CARNAVAL, CUMBIA AND QUEENS: REPRESENTATIONS OF BLACKNESS

Abstract

Because I want the next generation of women to be set free from the birdcage of racial, gender and class stereotypes, a place from which my mother, grandmothers and great grandmothers never had the chance to escape, it is a personal and political choice to rupture the experiences of racial prejudice that bind us into phobic races within various shades of hatred. I am both digging a new place to find “truth” and criticizing an essential part of who I am or what I was taught to believe about our black and indigenous heritage. An epiphanic moment combines past, present and future moments into an act of doing and becoming. In honoring the first “queen” in my family, I wrote the following non-fiction children's story about my great grandmother Bernarda in three languages. Although I have never seen a picture of Bernarda, I feel her Chibcha blood burning inside of me and within every awkward phrase that I piece together as I fumble through grammatical structures, reviving memories into performative language. I wrote the first draft in English and later translated it into French and Spanish.

Citation

Davila, D. (2005), "CARNAVAL, CUMBIA AND QUEENS: REPRESENTATIONS OF BLACKNESS", Denzin, N.K. (Ed.) Studies in Symbolic Interaction (Studies in Symbolic Interaction, Vol. 28), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 127-171. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0163-2396(04)28014-0