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  • Constructing Black Selves: Caribbean American Narratives and the Second Generation
  • Mamadou Badiane
Constructing Black Selves: Caribbean American Narratives and the Second Generation. By Lisa D. McGill. New York: New York University Press, 2005. Pp. ix, 318. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $50.00 cloth.

This work examines the literary and musical productions of several second-generation Caribbean American artists, such as the musician Harry Belafonte, writers Paule Marshall, Audre Lorde, and Piri Thomas, and the hip-hop group Proyecto Uno, whose narratives span the second half of the twentieth century. It takes a first step toward considering their work as negotiations of multiple identities, an approach that allows McGill to move away from a focus on economic mobility or social class when considering identity among second-generation immigrants. This framework also proves advantageous in that it allows McGill to bring together work in the social sciences and humanistic studies (literary, musical and performance analysis), a combination that results in a work that makes a contribution in both fields.

The author first looks at Harry Belafonte's performances and argues that he was able to explore new public expressions of black male sexuality because this was couched in a Caribbean context. She asserts that Belafonte "shed a performative African American identity from the late 1940s and early 1950s for the freedom [End Page 318] availed through claiming a Caribbean self" (p. 40). In so doing, Belafonte's sexualized body (or the public image of his body) became part of his Caribbean identity, which he used to assert the rights—his own and others'—of American citizenship. The next three chapters take up literary texts. According to McGill, Paule Marshall and Audre Lorde's works illustrate the use of a Caribbean identity to negotiate a composite sense of self. Marshall, for example, "imagines a recuperation of a black diasporic identity as a source of spiritual and political power for blacks" (p. 76). Similarly, Lorde not only resists the "West" but patriarchy as well by referencing African goddess figures. This allowed Lorde to assert multiple identifications—"black," "American," "feminist," and "lesbian." McGill's fourth and fifth chapters focus on Piri Thomas's Down These Mean Streets and the merengue, hip-hop of Proyecto Uno, and introduce issues of converging Hispanic and African heritages. Whereas blackness served as a source of empowerment for other authors, for Thomas it was conflictive. In contrast, Proyecto Uno's founders regard blackness as a creative space. If New York City was a "substitutive enclave" for the first generation, for the second generation it became a place to "engage and try on multiple enunciations of black, Caribbean, and Latino identities" (p. 214).

McGill draws on the ideas of Alejandro Portes, Min Zhou, and Paul Gilroy among others to illustrate the dialogue between African America and Caribbean culture. By showing how each "narrative producer" negotiates identity in changing ways and contexts, McGill envisions identity as a continuous process rather than a product. This reinforces the idea that identity itself cannot be read as a text but rather that narratives can speak volumes about how people negotiate identity. The identification of similar threads in the various narratives, despite the multiplicity of experiences, is a basic strength of this work. However, McGill does not thoroughly address the relationships between the second-generationers and their first generation predecessors. The differences mentioned are treated largely as ancillary. This weakens McGill's argument because the narratives may, in some ways, be created in direct opposition to the identities created or accepted by the first generation. McGill also fails to specify how gender and sexuality are essential to her argument. In refering to Belafonte's performance of black masculine sexuality, to Marshall and Lorde's feminisms, to Lorde's lesbianism, to Thomas's affirmations of masculinity as connected to his assertion of Hispanic/Puerto Rican identity, and to the sexualized content of Proyecto Uno's lyrics, McGill addresses the intersection of race and sexuality in each individual narrative, but she does not examine the connections between them or their importance as a connecting thread linking the narratives.

This work provides an assessment of identity that contributes to the academic debate but would also be of...

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