| This dissertation examines literary, filmic, and critical contestations of the cultural and ideological parameters of blackness. Establishing African-American cultural heterogeneity and hybridity as immanent, I demonstrate how narrow, overdetermined constructions of blackness reify deleterious exclusions and hierarchies. I negotiate the “cultural politics of difference” as a disputed socio-political and aesthetic approach to theorizing black collective identity, arguing that a focus on group complexity is neither apolitical nor ahistorical. I suggest that foregrounding, and where necessary forging, connections across and between various spectrums of difference, in combination with more nuanced, compelling articulations of intra-racial alterity, would enable a more inclusive, politically efficacious recasting of black identity. Holding in tension the ways that race, culture, ethnicity, nationality, class, sexuality, and gender are fluid and interactive, I problematize absolutist representations, which serve to homogenize and regulate the sign of blackness. My dissertation is itself a conceptual struggle over and within the sign of blackness, which critically engages other discursive disruptions of fixed, essentialist castings of black culture.; Chapter One intervenes in academic debates about essentialism and the politics of belonging, examining what is explicitly political about the “cultural politics of difference.” Here I also negotiate difference's discontents. Chapter Two historicizes difference as an approach to conceptualizing blackness and investigates its long-standing antecedents. Chapter Three reflexively juxtaposes the already overlapping discourses of black identity and critical mixed race studies. Chapter Four explores multiple modes of transnational border-crossing and addresses the impact of diasporic movement on converging local and global conceptions of blackness. Throughout the dissertation, I critically engage expressive cultural productions and criticism in my effort to disrupt over-determined categories of belonging and to consider how blackness might be cast as a more complex, user-friendly construct. For circulating discursive artifacts influence cultural ideology and common sense, and can constitute a form of cultural theory. Hence, my dissertation's multiple trajectories converge in my exegeses of the works of such cultural producers as Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, Jean Toomer, Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston, Audre Lorde, Marion Riggs, and Dany Laferrière. |
