Mixed Race Studies

The First Black Prairie Novel: Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance’s Autobiography and the Repression of Prairie Blackness

Journal of Canadian Studies/Revue d’études canadiennes
Volume 45, Number 2 (Spring 2011)
pages 31-57
E-ISSN: 1911-0251; Print ISSN: 0021-9495
DOI: 10.1353/jcs.2011.0022

Karina Vernon, Assistant Professor of English
University of Toronto

This essay situates Chief Buffalo Child’s Long Lance: The Autobiography of a Blackfoot Indian Chief (1928) within the cultural context of its production, the anti-Black racial climate of the Canadian Prairies in the early part of the twentieth century, in order to analyze the textual repression of its author’s Blackness. Although the Autobiography has been discredited as a fraud because, as Donald B. Smith discovered, Long Lance was not in fact Blackfoot as the Autobiography claims, but “mixed blood” from North Carolina, this essay reclaims it as the first novel penned on the Prairies by a Black author, for it tells a true—more metaphorical and allegorical than factual—story about the desire on the part of displaced “new” world Blacks for Indigenous status and belonging. This essay examines the implications of claiming the Autobiography as the first Black prairie novel and explores how reading it as fiction rather than autobiography extends our understandings of “passing,” racial identification and transformation.

Cet article situe l’autobiographie Long Lance: The Autobiography of a Blackfoot Indian Chief (1928) du Chef Buffalo Child dans le contexte culturel de sa production—le climat racial anti-Noirs des Prairies canadiennes au début du XX^e siècle—afin d’analyser la répression textuelle de son auteur noir. Donald B. Smith a par la suite considéré cette autobiographie comme une imposture, ayant découvert que Long Lance ne faisait pas partie de la confédération des Pieds-Noirs, mais était plutôt un « sang-mêlé » de la Caroline du Nord. Cependant, l’auteur du présent article considère cette autobiographie comme le premier roman écrit dans les Prairies par un Noir puisqu’il raconte une histoire vraie—quoique plus métaphorique et allégorique que factuelle—du désir des Noirs déplacés du « Nouveau » Monde d’acquérir le statut d’indigène et d’appartenir à leur monde. L’article examine les conséquences de la classification de cette pseudo-autobiographie comme le premier roman des Prairies écrit par un Noir et explore les manières dont sa lecture en tant qu’œuvre de fiction plutôt qu’autobiographie nous aide à mieux comprendre le concept de « passage », d’identification et de transformation raciales.

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The Color of Citizenship: Race, Modernity and Latin American / Hispanic Political Thought

Oxford University Press
November 2011
288 pages
6-1/8 x 9-1/4
Hardback ISBN13: 9780199746668; ISBN10: 0199746664

Diego A. von Vacano, Assistant Professor of Political Science
Texas A&M University

The role of race in politics, citizenship, and the state is one of the most perplexing puzzles of modernity. While political thought has been slow to take up this puzzle, Diego von Vacano suggests that the tradition of Latin American and Hispanic political thought, which has long considered the place of mixed-race peoples throughout the Americas, is uniquely well-positioned to provide useful ways of thinking about the connections between race and citizenship. As he argues, debates in the United States about multiracial identity, the possibility of a post-racial world in the aftermath of Barack Obama, and demographic changes owed to the age of mass migration will inevitably have to confront the intellectual tradition related to racial admixture that comes to us from Latin America.

Von Vacano compares the way that race is conceived across the writings of four thinkers, and across four different eras: the Spanish friar Bartolomé de Las Casas writing in the context of empire; Simón Bolívar writing during the early republican period; Venezuelan sociologist Laureano Vallenilla Lanz on the role of race in nationalism; and Mexican philosopher José Vasconcelos writing on the aesthetic approach to racial identity during the cosmopolitan, post-national period. From this comparative and historical survey, von Vacano develops a concept of race as synthetic, fluid and dynamic—a concept that will have methodological, historical, and normative value for understanding race in other diverse societies.

Features

• Advances an alternative concept of race as inherently mixed, unstable, fluid, and politically potent
• Links approaches to race in Latin American thought to canonical Western political discourse
• Posits “race” as a central component of modernity and of political theory

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• 1. Paradox of Empire: Las Casas and the Birth of Race
• 2. Mixed into Unity: Race and Republic in the Thought of Simon Bolivar
• 3. Race and Nation in the Democratic Caesarism of Vallenilla Lanz
• 4. The Citizenship of Beauty: Jose Vasconcelos’s Aesthetic Synthesis of Race
• Conclusion: Making Race Visible to Political Theory

White women’s complicity and the taboo: Faulkner’s layered critique of the “miscegenation complex”

Women’s Studies
Volume 22, Issue 4 (1993)
pages 497-506
DOI: 10.1080/00497878.1993.9978998

Karen M. Andrews
Kobe College, Japan

In Faulkner’s social milieu, the proscription against miscegenation between white women and black men was so deeply ingrained as to be “common sense.” White male hegemony promoted a double standard which tolerated one form of miscegenation, between white men and black women, while virulently prohibiting the other form. Miscegenation virtually came to mean only the taboo form, thus silencing the reality of white male exploitation of black women. As James Kinney argues, the “post-war apologists for racism tried to convert the rape victim into the rapist, to reverse reality in order to justify past and present inhumanity” (227).

In works such as Absalom, Absalom! and Go Down, Moses, Faulkner critiques the sexual and racial injustices wrought by this double standard. Moreover, he exposes the whites’ paranoid and often violent reactions to the taboo—the “miscegenation complex”—in several novels, particularly Light in August, and in stories, such as “Dry September,” [Read the full text here.] “Elly” and “Mountain Victory.” In “Dry September,” probably the most anthologized of his short fiction, Faulkner demystifies the “miscegenation complex” by exposing the complicity of whites, male and female, who exploit the taboo for personal and political gain.

“Dry September” entails a multilayered critique of the miscegenation/rape complex. At the most obvious level of analysis, Faulkner employs the character Hawkshaw as a counterhegemonic voice among the radical racists, Unlike the other white men gathered about the barbershop, Hawkshaw critiques the belief that any rumor of the interracial taboo involves a black…

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‘Horror and beauty in rare combination’: The miscegenate fictions of Octavia butler

Women: A Cultural Review
Volume 7, Issue 1 (1996)
pages 28-38
DOI: 10.1080/09574049608578256

Roger Luckhurst, Professor in Modern and Contemporary Literature
Birkbeck, University of London

Octavia Butler’s work is virtually unknown, and yet her ten novels and one short story collection constitute an astonishingly intricate and sustained meditation on the imbrication of race and gender across cultural and scientific discourses. By her own reckoning the only black woman science-fiction writer currently working, she has, since 1976, investigated the ambivalent legacies of slavery by sending a twentieth-century woman back in time to a Maryland plantation in 1815 (Kindred), envisioned a classically ‘sci-fi’ future (Patternmaster) only to explode its conventionality by tracing this future’s racial genealogy back first to contemporary Los Angeles (Mind of My Mind and Clay’s Ark) and then to seventeenth-century Africa (Wild Seed), and has also produced a stunning trilogy about inter-species hybridization which is at once rigorously within the bounds of revisionist evolutionary theory and yet also allegorizes a passage from the horror of miscegenation to the emergence of a literally catastrophic difference (Xenogenesis: Dawn Adulthood Riles, Imago).

Butler’s chance for recognition might have arrived in 1984 when her short story, ‘Bloodchild’ won both the Hugo and Nebula prizes, the science-fiction community’s major internal awards. A subtle and disconcerting story, ‘Bloodchild’ slyly rewrites the gendered anxieties of the ‘body horror’ genre by…

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From exile to transcendence: racial mixture and the journey of revision in the works of Lydia Maria Child, Hannah Crafts, Kate Chopin, James Weldon Johnson, and Jean Toomer

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
May 2010

Suzanne M. Lynch

My study, entitled From Exiles to Transcendences focuses on five authors: Lydia Maria Child, Hannah Crafts, Kate Chopin, James Weldon Johnson, and Jean Toomer. It examines each author’s effort to represent the mixed-race character as a constant “process of becoming” (Hall, Questions of Identity 4). This study aims to convey the distinctiveness of the American mixed-race character in American literature and to provide a thorough reading of how this distinctiveness is portrayed and sustained throughout the scope of the selected texts. My dissertation identifies the mixed-race voice as experientially distinct from other American raced voices while acknowledging the mixed-race character as one who demonstrates a connectedness to a plurality of racial cultures. The following chapters span a period of approximately 100 years and illustrate a common concern among them, albeit from differing perspectives and influences, regarding how home and family function as fluid spaces of racial subjectivity. My study maintains a position that the above authors questioned the presumed irreversibility of an entrenched understanding of family ties; that they challenged and rescripted the historically defined self with a self that privileges experience and discovery over pre-given identities; and that they depicted their characters as evolving subjects who created themselves with name and identity as they moved toward their “process of becoming.”

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Racial mixture and civil war: The histories of the U.S. South and Mexico in the novels of William Faulkner and Carlos Fuentes

Michigan State University
2008
266 pages
Publication Number: AAT 3331903
ISBN: 9780549837800

Emron Lee Esplin, Assistant Professor of English and American Studies
Kennesaw State University, Kennesaw, Georgia

A Dissertation Submitted to Michigan State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, Department of English

This dissertation is an endeavor in inter-American literary criticism with three primary arguments. First, I argue that the affinities and differences between the histories of the U.S. South and Mexico require us to redefine the terms “America” and “American” according to their original hemispheric context and to adopt a transnational approach when studying American literature. Second, I claim that the ways in which race and racial mixture are viewed in the Americas—specifically, the discourse of miscegenation in the United States and the discourse of mestizaje in Mexico–are national not natural. These discourses are connected to lengthy colonial and national histories and to specific moments of crisis in the formation of U.S. and Mexican national identities that took place during the U.S. Civil War and the Mexican Revolution. Third, I argue that William Faulkner and Carlos Fuentes participate in these discourses of racial mixture when their novels both replicate and challenge the essentialisms of miscegenation and mestizaje, respectively.

In my introduction, I develop a historiographic approach to inter-American literary studies that I follow in chapter one by laying the historical groundwork for comparing the U.S. Civil War to the Mexican Revolution and in chapter two by examining how the discourses of miscegenation and mestizaje which grew out of these conflicts disparately favor(ed) whiteness–miscegenation through overt segregation and mestizaje through public praise for racial mixture and private desires for assimilation. Chapter three explores how Faulkner’s Light in August, Absalom, Absalom! , and Go Down, Moses and Fuentes’ La muerte de Artemio Cruz and Gringo viejo repeat the essentialist underpinnings of miscegenation and mestizaje by describing so-called racially mixed characters as fragments. Chapter four examines how Light in August and Gringo viejo challenge the discourses by assigning violence to whiteness. Chapter five analyzes how Light in August and La muerte de Artemio Cruz offer fictional portrayals of both miscegenation’s and mestizaje’s erasure of Mexico’s African past. I conclude the project by offering a critique of current hybridity theory and by arguing that Go Down, Moses and La muerte de Artemio Cruz demonstrate the impossibility of positive hybridity.

Table of Contents

• INTRODUCTION: METHODS FOR INTER-AMERICAN LITERARY STUDIES
• CHAPTER 1: WAR IN THE TWO SOUTHS: PRESENT PASTS AND CIVIL WAR IN THE U.S. SOUTH AND MEXICO
• CHAPTER 2: DISCOURSES OF RACIAL MIXTURE BORN IN CIVIL WAR: CREATING THE NATION IN THE UNITED STATES AND MEXICO
• CHAPTER 3: RACIAL MIXTURE AS FRAGMENTATION
• CHAPTER 4: ANCESTRY, BLOOD, AND THE VIOLENCE OF THE WHITE FATHERS
• CHAPTER 5: BLACK, MEXICAN, AND BLACK MEXICAN
• CONCLUSION: POSITIVE HYBRIDITY?
• WORKS CITED

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‘Kissing the rod that chastised me’: Scarlett, Rhett and Miscegenation in Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind (1936)

Irish Journal of American Studies
Volume 13/14, (2004/2005)
pages 123-137

Sinéad Moynihan, Lecturer in English
University of Exeter

“It’s all so mixed up,” Cindy muses in a 2001 parody of Gone With the Wind, as she imaginatively revisits the turbulent years of her life spanning 1845 to 1873 (Randall 44). Cindy, the narrator of The Wind Done Gone, is the illegitimate daughter of Planter (Gerald O’Hara’s proxy) and Mammy. The world she describes is indeed “mixed up” and Alice Randall’s parody is an attempt to redress what some critics perceive to be glaring omissions from Margaret Mitchell’s original text, namely the racial chaos engendered by generations of miscegenation (as well as other taboos, such as incest and homosexuality). Here, the myth of pure, white Southern blood is exposed in all  its multicoloured g[l]ory: Cindy’s half-sister, Other (Scarlett’s surrogate), is racially mixed by virtue of her mother, the quintessential Southern lady; Dreamy Gentleman (Ashley Wilkes) is romantically involved with a male slave, and so on. Curiously, in so far as the reader is aware, the bloodline of R.[hett Butler], with whom Cindy is having an affair, remains pristinely white. In Gone With the Wind however, Margaret Mitchell presents a compelling basis for arguing that Rhett is mixed race and “passing” for white. If this is indeed the case, then surely it is time to revise charges of Mitchell’s “lack of critical vision” and “blindness” concerning the “realities of slavery” and to acknowledge our own critical myopia in relation to her treatment of miscegenation (Faust 13).

If Mitchell’s romantic hero is passing as white, race is indisputably central to the action of the novel, though, of course, not in an unproblematic way. In arguing that Rhett Buder is a free mulatto passing for white, I wish to add my voice to those recent critics that refute the long-established consensus on the “relegation of race relations to the periphery of the novel’s action” (O’Brien 165). In so doing, this paper builds upon two strands of existing scholarship on Gone With the Wind. The first of these critical strands is the counterpart to the provocative fictional reconsideration of Gone With the Wind in The Wind Done Gone namely the interrogation of Rhett’s racial ambiguity in Gone With the Wind Joel Williamson asks “How Black was Rhett Butler?” (87), to which Diane Roberts adds her own question: “How white is Scarlett?” (171). For Elizabeth Young, Mitchell “symbolically darkens” (237) the “literally white” Rhett (257), thus rendering his marriage to Scarlett a “metaphorically interracial romance” (237). Young’s insistence on the “metaphorical” and “symbolic” character of Rhett’s blackness (261, 263) is matched only by Joel Williamson’s curious reluctance to articulate the term “passing,” especially given his discover)- of an actual interracial relationship in an early work by Margaret Mitchell. In 1926, Mitchell penned a Reconstruction-set 15,000-word…

Marginal Man and Hard-Boiled Detective: Racial Passing in Robert Skinner’s Wesley Farrell Series

Clues: A Journal of Detection
Volume 26, Number 3 (Spring 2008)
pages 56-69
DOI: 10.3172/CLU.26.3.56

Sinéad Moynihan, Lecturer in English
University of Exeter

The author argues that tropes of detection and racial passing are mutually compatible in Robert Skinner’s six New Orleans-set mysteries. Set in the 1930s, they feature Wesley Farrell, a businessman-turned-sleuth who is passing as white. A passing plot coupled with a murder mystery foreground the issues of detection, evidence and clues, guilt, confession, exposure, and the often gross disparity between law and justice.

Passing into the present: Contemporary American Fiction of Racial and Gender Passing

Manchester University Press
2010-07-01
256 pages
216 x 138mm
Hardback ISBN: 9780719082290

Sinéad Moynihan, Senior Lecturer in English
University of Exeter

• Discusses wider themes including class, gender, sexuality, and religious identity
• Focuses on Philip Roth’s ‘The Human Stain‘, Louise Eridich’s ‘Tracks’ Percival Everett’s ‘Erasure’ and Paul Beatty’s ‘The White Boy Shuffle‘
• Looks at a wide rage of contemporary writers that represent the theme of gender and racial passing

This book is the first full-length study of contemporary American fiction of ‘passing’. Its takes as its point of departure the return of racial and gender passing in the 1990s in order to make claims about wider trends in contemporary American fiction.

The book accounts for the return of tropes of passing in fiction by Philip Roth, Percival Everett, Louise Erdrich, Danzy Senna, Jeffrey Eugenides and Paul Beatty. These writers are attracted to the trope because passing narratives have always foregrounded the notion of textuality in relation to the (il)legibility of black subjects passing as white. The central argument of this book, then, is that contemporary narratives of passing are concerned with articulating and unpacking an analogy between passing and authorship.

Aimed at students and researchers, it promises to inaugurate dialogue on the relationships between identity, postmodernism and authorship in contemporary American fiction.

Table of Contents

• 1. Introduction: ‘Passing’ into the present: passing narratives then and now
• 2. Living parchments, human documents: passing, racial identity and the literary marketplace
• 3. The way of the cross(-dresser): Catholicism, gender and race in two novels by Louise Erdrich
• 4. (W)Rites-of-passing: shifting racial and gender identities in Caucasia and Middlesex
• 5. Bodies / texts: passing and writing in The White Boy Shuffle and The Human Stain
• 6. Conclusion: ‘Passing’ fads?: recent controversies of authenticity and authorship
• Bibliography

Other Communions: Maya, Mulatto, Woman and God in Miguel Ángel Asturias 1923-1974

University of Michigan
2010
218 pages

Andrea Leigh Dewees

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Romance Languages and Literatures: Spanish) in the University of Michigan

“Other Communions: Maya, Mulatto, Woman and God in Miguel Ángel Asturias 1923-1974” engages the Guatemalan Nobel Laureate’s literary production over five decades, beginning with his portrayals of the Maya and expanding to include his representations of the mulatto, female and God. I am primarily concerned with close readings of Los ojos de los enterrados (1960), Mulata de Tal (1963) and El árbol de la cruz (1997) but I draw also from others of Asturias’s novels, as well as historiography, postcolonial and feminist theory, to show how Asturias narrates the nation through literary figures of the Other.

Chapter 2 begins with an intellectual history of Asturias as a “Maya” author, tracing the roots and permutations of this myth through biography, autobiography, and literary criticism. I then show how his appropriative creation of a Maya indigenismo is central to his political and aesthetic conception of Latin American literature. However, Asturias’s novels extend beyond this fictive Maya center. Chapter 3 analyzes a non-Maya, untranslated phrase associated with a mulatto character in Asturias’s Banana Trilogy. I analyze an emerging negrista aesthetic and argue that the interruptive repetition of the phrase structures the novel’s account of the recent history of revolution, land reform and democratic rupture in Guatemala, as well as the more distant legacies of the conquest, colonialism and slavery.

Mulata de tal also features a mulatta character and in Chapter 4 I explain how Asturias connects land to the female body through a complex series of fragmentations, profanations and redemptions. In contrast to the more historical concerns of the Banana Trilogy, this novel is encased within an apocalyptic framework, marking a shift in Asturias’s attention from a Maya origin to the end of days.

Finally, I examine a sketch published after Asturias’s death, El árbol de la cruz, calling attention to Asturias’s connection between the female Other and the cross in what amounts to a brief treatise on communion. I show how this text, read accumulatively through popular religiosity in others of Asturias’s novels, balances between definitive origin and conclusive end.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Abstract
• Chapter 1 Introduction Mimesis and Guatemalan National Literature
• Chapter 2 Asturias and lo maya
• Appendices
• Chapter 3 Irrupted History: 1944, 1954 and Los ojos de los enterrados
• Chapter 4 Fragments between hell and heaven: land, the female body and the text in Mulata de tal
• Chapter 5 Crosses, Origins, Communions
• Bibliography

Read the entire dissertation here.