Mixed Race Studies

Interview with Shirley Tate

Times Higher Education
2017-04-27

John Elmes, Reporter

Source: Kiran Mehta

We discuss realising what it means to be black in the UK, dealing with insomnia, and institutional racism in the academy, with the renowned race and black identity scholar

Shirley Tate is a cultural sociologist and researcher in the areas of institutional racism and black identity. Previously an associate professor in race and culture at the University of Leeds, she took up a new role as professor of race and education – the first of its kind in the UK – at Leeds Beckett University in April.

Where and when were you born?
In Spanish Town, Saint Catherine, Jamaica, in March 1956.

How has this shaped you?
I was brought up in Sligoville, which was the first free village in Jamaica set up after the enslaved population were granted full freedom in 1838. Being a black African-descent Jamaican is still pivotal to me in terms of how I identify as a person. I was very fortunate to be brought up there at a time of independence, Black Power, a resurgence of Rastafarianism and, with it, Garveyism. It was during this time that my cousin gave me a copy of Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks. I always look back at this as a really important moment in my coming to awareness as black and Caribbean because it helped me to understand how colonialism continued to work in the Western hemisphere for black people, people of colour and white people. Jamaica became independent from the British Empire in 1962, so I was British for five and a half years, then became Jamaican and then became a naturalised British citizen in the 1980s. I left Jamaica in 1975 for the UK, which was a very difficult transition. For the first time, I really realised what it meant to be a black person in a white country. I was really taken aback the first time that I was asked, by a seven-year-old mixed-race girl, whether I was “half or full”, meaning was I mixed race or not. For her, that was an important way to judge whether she had a connection with me. I was also asked by my boss, in the first job I had in the UK, where I had learned to speak and write such good English and was “complimented” by being told that I didn’t sound at all Jamaican. I cling to my Jamaican accent with a vengeance, so I didn’t feel the compliment…

Read the entire interview here.

Foucault, Bakhtin, Ethnomethodology: Accounting for Hybridity in Talk-in-Interaction

Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Research
Volume 8, Number 2, Article 10
May 2007
18 pages

Shirley Anne Tate, Senior Lecturer and Director of Studies
Centre for Interdisciplinary Gender Studies
University of Leeds

Theorising hybridity within Postcolonial Studies is often done at a level which seems to exclude the everyday with the exception of its relevance for the cultural productions of migrants and dominant culture’s “eating the other”. This article uses the exploration of hybridity as an everyday interactional achievement within Black “mixed race” British women’s conversations on identity to look at the production of an analytic method as process based on the task of the analyst as translator. This method as process thinks the links between FOUCAULT and BAKHTIN in the emergence of an ethnomethodologically inclined discourse analysis (eda) which is called on to make sense of a hybridity of the everyday where Black women reflexively translate discourses on identity positions in order to construct their own identifications in conversations. FOUCAULT’s discourses and BAKHTIN’s heteroglossia and addressivity allow us to theorise this movement in the talk which ethnomethodological transcription and theory enables us to first pinpoint occurring. The article begins by looking at first, how hybridity as identification emerges in talk-in-interaction through both speaker and analyst translations. Having established this, it then goes on to look at the theoretical convergences and divergences between FOUCAULT and BAKHTIN on the subject, identity and discourses in the eda enterprise. Looking at data through the lens of eda means that we must be aware of the subject positions which speakers identify as having the effect of constraining or facilitating particular actions and experiences and there is always the possibility for challenge to subjectification.

Table of Contents

• 1. Introduction
• 2. Method as Process—Talk, Hybridity, Translation
• 3. Blurring the Line Between Theory and Story
• 4. Discourses, Translation as Reflexivity and Dialogism in Talk on Identification
• 5. FOUCAULT and BAKHTIN—”Race”, Discourses and Dialogics
• 6. FOUCAULT and BAKHTIN: Ethnomethodology, Discourse Analysis and the Membership Category “Black Woman”
• 7. Conclusion
• Acknowledgements
• References
• Author
• Citation

Read the entire article here or here.

Black Skins, Black Masks: Hybridity, Dialogism, Performativity

Ashgate Publishing
February 2005
188 pages
234 x 156 mm
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-7546-3641-0

Shirley Anne Tate, Professor of Sociology
Leeds Beckett University, Leeds, United Kingdom

Black Skin, Black Masks: Hybridity, Dialogism, Performativity offers a timely exploration of Black identity and its negotiation. The book draws on empirical work recording everyday conversations between Black women: friends, peers and family members. These conversations are discussed in the light of the work of Homi Bhabha, Stuart Hall, Gerd Baumann, Claire Alexander and others on questions of hybridity, identity, otherness and the development of ‘new ethnicities’. Tate aims to address what she sees as significant omissions in contemporary Black Cultural Studies. She argues that theorists have rarely looked at the process of identity construction in terms of lived-experience; and that they have tended to concentrate on the demise of the essential Black subject, paying little attention to gender.

The book points to a continuation of a ‘politics of the skin’ in Black identities. As such it argues against Bhabha’s claim that essence is not central to hybrid identities. The conversations recorded in the book reveal the ways in which women negotiate the category of Blackness, in what Tate calls a ‘hybridity-of- the-everyday’.

The book introduces a new interpretative vocabulary to look at the ways in which hybridity is orchestrated and fashioned, showing it to be performative, dialogical and dependent on essentialism.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Foucault, Bakhtin, ethnomethodology
• Critical ontologies and racialized gender
• Storied hybridity and gendered readings of ‘Race’
• Beyond hybridity: bodily schema and the ‘Third Space’
• Resisting Black skin
• Hybridity, dialogism, performativity
• Fetishizing community: a politics of skin, homes and belonging
• Conclusion; Bibliography
• Index