What does it mean to situate your understanding of the world and history with your own subjective history? One of the most forceful moments I have ever witnessed at the EMP Pop Con is when the fabulous Drew Daniel (Dr. and Sir Matmos both in one body) discussed his upbringing and relationship to the song "Sweet Home Alabama," as he remembers it being sung in a football stadium in Kentucky. He is discussing the song "does your concious bother you" and in doing so, tells a story of his grandmother showing photos in a scrapbook, pointing out a black woman whose family had "been in the family." His delivery is subtle but the knowledge ruptured the whole paper, maybe even the whole conference for me. What does it mean to objectify one's place in history, to have this conciousness that may "bother you" if you really dig around. And then to move yourself to action to change the present because of your implicated status?

I had the pleasure of seeing 1/2 of the Hazel Carby symposium "Reconstructing Womanhood: a Future Beyond Empire" on Friday at Barnard University. There, after an introduction by Farah Griffin, Carby read from her soon to be completed next book Child of Empire. Carby is a bi-racial British feminist scholar of immense importance, and her newest book traces the history of her white Welsh mother and black Jamacian father in terms of their British subjecthood through education, marriage, family upbringing and old age.

She, fierce as she is, stood in front of maybe 300 peers, friends, collegues, and stranger and read this hour and a half long essay about her parents immense respect for Britain in spite of their "second class" status as Welsh/Jamacians and her brother's beatings by the Bobbies for being 'half race' during the Vietnam protests, of the impossibility of romance between her parents because of their contested multi-racial marriage and Carby's own beatings by her parents in those moments of extreme domestic frustration. In short, how questions of ethnicity, origin, gender, nationality and generation permiate every last moment of a life and how one can set them into conversation through a biographical narrative. A question from the floor asked about her Britishness vis a vis America, now that Carby teaches at Yale. Her response, "putting together the book Empire Strikes Back [a foundational text about blackness in Britian] made myself and Paul Gilroy unemployable in Britain." Anyone who knows contemporary black Atlantic studies knows how amazing and shocking this thought is – that Carby and Gilroy were kept from teaching – and it was really inspiring to me to see this room of people dedicated to intelligent, progressive discussion of the complex, subjective, historically-situated and performative experience of identity, the kind of work that renders the current popular music conversations about so called "racial miscegenation" hopelessly antiquated, reductive, unproblematized, unuseful. You say you want to talk about ethnicity in popular music? Let's start here.