Hybridity haunts the dreams of racial purity, then but not solely as its structural foil. |
Hybridity haunts the dreams of racial purity, then but not solely as its structural foil. Certainly the existence of racial “hybrids” infuriated racists, as demonstrated by the efforts of nineteenth-century scientists to prove that mulattos were infertile and would naturally die out. But hybridity also interrupts the ability of race to narrativize time. I find a suggestive emblem of such disjunctive or hybrid temporality in “the miscegenation of time,” a phrase from which the state of racialist thinking can never be fully removed. The hybridization of genre implied in the miscegenation of time entails not simply the splicing together of different forms but the encounter of genre with its law and therein its indeterminancy. Exposing fictions of race and progress, hybridity unsettles collective and corporeal memory…
Nyong’o Tavia, The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance and the Ruses of Memory, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009) 12.
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