Jayne O. Ifekwunigwe - Scattered Belongings

This is a book about ordinary lives faced with the dilemmas of belonging and not belonging and of people who find themselves to be strangers in two cultures. It is a book about how the often painful experiences of being of "mixed race" in a world perceived in terms of "Black" and "White" can instead be something to name and celebrate.

Scattered Belongings presents personal and political testimonies and analyzes "mixed race" theories. The book takes a rigorous critique of "race" and "mixed race" as its starting point. The following section includes the moving narratives of six women of both continental African/African Caribbean and European parentage. Collectively, their testimonies illustrate the ways in which identities are shaped not only by "race," but also by ethnicity, gender, class, and locality. Finally, Jayne O. Ifekwunigwe demonstrates how the lived experiences of "mixed race" individuals can help us to understand the dynamic construction of identities in a globalizing world.

Jayne O. Ifekwunigwe is Lecturer in Sociology and Anthropology at the University of East London.

Cultural Paradoxes of "Race," Nation and Gender

First published 1999

by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada

by Routledge
270 Madison Ave, New York NY 10016

1999 Jayne O. Ifekwunigwe

Transferred to Digital Printing 2005

Typeset in Garamond by Routledge

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Ifekwunigwe, Jayne O.
Scattered belongings: cultural paradoxes of "race," nation and gender/Jayne O. Ifekwunigwe
p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
1. Racially mixed people. 2. Echnicity. 3. Pluralism (Social sciences) 4. Race relations. 5. Identity. I. Title.
HT1523.136 1999
305.8dc21 9820493
CIP

ISBN 0-415-17095-8 (hbk)

ISBN 0-415-17096-6 (pbk)

I am the descended daughter of both and neither My forefathers are the so-called intrepid explorers of the dark continent who stole kisses and cultures The rusty and the dusty dealers in the Triangular Trade The hyper-zealots who hopped the fence during the Missionary Crusades adding a bit of cream to the coffee And of course the chocolate brown Africans who were there

At the same time, the distant drones of my fertile foremothers in Africa, Europe and the Caribbean lull me to sleep, but never unconscious

(Copyright: Jayne O. Ifekwunigwe, Berkeley, California, USA, September 9, 1992)

For my Geordie gran (1904-1997) and my LeGuan grandad (18931983)

If race lives on today, it does not live on because we have inherited it from our forebears of the seventeenth century or the eighteenth or nineteenth, but because we continue to create it today.

The recent bag of re-poetics (recuperate, rewrite, transport, transform and so forth) proffers the opportunity to confront many of the assumptions and confusions of identity I feel compelled to "reconfigure." The site of this poetics for me, and many other multi-racial and multi-cultural writers, is the hyphen, that marked (or unmarked) space that both binds and divides...a crucial location for working out the ambivalences of hybridity....In order to actualize this hybridity...the hybrid writer must necessarily develop instruments of disturbance, dislocation and displacement.

In the past six years or so, Wah's literary summons has been answered by a virtual flourishing of North American (Canada and the United States) texts in the forms of websites, fiction, poetry, autobiographies, biographies, and academic texts by "mixed race" writers who are often of "Black and White" parentage, middle class and/or academics and students. These countries' different historical legacies vis--vis immigrant and indigenous communities might explain this discrepancy:

While the United States (and Canada) is a country of immigrants where ethnic diversity is constitutive of the society, British society has aspired and continues to aspire to monoculturalism: the people of the empire have no claim on British territory.

In a more profound way than in the United States and Canada, the rigidity of the class structure in Britain also limits the extent to which "hybrid" writers are recognized, published, marketed and received. However, Friedman would argue that on both sides of the Atlantic, a "hybrid" identity is not accessible to the poor:

The urban poor, ethnically mixed ghetto is an arena that does not immediately cater to the construction of explicitly new hybrid identities. In periods of global stability and/or expansion, the problems of survival are more closely related to territory and to creating secure life spaces.

Scattered Belongings is a book with two major objectives. First, this text begins to redress the imbalance in British literature on "mixed race" theories and identities. Second, this book centralizes the everyday words of working-class and middle-class "mixed race" people in England. As sociocultural and political critiques of "race," gender, class and belonging, fluid contemporary "mixed race" narratives of identities engage with, challenge and yet have been muffled by two competing racialized, essentialized and oppositional dominant discourses in England. The first is the territorialized discourse of "English" nationalism, which is based on indigeneity and mythical purity. That is,"Englishness" is synonymous with "Whiteness." The second is the deterritorialized discourse of the EnglishAfrican Diaspora, which is predicated on (mis)placernent and the one drop rule. That is, all Africans have been dispersed and one known African ancestor designates a person as "Black." Through the personal testimonies of ordinary people, I will illustrate the ways in which, as we hobble toward the new millennium, "mixed race" de/territorialized declarations delimit and transgress bi-racialized discourses and point the way toward a profound re-alignment of thinking about belonging. As such, this book critically engages with the notions of biological and cultural hybridities as they are articulated in nineteenth- and twentieth-century theories of "race," "mixed race" and social identities.