTIFUL .hhh WE’VE 18 BEEN MADE TO HATE IT FOR SO LONG [you know?] WHICH W E’RE 19 RUNNING AWAY FULL SPEED FROM .hhh (.3) AFRLCAN stuff and 20 Lo and I LOVE it I love the carvings I love African drum music [ (.) ] I’ve 21 Sh [Mhm] 22 Lo got two BEAUTIFUL AFRICAN ah:m ROBES I’ll be [ wearing ] one to 23 Sh [Have you?] 24 Lo this presentation next week= 25 Sh =Mhm= 26 Lo=And I wear a wrap a lo:t Laura constructs for us her identification as an African centred Black woman in this extract. I begin by positioning her as someone who inscribes Blackness onto her body when I say, ‘I’m interested in your African wraps because like I’ve never seen you with one before you know’. Laura’s response to this begins in overlap and is an affirmation of this positioning as she wears ‘them all the time now’. In fact she wears ‘them to work now’. Wearing a headwrap to work is a very public declaration of Blackness. After my quietly produced claim to understanding ‘oh right’ on line 8, Laura produces a translation as reflexivity sequence in which she clearly states the reason for her use of African headwraps. That is, that she is ‘making a statement’, she is ‘going back to [her] cultural identity’ (lines 9-10). Following this she begins to reposition herself as an African identified woman by claiming that she is ‘sick of Western influences’ (lines 12-15) and because she wants to be herself and not ‘have to conform to what someone’s constructed for her’, she has turned to African culture. African culture is presented as the changing same with which she has identified in terms of art, music and dress. She shifts her positioning to that of identification with African-ness unlike other Black people who are ‘running away full speed from African stuff (lines 17-18). In this latter she also speaks herself as someone who is embracing African-ness through her dress and love of African cultural practices. A reliance on Foucault presents us with a problem in terms of the identification work being done in this extract. An analysis of statements does not necessarily lead us to see the speaker critique of the power/knowledge of ‘Western influences’, as Laura translates the relevance of her headwrap for her identification. To make speaker critique invisible is problematic, because it denies the systematic interrogation of identities in which Laura is engaged. Foucault’s ‘statements’ does not allow for the use of counter-narratives in the repositioning Laura undertakes in talk. So it would be difficult for us to say that Foucault’s account helps us to see identity talk as a reflexive activity where bodily practices are translated in the making of identification claims. What we can see through Foucault is that there is a discursive same of ‘African’ in opposition to ‘Western’, which is shown through

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bodily practices, cultural preferences and political thought. Being African-centred is constructed as the site of the emergence of a different Black womanhood as opposed to ‘the same Black woman’ who has ‘been made to hate it for so long and run away full speed from African stuff. Shared membership categories can perhaps help us to see how counterpositionings of Afro-centricity could be looked at using Foucault. In ‘Lecture One: 7 January 1976’ he seeks to delineate the genealogical project. Here Foucault talks about ‘the local character of criticism ’ which ‘indicates in reality [..] an autonomous non-centralised kind of theoretical production, one that is to say whose validity is not dependent on the approval of the established regimes of thought’ (Foucault, 1980a, p. 81). This is about then ‘an insurrection of subjugated knowledges’ (Foucault, 1980a, p. 81). These subjugated knowledges are insufficiently elaborated because they involve a popular knowledge (savoir de gens) incapable of unanimity. A savoir de gens is at the heart of the criticism of the claims o f a unitary body of Black womanhood in Laura’s talk. However, unanimity is being established in the process of talk-in-interaction. So we move one step further from the statement as a positioning, as a function of existence within discursive formations (Hitchcock, 1993), towards being able to respond to the question of what allows the speaker to make a statement. In responding to this question Mikhail Bakhtin’s work is useful. This is so as the speaker is a subject in process where an utterance context always establishes and re-establishes a position from which to speak (Hitchcock, 1993). Foucault only allows for agency in the position o f the subject produced by the statement. However, for Bakhtin struggles reside with the sign but also in the access to signification. This is what marks the subject as agent rather than just the subject as position produced through relations of power (Hitchcock, 1993). I see statements as talk that performs acts of identity positioning. So the statement conceived at the local level of conversation simultaneously speaks and speaks through, discourses of identification. This becomes obvious when we look at the positions occupied by speakers as they articulate and apply these identification discourses to either themselves, or to concrete issues, persons and events as in the above example. Applying identification discourses and criticizing the unitary body of Black womanhood leads us to look at biopower and governmentality in Black women’s identifications.

Biopower, governmentality and identifications What is clear in example 3.2 is that Blackness as community is about a discourse of surveillance, normalization and control. I say this because Blackness as community is based on a ‘regime of truth [..] that is the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true’ (Foucault, 1980b, p. 131). Black womanhood is a diagram, a relation of racialized gender power/knowledge that becomes apparent in talk.

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This is shown in the next extract by the difference of politics between The Nation of Islam and Sharon as a Caribbean identified woman who was an activist at the point at which the incident being related happened. The conversation follows on from a discussion about the relevance of The Nation of Islam to the British context: Example 3.2 Tape 2 Side A Lu, Sav, Lo, Sh, Pe: 45-46 1 Sh FROM THE TIME I went to this conference right? I went to this ah:m 2 BLACK CAUCUS conference in Liverpool and they had some like Black 3 Muslims there right, and there was this one guy (.) that was from America and 4 he had a:ll the clothes on you know, [like ] this and (.) everything and ah:m 5 Sa [°Mhm°] >6 Sh he wa:s there and THE ROOM PACK OUT WITH WOMEN TOO you 7 know? and he’s like TALKING and STUff and I SAID SOMEthing and 8 Shanaz said something because I’d gone with her and he looked at us and he >9 said YOU KNOW THE PROBLEM WITH YOU SISTAS IS YOU DON’T 10 REALIZE WHERE YOUR PLACE SHOULD BE YOUR PLACE IS AT 11 HOME BRINGING UP THE RACE AND NURTURING THEM INTO THE 12 culture HE said you’re not supposed to be out here on the FRONT Line it’s >13 US MEN who are supposed to do that WELL YOU CAN IMAGINE WHAT 14 ME AND SHANAZ SAID TO HIM= 15 = [Joint laughter] 16 Sh [You know, ] you can imagine (.) FIE:ST[INI:SS:?]= 17 Lu [((.hhh)) ] 18 Sa =Mhm: yeah= 19 Sh = TELLING US (.3) 20 Sh Like US CARIBBEAN WOMEN ESPECIALLY [that we ] MUST BE AT 21 Lo [Yeah ] 22 Lu [((-hhh))] 23 Sh [HOME ] BRINGING UP THE [RACE ] AND NURTURING THEM 24 Lu [((.hhh))] [((-hhh))] 25 Sh AND NOT on the FRONT line WHERE DOES HE COME FROM?= 26 Sa = [((.hhh ].hhh ))= 27 Lu [((.hhh))] =AND ALL: OF A SUDDEN THEY HAVE SUIT SHIRT 28 AND TIE?= 29 Sh =YEAH? you know what I mean?= 30 Lu =WHEN I WEAR SUIT SHIRT AND TIE THEY CALL ME A 31 WHITE MAN [((.hhh ].hhh .hhh)) ((*A::H:: GOD EXCELLENT YEAH)) 32 Pe [((.hhh))] 33 Sa [((-hhh))] 34 Lu ((.hhh)) (.) ((.hhh .hhh))

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In this extract, she first sets the scene in terms of the specifics of the audience ‘The room pack out with woman too you know?’6 (line 6) in order to highlight for her interlocutors the insensitivity and arrogance of the men with whom she disagrees. These men position Black women as ‘sistas’ who don’t realize where ‘[their] place should be [..] at home bringing up the race and nurturing them into the culture [..] you are not supposed to be out here on the front line it’s us men who are supposed to do that’ (lines 9-13). The men’s critique makes plain what their monologic discourse on Black womanhood is, what the same should be. That is, Black women should see themselves only as biological and cultural reproducers of ‘the race’. In the context of the meeting of the National Black Caucus in the 1980s all of the women present were therefore seen to be contravening the gender divide by taking up the male-defined space of Black frontline politics as a matter of course. In her loudly produced, ‘Well you can imagine what me and Shanaz said to him’ (lines 13-14) she shows her outrage, through an appeal to her listeners which interrupts her own story, drawing laughter from other interactants (line 15) who wait for what is to come. What comes after this laughter though is not a continuation of her account, but rather a translation as reflexivity sequence which is her own viewpoint on the reported comment with ‘Fiestiniss’7 (line 16) produced loudly. To call it cheeky places it at the level of an affront. After laughter from Lucien and an agreement from Sadie, she then goes on to contextualize the nature of her disagreement with the Nation of Islam point of view, through her use of the discourse of ‘the Caribbean woman’. In this discourse, which exists both in the Caribbean and its Black British diasporic communities, ‘the Caribbean woman’ is someone who has forged a place for herself outside of the sphere of the family and home, within the world of work and community politics. Throughout her turn at talk others agree minimally or laugh in agreement. This agreement suggests the sharedness for these speakers of the idea of ‘the Caribbean woman’. She uses the discourse of a different Black woman same to undermine that of the Nation of Islam’s view on Black womanhood. After making her objection to the Nation of Islam explicit, she goes on to construct their point of view as being outside of the Black woman experience within Britain by asking, ‘Where does he come from?’ Sadie responds with laughter at line 26, indicating that she gets her point that the attitude of the man being spoken about is outrageous. In constructing her story she makes the sexist viewpoint of the Nation of Islam an object of ridicule by calling on the counter-discourse of the Caribbean woman. She also places herself within this discourse through insider knowledge and the re-positioning of herself as a Black sister. Further, Lucien also shows distancing as a Caribbean heritage man from the views being spoken about. He does this through making their ‘uniform’ of the suitshirt-and-tie the butt of his joke with ‘When I wear a suit shirt and tie they call me a white man’. The point of this is not lost on Sadie and Peter who join in with his laughter. 6 This means that the room was full of women. 7 This means ‘cheek’.

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What is reflexively shown here is that for this member of The Nation of Islam there is an authentic Black womanhood that exists at the level of daily racialized gender practice. Further, Caribbean heritage women deviate from this because of the continuation of their tradition of working outside the home and being involved in the politics of antiracism. The Nation of Islam member’s point of view is derided by the interactants and in doing this they are critiquing those discourses of ‘a Black woman same’. Hybridity is thereby produced through the talk in which Sharon in interaction with the other speakers re-presents herself as having practice and politics free from the strictures of The Nation of Islam, even though it is becoming part of the way of life and politics of many Black Britons. It is clear that discourses of Blackness which emanate from Black communities while undoubtedly being liberatory also simultaneously operate and are operated, as a panopticon with its statements of ‘who is authentically Black’8 acting as the gaze. This is an ‘inspecting gaze, a gaze which each individual under its weight will end by interiorising to the point that he is his own overseer, each individual thus exercising this surveillance over and against himself (Foucault, 1980c, pp. 154-155). The idea of becoming one’s own overseer brings us to govemmentality. Foucault’s notion of govemmentality distinguishes between violence, domination and the power that characterizes relations between individuals as well as seeing power as both an objectivizing and a subjectivizing force. Power, therefore, is not unidirectional through the inscription of material effects on the body, but it is an agonistic struggle that takes place between free individuals (McNay, 1996, p. 85). Power and freedom are inextricably linked and are negotiated in talk-in-interaction. The interaction of power and freedom is shown in both examples so far. In example 3.1 it is between denying African centred culture and bodily practices present in anti-African discourse and the agency to locate oneself in such an identity positioning. In example 3.2, it is the power of being denied the position of Black sister but repositioning the self as Caribbean and therefore a Black woman. Power and freedom are also negotiated in the next extract. Here Senna speaks about being simultaneously a punk in her life in the city in which she lived in order to fit in with her white friends in terms of fashion and Anti-Nazi politics, while in Birmingham with her Black friend Sandra she went to soul clubs. This shows the power of whiteness in terms of Black assimilation and denial of the racialized self, alongside the agency she has to locate herself within Blackness. She begins positioning herself as a punk using fashion (drain-pipe jeans rather than flares) during her youth (lines 6-10). Janet and I both see punkyness as non-Black as we say we can’t imagine her as a punk. This illustrates the power which emanates from Blackness to maintain the boundaries of culture and bodily practices. After this challenge Senna goes into more detail of her punkyness as being to do with fashion in the form of wearing grandad shirts and a safety pin in her earring (lines 18, 20, 23 and 25). In this way she provides a translation as reflexivity sequence which 8 By this I mean that it is the panopticon that is talked into being as there is a prevalence of talk in the data about who is ‘really Black’. This thus makes the whole community into a panopticon.

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makes it obvious that for her punk was ‘a clothes thing’ (see also Janet line 26). She repositions herself as Black in opposition to punk by talking about her Black music practice with her friend in Birmingham (lines 29-31). Through this call to a culture of Blackness she produces the govemmentality of the Black same which is reinforced when she then goes on to say that she actually only pretended to like punk because of her white friends in the town in which she lived (lines 34-35). We see Senna in an agonistic struggle between a white defined and a Black defined ‘same’. By speaking of her being a punk as a clothes thing but also being about fitting into a regime of whiteness, she simultaneously shows the operation of her own freedom to work against this regime as well as its power to attempt to define who she could be. Alongside being a punk she has ‘a Black life’ in Birmingham with her best friend Sandra. This Black life is presented as based around soul music. She shows us then two other important things for her in terms of identification. First, the importance of peer group subculture in shaping identifications, as well as the significance of space as practised place (de Certeau, 1988, p. 117) in this process. Finally, she also demonstrates for us the double consciousness of which Gilroy (1993a and b) speaks, as a pragmatic orientation to her situation that becomes obvious through her clothing and the music associated with different identifications. Example 3.3 Tape 1 Side A Je. Sh. Sa: 61-62 >1 Sa We were all punks THEN you know because it was fl:a:res?= 2 Sh =You were a punk as well?

3

(-3)

4 Sa You know flaires were out then,= 5 Sh=Ohyeah.= 6 Sa=And I was one of the first people to wear drain pipe jeans, 7 (.4) 8 Sh Oh right?= 9 Sa=They were wearing THEY WEREN’T EVEN DRA.IN PIPE they were quite 10 still fl:a:red but they were much NARROWER than the (.) other ones, 11 (6 . 1) >12 Sh I can’t imagine you as a punk [Sen ] >13 Sa [((.hhh))] I wasn’t re-1 wasn’t a re:al 14 punk= >15 Sh °A cold punk,°= >16 Je =1 carn’t even begin to imagine you,= 17 Sh =N[o:, ] >18 Sa [ I ] wasn’t- I was like- I’d we:ar- I’d we:ar e:hm: 19 (.9) 20 Sa a PIN a hair a safety pin in my earring (.3) right?= 21 Sh =0:h: right,= 22 Je =Yeah =

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23 Sa = I used to wear grandad shirts.= 24 Sh =Yeah= 25 Sa And [ a:h:m: ] that was punk that was punky for those days= 26 Je [ °You’ve got a clothes thing0] 27 Je =You want to get that idea NOW, [((.hhh .hhh .hhh)) ] 28 Sh [((Yeah I think so*))]= >29 Sa =Yeah I think I should and then- but at the same time I used to go to 30 Birmingham to be with my other MY BEST friend SANDRA and I’d go to 31 SOUL does-1 was into SO:UL the sort of FORMation dancing,= 32 Sh=[((Oh right?*))] ((.hhh)) yeah 33 Je [Mhm ] >34 Sa [ SO I ] mean I really- I really actually HATE 35 the PUNK but I used to pretend to like it but I didn’t like it at all: Example 3.4 follows the previous conversation. Here Janet speaks of being a ‘rude girl’9 showing in contrast to Senna her unequivocal location within Blackness to the extent of putting ‘Rankin Roger the Beat’ on her jacket. To say ‘Rankin’ is very much about declaring Jamaican culture within the Two-Tone subculture of which she was a part. She therefore constructs herself as being somewhat separate from the Two-Tone subculture because of her assertion of Black identification and critiques the possibility that she could have been a Black woman who just assimilates to Two-Tone as a white subculture. Being a ‘rude girl’ relates very closely to the globalization of Jamaican culture and its permeation within Britain. It is even said by the speaker to be possibly something she has taken with her from her youth in terms of her attitude, which is recognized by other Black women as being that of a ‘rude girl’. Now as an adult being asked if you are a rude girl is frightening because it is seen as a demonized youth identity of a particular historical period and not one that should still have credibility, even if it ever once did. How identification stories of the past inflect identification construction in the present becomes apparent here. In positioning her identification as a rude girl she recalls herself as being Black and British and confident about this. Senna and I acknowledge this confidence by our joint explosive laughter at line 7. Janet’s only uncertainty is about whether she has taken the rude girl attitude into her adult life (see lines 15, 16 and 18), whether or not she is still the rude girl that she desires to be contrary to the expectation of Black womanhood. However, after my laughing affirmation that she is still a rude girl ‘you’re a rude girl yeah’ she agrees with this and then goes on to speak about the continuation of this throughout her life from the age of twelve or thirteen. Through this she establishes the ‘rude girl’ attitude as being a necessity for her in terms of being a Black woman. This, then, is what she 9 In working class Jamaican culture of the 1970s there were ‘rude boys’: young men who were trend setters in terms of fashion and musical tastes but who went against the grain of society. They did this latter by asserting their rights to disapproved of or criminal activity. The female equivalent of this were ‘rude girls’.

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wanted to establish about herself interactionally. She begins the extract by relating the incident in which she was asked by a young woman with whom she worked whether she was a rude girl or not, then going into the youth culture of the time at which she was a rude girl and then goes on: Example 3.4 Tape 1 Side A Je, Sh, Sa: 62-63 1 Je But like- like the thing is °I was a ru:de girl as far as I was concerned0 you 2 know what I mean?= 3 Sa=Mhm= >4 Je =Like rankin- BLACK harrington I saved up- saved up all my 5 money from the papers I did .hhh to buy a Black harrington and put 6 Rankin Roger The Beat on the back,= >7 = ((Explosive j oint laughter))= 8 Je =(( You know what I mean?*)) but ehm: a:hm: 10 (.9) 11 Je Like a:hm:- but like a:hm:- but like it- it shocked me because °she 12 said you used to be a rude girl and I looked at her and 1° said how do you 13 know I said? (( JUST YOUR ATTITUDE. A))= 14 =((Joint Laughter)) >15 Je BUT I- IT FRIGHTENED ME BECAUSE I THOUGHT °God am I still 16 arudegirl?°= 17 Sh =((.hhh)) ((°You’re a rude girl yeah0*)) 18 Je =YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN? because I used to be like- twelve (.) thirteen (.) fourteen ((A)) Speaking like the young woman In terms of the positioning and re-positioning I claim is occurring in this example, Janet spends several turns at talk (lines 1-6) establishing that she used to be a rude girl in her youth. At line 11 she goes on to show her positioning as this as an adult by another Black woman, both in her youth and now, because of her attitude. After joint laughter, she enters a translation as reflexivity sequence in which she reveals that this observation made her think about her present status as a ‘rude girl’ (lines 15-16). This seems to imply some uncertainty on her part at the time. I go on to affirm her rude girl status now and in her next turn at talk she agrees with this positioning with ‘you know what I mean?’10 This agreement is produced with raised volume indicating the certainty of this rather than her uncertain questioning in her translation as reflexivity sequence. There is also, though, a ‘white’ side to Black womanhood as an eye of power (as shown in examples 3.1 and 3.3) and this should not be ignored as it is also part

10 For more on ‘you know what I mean?’ as an agreement marker see Tate, S. (1984) and Sebba,M. and Tate, S. (1986).

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of the regime of truth in Black communities. Whiteness’s discourses of containment that are determined by, but also constitutive of the power relations that permeate ‘the social’, become clear in the following examples. Here the Black body as marked reveals the operation of power on the body’s possible identities as well as its occupation of space. This seems to encompass a notion of constant judgement, a control through normalization, as in the panoptic principle, because of the constant visibility of Blackness as a constructed phenomenon within Britain. We have Senna next recalling the New Cross Street massacre and its impact on her as the catalyst for political activism and trying to find out who she was: Example 3.5 Tape 1 Side A Je, Shu Sa: 49-55 1 Sa [They ] threw- threw a petrol bomb or something in the letterbox and 2 Sh [Yes: ] 3 Sa everyone- ba:h not everyone died but a lot of people DIED= 4 Sh =Mhm= 5 Je =°God° yes (.4) I remember THAT [JESUS,] 6 Sh [Mhm: ] Mhm:= 7 Sa =And I remember thinking how AW:FUL IT WAS I REMEMBER THEM 8 SAY-1 REMEMBER THE NEW- PEOPLE (.4) BRAGGING, I 9 REMEMBER THERE’S- REPO:RTS ABOUT THESE GUYS BRAGGING 10 IN the pub about .hhh °oh I just killed some niggers tonight, [it was ] 11 Sh [Mhm ] 12 Sa grea:t fun,° 13 (.5) 14 Sh Mhm: (.3) 15 Sa THAT’S- that’s what- °which is° my AWAKENING which is kind of the 16 AW:FUL thing that went on (.) 17 Sa I think that was the reason I was- I’ve never been active 18 before college,= 19 Sh =Mhm (.) 20 Sa When I left school I was-1 was in this ah:m 21 ( 1.2) 22 Sa Acting-1 was in this ROCK against racism club (.6) it is the punk e:ra= 23 Sh =Oh were [ you? ] yeah (.) yeah= >24 Sa [Mhm ] =Is the punk era then and I was I was like25 I was into this a:hm I’m (.) we’re all the same I’m just a different colour 26 [ kind of ] person at the time= 27 Je [Mhm ] 28 Sh =Mhm mhm= >29 Sa =And tryin to fi- basically get to find out who I was really I suppose^ 30 Sh =Mhm= 31 Sa =But I was-1 had white friends white middle class trendy lefty (.) type 32 friends=

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33 Sh =Mhm= 34 Je =Mhm= >35 Sa =And they were all middle class and no one- no one really liked me they just 36 thought I was-1 was their token BLACK friend I think= 37 Sh =[Mhm] 38 Je [Mhm] Here we see Senna establishing her position within the Rock Against Racism club as someone at that time in her life who was not politically attuned to her own racialized position as she was ‘into this [.] we’re all the same I’m just a different colour kind of person at the time’ (lines 24-26). That is, she had bought into the multi-cultural rhetoric which sought to erase the fact of racism in the British context. Here for her not to be Black politically is to do with lack of Black consciousness and awareness of oneself as racialized, resulting in her positioning herself within white culture. In her translation as reflexivity sequence she relates this positioning of herself as being to do with trying to find out who she really was (line 29). She goes on to reposition herself as a Black woman who was a token Black friend within the ‘trendy, lefty’ middle class circle within which she socialized (lines 35-36). As a Black woman she establishes here the salience of ‘race’, of the mark of skin, and the fact that because of this one can only be included in white circles as a token. The body as racialized is a key feature in example 3.6. This deals with Senna’s memory of wanting to be the same as/fit in with white people when she was a child and her use of a hot comb to inscribe their straight hair on a Black body, thus deracinating one aspect of herself. She speaks centrally of the internalization of oppression in terms of white standards of beauty and the fact that this is not being a Black woman. We might think hair is hair, merely organic matter produced by the body. However, hair is a ‘medium of significant statements about self and society and the codes and values that bind them, or do not’ (Mercer, 1994a, p. 100). So in contexts where ‘ “race” structures social relations of power, hair - as visible as skin color, but also the most tangible sign of racial difference - takes on another symbolic dimension [.. ] within racism’s bi-polar codification of human worth, black people’s hair has been historically devalued as the most visible stigmata of Blackness second only to skin’ (Mercer, 1994a, p. 101). It is significant that as a girl she changes this aspect of herself and reveals this now to women who only know her as a conscious Black sister with dreadlocks. In fact she pursues a response to her revelation on line 9 when none is forthcoming. After I, on line 10, finally acknowledge what she did she again speaks her transgression against her Black body. Janet then gives her own example of emulating whiteness in terms of hair in ‘Didn’t you used to put jumpers on your head?’ (line 12). The implication here is that these jumpers doubled for the long straight hair of whiteness desired in their youth. Her turn at talk then ensures that Senna knows that she was not alone as a child desiring whiteness through hair as ‘we all emulated that didn’t we?’ (lines 18 and 19). The three interactants subsequently engage in a very tightly organized

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agreement sequence which ends with Janet’s smiley-voiced agreement ‘Do you know what I mean?’ Example 3.6 Tape 1 Side A Je, Sh, Sa: 65 1 Sa I know-1 THINK

2

(.6)

3 Sa I don’t know REALLY I just always try to be the SA:ME as them I 4 used to go home and wish my h- and wish I was [(.4) ] I ALWAYS TRY 5 Je [°Mhm°] 6 Sa TO BE THE SA:ME AS THEM AND TRY TO NE- PO- HO- CO- you know 7 HOT coimb my hai:r 8 ( 1. 1) >9 Sa Youknoiw, h-= >10 Sh =0:h you did, [ you HOT] combed, mhm:= >11 Sa [Yeah ] =HOT co:mb my hai:r, (.8) 12 Je Didn’t you used to put JUMPERS on your head?= 13 Sa =°Jumpers?°= 14 Je =And use- and use it as a15 Sa =0:h I was much younger then wasn’t it-1 was-1 was like (.4) 16 [ PRIMARY ] SCHOOL days yeah = 17 Sh [ How old? ] >18Je =I’m just saying that ((*we all 19 EMULated that didn’t we, ))= 20 Sh = [ °Mhm° ] 21 Sa [ YEAH ]= 22 Je =((*Do you know what I mean?))= This brings to mind Michel Foucault’s (1980d, pp. 215-216) thoughts on the ‘confession’ in The Confession o f the Flesh: What I mean by ‘confession’ [..] is all those procedures by which the subject is incited to produce a discourse of truth about his sexuality which is capable of having effects on the subject himselfI

I want to re-read this in terms of the confession being about producing a discourse of truth about one’s Black woman identity. In identification stories the confession takes place as an intersubjective practice. It is designed to produce the effect of solidarity, empathy, and sameness through being the heroine of your own stories. So, Senna was just a girl trying to fit in with white people when she hot combed her hair. These stories above can be seen to express women’s awareness of the effects of various discourses’ ‘will to truth’ on their bodies - as in example 3.6 - through the various categorizing strategies of biopower, in which:

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Black Skins, Black Masks power relations materially penetrate the body in depth without depending even on the mediation of the subject’s own representations. If power takes hold on the body, this isn’t through its having first to be interiorised in people’s consciousness. There is a network or circuit of bio-power, or somato-power, which acts as the formative matrix of sexuality itself as the historical and cultural phenomenon within which we seem at once to recognise and lose ourselves (Foucault, 1980e, p. 186).

I, of course, would like to replace the ‘sexuality’ of the above passage with ‘Blackness’. The identification stories above can also be seen to be about women regulating themselves through a constant search for their innermost identity. Their own ‘truth’ though ‘simultaneously problematises [their] relation to the present, [their] historical mode of being, and the constitution of the self as an autonomous subject’ (Foucault, 1984b, p. 42). This is the tension that women negotiate in their talk. What begs the question here is what sort of truth is being sought? I think what becomes clear if one looks back at the last example is the nature of this truth. That is, that it is assimilationist, apolitical, non-racialized Black thought and bodily practice that is being purged from the self of Black womanhood. These ways of being become the ‘other’ which has to be ejected in the search for authentic Black womanhood. At base then the discourse of Black womanhood which emerges is that of being African/Caribbean/Black centred, accepting of natural Black beauty, practising Black-African/Caribbean/American/UK culture, being aware of the impact of assimilation on one’s thoughts and practices, resisting assimilation, and being oppositional. At the same time as being constraining, by exerting govemmentality, the discourse of authentic Black womanhood forms the basis of identity re-positionings as Senna shows us next. The ejection of whiteness from the Black self is obvious in example 3.7 which follows, in which Senna continues to speak about her hair. She uses her changing relationship to how it should look as a marker of her own changing politics and Black awareness. Her plaits and her Afro hair signify her trying to be a Black woman (see line 26). Here again hair is significant but this time in terms of signifying the same of authentic Black womanhood. She presents herself as a heroic figure (who can actually stop hot combing her hair), but one who is nevertheless scared of white people’s reactions, so she wears a scarf even though her hair was stylishly plaited. This implicates the action of biopower and govemmentality. She begins by positioning herself as someone who tries to assimilate to whiteness by hot combing her afro hair (lines 1-2) rather than plaiting it (lines 2-8). Her translation as reflexivity sequence is at lines 10-12 when she reveals herself as someone who wanted to plait her hair and wear it to school (lines 12-13). However, because of the markedness of Black hair at her school she wears a scarf over her plaits: Example 3.7 Tape 1 Side A Je. Sa, Sh: 65-68 >1 Sa Yeah Primary school age like I- like when I was at HIGH school >2 I used to try and HOT COMB my hair and stuff like this and the moment I

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4

51

STOPPED doing that I thought I’m gonna PLAIT my ha:ir:

(•)

5 Je Mhm= 6 Sa =Because it was all AFRO: or combing it back you know or whate:ver,= 7 Je =Mhm= 8 Sa = I never PLAITED it 9 (.8) >10 Sa This time I plaited it and I was so: embar-1 was just so: 11 (LI) 12 Sa Because I like plait my hair at HOME but I thought I want to go to 13 school and I do:n’t care? you know?= 14 Je =Mhm= 15 Sa =°So I plaited my hair° .hhh with it I did it down the middle and 16 I did like separate plaits down like this, you know?= 17 Je =Mhm= 18 Sa =To j- join together down bo:th sides:,= 19 Je =Mhm

20

(. 8)

21 Sa Anda:hm: 22 (1.6) and I WENT TO SCHOOL BUT I DIDN’T DARE-1 HAD TO 23 PUT A SCARF ON MY HEAD After some more talk in which she speaks about her hatred of the school and the fact that she still has nightmares about it, she speaks about plaiting her hair and going to school braving all the disgust and amazement from the white children. She uses this to show that she was not ashamed of being a Black woman. She, thereby, repositions herself (lines 24-30) as claiming the space of a Black-defined Black woman through her bodily practice irrespective of the discipline with which she is met: >24 Sa BUT like that was25 (.5) 26 Sa that was me trying- being- trying- being a BLA:CK woman= 27 Je=[Mhm] 28 Sa [And ] not being ashamed of being a Black woman kind of thing?= 29 Sh =Mhm:= 30 Sa A BLA:CK GIRL I suppose at the time(.3) 31 Je Mhm= >32 Sa ^Because I think if I was at school in- if I was at school in- a:hm: 33 (1.2) 34 Sa in- in CHAPEL TOWN for example I THINK or Lee- or ROUND here, 35 (.7) 36 Sa I wouldn’t be ashamed about my hair in plaits,= >37 Je =Mhm= 38 Sh =No you wouldn’t would you?=

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39 Sa =°I [wouldn’t,0] 40 Sh [ That’s ] tru:e She places her shame as a child onto the requirements of whiteness to be as assimilated as possible, even if that means changing your hair texture. In her view if she had been located in a school with more Black students her hair in plaits would not have been a source of shame. This is her repositioning of herself as a Black identified woman. Janet (line 37) agrees with this evaluation, as do I (line 38) by asking for reconfirmation of that point of view. Senna provides this and I produce an agreement (line 40). This agreement sequence helps us to see the unproblematic acceptance by the speakers of a notion o f Blackness as something that needs to be nurtured in community with other Black people. Senna experienced shame because the gaze of the white other in the form of her schoolmates reminded her that her action was transgressive o f an understanding of what constituted appropriate Black woman/girl behaviour and appearance. Her very being was transgressive of a white discourse on ‘race’ because of the mark of skin. It was a shame which she could only deal with by digging deep within herself and her community for affirmative Black womanhood. Only that made her capable of wearing her hair in plaits and establishing freedom from the gaze of whiteness. A freedom that was about asserting a Black woman identity that was then consistently affirmed in her encounters in Black community. What does this confession of past shame achieve in the present? Quite apart from the heroic aspects remarked on earlier and getting a sympathetic hearing, it makes us aware that making counter identifications can also involve traumatized feelings in the affirmation of Black womanhood, whatever your age. The assertion being made by Senna is that as Black women we are not bom with shame about our difference from whiteness but are made to feel shame because of white racism. Black women’s membership in a racialized context is, then, about struggle, both emotional and physical, from first awareness of Blackness onwards. Senna, Laura and Janet narrate themselves as Black women who are not limited and delimited by discourses of containment produced by the hegemony of ‘race’, ‘culture’ and ‘community’. This has also not been the case for Black women as a whole, because there have always been ‘sly civilities’ (Bhabha, 1994d) both in colonial and post- colonial times and spaces, releasing the transformational potential of hybridity. A question though remains. How can I make connections between hybridity and critical ontologies o f the self?

Hybridity and a critical ontology of the self A hybridity of the everyday means that Black women rather than being seen to be in search of ‘identity’, ‘home’ and ‘culture’ (Baumann, 1996; Alexander, 1996), must be acknowledged to be (re)forming these within Britain. They must be seen

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to be involved in transformational processes because of the situation of the identifications being deployed within the fragments of life being spoken. Interactants are in the process of seeing, thinking and narrating themselves as Black women at different times and spaces of the life course. In the process they establish Black womanhood as a unique individual experience through their own historical ontologies. The extracts from life used in these ontologies, when deciphered, seem to serve as metaphors of ‘the Black woman same’ and ‘the Black woman different’ in the transformational task of being and becoming. This has implications for monologic discourses of Blackness which would see identity in essentialized ways. If we look again at Senna’s remembrance of being a punk who is also into dub and soul music we see something interesting. That is, that for her at the point of her life about which she is speaking, identity was very much about commodification of musical forms and fashion and their use in the performance of identities within different spaces. Identities as narrated now, are linked to images which can be called up and identified as being to do with a particular identification, for example for Senna her practice of still wearing one earring even now; for Janet her rude girl attitude. What then constitutes a Black woman in discourses of Blackness? This question becomes salient as it is clear that identities can be about performance whilst at the same time maintaining some recourse to an assumed Black woman essence, a same, which for example for Senna, makes soul music her music of choice and for Laura means that Blackness is her identification irrespective of kinship. The same Black woman then is about roots and cultural practices. We can see the hybridity within the extracts as women uncoupling the power/knowledge of monologic discourses of roots and cultural practices. This is a reading against the grain that undoes the govemmentality of ‘authentic Black womanhood’. Bearing this in mind we can see notions of Black identity as fixed political, social and cultural entities as potentially troubled. They become troubled because as women go through the process of revealing their life through reminiscences and look at how they were constrained by or acted against power, they produce themselves as subjects both with and within identifications. This highlights the performative nature of identity categories. So there doesn’t seem to coincidentally be this necessary separation between political, social and cultural identities by interactants. Instead, these identifications operate simultaneously in talk. Two further points will have to suffice at this stage. First notions of hybridity also need to deal with loss, nostalgia, pain, change and feelings of lack which are not about a return to roots. Second, each life is a story and this relates to how cultures are built, so cultures might be phantasms, as self-production is imbued with fantasy. In acknowledging that there are Black women’s identifications that arise through autonomy, reflexivity and critique, I seem to be aligning myself to Foucault’s view that through a critical ontology of the self it is possible to develop alternative viewpoints from which individuals can resist the government of individualization. Critique is characterized by Foucault as a ‘limit attitude’ entailing a reflection on how what is given to us as universal can also contain

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places for possible transgression, of going beyond the limits imposed on us (Foucault, 1984b, p. 45). Criticism is, then, ‘a historical investigation into the events that have led us to constitute ourselves and to recognise ourselves as subjects of what we are doing, thinking, saying [..] it will separate out, from the contingency that has made us what we are, the possibility of no longer being, doing, or thinking what we are, do, or think’ (Foucault, 1984b, p. 46). Interrogating the established limits of identity results in autonomy, an increased capacity for independent thought and behaviour (McNay, 1996, p. 145). Such an interrogation of what are held to be the necessary boundaries to a Black woman identity which then becomes ‘a practical critique that takes the form of a transgression’ (Foucault, 1984b, p. 45) implicates translation as reflexivity. Foucault (1984b, p. 50) elaborates further for us what a critical ontology of the self is about in that it is ‘conceived as an attitude, an ethos, a philosophical life in which the critique of what we are is at one and the same time the historical analysis of the limits that are imposed on us and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond them’. There are two aspects to this, first a critique of what we are through an analysis of the limits imposed on us; and, second, trying to get to a possibility of being beyond these limits. It is this critical ontology of the self which has been looked at in extracts 3.2, 3.3 and 3.5, for example. This practical critique occurs through translation as reflexivity when speakers rationalize acting against monologic discourses of Black womanhood in terms of establishing for other interactants ‘how they are/what they desire to be/who they have come to be’ as Black women constructed through the process of life story telling. Foucault’s practical critique is shown in example 3.8 as Senna continues to talk about not liking punk music even though she was a punk in her youth. She sites herself as someone who liked listening to dub music by laughing in embarrassment that her friends wanted to listen to punk as well. This is what she is critiquing. That is, someone at that stage of her life who was operating in both a Black and a white world, but who was being positioned by her white punk friends’ assertion of a punk lifestyle in terms of their music choices (line 11). For her though, as I recognize in a translation as reflexivity sequence at line 15, she was living a life which goes beyond this, in which punk (signified as white music), dub and soul (signified as Black music), all play a part. The normality of this doubleness for the Black ‘you’ is affirmed by Janet in line 18, with ‘I suppose you do though don’t you?’ However Senna disagrees with this with ‘I don’t know’ before she then continues to show her commitment to Blackness by claiming not to remember the punk music, but only the soul and dub as a way of further distancing herself from the constraints of punk (lines 20-21). Musical preference becomes again a sign of the Black woman same for Senna in which she rejects assimilation to whiteness as an aspect of Blackness. Example 3.8 Tape 1 Side A Je, Sa, Sh: 58-60 1 Sa And I TRIED TO LIKE THEM THE ONLY- THE ONLY THING IS 2 WHEN YOU WENT TO THE CLUB IS THAT THEY HAD A:HM MAV3 MAVERICK used to play there,=

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4 Je =Mhnr= 5 (.6) 6 Sa THEY were pla:ying 7 (.6) >8 Sa And you’d- you’d listen to DUB MUSIC 9 (1.1) 10 Sh Oh yeah?= >11 Sa =Yes and they were asking for punk °as well0 ((.hhh [.hhh* ))] .hhh oh 12 Je [Mh m ] 13 Sa Go:d 14 (1.3) >15 Sh What a life punk AND DUB music AND soul music all mixed up together. 16 (1.8) 17 Sa °That’s [what I ] >18 Je [I SUPPOSE] YOU DO THOUGH don’t you? 19 (.5) >20 Sa I don’t know, I didn’t remember pu-1 ca:n’t y-1 can remember the soul 21 but I can’t remember the punk MUSIC, ((*)) Embarrassed laugh She continues after some talk by Janet about punk music being rubbish and punks always seeming dirty to her, by repositioning herself as Black by saying (see line 22) that she wasn’t really a punk but was only trying to fit in with white middle class punks who were quite clean. Like a fool, she said, she tried to ‘emulate those people and follow fashion’, thus showing that she now sees that phase as a regrettable part of her life. More than this, however, she also shows us that emulation was also a way of being like her ‘friends’ but not being like them. That is, that she was always Black and knew this to be the case. She demonstrates this in her use of ‘and follow fashion’ (line 35). In Jamaican Creole this means to imitate. Her choice of words then is very interesting in terms of Bhabha’s (1994e and f) work on hybridity in which he invokes mimicry as an important part of the process of speaking against monologic discourses. So, while also a punk, she was always a Black woman perhaps unknowingly subverting punk by her racialized presence, but always knowingly doing this through her musical tastes which went counter to the punk lifestyle: >22 Sa I was-1 suppose I actually wasn’t a punk but I was trying to fit [in 23Je 24 Sa with everybody else and I was like, 25 (.4) 26 Sa The middle class people were quite clea:n 27 (.4) 28 punks you know what I mean?= 29 Je =Mh [m ]

] [Mhm]

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30 Sh [Mh ]m= >31 Sa =So I just used to just a:h: EMULATE tho:se people= 32 Je =Mhm= 33 Sa =°Like a fool° 34 (.8) >35 Sa And follow fashion.

Conclusion What became apparent through the extracts is that speakers are engaged in the process of translation as reflexivity in the talk. That is, in a process of demonstrating awareness of their own and others’ positioning by discourses. This is then followed by their production of identity re-positionings in their talk. The emergence of critical ontologies through translation as reflexivity, therefore, potentially destabilizes and reverses power relations at the local level through the stories. In these stories women ‘speak’ themselves as engaged in the negotiation of the bio-power and govemmentality of Black womanhood. Such negotiation reveals the emergence of critical ontologies of the self as being a profoundly dialogical process. These critical ontologies of the self emerge from a recall of selectively appropriated sets of memories and discourses through which interactants represent themselves to themselves and each other. They represent themselves specifically as being in a process of change whilst occupying the space of the ‘same’ - the racialized gendered subject of the discourses of Blackness. This change is shown through a repositioning within these critical ontologies which interrogates and unsettles discourses of racialized gender. Hybridity, thus, becomes located within the moment of narration as a positioning within a space of ‘different from the changing same’ as Black women transform themselves into sites of resistance and change. I would like to turn now to a consideration of what the particularities of Black womanhood which emerge from the talk mean for Foucault. I think first, the talk makes us revisit Foucault’s work in terms of its applicability to hybrid identifications as positionings to discourses which women produce/reproduce in talk. As was said above, his work does not acknowledge the agency involved in hybrid positionings and must, therefore, be supplemented by a more dialogical approach in order to be useful. What has also emerged through the extracts is the double consciousness Black women occupy in making these identifications: a doubleness which is not acknowledged in a more Foucaultian perspective. This is so because of the focus on the panopticon of ethnicity and racist discourses. These are seen to be determinants of identity through the dual process of representation and internalization of oppression produced by the govemmentality of ‘the gaze’ of ‘authentic Black womanhood’. This panoptic view with regard to identifications in a racialized gender context is problematic because it leaves no room for the daily practices in which women seek to usurp this gaze through critical ontologies of the

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self. The next chapter continues to look at gendered readings of ‘race’ and what these might tell us about hybridity.

Chapter 4

Storied Hybridity and Gendered Readings o f ‘Race’

Introduction What the women’s talk has shown us so far is that we should understand ‘race’ as an unstable complex of social meanings that nonetheless continues to be salient in their lives. The complex is constantly transformed by everyday struggles for identification in which there is a permanent interplay between ‘race’ and gender. This chapter aims to look at this complex through the prism of gendered readings of ‘race’ and storied hybridity. By looking at what women make of ‘race’ we can then ground hybridity within the everyday. The third space of hybridity for Homi Bhabha (1990, p. 211) is not an identity but rather identification, ‘a process of identifying with and through another object, an object of otherness’. This description of hybridity and others (for example, Ifekwunigwe, 1999; Young, 1995a) have been articulated without reference to how real-time phenomena are oriented to in the production of hybrid identifications. I look at the work of Ifekwunigwe, Young, Bhabha, Hall, Gilroy, Spivak and Fanon to draw out hybridity’s conceptual threads and discontinuities. I use examples of what I call a hybridity-of-the-everyday contained in extracts of talk from ‘mixed race’ women who speak back to their positioning within Blackness, to continue to explicate my own point of view that hybridity is about the ongoing assemblage of identifications. This assemblage in terms of the extracts used occurs within the context of the discourses of Black womanhood on ‘community’, ‘race’ and ‘culture’. A hybridity-of-the-everyday cites an identity positioning of ‘different from the Black woman same’ within the times and spaces of talk on lived experiences. Within this talk the ‘same’ and ‘different’ are also interactionally constructed. The ‘third space’ of hybridity is, therefore, a dialogical space in which gendered readings of ‘race’ allow identity repositionings to emerge as speakers thread together discourses to identify with and through those objects of otherness - ‘Blackness’ and ‘whiteness’. First though, why storied hybridity and gendered readings of ‘race’?

Storied hybridity and gendered readings of ‘race’ ‘Within the cultural framework which sustains the construction of black as Other, white has no categorical status: it is the norm against which everything is measured

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with no need of self-definition’ (Young, 1996, pp. 32-33). This is clear but in terms of the women’s talk we need to add to Young’s words. The women’s talk makes us aware that within the cultural framework within which Black women as other is constructed ‘the Black woman’ has no categorical status: it is the norm against which everything is measured. What I am trying to make clear, is that in the system of domination and subordination which women speak about, both white and Black people have grasped the right to determine the boundaries of the other. So Black women live beyond the white/Black binary and in a complex marked by the categories Black/Black/white in interaction. Here the stability of ‘the Black woman’ depends on its naturalization, its exclusion of difference. This is how its hegemony is maintained. It is this hegemony that women lay bare in their talk and with which they struggle in order to produce identifications. By saying gendered readings of ‘race’ what I am drawing attention to is how women speak themselves as experiencing ‘race’. Further, I look at how women deconstruct and re-construct ‘race’ and, how ‘race’ as embodiment and cultural practices is itself changed/ maintained in this process. What this chapter and those that follow will do is establish a space for storied hybridity. In this hybridity of the everyday identifications are reflexively embedded in interaction as fragments of experience. Stories of lived experience are extremely useful sites for looking at the identifications that speakers perform. This idea is similar to Homi Bhabha’s (1994a, p. 178) point of view in which he privileges social experience as the starting point in theorizing about identities when he says: [..] nor does theory become ‘prior’ to the contingency of social experience. This ‘beyond theory’ is itself a liminal form of signification that creates a space for the contingent, indeterminate articulation of social ‘experience’ that is particularly important in envisaging emergent cultural identities.

The enunciatory moment, the beyond theory, provides a process in the articulation of culture by which ‘objectified others’ can become ‘subjects of their history and experience’ (Bhabha, 1994a, p. 178). The enunciatory present is a site for the emergence of identifications and agency. Identification is a practice located in specific social contexts as ‘a set of conditions that determine the way in which subjects orient themselves in relation to a larger reality which they define in defining themselves’ (Friedman, 1997, p. 88). So, hybridity, like other acts of identification, becomes a question of practice and, in particular, the practice of attributing meaning (Friedman, 1997, p. 85) in the enunciatory moment. The attribution of meaning is somewhat problematic then given that ‘race’ has become a catchall term that includes ‘community’, ‘culture’ and ‘politics’. Further, ‘culture’, ‘community’, ‘politics’ and ‘race’ are themselves in a state of flux whilst always being performed as essence, as the known, as the authentic, as we have seen before and will see again below. Gendered readings in stories of lived experience also replay this flux, this certain uncertainty which is ‘race’. In the next example we can see what Taylor (2000, p. 57) calls ‘antiracist aestheticism’. Within Britain there has been and arguably still continues to be, a

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hierarchical evaluation, a racialized ranking which assumes that Black physical features are to be despised because of their ugliness. This is linked to the practice of conflating physical beauty with morality, general cultural and intellectual capability, to the extent that ‘the physical ugliness of black people was a sign of a deeper ugliness and depravity’ (Taylor, 2000, p. 58). The post-colonial British experience is one in which, first, there is a struggle against the internalization of one’s ugliness. Senna shows us this in Chapter 3 when she straightened her hair as a child to overcome that most obvious stigma of Blackness. Here, Senna showed us the operation of the straight hair rule that makes Black hair approximate to ‘white’ standards of beauty and femininity. Second, there is also a realization that beauty is a racialized experience within contexts in which racism and white cultural definitions of beauty are hegemonic. Beauty then is ‘white beauty, in terms of the physical features that the people we consider white are more likely to have’ (Taylor, 2000, p. 59). These racialized standards of beauty have to be negated as they reproduce racism by encouraging us as Black women to accept our ugliness and to act on this assumption. The ‘anti-racist aestheticism’ position is that we should endeavour to remove the hold that racialized beauty has on our consciousness and cultivate the idea that we are beautiful just as we are (Taylor, 2000, p. 61). Anti-racist aestheticism is then an ‘in d ig e n o u s mode of cultural criticism’ (Taylor, 2000, p. 62), one which negotiates the relationship between Black women and Black culture. Tessa and Dana below, critique the use of the signifiers of whiteness - straight, blonde or highlighted hair, lightening skin artificially, non-brown eyes and a way of dressing and speaking which is not too Black - by Black women. Figures of Blackness are inextricably bound to figures of whiteness in this example. In the extract both women exchange what for them are practices which show a denial of Blackness and an assimilation to whiteness on the part of those they are critiquing. Dana speaks about ‘the growth of the Black blond in the last couple of years’ and the use of European and Chinese hair for weave-ons as fascinating (lines 1-5). Hair as we know has long been considered a signifier of ‘race’, class and gender as well as a marker of female sexuality (De Vere Brody, 1999, p. 101). Practices of hair makes it an important marker of cultural difference and is used by the speakers to reveal one’s level of Black consciousness. Dana positions the practice of weave-ons as other, with Tessa’s ‘oh God’ serving as an agreement. It is other for the two women because in European culture blonde hair has been associated with idealized forms of white beauty (De Vere Brody, 1999). Tessa begins a translation as reflexivity sequence after a (.7) pause about being amazed at the shade changes which Black actresses can go through in an advertisement, in the films and on TV (lines 6-12). This she relates to their ‘always [having] the same image they’ve always got the long hair that’s been straightened and highlighted [..] the right amount of makeup but not too Black [..] the right kind of clothes but not too Black clothes’. It is also significant that they don’t speak Tike Black people’ (lines 1017). These women are using essentialist notions of Black womanhood in terms of skin, hair, language, clothes and dress in order to read another’s practices as less Black. In doing this they also perform the double movement of constructing

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themselves as more authentically Black as ‘mixed race’ women. They do this by positioning themselves as the gaze from the space of the same/other. Indeed, Tessa positions herself as someone located within Blackness when she says ‘and I’m in the lingo’ as opposed to those she has been criticizing who are deracinating themselves. As a ‘mixed race’ woman Tessa thus establishes her own Black consciousness through reading for Black essence and remarking on her quotidian use of patois or Black British English.1Markers of Blackness - skin, hair, language, clothes - are being used strategically here to construct identifications from a Black ‘mixed race’ position. These markers are being used to perform a speaking back to discourses of assimilation to the norms of racialized beauty which is also part of a ‘Black woman same’. Tessa and Dana circumscribe ‘race’ through a reading of gendered practices on/of the body. By doing this they enable us to remember that ‘race’ is read in terms of cultural practices at the level of the everyday. Example 4.1- Tape 1 Side B TS: 84-85 >1 2 3 4 5 >6 7

D To me: the- the growth of the Black blo:nd in the la:st couple of years is so: fascina:ting= T =O h[ G:0:D ] D [And the ] kind of the use of li:ke European and Chinese hair and blue contacts? (.7) T It’s like I’m ama:zed at (.9) what ahm: I say- (.3) when I look at the television and you- you see a film being advertised and it’s got (1.1) a young Bla:ck actress in it (.6) and she’s SUDDENLY TU:RNED (.3) A SHA:DE 8 LI:GHTER?= 9 D =Mhm= >10 T =When she’s in the film .hhh and then you see her in a magazine and 11 she.’s a DIFFERENT sha:de .hhh and then you see her being interviewed >12 and she:’s a DIFFE:RENT sha:de they always have the same image and 13 they’ve always got the long hair that’s been straightened .hhh and kind of 14 HIGHLIGHTED a little bit .hhh and they’ve always got the right amount of 15 makeup BUT NOT TOO BLA:CK a makeup and they always wear the right 16 kind of clothes but not too BLA:CK clothes .hhh and I’m thinking you 17 know? do the:se women rea:lly know what they’re doing (.7) I mean 18 it’s very rare you hear any of them spea:king like Black people (1.0) and I’m 19 in the lingo The example shows that there is a negotiation of essentialist, political and cultural discourses of Black woman authenticity in the talk. This Black woman authenticity of the ‘same’ is placed alongside the inauthentic ‘other’ Black identities - with the ‘same’ and ‘other’ being contingently constructed in the talk 1 See Sutcliffe, D. (1982 and 1992) and Sebba, M. (1993) for more on Black British English.

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from the space of Black ‘mixed racedness’. Speakers construct identities through ‘what we might call “a practice of narration”, the invention o f the [..] self producing a fixed belongingness in rather the way we construct, after the event, a persuasive, consistent biographical “story”, about who we are and where we came from’ (Hall, 1996c, p. v). It is clear that producing a fixed belongingness in terms of this example implicates Blackness as an identification perceived as being inscribed on the body through the discourses of ‘race’, shade, consciousness, culture and community. Tessa and Dana show us though that there is no homogeneity in culture, consciousness and community within a continuation of ‘race’ as a point of commonality. The sociologist, Jayne Ifekwunigwe (1999) takes up the continuing salience of ‘race’ in ‘mixed race’ women’s identifications in her notion of metisse, metissage and the figure of the metisse griotte. She also critiques the notion of hybridity in her claim that: In essence, in England, there has not been a culturally ‘hybrid’ rupture, which is transforming the meanings of place and belonging for all her constituents. Rather, instead, in an attempt to delude late twentieth-century ‘rainbow’ members of the ‘global village’ into believing that opportunities, resources, commodities, icons and even individuals are located on an imaginary ‘gender-neutral’ level playing field where everyone has equal access, ‘cultural hybridities’ with their purported disconnection from ‘race’ science fiction have replaced biological hybridities (Ifekwunigwe, 1999, p. 10).

Unlike Ifekwunigwe I do not see that there is a disconnection from ‘race’ in a hybridity of the everyday. I also do not look at ‘cultural hybridities’ as such but hybridity as a negotiation of identity positionings in talk on lived experience. Hybridity is cultural to the extent that linguistic competence, identification discourses and talk-in-interaction are cultural. Ifekwunigwe also usefully alerts us to the fact that hybridity has been appropriated by mainstream academic discourse without any recognition of its origin in nineteenth century ‘race’ science fiction. In doing this she highlights the racism inherent in the term itself (Ifekwunigwe, 1999). I accept this but I want to move past it to a point at which hybridity disconnects from this heritage and introduces something new. So let us go back to her former point about there being no culturally hybrid rupture in England. What a focus on storied hybridity shows us is that there are culturally hybrid ruptures in the making at each moment of speaking as new spaces of belonging are constructed. Whilst critiquing the science fiction of ‘race’ Ifekwunigwe also seems to re­ inscribe this through her insistence on bi-racialization and her use of metisse and metissage. For her, these latter are ‘stand-in responses to the limitations and ambiguities of existing terms’ (Ifekwunigwe, 1999, p. 2) which reify ‘race’ and ‘are too ambiguous to be useful or do not adequately address the complexities of biracialized transnational belongings’ (Ifekwunigwe, 1999, p. 17). Metisse though is itself an unsatisfactory terminological tangle that uses essentialist categories as it

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still refers to ‘race’. Metisse also calls to ethnicity as a static descriptor of culture rather than a dynamic one, as by her definition it relates to: someone who by virtue of parentage embodies two or more world views [..] However, in this version metisse is not exclusively a racial term used to differentiate individuals with one Black parent and one White parent from those with two Black parents or two White parents. Metis(se) also pertains to people with parents from different ethnic/cultural groups within a country [..] That is, the term recognizes the specificities of ethnicities as they are maintained and redefined within national borders. In a globalizing world, one can increasingly claim that there are transnational/multiple migrants, who by their cumulative experiences of travel, education and labor, represent cultural metisse (Ifekwunigwe, 1999, p. 18).

For her then metisse extends beyond ‘racial’ Black and white discourses to show convergences across ethnicities, cultures, religions and nationalities. She also postulates different levels of metisse, proximate and mediate to recognize the significance of generation, which she explicates by speaking about descent groups. There is also a third level multiracialized metisse, those whose parentage cannot be assumed under the folk binary of Black and white (Ifekwuingwe, 1999, p. 20). What she doesn’t recognize is that hybridity emerges in the claims that women make to Blackness at the level of quotidian experience. Rather, she assumes that hybridity is a part of metissage. This would mean that metissage should be a space of identification with otherness. However, this is not explored in her attempt to ‘rupture particular bipolar/biracialized notions of Blackness and Whiteness’ (Ifekwunigwe, 1999, p. 21). Rather than ‘rupture’, what her discussion tends to do is to re-inscribe the binary so that while she posits metisse as an explanatory device that contains non-essentialist possibilities for identity politics, essentialism continues to be remade in the form of ethnicity, culture, descent groups and ‘race’. Further, her notion of cultural metisse seems to assume that there are such things as ‘cultures’ which can be recognized one from the other. This is somewhat at odds with a view that sees culture as being itself hybrid. Robert Young (1995a, p. 30) sees culture’s categories as never being essentialist, even when they aspire to be so because: [..] culture is always a dialectical process, inscribing and expelling its own alterity [..] it does not so much progress as constantly reform itself around conflictual divisions participating in [..] a complex hybridized economy that is never at ease with itself.

The question of hybrid cultural rupture now becomes one of seeing culture as dynamic, as constantly being on the move, as being in an agonistic struggle to name itself and to exclude its alterity. It is in this way in talk-in-interaction that a hybrid cultural rupture appears in the interaction of ‘the same’ and ‘the different’ in Black women’s gendered readings of ‘race’. In speaking of culture as inscribing and expelling its own alterity and reforming itself around conflictual divisions, Young

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also provides us with one way of looking at hybridity in talk. That is, to look for that which is spoken as conflictually ‘other’ and located as ‘the excluded’, that which is outside of women’s identity positionings, such as in example 4.1 above, the Black blond whose make up is not too Black and who does not look or speak like a Black person. This makes it impossible to just relate hybridity to either high or popular culture in terms of the productions of ‘migrants’ or to insist that a hybrid cultural rupture has not occurred, as each time Ifekwunigwe’s metisse griotte speaks, hybridity is instantiated. Let us turn to look at how hybridity is viewed within Cultural Studies more widely.

Hybridity within Cultural Studies For Robert Young (1995a, p. 25) there are two models of hybridization. That which involves creolization is about fusion, the creation of new forms, which can then be compared with the old form of which they are partly made up. This seems to be what Ifekwunigwe means by metissage. Another model of hybridity, ‘hybridization as raceless chaos’, is not productive of stable new forms but something closer to Homi Bhabha’s restless, interstitial hybridity. Interstitial hybridity is a ‘permanent revolution of forms’ that is also applied by cultural theorists to the British context (Young, 1995a, p. 25). Whichever model is chosen the argument remains that: Hybridity thus makes difference into sameness, and sameness into difference, but in a way that makes the same no longer simply different. In that sense it operates according to the form of logic that Derrida isolates in the term ‘brisure’ a breaking and a joining at the same time, in the same place: difference and sameness in an impossible simultaneity (Young, 1995a, p. 26).

It is this ‘impossible simultaneity’ of sameness and difference that I locate within a hybridity o f the everyday, within a storied hybridity in which women speak back to dominant discourses on identification. There is no doubt that Hall, Gilroy, Bhabha and Spivak have encouraged a revision of the way problems are addressed in the study of cultural politics (Werbner, 1997a). Some writers, like Jonathan Friedman (1997), see the hybridity discourse celebrated by the ‘new diasporic intellectuals’ as being merely a form of ‘moral self-congratulation’, a description of themselves and a product of a group that identifies the world in such terms. However, by charting how these writers’ work can be read so as to define hybridity we can do two things. First, we can break with the assumption that hybridity is itself a stable category in post-colonial theorizing and, second, we can begin to see some continuities in postcolonial theorizing. As will become obvious in what follows, what I constantly struggle with is that in the academy hybridity does not move beyond the contingent and the ephemeral, so it masks long-term social and political continuities and transformations. This, therefore, makes hybridity opaque as an analytic category. Let us look at the work of each writer mentioned above in turn to see if we can

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arrive at the possibility of seeing storied hybridity, a hybridity embedded in talk on lived experiences. At the end of the chapter I will also look at Fanon’s work because it seems to me that his work is an unmarked precursor of hybridity theory.

Some conceptual threads and discontinuities Whenever I mention the centrality of Homi Bhabha’s work (1990) on ‘the third space of hybridity’ in helping us to understand what Black identities could be about, I get a standard sort of response. That is, ‘don’t forget that Bhabha is a literary critic!’ So I will start from acknowledging that he does refer throughout to literary works, which provide his source material for descriptions, or ‘theory’ of social reality in the contemporary world (Friedman, 1997, p. 78). I also need to go a step further by acknowledging that the reading of literary texts as a gateway to the analysis of ‘migrant culture’ could have limitations. This is so, as it is necessary to go beyond this analysis of literary discourses and representations to the social, political and economic contexts from which they arise (van der Veer, 1997, p. 95). I also need to ask the question ‘who are migrants here?’ because of the issue of being Black and British that lies at the heart of Black politics. To go even further, Bhabha himself locates agency in the act of interruptive enunciation, a speaking back to essentializing discourses of containment. Surely, then, we should also privilege the insights of those who are not artists, poets, intellectuals or who would not describe themselves as ‘post-colonial border crossers’2 in terms of getting to these acts of interruptive enunciation? Doing this would mean that we would have to understand that hybridity does not only relate to ‘border crossers’ who read other border crossers’ poetry, but that it could also relate to other identifications occurring elsewhere within ‘the social’ rather than being only deposited in the creative works of ‘post-colonial migrants’. This moves us away from always seeing hybridity as necessarily linked to ‘migrant cultural production’ and ‘cultural mixing’, to realizing that: All cultures are always hybrid [.. ] To speak of cultural ‘mixing’ makes sense only from inside a social world. Hybridity is meaningless as a description of ‘culture’, because this ‘museumizes’ culture as a ‘thing’ (Werbner, 1997a, p. 15).

So hybridity is meaningless as a description of culture. If this is the case then this removes hybridity to the space of the negotiation of identification as is clear in example 4.1. Homi Bhabha takes up this theme on hybridity as identification in his thoughts on the ‘third space’ of hybridity.

2 Friedman (1997, p. 79) uses this term.

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The ‘third space’ of hybridity Homi Bhabha’s (1990, p. 211) take on hybridity is that: [..] all forms of culture are continually in a process of hybridity [..] the importance of hybridity is not to be able to trace two original moments from which the third emerges, rather hybridity to me is the ‘third space’, which enables other positions to emerge [..] [it is] not so much identity as identification [..] a process of identifying with and through another object, an object of otherness, at which point the agency of identification - the subject - is itself always ambivalent, because of the intervention of that otherness. But the importance of hybridity is that it bears the traces of those feelings and practices which inform it, just like a translation, so that hybridity puts together the traces of certain other meanings or discourses.

Hybridity is a new ambivalent identification that bears the traces of feelings and practices that inform it. For my purposes, I would like to place these feelings and practices within the context of the discursive construction of ‘community’, ‘race’, ‘culture’ and ‘consciousness’, for example, in order to make hybridity less ephemeral. I have already mentioned above, in relation to Robert Young’s work, the possible importance of the ‘conflictually other’ in terms of hybridity. Here again, Bhabha speaks of ambivalent identifications with otherness as being central to hybridity. Interactants would, therefore, give meaning to their own hybrid identifications through recognizing the otherness that they themselves embody. This is the case above as Dana and Tessa spoke of themselves as Black even while being ‘mixed race’. Further, in Bhabha’s view, hybridity is not confined to a cataloguing of difference, with its unity being a product of the adding together of its disparate parts. Creolization and metissage, therefore, is not what he is talking about. Rather, it emerges from the process of opening up ‘the third space’ within which narratives of ‘where you’re from’ interact with narratives of ‘where you’re at’ in order for new identifications to arise. The interaction of these narratives of origin and location is what gives Bhabha’s notion of ‘the third space’ some boundaries of its own. These boundaries are marked by ‘difference as it becomes known’ in terms of the identifications explored in storied hybridity. Hybridity has meaninged boundaries that are achieved interactionally through noting difference from the same of Black womanhood. This in turn would entail that Bhabha’s ‘third space’ is based on opposition to its own others (Friedman, 1997, p. 78). So even though Bhabha is opposed to recourse to essentialism with his language of liminality and in-betweenness organizing hybridity, this opposition implicates such recourse. I have said before that Bhabha locates agency in the act of interruptive enunciation, and it is to this point that I wish to now return. In the colonial context, Bhabha (1994e) talks about hybridity as being a displacement of the eye of surveillance through mimicry, a speaking back which produces something other than was entailed through colonial discourse’s construction of the other. Identity is constructed here through a negotiation of difference, within which the presence of

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fissures, gaps and contradictions is not necessarily a sign of failure (Papastergiadis, 1997, p. 257) but of the emergence of difference. Speaking back to discourses allows us to look at storied hybridity by: [..] reading into the present of a specific [..] performance, the traces of all those diverse disciplinary discourses and institutions of knowledge that constitute the condition and contexts of culture (Bhabha, 1994, p. 313).

Narrating identifications through diverse discourses means then that one is in a situation of double/multiple consciousness as hybridity is spoken in talk-in­ interaction.

Hybridity and ‘double consciousness’ Bhabha stresses the importance of ‘the migrant’ in producing liminal spaces of identification created by the performative transgression of grand narratives. ‘The migrant’ is able to open up this performative space of enunciation because of their double consciousness, a double vision that ensures that people are in two places at once and maintain a double perspective on reality. Gilroy (1993b) also speaks of this double consciousness whilst Bhabha’s (1994g, p. 4) words remind us that otherness is a necessary part of double consciousness because: The ‘other’ is never outside or beyond us; it emerges forcefully within cultural discourse, when we think we speak most intimately and indigenously ‘between ourselves’.

Even within the same of ‘authentic Black womanhood’ the other is spoken. This shows the oscillation between the axioms of foreign and familiar, as the sociologist Nikos Papastergiadis (1997) would have it. The subtlety and instability of revealing any division of meaning into an inside and outside within which Bhabha (1994, p. 314) describes hybrid sites of meaning as opening: [..] up a cleavage in the language of culture which suggests that the similitude of the symbol as it plays across cultural sites must not obscure the fact that repetition of the sign is, in each specific social practice, both different and differential. It is in this sense that the enunciation of cultural difference emerges in its proximity [..] we must not seek it in the ‘visibility’ of difference for it will elude us.

So, difference is always there but so much like a second skin that it is invisible! Perhaps Nikos Papastergiadis’s oscillation should be viewed as being to do with constructing identity as bricolage in order to account for such subtlety. This would take account of the fact that it is not just about the transferral of the foreign into the familiar but, rather, also about the ‘untranslatable bits that linger’ (Papastergiadis, 1997, pp. 277-278). Looking at the process of identification, therefore, requires recognition of the negotiation of positions with which women engage within this

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doubleness. In example 4.2, Sharon’s talk centres on being Jamaican and British simultaneously, while drawing attention to the contradictions in the discourse of British nationality and citizenship in terms of who can vote (lines 1-3). To stress ‘came from Jamaica’ implies that this is the ‘roots’, the cultural home, the source of the untranslatable bits that linger, which shows ‘where I’m from’ being simultaneous with ‘where I’m at’ (Britain) and ‘where I also belong’ if ‘I want to be British’ (lines 13-14). British becomes an inclusive nationality category rather than an exclusive ‘racial’ one: Example 4.2 Tape 2 Side B Lu, Lo, Sa, Sh, Pe: 39 >1 Sh AND THE THING IS as well you know THE:SE people have 2 such STRA:NGE THINKING because when I came here from JAMAICA 3 in nineteen seventy-five I could VOTE 4 (1-4) 5 P Mhm= 6 Sh =NOW TO ME FROM THE TIME I CAN VOTE I BELONG in THAT 7 COUNTRY [ right? ] 8 Lu [ Yeah ]= 9 Sh =If- if we go LIVE in America we ca.n’t vote you know until we 10 BEcome A:MERICAN CITIZENS right? so if I am voting and making 11 decisions about who should govern me [ we:ll ] TOUGH on them you 12 Sa [Yeah] >13 Sh know what I mean? I’m BRITISH [ AND THAT’S] IT if I WANT TO 14 Lo [Well that’s it ] 15 Sh [B E BRITISH I can CA:LL myself that 16 Lo [Yeah ] Sharon contextualizes her example with the preface ‘the thing is as well you know these people have such strange thinking’ (lines 1-2). ‘These people’ here relates to the state as she then goes on to make clear in what she says next ‘because when I came here in nineteen seventy five I could vote’. This is her positioning sequence. To say ‘these people’ also creates distance from whiteness and its ‘strange thinking’ that a non-British citizen could vote. After a (1.4) pause Peter produces a continuer,3 but nobody else takes the floor. She then reflexively translates the relevance of her example so that she can be sure that others in the room are on the same track that she is. That is, that the ability to vote in a country means that you ‘belong in that country’ (lines 5-6). She reinforces this point after Luke’s agreement through using the example of her understanding of American citizenship and voting, before going on to make the link again between being

3 Continuers are agreements like ‘mhm’ and ‘yeah’ which do not then lead to a take over in the turn at speaking (see Schegloff, 1982).

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British and being able to vote ‘so if I am voting and making decisions about who should govern me well tough on them you know what I mean? I’m British and that’s it’ (lines 9, 10, 11 and 12). She also equates being British with being in the position of being able to choose such an appellation in her repositioning sequence ‘if I want to be British I can call myself that’ (lines 13 and 15). She thereby creates a new identification for herself forged within the difference and sameness of ‘Jamaican’ and ‘British’. Her talk also has some relevance for the issue of hybridity. First of all she locates herself in opposition to the power of white identification discourses to name her as an outsider by stressing that voting means that you belong in Britain. She also simultaneously shows belonging elsewhere in terms of her origins in Jamaica as being totally compatible with being British as a citizenship choice because of where one lives. Being British is also presented as a negotiable option in terms of using it as something to ‘call myself, showing some distancing from it. This narration of negotiated naming alerts us to hybridity’s strategic performance of double consciousness. It makes us aware too that whilst people are unproblematically British citizens in their heads, their experiences of being other are also reflexively called upon to maintain distance from this Britishness which is also white English, Scottish, Irish and Welsh. Through the speakers’ use of identity categories the examples above remind us of the historical specificities of Black women’s identifications. They also remind us of the significance of the negotiation of difference and sameness as identity positionings in a storied hybridity.

Identity, position and hybridity The cultural critic Stuart Hall’s (1996d, p. 502) view on cultural identity continues in a similar vein to Bhabha’s in that cultural identity: [..] is not fixed, it’s always hybrid. But this is precisely because it comes out of very specific historical formations, out of very specific histories and cultural repertoires of enunciation, that it can constitute a ‘positionality’, which we call provisionally, identity. It’s not just anything. So each of these identity-stories is inscribed in the positions we take up and identify with, and we have to live with this ensemble of identity positions in all its specificities.

Identities aren’t ‘just anything’, they are positionings that are constantly being transformed. As such, they are never complete as ideas, world-views and material forces interact with each other and are reworked. This is a description of positionings in a process of contingent transformations. Hall’s anti-essentialist perspective on identity has had significant impact on the debates about extracting ethnicity out of its anti-racist paradigm (Papastergiadis, 1997, p. 275). This would help us to recognize that we are all ethnically located. The margin is important in Hall’s work as a site of counter-hegemony. This is the case because the margin challenges the centre through a three-pronged strategy: first, through an opposition

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to the given order; second, via recovery of broken histories and the invention of appropriate narrative forms; and third, through the definition of a position and a language from which speech will continue (Papastergiadis, 1997, p. 275). Although Papastergiadis (1997, p. 274) claims that nowhere in Hall’s ‘work is there a theoretical model which could be transferred to particular sites of struggle and used to “read o ff’ examples of hybridity’, Hall’s analysis of the challenge from the margin seems to be useful. The first prong of the strategy speaks in terms of a ‘speaking back’ in opposition to monolithic essentializing discourses as I have explored above in Bhabha’s work and in the examples. The second strategic strand includes the possibility of changing conceptions of self and community in the construction of social memories through individual or group narrativization which occurs in Sharon’s exploration of being Jamaican and British simultaneously, for example. The third aspect of the strategy is the conscious and self-conscious practising of difference which is recognized as ‘different from’ but ‘the same as’ by the self as is shown by Tessa and Dana in example 1, when they critique the emergence of assimilationist difference in Black beauty and language norms. What we see in Hall’s notion of challenge from the margin is a useful way of conceptualizing hybridity as a speaking back to dominant discourses of positioning. This emphasizes the complexity rather than homogeneity of ‘the Black woman experience’. So what is at stake is not a determinate break with the past but the re­ articulation of something different that seeks to go beyond pre-given categories. It is a dialogism which encourages multiplicity within the diaspora.

Diaspora The cultural critic Paul Gilroy’s (1993b) project in The Black Atlantic Modernity and Double Consciousness is to explore diaspora and double consciousness in order to challenge essentialism in the form of ‘Afro-centricity as authenticity’ and, anti-essentialist claims which see Blackness as an unwarranted construction. As the examples above show, diaspora opens up a historical and experiential rift between the place of residence and that of belonging. This in turn sets up a further opposition as consciousness of diaspora affiliation stands opposed to the political forms and codes of nation states (Gilroy, 1997, p. 329). Gilroy’s notion of outsidemess and its paired insidemess have been explored by the interactants in example 2 above. There has also been another outside/inside at work in example 1: authentic Blackness and the Black inauthentic other. This latter enables us to see that diaspora consciousness is multi-layered as there is no unitary Blackness. Through his metaphor of the ship/travelling within Gilroy’s diaspora we are presented with the ‘Black Atlantic’ as a hybrid ‘counter culture of modernity’: [..] one that expresses an authenticity not located in New York or London but in opposition to a dominant modernity and that has moulded strands and fragments into something shared at the level of the ‘structure of feeling’ and expressed as a

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kind of holism where the aesthetic, the political and the moral are one (Friedman, 1997, p. 74).

Again we can read ‘opposition’ as a speaking back to dominant discourses. However, what has been moulded from disparate strands and come to be shared in terms of politics, aesthetics and morality is unclear here. As well as this, Gilroy’s notion of ‘the structure of feeling’ is challenged by example 1 which shows that there is contestation in terms of the category ‘Black woman’. What is indisputable though is that there has been a pan-Caribbeanization and a consciousness of global Blackness that has been at the base of the Black anti-racist movement within Britain. This has been important in the forging of Black communities through using the discourse of ‘race’ and Blackness as an organizing principle within a politics of resistance (Hall, 1996e; Gilroy, 1987 and 1993a; James, 1993). Are we to assume that this ‘holism’ of which Gilroy speaks means that as diasporic Black women we share something akin to Negritude? For Senghor (1993, pp. 27-28) this ‘is rooting oneself in oneself and self-confirmation, confirmation of one’s being [...] it is the sum o f the cultural values o f the black world\ If this is the case and Gilroy is invoking Negritude, while he is opposed to Afrocentricity, he himself is positing some quasi-transcendental spiritual core that unifies all Black souls in the diaspora. Isn’t this merely another appeal to essentialism, no matter how alluringly phrased? If we take Gilroy’s point of view about this shared holism, what would we do with an extract like example 3 below and others above in which ‘Black woman’ cannot be taken for granted? What would an oppositional authenticity mean? What would the shared aesthetic and moral strands be here? Example 4.3 provides us with an interaction in which the question of Blackness is again raised at the level of the politics of naming. Here Black British-ness and African-ness are presented by interlocutors as occupying two different spaces because of the attitudes of African people who position Caribbeans as not being Black: Example 4.3- Tape 2 Side A Lu, Lo, Sa, Shu Pe: 21-22 1 Lo We had this BLACK [ society ] or whatever at 2 Lu [Clears throat] >3 Lo COLLEGE (.) and we were- you know we were °deciding° our na- we said 4 why can’t we call ourselves AFRO CARIBBEAN [ or ] whatever it was at 5 Sh [Mhm] 6 Lo that time that was political I can’t remember= 7 Sh =Mhm= 8 Lo =And (.) NO YOU’RE NOT (.) YOU’RE NOTHING TO DO WITH 9 ArFRICAN (.) [ you’ve ] YOU’RE NOTHING YOU’RE NOT 10 Sh [That’s right] 11 Lo BLACK YOU LOT ARE:N’T BLACK (.) 12 Sh It’s AW:FUL isn’t it that?= >13 Lo And us lot were like WHAT they on about? you know what I mean?=

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14 Sh =M[ hm ] >15 Lo [Well] WE ARE BLACK [((.hhh .hhh)) ] and they- and they got °really 16 really°AGGRESSIVE and so EVERYbody [ just ] walked out of the 17 Sh [Mhm] 18 Lo meeting and there were FOUR of us who were like West Indian right? and 19 the rest of them were Aifrican and we just got up and WA:LKE:D out (1.5) 20 it was REA:LLY- it took us A:GE:S to get back into a meeting [ and so ] 21 Sh [ Mhm ] 22 well it would wouldn’t it? (.) 23 Lo ((.hhh)) [ (.) ] I COULDN’T BELIEVE IT THAT’S THE FIRST 24 Lu [ ((.hhh)) ] 25 Lo TIME I EVER CAME ACROSS IT THOUGH you’re not Black There are several discourses of Black authenticity at play in this extract. These are based on the opposing points of view that Caribbeans are ‘proper Black’ because putative white kinship does not make one less Black; and, on the other hand, the right to be called Black is based on origin in Africa. This is mostly a conversation between Lola and Sharon with minimal laughter from Lucien at one point on the theme of Blackness as a category that Africans reserve for themselves. Lola expresses this through her loudly produced turn (lines 8, 9 and 11) in which the African view of Caribbean people as not Black is also about them being ‘nothing to do with African’ and in fact being ‘nothing’. This is the positioning sequence. Sharon’s agreement (line 12) shows her evaluation of the impact of this incident on Lola and her Caribbean colleagues. This evaluation is responded to as such by Lola, rather than as a question which needs a reply, as she then goes on to speak about the amazement they felt at the time ‘and us lot were like what they on about you know what I mean?’ (line 13). This turn is her translation as reflexivity sequence as she shows her interlocutors the vast difference in perspective between the Caribbeans and Africans being spoken about in her story. This is followed by her assertion of Blackness as a repositioning in opposition to the African positioning of nothingness, ‘Well we are Black’ and an embarrassed laugh (line 15). After all of this context setting she introduces an ‘us’ and ‘them’ type of contestation by speaking about the impact of their outburst on ‘us lot’ (lines 16-20). The story represents a speaking back to the ideas of ‘racial purity’ as the only warrant for African-ness. She joins her re-assertion of Blackness to a portrayal of the African students as aggressive, which led to the West Indian students walking out of the meeting. So what started out as the need to establish an AfroCaribbean Society/Black Society for reasons of solidarity and proclaiming a Black presence on campus, became a moment of deep division, based solely on African views of Caribbeans as not Black. Lola continues to speak about the impact of this on Caribbean people before then producing a summary of her example (lines 23 and 25). How can it be said in such an assertion of essentialism that hybridity is simultaneously present? What is important for us is to look at the politics of naming in which Lola engages in opposition to the African students. The latter see

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‘purity of African blood’ as the essential ingredient in Blackness. However, Lola recognizes her otherness from this and performs Blackness in opposition to it, a speaking back and a repositioning of herself as part of a diasporic Black people who are Black because of their Caribbean heritage. Who is authentically Black then is re-versioned as ‘there are different ways to claim Blackness as a politics of skin’. This in itself sets up the possibility of a multiplicity of Blackness within the sameness of Black skin as the mask of authenticity is removed. Oppositional authenticity would, therefore, be related to the interactants’ view of what it is to be Black. The shared aesthetic and moral strands would obviously come from this view. So, there is an essence of Blackness that individuals are using to interpret the behaviour of others who are being judged as different. My point here is that in looking at hybridity, as something recognized to be the same but different, part of the changing same, to be interested in solidarity but difference, we can maybe begin to ground Gilroy’s arguments in the world of the everyday. This would take us somewhere towards muting Friedman’s (1997, p. 74) very correct criticism that Gilroy’s: [..] argument is about transnational Blacks, intellectuals all, and it is directed to other intellectuals. It attempts to define Black identity in a new way. The question is for whom and how?

Looking at the question of for whom and how leads us to turn again to Gilroy’s view of an anti-essentialist diaspora. For him diaspora can be used to instantiate a new model that allows ‘us to perceive identity in motion - circulating across the web or network that they constitute’ (Gilroy, 1997, p. 334). Here, ‘dispersed people’ recognize the effects of spatial dislocation as rendering the issue of origins problematic (Gilroy, 1997, p. 335) as in example 4.3, above. However, they also relocate themselves within Blackness irrespective of this difficulty. Space is transformed when it is seen through the lens of diaspora in terms of communicative circuitry that has enabled dispersed populations to converse, interact and synchronize elements of their social and cultural lives. Examples of this within the British context can be found in the pan-Caribbeanization of reggae, soca, Jamaican Creole (see for example, Tate, 1984; Sebba, 1993), carnival and the influence of Black American music on Black British culture. This helps us to see that, ‘people do make their own identities but not in circumstances of their own choosing and from resources they inherit that will always be incomplete’ (Gilroy, 1997, p. 341). Blackness becomes an open signifier which ‘seeks to celebrate complex representations of a Black particularity that is internally divided: by class, sexuality, gender, age and political consciousness’ (Gilroy, 1993c, p. 123). Hybridity as a performance in the everyday arises in interactions when women speak back by deconstructing the ‘Black same’ and refusing assimilation.

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The assimilation of other voices and speaking back In Can the Subaltern Speak? post-colonial critic Gayatri Spivak (1993a) denies that this speaking back can happen in terms of it being heard by the colonizers. Nikos Papastergiadis’s (1997, pp. 277) view is that ‘Spivak, unlike Hall, seems to limit the concept of hybridity as a metaphor for cultural identity’ because she rightly disputes the applicability of the concept of hybridity to the subaltern condition. However, Spivak (1993b, p. 89) seems to speak directly to Bhabha’s view of hybridity as identification with and through an object of otherness when she says: To render thought or the thinking subject transparent seems, by contrast, to hide the relentless recognition of the other by assimilation [..] Derrida does not invoke ‘letting the other(s) speak for himself but rather invokes an ‘appeal’ to or ‘call’ to the ‘quite-other’ (tout-autre as opposed to a self consolidating other), of ‘rendering delirious that interior voice that is the voice of the other in us’.

One way in which this could be read is that this is about undoing the assimilated other in us which enables us to get to an-other identity position based on critique. Undoing the assimilated other in us is similar to Robert Young’s (1995a) view of hybridity as being to do with the conflictually other within. So, by looking at the resistance to the assimilation of other voices in us by making the voice of the other delirious, Spivak seems to me to be speaking about hybridity. This is so as assimilation implicates doubleness, almost of one thing masquerading as another. Within this what it also implicates is mimicry as a way of undoing the selfconsolidating other’s voice, so that an-other identity positioning can emerge. What does all of what I have said add up to in terms of elucidating a hybridity of the everyday?

A hybridity of the everyday Hybridity is an undeniably slippery concept. I have tried above to pin it down to a few categories of identification assemblage within the space of talk on lived experience where women speak about the same/different. The hybridity of the everyday which arises within this talk focuses on several processes which are present in a speaking back to dominant discourses, namely: 1) acknowledging the conflictually other within; 2) double consciousness and the negotiation of identifications; 3) changing conceptions of self and community; 4) and, resisting assimilation. Some parts of this list lead me to recall the work of Frantz Fanon (1986). Could it be that he was an unacknowledged precursor of hybridity theorizing? I think that this is an important question given the dominance of Hall, Gilroy and Bhabha in

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this area. Fanon speaks of double consciousness when in Black Skins, White Masks he looks at the psyche of the colonial Martiniquan who only feels like a whole man when he sees the boat at the pier that is to take him to France, the motherland. This double consciousness of colonialism also extends to the ways of being within Martinique in which those who have been to France only speak French to show their difference from erstwhile comrades. There is then a conflictually other within. This Fanonian double consciousness is more reminiscent of the DuBoisian one as it relates to assimilation in its more damaging negative facets. That is that double consciousness in which aspects of identification are denied in order to be something or someone else. However, Fanon’s view is that there is not one ‘negro’ but many ‘negroes’. This establishes the multiplicity of identities that is a part of hybridity. Fanon’s work also encompasses a speaking back to dominant discourses, whether based on the Affo-centricity of Negritude or white supremacist essentialism, whilst looking at change within the identifications produced by the discourses of Blackness. Leaving Fanon aside what else can be said about a hybridity of the everyday? Hybridity is about Derrida’s ‘brisure’ in which the same and different are simultaneous in identification talk. In we have women giving meaning to this ‘difference from the same’ through the prism of a Black woman authenticity. The ‘third space of hybridity’ is, therefore, identification as difference from some ‘same’ that is performed in interaction. Hybridity is dialogical and this is significant for understanding the notion of translated hybrid identities as recognizable with reference to an essence in terms of a ‘difference from the changing same’. Difference from the changing same is my reformulation of Gilroy’s (1997) ‘changing same’ to acknowledge that this latter is itself subject to essentialisms, no matter how contingent. Individuals are engaged in a process of translating discourses of Black essentialism and using this to read off practices as more or less Black or not Black at all, as in the extracts. In the extracts women have been particularly oriented to the reflexive construction of Blackness as a membership category through reasoned accounts. Just as a sense of Blackness is reflexively constituted by reference to whiteness, the reverse is also the case. In order to re-make ‘Black’ as a category, members assumed and revealed cultural knowledge around the impact of white racist and exclusionary Afro-centric thinking on the possibility for their claim to this category. The category Black is continually and consciously constructed in opposition to the ‘race’ and nation debates of whiteness and a Black community generated ‘same’. Theirs is a very particular take on Blackness that does not seek to assimilate with or claim it without critique, but to remain within it as an-other Black woman. Finally, discourses of the self and others are reflexively re-created through membership categories like Black, British, African and Caribbean. The idea that meaning is constructed by interactants for interactants adds the flavour of intentionality to looking at hybridity. de Certeau’s (1988) idea of tactics is apposite here. This makes hybrid texts strategic and political acts, practices which both constitute and are constituted by the social and ‘which cannot count on a “proper” (a spatial or institutional localization), nor thus on a border-line

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distinguishing the other as a visible totality’ (de Certeau, 1988, p. xix). These texts made through talk are ‘already practices. They say exactly what they do. They constitute an act that they intend to mean. There is no need to add a gloss that knows what they express without knowing it, nor to wonder what they are the metaphor o f (de Certeau, 1988, p. 80). Interactants are engaged in constructing meaning in the manner of bricolage ‘that is, an arrangement made with the materials at hand’ from a position which is ‘simultaneously inside and outside, dissolving both and mixing them together’ (de Certeau, 1988, p. 174). This means that the identifications produced during talk-in-interaction are open to reinterpretation, challenge, negotiation and change in the course of the interaction. That is, to an ongoing reading and making which itself produces hybridity as a continual process. The ongoing reading and making of identifications, points to a dialogics of hybridity in which individuals engage in translation as readers and makers of identifications. That is, in the recognition, acceptance or denial of discursively constructed meanings in terms of the identifications they wish to perform. Dialogism and translation become important then in hybridity within the context of the ‘raced’ habitus. Within this habitus hybridity arises through the binary oppositions of Black/white, Black self/Black other, as these are negotiated across time and space.

Conclusion I have attempted to make hybridity less of a nebulous concept through anchoring it in the day-to-day interactions of individuals. This hybridity of the everyday involves interactants using gendered readings of discourses of a Black authentic same. Speakers show us through this that ‘race’ is unstable and can be transformed through hybridity, whilst hybridity depends on essentialism in order to emerge. There is then a simultaneity of ‘same’ and ‘difference’ in identifications. Through this understanding hybridity becomes transparent in talk as speakers construct difference from the changing same. It is the changing conceptions of self and community that are spoken into being that alert us to the dialogical nature of a hybridity o f the everyday defined as a negotiation o f identity positionings in talk. This change is itself reflexively translated as a change by using Black essentialism as a template with which to make comparisons based on ‘skin’, ‘culture’, ‘race’ and ‘community’, for example. In translating their position and that of others in talk, women speak back to dominant discourses. This translation demonstrates double consciousness through its acknowledgement of the conflictually other within changing conceptions of self and community. The next chapter goes a step further in looking at translation and continues to look beyond the hybridity discourse of Cultural Studies that has begun here.

Chapter 5

Beyond Hybridity: Bodily Schema and ‘the Third Space’

Introduction In Introduction: Who Needs Identity? Stuart Hall (1996a, p. 16)1 alerts us to the continuing necessity and complexity of identity for the individual and for politics. What Hall makes us think about here is the necessity to go beyond the hybridity thinking of Cultural Studies because of the interplay between speakers and the ‘social’. In this interplay social constructions of Black womanhood are linked to gender as well as racial hierarchy, meaning systems and institutionalization (Brewer, 1993, p. 17). Frantz Fanon’s (1986) Black Skin, White Masks makes clear to us that in the colonial system of power/knowledge sustained by ‘the look’ from the place of the Other, the bodily schema is culturally and historically shaped (Hall, 1996f). This racialized bodily schema produces an invisible visibility of Black womanhood. However, Fanon also reminds us of the possibility for disidentification with essentialist images (Fanon, 1986, p. 136) that facilitates the emergence of difference through a call to racializing bodily schema. This fixing of the same and the emergence of difference within the same occurs through a speaking back to dominant discourses. A speaking back is enabled by a translation of identification discourses in the space of postcolonial Britain where ‘Black’ and ‘woman’ appear mutually exclusive. On the one hand, Black community generated discourses maintain exclusions in terms of admittance. While on the other, as Sarah makes clear below, within the quotidian experiences of Black women ‘race’ continues to overshadow gender in the white imagination and the identity of ‘Black woman’ has to be fought for. Her words show us that there is a metalanguage of ‘race’ in which gender is collapsed to a Unitarian position of unmarked Blackness. Sarah has been talking before the extract about the difficulties she had with the Union representing both her and her harasser when she had lodged a formal complaint at work. She is now not in a Union because she would prefer to hire a solicitor given her past experiences. In the extract Sarah is establishing a discourse of Blackness as ‘raced’ and gendered in opposition to the institutional lack of recognition of her gender ‘it isn’t going to happen to me with regards to gender because they do NOT recognize me as a woman’ (lines 8, 10 and 11). 1 ‘... the question, and the theoretization, of identity is [...] of considerable political significance, and is only likely to be advanced when both the necessity and the ‘impossibility’ of identities, and the suturing of the psychic and discursive in their constitution, are fully and unambiguously acknowledged’.

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Example 5.1 Tape 2 Side A SoT: 134-135 1 Sh Yeah that’s [ better go outside] 2 S [ .hhh because ] I am not going to tell any:body[ .hhh ] that 3 Sh [ Mhm] 4 S IS GOING TO REPRESENT= 5 Sh =Mhm= 6 S =MY MANAGER because that’s the ONLY REASON I’m going to need [it] 7Sh [Mhm] >8 S is IF something happens to me [ .hhh ] with regards to ra:ce because it isn’t 9 Sh [Mhm] 10 S going to happen to me with regards to gender because they do NOT recognize 11 me: as a wo:man, = >12 Sh =1 know and that’s the other thing they don’t do they? (.9) 13 S I’m NOT a woman (.5) 14 Sh That is so: interesting as well that we’re not women (.6) we’re just this (.4) blob 15 ((.hhh))= 16 S =>A Black blob at that18 S [ ((.hhh .hhh )) ] you kno:w these a:hm I remember 19 st- these students these two white women students saying to me Sarah do you 20 see: yourself as .hhh a Black person or a woman?= 21 Sh=Ohye:ah= 22 S =1 said WHAT? (.6) I see myself as a Black person a:nd a woman= 23 Sh =Mh [ m: ] 24 S [No:] but do: you see yourself as a Bla- I SAID I AM A: BLACK 25 WOMAN= 26 Sh =Mhm::= 27 S =And they just no: no: no: but do you?= 28 Sh [ Yea:h ] 29 S [ And ] it was just a wa:ste of time= 30 Sh =1 kno:w= 31 S =It was just a wa:ste of ti:me= 32 Sh =1 know She reveals her positioning by the look from the place of the Other through her assertion that ‘race’ is all that seems to count in terms of the institution in which she works. She is Black and genderless (lines 8, 10 and 11). The translation as reflexivity sequence is done jointly when I agree with this (line 12) and Sarah reiterates her assertion of her positioning as genderless ‘I’m not a woman’ (line 13). After a (.5) pause I continue to agree with Sarah’s assertion with a joke ‘we’re

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just this blob’ followed by laughter (lines 14 and 15). Sarah agrees with a speedily produced joke ‘A Black blob at that’ (line 16). I receive this as a joke, as I laugh and recycle ‘a Black blob’ with laugher bubbling through before laughing again (line 17). Sarah laughs in overlap and following this provides an example about being asked about whether she saw herself through the prism of ‘race’ or gender. This is used to establish her re-positioning, her dis-identification from essentialist images, her speaking back as a hybrid subject. For her being Black is not genderless as she is simultaneously ‘raced’ and gendered. ‘I said I am a Black woman’ is replayed as a speaking back to her questioners (lines 24 and 25). Sarah goes against the grain of the institution in which she works where her womanhood is not acknowledged. However, the questioners even though her students, do not accept her position. What she is doing here in terms of using her students in her example is positioning these two white women as the look from the place of whiteness. This is obvious given her earlier assertion that ‘they do not recognize me as a woman’. These women represent the look from the space of whiteness interactionally in order to establish her hybrid position in opposition to whiteness as someone who is a Black woman. Students are less powerful than their lecturers in the institutional hierarchy but such is the power of whiteness that they can question her right to assert that both ‘race’ and gender are intertwined and both therefore matter for her identification as a Black woman. As Sarah shows us within the context of postcolonial Britain occupying the third space of hybridity between identifications in which ‘Black woman’ is possible is both politically and culturally subversive. I continue below, through women’s talk, to explore the regime of racialized and racializing bodily schema emanating from whiteness and Blackness. I look at women’s negotiation of this regime as a speaking back to dominant discourses in order to show the discursive and interpersonal construction of ‘Black woman’ within the third space of talk through translation. Within this third space skin is a frontier. It is an identity cipher emanating from the racialized bodily schema within which we are located. Racialized bodily schema have to be queered in order for an-other Black woman to emerge through hybridity as a speaking back to dominant discourses on Black womanhood. Hybridity though still contains essentialism within it because of speakers’ use of racializing translations of the tropes of, for example, kinship, community, ‘race’, roots and politics. It is through these translations that the subaltern can speak within the interstices of identifications.

Racialized and racializing bodily schema What Sarah shows us in her talk is dis-identification with the racialized bodily schema of Black womanhood emanating from whiteness. She also shows us the possibility for an-other reading, an-other identification. Within this new identification she appropriates racialized bodily schema differently. That is, she re­ creates the certainty of ‘race’ and gender in order to produce a racializing bodily schema in which ‘race’ and gender are simultaneously a part of her identification. For Dianna Fuss (1995), identification involves the play of difference and

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similitude in self-Other relations. However, at the same time that identification is the stimulus for the recognition and mis-recognition that brings a sense of identity into being, it also immediately calls that identity into question. Identities, therefore, are highly unstable and endlessly open to change (Fuss, 1995). Identity as identification takes us into the realm of the psychoanalytic. This presents us with the difficulty that using psychoanalytic theory to explicate Black identity means that I will be using the same Western intellectual discourse which participates directly or indirectly in the subjugation of ‘the Black Other’ (Mama, 1995; Fuss, 1995; Spivak, 1993a; Venn, 1992). As such, we need to be aware of the necessity to question its concepts in terms of their universal applicability.2 As I said before I see Black women’s identities as texts of social practice. As such, they are identifications forged through representation within the meaning systems of different discursive regimes in colonial and post-colonial spaces. Identification as a process prevents identity from ever achieving the status of an ontological given, while at the same time enabling the formation of an illusion of identity as immediate, secure and totalizable as it: names the entry of history and culture into the subject, a subject that must bear the traces of each and every encounter with the external world. [It] is, from the beginning a question of relation of self to other, subject to object, inside to outside (Fuss, 1995, p. 3). Let us look at an example to help us take up the point about identification as a relation of self to other. This is important to do in order to remind ourselves that it isn’t just whiteness which is the other here but Blackness also occupies this space. Before the talk in example 5.2 below, Laura has been speaking about being a ‘mixed race’ Black child growing up in West Yorkshire. At lines 1, 2 and 4 she positions herself as Black by asserting that she always hung out with a Black group rather than a white one. At line 5 I question her place within that group in terms of whether or not she was accepted as a Black girl. Laura then enters into talk that shows her reading of a discourse of ‘mixed race’ as not being accepted in either Black or white circles. She distances herself from this by saying that this is the view of some ‘mixed race’ people. She also speaks of facing hostility from other Black people that she did not let deny her a place in society as a Black woman (lines 7-17). This is her translation as reflexivity sequence. From line 19 she asserts her identification as a Black woman when she repositions herself with ‘I see myself as a Black woman’, whilst showing awareness that not all ‘mixed race’ people would use that description for themselves. In this extract then, Laura shows us the complexity of her identification with discourses of ‘Black’ and ‘mixed race’, similitude and difference, self and other. She also shows agency in that she speaks herself as someone who neither capitulates to the ‘mixed race’ position of being not Black and not fitting in either Black or white circles, nor to the Black position 2 This is why Black identities as texts of social practice is used in this book drawing on LePage and Tabouret-Keller’s (1985) work on identifications in talk as people say ‘1 want to be seen as., but also as...’ See also Sebba, M. and Tate, S. (2002) and Tate, S. (2000).

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that ‘mixed race’ people are not Black. Rather she asserts a re-positioning as a Black woman. She constructs in her talk a racializing bodily schema in which ‘Black womanhood’ as a category is inclusive of ‘mixed race’ women. Example 5.2 Tape 1 Side A LF: 36 >1

L Within SCHOOL I always hung out with a Black posse do you know what

1 2 mean?= 3 S =M[hm] >4 L [ I ] never hung out in a WHITE posse it’s just a = 5 S =And how was that then? hanging out with a Black posse? Did they 6 accept you as a Black girl like them?= >7 L =Yeah? you know, like you- you hear some mixed race people that say 8 that they don’t feel accepted in EI:[THER] ciircle = 9 S [M hm ] =Mhm:= 10 L =And that isn’t to say that I haven’t had hostility from Black people because I 11 have .hhh but I’ve never felt that I DIDN’T FIT IN [ OR ] THAT I 12 S [Mhm] 13 L WASN’T WHERE I WAS MEANT TO BE [.hhh ] I APPRECIATE that 14 S [Mhm] 15 L you get hostility from all sorts of [ people ] .hhh and I’m not going to let 16 S [Yeah ] 17 L somebody’s hostility .hhh deny me: MY place in society [ it’s like ] 18 S [ °Mhm mhm°] 19 L I SEE MYSELF AS A BLACK WOMAN SHIRLEY you know?= 20 S =Mhm= 21 L =OTHER MIXED RACE PEOPLE you know maybe don’t [ that’s ] for 22 S [ Mhm ] 23 L THEM to say I see myself PURELY AS A BLACK WOMAN The extract again makes us see the continuing significance of racialized embodiment in Black women’s identities. What Laura shows us though is that first, there is no universally identical identity moulded by a static culture. Laura makes this plain as she shows the contestation that there is in terms of the identity category Black. Second, she shows us that identities are practices embedded in ‘the social’ as she interprets the membership category Black. It is through her interpretation and critique of these discursive texts that she arrives at her own text of social practice, her own Black woman identification. Third, these social sites of identity are multiple. Laura shows us three such sites in her talk. These are that some ‘mixed race’ people don’t see themselves as Black and so wouldn’t socialize with Black people; some Black people don’t see ‘mixed race’ people as Black; and, her own position that ‘mixed race’ people are Black irrespective of kinship. Her talk on identity demonstrates a multiple consciousness by constantly translating and remaking the category Black through her dialogical engagement with

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discourses. In this engagement she queers Black skin to produce her own position of difference, an-other Black, within a discourse of Blackness based on ‘skin’ and ‘race’. The dialogical interaction of being addressed as ‘the Black same/other’ and answering as an-other Black shows the continuing salience of racialized and racializing bodily schema in women’s lives, alongside an agency which acts to change the discourse of Black womanhood from within. Frantz Fanon (1986) writes about a racial epidermal schema in the colonial context. This schema means that the Black man must be Black in relation to the white man. Here in the white world consciousness of the body is a position of negation for the Black man, a position of ‘certain uncertainty’ (Fanon, 1986, p. 111). This schema does not impose itself on Black communities but is a ‘definitive structuring of the self and of the world’ (Fanon, 1986, p. 111). Below this corporeal schema there is a historico-racial schema constructed by the white man in which one exists triply in terms of responsibility for ‘my body, for my race, for my ancestors’ (Fanon, 1986, p. 112). In this context one is over-determined from without. In the context in which Sarah finds herself the racial epidermal schema generated from whiteness exists to the extent of denying the significance of gender in her life. For Laura, the schema marks ‘mixed race’ people as Black irrespective of kinship. Laura also shows us that there is a Black generated racial epidermal schema. This racial epidermal schema would deny her a place within Blackness itself. Fanon in the postcolonial context could then be made to read ‘a Black woman must be a Black woman in relation to the Black woman’. This neatly sums up the paradox here. That is that ‘the Black woman’ is the other of whiteness whilst also containing its own alterity. Laura and Sarah both continue to be over­ determined from without, whether the gaze emanates from Blackness or whiteness. They both occupy a position of certain uncertainty as Black skins, Black masks produce multiple identity positions where, as Black masks are removed - for Sarah her lack of gender, for Laura her ‘mixed race’ roots - an-other Black skin emerges. The removal of Black masks is itself agentic. Let us look in more detail at the interaction of racialized bodily schema and agency in the colonial context beginning with the work of Fanon.

The colonial other and agency The sociologist Lola Young (1996b, p. 88) rightly criticizes Frantz Fanon for his exclusion of Black women, the construction of pathological models of the psycho­ sexuality of women and ‘the evidence of a deep seam of fear and rage regarding Black women. She takes issue with Bhabha’s (1986) contention that Fanon’s use of the term ‘man’ connotes a phenomenological quality of humanness inclusive of man and woman, because for her it is not just about the generic use of a sexist pronoun but rather the ontological status of Black women. As the struggle between Black and white is done man to man, for Young (1996b, p. 89): The unassimilable ‘body image’ based both on an ‘epidermal schema’ and possession of the phallus renders white and black women - on one level -

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peripheral to the central contest. Further examination demonstrates that black and white women are accorded differentiated textual status, since although the motivations of both come under his scrutiny, Fanon’s uneasiness in thinking about the specificity of black women’s experiences of racism and colonialism is palpable. Fanon removes Black women to the sphere of reproduction where their attempt is to annihilate the ‘black race’ and perpetuate a colour/caste system that benefits the colonizer (Young, 1996b, p. 91). The question of what is the ‘Black race’ is apposite here, as the talk so far has shown us that there are many ways to inhabit Blackness. Also, the colour/caste system has not been brought home to the metropole as forcibly as it was maintained in the colonies. As Laura’s talk illustrated and as Dana and Bianca will show us below, being ‘mixed race’ does not mean a position of privilege and their constant struggle is to be allowed into Blackness. Notwithstanding critiques of his work, it is clear that Fanon has contributed to contemporary theorizing of ‘racial’ alterity and difference as well as to Black politics (Hall, 1996f). Fanon’s (1986) Black Skin, White Masks makes clear to us the violence of identification in the colonial context. Identification is violent as it is about how white subjects accede to power and Black others learn subjugation. Fanon reads ‘race’ as a discursive regime whose epidermal schema means that the ultimate impact on the colonized is the internalization of oppression. The colonized, in being centred on Europe, endeavours to be ‘elevated above his jungle status in proportion to his adoption of the mother country’s cultural standards. He becomes whiter as he renounces his blackness, his jungle’ (Fanon, 1986, p. 18). The image of the Black woman is dependent on her Blackness but she must also be Black in relation to the needs and desires of whiteness. Black originated identities are negated in the representations of Blackness in the colonial context so the colonized accept that any originality or multiplicity must be denied. The colonized other produces texts of social practice imitating the colonizer’s ideas of Black essential difference generated in this discursive regime. It is only this that will be allowed past the boundaries of cultural intelligibility into the realm of signification. To allow anything else would be to undermine the cultural construct of ‘the Other’ designed to uphold and consolidate colonialist definitions of selfhood (Fuss, 1995). However, Fanon also reminds us of the possibility of dis-identification which exists when Black women assert differences within Black womanhood.3 Producing a representation of Blackness counter to racist images facilitates the emergence of difference. It also allows the possibility for individuals/‘the people’ to free themselves from the mental colonization of essentialism, whether this comes from Afrocentricity (as Laura shows us above and we will see in example 3) or Imperialism’s cultural and epidermal supremacy (as we saw in example 1 and will see again below). One can then just ‘be a [wo]man among other [wo]men’ (Fanon, 1986, p. 112), rather than existing triply as body, ‘race’, ancestry (Fanon, 1986, p. 112). 3 This is similar to Fanon’s (1986, p. 136) claim that ‘Negro experience is not a whole, for there is not merely one Negro, there are Negroes’.

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In terms of what ‘Black woman’ means at the levels of identification and aesthetics, Bhabha can be criticized for not broaching the question of a gendered colonial subject in his theorizing on hybridity (Young, 1995b, p. 154). In a similar vein to Fanon, Bhabha (1994g) argues that the discursive construction of the colonial subject and the exercise and maintenance of colonial power necessitates the production of racial and cultural difference as a hierarchy. The system of colonial representation contained within the racist discourse’s stereotype means that we already know ‘the essential duplicity of the Asiatic or the bestial sexual licence of the African’ (Bhabha, 1994h, p. 66). Identity is fixed as the fantasy of difference. The colonized population, ever the white man’s burden, are imprisoned in the circle of representation and interpretation, so that the only identities which are given meaning are those of the racialized other. However, Bhabha (1994e) also highlights the possibility that exists, within this colonial totalitarianism, for the emergence of difference as mimicry disrupts colonialism’s authority. This disruption emerges when ‘the look of surveillance returns as the displacing gaze of the disciplined, where the observer becomes the observed and ‘partial’ representation re-articulates the whole notion of identity and alienates it from essence’ (Bhabha, 1994e, p. 89). For Bhabha (1994f) hybridity emerges in this space of disruption. However, I take issue with Bhabha that there is an alienation from essence here because as we have seen in the examples above racializing is at work in the talk. Let us look at another example of this speaking back to the eye of surveillance in order to see my point that essentialism stays in. In example 5.3 Dana and Bianca show us that there is a panopticon of Blackness generated from both whiteness and Black community exclusions. Within this racialized bodily schema Black women are made the other of both Blackness and whiteness. The latter denies the possibility for anything other than the Black blob spoken about by Sarah earlier, whilst the former questions one’s Blackness. The extract follows talk about Bianca being asked by a white colleague if, in terms of feminist politics, she was Black or a woman: Example 5.3 DF and B Tape 1 Side 1: 7 1 B 2 3 D 4 5 B 6 7 D 8 B 9 D 10 B 11 D 12 B 13 D 14 B

Are you a woman or are you Black? I thought WHAT? IT’S PERFECTLY [OBVIOUS WHAT I AM] I AM A BLACK WOMAN YEA:H?= [You kno:w what as well ] =>Youkno:w what as well< when you’re Black you’re not allowed to be disabled either= =No: you cain’t be: and you ca:n’t be: anything else but totally straight can you? you know? °things like that0 (1.9) It’s li:ke [Black people (.3)] because WHI:TE people are all in compartments [°It’s so stra:nge°] but WE:’RE NOT [ you ] see= [Mhm] =Mhm= =Because our Blackness is an INTEGRAL part of our who:leness= =Mhm (.9) [ mhm ] [Or ] when we’re ALLOWED to be BLACK [because ] the [ Yeah ]

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15 D amount of people> I’ve had since I ’ve come to London who’ve said 16 to me< do you consider yourself to be Black? [ and .hhh] to >ME: it’s a 17 B [ Really ] 18 D JOKE< because I think (.7) we:ll >all this TI:ME right?< in a way my Blackness is 19 defined by white people be[ cause ] as long as white people call me: a 20 B [ Mhm ] 21 D BLACK bastard = 22 B =Then [you a:re aren’t you?] 23 D [ THEN I ] KNO:W that I must be Black then= 24 B =Ab:so:lu:tely (1.0) 25 D As far as I’m concerned MY: guideline has always been >if you’re NOT 26 WHITE (.6)[ you’re Black] 27 B [You’re Black] The extract begins with Bianca and Dana agreeing that for whiteness Blackness is undifferentiated: we have no gender, no disability, no sexuality because unlike white people we are not in ‘compartments [...] our Blackness is integral to our wholeness’ (lines 1-11). Dana then begins a turn which is her positioning of both of the speakers as being placed outside of Blackness (line 13) with ‘or when we’re allowed to be Black’ because their Tight skin’ has been constructed within Blackness to exclude them from its tightly drawn boundaries. Dana then reflexively translates this through a recounting of her experience since she has been in London of being asked if she sees herself as Black and goes on to critique this by placing it as a bad joke (lines 13-16). On lines 18-26 she repositions herself within Blackness with agreements from Bianca because of her Blackness being defined by white people ‘in a way’ (that is, partially). Dana then is left with one simple guideline that if you are not white you are Black to which Bianca agrees with her collaborative completion ‘you’re Black’ (line 27). A racializing bodily schema is produced here based on the certainty of the Black home irrespective of one’s shade because of the exclusion from whiteness. Women use translation as reflexivity to look at and comment on their positioning by monologic discourses before they reposition themselves outside of the racialized gender regime. In example 5.2, Laura spoke back to discourses of ‘the Black same’ which emanate from Blackness as do Dana and Bianca above. In example 5.1 we saw the other facet of an-other Blackness. That is, a speaking back to whiteness from within the boundaries of Blackness. This speaking back does keep the essentialism of racialized bodily schema in but repeats it differently. Racialized bodily schema can therefore be a location from which hybridity can emerge.

Racialized bodily schema and hybridity Racialized bodily schema means that for Black women both master narratives, whiteness and Blackness, provide the raw material for double consciousness and multiple identifications. In Signs Taken for Wonders Bhabha (1994 f, pp. 114-115)

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states ‘colonial hybridity is not a problem of genealogy or identity between two different cultures’. Two contradictory knowledges about identity exist within the colonized based on an idea of ‘where I’m from’ (‘takes reality into account’) and ‘where I’m at’ (‘replaces reality with a product of desire’). These contradictory knowledges become active in the space of hybridity so that there is no ‘originary’ (Bhabha, 1990, p. 210). The two contradictory knowledges of which Bhabha speaks are ‘roots’ and ‘routes’ (Gilroy, 1995) such that for Bhabha (1990, p. 211) ‘all forms of culture are continually in a process of hybridity’ and all positions within this process are partial. In the extracts that we have looked at above we have women re-routing their identifications through the racialized bodily schema emanating from Blackness and whiteness. They provide us with gendered readings of the essentialism of ‘race’ as they continuously produce ‘originary Black womanhood’, even while they simultaneously re-produce it differently. Their translations of identification discourses, ‘the originary’, provide us with fleeting moments where women use essentialism to unveil and transform the hegemony of ‘race’ and racism. Winant (1994, p. 29) looks at racism as a discourse and a practice based on ‘race as hegemony’ in which: opposition and difference are not repressed, excluded or silenced (at least not primarily). Rather, they are inserted, often after a suitable modification, within a ‘modem’ (or perhaps ‘post-modem’) social order. Hegemony is therefore oxymoronic: it involves a splitting or doubling of opposition which simultaneously wins and loses, gains entrance into the ‘halls of power’ and is co-opted, ‘crosses over’ into mainstream culture and is deprived of its critical content. Critique is co-opted but not before it produces a momentary rupture in the Unitarian discourse on ‘the Black woman’. This makes it possible to see the colonized as not being in a fixed position as the passive object of the colonial gaze, but as being one who engages in evasions and sly civilities through refusing to satisfy the demands of the colonizer’s narrative (Parry, 1995, p. 41). By ‘colonizer’s’ here I mean both master narratives, Blackness and whiteness. Sly civilities reiterate a different knowledge of identities, a different positioning in terms of identifications. In example 5.2 for instance, Laura locates herself above within Blackness so that subversion emerged in the space offered by hybridity as a position of speaking back to domination. Bhabha (1996b) takes up this view in Culture’s In-Between in which he sees hybridization as a counter-strategy to colonial hegemony. This counter-strategy leads to the development of ‘interstitial agency’. Interstitial agency does not seek cultural supremacy, sovereignty, assimilation, or collaboration. Rather, hybrid agencies deploy: the partial culture from which they emerge to construct visions of community, and versions of historic memory, that give narrative form to the minority positions

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they occupy; the outside of the inside: the part of the whole (Bhabha, 1996b, p. 58).

That is, hybrid agency is translating and re-versioning identification discourses. ‘Black woman’ as identification can then be spoken against racialized bodily schema and through racializing bodily schema within the interstices produced by gendered readings ‘against the grain’ of ‘race’. This is how interstitial agency emerges in the talk.

Interstitial agency, gendered readings and translation In this anti-essentialist moment ‘“roots” has given way to “routes”, with metaphors like “diaspora” challenging fixed, essentialised identities’ (Hall, 1995 cited in Pile and Thrift, 1995, p. 10). Diasporic individuals construct new kinds of cultural identity by drawing on more than one cultural repertoire as Sheryl does below. Sheryl and John perform a separation from and rejection of Englishness next in terms of the politics of naming. In a discussion about what people would feel comfortable calling themselves and why this is the case they translate discourses of ‘English’ and ‘British’ as being more or less racist before Sheryl chooses the space of distance from these appellations. The positioning segment of the interaction is at lines 1-8 in which Sheryl and John deny ‘English as a description’ for themselves because it has too many ‘racist connotations’. John then admits to preferring British and Sheryl uses British only as a description of nationality. John agrees with this before Sheryl’s translation as reflexivity sequence on line 10 with which he also agrees. They both then would not use British as a description for themselves. The rejection of both British and English is therefore complete. Example 5.4 Ch, J and Sh Tape 1 Side B: 138-139 >1 Ch I WOULDN’T NOW like-1 wouldn’t ever describe °myself as English0,= 2 J =Uhuh I DON’T-1 DON’T DESCRIBE MYSELF AS ENGLISH EITHER because for me: it carries too much a:hm [RA:CIST] 3 Ch [ Yes: ] 4 J CONNATATIONS to for me: right, [a:hm ] ah’m I-1 don’t know, I prefer 5 Sh [Mhm ] 5 J BRITISH: [ to be ] honest ( indecipherable ) 6 Ch [British British] I use it a:hm as a- in terms of (.4) officially it’s my 7 nationality,= 8 J =[Mhm ] that’s it yeah ahm= 9 Sh [Mhm ] >10 Ch But it’s not like I would [ (.) ] choose it as a description for myself 11 J [No:]

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Further on in the same conversation (example 5.4a), after giving examples of when British as a nationality would be appropriate, Sheryl repositions herself as Black. This location is based on her claims to Antigua, the Caribbean and a connectedness to the African diaspora and ‘other [..] Black people as well’. This connection is made because as she says ‘I do want to distance myself from what I see as white British people’. A part of this distancing is a refusal to use British’ or to use it ‘very reluctantly’ (line 12 onwards below). Example 5.4a Ch. J and Sh Tape 1 Side B: 139 >12 Ch It’s not just that I see myself (.) as Antiguan [.hhh I] see myself 13 Sh [Mhm ] 14 Ch very much as connected to people who: are of Caribbean origins [and to 15 Sh [°I 16 Ch people] of African descent= 17 Sh know0] =Mhm= 18 Ch =globally= 19 Sh =Mhm= 20 Ch =and other you know Black people as well °I just feel° I DON’T KNO:W 21 I just (1.1) BRITISH: is just (.7) I suppose (.) in a sense mainly because 22 I do-1 do want to DI:STANCE myself from what I see: as .hhh white 23 British people °I refuse to use British0 you know,= 24 Sh =Mhm= 25 Ch =and: I DON’T really (1.2) I don’t know,= 26 Sh =Mhm= 27 Ch =but I use British very reluctantly When I asked her why she would not use English then her response continued on the theme (see example 5.4b below) of making herself other. Now, though she began to talk about this in terms of why this is a necessary thing to do as a Black woman within Britain, as ‘if people seek to exclude you after a while do you really want, you know what I mean, do you really want to be part of them anyway?’ (line 28). This is her positioning of herself within the discourse of racism and itis through this that she continues to show her rejection of whiteness. Her translation as reflexivity sequence at line 31 is an answer to her question of ‘no’ because she in fact doesn’t want to be like English people anyway. She then repositions herself as someone who’s ‘reached that stage where I’m not striving for that in fact I’d seek to distance myself I think I’d make myself more different if I can’ (lines 3440). This striving for distance from whiteness and making herself more different are important aspects of rejecting whiteness and producing otherness by choosing the place of stranger. Making oneself other is connected to the rejection of a whiteness within which one is the other, as in the colonial context spoken about by Bhabha and Fanon.

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Example 5.4b Ch, J and Sh Tape 1 Side B: 139-14 >28 Ch It’s like what John is saying it’s like in terms of IF people seek to 29 exclude you after a while DO YOU REALLY WANT [you know 30 J [ Mhm ] >31 Ch what I mean,] DO YOU REALLY WANT TO BE PART OF THEM?[({.) ] 32 Sh [Mhm] 33 Ch ANYWAY? (.) NO:: I’ve reached that-1 don’t wa:nt to be: (.4) °right, I’m >34 not English0 fine I’m not English [I don’t] want to be: like you anyway 35 Sh [ Mhm] 36 Ch you know I’ve reached that sta:ge °where= 37 Sh =Mhm= 38 Ch = I’m not striving for that,0 [ in fact ] I’d seek to distance myself I think I’d 39 Sh [ Mhm ] 40 Ch make myself you know a bit ((*mo:re different if I can,)) From a postcolonial perspective, Sheryl and the other speakers would be seen as translated people who live with and speak from difference within the interstitial spaces of the Black diaspora (Bhabha, 1994; Gilroy, 1993a). I have said that speakers translate from identification discourses in order to construct hybrid identifications. Are there two incommensurable meanings of translation at work here? What is translation then? How does it relate to agency? In what way is it a part of gendered readings of ‘race’? Stuart Hall (1995) sees translation as a process of cultural change where going from one space to another, for example, means that cultural practice becomes translated, becomes different from what it once was because of the impact of the new space and time. For Bhabha (1990, p. 210) ‘cultures are always subject to intrinsic forms of translation’ as people act to objectify cultural meaning. Further: [..] translation is also a way of imitating, but in a mischievous, displacing senseimitating an original in such a way that the priority of the original is not reinforced but by the very fact that it can be simulated, copied, transferred, transformed, made into a simulacrum and so on: the ‘original’ is never finished or complete in itself. The ‘originary’ is always open to translation so that it can never be said to have a totalised prior moment of being or meaning - an essence (Bhabha, 1990, p.

210).

As the act of translation negates the essentialism of an originary culture, then culture itself is continually in a process of hybridity defined as ‘the “third space” which enables other positions to emerge [..] [that] displaces the histories that constitute it, and sets up new structures of authority, new political initiatives which are inadequately understood through received wisdom’ (Bhabha, 1990, p. 211). Like a translation, hybridity bears the traces of the feelings and practices of other meanings and discourses which inform it, without giving them the authority of being prior in the sense of being original. ‘The process of cultural hybridity gives rise to something different, something new and unrecognisable, a new era of negotiation of meaning and representation’ (Bhabha, 1990, p. 211). It is important

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to look carefully at these arguments as Bhabha’s anti-essentialism, whilst denying the originary, must have some recourse to a reification of what came before, in order to make claims such as new identities are constructed drawing on different cultural repertoires. Or, that they are multiply constructed drawing on different practices and discourses. Or, that something is new and unrecognizable. Otherwise, how could ‘new’, ‘multiple’ and ‘different’ be conceptualized? We are dealing with more than a trace of feelings, practices, meanings and discourses as the extracts show us. We are dealing with an essentialism which Pnina Werbner (1997b, p. 228) describes as being: [...] to impute a fundamental, basic, absolutely necessary constitutive quality to a person, social category, ethnic group, religious community, or nation. It is to posit falsely a timeless continuity, a discreteness or boundedness in space, and an organic unity. It is to imply an eternal sameness and external difference or otherness [..] essentialism is a performative act.

Essentialism is a performative act as it posits falsely a timeless continuity which takes us back to Bhabha’s view that ‘people act to objectify cultural meaning’ and what this could mean in terms of ‘received wisdom’. Received wisdom implies the idea of more than just anteriority. It invokes the idea of ‘tradition’. Tradition arises when people act on the anterior in order to ‘assert the close kinship of cultural forms and practices generated from the irrepressible diversity of Black experience’ (Gilroy, 1993b, p. 187). Translation then ceases to be viable in Bhabha’s terms of producing culture as simulacra in a mischievous displacing sense. This is the case as tradition is invoked to underscore the historical continuities that make the notion of a distinctive self-conscious Black culture plausible (Gilroy, 1993b, p. 188). Further, the idea of tradition asserts the legitimacy of a Black political culture vis-a-vis white supremacy’s discourse on ‘the other’ (Gilroy, 1993b, p. 202). What is also asserted is ‘the discourse of the same - a homology - which co-existing with its more recognizably political counterpart helps to fix and stabilize the boundaries of the closed racial community’ in the present (Gilroy, 1993b, p. 202). So, within the present, tradition works to construct an essentialist originary in terms of the political and cultural discourses of ‘the other’ and ‘the same’. Like Sheryl above, Paul Gilroy (1993b, pp. 1-2) reminds us of the continuance of such an origin within contexts in which Black people have been racialized, when he says: The contemporary Black English, like the Anglo-Afficans of earlier generations and perhaps, like all Blacks in the West, stand between (at least) two great cultural assemblages [..] At present they remain locked symbolically in an antagonistic relationship marked out by the symbolism of colours [..] Black and white. These colours support a specific rhetoric [..] of nationality and national belonging as well as the languages o f ‘race’ and ethnic identity.

The languages of ‘race’, ethnicity and belonging lead us to the cultural critic Avtar Brah’s (1992, p. 142) useful question, ‘how is the link between social and psychic reality to be theorized?’

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I ughwant to look at this question first through binarism and then thro translation. The logocentric system of knowledge within an essentialist Black originary hides differences within the Black same and conceals the power structures that keep the hierarchical relations of Black same/Black other intact. Through some of its binarisms highlighted by women so far, for example, darkskinned/light-skinned, political consciousness/assimilation to whiteness, the centre and the margin of Blackness as a homology has been shown. Such binarism works to reduce the possibilities for difference so that this ‘stasis of meaning, regulates and disciplines the emergence of new identities’ as margins are established (Rutherford, 1990, p. 22). The margin marks what the centre lacks and what it needs to confirm its identity, so that even in its non-identity the margin is an integral part of the centre. The Black same expels its anxieties onto the Black other filling it with the antithesis of its identity, while the Black other mirrors what is familiar to the Black same. However, as a supplement to the Black same the Black other threatens to deconstruct its hegemonic subjectivities and discourses so that even ‘as difference is pathologised and refused legitimacy, new terms and new identities are produced on the margins’ (Rutherford, 1990, p. 22) through translation. Taking the point of view that Black women’s identities are texts of social practice makes us see translation as a process in which individuals engage in applying and critiquing identity discourses. Translation, therefore, assumes centrality in this account as a way of describing a two-fold process in terms of the resolution of discourses of the self and the social. In this process essentialism cannot be denied. The first aspect of the process is, how discourses and practices position us as social subjects of particular discourses. The second is, the process by which women interact reflexively with discourses in order to identify with these subject positions or not. This two-fold process is perhaps best captured in the words of Walter Benjamin (1970, p. 78) who writes on translation: Fragments of a vessel which are to be glued together must match one another in the smallest details although they need not be like one another. In the same way a translation, instead of resembling the meaning of the original, must lovingly and in detail incorporate the original mode of signification, thus making the original and the translation recognizable as fragments of a greater language, just as fragments are part of a vessel.

Translation thus contains within itself similitude and difference, the presence of alterity within the ‘I’, the discourses of the ‘we’ in any ‘I’ that is constructed: racialized and racializing bodily schema as fragments of claims to a Black woman authenticity.

Translation, authenticity and difference For Foucault (1984c, p. 351) from the idea that the self is not given to us, there is ‘only one practical consequence: we have to create ourselves as a work of art’. This process is not about liberating a true or essential inner nature. It is rather about

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seeing one’s life and identity as a process of self-creation and open to change and re-creation (McNay, 1996, pp. 146-148). He places an ethics of the self within the context of culturally determined notions of identity: a regulatory ideal. Identities comprise both freedoms and constraints in which ‘the boundaries of identity can be conceived of as the recognition of constraints and the interplay between their aperture and closure’ (Melucci, 1997, p. 65). ‘The boundaries of identity’ points to the idea that some origin remains. The talk itself through its use of racialized bodily schema in the making of identities brings to mind an ‘understanding of performativity not as the act by which a subject brings into being what she/he names, but, rather, that reiterative power of discourse to produce the phenomena that it regulates and constrains’ (Butler, 1993, p. 2). Blackness is such a discourse, which whether from within the Black communities in Britain or without facilitates certain Black identifications and disallows others. Identifications are regulated practices that are given meaning by individual acts of translation in the process of identification/dis-identification. To say that regulated practices are given meaning by speakers also entails the second meaning of performativity, in which a subject brings into being what they name. This is part of racializing bodily schema. It implicates translation in terms of how subjects ‘fashion, stylize, produce and “perform” these positions, and why they never do so completely, for once and all time, and some never do, or are in a constant agonistic process of struggling with, resisting, negotiating and accommodating the normative rules with which they confront and regulate themselves’ (Hall, 1996a, p. 14). This reminds us that translation is a location of representation and power in postcolonial contexts. Here hegemonic translation forms subjects and brings into being particular versions of the postcolonized through its focus on ‘reality’ as something un-problematically ‘out there’. Within hegemonic translation representation is seen to provide direct, unmediated access to reality; and, knowledge is a representation of reality (Niranjana, 1992, p. 2). The postcolonized are contained, postcolonized culture is fixed and hegemonic versions of the other are constructed. Translation works in the postcolonial moment to construct ‘the Black woman’: to write practices of subjectification. However, ‘translation as reflexivity’ as I call it, organizes identity across time and space synchronically (who am I at this moment?) and in time (who am I compared with yesterday or tomorrow, compared with memory or projection?) in order to produce an ongoing story of the self. In linking time and space in this way interactants in the extracts speak themselves as the same across time and space. By speaking themselves as Black women, they negotiate discourses of Black womanhood as ‘race’, culture, politics and community. This takes as a point of departure that we are still who we used to be as Black identified women and that this self is always ours as a site of anchorage. Our site of anchorage is also presented as the only choice to make within the British context in which we are constructed as racialized others. A Black woman ‘same’ is necessary if we are to become subjects even as we negotiate difference from this as a necessity. In the examples interactants present us with some aspects of a Black regulatory ideal in terms of their notion of a Black woman ‘same’, as they speak about

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struggles for Blackness. The Black regulatory ideal emerges in interactions in which individuals show themselves as authentically Black. Authenticity is not that view which says that we have to be ourselves in order to be authentic. Rather, authenticity is more about the kinds of selves that are allowed to emerge through the regulatory ideal of the racialized bodily schema of Black womanhood. Speakers’ claims to Black authenticity are visible within the text, as for Foucault (1984d, p. 112) ‘the text always contains a certain number of signs referring to the author’. Authenticity is not performed in the extracts by saying ‘I am a real Black woman’. That is, producing a finished text to be read or abstracted with a fixed representation (Stewart, 1996). Rather, Black womanhood as a discourse is reflexively translated in terms of a ‘politics of skin’, using signifiers such as ‘race’, culture and anti-racist politics to demonstrate the authenticity of the speaker. This is the interpretive space of authenticity that is negotiated by speakers as they show who they are by showing who they are not. Who they are not is the location within which the difference of racializing bodily schema emerges. Women are at one and the same time visible and invisible in the text ‘creating a space into which the [..] subject constantly disappears’ (Foucault, 1984d, p. 102). This space makes possible: [..] an-Other set of choices. In this critical thirding the original binary choice is not dismissed entirely but is subjected to a creative process of restructuring that draws selectively and strategically from the two opposing categories to open new alternatives (Soja, 1996, p. 5).

Such critical thirding neatly explains what is meant by translation and the racializing bodily schema emerging from it. Through translation as a critical thirding hybridity keeps essentialism in. Hybridity becomes a site of identifications that draws on the two opposing categories Black/Black and white/Black to open new alternatives. So, while being formed according to the meaning of the original, these alternatives are now different. Indeed, ‘no translation would be possible if in its ultimate essence it strove for likeness to the original [..] in its afterlife - which could not be called that if it were not a transformation and a renewal of something living - the original undergoes a change’ (Benjamin, 1970, p. 73). The idea that change is involved in an ‘original,’ that is in a Black ‘same’, makes us also look at translation as temporal and spatial. For Barbara Adam (1990, pp. 142-147): Past and future can only be lived, experienced, related to, interpreted, sought out, captured, recaptured, or preserved in the present [..] the contemporary reliving is always inclusive of the intervening years [..] these years are fundamentally implicated and resonate through the experience. The relived experience is different because of it [..] The past is reconstituted in the present as Mead (1959) asserts because each moment is recreated, reselected and reinterpreted, preserved and evoked afresh in the light of new knowledge. This makes the past revocable [.. ] We are shown to relive the past and to learn from it, to use it for future action and to make a puzzling present manageable, for creating reality and for changing it, for legitimating existing practices and for personal and social control and power

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Stories of past experiences are also stories of the present and the future, shaped and reshaped in the telling. Stories, though, are as intrinsically and revealingly spatial as they are temporal and social (Soja, 1996, p. 7). The previous extracts and those below make us see translation as ‘a means of bracketing time-space by coupling instantaneity and deferral, presence and absence’ (Giddens, 1991a, p. 25). Translation then is about dis-embedding, ‘the “lifting out” of social relations from local contexts of interaction and their restructuring across time and space’ (Giddens, 1991a, p. 21). So, in sum, translation as a process in talk can be seen to be a ‘mode of insertion into time and space’ (Giddens, 1991a, p. 20) in which there is a reflexive appraisal of identifications in the light of continual inputs of knowledge affecting the actions of individuals and groups. Racialized and racializing bodily schema are carried across time and space through the reflexive process, translation. Anthony Giddens (1991b, p. 33) in The Consequences of Modernity asserts: in the context of a post-traditional order, the self becomes a reflexive project [..] the altered self has to be explored and constructed as part of a reflexive process of connecting personal and social change [..] The process of ‘reaching’ back into one’s early experiences [..] is precisely part of a reflexive mobilising of selfidentity.

This reflexive process of connecting personal and social change is what is at the heart of translation. As such it implies practices of the self at the level of critical self- awareness. In this self awareness the ‘struggle of being against non-being’ is the perpetual task of the individual, not just to ‘accept’ reality, but to create ontological reference points as an integral aspect of ‘going on’ in the contexts of day-to-day life (Giddens, 1991b, p. 48). One such ontological reference point being life stories in which identity is routinely created and sustained in the reflexive activities of the individual (Giddens, 1991b, p. 51). Self-identity is, therefore, the self as reflexively understood by the person in terms of her biography with continuity across time and space also being subjected to reflexive interpretation (Giddens, 1991b, p. 53). A person’s identity is to be found in the capacity to keep a particular story going. However, the individual’s biography cannot be wholly fictive but must continually integrate events which occur in the external world, and sort them into the ongoing ‘story’ of the self (Giddens, 1991a, p. 54). The individual must integrate information deriving from a diversity of mediated experiences with local involvements in such a way as to connect future projects with past experiences in a reasonably coherent fashion (Giddens, 1991a, p. 215). In this way then, there is more of a transformation which occurs because of reflexivity. Translation as a reflexive process is also, therefore, about routines of alteration that people make to their identities. To be reflexive is to have a sense of diverse paths and patterns that are evaluated so as to arrive at different outcomes. Reflexivity is about the

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transformations in thinking about oneself or one’s actions in the past action or state, in a present telling in which social memory is creatively constructed and reconstructed interactionally. The clinical psychologist Alberto Melucci (1997, p. 63) highlights the agonistic struggle that this interactional reconstruction entails when he asserts the importance of the multiplicity that derives from uncertainty and the paradox of choice. For him: Our self simultaneously comprises a number of components, and the deepestseated aspect of uncertainty is structured precisely by our difficulty in identifying with only one of them, and by the requirement that we should do so in order to act. Hence, not only is it difficult to identify ourselves over time and to state that we still are who we used to be; also - and perhaps even more so - it is hard to decide at any particular moment which self among many is ours.

However, we can see from the extracts that women make it clear which self among many is theirs. In the interactions translation as reflexivity is a strategy of resistance that women use to subvert the monologic discourse of ‘the Black woman’. Translation therefore demands a re-reading of discourses of identification in order to make sense of how subjectification operates from a ‘partial’ perspective. The concern is with micro practices of translation that disturb the always already known of Black womanhood, that displaces its discursive conditions of dominance through the performance of Black skins, Black masks. Within this performance hybridity ensures that: other ‘denied’ knowledges enter upon the dominant discourse and estrange the basis of its authority - its rules of recognition. The threat from the hybrid is finally uncontainable because it breaks down the symmetry and duality of self/other, inside/outside [..] as it inserts its insurgent interrogations in the interstices (Bhabha, 1994f, pp. 114-117).

In Laura’s talk in example 5.5, we see such a breaking down of the duality of self/other while re-making this boundary differently through her interrogations of white/Black as the authoritative binary. Prior to the talk presented here she has been speaking about her experiences of visiting the Caribbean and New York where people did not think that she was ‘mixed race’, just light skinned, and did not place her outside of Blackness because of this. She saw this as being different from her experiences of not being considered Black in Britain. The extract shows that her embodiment as a light-skinned Black woman, as for Bianca and Dana in example 5.3, inserts difference within Blackness itself. She thus transforms the rules of recognition of Blackness while making white supremacy visible as someone who stands outside of it. Example 5.5 Tape I Side A LF: 31-34 1 L I’m not an ((Aapologist for white people))= 2 Sh =Mhm mhm =

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3 L =You kno:w what I mean?= 4 Sh = Mhm = 5 L =And some people say how can you: be how g- how can you: sa:y some of the 6 things you sa:y Laura because when I see: injustice and stuff like that I 7 spe:ak about it= 8 Sh =Mhm= 9 L=People say well how can y- AND I TALK VERY STRONGLY [ you ] krowl 10 Sh [Mhm] >11 L DON’T mince my words and stuff and they say to me .hhh we:ll how can you >12 ta:lk like that when you’ve got a white pa:rent I said having a white pa:rent >13 doesn’t change my reality [ I ] said I’m a Black woman = 14 Sh [Yeah] =That’s right= >15 L =1 said I: could be trav-1 could travel with my mother to Spain next week 16 Shirley and we get to Customs they’ll let her through= 17 Sh =Ehm= 18 L =And they’ll stop me= 19 Sh =Ehm= 20 L =Because statistics show that one in s- seventy Black people they stop one in 21 two thousand Caucasians= 22 Sh =Mhm= >23 L =You know THE FIGURES. hhh SO: HAVING A WHITE MOTHER doesn’t >24 protect me [ in ] this society [ SO: ] I might as well just own up to the fact= 25Sh [((-hhh))] 26 =°Just be you woman,°= >27 L =Just be ME:= 28 Sh =Mhm= 29 L =And IDENTIFY WITH BEING BLACK BECAUSE [.hhh ] if I: see 30 Sh [Mhm] 31 L myself as white I’m going to have a re:ally big PROBLEM,= 32 Sh =Mhm= 33 L ^Because people aren’t going to be able to see me as white?= The discourse being used and established above is that of an unambiguous positioning within Blackness irrespective of kinship because at the everyday level, colour counts. Laura begins by saying of herself T ’m not an apologist for white people’ (line 1). This character reference then forms the basis for her identity positionings as the conversation progresses. She speaks of herself as being positioned - addressed as ‘the mixed race same’ - by ‘some people’ who ask her ‘how can you say some of the things you say Laura [..] how can you talk like that when you’ve got a white parent’ (lines 5-12). Laura then goes into a translation as reflexivity sequence which she presents as a reply to this positioning ‘having a white parent doesn’t change my reality’ (lines 12 and 13). My overlapping agreement follows, as Laura continues to talk. She then repositions herself when she speaks back in opposition to being positioned because of her kinship through

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the cliche ‘I am a Black woman’ (line 13). I produce an agreement ‘that’s right’ and Laura follows this with an example to support her re-positioning (lines 15-23), before reiterating the necessity to claim Blackness irrespective of kinship (lines 2433) because of the impact of ‘race’ on her daily life. The example used by Laura to support her identity re-positioning as a Black woman is based around the treatment of Black people at die hands of the state in terms of immigration. So, this is about her being positioned as Black by the State as she would also face this treatment irrespective of her white mother. This latter is shown when Laura then begins a summing up to her claim to Blackness based on her recycling of her previous theme that ‘having a white parent doesn’t change my reality’, this time saying ‘so having a white mother doesn’t protect me in this society’ (lines 22-24). In this way she repeats the earlier translation as reflexivity sequence. This gets a laugh in agreement from me. Laura states what the upshot of her positioning by the state is in terms of her own identification, ‘so I might as well just own up to the fact’ of Blackness as it is a necessary choice given the reality of the quotidian experience of Blackness. I agree with this in my latched comment ‘Just be you woman’, to which Laura agrees with a recycling of my turn ‘Just be me’. Laura then proceeds to say what just being me is all about and so continues her repositioning sequence. That is, identifying with being Black, as after all colour counts and if she sees herself as white then she will ‘have a really big problem’. In seeing colour as being significant for ‘mixed race’ people as a marker of ‘race’ Laura uses essentialism in the form of racializing bodily schema to get to a hybrid positioning. She does this in opposition to those people who think through a racialized bodily schema and say that it is strange that she can speak out so forcefully against injustice as a ‘mixed race’ woman. Her hybrid identity as a Black ‘mixed race’ woman then inserts its insurgent interrogations in the interstices of the Black woman ‘same’. As we can see, the agentic micro-practice of translation in talk re-inscribes ‘the Black woman’ as a supplement (Derrida, 1981, p. 43), an ‘undecidable’. That is, as something which resists binaries ‘without ever constituting a third term’ (Derrida, 1981, p. 43) once and for all. The non-constitution of a third term once and for all is apparent in talk as women identify with and through that object of otherness ‘the Black woman’. They fleetingly produce an-other Black woman in the hybrid moment as they resist the racialized bodily schema of Black masks and produce the racializing bodily schema of an-other Black skin. So far I have privileged ‘speaking back’ to the look from the place of the other, as productive of hybrid identities. Does this remove Black women from the position of the ‘pure subaltern’ spoken about by Spivak?

Speaking back, subalternity and hybridity In common with Fanon and Bhabha, it is also Gayatri Spivak’s view that imperialism was a subject constituting project. In ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ (1995a), she highlights the relationship of both the imperialist and indigenous patriarchal systems in the class and gender oppression of the subaltern. On the one hand subalternity means that there is no access to social mobility. On the other

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subaltemity entails that only certain types of speaking will be heard, will be interpreted and given meaning by these hegemonic systems. According to the post­ colonial critic Benita Parry (1995, p. 36), from the discourse of sati ‘Spivak derives large general statements on women’s subject constitution/object formation in which the subaltern woman is conceived as a homogeneous and coherent strategy’ - a voiceless woman. In my view, what Spivak was pointing out, was that women’s speaking could only be heard, only be ‘meaninged’ within the patriarchal and imperialist discursive regimes. Even the suicide of Bhuvaneswari Bhaduri4 was read, not as that of a militant insurgent, but as that of a woman tainted by illegitimate love. Spivak still argues that the subaltern cannot speak - with all the implications this has for a politics of resistance or liberation, a speaking back to the eye of surveillance that is central to hybrid identities. Indeed, this view was repeated in Echo (1993a, p. 188). In her own separate enclosure, the subaltern still cannot speak as the subject of a speech act. Spivak’s definitions of speaking and subaltern, so central here, become clearer in Subaltern Talk: Interview with the Editors (29 October 1993) (Spivak, 1996). For Spivak, a subaltern is one who is denied entry to the lines of social mobility and prospects of militant insurgency. By ‘speaking’, she is not concerned with actual utterances but with a transaction between the speaker and listener. So, “‘the subaltern cannot speak” means that even when the subaltern makes an effort to the death to speak, she is not able to be heard, and speaking and hearing complete the speech act’ (Spivak, 1996, p. 292). This separates the ‘not speaking’ from the general condition of subaltemity in which speech acts exchanged are only accessible to oral history, ‘or a discursive formation different from the investigation’ (Spivak, 1996, p. 306). ‘Not speaking’, then, is the case of ‘the pure subaltern’ (Spivak, 1996, p. 289) because the effort to represent oneself against the grain of official institutional structures of representation is not acknowledged, so that identities constructed as counter-discursive remain outside of social readings within representation. Difference though does emerge and is encoded in oral history. Sarah shows us this in example 1 above when she says that even when she asserts her identity positioning as a Black woman, she is still questioned on the legitimacy of this location because institutionally she is genderless whilst being unequivocally ‘raced’. Her re-location of herself as a Black woman has been encoded in oral history here. In Subaltern Studies - Deconstructing Historiography Spivak (1993c) looks at subaltern subject-effects. A subject-effect is conceptualized as the effect of an operating subject that is part of an immense, discontinuous network or ‘text’ of strands - for example, related to politics, ideology, history and sexuality. Different configurations and intersections (‘knottings’) of these strands determined 4 Bhuvaneswari Bhaduri’s suicide happened at the age of 16 or 17 when she hanged herself in her father’s apartment in North Calcutta in 1926. The suicide remained a mystery because as she was menstruating at the time it was clearly not a case of ‘illicit pregnancy’. A decade later the reason emerged. She had been a member of a group in the armed struggle for Indian independence. She had been asked to commit a political assassination and unable to do this, she killed herself.

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heterogeneously, although dependent on a myriad of circumstances, produce subject effects. The self is always, then, a production ‘rather than a ground’ (Spivak, 1993c, p. 222). This fits in with her ongoing critique of phonocentrism5 based on ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ However, in remembering to reiterate the issue of the complexity of the production of senses of the self, she enables the emergence of different subject effects, positions from which to speak identities, so that the speech act can be completed. Identification(s) and identities can be represented and recognized as in the extracts. Through her focus on the subaltern woman as insurgent, Spivak highlights the place of embodiment as a signifier of identity and the capacity for the representation of agency through embodiment. In the case of sati, or suicide, being a gendered body and being an immolated ‘once-a-body’ signifies the place of embodiment in determining spaces of the inscription of identity. Even when identity claims are made within an anti-imperialist framework agency does not necessarily follow ‘as identity claims are political manipulations of people who seem to share one characteristic and therefore it is a sort of roll-call concept’ (Spivak, 1996, p. 294). Not withstanding this critique the use of one characteristic, for example Black woman, to make identity claims as a part of a politics of liberation is about the use of strategic essentialism. It is an essentialism though, which I would argue is agentic as Laura showed us in example 5, when she speaks back to those discourses which position her as not Black because of her white kinship. The participants in this study are not ‘pure subalterns’ but are engaged in a constant struggle to insert hybrid difference into the Black woman ‘same’ within the diaspora. What the talk shows us is that hegemonic Black woman identities and subaltemity are important aspects of identifications. The hegemonic Black woman same has the power to allocate meaning whilst subaltemity is a space of contestation. Subaltemity is ‘the site not just of negated identity, but also for a constant negation of identity positions’ (Moreiras, 1999, p. 377). This is an important point to make especially with regard to the Black woman/Black women binary. It is important because what needs to be acknowledged is that within this binary Black womanhood also produces its subaltern subject effects, which have to be negated in order for difference to emerge. Rethinking hybridity with the subaltern in helps us to move beyond the white/Black colour line in order to be able to articulate resistance to hegemonic discourses as a whole. It also enables us to be able to articulate resistance as embodied as it allows the undecidable, Black woman, to be re-inscribed through racializing bodily schema in talk. What then of the ‘third space’, difference and diaspora?

5 For Spivak (1993c, p. 223) to ‘describe speech as the immediate expression of “the self’ marks the site of a desire that is obliged to overlook the complexity of the production of (a) sense(s) of self. This highlights a central issue for this book’s dialogical performative take on hybridity. Like Spivak speech is not being seen to be the expression of the self. Rather identifications are seen to be performed in the negotiation of discursive positionings that arise in stories of lived experiences.

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‘The third space’ of hybridity, difference and diaspora Drawing on Homi Bhabha’s (1990, 1994, 1996a and b) work and the words of Sarah, Sheryl, Laura and Dana makes us see hybrid identities as a counterhegemonic project. This brings subaltemity in so that we can go beyond hybridity to thinking in terms of Soja’s ‘critical thirding’, which moves past binaries while being imbricated by them. At the moment at which the sign Black woman attempts to become a generalized knowledge or a normalizing hegemonic practice, subaltern interstitial agency produced in the translation of gendered readings of ‘race’ leads to hybridity. The third space as a location of identification in talk allows the identity positioning of an-other Black woman to emerge. In both Spivak and Fanon we see references to the negative impact of essentialisms in the emergence of difference. In Fanon, negritude was the object of critique. This critique can also be seen to be extendable to Pan-Africanism and Afro-centricity with their essentialist notions of Blackness. These arose out of Black anti-racist struggle and still have currency today within Black British communities in terms of identifications and identities. However, the ‘fact is “black” [woman] has never been just there either. It has always been an unstable identity, psychically, culturally and politically. It too is a narrative, a story, a history. Something constructed, told, spoken, not simply found’ (Hall, 1987, p. 116). Such constructions lead to the emergence of new political identities and a new conception of ethnicity as a counter to the discourses of nationalism or national identity within post-war Britain. Black women are constructing identifications within w h ich ‘“black” is essentially a politically and culturally constructed category which cannot be grounded in a set of fixed transcultural/transcendental racial categories’ (Hall, 1992, p. 254). Instead Black must, as Sheryl shows above, include difference as positions within representation of what it means to be Black, British and woman simultaneously. Further, it is acknowledged that only ‘some of our identities are sometimes caught in that particular struggle’ (Hall, 1996b, p. 472). What we have here then are women who have been diasporized creating identities in the third space of hybridity. The point though is two-fold. First, since our ‘racial’ differences do not constitute all of what we are, we are always negotiating differences of gender, sexuality and class, for example. Second, these antagonisms refuse any simple reduction to each other. We are always in negotiation with a series of different positionalities and the identifications that they imply. We are always negotiating racialized bodily schema through translation to produce racializing ones. So ‘at the very moment when celebrated Euro-American cultural theorists have pronounced the collapse of “grand narratives” the expressive culture of Britain’s Black poor is dominated by the need to construct them as narratives of redemption and emancipation’ (Gilroy, 1993d, p. 42). That is, Black women are reconstructing narratives of origin and Blackness at the same time as negotiating the possibility of being within the space of Britain as for Sheryl above. Cynthia next shows us a part of this negotiation, a placing of herself somewhere else even given the pressures of assimilation. Prior to the talk in example 5.6, Cynthia has been speaking about not being

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treated like a colleague in the workplace. Here she shows us that there is a need to negotiate belonging when one’s place cannot be taken as a given. She relates this negotiation in terms of her ‘spirit not being here’. Like Sheryl above she explains this in terms of locating herself as a stranger (lines 1-4), someone who does not belong here. She boundaries off this location of herself with ‘do you know what I mean?’ before her translation as reflexivity sequence, where she translates this for me as being about feeling that she ‘should be somewhere else in other words’ (lines 6-7). Example 5.6 CaF Tape 2 Side A: 129-130 >1 2 3 4 5 >6 7

Ca Even though I’m living- it’s like I don’t kno:w (1.5) I just don’t (.5) FEE:L as though (1.0) I belong HERE (.3) Sh Mhm= Ca =Do you know wha:t I mean?= Sh =°M[hm ]° Ca [It’s ] like there’s so- it’s like there’s somewhere- like I should be somewhere- like I should be somewhere else in other words

Further on in the conversation she says that even though she has to admit that living here does have some ‘impact on you’ in terms of assimilation to ‘English ways’ she still ‘identifies’ herself as separate from ‘the whole English system’ and chooses not to ‘identify with them though’. She repositions herself in a space of otherness as someone who talks ‘how I want to talk dress how I want to dress and [..] I do what I want to do’ (lines 10 and 13). Following a (1.3) pause (line 15) she does concede though that living in the space of England does have some impact and that there is a possibility for assimilation to ‘some elements of it’. She reaffirms this point of view on line 18 after my continuer. There is a long (2.3) pause before my agreement with Cynthia’s point of view on assimilation. After her overlapped agreement with my turn she reiterates her identification as ‘separate [..] from the whole English system’. >8 Ca 9 Sh >10 Ca 11 Sh

I don’t identify with them though= =Mhm= =1 don’t me (.) I talk how I want to talk dress how I want to dress= =Mhm

12

( 1.0)

13 Ca And a:hm I do: what I want to do:= 14 Sh =Mhm= 15 Ca =°And that (.9) °but yeah° (1.3) but I think yeah living yeah living here 16 DOES have impact in a sense you do: take on some elements of °it°= 17 Sh =[°Mhm°] >18 Ca [ You ] do: 19 (2.3) 20 Sh Yeah you’re bound to rea[lly ] 21 Ca [Yeah]

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22 (1.3) >23 Ca °I don’t know0 [ I ] STILL identify myself as being separate though (.) 24 Sh [Mhm] 25 Ca from the whole English system The impact of ‘Black culture’ on white Britain has been well documented in, for example, Gilroy (1993e), Sebba (1993) and McRobbie (1996). What has been written about less is the reverse of this, that which is implicated by the very notion of identification. That is, the identification with aspects of the white other spoken about by Cynthia and Fanon. Fanon deals of course, with the internalization of oppression, with the wanting to be white, which Senna relates to hot-combing her hair and Janet to wearing jumpers on her head to simulate long straight hair, in chapter 3. However, we should look beyond the internalization of oppression to the (dis-) identification with Black culture and politics that we have also seen within women’s talk. This is also an important aspect of Black women’s identification as: If the oppressed is defined by its difference from the oppressor, such a difference is an essential component of the identity of the oppressed [..] in that case, the latter cannot assert its identity without asserting that of the oppressor as well (Sarup, 1996, p. 60).

Black women cannot assert their identification without the Black woman ‘same’. This is so as the construction of subjects in discourse and the exercise of power through discourse necessitates the articulation of racial and sexual difference (Bhabha, 1994g, p. 70). The oppressed are produced as ‘other’ but an other which is knowable and visible (Bhabha, 1994h, p. 71). This is made obvious by the extent to which ‘race’ and colour continue to have salience in the lives of Black women as is asserted by Laura in the next example. Before the extract which follows, Laura has been talking about the demise of Black culture and the fact that it now seems to be focused on rice and peas and chicken6 on Sunday and Carnival once a year. She then goes on to talk about being asked to do a presentation about the Black British experience and that she was not going to do a presentation on Caribbean culture which is what the Social Services Department was asking for. We join the conversation at the point at which she begins to talk about what she will talk about instead. Example 5.7- Tape 2 Side A LF: 62-63 1 L I’m sta:rting my presentation next week with a quote from Spike Lee (.6) 2 S Ye [ah ] >3 L [Whi]ch says the- the BIGGEST LIE EVER TOLD IS .hhh IT DOESN’T 4 MATTER WHAT CREED COLOUR OR NATIONALITY you are it’s the 5 person that you are that matters and if you do a good job [ .hhh ] you 6 S ' [Mhm] 6 Rice and peas and chicken is the stereotypical British Caribbean Sunday meal.

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7 L know blah blah blah and then it goes on to say .hhh BULLSHIT= 8 S =Mhm::= >9 L C O L O U R (.8) MATTERS: = >10 S =Mhm: it does, (.8) >11 L COLOUR (.8) I- RACE MATTERS:= 12 S =Mhm= 13 L =It’s EVERYTHING IT HAS EVERYTHING TO DO: WITH EVERYTHING= 14 S =Mhm= 15 L =.hhh and that’s how I’m going to start my:- my presentation next [week ] 16S [Oh right] 17 L .hhh because IT MATTERS= 18 S =Mhm= 19 L =IT SHAPES OUR WHO:LE LI:FE= 20 S =Mhm= 21 L =You kno:w what I mean?= 22 S =Mhm= >23 L .hhh and to me: (.8) AT THE END OF THE DAY YOU CAN HAVE ALL 24 YOUR VARIATIONS SHIRLEY BUT AT THE END OF THE DAY WHEN 25 YOU BRING IT TO THE BA:SE LINE= 26 S =Mhm= >27 L =It’s between °Black and whi:te°= >28 S =Y[ep ] 29 L [You] kno.w what I mean .hhh She uses the words of Spike Lee to show her point of view that ‘race’ and colour continue to be significant in terms of her Black experiences in that they shape our whole life. At line 101 agree that colour matters and again at line 28 but for the most part I produce ‘Mhm’s’ which could be taken to indicate a general agreement with Laura’s point of view. Laura produces the upshot of her argument at lines 23-27 in which she claims that irrespective of variations it invariably comes down to Black and white. That is the fundamental dichotomy which exists in ‘the social’ and which governs who it is possible to be. This is the double consciousness within which Black women live within the British context and that forms the resource for the identifications that they construct in talk. The racialization of skin continues to be salient in identifications even in this antiessentialist moment in academic theorizing. Racialization has always been part of the identifications of Black women. They identify with and through racialized and racializing bodily schemas and their others, reproducing their binaries whilst simultaneously unsettling them through translation.

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Conclusion I started from a position in which I situated hybridity as a speaking back to dominant discourses. I did this in order to develop an argument for moving beyond a hybridity dictated by the colour line and the argument developed within Cultural Studies of its perpetual flexibility. We see through the examples above that Black women’s identities cannot be thought divorced from a politics of skin in terms of racialized and racializing bodily schema. A politics of skin ensures that Black women’s hybrid identities are dialogical as speakers’ constant task is to translate identification discourses in talk. Translation is a critical thirding which is spatial, temporal and (re)structures identification discourses across space and time. It is the routines of alteration which women make to their identities and as such, translation demands a re-reading of discourses of identification. This demand disturbs the always already said of Black womanhood as Black women struggle for identities that are other than those which have been given to them. Through the use of speaking back and identity re-positioning, this struggle produces different, hybrid identities within the third space of talk. Hybridity thus becomes an everyday interactional phenomenon which unsettles the boundary of ‘the Black woman’. Hybrid identities though still rely on racialized bodily schema to be meaningful. Within interaction, ‘race’ and ‘identity’ are deconstructed and reassembled differently through the translation of the tropes of ‘community’, ‘culture’, ‘shade’, ‘belonging’ and ‘consciousness’. Through these tropes Black skin as an identity cipher is ‘queered’ as an-other Blackness emerges through gendered readings of ‘race’ in which authenticity is refigured. The next chapter continues to look at how authenticity is refigured through the exclusion of the conflictually other in terms of the abjection of ‘the voice of the other within’.

Chapter 6

Resisting Black Skin

Introduction The work of Bhabha (1994b and c), Gilroy (1993b), Hall (1992 and 1996a), Spivak (1995a) and Fanon (1986) all highlight the centrality of discourses and counter­ discourses in identifications. However, they do not attend to the place of abjection as such in this identification making. As said in Chapter 3, Black women’s gendered readings of ‘race’ in talk on lived experience makes it clear that discourses of Blackness which emanate from Black communities are savoir de gens but also simultaneously operate as a panopticon. Within this panopticon there are statements of ‘who is authentically Black’1 that act as the gaze which disciplines the possibility for the emergence of difference. This authenticity trope relates to biopower and its attendant govemmentality. Authenticity has to be abjected and transformed as we saw in the last chapter in order for an agentic other Black womanhood to emerge as Black skin is resisted. Activating agency to counter biopower links in to the necessity to account for the speaking subject through letting in the foci of co-being and addressivity (Holquist, 1991). In this chapter I continue to use talk from women to show how they construct themselves as radically other within stories of identification/disidentifkation with Blackness. They do this identification work by critiquing and thereby abjecting discourses of othering. They are not powerless in the face of the abjection of racism and chromatism but construct counter-discourses of Black womanhood. These range from the strategic essentialism of Black politics, to rejecting whiteness and deconstructing and claiming identities as African Caribbean diasporic women. Through this identity repositioning enabled by counter discourses, the women create new addressivities as they perform themselves as ‘the same Black woman but different’. As has been said previously, I take new addressivities to be hybrid identity positionings. This claim does two things analytically. First, it makes the experience of othering which comes from monologic discourses central to hybridity. Second, it shows these discourses as ‘the voice of the other within’. This voice contains within it a discursive positioning of the speakers as abject. However, speakers critique and in turn, abject this positioning before they perform a new addressivity for themselves. The process of a hybridity of the everyday in talk-in-interaction 1 By this I mean that it is the panopticon that is talked into being as there is a prevalence of talk in the data about who is ‘really Black’. This thus makes the whole community into a panopticon.

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enables us to notice again that hybrid identifications are dialogical and performative. At the level of the everyday we can also see the connection between govemmentality and dialogism in these identifications. I will focus here on extracts of talk which look at the impact of shade on women’s lives. Let us now turn to looking at the place of abjection in hybridity.

‘Skin’, abjection and otherness In what follows, Senna is talking about her experience of being on a bus with a driver who had deliberately nearly trapped her in the doors as she got on the bus. He had also refused to apologize, making her even angrier. We join her recollection of the event at the point at which she asks him for his number: Example A Sa, Je. Sh Tape 1 Side A: 83-84 1 Sa He st- he looked and said WHAT? what’s your number? and he started2 before- beforre he got to stop but instead of braking gently like he did he put 3 the brakes on really HA:RD so that EVERYBODY went LU:RCHING 4 FO.RWARDS [ RIGHT? INCLUDING] ME:: 5 Sh [((°What an idiot0 * )) ] 6 ( 1.0 ) 7 Je Mhm 8 (.6) 9 Sa HE DID IT ON PURPOSE OBVIOUSLY so I said ah:m WHAT’S YOUR >10 NUMBER? HE SAID OH GO SUCK ON A BANANA YOU NIGGER 11 (.9) 12 Sh REA:LLY? (.) 13 Sa °Ye:a:h:?° 14 (1.4) 15 Sa HE SAID IT QU- he said it LO:W but I could hear him it’s clear enough 16 (.8) 17 Sa I was just-1 was so ANGRY: before I th- before I would’ve thought no: 18 I’ll just report this I should’ve just DONE that 19 (.5) >20 Sa But I couldn’t I just slapped him I just TU:MPED him in his face= 21 Sh =Youknow?= >22 Sa =((Two years ago*)) this big odd woman I went WHAT BUFF2 ((and 23 just got off the bus*)) What does Senna reveal in her talk about Blackness as a position within Britain? A central aspect of looking for answers to this question is that in defining others according to our own criteria we also identify ourselves (Jenkins, 1996, p. 83). ‘Thus the categorisation of others is a resource upon which we draw in the 2

‘Buff is the punch she gave the driver.

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construction of our identities’ (Jenkins, 1996, p. 87). Senna reveals the power of a name, ‘nigger’, to exert white supremacy by making a Black woman feel all of the power to know and categorize her. This ‘always already known’ of the stereotype (Bhabha, 1994h) which she encounters springs from the knowledge base of the ideology of white supremacy. She is told to ‘go suck on a banana’ which relates to the white racist assumption that Black people are all from the jungle (line 10). Her adult status did not save her from this abuse, nor did it ensure that she got what she wanted. That is, the driver’s number so that she could complain about his behaviour. The driver at an individual level becomes the locus of the power/knowledge of white racist supremacy by making Senna other through naming. Senna in turn, though, acts against this othering by ‘tumping’3 him in the face before she got off the bus. She thereby asserts her position as an equal not an inferior and transgresses the boundaries prescribed for her by racist ideology (line 20 ). She narrates herself as someone embodied in opposition to whiteness and living in and with that opposition. Within this opposition that which is visible, her skin, her inscription o f Blackness, acquires significance in being and becoming a subject in opposition to a ‘white’ other. In this narration of the self she highlights for us the difficulty of being Black within a racialized context. That is that skin means that identification is always conflict ridden because of othering. As Calhoun (1994, pp. 20-21) rightly says: It is not just that others fail to see us for who we are sure we really are [..] We face problems of recognition because socially sustained discourses about who it is possible or appropriate or valuable to be inevitably shape the way we look at and constitute ourselves with varying degrees of agonism and tension.

Calhoun very accurately describes here the struggle with ‘the voice of the other within’ produced by racism. These are the socially sustained discourses with which speakers have to struggle to become subjects. One way in which this is performed in the conversations is to acknowledge one’s otherness while also making whiteness other. Senna does this when she repeats her naming as ‘nigger’ by the bus driver alongside her response to this. I have said before that individuals construct themselves as Black in opposition to whiteness. This is not particularly surprising or revelatory. There is though a very interesting process at work here in Senna’s talk. The first part of this process involves disavowal and the second is about establishing oneself as a Black subject. Taking example A again, Senna’s disavowal comes in terms of her reported response to the appellation ‘nigger’ and to the words ‘go suck on a banana’. She takes a stand for both herself and other Black people by punching the driver. Her action disavowed Black submission to the power/knowledge of white racist supremacy. This disavowal also enables her narration of herself to be interpreted as an expulsion of ‘the conflictually other’, that is, the position of nigger. It is here that Julia Kristeva’s (1982) seminal work on abjection becomes apposite. 3 Tumping means hitting hard.

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The abject for Kristeva (1982, p. 2) is an object which is radically excluded but which still challenges ‘its master’. Although it is something rejected it does not become excluded totally from the self but continues to disturb borders, positions, rules, as the in-between, the ambiguous. Abjection is a ‘danger to identity that comes from within’ (Kristeva, 1982, p. 71), a ‘[..] threat issued from the prohibitions that found the inner and outer borders in which and through which the speaking subject is constituted’ (Kristeva, 1982, p. 69). Abjection is a device of discriminations, of differences whose function is to protect the symbolic order from ‘dangerous identities’. It does this by inscribing limits on that which is abject because the abject cannot be totally excluded. It is through verbal communication, the word, that the abject is disclosed (Kristeva, 1982, p. 23). That which is ‘conflictually other’ - ‘the voice of the other within’ - is disclosed in talk on lived experience. These stories of quotidian experiences based on skin then, are abjection stories in which speakers expel ‘the voice of the other within’ in order to become subjects. In other words, in order to narrate myself as a Black woman subject there is a double movement in which: I expel myself, I spit myself out, I abject myself within the same motion through which ‘I’ claim to establish myself [..] it is that that they see that ‘I’ am in the process of becoming an other at the expense of my own death (Kristeva, 1982, p.

3). The ‘m yself that is expelled is the discursive positioning which makes, for example, Senna abject because of her racialized skin. This myself is the danger to Black women’s identity which comes from within. In the double motion of abjection and becoming subject the Black mask of racialized skin is removed revealing an-other Black skin below. Unlike Kristeva I do not claim that there is revulsion or creeping of the flesh. What I claim instead is that that which disturbs the borders of Black women’s self-narrativizations is expelled in interpersonal interaction. Women then like Senna, cease to experience the humiliation of aversive, avoiding or condescending behaviour, but instead speak against it. They critique these reported behaviours in order to keep the borders of their Black woman self firm. Abjection as an action of simultaneously expelling myself in order to become an-other is what is significant in terms of the place of abjection in a hybridity of the everyday. Abjection and becoming an-other are integral to the process of positioning, translation as reflexivity and repositioning, which I claim accounts for the construction of hybrid identifications in talk-in-interaction. In example 6.1 Laura shows us some of the abjection that ‘light skinned’ Black women face on a daily basis and her response to this.

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Example 6.1 Tape 1 Side A LF: 3 1 S What do you think Black identity is then? (.) 2 L Mhm= 3 S =You kno:w to you= 4 L =TO me:?= 5 S =Mhm= >6 L =To me: it’s about your- you see a lot of peiople say >7 Bla:ck identity is something you wea:r it’s the colour of your >8 skin and that is how you would imme:diately= 9 S =[ Mhm ] >10 L [identify] somebody as being of a certain ra:ce or a certain 11 S [Mhm mhm] >12 L [pe:oples but] I think it’s deeper than skin colour I think it’s a 13 S [ Mhm mhm ] >14 L [ co:nsciousn]ess I think it’s a genetic cording as well I think= 15 S Ri:ght? oh yeah right= 16 L =Like >for example< MY: farther I wouldn’t see him as a Black 17 activist I wouldn’t see him as (.6) .hhh instilling any rearlly true 18 BLACK POW[ER ] or anything into me as a child= 19 S [Mhm] =°Mhm°= 20 L =but when I went to America in nineteen ninety and met my grandfather 21 I saw it all in him so to me it has to be something genetic Laura’s talk is prompted by my question ‘what do you think Black identity is then?’ She presents the general discursive view that, ‘a lot of people say Black identity is something you wear it’s the colour of your skin and that is how you would immediately identify somebody as being of a certain “race” or a certain peoples’. Skin colour as ‘race’ essence is the discursively constructed locus of Black identity. Here dark skin undeniably equals Black authenticity. On lines 1214 her own viewpoint emerges: ‘it’s deeper than skin colour it’s a consciousness a genetic coding as well’. She supports this with the example of her consciousness of Blackness, Black power and her self positioning as Black being related to her grandfather’s politics not her father’s. As a ‘light-skinned’ Black woman she opposes the discourse of ‘dark skin equals Black authenticity’ through asserting that skin is mere surface, but genetic coding and consciousness are deeper aspects of her Black identity. In her talk skin is an ambiguous signifier of Blackness because of the interventions she makes into the discourse of ‘dark skin equals Black authenticity’. Within this discourse to be light-skinned, to have skin that is fluid and makes possible the occupation of other spaces of identity is to beg the question, ‘are you Black enough?’ This question is asked because at the everyday level of lived experience of Black identity, shade signifies: it sets up an identity positioning, an address of Black same/ Black different. In this address a light skin shade means a position of ‘other’, of the not-quite Black. Bodies occupy a space in-between, a position in which a proximity to

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whiteness as culture, identity and politics is assumed. However, speakers like Laura produce an-other address in talk on lived experience when they re-inscribe themselves differently within a binary frame as occupying the category Black irrespective of the ambiguity of their shade. An-other address is therefore one in which speakers perform themselves as visibly Black irrespective of shade. They thereby resist the mask of Black skin as the discourse of ‘dark skin equals Black authenticity’. Speakers accomplish this movement from the address of other-to-Blackness to that of an-other Black through a recourse to reifications of Blackness in talk. Through using the voices of others and themselves - that is, a ‘layering of voices’ they translate for their interlocutors how they are positioned because of shade and then critique this positioning in order to produce an-other address. In this negotiation of positionings a hybrid Black identity emerges. This shows us the dialogical and performative nature of hybridity as individuals negotiate discursive positionings in talk-in-interaction. I will continue to use the talk of Black ‘mixed race’ women beginning first, with a look at translation, shade and address, followed by a discussion of what is significant about a layering of voices in identity talk in terms of hybridity. I will then look at how claims to Blackness are made irrespective of shade, before finally, discussing what talk on shade contributes to theorizing on hybridity.

Translation, shade and address Radhika Mohanram (1999, p. 3) reflecting on the cartography of bodies asserts: [..] there is an embodiment of blackness with a simultaneous disembodiment of whiteness, a disembodiment accompanied by two other tropes at the level of discourse. First, whiteness has the ability to move; second the ability to move results in the unmarking of the body. In contrast blackness is signified through a marking and is always static and immobilizing.

However, a light skin shade destabilizes this neat binarism because it allows Blackness to move. The mobility of Blackness arises through shade. It is a refusal to be marked by the gaze because of the addresses it establishes for those who are reading the body. The reader is always then left with the question of origin and ‘race’. For those who are ‘racially’ ambiguous because of their Tight skin’ shade doubleness arises as speakers narrate themselves as ‘visible seers’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1968 quoted in Crossley, 1996, p. 57). This doubleness is shown in the identity positionings being brought into being in talk in the examples so far. On the one hand, speakers narrate themselves as being positioned by the gaze of disciplinary Blackness; while on the other, they re-position themselves to an-other space of identity. Speakers engage in an ongoing translation of the point of the stories on ‘shade’ as they use a layering of voices in their talk. Speaker translation is important for negotiating discourses because it facilitates two interactional

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processes. It allows interactants to see first, how discourses and practices position speakers as subjects; and, second, how speakers interact with these discourses in order to identify with or dis-identify from, particular subject positions. As said earlier, translation works through the negotiation of similitude and difference and highlights the presence of alterity within discourses of the ‘we’. Let us turn to the next example to look at the movement of the Black body and a layering of voices in talk. Prior to this extract Dana has been speaking about being thought to be Iranian, Bangladeshi and Pakistani because of her shade: the ambiguity of her skin makes possible her movement across identity positionings. She uses an expert - an old ‘mixed race’ woman in Barbados - who reads her body for signs of sameness and difference. By using this expert (lines 1-4) she is going back to a Caribbean origin as a source of wisdom and understanding about her ability to slide from body to body because she’s ‘from magical breed’, she’s ‘a chameleon’ (lines 13-14). ‘A chameleon wherever they are they become the colour of whatever they’re on’ (lines 18-19). She then translates the relevance of this for her ‘so I look like all these different things and like wherever I am it’s like that part will be more prominent, before she asserts her identity re-positioning ‘and to me that kind of sums up my identity in a way but within a Black understanding’ (lines 19-26). For her, because of the address produced by her shade, her identity has a chameleon­ like multiplicity. Such multiplicity for her is partial and contextual -‘wherever I am it’s like that part will be more prominent’ - and perhaps subject to a successful performance of the identity positioning she would claim. Example 6.2 Tape 1 Side A DF: 10-12 >1 D But this ONE woman I met in Barbados summed it up she was MIXED 2 race she was eighty six and she was part Indian and part= 3 Sh =>Mhm yeah13 D =And one day she sat down and she said to me you kno:w you’re from 14 MAGICAL breed so I said what do you mean? she said you’re a chameleon 15 Sh [M hm ] 16 D [ And I] said what do you mea:n? because I couildn’t understand= 17 Sh =Mhm= >18 D =And she said a chame:leon wherever they are they 19 become [ the colour] of whatever they’re on so like I look like 20 Sh [ Oh yeah]

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all these different [things] and like wherever I am it’s like that [Yeah] that part will be more prominent and all that and to me that kind of sums up= =Yea:h mhm= =My identity in a way but within a Black understanding= =Yea:h

So far we have looked in a preliminary way at the layering of voices in the stories but what is significant about this in terms of what I am trying to say about hybridity?

What is significant about a layering of voices? The extracts of talk are stories in which speakers produce ‘many voiced texts’ (Giinthner, 1998) through a layering of voices. Speakers fill reported events with their commentaries so that an utterance can simultaneously belong to the other the one being represented - as well as the speaker and, carry these two points of view. This process produces doubleness in these stories as identities are constructed through positioning and re-positioning. The performative space of a layering of voices allows for the emergence of hybridity through a speaking back to discourses of containment, rather than a silencing and being spoken for, of the subaltern (Spivak, 1993b). White discourses on ‘race’ are not the only ones which light skinned Black women have to negotiate. There is also the Black community generated discourse of ‘dark skin equals Black authenticity’ of example 6.1. The invisibility of this discourse has to be deconstructed and re-constructed with a difference in order for Black womanhood as an identity positioning to be claimed. In other words, Black womanhood as an identity cipher has to be emptied out and refilled with different identity categories and perspectives. As both Dana and Laura make clear though, even within this agentic practice, the body is still subject to being read by the disciplinary gaze of Blackness. Sara Ahmed (1999, p. 89) asks a question which is apposite here: ‘how do ambiguous bodies get read in a way which further supports the enunciative power of those who are telling the difference?’ Black experts read the ambiguity of Laura’s and Dana’s bodies through discourses of ‘race’ and kinship and their impact on the (im) possibility of whiteness/ Blackness. Blackness as a discourse and an identity positioning becomes simultaneously marked and visible in this moment in identity talk. It becomes a ‘racial purity’ in which the gaze of Blackness ‘hesitates only upon those that are already marked as different (such a hesitation on “exceptional ambiguous bodies” allows the “community” to imagine itself as unmarked and hence [Black])’4 (Ahmed, 1999, p. 93). Authentic Black womanhood needs to abject its alterity ‘mixed racedness’ to keep the boundaries of 4 The original quote reads ‘white’.

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the community firm. Whilst for some the ambiguity of shade allows for the possibility of passing through states of non-Blackness, biological ideas of ‘race’ retain ‘the inescapable corporeality’5 of Blackness as Laura highlights above. Richard Dyer (1997, p. 3) comments on the issue of visibility and invisibility produced by skin when he says that ‘the invisibility of whiteness as a racial position in white (which is to say dominant) discourse is of a piece with its ubiquity’. Thus, ‘the claim to racial superiority resides in that which cannot be seen [..] the ultimate position of power in a society that controls people in part through their visibility is that of invisibility, the watcher [..] looking and being looked at reproduce racial power relations’ (Dyer, 1997, pp. 44-45). I quote Dyer here because this observation also relates clearly to the power relations of the politics of skin within Blackness itself. This is a politics within which Black authenticity is measured through the darkness of one’s skin shade. Within such a politics light skin makes one politically ambiguous because of the assumption of white influence. In her talk Laura makes a dominant Blackness visible by relating it to skin colour. She thus subverts its invisibility as watcher and undermines the dominant power relations of the politics of skin where dark skin equals Black authenticity. She does this when she reports on her own Black identity as being to do with kinship and political consciousness. Laura engages in what Homi Bhabha (1994b, p. 47) describes as putting the eye/I in the impossible position of enunciation so that identity can be spoken because: To see a missing person, or to look at Invisibleness, is to emphasize the subject’s transitive demand for a direct object of self-reflection, a point of presence that would maintain its privileged enunciatory position qua subject. To see a missing person is to transgress that demand; the T in the position of mastery is, at that same time the place of its absence, its representation.

The invisibility of Blackness catches the eye as it is re-presented by Laura as lacking power to make her a ‘passer’ who is less than Black. Blackness lacks power because she strategically locates herself unequivocally within it as kinship and identification category. She re-presents herself as visibly Black despite her shade and thus interrogates ‘not simply the image of the [Black] person, but the discursive and disciplinary place from which questions of identity are strategically and institutionally posed’ (Bhabha, 1994b, p. 47). In the colonial context Homi Bhabha (1994e) talks about hybridity as being a displacement of the eye of surveillance through mimicry: a speaking back which produces something other than was entailed through colonial discourse’s construction of the other. In the example above Laura speaks back to the exclusion of Blackness by claiming a position of ‘Black irrespective of shade’. This provides us with some clues as to how mimicry works in the context of these stories and leads us to the work of the post-colonial critic Gayatri Spivak.

5

DyerR. 1997, p. 24.

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As said earlier, in ‘Can the Subaltern SpeakV Spivak (1993b) denies that the speaking back of the subaltern can occur in terms of it being heard by the colonizers. She does not, however, say that this speaking back does not occur. In fact she provides just such an example of speaking back through the suicide of Bhuvaneswari Bhaduri, whose act is rendered invisible because it does not enter the circle of meaning of the dominant imperialist patriarchal discourse. In order to be heard one has to speak in and against an assimilated tongue by ‘rendering delirious that interior voce that is the voice of the other in us’ (Spivak, 1993b, p. 89). Speaking in and against an assimilated tongue involves an interception. Here the ‘description of speaking as “an interception” highlights both the contingency and construction of the act. An interception suggests something that is stopped or caught between two points’ (Didur and Heffeman, 2003). Interception displaces meaning so there can never be a definitive reading of what was said while also pointing to the binary in which it is trapped (Didur and Heffeman, 2003). By undoing the assimilated voice of the other through the layering of voices and translation, speakers occupy an-other position of Black womanhood whilst pointing to the Black/Black binary. They occupy an-other position through mimicry. This is how a claim to Blackness is made from a space of ambiguity produced by light skin. Black womanhood undergoes what Papastergiadis (2000) describes as a radical form of transformation as, through talk, new interpretations spread and multiply. Simultaneously though, this dispersal and multiplication also enhances the authority of Black womanhood through its proliferation of translations because: a translation never arrives at its destined port, it is forever conscious of its place of departure and unable to rest in any abstraction of its own destination. Never quite there, the translation continues to reinscribe itself in the process of journeying. These temporary reinscriptions, which are formed in the contestation between departure and arrival, are the signs with which [Black women]6 enunciate themselves (Papastergiadis, 2000, p. 139).

Black womanhood is re-inscribed differently in talk, no matter how fleetingly, as translation as reflexivity encounters the untranslatable bits that linger. These untranslatable bits act as an impulse for further translation of sameness and difference to disperse and undo the authority of ‘the authentic Black woman’ as women position themselves as unambiguously Black.

Being unambiguously Black According to Mikhail Bakhtin (1981), a unitary language imposes limits on heteroglossia and attempts to crystallize it into the unity of everyday and literary language. If we relate this to the discourse of ‘dark skin equals Black authenticity’ we see that the limits imposed by shade are reproduced within everyday 6 The original reads ‘diasporic communities’.

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conversations. In conversations, shade is presented within a layering of voices in talk as the voice of the dominant Black discourse and re-presented as the heteroglossic voice of speaker critique. Through the layering of voices we see speakers striving to liberate themselves from objectification as ‘other to Blackness’ and attempting to expose the limits of the discourse of ‘dark skin equals Black authenticity’. This occurs as: One’s own discourse and one’s own voice although bom of another or dynamically stimulated by another, will sooner or later begin to liberate themselves from the authority of the other’s discourse (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 348)

Talking shade through a layering of voices produces a hybridity of the everyday that has boundaries that are given meaning in interaction. In talk these boundaries are determined by the fact that ‘all words have the taste of a profession, a genre, a tendency, a party [..] a generation, an age group, the day and hour’ (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 293). For a hybridity of the everyday to become possible one must take the words from others and make it one’s own. Speakers do this through the layering of voices which produces a ‘double voicedness’ in talk as shade is rejected as an arbiter of Blackness whilst maintaining the authoritative voice of ‘race’. As speakers author themselves, a space occurs which is defined by the ‘interrelationship of differentiated vocal perspectives on the social world’ (Holland et al, 1998, p. 173). In this space of difference a hybridity-of-the-everyday arises when identity positionings are negotiated in talk through speaker re-orchestration of different voices. Speakers develop their own authorial stance, they make a voice of their own by critiquing other voices. In examples 6.3 and 6.4 what will become more obvious is the negotiation of an-other position within Blackness in talk-in-interaction. As has been shown above in Laura’s talk, this position is at one step removed from the authoritative discourse on Blackness but none-the-less still uses this as a point of reference. Speakers push at the boundaries of authoritative discourse through re-positioning themselves as Black irrespective of shade. Blackness as a category is re-membered to reveal that while women are rooted in notions of ‘race’ - the untranslatable bits that linger simultaneously they are expanding Black womanhood as ‘race’, ‘culture’, ‘consciousness’ and ‘community’. In example 6.3, Dana talks about that discourse of Black identity based on shade in which ‘it’s like awareness of identity to them is based on how dark you are’. This discipline of the body implies for her that she has ‘to prove’ herself ‘all the time’ (lines 3, 4 and 6). Sharon (line 5) agrees that Dana is positioned as ‘other’ by this disciplinary Blackness and asks the rhetorical question ‘what happen to them?’ (line 7). This question shows her bewilderment at identity being based on how dark skinned you are, before her agreement with the end of Dana’s turn, with ‘I know but you know’ (line 7). She layers the voices of others within her talk followed by critique when she says ‘they’re going well if you’re dark you’re really Black right but then they’re there straightening their hair’. Both women critique this Black discipline of the body by revealing some of its contradictions: changing natural Black hair by ‘straightening’ and ‘perming’ or by weaving on Chinese hair.

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This critique enables a speaking back to Blackness as discipline. They sum up their critique by translating the relevance for them of this practice of weaving on Chinese hair with Dana’s ‘outrageous’ (lines 23 and 25) and Sharon’s ‘sick’ (lines 26 and 27). As has been said in Chapter 2 hair is not just organic matter. It signifies attachments to Black womanhood as politics, cultural practices and rootedness in a philosophy of a natural Black body beautiful. Through their critique of the deracination of Black hair they again assert an anti-racist aestheticism. It is the category natural Black hair which is then expanded by Dana in her repositioning within Blackness when she asserts that even though ‘those people are the same ones [..] that weave on hair [which] imitates white hair’, ‘my hair is not allowed to be existing’ (lines 28 and 29). Her shade, through her hair, contradicts Blackness so is ‘not allowed’ but darker skinned Black women can have hair which imitates white hair and Black people see no contradiction in this as ‘it’s alright if they weave that on their head’ (line 31). Sharon agrees throughout with Dana’s position and finally states that Black people are ‘funny’, meaning they have strange ways of thinking, if they can’t see the contradiction in their position on Dana’s hair as non­ allowable within Blackness and their practices of straightening, perming and weaving on straight hair (line 32). Example 6.3- Tape 1 Side A DF:14 1 D [ Yeah yeah and- ] and you know? if 2 Sh [ Yeah ah know ] >3 D you don’t do that you know? and it’s like awa:reness of >identity to them is 4 based on how dark you are5 Sh =Mh:m I kno:w (.6) >6 D So like me [I have to pro:ve ] myself all the time,= >7 Sh [What happen to them?] =1 know but you know? >8 I find it so: contradictory Dana right? they’re going well if you’re dark 9 you’re really Black right? but then they’re there straightening their hair,= >10 D =1 kno:w (.8) >1 ISh And if they’re not straightening they’re perming it if they’re not perming it 12 [they plai: ting-] >13 D [ Plai:ting all ] things in= >14 Sh =They plaiting all dead hair into it= >15 D =And the thing that re- the thing that really made me sick once was when 16 D this friend asked me to go and buy this hair (1.0) and the hair she asked 17 me to buy was (1.0) C hinese^ 18 Sh =Really?= 19 Sh =Putting on the Chinese stuff number two and like I was with this Chinese 20 D person buying the h a ir and it was rea:lly you kno:w? (1.0) 21 and it was jus like rea:lly you know?= 22 Sh =Mhm= >23 D im ag in in g that they putting that on their h a ir it just [seems so:] 24 Sh [ I know ]

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25 D OUTRA:GEOUS?= >26 Sh =1 find it sick-1 fl:nd it sick because you see these women walking along 27 right?(2.0) >28 D And then thorse people are the sa:me ones right? that weave on hair right? 29 [ it imitates ] white hair but like my hair is not allowed to be exi:sting= 30 Sh [Oh it’s awful] =Mhm= >31 D =But it’s alright if they weave that on their head= >32 Sh = Mhm I kno:w funny aren’t they? The example presents us with a problem of shade as the final arbiter of Blackness. Dana speaks centrally about the notion that awareness of identity is not just about shade and hair that appears to be Black. This dismantles discourses of Blackness based on a disciplined Black body. Hers is an-other positioning within Blackness, though one which is produced through the juxtaposition of contrastive essences; for example, the incongruity of Chinese hair on a Black person as an imitation of white hair. Dana in interaction is producing different addresses within Black womanhood that include the inscription of whiteness on her body as being unproblematic in her own identification as a Black woman. This inscription is only problematic because of the way darker-skinned Black people see her: as other, as abject. The talk shows speakers’ awareness of the effects of the discourse of dark skin equals Black authenticity’s ‘will to truth’ on their bodies through the various categorizing strategies of biopower.7 The biopower of authentic Black womanhood is resisted through both recognition and loss, as those whose bodies are marked by whiteness abject this from the Black self through recognizing an-other Blackness that they embody. Speakers uncouple the power/knowledge of authentic Blackness at the local level through critique, troubling notions of a Black woman identity as a fixed political, social and cultural entity. For Foucault (1984b) through a critical ontology of the self it is possible to develop alternative viewpoints from which individuals can resist the government of individualization. Critique is characterized by Foucault as a ‘limit attitude’ entailing a reflection on how what is given to us as universal can also contain places for possible transgression, of going beyond the limits imposed on us (Foucault, 1984b, p. 45). This interrogation of what are held to be the necessary boundaries of a Black woman identity becomes ‘a practical critique which takes the form of a transgression’ (Foucault, 1984b, p. 45). It is this transgression which I have named a speaking back to the eye of power and located within a hybridityof-the-everyday. Within this speaking back there is a construction of a counter­ discourse in which Black authenticity is de-coupled from shade: an identity re7 ‘Power relations materially penetrate the body in depth without depending even on the mediation of the subject’s own representations. If power takes hold on the body this isn’t through its having first to be interiorised in people’s consciousness. There is a network or circuit of biopower, or somato-power, which acts as the formative matrix of [Blackness] itself as the historical and cultural phenomenon within which we seem at once to recognise and lose ourselves’ (Foucault, 1980e, p. 186).

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positioning in which Black skin is resisted. In this resistance the mask of Black authenticity is removed to reveal an-other Black skin beneath. In example 6.4, both women speak themselves as being discursively constructed as outside Blackness and whiteness because of skin, but still claiming Blackness at any rate. Dana begins by placing both Tessa and herself at the centre of a particular view of shade, address and politics emanating from Black communities. This view is encapsulated in ‘an attitude [..] that to be conscious you’ve got to hate light skin people now’ (lines 1 and 2). Tessa laughs then says with a smile in her voice ‘for some strange reason’ (lines 3 and 4). Dana continues with a smile in her voice ‘and I think to myself what the bloody hell am I then? I’ve been here in the struggle now for thirty years now what the hell is going on you know?’ Tessa’s laughter in agreement overlaps most of Dana’s talk. Dana shows here the nature of the negation she suffers - ‘what the bloody hell am I then?’ (line 5) - at the hands of Black people because of the mark of whiteness on her skin. Such negation exists irrespective of her involvement with Black politics and her experience of racialization as a Black woman. Tessa agrees with Dana’s assessment of their situation as light-skinned women in her next turn with ‘to me it’s always been like that and I think it always will be like that’. Their position as other to Blackness has a history and a future. Tessa then translates for us the reason for their unique position of negation as light-skinned Black women, ‘you have the Black people who don’t want to accept you because you’re mixed and white people who don’t want to accept you because’ (lines 10-13). Dana at this point produces the collaborative completion ‘because you’re Black’. Tessa agrees with this and then goes on to reiterate their joint point of view ‘it’s like to the Black people you’re white and to the white people you’re Black’ (lines 15-16). Shade produces these addresses of negation in which nobody is ‘interested in what I have to say about’ identity (lines 16 and 17). Skin says it all: it speaks volumes. Dana’s re-positioning begins with a stretch of talk, which is a speaking back to the negation that Black people perform when they ask her ‘do you see yourself as Black?’ (line 20). This is something that ‘really makes [her] laugh’ and she finds ‘so weird’. She is using an-other attitude in terms of ‘race’ and political consciousness here to place their question as weird and funny because ‘I just think I’ve always known I’m Black’ (lines 22-23). Tessa agrees with this before Dana then shows how ridiculous the question is to her with, ‘is it an option now that I should like to change?’ This receives overlapping laughter from Tessa (lines 2628). In this way through translating the irrelevance of this non-position of negated in-betweeness produced by their shade and repositioning themselves within Blackness, they claim Blackness not as an option, but as a necessity, because it is something that they’ve ‘always known’. Example 6.4 Tape 1 Side B TS: 90-91 >1 D 2 3 T 4

And I tell you that’s an attitude now that to be conscious you have got to ha:te light-skinned people now= ((.hhh .hhh )) for some stra.nge reason ((.hhh .hhh. .hhh)) for some stra.nge reason=

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>5 D =((*And I think to myself what the bloody hell [am I then?)) I’ve been 6 T [ ((.hhh .hhh 7 D here in the struggle now] for ne- for thirty years now what the hell’s going 8 T . hhh .hhh .hhh .hhh))] 9 D on you know? = >10 T =1 mea:n to me: it’s like always been like that and I think it always will be 11 like that because you have the Blaick people who don’t want to accept you 12 because you’re mixed and whi:te people who don’t want- who don’t want 13 to accept you because= >14 D =Because you’re Blaick ((.hhh))= >15 T =Right because-and it’s like to the Blaick people you’re white and 16 to the whiite people you’re Black and then you’re standing there going isn’t 17 anyibody interested in what I have to say about thiis? and they really 18 aren’t you know what I mean? (.6) >19 D What really makes me laugh is when I went down to- when I’m in 20 London and people say do you see yourself as Bla:ck?= 21 T =Yeah?= 22 D =1 fiind that so: weiird because I just think I’ve always knoiwn I’m 23 Bla:ck= 24 T =Yeah= >25 D Why do you think I sh- an- and I thiink is it an option now?[ that I should 26 T [((.hhh .hhh 27 D like to change? ] 28 .hhh .hhh .hhh)) ] The examples present us with a performance of a hybridity of the everyday in which essentialist discourses on ‘race’ as kinship, roots, politics, community, culture and consciousness still matter. What we have then is a flexible essentialism in which the trope of ‘bio-political kinship’ (Gilroy, 1993f) gives integrity to ideal essential racial cultures, in which ‘race’ is defined through the ideas of culture and identity. At the same time, however, bio-political kinship, culture and identity are themselves brought into question in the talk. This talk therefore raises some interesting issues for hybridity theorizing generally.

The significance of talk on shade for theorizing on hybridity The speakers have shown that racialized gender identities cannot be assumed based on just skin colour. There are different ways to claim Black womanhood as a politics of skin when ‘race’ cannot be assumed by a look. Blackness has to be performed and given meaning inter-subjectively because ‘race’ still matters in Black identifications. Embodiment therefore has a place in thinking about hybridity as: The body contains within it the markers of the places inhabited by the subjects [..] The body also grants the subject a sense of belonging to the normative group, or of

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Black Skins, Black Masks being the other. The body is perceived as origin and signifies the place of origin. The body is also a message board. Its surface is inscribed and written on (Mohanram, 1999, p. 200).

The surface of the body that has been the focus of this chapter is that whose light skin shade means that it is inscribed by ‘racial’ uncertainty and ambiguity. Its bearers’ quotidian task becomes the re-inscription of their Blackness as an identity positioning in talk-in-interaction. This re-inscription means that ‘difference is not undone but rather reinvested with itself, fissured through with an involvement that transforms and complicates its original identity’ (Kirby, 1997, p. 52). Blackness as skin becomes mobile because interactants speak the Black body differently. As they resist Black skin and remove the Black mask of monologic discourse a different Black skin emerges. The body becomes ‘a scene of writing, subject to a sentence that is never quite legible, because to read it is to write it, again, yet differently’ (Kirby, 1997, p. 56). Within this rewriting speakers unsettle the discourse of dark skin equals Black authenticity through recourse to ‘the same’, for example, of kinship, culture, ‘race’, politics and community. Such essentialism should be engaged with by hybridity theorists because of its potential to unmask the invisibility of dominance, problematize the recognition of its authority and show that universalizing discourses are not unified. Indeed for Vicky Kirby (1997, p. 60): [..] if we begin by analyzing the in-habiting of oppositional terms, taking leverage from the negative side of the binary, then we are inevitably faced with the specter of something more. Something that, because it embraces and confounds both terms, destabilizes their division and refigures their meaning.

Speaking Blackness irrespective of shade, resisting Black skin and a position of whiteness simultaneously, refigures the meaning of Blackness within a hybridity of the everyday. However, what does a ‘hybridity of the everyday’ offer to hybridity theorizing? The talk on shade enables us to see first, that hybridity as a speaking back to dominant discourses through mimicry, is an everyday interactional phenomenon. Mimicry occurs in the negotiation of identity positionings in talk as speakers trade being positioned as the other, for a repositioning of ‘an-other Black irrespective of shade’. This in itself sets up a rupture in the very terms of belonging within the discourse of ‘dark skin equals Black authenticity’. In turn this means that speakers are aware that irrespective of their light skin, ‘race’ impacts on their quotidian experiences. Speakers reconnect ‘race’ with their experiences and, through this, show its continuing salience in their lives. They themselves claim ‘race’, for example, by speaking about kinship as significant in Black identities (Laura above), while simultaneously showing differences within Blackness in terms of, for example, hair texture and skin colour (examples 6.3 and 6.4). The biological and genealogical coexist within the identities constructed through the talk which re­ inscribes Black corporeality differently. Speakers do not deny the binary oppositions of Black and white but challenge them and expand the category Black

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by including themselves as ‘light skinned’ women within it. They speak back to the dominant Black discourse and negate its optical perceptions that shade makes them other: the not-quite-Black. What they show in their stories of lived experience also is that the dominant Black discourse cannot easily deal with phenotypic ambiguities, whereas those who are made ambiguous because of readings of their shade narrate themselves as the Black same-but-different using ‘race’ and culture as key signifiers of Black identities. They speak against the subjugation of discourses of Blackness and whiteness which exclude and silence them and thereby critique essentialist Blackness and normative whiteness, whilst speaking an-other Blackness through essentialism. This speaking back tends to belie Ifekwunigwe’s (1999, p. 177) claim that the ‘term Black has become an essentialized political term lacking both dynamism and fluidity and frequently fused with ethnicity and nationality’. I say this because we see women in a tum-by-tum way showing a dynamism and fluidity of the term Black. Here an affirmation of their Blackness does not depend on ‘the reification of nineteenth century bi-racialized hierarchies based on skin colour, hair texture and eye colour’ (Ifekwunigwe, 1999, p. 185). Rather, such affirmation rests on the disruption of this hierarchy as the subjugated position of Black is claimed irrespective of one’s ability to pass for white or one’s discursive positioning as other to Blackness because of shade. What is at issue then is an acknowledgement of: The performative nature of differential identities: the regulation of those spaces that are continually contingently ‘opening out’, remaking the boundaries, exposing the limits of any claim to a singular or autonomous sign of difference - be it class, gender or race (Bhabha, 1994i, p. 219).

The talking into being of the discourse of ‘dark skin equals Black authenticity’ fleetingly produces the Black subject as talk cites the boundaries of the Black community itself. Talk does this by repetition of the constitutive conventions of ‘dark skin equals Black authenticity’. However, it also at the same time, produces re-articulations of this discourse following the process of translation in talk. Speakers use essentialist definitions of ‘race’, ‘culture’, ‘community’ and ‘Black politics’ to construct those racial boundaries within which they are positioned as opposed to those within which they position themselves. In doing this they establish for their interlocutors the fluidity within the fixity that is their Black experience. Their construction of difference within the continuity of ‘the same’, makes us see the necessity for the repetition and re-articulation of essentialism in the definitions of ‘racial boundaries’ in the hybrid moment in talk. Within talk essentialist notions of origins, roots, and kinship for example, are placed alongside new emergent definitions as speakers expand the boundaries of ‘the Black same’ when they claim Blackness.

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The repetition of the same and the articulation of the different in the talk reminds us of Robert Young’s (1995a, p. 26)8 view that hybridity is an impossible simultaneity of sameness and difference. This makes us see some connections with the extracts. The first of these is the ongoing negotiation of identity positionings in the talk in terms of ‘same’ and ‘different’. The second is the abjection of discourses of positioning as Black other (different) in order to get to the position of an-other Black (same but different). The third is that a retreat into Black essentialism as ‘race’, ‘culture’ and so on, characterizes the negotiation of same and different in the talk. Therefore, such a retreat into essentialism is itself a part of the hybrid act of re-positioning, as interactants speak back to those discourses within which they would be made other from the space o f those discourses themselves. This mimicry is ‘at once resemblance and menace [..] [the] [menace] of mimicry is its double vision which in disclosing the ambivalence of colonial discourse also disrupts its authority’ (Bhabha, 1994e, p. 88). Speakers’ double vision is displayed when they show their positioning as other in talk before moving to an-other Black re-positioning. They are engaged in a mimicry in which ‘the look of surveillance returns as the displacing gaze of the disciplined, where the observer becomes the observed and partial representation rearticulates the whole notion of identity’ (Bhabha, 1994e, p. 87). In the re-articulation of identity here there is a (re)inscription of Black essentialism differently as speakers engage with new readings of the Black gendered body. Blackness becomes a ‘metonymy of presence’ (Bhabha, 1994e, p. 89) through mimicry as identities of an-other Black woman are brought into being in conversation. Such a metonymy of presence reminds us of the continuing significance of embodiment in Black identifications in which there is a return to what Bhabha denies. That is, ‘an originary essentialist self-consciousness’ (Bhabha, 1996a, p. 204), which occurs in the space of the ‘intersubjective performative act’ (Bhabha, 1996a, p. 206) of identity construction in talk-ininteraction. Looking at the talk as instances of a hybridity of the everyday in which a layering of voices, abjection and translation enables performative acts to arise, returns us to the possibility for the third space of hybridity within conversations. The negotiation of the third space means that ‘we may elude the politics of polarity and emerge as others of ourselves’ (Bhabha, 1994j, p. 39). In emerging as others of themselves, Black women transgress a constraining Black womanhood and affirm Black woman identities in which shade is not significant, as they ‘fashion, stylize, produce and “perform” these positions [..] in a constant agonistic process of 8 Hybridity [..] makes difference into sameness and sameness into difference but in a way that makes the same no longer simply different. In that sense it operates according to the logic that Derrida isolates in the term ‘brisure’ a breaking and a joining at the same time, in the same place: difference and sameness in an impossible simultaneity.

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struggling with, resisting, negotiating and accommodating the normative rules with which they confront and regulate themselves’ (Hall, 1996a, p. 14).

Conclusion Chromatism is disruptive of Black politics but it has deep resonance for the women whose talk is presented here and for Black communities in Britain. This is the case because shade deals centrally with a politics of visibility, inclusion and exclusion within Blackness. As women speak there is an interaction of three discourses on the body - the quite Black, the not-quite black and the not-quite white. There is also an appeal to essentialism as skin, culture, history, and roots to establish personal identity claims to the quite-Black. Skin then is a metaphor for the abjection of the status of the ‘not quite’ for the ‘quite Black’ as an identity positioning. Women thus go beyond the mark of skin as they assert Black sameness. A useful way to look at this going beyond the mark of skin in order to assert sameness is Spiller’s (1987) views on the ‘body’ and ‘flesh’. The ‘body’ is the corporeal object which is subject to discipline whilst flesh is ethnicity, ‘that which holds, channels and conducts cultural meanings and inscriptions’ (Gonzalez, 1997, p. 130). Spillers though does not see ethnicity as being in a process of constant evolution as does Hall (1992), nor is there any notion of hybridity as an everyday possibility. How does her work then link to a hybridity that tries to recuperate the body in theorizing? Skin is still the captive of discourse and constantly subjected to the panopticon of ‘race’ and shade. To go beyond skin while being embodied then is about removing Black masks through a call to flesh, a re-visioning of Black skin as kinship, community, culture and ‘race’, for example. As women are denied Black skin because of shade the quite Black for them becomes their assertion of sameness within Black skin. A Black skin which is now transformed. There is a movement in this talk on ‘shade’. One in which there is a ‘traffic of same-and-othering’ (Spivak, 1995b, p. xxiv), as speakers move between positions of claiming the Black an-other whilst denying being the Black ‘other’. By constructing their identities through talk as a negotiation of positions that they continually translate for their interlocutors, women resist Black skin: they resist and make visible the discourse of dark skin equals Black authenticity. Through this they remove a Black mask to show an-other Black skin below. In this un-masking, the racialized body is re-imagined and re-membered differently whilst remaining central to Black identifications. Resisting Black skin through critical ontologies of the self produces different addresses in conversations. It is here, through a layering of voices, that we see speakers resisting Black skin because of the speaking back which mimicry entails. Speakers assert their Blackness irrespective of the ambiguity of their skin and, in fact, because of it. Such identification in interaction marks this as a hybrid moment in which performativity releases the potential for both the citing of the boundaries of discourses of Blackness and the emergence of a different politics of skin. This politics disrupts a reading of Black skin etched with a hieroglyphics of

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whiteness as necessarily implying a second skin which masks Black identity and fills it with whiteness as politics, ethnicity and identity. Such disruptive reading re­ makes Blackness as an ‘identity cipher’ (Klor de Alva, 2000) as a white mask is disavowed when speakers construct themselves as occupiers of the cultural, political, communal and ‘racial’ location of an-other Black. As they resist Black skin speakers simultaneously expand its boundaries. The next chapter continues on this theme of the expansion of the boundaries of Blackness through performativity.

Chapter 7

Hybridity, Dialogism, Performativity

Introduction What the speakers have shown us in the preceding chapters is the necessity to dismantle Blackness as a master signifier. This is necessary if a Blackness, which is inclusive of otherness, is to be claimed. To claim an inclusive Blackness, the women make visible the regulatory ideal of authentic Black identity and white hegemonic conceptions of Black authenticity. They then make them other, the abject that must be excluded for their Black identifications to come into being. Blackness as a master signifier is dismantled through what Fanon calls Vexperience vecue (Tived experience’). In this chapter I focus on identity cliches. I continue to look at how the construction of claims to Blackness in talk on Black women’s lived experience produces and re-produces shared discourses on Blackness as kinship, culture, consciousness, politics and skin. These shared discourses are also the site for the emergence of difference. Difference emerges through the dialogical act of critique. This is a re-reading or translation that makes all texts open to revision. It is a re-reading which De Vere Brody (1999, p. 89) refers to as ‘throwing shade’. Re-reading is a dialogical understanding of the emergence of difference. It also sees difference as performative in the intersubjective moment of translation as reflexivity in talk. When women say ‘I am Black’, they name themselves. As well as this they construct themselves in opposition to being placed outside of Blackness by asserting their position on the margin through becoming an-other Black woman. Translation as reflexivity then is an important aspect of performativity. This is the case as it is through translation as reflexivity that interactants engage in an agency that is a double movement of being constituted in and by the signifier. ‘Black woman’ emerges as a site of discursive contestation as well as interactionally constructed agreement, in terms of sameness to and difference from itself. It is within this space of sameness to but difference from, that we see the place of translation as reflexivity in the movement of performing hybridity through the trope of ‘the Black woman same’. This happens as speakers narrate their Black womanness as the product of dis-identification with a politics of skin, a disruption of Black masks. At the same time though, it is also the ‘forcible citation of a norm, one whose complex historicity is indissoluble from relations of discipline, regulation, punishment’ (Butler, 1993, p. 232). I will look first of all below at a politics of skin and the essentialism that persists in Black women’s identifications, before moving to a consideration of hybridity as dialogical and performative.

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A politics of skin, ‘race’, kinship The emphasis on politics as being to do with confronting racists on the frontline or now in Blairite Britain, cooption into a state sponsored focus group/working party, ignores the more subtle and long lasting forms of resistance. It also depoliticizes internal conflicts in the Black community around gender, shade, class, sexuality and cultural practices, for example. Further, the fact is that the ‘understanding of “race” that we use almost without thinking, the ideas of nationality and culture which support it [..] all derive from a history of ideas that has been integral to modem racial typology and white supremacy’ (Gilroy, 1993g, p. 9). What women have done in talk is to draw critical attention to the cultural construction, the artifice of ‘race’, which we inhabit as a Black community. In this way they show us that community politics are deeply personal, gendered and problematic. Black womanhood is constructed in ideologies of gender, sexuality, class and ‘race’ and it is the subject of struggle over its representation and interpretation. Through a reflexive voicing of Black womanhood there is a subversion of categorical essentialism as Black skins, Black masks is performed in talk. Here there is a shift from identity to identification as a dynamic process. Within identification there is a: hideous ambivalence whereby the metastructure of racial othering is reproduced among the subaltern subjects themselves, by being displaced from the white/black frontier of racism into the internal borderlines of gender [..] (Mercer, 1994b, p. 168).

Mercer here is speaking about whiteness but as the women have shown us we need to also look at the work of Blackness as a master signifier. For example, the women break through the silence that conceals attitudes about shade in the Black community. As Laura showed us in the last chapter skin colour does affect identification and although it has been used as a metaphor for Blackness, level of pigmentation does not in and of itself determine the level of one’s ‘racial’ identification. We know within the Black community that even after years of ‘Black is beautiful’ negative attitudes about women with dark skin persists. However, there is little acknowledgement of the pain and the exclusion of those with light skin like Dana who has her Blackness questioned even when she does not want to ‘pass’ herself. The one-drop rule still exists as Dana, Laura and Tessa have shown us and still shapes the development of ‘racial’ identity even while it roots their kinship also in whiteness. Although its origins lie in slavery, colonialism and racism the ‘one drop rule’ is used by the women to show a sense of ‘racial’/political loyalty and identification. Cultural practices, for example food, language, dress, also serve the same purpose. Blackness as a master signifier is, therefore, dependent on ‘race’ and its inclusions/exclusions. For Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks (2000, pp. 17-18): race will continue to be to be articulated with kinship, with ethnicity, with culture, in ways that will require repeated purges of its claim to inheritance. Theoretical

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expurgations may be useful at one level, but they do not undercut the emotional force of an ethnos that race so effectively and resiliently enables [..] this effect is made possible primarily through race’s ability to combine with narratives of the family and kinship in order to appear as a factor of inheritance [..] race emerges [..] in the moment when some anxious boundary of inclusion and exclusion [..] breaks down or becomes particularly vexed.

The one-drop rule contains the assumption within it that ‘race’ is a matter of kinship and fixes the gaze of Blackness on visible difference within itself. Visibility matters in Blackness’s regime of looking and the visibility of ‘race’ is reproduced in our daily commonsense and practices on/of the body. Through the signifier ‘Black womanhood’ as a regime of visibility we identify ‘racially’. We do this because the signifier itself holds out a promise of wholeness, a semblance of coherence, thus perpetuating our desire for Black womanhood. Black womanhood as a signifier is the ‘voice of the other within’ with its own sets of inclusions and exclusions that determine the subject, to the extent that ‘to be a raced subject is to be subjected to the signifier [Blackness]. [Blackness] is the transindividual aspect of the unconscious which subjects us all “equally” to the logic of race’ (SeshadriCrooks, 2000, p. 24). So much so that through the regime of visibility we read skin as a privileged site of ‘racial’ meaning which signifies the ground of the subject itself. If we return to Mercer’s thoughts above we can see that ambivalence is also important here, because while we recognize the oppressive dimensions of Black womanhood we still need to attach ourselves to it even if we can’t find the images that we want to see. What the women show us though is that signs can be read differently to produce new meanings as their own lived experiences are brought to bear in these readings. Black women as readers construct new identities by reading against the grain, converting otherness into identification. Here, what should have been outside is inside and because the excluded other is within the self, the other emerges from the self. A politics of skin is circumscribed by ‘race’, identification and cultural practices. However, the continual movement of a politics of skin in talk as it is read and re-made returns us to looking at hybridity as dialogical and performative.

Hybridity as dialogical and performative What I call a ‘politics of skin’ is present in identity cliches in those turns at talk in which Black identity is claimed. In order to be unquestioned as identity claims by interlocutors these cliches must be shared socially. Therefore this is where we can see the operation of discourses at the level of statements.1 Identity cliches show interactants’ narration of themselves as positioned by discourses and their repositioning of themselves in relation to these discourses. As I have said before, it

1 Foucault (1995).

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is this positioning, translation as reflexivity and re-positioning which leads to the development of critical ontologies of the self. It is here that the hybrid moment arises in talk. The approach of looking at positioning and repositioning in talk-in-interaction is based on an analysis that seeks to account for the dialogical interaction between ‘the same’ and ‘the other’ in hybridity. This analysis produces an account of a hybridity of the everyday being constituted by the process of statement translation as reflexivity - addressivity. As I said in the Introduction and Chapter 2, I draw on Foucault’s (1995) concept of statements as the building blocks of discourses and Bakhtin’s idea of addressivity in this formulation. These statements in the form of identity cliches are reproduced in identification narratives as ‘points of temporary attachment’ (Hall, 1996a, p. 6) to the positions constructed for us by discursive practices. We can see these statements when we look at the positions occupied by speakers as they articulate and apply these identification discourses to themselves, concrete issues and events. Translation as reflexivity is the connector between individuals and statements as points of temporary attachment. Through translation as reflexivity speakers show their awareness of discursive positioning before critiquing and abjecting this and constructing new addressivities in the talk. New addressivities illustrate Black women going beyond the limits imposed on them (Foucault 1984b, p. 45). These addressivities as critical ontologies speak back to discursive positioning and create radical otherness and counter-discourses in talk-in-interaction. New addressivities signal the hybrid moment in identification talk. What is clear through looking at talk is that this hybrid moment is arrived at through a re-membering of the membership category Black as a label of alterity, whilst simultaneously being rooted in Blackness as, for example, skin, ‘race’ and culture. Blackness as an identification is at one and the same time monologic and a negotiation of positions. The performativity of Blackness as a discourse emerges through the interaction of ‘the Black same’ and ‘the Black other’ in the interactional accomplishment of Black hybrid identifications. In these interactions speakers resist ascribed categories through establishing accounts of biographical authenticity whilst simultaneously rooting themselves in the ascribed category Black. I bridcontinue below to focus on how Blackness is constructed in the hy moment in talk by looking at the following themes recurrent in the interactions: 1) the question of being Black enough; 2) if you’re not white you’re Black; 3) critiquing assimilation; and, 4) using character references to claim Blackness.

‘First they’ll ask you what you are’ The question of Blackness is one with which we are faced whether from the gaze of Blackness or whiteness. As Dana, Tessa, and Laura made obvious to us there is an

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expectation that awareness of Blackness and political commitment are based on the ‘darkness' of one’s skin. At least this is the assumption of a monologic Blackness. These women show us though that shade is mere surface and what is more important is a political consciousness, a rootedness in Blackness in which ‘race’, culture and community have a renewed centrality. This centrality is one that is renegotiated to be more inclusive than those models of Black authenticity more narrowly drawn. These models pervade society as Laura tells us in the example 7.1 when she makes her claim to Blackness through and against those discourses emanating from whiteness which seek to make her abject by denying her right to the name ‘Black’. She makes the white questioning of her Blackness abject as she speaks about the visibility but deniability of Blackness that exists for her as a ‘mixed race’ Black woman. The discourses being used here are those of ‘race’ as kinship and Blackness as a dis-identification from whiteness even when one could be ‘allowed to pass’ - given a probationary whiteness - because of the mark of whiteness on one’s skin. Example 7.1- Tape 2 Side A LF: 54-56 >1 L To me a:hm (.6) ESPECIALLY ELDERLY WHITE PEOPLE o:h 2 you a:hm (.4) FLRST they’ll ask you what YOU ARE:= 3 Sh =Mhm (1.0) >4 L So: the mere fact that they ask you what you are: means that they can 5 see that you’re different] that you’re not like THEM= 6 Sh [Yeah] =[°Yeah that’s true0] 7 L [((.hhh.hhh .hhh)) ] and .hhh >8 and then when you say I’m BLA:CK, (.4) 9 Sh Yeah (.8) 10 L But you know, (.) what I've said is T v e got a white parent and a Bl[ack 11 Sh [Mh 12 L parent] but I’m Black ° .hhh then they’ll say WELL YOU’RE NOT BLACK 13 Sh m:: ] 14 L RE:ALLY, and then they’ll say= 15 Sh=Mhm= 16 L = Well REA:LLY YOU KNOW YOU COULD MAYBE PASS FOR YOU 17 KNOW PEOPLE HAVE SAID TO: ME I LOOK ORIENTAL (.) people 18 have asked me if I’ve got Chinese in my family = 19 Sh=Yeah = 20 L =They’d say I look flamenco:ish (.) very Spani:shy= 21 Sh=Spanish yeah= 22 L =And [ stuff like that ] .hhh IT SEEMS I CAN LOOK LIKE ANYTHING you 23 Sh [ That is true ] 24 L know but I’m just BLACK

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Laura shows her discursive positioning by the question from elderly white people who ‘first [..] ask what you are’ (lines 1 and 2). This question in itself places her not as a person but as an object of curiosity. After my continuer there is a (1.0) pause, followed by Louise’s translation as reflexivity sequence ‘so the mere fact that they ask you what you are means that they can see that you’re different that you’re not like them’ (lines 4 and 5). I agree with her point of view on the reason for the question of ‘what are you?’ before she then repositions herself as Black on line 8 following initial laughter. On lines 10 and 11 she qualifies her Blackness in terms of kinship - ‘I’ve got a white parent and a Black parent’ - before again reiterating her position as a Black identified woman with ‘but I’m Black’. She repositions herself therefore as located in Blackness and continues this theme in the rest of the extract in which she relays people’s views of her as ‘not Black really’, as oriental or Spanish because of her shade (lines 12-21). On line 24 in reasserting her re-positioning as ‘just Black’ she reproduces the simple fact of her own Black politics and that of some of the Black community. That is, that irrespective of white kinship Blackness can be un-problematically claimed. In doing this she denies the centrality of ‘purity’ of ‘race’ as the sole criterion of identification and instead asserts the centrality of consciousness of ‘race’ in Black identifications. This is the nature of her new addressivity. This is how she expands the boundaries of the (im)possibility of Blackness through the process of constructing a hybrid identification in talk. The binaries Black and white as I have shown throughout do, of course, have a profound impact on Black women’s identifications. It is simply the case that if you are not white you are Black within a society in which ‘the one drop rule’ persists. This rule as Ifekwunigwe (1999) rightly asserts has a long history and a racist one. What is interesting here though is that such a rule relating to colonialism, imperialism, slavery and racial states structured through white dominance, is being used by Laura to claim Blackness. One could say that it is almost akin to the reclamation of ‘Black’ as a positive invocation of identity as Laura makes Black kinship paramount in determining who it is possible to be. Her claim to Blackness carries incredible power undermining any position of ‘racial’ ambiguity. There are no ‘biological hybrids’ (Ifekwunigwe, 1999) here, just interactional ones as Laura again shows us when she speaks on the fact of her Blackness.

61 don’t see it like that I’m Black’ Example 7.2 was preceded by talk from Laura in which she asserts that she refuses to go along with what people want her to be whilst at the same time reinforcing her self defined identity as Black. The extract stresses the place of kinship in the making of a claim to Blackness by a ‘mixed race’ Black woman. This focus on kinship is used in order to build up a case for her right to claim a place with her ‘own people’ and to justify her claim to Blackness irrespective of her ‘mixed race’ category ascription. Laura both draws on and remakes the discourse of ‘I am Black irrespective of ancestry’ which is a recurrent theme in the talk of Black ‘mixed

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race’ women, through the use of the notions of Blackness as kinship and Blackness as an identification based on consciousness. She does this by using two positioning and repositioning sequences in her talk. First, her positioning as being placed outside Blackness also establishes her claim to Blackness when she locates herself within Black community in ‘sometimes it’s your own people that attack you the most’ (lines 1 and 2). I agree with this before her translation as reflexivity sequence, ‘but that’s where I’m comfortable I’m comfortable around Black people’ (lines 4-6). A re-positioning with the cliche ‘I identify as being totally Black’ (line 6) then produces a new addressivity. Last she provides arguments to support her re-positioning of herself as Black. These arguments to support her claim to Blackness deserve some detailed attention. Her first example is based around her assertion that Black identity is what she has located herself within as a ‘mixed race’ woman. In doing this she positions other ‘mixed race’ people (lines 9-11) as not being like her. This is so as they ‘don’t take the standpoint I take they would not choose they would say I’m mixed race and that is it and they would see that if you choose one or the other then you’re denying half of yourself. She then locates her own position in relation to this in a translation as reflexivity sequence ‘I don’t see it like that’ (line 14). After an agreement from me (lines 15-16), Laura reasserts her claim to Blackness by positioning herself with the cliche ‘I’m Black’ (line 17). Through this cliche she establishes a new addressivity. The second example she uses is based around Black identity not being a choice but a necessity because of the dominance of ‘the Black gene’. Indeed, she positions ‘mixed race’ people as Black because of ‘the Black gene’ (lines 24-37), which is followed by my agreement ‘you will have a Black child’, before she reiterates her assertion about the dominance of ‘the Black gene’ ‘you know what I mean you’re going to have a Black child’ (line 39). She locates identity as being to do with kinship and thus one is unavoidably and perhaps, necessarily, Black. Example 7.2 Tape 1 Side A LF: 22-24 1 L BUT (.3) a:hm (.) sometimes it’s your OWN PEOPLE that attack you the mo: st 2 ((.hh[h .hhh )) ] you knorw wha:t I mean?= 3 Sh [ 0 :h I know] =((*! know it [is )) ] 4 L [They] attack you the 5 MOST but (.4) THAT’S where I’m COMFORTABLE I’m comfortable 6 around Bla:ck people I identify as being TOTALLY BLA:CK= 7 Sh =°Mhm°= >8 L=Te:chnically I am mixed race I have got a Caucasian parent and .hhh 9 I have mixed race friends who DON’T take the standpoint that [ I ] take 10 Sh [Mhm] 11 L THEY WOULD NOT CHOOSE THEY WOULD SAY I’M mixed race and 12 that is i:t [ .hhh ] and they would see that if you choose one or the other 13 Sh [Mhm ] >14 L then you’re denying ha:If of [ your self ] I don’t see: it like that?=

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15 Sh [ Mhm ] =No I don’t I 16 mustadmit= >17 L =I don’t °see° it like that? I’m BLA:CK [.hhh ] and: (.7) ahim [ (.) ] I 18 Sh [Mhm] [Mhm] 19 L believe that moist rix- mixed race people if they were left on their o:wn and 20 NOT INFLUENCED,= 21 Sh =Mhm= 22 L =THEY would gravitate more towards the Bl[ack side] BECAUSE whether 23 Sh [Mhm ] 24 L you want to get scientific about it or technical a:hm ge- in GENETICS the 25 BLACK GENE is DOMINANT= 26 Sh =Mhm= 27 L =And the WHITE GENE is RECESSIVE= 28 Sh =Mhm= 29 L =Yuh kno:w?= 30 Sh =Mhm= 31 L =And DOMINANT means STRONG [recessive] means WE:AK:= 32 Sh [ Mhm ] =Mhm= 33 L =So: it doesn’t matter whether you have a BLACK woman and a white man = 34 Sh = Mhm (.7) 35 L O ra BLACK man and a white woman= 36 Sh =Mhm= 37 L =YO:U are going to have a child of colour, (.) 38 Sh °You will have a Black child°= >39 L =You kno:w what I mean? you are going to have a Black child= 40 Sh =Absolutely= 41 L =Because the Black gene is dominant whether it’s the male or the [feimale] 42 Sh [ Mhm ] 43 L and so: you know? I think there’s le:ssons in that and .hhh not only that 44 SOCIETY AS A WHOLE sees you: as a BLACK per[son ] you [kno:w 45 Sh [Mhm] [Absolutely] 46 L what] I mean, [.hhh ] they see you as DIFFERENT [and ] 47 Sh [Absolutely] [Mhm] In terms of her views on ‘the dominant Black gene’ that is open to being questioned, both interactants enter an agreement sequence around what kind of a child will be bom from Black and white parents. That is, a Black child. The child would be nothing more, nothing less. Through this sequence Laura is continuing her own claim to Blackness based on this example whose upshot is ‘You are going to have a child of colour’ (line 37). She translates the significance of her example in this regard for us by saying ‘I think there’s lessons in that [..] not only that society as a whole sees you as a Black person’. So, for her, to be Black is not just dependent on society seeing us as Black but also about us as Black people acknowledging our Blackness irrespective of being ‘mixed race’. What is happening in this interaction is that Laura is carving out a positionality which is one

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in which Black ‘mixed race’ people cannot be excluded from the category Black because of their kinship, but must be included in spite of it. This position is an important one given the historical and continuing debate about Black ‘mixed race’ people as ‘hybrid’, ‘not quite Black’, ‘in-between’ people who occupy a no­ woman’s land between Blackness and whiteness. That is, women who are nowhere and nothing. Laura positions herself somewhere. She is within Blackness which is where she feels comfortable. In making this claim of belonging, of being totally Black she draws very powerfully on discourses of ‘the mixed race condition of confusion’ as opposed to Blackness as certainty because of kinship, to support her claim. Once again then this is an example of hybridity as a negotiation of discourses of ‘the Black other’ focused on the skin of the ‘mixed race’ woman who then uses a recourse to the flesh of ‘the Black same’ to produce a re-positioning as Black. The discussion of the extracts throughout the book has highlighted the interactional construction of distance from whiteness, that is the abjection of whiteness, as a signifier of Blackness. Indeed, distance from whiteness is sought irrespective of having a white parent. The next section takes this distancing as the theme as we turn to look at how Laura constructs the need for distance from whiteness in order for a Black identity claim to be made.

‘Every sphere of my life is within a Black perspective’ Example 7.3 is the continuation of a conversation in which Laura has been talking about the use of chromatism2 in slave societies to divide Black people. This shows her understanding of the historical root of the problem that she then discusses. Her talk on being positioned as other is about the understandable hostility that ‘mixed race’ people sometimes experience from other Black people because they believe they ‘are [..] in a [..] more elevated position than somebody that’s dark skinned’ (lines 1-6). Through saying ‘we deserve the hostility’ she also places herself within this group because of her shade and therefore assumes this positioning. In her translation as reflexivity sequence she claims to ‘understand that’ but at the same time will not let it ‘deny [her] where [she] want[s] to be’ (lines 8, 9 and 11). That is, within the Black community which is where she feels comfortable. This is how she begins to show distance from whiteness. The repositioning as Black performed by Laura here is based on a centreing of herself as a Black woman who ‘moves totally in Black circles’ with every sphere3 of her life being ‘within a Black perspective’ (lines 12, 14 and 15). This new addressivity continues to show distance from whiteness, which is reinforced when she goes on to provide examples of aspects of her cultural and 2 Chromatism refers to colour consciousness. During slavery in the Caribbean, societies were established in which light skin and white ancestry meant privilege and the possibility to become free. 3 She says ‘spear’ in the interaction but this is probably a slip of the tongue.

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community life, theatre, music and friendships, which for her revolve around Blackness. Through this she establishes herself as a ‘mixed race’ woman who does not feel the privilege of ‘skin’ that others feel. She refuses to live within whiteness but locates herself within Blackness instead. Laura’s position on friendships is interesting here, as she introduces a potential source of contention into her talk. That is, her right to discriminate outside of work in terms of who she spends her time with. After this admission she pauses briefly and I produce a ‘Yeah’ during this micro-pause. Laura then goes on to translate for me what she means by discrimination just to be sure that it is understood that for her discrimination is not about ‘being disrespectful or harming other people’. It is merely about spending time within Black community and with Black people, as far as is possible. This example further demonstrates the distancing of herself from whiteness. The discourses being developed are those based on Blackness as culture and the sociality of community. She presents living in Black community as a necessary choice and one based on consciousness and comfort. Hybridity arises in establishing herself as the other of whiteness through choosing to participate in Black cultural practices and productions predominantly and choosing to have only Black friends. She justifies her friendship choices, as this could be potentially contentious, by talking about it as her right to discriminate in terms of whom she spends her non-work time with. Her point of view is that she has to work with white people but she doesn’t have to socialize with them. She is, therefore, someone who performs herself as deciding on her right to Black spaces in a white world and then actively constructing these for herself. Example 7.3- Tape 1 Side A LF: 17-20 >1 L And SOME m- SOME mixed race people DO ACTUALLY BELLEVE they 2 are a:hm in a- in a (.4) more ELEVATED position [ than ] somebody that’s 3 Sh [ Mhm] 4 L dark skinned [ and ] (.4) so: SOMETIMES WE DESERVE the 5 Sh [ Mhm ] 6 L HOSTILITY] do you kno:w what I mean?= 7 Sh =Mhm= >8 L =1 can .hhh UNDERSTAND THAT .hhh BUT .hhh I- I ’m not going to 9 let THAT deny me: where I want to be: [and ] where I feel com[fortable] 10 Sh [ Yeah] [Yeah ] >11L and I feel .hhh so:: COMFORTABLE in Black community, I’ve got to a 12 stage now Shirley where I’m going to be thirty four next month [right? ] .hhh 13 Sh [Uhuh ] 14 L and I (.) move TO:TALLY (.)in Black circles .hhh EVERY SPEAR OF MY 15 LIFE is (.7) within a Black e:hm perspective, [.hhh ] I very rarely go to 16 Sh [Mhm] 17 L white theatre I DO NOW AND AGAIN because I’m interested in SCRIPT 18 Sh [Right] 19 L WRITING and stuff like that [ so ] you have to go and=

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20 Sh =Ye[ah ] 21 L [See] everybody’s work ] but it’s PREDOMINANTLY BLACK 22 Sh [See other things] 23 L theatre that I go and see= 24 Sh =Mhm= 25 L =1 very RARELY go to the cinema unless it’s a Black mo:vie,= 26 Sh =Mhm= 27 L =Although there are exceptions, .hhh I: (.5) if I were to go out and dance 28 and stuff which I don’t do very much of now, it would be: where I kne:w for 29 a fact we were going to get Black music [AND ] NOT ONLY WAS IT 30 Sh [Mhm] 31 L GOING TO BE BLACK music but there were going to be Black people 32 Sh [Mhm mhm] >33 L there: [ .hhh ] you kno.w what I mean? ah::m my FRIENDS, (.) 34 Sh Mhm (.3) 35 L I have COLLEAGUES that are white, = 36 Sh =Yeah= >37 L =But in my OWN time (.) I discriminate [ (.) ] YOU KNOW, I 38 Sh [Yeah] 39 L DON'T THINK [THERE’S ] ANYTHING WRONG with discrimination 40 Sh [°Yeah yeah°] 41 L as long as you’re not ah being disrespectful or harming other people?^ 42 Sh =Yeah= 43 L = OUTSIDE OF WORK I DO DISCRIMINATE I THINK this is my time 44 Sh [Mhm] 45 L [and ] I spend it with whoever I want to [I don’t] have the CHOICE when 46 Sh [°Mhm°] 47 L I’m at work [I ] have to work with (.) white people [and ] stuff like that 48 Sh [Mhm] [Mhm] If we look at all of the examples so far we can also see that what speakers have always done is to construct positive character references for themselves in opposition to those whom they are critiquing. This is shown for example in the last extract when Laura spends quite a lot of time rationalizing her right to choose who she socializes with in order to mitigate the effect of her declaration that she discriminates outside work. To admit to discriminatory behaviour is potentially face threatening so she has to reconstruct this as not being disrespectful to, or harming anyone. I would now like to move on and look at one last example of character references.

‘I ain’t talking about rice and peas in one part of it’ In interactions in which Blackness is constructed, character references are often used to establish oneself as more Black than others. Such character references are

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generally performed as oppositional to the positions of other Black people. These latter are constructed as being negative or in some way valueless. Character references then are assertions of one’s Black identification at that point in the talk. Laura has been talking before example 7.4 about the difficulties that ‘mixed race’ children face growing up with white mothers who know nothing about skin or hair care for Black people and whose fathers are largely absent so that they can’t instill Black culture into the child. The claim to Blackness here takes the form of a character reference in which Laura produces a hybrid positioning by establishing Blackness for her as being to do with anti-racist politics rather than just the prevailing pan-Caribbeanized Black British culture. Once again then the discourse of Blackness as consciousness is being used. Her claim to Blackness - with agreements from me - begins through her assertion that Black identity is being reduced to food and Carnival and that that makes her angry (lines 1-2, 4 and 6). This positions other Black people as inauthentic and she goes on to reinforce this in her derision of them on lines 8, 10 and 12. She places herself as a Black woman through her translation as reflexivity turn ‘I think you know we want to wake up you know’ (line 14), which is followed by my continuer. She then shows herself as someone who is awake to the problem by establishing a new addressivity for herself in opposition in terms of her politics (lines 16-17). That is, as someone who does not relate ‘race’ and culture solely to rice and peas and chicken. I agree with her position with ‘Good for you’ followed by laughter, before she goes on to talk about what she will put in her presentation as an example of her new positioning (lines 19 and 20). This makes obvious to us that for her Black identity and culture cannot be divorced from the history of slavery and exploitation which Caribbean heritage people have in common. Laura again locates herself as Black through ‘our people’ when she re-affirms her political position to not reproduce Black people as food and carnival, ‘because I’m not reducing our people to a:h rice and peas on a Sunday and carnival once a year’. She avers that if that is the kind of presentation that they want then they need to look elsewhere (lines 25-29). Example 7.4- Tape I Side B LF: 36-38 >1 L You know .hhh it rea:lly angers me because BLACK: IDENTITY and 2 culture is being reduced to rice and peas on a Sunday and a piece of chicken= 3 Sh = Yea[ h °ah know0 ] 4 L [And CA:RNIVAL] once a year= 5 Sh =1 know= 6 L =AND-and that REA:LLY ANGERS ME:= 7 Sh =Mhm= 8 L =((+Yeah man my children have their nee and peas on a Su-)) [ hhh ] IS THAT 9 Sh [Mhm ] 10 L n?[ IS ] THAT-IS THAT WHAT WE AMOUNTTO?[ (.) ] nee and pea:s 11 Sh [Mhm] [Mhm] 12 L ON A SUNDAY?=

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13 Sh =Mhm mhm= >14 L =1 think you know? we want to wake up you kno:w?= 15 Sh =Mhm= >16 L ^Because I ’ve been asked to do: a presentation next week on ‘race’ and 17 culture and I AIN’T TALKING ABOUT RICE AND peas in one part of it= 18 Sh =pt:: Good for you [ ((.hhh .hhh .hhh .hhh .hhh .hhh)) ] 19 L [I ain’t talking about rice and peas Shirley] I’m talking 20 about how we GOT to be: in the WEST in the first place= 21 =Mhm= >22 L I’VE TO:LD THEM IF THEY WANT SOMEBODY TO DO IT LIKE 23 THAT, GO AND ASK SOMEBODY ELSE,= 24 Sh =Yeah= >25 L ^Because I’M NOT REDUCING OUR PEOPLE^ 26 Sh =Mhm= >27 L =To a:h: rice and peas on a Sun[ day ] and- and Ca:mival once a year [ I ] 28 Sh [°Mhm°] [Mhm] 29 L REFU:SE to do tho:se sorts of presentations ((+ )) Speaking like the men The examples looked at above and throughout the preceding chapters show how it is possible for ‘the Black same’ and ‘the Black other’ to be simultaneous in talk and produce moments of hybridity in interaction. The examples have focused on interactions in which there is a process of discursive positioning, a critique of that positioning and an identity re-positioning. The dialogism involved in hybridity is clear. What has perhaps been less clear is how the performativity of Blackness becomes obvious. My view, of course, is that it becomes obvious in the use of discourses of difference and sameness in claims to Black identity produced in talkin-interaction. It is to these issues that we now turn.

Claiming Blackness and performativity The construction of claims to Blackness as part of the ongoing sequential organization of the talk works towards the emergence of shared discourses on Blackness. This is reminiscent of Butler’s (1993, p. 2) view of performativity. To reiterate, for her, performativity is both ‘the reiterative power of discourse to produce the phenomena that it regulates and constrains’ and ‘the act by which a subject brings into being what he/she names’. Her notion of performativity is brought to mind quite forcefully, for example, if we look at one of the basic structures of these claims to Blackness:1 1) 2)

claim to Blackness is made by the speaker; there is an example from the speaker or other interactants to support the claim;

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3)

and, the claim is repeated in a summary before entering into a connected theme or a new topic.

The power of discourses to regulate and constrain resides in the claim to Blackness itself, which shows the speaker as being discursively located. The examples above speak to us quite powerfully about the significance of naming. To say ‘I am Black’, to name oneself, is at one and the same time to locate oneself politically, socially, intellectually, philosophically, culturally, ‘racially’ and emotionally. Naming is identity constituting as it ‘orders and institutes a variety of free-floating signifiers into an “identity”, the name effectively sutures the object’ (Butler, 1993, p. 208). The examples remind us that: recognition is not conferred on a subject, but forms that subject. Further, the impossibility of a full recognition, that is, of ever fully inhabiting the name by which one’s social identity is inaugurated and mobilized, implies the instability and incompleteness of subject-formation (Butler, 1993, p. 226). When I say I am Black then, I anchor myself within an essentialism ‘without which I cannot speak’ (Butler, 1993, p. 226), even whilst this essentialism is contingent. I also construct myself in opposition to discursive otherness by asserting my position on the margin through becoming an-other Black in the hybrid moment in talk. In the extracts the supporting talk following the initial claim to Blackness is where we see the speakers’ own take on Blackness coming into being. That is, speakers translate for us the ways in which they interpret their Blackness claim or the claim of another speaker. This reminds us of Laclau’s point of view that ‘if the process of naming of objects amounts to their very constitution, then their descriptive features will be fundamentally unstable and open to all kinds of [..] rearticulations’ (Butler, 1993, p. 210). These are the rearticulations that become apparent in the talk through the dialogical process of translation as reflexivity. This is where we also see the instability and incompleteness of subject formation as speakers critique and abject discursive positioning. Translation as reflexivity is therefore an important part of performativity as I have said before. Such translation as reflexivity becomes apparent in the talk through speakers’ activities. Some of these activities are: 1) linking discourses of identification to themselves and others through the translations which they do for their interlocutors of the relevance of what is being said; 2) using experiences of the past and translating their relevance for identity now; 3) using examples based on ideas of a common Black experience of racism to make their claims to Blackness translatable to the experiences of others; 4) and, translating the relevance of bodily practices for identity.

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So, through translation as reflexivity interactants engage in an agency ‘[which] would then be the double movement of being constituted in and by a signifier, where “to be constituted” means “to be compelled to cite or repeat or mime” the signifier [Black] itself (Butler, 1993, p. 220). However, within this miming of the signifier Black there is a: failure of the signifier to produce the unity it appears to name [..] [which is] the result of that term’s incapacity to include the social relations that it provisionally stabilizes through a set of contingent exclusions (Butler, 1993, pp. 220-221).

This is shown for example, in terms of how Laura chose to answer the question ‘Are you Black enough?’ Here, it is the exclusions which are used to establish Blackness. These exclusions, whilst being a part of individual experiences, also have vested in them the oppositional discourses which exist in Black politics. For example the idea of the necessity to create a place for oneself within Black community and politics; and being African-centred rather than assimilating to whiteness as a Black ‘mixed race’ woman. ‘Black woman’ emerges as a site of discursive contestation as well as interactionally constructed agreement, in terms of sameness to and difference from itself. It is within this space of sameness to but difference from, that we see the movement of performing hybridity through the vehicle of essentialism as women construct themselves in opposition to otherness. They do this by asserting their position on the margin through speaking themselves as an-other Black woman. This happens as speakers narrate the identification ‘Black woman’ as the product of a dis-identification with a ‘politics of skin’ at the same time as it is the ‘forcible citation of a norm, one whose complex historicity is indissoluble from relations of discipline, regulation, punishment’ (Butler, 1993, p. 232). What does dis-identification from, but citation of the same of Blackness, mean for hybridity as an impossible simultaneity of sameness and difference?

The impossible simultaneity of sameness and difference For Young (1995a, p. 26) hybridity is a breaking and a joining at the same time, a production of difference and sameness simultaneously. The notion of sameness and difference in an impossible simultaneity is an important one as it enables us to make two connections. One connection is to the abjection of the same to get to an­ other position. The other is that the retreat into everyday ‘racial’ theory that characterizes much of the talk is itself a hybrid act of positioning. This ‘racial theory’ is that which the Black community has itself established in order to keep its borders firm, to show its inclusions and exclusions, to establish the nature of ‘the Black same’. ‘The Black same’ is represented by individual translations of discourses of ‘race’, ‘culture’, ‘community’, kinship and politics. These are then reflexively recognized and applied, or disavowed and rejected in terms of the identity positionings being constructed. However, the movement between discourses of ‘the same’ and ‘the different’ is not as stark as I have implied. Rather,

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what we see are positionings of individuals one step removed from those discourses that would seek to position them as other. What we are seeing is the operation of brisure in talk as hybridity doesn’t necessitate massive disjunctives in order to come into being. This is the case as hybridity allows a number of discourses of Blackness to be used in talk-in-interaction without apparent disjunctive because of the negotiation of positionings that it entails. A call to ‘the Black same’ provides a variety of possible positionings as Black women make clear what this same is about for them in the translations in the talk. There is in the examples a denial of being made ‘other’ by discourses of positioning whilst living with this otherness daily. This denial of otherness is constituted through a conversationally generated discourse of sameness within Blackness based on a self- generated inclusion in terms of ‘race’, ‘culture’, ‘community’ and politics encapsulated within ‘Black woman’. In this way a recourse to essentialism - ‘the Black same’ - is a hybrid act of positioning as it denies the relevance of a discursively constructed ‘other’/self and replaces it with a speaker-defined, conversationally constructed ‘other’. This is interactionally accomplished in conversations through the dialogical nature of the identification stories which people tell. These stories are ‘told not through one long conversational turn taken by the “story teller”, but through a series of [..] turns by both “teller” and “audience” [..]. This dialogic form of storytelling means that the distinction between “storyteller” and “audience” becomes blurred, because what is happening is that the speakers are collaborating in a story telling’ (Cheepen, 1988, pp. 53-54). What I have been discussing so far is that in talk-in-interaction what we see are women speaking hybridity through essentialism. Does this really provide a useful link with Paul Gilroy’s (1997) notion of ‘the changing same’ as I claimed earlier?

Difference from ‘the changing same’ as a strategic performance of hybridity in interactionI I think what these claims and other identity re-positioning talk presented above show us is that hybridity is a strategic performance of self. In this performance, to be a ‘Black woman’ is presented as being about being placed or placing yourself in an oppositional struggle around naming. That is, the construction and use of difference which you yourself have defined as alterity, for example, in terms of language, dress or thought. This opposition and self-defined alterity is based on a double consciousness formed by the interaction of narratives of ‘what is Black’ and ‘what is not’ within particular times and spaces, in order to show identity positionings. Hybridity as a strategic practice becomes explicit if we remember the use of signs, for example, language, bodily practices and claims to cultural and communal knowledge, in the construction of identity. Hybridity then, could be viewed as transiently essentialized, to paraphrase Alexander (1996), fixed in brief, fleeting moments of talk. This transience exists within the boundaries formed by the

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categories ‘Black’ and ‘not Black’, which speakers draw on in their individual selfpositionings. Gilroy (1997, pp. 335-336) uses Leroi Jones’s idea of ‘the changing same’ to expand the idea of diaspora. Diaspora identities are ‘creolized, syncretized, hybridized and chronically impure cultural forms, particularly if they were once rooted in the complicity of rationalized terror and racialized reason’. The changing same is ‘not some invariant essence that gets enclosed subsequently in a shapeshifting exterior with which it is casually associated [..] The same is present but how can we imagine it as something other than an essence generating the merely accidental?’ Gilroy’s (1997, p. 336) answer to this question is to make ‘the changing same’ something that is not reified but maintained and modified in ‘a determinedly non-traditional tradition’. The talk throughout has shown us however that essentialism, no matter how contingent, is used in identification construction. The essentialism here is that of ‘race’ as it is clear that the identifications spoken throughout the extracts still rely on racialized and racializing reason. Further, in being brought into being through talk ‘the changing same’ fleetingly becomes reified. Through talk speakers show difference from ‘the changing same’ as they speak new addressivities. The claims to Blackness further illustrate for us, as said earlier, that speakers construct identifications within ‘difference from the changing same’. Identity is thus characterized by bricolage. This bricolage has recourse to essentialism and difference in order for it to be strategically performed in talk as sameness within difference, through the agreements produced in interaction. There is also a sense of the constitution of Black essentialism itself within these claims. Such a constitution is based on tropes of ‘race’ - for example, skin, origin, language, community, kinship, hair - and their use strategically. This is how we can imagine Gilroy’s changing same. What speakers are doing is reflexively building discourses of Blackness in talk-in-interaction on the theme of the membership category Black. Women draw on discourses of Blackness whilst simultaneously representing individual differences at the local level. Individual differences are shown in the re­ positioning of new addressivities as speakers construct themselves as ‘an-other Black’ when they speak from the margins of discourses on Blackness.

‘An-other Black9 and the translated hybrid subject In the examples women speak themselves as occupying a space of an-other Black, a radical otherness, by critiquing the givens of Blackness. However, the abject we will remember is never fully expelled and returns constantly to challenge its master (Kristeva, 1982). Black women have to find answers to the question from other Black individuals, ‘are you Black enough?’ Further, we have seen from the examples that we are always preceded by a Blackness which is ‘always already there’, whilst it is also in the process of being constructed. This makes it necessary for us to answer for the particular spaces we occupy across time. Our response to

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this question of Blackness should be ‘yes’. This would then have implications for the construction of identifications in talk because: Each time we talk we literally enact values in our speech through the process of scripting our place and that of our listener in a culturally specific social scenario (Holquist, 1991, p. 63).

So even within ‘yes’, individual differences will be established thus expanding the category Black. In answering ‘no’ in terms of the doxa but ‘yes’ in terms of the multiplicity that is a part of Blackness as a politics of skin, we present Black interlocutors with the possibility of a space of multiple addressivities. But then, this is perhaps the place occupied by those who would be subjects within the time and space of stories of lived experience. To make yourself so radically other means that your perspective expands from just that of the subject’s vantage point of seeing the world as if from a frontier (Jefferson, 1989, p. 154). ‘The Other [..] has a perspective on the subject that enables him both to see the external body that constitutes the subject’s vantage point on the world, and also to see that body as part of that world. This is a perspective that is at once radically different from that of the subject, yet also serves to complete it’ (Jefferson, 1989, p. 154). This is what the dialogical analysis of translation as reflexivity allows individuals to engage in. It is a combination of the issue of addressivity and making yourself radically other which holds a key to understanding what ‘translated hybrid subject’ means interactionally. These subjects are those who say ‘no .. but’, who construct themselves as Affican/Caribbean/Black to denote origin and connectedness to the diaspora, but also something else. They are multiple irrespective of skin and, in fact, because of it. What I am trying to capture here goes beyond Paul Gilroy’s idea of double consciousness and Fanon’s racial epidermal schema, even though it does incorporate these. I say this because double consciousness implies a notion of being aware of your situation but not necessarily acting against it. I also think that this in­ action within awareness also relates to the dialogical notion of co-being. So one would remain within Black masks and disciplined by the panopticons of ethnicity and white supremacy rather than challenging them to reveal other ways of inhabiting Black skin. Placing yourself in a space of radical otherness in talk involves the agentic process of abjecting ‘the voice of the other within’ and of making yourself subject in that very moment of abjection. I have said repeatedly that ‘the third space’ exists within the time and space of the narrativization of the self. Dialogism provides an extension to this in that it sees identity arising in the relations between self and other. Making oneself radically other is accomplished through the performance of where you’re from, or where you are marked as being from (the past African Caribbean); where you’re at (the present African Caribbean within Britain); and where you want to be (future possibilities for developing African Caribbean-ness based on the identification work I do now). In terms of how women practice identities as texts of social practice, they negotiate discourses in the reflexive translation processes which

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dialogic analysis entails. That is, they perform new addressivities in the ongoing flow of the talk. In the examples, Black identities as texts of social practice become the reflexive practice of dealing with the aporias produced by skin as other/same within the performance of Black skins, Black masks. Discourses of the other produce discourses of the same. So, to become subject one has to be radically other, through abjecting constructed otherness and producing unrecognizable excess. Making oneself other then, can also be a space and time of transformation as we locate ourselves within critique, so as to resolve the aporias of Black ‘skin as other/same’. Black women are, therefore, not border or liminal. Rather, what is at play here is a process in which they negotiate the irresolvable tensions of the possibilities of belonging to/ in the social world in the past, present and future, given the mark of their ‘skin’ and their negotiation of the terrain of Blackness. What looking at discourses of whiteness and Blackness as ‘the voice of the other within’ which women speak back to contributes theoretically, is the ability to look at the power/knowledge complexes in which Black women live and struggle to surmount. Whilst power/knowledge makes them abject, women simultaneously speak themselves as fighting back against the powers of abjection, thereby transgressing the boundaries of Blackness and ‘whiteness’. Here the reflexive translation of discourses in the form of dialogism becomes important as it produces the speaking subject. As speakers construct critical ontologies of the self the process of abjection and the dialogical analysis entailed in translation as reflexivity, constructs an-other ethics of Blackness. Within this, acting as a subject engaged in critique of both ‘the margin’ and ‘the centre’ from the space and time of radical otherness, is at the heart of individual identities. To quote bell hooks (1991, p. 153): I am located in the margin. I make a definite distinction between that marginality which is imposed by oppressive structures and that marginality one chooses as a site of resistance- as location of radical openness and possibility. This site of resistance is continually formed in that segregated culture of opposition that is our critical response to domination. We come to this space through suffering and pain, through struggle. We know struggle to be that which pleasures, delights, fulfils desire. We are transformed, individually, collectively, as we make radical creative space which affirms and sustains our subjectivity, which gives us a new location from which to articulate our sense of the world.

Who though are ‘we’ and what is ‘our sense of the world’ when there are competing discourses of Blackness?

Conclusion: on competing discourses of Blackness What I have developed so far is an approach to looking at how women claim Blackness in talk through using essentialism to get to hybrid identity positionings. Hybridity was largely made obvious in the talk through double consciousness, and

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the oppositional positionings produced through new addressivities so that what we saw was: the construction of cultural authority within conditions of political antagonism or inequity [.. ] [so that] At the point at which the precept attempts to objectify itself as a generalized knowledge or a normalizing, hegemonic practice the hybrid strategy or discourse opens up a space of negotiation Such negotiation is neither assimilation nor collaboration. It makes possible the emergence of an ‘interstitial’ agency that refuses the binary representation of social antagonism. Hybrid agencies [..] deploy the partial culture from which they emerge to construct visions of community, and versions of historic memory, that give narrative form to the minority positions they occupy; the outside of the inside: the part of the whole (Bhabha, 1996b, p. 58).

Bhabha’s viewpoint is a seductive one. What is significant for us in Bhabha’s ideas is what he says about an interstitial agency that refuses binary opposites. First, women use these binaries in order to establish hybrid positionings in the talk as, ‘Black woman’ is constituted by what it excludes as much as by what it includes. The fact is also that these positions shift constantly in the talk through a call to discourses that are constructed in talk-in-interaction. These counter-discourses in themselves, whilst speaking against the grain, can also be seen at the same time to be about the interactional construction of an-other normalizing hegemonic practice. This is so as speakers use versions of discourses of ‘Black woman’ that exist in the Black community. Where then does hybridity really come in here? We seem to be forever caught in a loop of same/difference/an-other/same in the performance of identifications and that is what we should recognize. We should recognize that both same and different are open to subversion at any time through hybrid agency. There are two other aspects of Bhabha’s viewpoint to deal with in order for it to make more sense with regard to the talk. First, let us look at the notion of partial culture. Although partiality emerges in the strategic use of signs and practices in the telling of life stories, I do not think that the talk speaks of anything partial, nor do I think that the speakers would see their culture as partial. Second, he seems to be setting up an ‘out there’ agency-structure dichotomy. However, in common with Boden and Zimmerman (1991, p. 4), I see ‘social structure as something humans do’. Further, ‘what a participant does in talking or in responding to another’s talk is warrantably used as information concerning his or her intentions, motives, character and the like’ (Boden and Zimmerman, 1991, p. 11). This is the agency ‘that organizes social interaction’ (Boden and Zimmerman, 1991, p. 11). Social structure and agency, therefore, both arise in conversation as women select, adapt and combine accounts to reflexively reproduce and produce Blackness differently. I have said throughout that hybridity arises in ‘the third space’ of conversational interactions and this has emerged above in the analyses. This then is the ‘interstitial agency’ of which Bhabha speaks in which the interaction of ‘the same’ and ‘the different’ leads to hybridity. Hybridity then is fleeting in talk-in-interaction. I think that this is what seeing ‘the third space’ as existing in some sort of nebulous zone, rather than within interaction and the meanings that are constantly constructed and

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deconstructed, tends to miss. It misses the dialogical engagement between sameness and difference in order to get to interstitial hybrid agency, the subjugated knowledge which is important in the production of critical ontologies of the self. The production of an-other Black woman through the interstitial agency of hybridity has implications for the Black collective. This is the case as it unsettles the assumed homogeneity necessary for community. The next chapter turns to the issue of community as we look at what a politics of skin means for questions of home and belonging.

Chapter 8

Fetishizing Community: A Politics o f Skin, Homes and Belonging

Introduction This chapter’s aim is to look at what the possibilities are for Black community. This is an important consideration given the unsettling of Black identity by gendered readings of ‘race’ and the production of hybrid identifications. As we have seen before, ‘the Black community’ is an important point of identification for women whilst also being a site of disavowal and contestation. Attending to ‘the Black community’ is necessary because we see women asserting both a demand for solidarity and singularity in their talk. Their singularity, their alterity is interactionally constructed as integral to ‘the Black community’ rather than being its antithesis. The women’s insertion of alterity within talk-in-interaction produces a dialogical performative conception of community formed within the intersubjective encounter. Their talk also produces interstitial agency. Below I will look at how interstitial agency re-produces ‘the Black community’ as dialogical and performative. As I do this I will be attending to Bhabha’s (1994i, p. 231) questions: ‘Is there a poetics of the “interstitial” community? How does it name itself, author its agency?’ Interstitiality is the space within which belonging to community is negotiated. I understand it here in two ways. First, interstitial community is produced in the space of the intersection between Blackness and its binary whiteness. Here ‘race’ determines the interstitial community as being Black. Second, it arises because of the need to negotiate belonging within ‘the Black community’. A politics of skin determines inclusion/ exclusion within the Black collective so that if one does not conform to the regulatory ideal of Blackness one is part of the marginalized interstitial community created by such exclusions. The binary here then is a Black/Black one. These are the spaces of the agonistic struggle over identity that we have seen in the women’s talk so far. The interstitiality within Blackness itself produced by negotiating different spaces of belonging will be the focus in this chapter, as what women have been most concerned to explicate in their talk is the govemmentality of the discourse of ‘the Black community’ and their responses to this. At the level of the everyday, their responses constantly disturb and remake the boundaries of ‘the Black community’ as a home, a site of belonging. This disturbance of the boundaries is what I call an interstitial poetics of Black community. I am not then talking about physical boundaries but those of affect.

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Those circumscribed by a politics of ‘race’, culture and sociality. In other words, those negotiated and remade through a politics of skin. Bhabha’s questions on interstitial community assume urgency because we are now at a point where we are being asked to live the Parekh Report’s (2000) British utopia of ‘a community of communities’. The word ‘community’ seems to occupy at least four spaces at once within this notion of the British nation as a community of communities. First, the continuation of the ideal of multiculturalism in communities of Black and minority ethnic people bound together by identities based on ancestry, tradition, geopolitics and antiracism. Second, at the level of the nation, Britain as a community of shared national interests, thus denying that it is in essence a society based on inequity. Third, the possibility for the emergence of mainstream ‘state approved’ hybrid identities. And fourth, the necessity for fixed community boundaries to ensure that different communities do not influence each other. The Report thus serves to highlight the govemmentality at the state and local levels, in which we are being asked to re-assert the necessity for ‘the Black community’ itself within the community of the British nation. Indeed, as well as govemmentality the Report reproduces Black community as a fetish in the everyday sense of the word. That is, as an object which is irrationally reverenced. I go beyond this to looking at community as part of the structure of feeling in diaspora. This moves us towards looking at community as something that maintains the Black same but simultaneously allows difference through a contestation over identification. Within this contestation a new sense of community as fetish emerges. What would community mean if Black women contest it as a site of safety and belonging? What could ‘the Black community’ be to those who are denied a place within it because of the exclusionary practices of Black politics? What are the borders of govemmentality and interstitial community within Blackness itself? What are the politics of a re-imagining of ‘the Black community’? I look at these questions in order to show some aspects of the disturbance of boundaries that produce the poetics of interstitial Black community. Interstitial Black community is a community of an-other Black produced by difference from Blackness. I begin by looking at ‘the Black community’ as a performative discourse. This performative discourse is based on admittance circumscribed by a politics of skin that underlies the subject’s inclusion in the collective. I argue that through an iconography of Blackness ‘the Black community’ becomes a fetish which exerts its own govemmentality that is undone and transformed through moments of agency. Clearly then ‘the Black community’ is mobile. I evaluate the place of the notion of Black community as fetish in the conclusion by looking at the necessity for a re­ imagining of ‘the Black community’ as ‘“raced” within difference’ given the continuing necessity for anti-racist politics. First though, what can ‘the Black community’ be?

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‘The Black com m unity’ and perform ativity The Parekh Report (2000, pp. 27-37) sees ‘community’ as a complex term which can refer: [..] to a strong sense of group solidarity. Also a homogeneous set, with fixed internal ties and strongly defined boundaries [..] Post-migration communities are distinct cultural formations but they are not cut off from the rest of British society [..] the process of hybridisation and mixing will increasingly be the norm [..] Community traditions will remain a strong source of identity and solidarity and may strengthen over time rather than erode [..] communities today are neither self-sufficient nor fixed and stable. They are open, porous formations.

The report understands community as dynamic and changing but fixed within tradition as a locus of identification. This version of community does not enable us to see the coming into being of interstitial community formed between the cracks of ‘distinct cultural formations’, ‘British society’ and ‘hybridisation and mixing’. Focusing on women’s talk on community allows us to look between the cracks. This is so as talk produces meaning within the narrative and everyday agentic practice of the construction of Black community. ‘The Black community’ is seen as a unified and separate entity in which individuals are bound together by mutuality, identification and a structure of feeling which remains beyond analysis (Alexander, 1996). I think that what the women’s talk has shown us above is that there is more contestation than mutuality within ‘the Black community’. I am also not convinced that ‘a structure of feeling’ remains beyond analysis because we see through the translation as reflexivity in women’s talk a critique of aspects of ‘race’, culture, politics, kinship and community, for example, which constitutes such a structure of feeling. Through translation as reflexivity new identities emerge in confrontation with dominant cultures whose discourses and language do not allow a full articulation of their experiences. The margin speaks back its experience of subordination, decentres dominant discourses and identities and transforms its own meanings through opening itself up to its internal differences. For Homi Bhabha community is the supplement of modernity. In the metropole it is the space of the minority and in the transnational world it relates to diaspora, migration and asylum. ‘Community’ in the British context is undoubtedly conflated with ‘race’ through its concern with both individual identity positionings and external perceptions of group experiences. ‘The Black community’ is a supplement, a space of the minority and: As a category, community enables a division between the private and the public, the civil and the familial, but as a performative discourse it enacts the impossibility of drawing an objective line between the two [..] The narrative of community substantializes cultural difference and constitutes a ‘split-and-double’ form of group identification [..] The colonized refuse to accept membership in the civil society of subjects consequently they create a cultural domain ‘marked by the

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distinctions of the material and the spiritual, the outer and the inner’ (Bhabha (1994i, pp. 230-231).

This cultural domain formed because of a refusal of subjection is interstitial Black community in the postcolonial context. Bhabha marks two aspects of the poetics of interstitial community in terms of its binary whiteness. I would like to apply these to looking at the issues of Black/Black interstitial community formation that are articulated by the subject. The first of Bhabha’s points can be taken to be that community is about admittance because of his focus on a refusal of membership. For Rey Chow (1999, p. 35) admittance operates in several senses as: The person who is or is not admitted bears on him or her the marks o f a group in articulation.[..] Admittance [..] is a permission to enter in the abstract, through the act that we call validation. To be permitted to enter is then to be recognized as having a similar kind o f value as that which is possessed by the admitting community. Third, there is admittance in the sense of a confession [..] Insofar as confession is an act of repentance, a surrender o f oneself in reconciliation with the rules o f society, it is also related to community.

These aspects of admittance (a) bearing the marks of the collective, (b) being recognized and (c) surrendering oneself, are at base about identification/being identified and forms an integral part of interstitial community. There is then within ‘the Black community’ an economy of power which produces objectified and subjugated subjects. This economy is reproduced in the structure of feeling that binds us through the necessity for recognition in order to be allowed into the Black collective. As we have seen in the earlier talk women struggle to be recognized as part of the Black collective. What is significant in the women’s talk though is that the other who is doing the recognition in terms of positive evaluation must be seen by the speaker as worthy of giving that recognition to her. Without this the other’s recognition has no affirmatory power. If the subject does not recognize the other then their recognition is meaningless. This is part of the agentic poetics of interstitial Black community that women reproduce in talk that struggles to be heard within the structure of feeling of ‘the Black community’. The second of Bhabha’s points is that community is a performative discourse. As a performative discourse ‘community’ is given life by the intertwining of the spiritual and the material. Although what Bhabha means by ‘spiritual’ is unclear I would like to read this as the structure of feeling which I am trying to unpick here as well as the imagining and speaking of these bonds differently by women. There are then competing definitions of just what is ‘the Black community’. The intertwining of the spiritual and the material within the frame of the regulation of community formation by admittance enables an everyday agentic practice to emerge through narrative. This narrative everyday agentic practice is what I call a poetics of Black interstitial community. Such a poetics enables agency because our ‘insertion into the human world of social life challenges us to intervene practically in social processes so that they do not negate but enhance human agency’ (Henry, 1997, p. 15). Agency is achieved through a translation and a rewriting of

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discourses that reveal their roots in communication and social action (Henry, 1997, p. 16). The ideas of split and double/material and spiritual gives the impression that identification with the Black collective is based on some essentialism, some bearing of the marks that constitute the group and individual membership within it. The mark that appears consistently throughout the talk is that of ‘race’. What happens though when the existence of ‘the group’ is itself brought into question as Cleavia does in example 8.1? Example 8.1 Tape 1 Side A: 2-3 1 C l constantly chainge because (.8) of other peiople’s perceptions (.6) of wha:t 2 Bla:ck is ? and I think what we have tried to do in this country and maybe what 3 >o:ther people have tri:ed to do as well< (.) round the wo:rld is (.8) >I’ve< 4 we’ve tri:ed to say (.8) this is what Black is but we’ve >never< rea:lly 5 succeeded in doing that because the boundaries are akways charnged all 6 the ti:me (.7) 7 L Mhm?= 8 C =1 mean we’re >constantly< saying this is what Bla:ck is politically (1.3) 9 but there are so: ma:ny differences (.8) within that tha:t we are constantly 10 having to revise that and .hhh I thiink (.7) it’s >rea:lly d ifficu lt to say 11 we:ll this is what (.5) °Black° community is unless you are talking personally Cleavia makes us aware that not only is Black community contested and fluid, but it is also about personal definitions of what it could be. What form could community as a basis for identification take if we are left with the ‘talking personally’ of individuals? What would then be the possibility for interstitial community? As a performative discourse, ‘the Black community’, that whose interstitiality is marked with reference to its otherness from whiteness, does indeed substantialize cultural difference through marking the inner and the outer in terms of admittance. This performativity still functions within a translational time and space in British politics in which the collective identity ‘Black’ is contested and has to be negotiated and where the very notion of ‘the Black community’ itself is questioned. Indeed, within ‘the Black community’ the inner and the outer is marked as we have seen in much of the talk previously through the tropes of ‘culture’, politics, consciousness and shade, for example. ‘The Black community’ is also spoken about as a focal point and takes on a spatial/social interactional meaning: it becomes an agency in space and time produced in interaction (see Laura’s talk in example7.3). It is a spatial/social interactional nexus that would act to counter the dispersal and politics of assimilation the women speak about (Laura in example 7.4). Of significance is the women’s use of an iconography of Blackness in order to make the inner and the outer of ‘the Black community’ visible: for example, West Indian (Lola, 5.3) hair, shade, cultural practices, transnational links, roots and language (see Dana and Tessa in example 5.1). These symbols serve as representations of ‘the Black

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community’. Further, their words point to the existence of interstitial community within Blackness itself on three levels. First, a community of homogeneity in which authenticity is realized through culture, skin colour and interaction (Dana and Tessa example 5.1). Here, to be Black is narrowly circumscribed by spatial interactional foci, food and language, in contradistinction to whiteness. Second, a community of difference within Blackness to the extent that difference becomes apparent at the moment of negation of Black community (see, for example, Dana and Tessa in examples 6.3 and 6.4; Lola in example 5.3). This is the muchmaligned zone of integration. Third, a community of ‘different from the changing same’ in which through a politics of skin Blackness is critiqued and difference established through hybridity, whilst simultaneously Blackness is nonetheless reinscribed. ‘The Black community’ means different things to different people and also refers to different aspects of collective experience. The question of authenticity has emerged in the talk as quite central to Black women’s identifications. The women have oriented us to the fact that we are now in a situation in which ‘the authentic’ within Blackness can no longer be taken to be ‘the real’ as it has always been the site of difference even within a public performative discourse of ‘the Black community’ which has tightly drawn boundaries in terms of admittance. By authenticity here then I have to mean that ‘authentic identity is a matter of choice, relevance and a feeling of rightness. In other words, authentication also means ruling out certain options as incorrect or inappropriate’ (Radhakrishnan, 2003, p. 316). Authenticity becomes instead a: critical search for a third space that is complicitous neither with the deracinating imperatives of Westernization nor with theories of a static, natural, and singleminded autochthony [..] [it] is an invention with enough room for multiple rootedness [..] there need be no theoretical or epistemological opposition between authenticity and historical contingency, between authenticity and hybridity, between authenticity and invention (Radhakrishnan, 2003, p. 316).

A poetics of interstitial Black community has always been based on contingency, hybridity and invention, as its agency is authored within the critical third space of talk-in-interaction. This agency is opposed to the govemmentality of the discourse of ‘the Black community’.

‘The Black community’ and govemmentality In their analysis of the state as a cultural formation, Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer (1985) speak of govemmentality as the state’s project of moral regulation (Ong, 2000). This regulation is aimed at ensuring a unitary and unifying expression to multi-faceted group experiences (Ong, 2000). The role of the state in universalizing the concept of ‘the Black community’ is attained through a process of individuation where people are constructed in definitive ways as citizens. Minority groups cannot escape the cultural inscription of state power and other

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forms of regulation that define the different modalities of belonging. One cannot therefore ignore civil institutions and social groups as disciplinary forces in the making of citizens (Ong, 2000). As this is the case, one cannot ignore the impact of the performative discourse of ‘the Black community’ in the coming into being of Black subjects. ‘Cultural’ difference, naming and the politics of national belonging are potent signifiers of interstitial Black community in terms of its binary, white community. However, as the women’s earlier talk shows us, within a context in which Black community exists interstitially in terms of difference from itself, and where authenticity is an invention, at the level of quotidian interaction we are still left with residual traces of the myth of the solidarity of ‘the Black community’. This myth is continually reprocessed and invoked in the face of racist essentializing to produce a ‘split-and-double’ form of group identification. Such identification is at one and the same time inside and outside an imagined Black collective in which ‘race’ prefigures a transient solidarity, one that cannot be taken for granted. ‘Race’ becomes not just a site of subversion and transgression but also another sign of agency and identity. There is then a doubleness of Black interstitial community in which the structure of racial difference is founded on two master signifiers Blackness and whiteness. They both produce a logic of differential relations. First, ‘the Black community’ establishes itself by referring back to the other signifier ‘white’. ‘The Black community’ also refers back to Blackness itself as it produces asymmetries and hierarchies within admittance to ‘the community’. Both master signifiers remain outside of the play of signification even as they enable the logic of differential relations through ‘race’. What are the translational spaces through which ‘race’ negotiates the Black collective? The women have spoken above of a real Blackness in opposition to the absence of this in those who have assimilated to whiteness. In their words we can begin to see what I will explore in more detail next. That is, the operationalization of the performative discourse of ‘the Black community’. This discourse produces govemmentality through its structure of feeling. A structure of feeling that proceeds as a regime of truth on authenticity understood as autochthonous in which ‘race' as culture, colour and consciousness establishes the community boundaries. However women simultaneously re-negotiate ‘the Black community’ from its own interstices as a site of belonging, as a site of admittance, as home.

‘To say I’d just discovered my Black identity is so inaccurate’ - negotiating Black community What could ‘the Black community’ be for those who are denied a place within it because of the exclusionary practices of a Black politics of skin? What can it mean when we speak about the performative discourse of Black community as a regime of truth? Laura speaks from her own particular position within Blackness as a ‘mixed race’ woman whose experience is that she is thought of as only just having discovered her Blackness because of kinship, as her link to whiteness is made visible through her light skin shade.

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Example 8.2 LF Tape 1 Side A: 2 1 L >The trouble is< even sometimes Black people are our own wo:rst enemy 2 because they say o:h look she’s discovered her Blackness all of a sudden= 3 S =Mhm= 4 L = You know we say HORrible [things] about each other [to ea]ch other, 5 S [ M h m] [Mhm] 6 L don’t we?= 7 S =Mhm= 8 L = I wrote an article last year in a magazine and .hhh somebody wrote a >9 reply to it saying >people like her< (.) [meaning me] a:hm just because 10 S [ Oh gosh ] >11 L they’ve found their Black identity all of a sudden and >dah di dah di dah< 12 and I thought o:h you know you are so ignorant [ YOU KNOW THEY 13 S [ So did she know you 14 had a ] white mother then? 15 L DON’T THI- ] ((Clears throat)) I am not sure what she was assuming= 16 S =Mhm= 17 L =BUT obviously from the way she wrote she didn’t kno:w me (.) very well= 18 S =Mh[m] 19 L [Be]cause to sa:y I had just discovered my: B laxk identity is so: 20 inaccurate^ 21 S =Mhm= >22 L = I have discovered my B laxk identity as a ve:ry young child. The hostility that Laura reports on marks the surveillance of the boundaries of community through the trope of ‘racial purity’. Here recognition revolves around the politics of visibility. ‘Racial purity’ as a necessity for Black community is contained in the pejorative ‘just because they have found their identity all of a sudden’ (lines 9-11) with which Laura has had to deal when she has claimed her position as Black. This claim is made within the emotional violence of othering from the Black community. In order not to be positioned on the border, as marginal because of the surveillance of the borders of Blackness, she must have known her Black identity from a young age (line 22). The fact that she has to do the constant interactional work of marking herself as rooted within Blackness makes Black community a site of surveillance, normalization and control. Within this site the necessity for Black consciousness is reproduced as part of the regime of truth of ‘the Black community’, as part of its govemmentality. Laura’s disruption of the regime of truth in which skin colour does not signify outsidemess because of her consciousness of her Black identity, seeps through the interstices of the construction of ‘the Black community’ disturbing its totalizing narrative of homogeneity. Through performing herself as Black she undermines the govemmentality of ‘the Black community’ and refuses her position as one who surrenders herself in reconciliation with Blackness as a regime of truth. The examples throughout have shown us that there is the continual necessity for the performance of ‘political’,

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‘racial’, ‘cultural’ and ‘communal’ solidarity. This then is the govemmentality of ‘the Black community’ reproduced at the level of the everyday. Refusing subjection troubles the assumed ease of the negotiation of a collective Black identification based on ‘race’ and the unchallenged continuation of such a politics. However, what are the intersections between govemmentality and interstitiality within ‘the Black community’ itself? How does govemmentality proceed at the level of the subject? The Black community is reproduced by Laura at the quotidian level of interaction as something permeable, something to be negotiated, even whilst its symbolic border guards keep its borders firm. Govemmentality becomes part of the translational space and time in which ‘the Black community’ is negotiated. A space and time in which power relations take hold of the body through the bio-power of ‘the politics of skin’. Black people and Black experiences are positioned and subjected in the dominant discourse of ‘the Black community’. As shown by Laura and numerous other examples in this book, we are constructed as worthy of admittance or not within its categories of knowledge about who is authentic, about ‘who is really Black’. The power of confirmation of and conformation to the norm then makes us see and experience ourselves as inside or outside ‘the Black community’. The dominant discourse of ‘the Black community’ produces cultural/racial identity as fixed and essentialist, lying unchanged outside of history, culture and representation. It is a fixed origin to which we have the key for the lock - authentic Blackness. ‘The Black community’ proceeds as a point of similarity and continuity and its interstitial agency in terms of its binary opposite ‘the white community’, is based on toeing ‘the race line’ defined in terms of colour, culture and consciousness. There is though another agentic interstitial poetics. As I have said before, it is that produced by difference and rupture within the boundaries of ‘the Black community’. This difference and rupture is still thought and spoken in terms of the dialogical relationship between itself and ‘a Black continuity’. Lola Young (2000, p. 167) describes such a Black continuity as an indisputable feature within the Black diaspora as: The invocation of a discernible essentialized Blackness is often embedded in commonsense expressions of diaspora sensibilities. Such forms of black consciousness inform the anxieties which black people may have about what is perceived as a loss of cultural distinctiveness involved in recognizing the dynamic syncretism which characterizes so much of everyone's experiences. For many black people the notion of a transnational black community is an empowering one because it provides a position of authority from which to speak.

However, alongside this ‘continuity’ of a transnational Black community, the extracts also show that difference and rupture is inscribed within ‘the Black community’. This inscription makes the negotiation of its govemmentality possible. The negotiation of govemmentality is possible because of the translations of ‘the Black community’ in which we engage to position ourselves as subjects worthy of admittance. In common with Derrida’s notion of differance as a marker

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which disturbs our understanding/translation of the word, such Black interstitial agency produced in the negotiation of govemmentality, sets ‘the Black community’ on the path to new meanings without erasing the trace of its other meanings. This trace has been shown in the extracts above, for example, at the levels of culture, interaction and political consciousness. These Black community boundaries and the performance of commonality which they necessitate are themselves however, subject to transgression because: Social differences are not simply given to experience through an already authenticated cultural tradition; they are the signs of the emergence of community envisaged as a project - at once a vision and a construction - that takes you ‘beyond’ yourself in order to return, in a spirit of revision and reconstruction, to the political conditions of the present (Bhabha, 1994c, p. 3).

The ‘beyond yourself though is always subject to the pull of the panopticon of Blackness with its statements of ‘who is really Black’ serving to discipline difference. Discipline springs from ‘an inspecting gaze, a gaze which each individual under its weight will end by interiorizing to the point that he is his own overseer, each individual thus exercising this surveillance over and against him self (Foucault, 1980c, pp. 154-155). ‘Awareness and practice of culture’, prefigures a Black community solidarity. Here ‘Black culture’ is drawn on as a performative discourse of public identification, as part of the structure of feeling of ‘the Black community’. Black culture is a performative discourse that survives and within which is embedded the govemmentality of ‘the Black community’. The govemmentality of the performative discourse is necessary in order to give an illusion of ‘the Black same’ because of the rifts which exist within Blackness as a quotidian practice, experience, ideology and consciousness. Given the contestation within Black community and the incommensurable positions within Blackness highlighted by the extracts, can we continue the collective fiction that there is such a thing as ‘the Black community’? What attending to Bhabha’s (1994i, p. 231) questions: ‘Is there a poetics of the ‘interstitial’ community? How does it name itself, author its agency?’ make clear is, the significance of this contestation within Blackness for re-imagining ‘the Black community’. Indeed, the necessity for such a re-imagining within the boundaries of the performative discourse itself.

Re-imagining Black community So far I have looked at a poetics of interstitial Black community. I have done this by looking at the govemmentality produced by the performative discourse of ‘the Black community’ and attendant iconography of Blackness within the structure of feeling talked into being by the women. Alongside admittance, I have also shown another aspect of such a poetics, that which is based on critique and transformation of the boundaries of the collective. A poetics of the Black community in interaction emerges based on an admittance in which the ‘raced’ body is used as a sign of

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community itself. T he Black community’ becomes a 4 “cipher space” - a space that can hide the secrets of identity while simultaneously providing the clues to its discovery [..] as an empty place holder it can be filled with almost any category of identity’ (Klor de Alva, 2000, p. 175). Almost needs to be emphasized here because of the impact of racialization on what can fill the empty space, as markers of sameness and difference, fixity and fluidity are combined interactionally to produce the effect of community. The iconography of Blackness used by the women leads one to think about ‘the Black community’ as a polyphonic text. Here identity can only be articulated as a set of representations through the use of simulacra. In the examples cited earlier, speakers both re-imagined and re-invoked ‘the Black community’ as they constructed it in talk: as they made its absence, presence. Within this collapse of the border between the ‘real’ and ‘imaginary’, Black community becomes ‘no longer a question of imitation, nor of reduplication, nor even of parody. It is rather a question of substituting signs of the real for the real itself (Baudrillard, 1983, p. 4) within the performative discourse of ‘the Black community’. Substituting signs of the real for the real itself is part of the poetics of Black interstitiality and these signs of the real reproduce the govemmentality of ‘the Black community’. Such a reproduction of signs of the real, of making the absent present, are revealed in the earlier examples through the markers language, food, and sociality, for example. These signs of the real being taken for the real itself are again replayed by Dana at the level of kinship, in the following example. Example 8.3 DF Tape 1 Side A: 4-5 1 D And you see like when I was at school people used to call me half breed all 2 the time= 3 S =You see= 4 D = And I used to say bo:th my parents are Bla:ck= 5 S =Yeah= 6 D = And both my parents sa:w themselves as Bla:ck as [well and li:ke] I can 7 S [ Absolutely ] 8 D I can remember my dad sayiing to us and DON’T think you lot are better 9 than any of these other peoiple because you are liighter than them= 10 S =Mhm= 11 D = Like >when I was younger< I never rea:lly talked about my origin[ and ] 12 S [Mhm] 13 D mo:st people just assumed that, (.7) 14 D You know? I was a mixture of Black and white= 15 S =[Mhm] 16 D [But ] I never felt like that though (.5) >17 D And then my mum would start talking and she would say you kno:w? that 18 my gran probably had some In:dian blood in her and possibly some 19 Chiinese blood as well .hhh [so then] I became faiscinated then= 20 S [ Yea:h ] =Yea:h= 21 D =Because I realized that we we:ren’t just one thi:ng or another because I

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had always identified with the African side of things (1.1) Amongst the family the children that we have you can never tell what colour they are going to be or what they are going to look like, because there are some with Arawak Indian1 fea:tures, some of us have Chimese features, some of us are a bit more Affixan looking and so:me of us are even whi:te >we all see: our:selves as Black tho:ugh
1 2 3 >4 5 6 7 8 >9 10 11 12 13 14 15

D And it’s very hard because I feel more isolated as a Black woman now,= S = M h m (l.l) S Mhm= D = I thi:nk than I have done for a lo:ng time, because Bla:ck politics have become the politics of splintering [and you see if] I splinter myself off S [ Absolutely ] D then that splinters off my humanity [and my] identi:ty= S [ Mhm] =Mhm= D = And what would be left if: I splintered off from a: 11 those identities?= S =Mhm= D =There won’t be [anything] left, (1.2) nothing just a shell (.8) not even a S [Nothing ] D shell you know because I: ca:n’t be part of a Black politics that’s antiAs:ian and I can’t be part of an As:ian politics that’s anti-African (.) I can’t split myself into that many pieces.

Naming is an important aspect of interstitial Black community as well as being a potent method of filling absence with presence, as Dana shows us next. In example 8.5 she talks about being included or not within the Black Workers’ Group within her workplace. Her central concern here is to fill the absence of Anglo-Indian in terms of her friend Carol’s identity with the presence of Blackness as a category of identification. Here interstitial ontologies of ‘the Black community’ emerge in the intersectional space of self and other through the questioning of her friend’s identification as Black by other Black people and then also in her questioning of how she herself is viewed by her colleagues (lines 8-12). Here though Dana makes it clear that what is significant is people’s identifications as ‘you should just give it her anyway, if Carol doesn’t think she is Black she won’t go will she?’ (lines 9 and 11). ‘The Black community’ is then re-imagined as a site of identification irrespective of kinship where anyone who is not white and is racialized can be included. Example 8.5 DF Tape 1 Side A: 25 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

D My friend Carol sta:rted to work and she is Anglo: Indian. You can see that she’s Indian,= S =Mhm= D = extraction, you know? [ you ] can see: she’s NOT whi:te anyway S [Mhm] D and they were having this (.4) ah:m theatre trip (.9) so they as:ked me if I wa:nted to go: and I said to >the girl who was organizing it< o:h have you as:ked Ca:rol if she wanted to go? >and she said< o:h does Carol thi:nk

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9 she’s Black? (.4) and I said [ (.5) you should just] give it her anyway? 10 S [> My goodness < ] 11 D If Carol doesn’t think she’s B laxk then she won’t go will she:? (.8) and 12 that made me think then is that how you see me:? The notion of ‘roots’ is also used as a sign of the real through which Black community can be re-imagined and re-presented. Dana and Bianca critique the notion of Black style, of simulacra being themselves taken to be signs of Blackness, of belonging to community, next. For example, ‘wearing certain expensive clothes and having a mobile phone and having a BMW and living in Palmer’s Green or Edgefield... [and] wear[ing] African clothes’. However, the fact is ‘clothes don’t say who you are’ and one needs to be embedded in ‘the roots thing’. As a sign of the real, ‘roots’ does a double duty. It performs ‘home’ and political consciousness as necessary to a claim of a place in ‘the Black community’ - of being rooted in ‘the same’. The notions of ‘home’ and political consciousness, though unstable, also contain within them signs of the real. ‘Home’, implies an identificatory genealogy based on diasporic origins and Caribbean descent. ‘Political consciousness’ implicates within itself an awareness of a commonality of racist oppression around which ‘the Black community’ can organize as a political force in order to disrupt the homogeneity of the imagined community of the British nation. Example 8.6 DF and B Tape 1 Side A: 247 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

D

It’s like a lot of people now are see:ing themselves as B laxk people by having a certain style= B =1 kno:w= D = Like wea:ring certain expensive clothes and having a mobile pho:ne and having a BMW and living in Pa:lmer’s Green or Ed:gefield, whatever it is= B =Mhm= D = Do you kno:w what I mean? and you kno:w they wear Afrixan clo:thes but it’s li:ke the roots thi:ng just isn’t there in it you know?= B =Y ea:hyouareright= D = That kind of roots thing it’s just not there they are not rooted in anything= B = No it agsin boils back down to the feet your clo:thes don’t say who you are= D =It’s like B laxk consu:merism isn’t it? (1.1) B Yea:h it still doxsn’t sa:y who: you are.

What is clear from the examples is that in the emergence of agency within the poetics of the ‘interstitial’ Black community, there is a performative discourse within which ‘the Black community’ is re-imagined and re-membered through simulacra. We then begin to see the invisible visibility of ‘the Black community’ and the govemmentality this entails. Within this govemmentality, to name oneself as part of ‘the Black community’ is to anchor oneself to an essentialism that is a simulation. ‘The changing same’ of ‘the Black community’ is retained and modified whilst being ‘ceaselessly reprocessed’ (Gilroy, 1997, p. 336). As one

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places oneself on shifting sands where the true becomes the false and the real the imaginary, one is constantly presented with the necessity to reproduce ‘the Black community’ as a point of certainty as ‘roots’ though we take various ‘routes’ (Gilroy, 1995) to identifications. What does this tell us about ‘the Black community’ as fetish?

The Black community as fetish The rejection of the ‘we’ as essentialist and authoritarian is a taken for granted in enabling political identity. As well as this though the ‘we’ is also powerfully invoked as a site of belonging. Such is the poetics of Black interstitial community. The ‘I’ and the ‘we’ are irrevocably intertwined in an agonistic process of negotiation - newness - fixity - negotiation as an unending cycle. This is important in terms of the Black community as fetish. For Bhabha (1994h, p. 74) ‘fetishism is always a “play” or vacillation between the archaic affirmation of wholeness/similarity [..] and the anxiety associated with lack and difference’. ‘The Black community’ as fetish: [..] gives access to an ‘identity’ which is predicated as much on mastery and pleasure as it is on anxiety and defence, for it is a form of multiple and contradictory belief in its recognition of difference and disavowal of it [..] the scene of fetishism is also the scene of the reactivation and repetition of a primal fantasy - the subject’s desire for a pure origin that is always threatened by division’ (Bhabha, 1994h, pp.74-75).

Within a dialogical performative understanding ‘the Black community’ becomes a site of both fixity and fantasy: a fetish. The Black community as fetish is a form of knowledge which allows the possibility of having two contradictory beliefs: ‘one that allows the myths of origins, the other that articulates difference and division’ (Bhabha, 1994h, p. 80). The one belief throughout the examples which seems to allow the myth of origins and articulation of difference is the visibility of ‘race’: a sign for culture, Black politics, consciousness and rootedness. Alongside this we must also have in the forefront of our minds those other divisions and differences that arise from racism and from the interstices of ‘the Black community’ itself through critique. What does it mean for the transformational agency of Black politics to speak of its base ‘the Black community’ as a fetish: a scene of the myth of origins, recognition and disavowal of difference?

Conclusion: on the politics of community as fetish Within the poetics of Black interstitial community there is disavowal and ambivalence present in the continual necessity for the performance of ‘political’, ‘racial’, ‘cultural’ and ‘communal’ solidarity. This continual necessity for the

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performance of solidarity is the govemmentality of ‘the Black community’ reproduced at the level of the everyday. Such is the hold of ‘the Black community’, its govemmentality, that we are forced to reproduce its invisibility as visibility, its shadow as substance, its fantasy as the real, through an iconography of Blackness, through simulacra. These simulacra become ambivalent positions of identification and belonging as they reproduce the boundaries of the collective. Ambivalence splits ‘the real’, ‘the visible’, revealing the absence of Black community within its metonymies of presence. When we name ourselves we anchor ourselves to a simulation but we also set ‘the Black community’ on the path to new meanings. We transgress its boundaries without erasing the trace of its other meanings. Within this critique produced in the performance of commonality the racialized body becomes a sign for a ‘community in difference’. If community is re-imagined as a fetish it allows in this new performative discourse of ‘the Black community’ as a ‘community in difference’ from which antiracist politics can continue. The notion of ‘the Black community’ needs to be ‘enraced’ so that ‘the Black community in difference’ can be spoken within a context in which racism persists. Activists have to acknowledge the continuing significance of ‘race’ and racism in politics but also pay attention to counter-narratives from the margins. These counter-narratives both evoke and erase the govemmentality of the performative discourse of ‘the Black community’. The evocation and erasure of ‘the Black community’ means that it is politically necessary to widen the symbolic border guards of admittance that identify members and non-members. These symbolic border guards would then be constantly contested and change the constructed boundaries of the imagined community. ‘The Black community’ would become energized by its own interstitial politics. The community must of necessity re­ imagine itself as ‘“raced” within difference’. Here ‘race’ itself is a sliding signifier rather than a position of certainty and security and anti-racism is the common battle within a claim for a Black British space.

Chapter 9

Conclusion

I began with two simple motivations. The first of these was to look at what Black women’s talk can contribute to our understanding of hybridity. The conclusions that could be drawn from my analysis of a hybridity of the everyday may be summarized as follows: 1) Black women’s identities are texts of social practice; 2) hybridity is dialogical because as an everyday interactional phenomenon translation is integral to it; 3) the Third space’ in interaction is a negotiation of identity positions in which statement, translation as reflexivity and new addressivity perform Black skins, Black masks; 4) establishing new addressivities in talk is necessary for hybrid identificatory strategies and abjection is central to this; 5) and, performativity is important in hybrid identifications, which are themselves critical ontologies of the self The second of my motivations was to see how thinking through hybridity helps us to think ‘race’, a politics of skin and community. This takes us beyond hybridity to a position where Blackness is simultaneously transformed and recouped. Starting from talk it is clear that in the discourse of ‘authentic Black womanhood’ there is an attitude to do with identity based on notions of autochthony that produces its own bodily schema and ‘cultural’ praxis. Black authenticity equals dark skin and rootedness in the Caribbean and Africa. This then is the monologic version of Black skin which is unsettled when a hybridity of the everyday disrupts its totalizing principles. This disruption means that a Black mask is removed to reveal a different Black skin, as the boundaries of Black womanhood are expanded. As I said in the Introduction a problem with much of the theorizing on hybridity is that it has been divorced from the voices of Black women. What I have tried to do is to address this imbalance by engaging with Black women and putting their experience at the centre of theorizing. By talking about their lived experiences, what women show us is that ‘race’, racism, skin, community, politics and culture, cannot be left out of theorizing Black hybrid identifications. What their talk also allows us to establish is that any theorizing that includes a Black particularity must critique whiteness as the norm as well as, importantly, monologic discourses on Blackness. Such theorizing must be centred on Black experiences and, must be

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capable of establishing a space for Blackness/Black womanhood as a discourse of containment to be critiqued and for differences to emerge. I have said that awareness of discursive positioning, translation as reflexivity and addressivity are important in theorizing hybridity in interaction. This acknowledges the power relations of white/Black, Black/Black, same/different within which women are embedded in their daily lives. These relations of skin are important to remember because they are the catalysts in the identifications that are performed in the everyday. I am not saying that our identities as Black women are just dependent on our experiences of racism or Black exclusion, as that would make us into merely reactive ciphers. Instead what I am saying is that hybridity in terms of Black identifications should not be moved out from the loaded discourse of ‘race’ to a more neutral zone of identity and cultural fusion, which is what some theoretical approaches to hybridity suggest. To do this would be to deny the salience of ‘race’ in our lived experiences as Black women. It is also important to remember that Black women also use discourses which locate us as homogeneous because of the continuation of discourses of authenticity within Black communities and that these discourses equally have to be struggled with in order for difference to emerge, in order for Black skin to be transformed. I want to turn to looking at hybridity as a strategic identificatory performance that arose in the talk. I have said that contexts of racialization are significant in terms of theorizing hybridity. Their importance extends to the implications of skin in this racialized context, in terms of exclusion and the strategic methods for inclusion and distancing with which speakers engage. This I have termed mimicry, the process of speaking back to the eye of power. In retrospect, such strategic hybridity needs to be considered also as a radical otherness in which assimilation of the voice of the other within has a place. Bhabha (1994f, p. 121) shows us the connection between mimicry and hybridity when he states: To the extent to which discourse is a form of defensive warfare, mimicry marks those moments of civil disobedience within the discipline of civility: signs of spectacular resistance. Then the words of the master become the site of hybridity the warlike, subaltern sign of the native - then we may not only read between the lines but even seek to change the often coercive reality that they so lucidly contain.

What is acknowledged by Bhabha here, and by Gayatri Spivak (1993b) in ‘Can the subaltern speak?’ is that such a strategic form of hybridity does necessitate assimilation of the master’s discourses. The link between hybridity and assimilation underlies Gilroy’s viewpoint on double consciousness, as well as Bhabha’s view of mimicry as an ambivalent third choice bordered by black skins/ white masks. This means that assimilation itself can be viewed as a hybrid act of identification although being ‘submerged in whiteness’ or acting in ways seen to be ‘white’, is critiqued in the talk by the speakers. Assimilation must be done differently then from the viewpoint of awareness of, coupled with detachment from, whiteness and a political consciousness rooted in Blackness. As we have seen, women also speak

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about the words of the master emanating from Black community generated discourses of Blackness. So who is the master and who is the native when interactants perform, recreate and change these discourses, as is the case for those which spring from whiteness? This makes us recall that it is not just discourses of whiteness that coerce, but discourses of Blackness as well. Power and how to undermine its grip are central to a strategic hybridity which is itself constructed and shifting. What a hybridity o f the everyday enables us to see is that speakers treat whiteness and Blackness as partial hegemonies susceptible to resistance and transformation. The necessity of embodied difference is maintained while at the same time entering into dialogue about the boundaries of Blackness. This politics of skin produces ‘difference from the changing same’. There is no necessary always already fixed point of belonging and while skin, culture, politics, ‘race’, racism and community continue to be employed to convey a sense of inclusion; what this inclusion means, is now a matter of contingency. Black women live within and negotiate the tensions of being both inside and outside Blackness. This allows them to deconstruct the always already said, and to create new addressivities. The dialogical negotiation of the ‘third space’ means that ‘we may elude the politics of polarity and emerge as others of ourselves’ (Bhabha, 1994j, p. 39). In emerging as others of ourselves we transgress a constraining Blackness and affirm multiple Black identifications: we remove Black masks to reveal Black skins. To say that there is a dialogics involved in hybridity is unremarkable as this is clear. However, what is not available in the literature is any notion of what this dialogism entails in terms of making Black identifications in talk. Through using talk-in-interaction I have looked at a triple dialogics of hybridity. First, translation as reflexivity is a dialogical analysis, a critique of discourses of the same/other in which abjection is a central process. Second, that interactants link the micro and the macro in their use of discourses to perform identity positionings. Third, we have also seen a dialogism in which difference and essentialism are intertwined in the construction of hybrid texts of social practice. New addressivities - that is hybrid identity positionings - are given the meaning of ‘different from the changing same’ in talk-in-interaction as speakers construct difference whilst using discourses of fixed, authentic, ‘racial’ identities in this process. Within hybrid identities sameness cannot be taken for granted as these identities are dialogical, relational and dependent on the relationship with the other in order to come into being. So identity must be demonstrated in relation to the alternative possibility of differentiation, because we are not what we were (Gilroy, 1995, p. 26). ‘We are not what we were’ reminds us that there is now a new politics of skin in which skin can no longer be taken to signify Black authenticity. Authenticity has to be performed as a ‘difference from the changing same’. This gives a new perspective to Gilroy’s cultural reprocessing linked to the fragmentation and dispersal of diaspora, as the same becomes different and the different becomes the same, even whilst being contingently essentialized in talk-in-interaction. For Hall (Papastergiadis, 1997, p. 275) there is the possibility of changing conceptions of self and community in the construction of social memories. Change implies the

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existence of a same. If skin no longer signifies authenticity, how can we support Hall’s claim that change occurs in the social construction of social memories? Where would we be able to site the self and community outside of the assumed authenticity of racialized skin? The women’s gendered readings of ‘race’ show us the possibility that we have an-other set of authenticity constructs in operation within Black community. Racialized skin is re-produced through radical otherness via authenticity tropes, for example Blackness as consciousness in terms of a Black/ African centred politics; pride in roots and heritage; an anti-racist world view; kinship; and resistance to assimilation to whiteness. These tropes of Black authenticity come into being through the performative potential of storied memory. In life stories community and ‘identity as skin’ become fluid and contingent whilst simultaneously being routed through ‘roots’, culture, politics and space. I have shown that in life-stories new addressivities, an identification of different from the same, becomes known through the telling. ‘Different’ and ‘same’ are subjected to slippage within the boundaries of ‘the third space’. However, different and same also form the boundaries of ‘the third space’ which is achieved interactionally. This helps us to revisit Bhabha’s notion of hybridity as being a process of identifying with and through an object of otherness. If it is the case that skin no longer signifies authenticity, if there is no longer a Black skin, then we have to become the others of ourselves through talk in order for ‘the third space’ to emerge. As Black interlocutors we make Blackness - whether generated from white or Black discourses - ‘other’ through abjection in order to become an-other within the space of radical otherness. Othering then is itself a double movement in which speakers are performing Spivak’s (1993b, p. 89) ‘rendering delirious the voice of the other within us’ in order to claim Blackness at one step removed from the changing same. Abjection is not looked at in theories of hybridity, per se. However, as abjection of ‘the voice of the other within’ in interaction, it emerged as being quite central to hybridity in terms of the talk. Abjection here was double. First, it related to women’s lived experiences of racism or being made the other of a disciplinary Blackness. Second, abjection of one’s discursive positioning enables the construction of new addressivities in the talk. These new addressivities are the sites of difference from the changing same of discursive positioning. Abjection emerges as critique that keeps the borders of the Black same firm even though these borders change in the on-going flow of the talk. The notion of borders is significant in terms of how speakers bring Blackness and whiteness into being through talk. Blackness is performed as racialized, authentic, political, but always with the potential for difference at every turn. Speakers also racialize whiteness in talk. Through this whiteness ceases to be invisible and becomes a fixed and essentialized racial position of domination which is to be critiqued and usurped. That is to say, Blackness and whiteness are simultaneously produced in talk. This shows us the dialogical nature of third space performativity in which the other is fixed and it is only the self, ‘the changing same’ which can be different. The discussion has raised the whole question of ‘just what is the third space anyway?’ The talk has shown that ‘the third space’ exists in talk-in-interaction as

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the negotiation of positionings in which speakers engage when they translate and reflexively apply discourses to themselves or disavow these discourses in terms of the new addressivities that they construct. A question that arises at this point is, if Blackness is inscribed as essence how is it the ‘other’ of the hybrid Black speaker? Essentialist Blackness becomes the other in talk as speakers construct new addressivities at one step removed from that identity positioning which has been given to them. For example, Senna speaks about her hair as her inscription of Blackness. She at first deracinates this by straightening it in order to fit in with whiteness’s straight hair rule. However, she also acts against this inferiorization of hair by asserting its centrality to her identity as a Black woman by ceasing to straighten her hair and wearing her afro-hair in plaits. It is in the negotiation of identity positionings in talk-in-interaction in which Blackness as the other emerges. For Senna here Blackness as the other is an assimilated Black other who shows this through straightening her hair. The interaction of ‘the same’ and ’the different’ in hybridity was focused on in the penultimate chapter which looked at the discourses of Blackness that tellers both inscribe into claims to Blackness and produce collaboratively. This linked to the notion of ‘different from the changing same’ to show the contingent essentialism of ‘the changing same’. Speakers use essentialized definitions of ‘race’, ‘culture’, ‘community’ and ‘politics’, for example, to construct those ‘racial’ boundaries within which they are located as other and within which they would be subjects. In doing this they establish for us a fluidity within a fixity which is the Black experience. Their construction of difference within the continuity of the changing same makes us see the necessity for essentialism within the definitions of racial boundaries in the hybrid moment in talk. Within this negotiation of same and different, essentialist notions of origins, roots, kinship, community and shade are placed alongside new emergent definitions of these essentialisms in talk. For example, authentic Blackness as being about consciousness and politics rather than dark skin shade; being rooted within the Caribbean, Africa and Britain simultaneously as a part of Blackness; and being Black irrespective of white kinship. Through this negotiation the ‘racial’ boundaries both expand and are re-inscribed as ‘the same’. In talk, performativity becomes a part of ‘difference from the changing same’ as ‘race’ is replayed simultaneously as a constraint and the site of agency in the emergence of Black womanhood. Some of this performativity in terms of ‘difference from the changing same’ relates to shade and the centrality of the visual in Black identities. Within the talk there is resistance to a Blackness that is reducible to skin colour alongside a need to perform identity through bodily practices in order to make Blackness visible. The visual is important then in making claims to identification and difference. The shade of one’s skin potentially sets up different addressivities within Blackness. For example, ‘light skin’ sets up a question of Blackness, a counter-aesthetics, an addressivity of ‘the different’, through its dialogical engagement with and unsettling of the discourse of ‘dark skin equals Black authenticity’. Shade expands the boundaries of Blackness itself in terms of who can claim that space as skin-shade performs difference from the changing same. The gaze of

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Blackness is unsettled and returned from a position of difference. This tells us that ‘racial’ identities cannot be assumed based on just skin colour. This would be too tenuous a criterion. There are different ways to claim Blackness as a politics of skin when the changing same of ‘race’ cannot be assumed by a look. The look must be diverted to some other way of signifying Blackness. Shade forces those who would be Black irrespective of the mark of white kinship to perform themselves as conscious of Blackness as a politics, a way of life, an origin, and a community, through for example, dress, talk, hair and life-styles. This performance has been captured, for example, by looking at hybrid identifications as critical ontologies of the self. Here ‘the changing same’ will always be dynamically changed through the critical ontologies of the self that are performed in ‘the third space’ of radical otherness. What does this thinking through of Black hybrid identities based on Black women’s talk on lived experience mean for identities within racialized contexts? First a hybridity-of-the everyday makes clear that hybridity is not just about the cultural productions of migrant intellectuals, artists and writers. This means that ‘the cultural hybrid’ and ‘hybrid cultural rupture’ need to be rethought. Such a rethinking has implications within the racialized space of Britain if we start from the position that we can no longer think of Black, hybrid, exotic cultures and persons occupying the space of Britain. Rather we need to think of hybridity as an everyday possibility which occurs in something as mundane as conversation. It will mean engaging in a process in which we see ourselves in the other and acknowledge this as part of our identifications. These identifications themselves arise through a politics of skin and cannot be divorced from this. Hybridity theorizing cannot then claim to occupy a post-racial space in which ‘race’ is anachronistic. I have said above that ‘the Black community’ is both invoked and critiqued as a focus of identification. What does it mean then for questions of home and belonging if ‘community’ can no longer be taken for granted? How are we to live together within the agonistic space of Blackness? Is it possible to have a ‘we’ when there are as many Black skins as there are Black masks? As Ien Ang (2001, p. 193) asks ‘how in short, can we live together-in-difference?’ Through their hybrid identifications in talk the women have shown us that what we have to remember is that authentic Black skin does not mean just one skin and one mask which is performed with everything else being made into the abject outside. Authenticity is about multiplicity and we must think therefore in terms of the connections that can be made between us by continuing to recognize affiliations-in-difference. Hybridity as a politics of skin can support community whilst incorporating difference as central to this. It helps us to think through the present problem of community: namely, the issue of establishing collectives in a time of identity multiplicity. The coercive mis-recognition women speak about is an incitement for social and political struggles within and about the boundaries of the Black community. This contention from within is essential in order for community to become a site of recognition through a process in which we come to understand each other better in our uniqueness. This means in turn that we can then respond to each other’s needs

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Modood (eds.), Debating Cultural Hybridity - Multi-cultural Identities and the Politics o f Anti-racism, Zed Books, London, pp. 226-254. Widdicombe, S. and Woffitt, R. (1995), The Language o f Youth Subcultures, Harvester Wheatsheaf, London. Willig, C. (1999), ‘Introduction: making a difference’, in C. Willig (ed.), Applied Discourse Analysis: Social and Psychological Interventions, Open University Press, Buckingham, pp. 1-21. Winant, H. (1994), Racial Conditions, University of Minnesota Press, London. Yar, M. (2002), ‘Recognition and the Politics of Human(e) Desire’, in S. Lash and M. Featherstone (eds.), Recognition and Difference - Politics, Identity, Multiculture, Sage Publications, London, pp. 57-76. Young, L. (1996a), Fear o f the Dark - ‘Race’, Gender and Sexuality in the Cinema. Routledge, London. Young, L. (1996b), ‘Missing Persons: Fantasising Black Women in Black Skin, White Masks’, in A. Read (ed.), The Fact O f Blackness - Frantz Fanon and Visual Representation, I.C.A., London, pp. 86-101. Young, L. (2000), ‘Hybridity’s discontents: re-reading science and “race”’, in A. Brah and E. Coombes (eds.), Hybridity And Its Discontents: Politics, Science, Culture, Routledge, London, pp. 154-167. Young, R. (1995a), Colonial Desire - Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race, Routledge, London. Young, R. (1995b), White Mythologies - Writing History and the West, Routledge, London.

Index

abjection 105, 106, 108, 122, 133, 139, 143, 162, 164-5 Adam, B. 93 addressivity 9, 11, 25, 29, 30, 105, 106, 128, 130, 131, 132, 133, 136, 142, 144, 162, 166 Ahmed, S. 112 Alexander, C. 3,4, 52, 140, 148 Ang, I. 16, 167 Antaki, C. 27, 28 Antaki, C. and Widdicombe, S. 26 anti-racist aestheticism 59, 116 Anzieu, M. 5 authenticity 9 1,93,104, 105, 109, 110, 113, 115, 117, 118, 120-21, 123, 125, 128, 129, 152, 153, 163-8 authentic Black womanhood 112, 117, 163 Bakhtin, M 5, 9, 14, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25,28, 29, 114, 115, 128 Barker, C. and Galasinski, D. 5, 8 Baudrillard, J. 157 Baumann, G. 2, 52 Benjamin, W. 91, 93 Bhabha, H. 2,4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 13, 14, 15, 16, 52, 55, 58, 59, 64, 65, 66, 67, 69, 70, 74, 82, 85, 87, 88, 90, 95, 97, 100, 102, 105, 107, 113, 121, 122, 144, 145 146, 147-9, 155, 160, 163, 164-5 bio-power 34, 50, 56, 105, 117,154 Birch, M. 21 Black Boden, D. 15, 21 Boden, D. and Zimmerman, D. 145, 146 bodily schema 7,77, 79, 81, 82, 84, 85, 86, 87,91,92,93,94,97, 99,100, 103,104 Brah, A. 90 Brewer, R.M. 77 Butler, J. 92, 125, 138, 139 Calhoun, C. 107 Cameron, D., Frazer, E., Harvey, P., Rampton, M.B.H. and Richardson, K. 18

changing same 9, 10, 11,32, 33, 34, 36, 38,39, 56, 73, 75,76, 140, 141, 150, 159, 164, 165, 166-7 Cheepen, C. 140 Chow, R. 149 Christian, M. 31 chromatism 105, 123, 133 co-being 105, 142 community 2, 3, 7, 8, 10, 11,31, 33, 40, 42, 43, 52, 58, 59, 62, 66, 70, 74, 76, 77, 79, 84, 86, 90, 92, 104 Black 10, 77, 84, 112, 121, 126, 130, 131, 133, 134, 139, 140, 144, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161 interstitial 146-48,149,150-52,154-56 conversation analysis 13, 15, 19, 20 critical ontologies 6, 8, 20, 30, 31, 34, 52,56, 123, 128, 143, 145, 162, 167 critical textwork 27, 28, 29 Crossley, N. 20 culture 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 38, 39,41,42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 50, 52, 54, 58, 59, 60, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 70, 73, 76, 80, 81,86. 89, 90, 92, 100, 102 culturally hybrid rupture 4, 62 de Certeau, M. 44 ,75 de Peuter, J. 20 Deleuze, G. 36 Derrida, J. 97, 154 De Vere Brody, J. 60, 125 dialogism 4, 8, 19, 20, 22, 24, 106, 137, 143, 164 diaspora 70, 71,73, 87, 88, 89, 99, 100, 141, 142, 147, 148, 154, 164 Didur, J. and Heffeman, T. 114 discourse analysis 14,22,24,25,27,28,29 double consciousness 44, 56, 74, 75, 76, 85, 103, 141, 142, 144, 163 Dyer, R. 113 Edwards, R. and Ribbens, J. 24 embodiment 81, 95, 99, 110, 119, 122

179

Index enunciation 6, 13, 15, 65, 66, 67, 69, 113 essentialism 2, 5, 6, 7, 10, 11,28, 29, 63, 66, 70, 71,72, 75, 79, 83, 84, 85, 86, 89, 90,91,93,97, 99, 100, 105, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 125, 126, 138, 139, 140, 141, 144 ethnomethodology 14, 22, 24, 25 ethno-methods 28, 29 ethnomethodologically inclined discourse analysis 4, 14, 24 Fanon, F. 65, 74, 75, 82, 83, 84, 89, 97, 98, 100,102 fetish 10, 147, 160, 161 Foucault, M. 8, 9, 14, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 28, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 41, 43, 49, 50, 54, 56, 91, 93, 102 127, 128, 131, 155 Freeman, M. 16 Friedman, J. 59, 64, 65, 66, 71, 73 friendship 29 Fuss, D. 79, 80, 83 Garfinkel, H. 19, 26 Giddens, A. 94 Gilroy, P. 7,9,33,36,44,58,64,67,70, 71,73, 74, 75, 86, 89,90,91,101,102 Goldberg, D.T. 32 Gonzalez, G.M.J. 123 governmentality 6, 9, 32, 34,40, 43, 44, 50,53,56, 106, 146, 147, 155, 156, 159, 161 Giinthner, S. 19, 112 Hall, S. 2, 7, 20, 31,58, 62, 64, 71, 74, 77, 83,87, 92, 100, 123, 128 Haraway, D. 18 Henry, P. 149. 150 heteroglossia 22, 23, 29 Hill Collins 31 Hitchcock, P. 40 Holland, D., Lachicotte Jr., W., Skinner, D. and Cain, C. 16, 19,24, 115 Holquist, M. 19, 20, 22, 105, 142 hooks, b. 31, 143 Hutchby, I. and Wooffitt, R. 2, 13, 26 hybridity 2, 4 ,5 ,6 , 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 13, 15, 19, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 33, 34, 36, 43, 52, 53, 54, 55,56,57,58,59,62,63,64, 65, 66, 67, 69, 70, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 79, 84, 86,

87, 90, 94,95,99, 100, 101, 104, 105-6, 110, 112, 115, 117, 120, 122-3, 125, 127, 128, 133, 134, 137-9, 140, 141, 144, 145, 152, 162-7 of the everyday 4, 7, 8, 9, 11, 13, 14, 15, 20, 21,22, 24, 25, 28, 29, 52, 59, 62, 64, 74, 75,76, 105, 108, 115, 122, 128, 162, 164 storied hybridity 7, 58, 59, 62, 64, 65, 66, 67, 75 hybrid cultural rupture 10, 63, 64, 167 cultural hybrid 10, 167 identity cipher 79 Ifekwunigwe, J.O. 2, 4, 58, 62, 63, 64, 121, 130 interstitial agency 86, 87, 100, 146, 154155 interstitial poetics 146, 154 intimate distance 29 James, W. 71 Jarrett-Macauley, D. 31 Jefferson, A. 14 Jenkins, R. 106 Kirby, V. 120 Klor, de Alva J. J. 124, 156 Kristeva, J. 8, 107, 141 LePage, R. and Tabouret-Keller, A. 80 Mama, A. 2, 80 Mauthner, N. and Doucet, A. 18 McNay, L. 23, 24, 35, 37, 38, 43, 54, 92 McRobbie, A. 102 Melucci, A. 92, 95 Mercer, K. 2, 48, 126 metissage 62, 63, 64 metisse 4, 62, 64 griotte 62, 64 Miller, G. 22, 24, 25 mimicry 55, 66, 74, 84, 113, 114, 120, 122, 123, 124, 163 Mirza, H.S. 31 Mohanram, R. 110, 120 Moreiras, A. 99 Niranjana, T. 92 negritude 71, 100

180

Black Skins, Black Masks

Ong, A. 151-2 Papastergiadis, N. 67, 69, 70, 71, 74, 114 Parker, I. 14, 27, 29 Parry, B. 86, 98 Pearce, L. 25 Pechey, G. 23, 25 performativity 92, 93, 124, 128, 137, 138, 148, 150, 162, 165-6 Pile, S. and Thrift, N. 87 Pomerantz, A. and Fehr, B.J. 19, 20 Potter, J. 36 Potter, J. and Wetherall, M. 26 ‘race’ 2, 4, 7, 8,,10, 11, 15,21,23, 33,48, 52, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 66, 71, 75,76, 77, 79, 80, 82, 83, 84, 86, 87, 91, 93, 97, 100,103, 105, 106, 110, 111, 113, 114, 116, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 137, 141, 142, 147-9, 151, 153, 155, 158, 161-3, 165, 166, 168 gendered readings 2, 7, 56, 57, 58, 59, 63,86, 87, 89, 100, 104, 105, 106, 126, 146, 165 racialized gender 6, 31, 32, 33, 34, 40, 56, 85, 119 racialized skin 5 racial epidermal schema 82, 142 Radhakrishnan, R. 151 radical otherness 4,11 rarefaction of discourse 23 reflexivity 18, 19, 24, 25, 35, 36, 38, 54 Riessman, C. 21 Rutherford, J. 91 savoir de gens 105 Sandywell, B. 22 Sarup, M. 38,102 Schegloff, E.A. 15,68 Schrift, A.D. 36 Schutz A. 20,21,34, 35,38 Sebba,M. 61,73, 102 Sebba, M. and Tate, S. 6, Senghor, L.S. 71 Seshadri-Crooks, K. 126 shade 1, 8, 11, 60, 62, 106, 109, 160, 111, 113, 114-9, 120-23, 129, 130, 133, 166, 167 Shorter, J. and Billig, M. 28

Skin 1,5, 60, 61, 67, 73, 80, 105-7, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112-4, 119, 120, 122, 123, 125, 126, 128-9, 130, 134-5, 137, 140, 142-4, 146, 164, 167 politics of skin 2, 10, 11,73,93, 104, 113, 119, 123, 126, 127, 139, 142, 145, 146-7, 151-4 Small, S. 31 Soja, E.W. 93,94,100 Spillers, H. 123 Spivak,G. 58, 64, 74, 80, 97, 98, 99, 100, 105, 112, 113, 114, 123, 163, 165 Stewart, K 93 structure of feeling 70, 147, 148, 149, 152, 155 subaltern 74, 98,99, 100, 114 Sutcliffe, D. 61 talk-in-interaction 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 9,15, 22, 29,32,40,43,62,63,67, 76, 105, 115, 120, 122, 128, 144 Tate, S. 1, 13,73 Taylor, P. 59 texts of social practice 6, 10, 13, 20, 21, 28, 80, 83,91, 142, 143, 162, 164 The Parekh Report 147-8 ‘third space’ 5, 6, 7, 9, 22, 27, 58, 65, 66, 75,79, 102, 142, 151, 162, 167 talk as a 5, 6, 105, 123 transgredience 19, 20 translation 7, 8, 10, 66, 77, 78, 80, 85, 86, 89, 90,91,92, 93,94, 95, 104, 108, 111, 112, 114, 122, 123, 163 cultural 10 as reflexivity 7, 8, 10, 13, 14, 15, 19, 20, 25, 31, 32, 34, 35, 36, 39, 42, 44, 46, 47, 48, 50, 54, 56, 60, 72, 94, 95, 101, 108, 114, 125, 128, 130-1, 133, 136, 139, 140, 142, 149, 162, 163 translated hybrid subjects 9, 141 van der Veer, P. 65 Van Dijk, T. 20,21,26, 28 Venn, C. 80 Watson, G. 32 Werbner, P. 64, 65, 90 Widdicombe, S. and Woffitt, R. 21,26, 27 Willig, C. 19, 29 Winant, H. 86

Index Yar, M. 9 Young, L. 58,59, 82, 157

181 Young,R. 6, 9, 13, 16, 58, 64, 63, 66, 74, 83, 123, 141