Content area
Full text
Borrowed Identities. Jennifer Kelly. New York: Peter Lang, 2004. 231 pp. $29.95 US sc.
Jennifer Kelly's Borrowed Identities demonstrates how Black identity formation in Canada is a cultural process that is refracted through race, class, gender, sex, and religion. Kelly's study group is a set of fourteen African-Canadian students from Alberta. The texts Kelly uses are from various sources-print, television, aural-most of which are produced in the United States. Treating the students' responses to her questions as narrative, Kelly looks at the ways in which a Black identity is constructed, demonstrating how the lack of African-Canadian symbols becomes a crucial factor. Often, these students use "Black" interchangeably with African American and African Canadian. This is "linked with phenotype and age and a trace of historical memory" (p. 30). The African-Canadian sense of Blackness is influenced by understandings of symbolic forms constructed mainly by youth culture in the United States-what she calls "borrowed Blackness" (after Andre Alexis).
"Blackness" and "belonging" are discourses that cross geographic barriers/borders in a dynamic of remembrance. Kelly suggests that students bring a sense of hybridity to all their...