ABSTRACT
This chapter explains how the construction of claims to Blackness in talk on Black women's lived experience produces and re-produces shared discourses on Blackness as kinship, culture, consciousness, politics and skin. It focuses on a politics of skin and the essentialism that persists in Black women's identifications, before moving to a consideration of hybridity as dialogical and performative. The continual movement of a politics of skin in talk as it is read and re-made returns us to looking at hybridity as dialogical and performative. 'The third space' exists within the time and space of the narrativization of the self. Dialogism provides an extension to this in that it sees identity arising in the relations between self and other. In terms of how women practice identities as texts of social practice, they negotiate discourses in the reflexive translation processes which dialogic analysis entails. That is, they perform new addressivities in the ongoing flow of the talk.
