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Abstract

In this autoethnographic narrative, the author examines moments of encountering his fugitive identity shaped by family practices, escape, sociocultural and linguistic migration. Marked as a foreign body in Europe, he (re)constructs his identity as inherently connected to systemic violence and oppression in both Europe and the United States. Responding to Western, White supremacy, anti-Blackness, and the violence of dominant normativity, he considers what it means to negate the meaning of oppressive socioeducational systems, their institutionalized language, settled expectations and practices. Thinking about his own body and the link between visibility and invisibility in racially structured societies, he examines the parallels between his own nondominant identity and those marked by the White gaze. Weaving together reflections on family history and Otherness in Europe with Black American narratives of marked visibility/invisibility, the author meditates on improvisation as a liberatory, counterhegemonic performance of reality. He concludes by returning to this text as a trace of improvisational, experimental, and liberatory thought, a medium with the potential to negate itself, to break itself, to escape itself.

Keywords

ethnicity and race identity music Blackness Whiteness pedagogy

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Improvising Identity,Body,and Race

Abstract

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References