Nadia Karizat: Divided into nothing

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

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.

Nadia Karizat: Divided into nothing

Nadia Karizat: Divided into nothing

The Michigan Daily
2016-05-18

Nadia Karizat

There are moments in my life that have burned me silently and set me up for questioning what I am. I say “what” and not “who” because I know who I am. I am someone who believes that the best moments are spontaneous, that music cures all and that the most fun thing one can do on a Saturday night is sit with friends and discuss our exquisite lives. I am also a biracial (Arab and White [Italian]) woman from Michigan who’s checked “other” on every single form she’s needed to fill out since she was 8 years old and made aware that society felt the need to force all her complexities into a single box…

Read the entire article here.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 9th, 2016 at 19:58Z and is filed under Articles, Autobiography, Media Archive, United States. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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Mixed Race Studies

Nadia Karizat: Divided into nothing

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