Black Skins, Black Masks

Hybridity, Dialogism, Performativity

Shirley Anne Tate

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351955249
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Black Skin, Black Masks: Hybridity, Dialogism, Performativity offers a timely exploration of Black identity and its negotiation. The book draws on empirical work recording everyday conversations between Black women: friends, peers and family members. These conversations are discussed in the light of the work of Homi Bhabha, Stuart Hall, Gerd Baumann, Claire Alexander and others on questions of hybridity, identity, otherness and the development of 'new ethnicities'. Tate aims to address what she sees as significant omissions in contemporary Black Cultural Studies. She argues that theorists have rarely looked at the process of identity construction in terms of lived-experience; and that they have tended to concentrate on the demise of the essential Black subject, paying little attention to gender. The book points to a continuation of a 'politics of the skin' in Black identities. As such it argues against Bhabha's claim that essence is not central to hybrid identities. The conversations recorded in the book reveal the ways in which women negotiate the category of Blackness, in what Tate calls a 'hybridity-of- the-everyday'. The book introduces a new interpretative vocabulary to look at the ways in which hybridity is orchestrated and fashioned, showing it to be performative, dialogical and dependent on essentialism.

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 food² 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 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 of 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.

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 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 metísse 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 interactiona...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Foucault, Bakhtin, Ethnomethodology
• 3 Critical Ontologies and Racialized Gender
• 4 Storied Hybridity and Gendered Readings of 'Race'
• 5 Beyond Hybridity: Bodily Schema and 'the Third Space'
• 6 Resisting Black Skin
• 7 Hybridity, Dialogism, Performativity
• 8 Fetishizing Community: A Politics of Skin, Homes and Belonging
• 9 Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index