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Book: Codes of Conduct

Chapter: “Power Play: Race Performance at the Margins”

DOI: 10.1558/equinox.24868

Blurb:

This essay addresses code-switching as a careful, though often unconscious, way of identifying spheres of dominance and power. Whether the aim is to subvert or authorize particular power structures, performing certain social scripts--or “codes”--establishes one’s participation in a group. Thus, code-switching is not a by-product of marginalization but rather a universal practice (albeit to varying degrees in different contexts) by which social actors identify “dominant” and “marginal” groups. I will press this argument through an analysis of “postblackness” and the ways in which race and politics are mediated in the American South.

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