{"id":11381,"date":"2011-01-09T03:01:34","date_gmt":"2011-01-09T03:01:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=11381"},"modified":"2011-01-09T03:01:34","modified_gmt":"2011-01-09T03:01:34","slug":"what-racial-hybridity-sexual-politics-of-mixed-race-identities-in-the-caribbean-and-the-performance-of-blackness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=11381","title":{"rendered":"What Racial Hybridity? Sexual Politics of Mixed-Race Identities in the Caribbean and the Performance of Blackness"},"content":{"rendered":"

What Racial Hybridity? Sexual Politics of Mixed-Race Identities in the Caribbean and the Performance of Blackness<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Lucayos<\/a>
\nThe School of English Studies of The College of The Bahamas\u2019 Journal of Caribbean and Postcolonial Criticism and Creative Work
\nVolume 1 (2008)
\n<\/a>pages 90-105<\/p>\n

Papers from the 26th West Indian Literature Conference, March 8-10, 2007<\/em><\/p>\n

Angelique V. Nixon<\/a><\/strong>, Assistant Professor in Residence of Woman\u2019s Studies
\nUniversity of Connecticut<\/p>\n

for our blood, mixed
\nsoon with their passion in sport,
\nin indifference, in anger,
\nwill create new soils, new souls, new
\nancestors; will flow like this tide fixed
\nto the star by which this ship floats
\nto new worlds, new waters, new
\nharbours, the pride of our ancestors mixed
\nwith the wind and the water
\nthe flesh and the flies, the whips and the fixed
\nfear of pain in this chained and welcoming port.<\/p>\n

~ Kamau Brathwaite<\/a> \u201cNew World A-Comin\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The authenticity of \u201cBlackness\u201d has continuously been challenged in the debates over identity politics, specifically within Black Cultural Studies, Black feminisms, African American Studies, and Postcolonial Theory. The meaning of the word \u201cBlack\u201d often depends upon the social, historical, cultural, and geographical context, but it is almost invariably political. In the United States, Black refers to African Americans (including mixed people of African descent because of the \u201cone drop\u201d rule<\/a>), while in Britain, the term Black politically generally categorizes all non-white people\u2014Asians, Africans, and Afro-Caribbeans (Kanneh 86). In the Caribbean, the word \u201cBlack\u201d is usually used to describe people of African descent, but its history remains complex given the array of reactions to racial mixing by different colonial powers (meaning the development of racial categories determined by blood and coded by law). Each European colony had legal codes and categories for mixed race identities, which created different \u201cclasses\u201d of people determined by skin color. Today, the word \u201cBlack\u201d has different political and social meanings, but at the same time, we cannot deny the realities of race and racism for Black people and other people of color around the world. Furthermore, mixed-race Black identities continue to have a major affect on how we think about race and identity. And considering the different political and social connotations of the word \u201cBlack\u201d and the massive consumption of Black culture, \u201cBlackness\u201d as a signifier remains elusive and subject to appropriation and commodification; hence, Blackness has been and continues to be constructed and commodified by all kinds of people and places.<\/p>\n

Therefore, any essential notion of \u2018the Black subject or experience\u2019 has been contested by a number of theorists; however, Stuart Hall<\/a> argues for a \u201cnew politics of representation\u201d that engages in difference and recognizes Black experience as Diaspora<\/a> experience (170). In essence, he argues that we must remain committed to engaging in the politics of Black representation, while simultaneously recognizing the differences within our difference. The challenges to \u201cidentity politics, recent debates over \u2018mixed race\u2019 identities, forms of racism, and class complicate the broad terrain of \u2018racial difference\u2019 on which \u2018Blackness\u2019 is identified\u201d (Kanneth 94). In these debates, postmodernism<\/a> has been helpful to Black Cultural Studies insomuch as it allows for multiple Black identities, but as bell hooks<\/a> recognizes in \u201cPostmodern Blackness,\u201d the postmodern critique of identity appears at first glance to threaten any opportunity for those who have suffered from oppression, domination, or colonization (hooks 23). But hooks argues that a postmodern critique of essentialism is useful in opening up constricting notions of Blackness, and this would be a radical and serious challenge to racist discourse that uses the notion of a Black authentic experience (28). She asserts that \u201csuch a critique allows us to affirm multiple Black identities, varied Black experience. It also challenges colonial imperialist paradigms of Black identity which represent Blackness one-dimensionally in ways that reinforce and sustain white supremacy\u201d (28). While hooks does posit that we critique and abandon essentialist notions of Blackness, at the same time, she says that we must still \u201cstruggle for radical Black subjectivity\u201d\u2014where the lived and diverse experiences of Black people complicate our sense of identity (29). Although hooks does not specifically discuss mixed-race identities, I use her insights to discuss the possibilities around the signification of \u201cBlackness.\u201d<\/p>\n

Given the recent media attention on mixed-race and bi-racial identities (including Tiger Woods<\/a>, Barack Obama<\/a>, Kamora Lee [Kimora Lee Simons<\/a>], Alicia Keys<\/a>, and others) and the historical fetishization of \u201cexotic\u201d women of color, I am interested in how racial performance and performativity operates in a mixed-race body, and most specifically, how these complicate the signification of Blackness. Thus, how is the Blackness of a mixed-race person embodied? What does this embodiment of Blackness mean for a mixed-race person? Are mixed-race Black identities normalized through choosing a race, passing, or legal codes that regulate race? How is mixed race situated in the discourse of racism? When a racially mixed person claims or asserts Blackness through performance or a speech act utterance (I am Black, but I\u2019m\u00a0mixed, or I\u2019m mixed and Black, or I identify as Black<\/em>) does this destabilize racism or essentialist notions of race?<\/strong> In this project, I offer a theoretical framework about what I call the sexual politics of mixed-race identities and performance of Blackness in the Caribbean context, which I argue through using both personal narrative and literary representations….<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What Racial Hybridity? Sexual Politics of Mixed-Race Identities in the Caribbean and the Performance of Blackness Lucayos The School of English Studies of The College of The Bahamas\u2019 Journal of Caribbean and Postcolonial Criticism and Creative Work Volume 1 (2008) pages 90-105 Papers from the 26th West Indian Literature Conference, March 8-10, 2007 Angelique V. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,21,125,1196,8,20],"tags":[5115,5114,5116],"class_list":["post-11381","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-latincarib","category-identitydevelopment","category-literary-criticism","category-media-archive","category-usa","tag-angelique-nixon","tag-angelique-v-nixon","tag-lucayos"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11381","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11381"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11381\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11381"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11381"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11381"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}