DARK BLOOD

Abstract

The article presents an analysis of the Danish documentary series, Slaves in the Family. It demonstrates how an analytics of hybridity can unpack the naturalizations and de-naturalizations of categories of purity, arguing that it is vital to capture the unstable tension, which inheres in the concept of hybridity, between the mixing of elements on the one hand, and the displacement of categories on the other. Slaves in the Family criticizes and destabilizes ideas of purity by rearticulating the story of Danish colonial history and of Danish national identity. However, the series situates itself uneasily between hybridity as displacement and a liberal hybridism, and so notions of purity are re-installed by the way in which the series articulates „kinship‟ as the basis of true relations and authentic identity.