Shaping Transcultural Ethnographies of Southerness: The Skin Between Us. A Memoir of Race, Beauty and Belonging by Kym Ragusa

Abstract

This essay proposes an analysis of Kym Ragusa’s memoir The Skin Between Us. A Memoir of Race, Beauty and Belonging in which the author takes us to travel through her history and origins and to intercept these representations in the form of ethnographies of Southernness. These ethnographies are haematic, corporal, thematic, cultural and material “connectors” which carry within them signs of Ragusa’s belonging to the South of the world – but not exclusively – as she moves to and fro be- tween working-class Italian-American and African-American families. Indeed, Ragusa is the daughter of an African-American mother and an Ital- ian-American father, a writer and director/documentary maker who us- es her work to challenge the limits of gender, race and class, questioning the representations of the South presented in/by European and American culture. She calls for a return to the South not only as a geographical cat- egory, but also a state of mind, a horizon composed of traditions, histo- ries and values, but also of conflicts and contradictions. To this end, the proposal here is to conceive the writer in question as a translators of sorts, who wants to create an awareness of otherness, to bridge and allow for in- tellectual passage and exchange in order to illustrate the differences in the cultural and social systems as they come into contact.