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The Shame of ‘Mixedness’: Black Exclusion and Dis/alienation

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Abstract

This chapter uses ‘brownness’ as ideal to take up a discussion of somaesthetics and sarkaesthetics through looking at the shame caused by negative aesthetic value within Black Nationalist politics attached to being Black-white ‘mixed race’ and its ‘dissing’. That is, Black women’s bodies are a medium for creating aesthetic value through the subject’s adoption of a third-person perspective, enabling the emergence of dis/alienation from existing Black Atlantic discourses on the Black woman’s beauty shame.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    In the first wave, there were 125,000 volunteers, mostly Jamaican, who joined the RAF, worked in munitions factories and in forestry in Scotland. By 1942, there were 3 million American troops 130,000 of whom were African American. The British government responded with measures to curb the flow of non-white soldiers. From these policies, we can see the emergence of Britain as a modern racialized state (Carby 2007).

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Correspondence to Shirley Anne Tate .

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Tate, S.A. (2018). The Shame of ‘Mixedness’: Black Exclusion and Dis/alienation. In: The Governmentality of Black Beauty Shame. Palgrave Pivot, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52258-0_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52258-0_6

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  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Pivot, London

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-137-52257-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-137-52258-0

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