Negotiating Blackness

Abstract

This article explores the experiences of young British people with African and Caribbean heritage during a volunteer tourism trip to Zimbabwe. It gives an ethnographic account of how racialized identifications and geographies surfaced – and were negotiated – through emotional encounters and embodied performances. Young volunteers contended with the racialized imaginaries of charity that painfully positioned their blackness as ‘mis-fitting’ in the performances of virtue central to volunteer tourism. However, they performed their blackness in ways that asserted value, variously invoking a proud ‘authentic’ bond with ‘Africa’ and forging connections around diasporic African cool. Volunteers’ claims of authentic ‘Africanness’ often problematically homogenized Africa, but celebratory affects around transnational popular culture contained possibilities for disrupting denigrating hierarchies. This account illustrates the potential for youth studies to engage further with the ‘more-than-representational’ ways in which racialized difference comes into force, but that this approach can and should sharpen our analysis of enduring racialized prejudices.