De la parodia a los cuerpos

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In terms of the negotiation of position which translation as reflexivity allows, this example demonstrates a repositioning of what Lu claims in lines 1-3 as “so much change in the kids". This general positioning is translated in lines 8 and 10 as kids being “so far removed" from Blackness. That is followed by an example of their lack of cultural knowledge around soul food to support his positioning of them. On lines 18-30 Lu repositions these changed Black kids as 'mixed race' ("ninety five percent of their mothers are white") who are without access to Black culture because of a lack of interest on the part of their fathers. He repositions them then as Black kids who are just discovering a Blackness which they have been denied because of their heritage.

Example 6-Tape 2 Side A Lu,Lo,Sa.Sh,Pe:7

>1 Lu = An ah see so: MUCH CHANGE ah've ah've SEEN SO MUCH CHANGE IN 2 THE KIDS [ (.) ] yuh nuh, with the BASKETBALL team we've got about forty

3 Sh [Mm]

4 P [Mm]

5 Lu kids in there, (.) 6 P Mhm

7 (1-4)

>8 Lu An when yuh HEAR the CONversa:tion 9 (0.8)

>10 Lu they're SO: FAR REMOVED (( clears throat)) THEY'RE TALKIN about 11 SOU:L FOOD like it's a (.) NEW DISCOVERY (.)

12 P [Mhm ] 13 S [Mhm ] 14 (0.5)

15 Lu 0:h ah went an tried this an that the other day an ah tried this an ah tried 16 that an ah an ah'm sayin to em WHY?

17 (0.5)

>18 Lu a:h well I don't HAVE that BECAUSE NINETY FIVE PERCENT OF THEIR 19 MOTHERS ARE WHITE =

20 S = Mh [m :: ] 21 P [Mhm] =

22 Lu = An the fa:ther: well IF THEY'RE THERE they can't be bloody BOTHERED 23 [((. hhh .hhh ))] to cook THAT for em ANYway =

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24 S [ Yeah ] = Yeah that's right actu [ally ]

>25 Lu [THEY]

26 NOT going back on the FRONT line to go into the cafe [ or ] any- anywhere

27 P [Mhm ]

28 Lu like that= 29 Sh =Mhm=

30 Lu =So it's NEW for em

What Lu has to say about this change in the culture of young Black people is important in terms of hybridity theorizing. Here Black young people are presented as growing up in a void as far as Black culture is concerned, but now at that point in their lives being spoken about in which they are actively seeking this out irrespective of their white heritage. These young people are therefore seeking to construct their own texts of authentic Blackness through using essence in terms of cultural practices. In doing culture through narratives interactants demonstrate their continuous scanning for signs translated as culture and the continuous re-presentation of a culture of 'the Black same'. Culture is about translation then as this re-presentation can be "understood properly only as the historically negotiated creation of more or less coherent symbolic and social worlds" (Werbner, 1997b: 15). In this negotiation people engage in accounting for what they do say and might think in a mutually meaningful way (Baumann, 1997: 211). Culture becomes a cause of "why those who have it act as they do" (Baumann, 1997: 212). These narratives thus provide interpretive spaces in the telling for the questions of “what is Black identity?” and "who can claim Blackness?" through its focus on a culture of 'the Black same' as authentic.

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Conclusion: translation as reflexivity

In this chapter translation has been looked at as a central part of the intersubjective negotiation of identities which occurs in talk-in-interaction as people move from assertions of identity positionings to identity re-positionings. Translation has been removed from its limits in the literature on Black identities within which it has been coupled with hybridity to now being a process that individuals use to mark the negotiation of discourses in these identity positionings9. As a process of negotiation it has been shown to involve a linking of time, space, performativity and reflexivity in the intersubjective construction of identities. It is this intersubjective negotiation of positions in talk which constructs and reconstructs the borders of Blackness which enables the claim to be made that ‘the third space’ exists in conversation. A focus on the role of translation in this process has helped us to see the possibility for the emergence of hybridity as a site of identifications as people assemble identities as texts of social practice in the creative performance of life stories.

Reflexivity for Harold Garfinkel (1967) is axiomatically implied in social interaction and is therefore essential to any form of social being. Reflexivity has been spoken of above as the transformations in thinking about oneself and one's past action or state in a present telling. This auto-critique can be highly effective in opening up one's past activities to critical scrutiny. It has also been spoken about as interactants' interpretations of discourses in the interaction between collective and individual identities as speakers

9 In Chapter 5b, translation as reflexivity w ill continue to be extended and w ill take on the meaning o f dialogic analysis.

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construct their identifications in talk-in-interaction. What has emerged here is that people both speak their identities as a fixed common-sense fact, but also see Blackness

as a socially constructed representation which is a matter of interpretation. Such interpretation hinges on a reading of the body, cultural practices and politics for Blackness. Both translation and reflexivity link together to provide a connection between individuals and their negotiation of discourses of Blackness through auto-critique. Translation as reflexivity is the process by which individuals reveal their identification with, through and against Blackness in a present telling. The place of translation as reflexivity in the making of identifications will continue to be explored throughout this project.

The use of extracts has helped to show that there is still a recourse to discourses of Black authenticity from a "starting point within culture or practice' from which practices are recognised” (Turner, 1994: 103). This recognition points in turn to the continuation of origin within this anti-essentialist moment in theorizing Black identities, thus leading to a questioning of the status of a hybridity which is devoid of a recourse to essence. Although within the data essentialism in the construction of authentic identities was obviously displayed, what was also shown were the age/generation, shade, political and cultural differences which exist in the Black communities of the speakers and which act as divisive forces within Blackness. It is these divisions which provide the impetus for the negotiation of identity positionings in talk as speakers strive to show difference from discursive constructions of the same. These divisions will continue to be looked at throughout the rest of this project.

167 Translation

The next two chapters will attempt to construct a theoretical model about discursive positioning and repositioning in which translation as reflexivity is pivotal. This negotiation of position itself is going to be seen as the process that allows hybridity to arise in the ‘third space’ of talk-in-interaction because of auto-critique. I will look first at how Foucault can help to illuminate ‘discourses of Blackness’; and second, I will turn to Bakhtin’s addressivity in order to account for the speaking subject who can create hybrid positionings in talk. This exploration should support the claim that Black hybrid identities as texts of social practice are dialogical and have a ‘same but different’ orientation simultaneously. The next two chapters thus look in more depth at the theme of this project. That is that hybridity has its alterity essence in the everyday negotiations of identity in talk-in-interaction.

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Chapter 5

Texts of social practice and critical ontologies of Blackness

Introduction

The work of Bhabha (1994b and c), Gilroy (1993a), Hall (1996a), Spivak (1995) and Fanon (1986) all focus on the centrality of discourses and counter-discourses. For example, Bhabha’s mimicry and hybridity; Gilroy’s double consciousness and hybrid cultural productions in the British context; Hall’s (1996a: 6) view on “identities as points of temporary attachment to the subject positions which discursive practices construct for us”; Fanon and the discursive construction of otherness in the colonial context with the necessity for maintaining difference against the colonial assimilationist project that this entails; Spivak’s view that only some discourses (white, male, middle class) are allowed into the circle of meaning in the colonial context irrespective of the nature of counter narratives.

This chapter continues to look at the construction of Black authenticity in talk in order to examine how:

-discourses of containment1 impact on people’s lives through being translated and reflexively reproduced in talk on identity;

-interactants produce counter-narratives and practices through translation as reflexivity, in the performances of their identifications through the talk.

1 By discourses o f containment I mean those monologic discourses on identity to which people are required to conform by friends, family, colleagues and society.

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Linking the macro and the micro

The focus of this chapter will continue to be on interactants’ accounts in order to understand how they use discourses in constructing identifications in talk. Discourses will be understood from the bottom up, so to speak, through looking at the micro-physics of power as it is relayed in individuals’ stories of lived experience. This focus is based on the understanding that “structures, systems, cultures and so on are “occasioned” phenomena which exist [..] in the practices of participants” (Watson, 1992: xx). Participants constitute what they see as ‘the system’ in interaction with others. Having constituted this system participants orient themselves to it as if it had an objective existence prior to and independent of their interaction. So constraint and agency are to be found in the interactional practices of individuals in which they conjoin the macro and the micro (Watson, 1992: xx). The work of Schutz and Foucault on culture and reflexivity will be drawn on initially below to link the micro and the macro levels of analysis at a theoretical level.

How will discourses become susceptible to analysis though in terms of the sequential organisation of conversation? Paul Gilroy’s concept ‘the changing same’ provides us with a possibility for such an analysis. For Gilroy (1997: 335-336):

This ‘changing same1 is not some invariant essence that gets enclosed subsequently in a shape shifting exterior with which it is casually associated. It is not the sign of an unbroken, integral inside protected by a camouflaged husk [..] The same is present but how can we imagine it as something other

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than essence generating the merely accidental? The same is retained without needing to be reified. It is ceaselessly reprocessed. It is maintained and modified in what becomes a determinedly non-traditional tradition, for this is not tradition as closed or simple repetition.

What are we to make of this though when we have seen in earlier chapters that individuals talk about themselves and others as though Black is the sign of an unbroken integral inside, as invariant essence because of the intervention of ‘race’ in their lived experiences? Further, how can ‘the same’ be re-processed without recourse to such reifications? Although ‘the changing same’ could be useful as a phrase to describe what emerges in the interplay between the same and different in identification talk the impact of discourses of Blackness needs to be acknowledged. This is so as these discourses serve to reify Blackness and are what individuals negotiate as they construct identities. However, the maintenance and modification of ‘the same' in talk is what is of particular interest here. As, if the analysis focuses on the variant that is critiqued then the invariant should become clearer. It is in this invariant that it should be possible to locate discourses of Black essence as they appear in the talk.

In order to look at the variants and invariants that exist in the talk of individuals and the possibility for counter-narratives which arises through their interaction, I am going to use a model gleaned from Foucault’s work. Central to this model are “diagrams” and “statements”. In this model there is a diagram of Blackness on which statements are based which are expressive of the diagram’s relations of force and

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knowledge. The translation as reflexivity in which speakers engage shows their awareness of statements. This awareness is either used or contradicted in identity positionings. The analysis that I will develop centres on how people negotiate bio­ power and governmentality in the production of a critical ontology of the self. In achieving this, interactants demonstrate their participation at the local level in discursive constructions through their talk, by using translation as reflexivity as a process to link the macro to the micro in interaction.

Translation as reflexivity will be taken to be that point in the talk in which individuals show their identification through, with and against the subject positions constructed for them by discourses. Through this translation as reflexivity it therefore, becomes obvious the meanings of Blackness which individuals identify with, through and against, as they subject themselves to the discourse’s rules and become the subjects of its power/ knowledge. In identifications against the discursive positionings of Blackness, translation as reflexivity is productive of hybridity as a ‘speaking back to the eye of power’ at the moment of narration. Stories then become sites of a hybridity of the moment, producing spaces of ‘different from the changing same’2.

Schutz. Foucault and culture

In Schutz’s (1967: 10) view:

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[..] the world is an intersubjective world of culture [..] because from the outset the world of everyday life is [.. ] a texture of meaning which we have to interpret in order to find our bearings within it and come to terms with it [..] This texture of meaning, however, [..] originates in and has been instituted by human actions, our own and our [..] contemporaries and predecessors.

I have started with Schutz for a number of reasons. First, he stresses the intersubjective nature of culture and its constitution of the world. Second, his point of view that the world is a ‘texture of meaning’ which has to be interpreted. Finally, his idea that meaning originates through and is instituted by human actions through time and space. This point of view links closely to my own position that Black identities are texts of social practice which have to be ‘meaninged’ in interaction. Further, Schutz also highlights the centrality of translation as reflexivity by speaking about the importance of interpretation in coming to terms with a world which we ourselves make. Foucault’s point of view would be that it is through this interpretation that individuals come to understand themselves within the context of culturally determined notions of identity by large scale cultural patterns manifesting themselves at the level of individual identity through a process of mediation

[..] in which the subject constitutes himself in an active fashion by the practices of the self, these practices [..] are patterns that he finds in his culture and which are proposed, suggested and imposed on him by his culture, his society and his social group (McNay,1996: 154).

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Again then, Foucault focuses on translation as reflexivity through this mediation process as well as noting the centrality of culture/society/social group in identities. He, thus, usefully juxtaposes the micro-level of practices of the self against the macro-level of the determining social horizon (McNay, 1996: 155). In his work on the history of sexuality Foucault (1984c: 333-334) treats “sexuality as the correlation of a domain of knowledge, a type of normativity and a mode of relation to the self; it means trying to decipher how [..] a complex experience is constituted from and around certain forms of behaviour: an experience which conjoins a field of study [..], a collection of rules [..], a mode of relation between the individual and himself. For both Schutz and Foucault, therefore the “study of forms of experience can thus proceed from an analysis of “practices” “ (Foucault, 1984c: 335).

These practices are those in which individuals both speak from within discourses and construct counter-discourses in their micro-strategies for dealing with the variant and the invariant of Blackness in constructing identification narratives. Both the variant and the invariant become obvious in the following example. Here Lu produces the variant at lines 5-7 by being scathing of Dominicans- while speaking as a knowledgeable member of the wider Black community. On the other hand he is also supportive of their position as someone of Dominican ancestry himself. This is where the invariant becomes obvious (lines 22-24). The extract begins by Sh talking about the bad reputations of Jamaicans in Britain. This is not denied by the other interactants. Lu then gives a Dominican’s view on why Dominicans marry Jamaicans. That is, because of the fear of inbreeding. For several turns interactants show their agreement with his point of view through laughter and affirmations (lines 8-17). When Lu is asked about “loads of inbreeding” by his Jamaican girlfriend in what she

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later confesses to have been a joke, there is no uptake by him of this as a joke. What he does instead is to defensively talk- in a more recognisably Creole form- about inbreeding within the wider Caribbean context, ending in “o:h:” to show his anger. Lo then begins to talk about this generally, thus, defusing the situation. For both the interactants in this conversation and for myself as an analyst, there has to be shared knowledge in terms of the topic. Knowledge goes beyond interactional rules such as turn taking to shared cultural knowledge to get the joke as well as understand the more serious side about inbreeding where, in the Caribbean cousins do not as a rule marry each other, no matter how distant the relationship:

Example 1- Tape 1 Side A Lu.Lo.Sa.Sh,Pe:2-3

1 Sh Ah’m amazed that anybody bothered marryin Jamaicans here apart from 2 Jamaicans ((.hhh .hhh)) ((Aachshally))=

3 P [((.hhh))]

4 Sh [ We’ve] got such a BAD reputation here ah couldn believe i(t)= >5 Lu =NO I’LL TELL YUH WHY

6 <1-°>

7 Lu Cos if yuh’re Dominican dey good to be yuh bloody cousin ,= >8 Sh = Ah true (.) [ ((.hhh .hhh))]

9 Joint [((.hhh [.hhh ] .hhh ] .hhh))=

10 Sa [VE:RY TRUE]

11 P =Well dat’s it yeah=

12 Sa =AH TRUE::= 13 P =Yeah ah know= 14 Sh =Dat’s no lie= 15 Sa =°Orthe° aunty of (.) 16 P No Inbreeding (1.0) 17 Sh Dat’s true: that is (.)

18 Lo Loads of inbreeding in’t there Lu though?= 19 P =Cos sh-erh:=

20 Lu =What LOAds of inbreedin?=

21 Lo =((.hhh )) ah was jokin (1.0) ((.hhh .hhh)) (.)

>22 Lu Is di siem inbreedin yuh fi:n in any one ah di islands okay4=