Symposium Abstracts

(remaining abstracts are pending)

Patricia Pinho

Title: White But Not Quite: Investigating Whiteness, Blackness and Mestiçagem in Brazil

Differently from most Latin-American countries where the mestizo/a has been predominantly defined as the mixture between the white and the indigenous, the meanings of mestiço/a in Brazil are much more ambiguous, not only because the term refers to a greater variety of “racial” mixtures, but also because of the multiple and contradictory cultural representations of mestiços/as in the country’s media, literature and common sense. While this ambiguity stimulates a preference for whiteness, thus reducing the access to power by those deemed “black,” it simultaneously fuels a rejection of “pure” forms of whiteness as witnessed in the cult of morenidade (brownness) in Brazil. Therefore, not all forms of miscegenation are valued in the country’s myth of racial democracy, and some “types of mixture” are clearly preferred to the detriment of others. In this presentation I argue that anti-black racism in Brazil is expressed not only against dark-skinned individuals, but also as an operation that devalues the physical traits “deemed black” even among those who have a lighter skin complexion. Thus, the presentation analyzes the “readings of the body” of mestiços/as in Brazil, examining the junction and disjunction of whiteness and blackness in these interpretations.

Kim Robinson-Walcott

What does it mean to be a white Jamaican? The definition of ‘whiteness’ is a fluid one, and not only may its meaning in Jamaica differ from its meaning in other countries, for example the USA, but within Jamaica (and, indeed, within other countries) there may be multiple meanings and multiple contradictions. Racial labels assume different meanings depending on the cultural context. Nevertheless, being white in a country where 95% of the population is black, but where whites still represent the upper echelons of society, produces a peculiar dilemma of privilege counterpoised by marginalization, of entitlement counterpoised by unbelonging. compounded by guilt over, and/or a distancing from, the past role of whites in a plantation slave society, the dilemma of white Jamaicans is undeniable.

What would also seem to be undeniable, however, is that the costs of being white are outweighed by the benefits. The white Jamaican writer Anthony C. Winkler acknowledges in his autobiographical Going Home to Teach that growing up white in Jamaica “gained you access to places to which you could not otherwise go” (93). The second-generation Jamaican British writer Andrea Levy in her semi-autobiographical work Every Light in the House Burnin’ discusses her (protagonist’s) ability to assimilate into mainstream white British society because her light skin and straight hair allows her to ‘pass’ for white. Whiteness brings clear (pun intended) benefits, both for Winkler in black Jamaica – and later in white America – and for Levy in white England. Yet: “You not a Jamaican!” Winkler is accused by a black street urchin in Jamaica. “You can’t be Jamaican!” imply the white British acquaintances of Levy’s protagonist in London. Both Winkler and Levy are rejected as authentic Jamaicans because of their skin color. It takes a stint of living in the USA for Winkler to fully appreciate just how much of a Jamaican he is, as well as to grasp the idiosyncrasies of Jamaican vs. American constructions of whiteness vs. blackness; while Levy’s protagonist, having at first successfully rejected her second-generation Jamaicanness, eventually finds that in order to wrestle with her underlying unease and crippling sense of unbelonging she must travel to Jamaica and deconstruct her white/black identity.

This paper examines issues of racial and cultural identity raised, directly or indirectly, by Winkler and Levy as white/near-white writers of the Jamaican diaspora.

Silvio Torres-Saillant

This paper will invite reflection on blackness in the modern world by exploring the juncture at which diasporic Dominicans find themselves as they contend with several competing discourses powered by historical experiences that do not quite match their own, but against which they are expected to measure themselves to claim moral, political, and intellectual ascendancy in a political terrain informed by the discursive logic bequeathed by the Civil Rights Movement in the United States. Ancestrally linked to a country with a legacy of publicly enunciated negrophobic thought and a problematic rapport with the hemisphere's first black republic, Haiti, Dominicans in the United States wrestle with the desire to affirm the black self-awareness that official nationalist ideologies in the land of origin discourage, while maintaining their relative autonomy vis a vis the narratives of black identity emanating influentially from the specific experience of African Americans. This analysis asks whether different historical experiences might effectively produce different ways of being black, and whether the understanding that race is socially constructed can make us amenable to fissures in the dominant emplotments of racial ontologies, and whether the Caribbean experience of race, with the Dominican chapter occupying the centrality it deserves, has any light to shed on the structure of blackness and racial affirmation in the modern world today.

Evelyn O’Callaghan

Some of the suggested questions to be raised in this Small Axe/University at Albany symposium include “How do we begin to understand the difference within and among black communities nationally and internationally?” and “How does race, that ‘floating signifier,’ signify differently in Haiti, Jamaica, Costa Rica … compared with the experiences of racialization when members of theses territories relocate to the US?” Perversely, I want to rephrase these questions to ask “How do we begin to understand differences within and among white communities nationally and internationally?” And “How does race signify differently in the Caribbean compared with the experiences of racialization when White Creoles relocate to the ‘mother country,’ England?”  With reference to a little known nineteenth century novel by an Antiguan Creole, With Silent Tread (c1890), this paper examines the different ways in which whiteness is constructed in the West Indies and in England. Paradoxically, the concept of “transcultural whiteness” exposes the ambivalence of racial distinctions such as in the British colonial context.

Michelle Stephens

Despite the hyper-visibility of black masculinity in American popular culture, both at home and abroad, gender and sexuality are still relatively unmarked categories in current discussions of black cross-culturality and diaspora. At the same time, as conversations about, and connections between, diasporic and transnational blackness’s emerge in our contemporary, global context, new questions arise concerning the relevance of race and blackness for describing the cultures, experiences and identities of diasporic populations in both the New and Old Worlds.

In this paper, I explore how we might resolve both of these concerns, that is to say the absence of gender and sexuality in certain discussions on one hand, and the hyper-visibility of American conceptions of race in studies of black global literature and culture on the other. I propose that the answer lies in a much more complex account of the racial unconscious, a term which I apply to the subjects of modernity at large, but which I will delineate in the specific context of the structures of a black, male unconscious post-modernity. The work of Frantz Fanon is crucial to my discussion.

My analysis will refer to his study of the effects of colonial pathology on the black subject’s identity formation, as addressed in Black Skin, White Masks. I will focus on a short excerpt from the chapter, “The Fact of Blackness” where the dynamics of looking and on looking structure the opening scene as a French female child points to Fanon and exclaims, “Look, a Negro!”

In my presentation, I will explore this moment as an important scene of subjection in the formation of a black male unconscious, as Fanon sees himself in the face of a racialized and gendered gaze. I will demonstrate how the notion of black “triple-consciousness” that Fanon describes in this chapter can be employed to expand current U.S. discussions of race beyond the DuBoisian, and by extension, African American notions of double-consciousness. In addition, I will propose a number of ways in which the recognition of colonial desire can inform our attempts to place gender and sexual identity at the heart of critical discussions of diasporic blackness.

Berhane Araia

When many thinkers theorize blackness and the diasporic identities of people of African descent, particular forms of identity construction such as ethnicity and nationalism tend to figure prominently.  Analyses of survey data from selected African countries, for example, demonstrate that Africans are less likely to identify with a continental form of identity. Rather, more particular forms of identity construction such as ethnicity and religious group affiliation typically have more salience. These trends are often dramatically different from the sense of pan-Africanism that was prevalent during the mid-twentieth century independence struggles of various African nations. On the other hand, emigration has provided many Africans with the opportunity to define or redefine their national and ethnic identities. Immigration to the United States, for example, has often provided Africans with the opportunity to engage diasporic discourses of race and race relations that require a rethinking and reconfiguration of their sense of blackness and Africanity.

In this paper, I focus on the horn of Africa region and its diaspora communities in the United States. Using the cases of Eritrea, Ethiopia and Somalia, I develop a theoretical proposition that suggests that the lack of a coherent notion of blackness within the black diaspora in the United States affects relationships within these diasporic communities and complicates relationships between the diasporic African community and the African-American community. The presentation concludes that the lack of a comprehensive idea of blackness and/or Africanity, coupled with the physical, linguistic and ethnic diversities in the sub-Saharan African region have made it difficult to develop any regional sense of citizenship and identity. Furthermore, the experiences and challenges of the African diasporic communities have ushered in reconfigured identities, redefined against the reflection of their experiences in their host countries and further complication notions of blackness and Africanness, at home and abroad.