{"id":8703,"date":"2010-09-03T04:35:19","date_gmt":"2010-09-03T04:35:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=8703"},"modified":"2010-09-03T17:02:45","modified_gmt":"2010-09-03T17:02:45","slug":"%e2%80%9cwhat-is-in-my-blood%e2%80%9d-contemporary-black-scottishness-and-the-work-of-jackie-kay-book-chapter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=8703","title":{"rendered":"\u201cWhat is In My Blood?\u201d: Contemporary Black Scottishness and the Work of Jackie Kay [Book Chapter]"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cWhat is In My Blood?\u201d: Contemporary Black Scottishness and the Work of Jackie Kay [Book Chapter]<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Literature and Racial Ambiguity<\/a><\/em>
\nRodopi B.V.
\n2002-09-15
\n328 pages
\nISBN-10: 9042014180
\nISBN-13: 978-9042014183
\npp. 1-25(25)<\/p>\n

edited by Teresa Hubal<\/strong> and Neil Brooks<\/strong><\/p>\n

Peter Clandfield<\/a><\/strong>, Assistant Professor of English Studies
\nNipissing University, North Bay, Ontario, Canada<\/em><\/p>\n

The work of the Scottish writer Jackie Kay<\/a> (b. 1961) not only refutes simplistic definitions of race and racial attributes, but also challenges utopian idea(l)s about racial and cultural hybridity as a condition that, in itself, resolves problems arising from racial differences\u2014that is, from dissimilarities, conflicts, and things in between. In her 1985 poem \u201cSo you think I\u2019m a mule?,\u201d Kay, who is of mixed black-white (African-British) biological parentage, voices what sounds like an unequivocal rejection of white attempts to theorise about people of obviously complex racial ancestry:<\/p>\n

If you Dare mutter mulatto<\/a>
\nhover around hybrid
\nhobble on half-caste<\/a>
\nand intellectualize on the
\n\u201cMixed race problem\u201d,
\nI have to tell you:
\ntake your beady eyes offa my skin;
\ndon\u2019t concern yourself with
\nthe\u00a0\u00a0\u201cdialectics of mixtures\u201d;
\ndon\u2019t pull that strange blood crap
\non me Great White Mother.
\nSay I\u2019m no mating of a she-ass and a stallion
\nno half of this and half of that
\nto put it plainly purely
\nI am black (lines 29-43)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This 66-line poem is given in full as an epigraph to Heidi Safia Mirza\u2019s<\/a> Introduction to Black British Feminism: A Reader<\/em> (Routledge, 1997), where it serves as a strong statement about the determination of black British women to set their own agendas. In the context of Kay\u2019s own evolving career, though, the poem\u2019s significance is much more ambiguous. While its speaker states emphatically that she is black and is\u00a0\u201cnot mixed up\u201d (line 50) about race, mixedrace voices in Kay\u2019s more recent works are less certain. Without being \u201cmixed up\u201d in the sense of being confused or incoherent, these works delineate complex emergent forms of racial and cultural identity that undermine fixed concepts not only of Britishness, blackness, or black Britishness but also of hybridity itself…<\/p>\n

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

\u201cWhat is In My Blood?\u201d: Contemporary Black Scottishness and the Work of Jackie Kay [Book Chapter] Literature and Racial Ambiguity Rodopi B.V. 2002-09-15 328 pages ISBN-10: 9042014180 ISBN-13: 978-9042014183 pp. 1-25(25) edited by Teresa Hubal and Neil Brooks Peter Clandfield, Assistant Professor of English Studies Nipissing University, North Bay, Ontario, Canada The work of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,1933,1196,8,10],"tags":[1587,3722,3723],"class_list":["post-8703","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-bookchapter","category-literary-criticism","category-media-archive","category-uk","tag-jackie-kay","tag-peter-clandfield","tag-rodopi-b-v"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8703","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=8703"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8703\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8703"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8703"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8703"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}