Mixed Race Studies

Foucault, Bakhtin, Ethnomethodology: Accounting for Hybridity in Talk-in-Interaction

Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Research
Volume 8, Number 2, Article 10
May 2007
18 pages

Shirley Anne Tate, Senior Lecturer and Director of Studies
Centre for Interdisciplinary Gender Studies
University of Leeds

Theorising hybridity within Postcolonial Studies is often done at a level which seems to exclude the everyday with the exception of its relevance for the cultural productions of migrants and dominant culture’s “eating the other”. This article uses the exploration of hybridity as an everyday interactional achievement within Black “mixed race” British women’s conversations on identity to look at the production of an analytic method as process based on the task of the analyst as translator. This method as process thinks the links between FOUCAULT and BAKHTIN in the emergence of an ethnomethodologically inclined discourse analysis (eda) which is called on to make sense of a hybridity of the everyday where Black women reflexively translate discourses on identity positions in order to construct their own identifications in conversations. FOUCAULT’s discourses and BAKHTIN’s heteroglossia and addressivity allow us to theorise this movement in the talk which ethnomethodological transcription and theory enables us to first pinpoint occurring. The article begins by looking at first, how hybridity as identification emerges in talk-in-interaction through both speaker and analyst translations. Having established this, it then goes on to look at the theoretical convergences and divergences between FOUCAULT and BAKHTIN on the subject, identity and discourses in the eda enterprise. Looking at data through the lens of eda means that we must be aware of the subject positions which speakers identify as having the effect of constraining or facilitating particular actions and experiences and there is always the possibility for challenge to subjectification.

Table of Contents

• 1. Introduction
• 2. Method as Process—Talk, Hybridity, Translation
• 3. Blurring the Line Between Theory and Story
• 4. Discourses, Translation as Reflexivity and Dialogism in Talk on Identification
• 5. FOUCAULT and BAKHTIN—”Race”, Discourses and Dialogics
• 6. FOUCAULT and BAKHTIN: Ethnomethodology, Discourse Analysis and the Membership Category “Black Woman”
• 7. Conclusion
• Acknowledgements
• References
• Author
• Citation

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Is the Discourse of Hybridity a Celebration of Mixing, or a Reformulation of Racial Division? A Multimodal Analysis of the Portuguese Magazine Afro

Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Reasearch
Volume 11, Number 2, Article 24 (May 2010)
29 pages
ISSN: 1438-5627

José Ricardo Carvalheiro, Assistant Professor in the Communication and Arts Department
University of Beira Interior, Portugal

For many years the study of “race” relations was dominated by paradigms—of assimilationism and multiculturalism—which highlighted difference and division (as a problem, or a virtue). In more recent years the idea of racial and cultural mixing—creolization or hybridization—has become an important concept in ethnic and racial studies. The starting point of this article is the observation that the idea of racial and cultural mixture—hybridity or mestiçagem—was a key ideological feature of Portuguese colonialism in its last decades. If hybridity is not therefore a new discourse in Portugal, what is the place for it today and what kind of hybridity is being referred to? What might the Portuguese case tell us about discourses of hybridity more generally? The article explores these questions through a combined visual and linguistic analysis of the lifestyle magazine Afro as a site where contemporary discourses about “race” intertwine.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
3. The “African” Minority in Portugal
4. Afro, a Magazine in the Market
4.1 What does the existence of a lifestyle magazine such as Afro mean?
5. Racial Actors in Visual and Verbal Texts
6. Transnational Representations, “Race” Questions and Hybridity
7. Stories About Mixing: Layers of Discourse
8. Conclusion
Acknowledgments
References
Author
Citation

Read the entire article here.