Black British Identities : The Dialogics of a Hybridity-of-the-Everyday.

Tate, Shirley Anne (1999) Black British Identities : The Dialogics of a Hybridity-of-the-Everyday. PhD thesis, Lancaster University.

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Abstract

This study looks at hybridity as an everyday interactional phenomenon using conversations on lived experience, amongst Black British people of Caribbean heritage between the ages of 16-40 who are from London, the Midlands and West Yorkshire. Black British identifications in talk-in-interaction are conceptualised as texts of social practice so as to look at Bhabha's notion of 'translated hybrid subjects' who function within a 'third space of hybridity' where there is a denial 'of a prior given original or originary culture'. The conversations are analysed using an ethnomethodologically inclined discourse analysis- a framework that I develop which is influenced by Foucauldian approaches to discourses, Bakhtin, ethnomethodology and discourse analysis. I generate a model for looking at the hybridity of the everyday in talk-in-interaction, which is based on its constitutive components: statement, translation as reflexivity, new addressivity. Using analyses of the data I show that there is a simultaneity of hybridity and essence in Black identification talk. 'Essence' manifests itself as 'race', skin, roots, community, culture and politics and remains within any notions of translation or hybridity. The third space' is constituted in interactions in which speakers show their awareness of being positioned by discourses and then negotiate an-other positioning. Hybrid identities are critical ontologies of the self, the radical otherness of different from the changing same produced through dialogism, performativity and abjection. Translation as reflexivity shows the dynamics of hybridity in talk-in-interaction as speakers use dialogic analysis to critique their positioning and then re-position themselves within identification discourses to produce new addressivities. These addressivities are hybrid identifications.