The Amalgamation Waltz
Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory
Does racial hybridity offer a future beyond racial difference?
248 Pages, 6 x 9 in
- Paperback
- 9780816656134
- Published: May 14, 2009
Details
The Amalgamation Waltz
Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory
ISBN: 9780816656134
Publication date: May 14th, 2009
248 Pages
9 x 6
Deeply interested in how discussions of racial hybridity have portrayed the hybrid as the recurring hope for a distant raceless future, Nyong’o is concerned with the ways this discourse deploys the figure of the racial hybrid as an alibi for a nationalism that reinvents the racist logics it claims to have broken with. As Nyong’o demonstrates, the rise of a pervasive image of racially anomalous bodies responded to the appearance of an independent black public sphere and organized politics of black uplift. This newfound mobility was apprehended in the political imaginary as a bodily and sexual scandal, and the resultant amalgamation discourse, he argues, must be recognized as one of the earliest and most enduring national dialogues on sex and sexuality.
Nyong’o tracks the emergence of the concept of the racial hybrid as an ideological modernization of the older concept of the mongrel and shows how this revision brought race-thinking in line with new understandings of sex and gender, providing a racial context for the shift toward modern heterosexuality, the discourse on which postracial metaphors so frequently rely. A timely rebuttal to our contemporary fascination with racial hybridity, The Amalgamation Waltz questions the vision of a national future without racial difference or conflict.
Tavia Nyong’o is a cultural historian currently teaching in the Department of Performance Studies, New York University. His research interests include black performance, visual culture, and gender and sexuality studies. His writing has appeared in the Yale Journal of Criticism, Radical History Review, Social Text, and the Nation. He can be reached at http.//www.tavianyongo.com.