Mixed Race Studies

Whiteness in the Novels of Charles W. Chesnutt

University Press of Mississippi
2004
248 pages
bibliography, index
Cloth ISBN: 1578066670 (9781578066674)
Paper ISBN: 9781604732481

Matthew Wilson, Professor of English and Humanities
Pennsylvania State University, Harrisburg

An examination of race and audience in an American innovator’s writings

Charles W. Chesnutt (1858-1932), critically acclaimed for his novels, short stories, and essays, was one of the most ambitious and influential African American writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Today recognized as a major innovator of American fiction, Chesnutt is an important contributor to de-romanticizing trends in post-Civil War Southern literature, and a singular voice among turn-of-the-century realists who wrote about race in American life.

Whiteness in the Novels of Charles W. Chesnutt is the first study to focus exclusively on Chesnutt’s novels. Examining the three published in Chesnutt’s lifetime—The House Behind the Cedars, The Marrow of Tradition, and The Colonel’s Dream—as well as his posthumously published novels, this study explores the dilemma of a black writer who wrote primarily for a white audience.

Throughout, Matthew Wilson analyzes the ways in which Chesnutt crafted narratives for his white readership and focuses on how he attempted to infiltrate and manipulate the feelings and convictions of that audience.

Wilson pays close attention to the genres in which Chesnutt was working and also to the social and historical context of the novels. In articulating the development of Chesnutt’s career, Wilson shows how Chesnutt’s views on race evolved. By the end of his career, he felt that racial differences were not genetically inherent, but social constructions based on our background and upbringing. Finally, the book closely examines Chesnutt’s unpublished manuscripts that did not deal with race. Even in these works, in which African Americans are only minor characters, Wilson finds Chesnutt engaged with the conundrum of race and reveals him as one of America’s most significant writers on the subject.

American Mixed-Race Literature: Cultural History, Precursors, Identities, and Forms of Expression

Purdue University
2004
116 pages
Publication Number: AAT 3166693
ISBN: 9780542022999

Gino Michael Pellegrini, Adjust Assistant Professor of English
Pierce College, Woodland Hills, California

This dissertation focuses on recent instances of mixed race literature in American culture such as Danzy Senna’s novel Caucasia, Rebecca Walker’s Black, White, and Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self, and Kip Fulbeck’s Paper Bullets: A Fictional Autobiography. This dissertation suggests that these mixed race literary texts, as well as the multiracial experiences, sensibilities, themes, and expressions communicated therein, differ from traditional conceptions and descriptions of race and mixed race in American society, history, and literature that are based on the logic of the binary racial system. Mixed race literature attempts to phrase and communicate suppressed, distorted, and/or neglected multiracial experiences, sensibilities, and possibilities. Mixed race literature is also coextensive with the emergence of the multiracial social formation and movement in the post-civil rights era. “Precursors” to mixed race literature fall short in their attempt to phrase and to communicate complexities and experiences of mixed race lived existence. I read Jean Toomer’s Cane as one of the most significant precursors to mixed race literature in American literature. Mixed race literature also differs from “mixed race in American literature” insofar as the later, in the presentation of mixed race characters and themes, both relies on and validates the categorical, hierarchical, and dichotomous logic of the binary racial system. Notable examples in the canon of American and American Ethnic literature are William Faulkner and Toni Morrison who, from a mixed race perspective, extend and promote in their texts the suppression and distortion of multiracial complexities, possibilities, and lived realities in the service of the binary racial system.

Table of Contents

• Abstract
• Chapter One: Multiracial Identity in the Post-Civil Rights Era: A Personal Narrative Essay
  • The Summer of 1999
  • Growing up Racially Mixed in the 1970s and 1980s
  • Negotiating Raciated University in the 1990s
  • Conclusion
• Chapter Two: Cane and Jean Toomer: Percursors, American Mixed Race Literature
• Chapter Three: Danzy Senna’s Caucasia: A Novel About Growing Up Racially Mixed and Becoming Multiracial in the Post-Civil Rights Era
• Chapter Four: American Mixed Race Ficiational Autobiographies: Rebecca Walker’s Black, White and Jewish and Kip Fulbeck’s Paper Bullets
• List of References
• Vita

Purchase the dissertation here.

From Manenberg to Soweto: race and coloured identity in the black consciousness poetry of James Matthews 

African Studies
Volume 62, Issue 2 (December 2003)
pages 171-186
DOI: 10.1080/0002018032000148740

Mohamed Adhikari, Associate Professor of Historical Studies,
University of Cape Town

The Black Consciousness poetry of James Matthews, internationally recognised Coloured writer from the Cape Flats, reflects the growing popularisation amongst politicised Coloured people during the 1970s of the idea that racial distinctions in general, and Coloured identity in particular, had historically been used by the white supremacist establishment to divide and rule the black majority. This insight, by no means novel, provided the main thrust to the popular rejection of Coloured identity in the anti-apartheid movement of the 1980s. Coloured rejectionism had, however, originated within a small section of the Coloured intelligentsia, in particular amongst those active within the Non-European Unity Movement (NEUM) in the early 1960s (Adhikari 2002: 186-87, 213-14, 243-48) and grew into a significant movement by the time it peaked at the end of the 1980s. Though confined to a politicised minority within the Coloured community itself, and observed mainly in public discourse or for pragmatic reasons, the disavowal of Coloured identity had by the early 1980s nevertheless become a politically correct orthodoxy within the anti-apartheid movement, especially in the Western Cape. In response to the overt racism of apartheid, the democratic movement embraced non-racism as a cornerstone of its philosophy and any recognition of Coloured identity was condemned as a concession to apartheid thinking. This tendency was, however, reversed during the four-year transition to democratic rule as radical changes to the political landscape in the first half of the 1990s once again made the espousal of Coloured identity acceptable in left-wing and “progressive” circles (Adhikari 2000: 349; 2002: 23-24, 281-87). 

Read or purchase the article here.

“What Are You?”: Exploring Racial Categorization in “Nowhere Else on Earth”

The Southern Literary Journal
Volume 39, Number 1 (Fall, 2006)
pages 33-53

Erica Abrams Locklear, Assistant Professor of Literature & Language
University of North Carolina, Asheville

In his introduction to the 1985 collection of essays entitled “Race,” Writing, and Difference, Henry Louis Gates rightfully asserts: “Race, as a meaningful criterion within the biological sciences, has long been recognized to be a fiction” (4), Even so, contemporary disputes centered on race remain one of American most glaring problems. Although laws supporting atrocities such as the Jim Crow South rest in the past, the systems of classification that inspired them still operate on many different levels of present-day American society, ranging from the way people describe themselves, to the labels people place on difference, to the way the American government decides what fraction of “blood” constitutes race. Fiction writer Josephine Humphreys explores the complexities, falsifications, and implications of racial classification for the Lumbee Indians of Robeson County, North Carolina in her historically based novel Nowhere Else on Earth. First published in 2000, the work’s 2001 Penguin edition includes a readers guide following the text in which Humphreys explains her impetus for writing about the Lumbee people. She admits that when she first encountered a Lumbee aboard a train, upon discovering ihat the woman was not white, Humphreys asked, “What are you?”, She goes on to remember that the young woman explained the story of the Lumbee people, as well as the infamous tale…

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“The Horrid Alternative”: Miscegenation and Madness in the Frontier Romance

Journal of American & Comparative Cultures
Volume 24, Issue 3 (Fall/Winter 2001)
Pages: 137-151
DOI: 10.1111/j.1537-4726.2001.2403_137.x

Harry J. Brown, Assistant Professor of English
DePauw University

In a speech delivered to a gathering of Delaware and Mohican Indians, Thomas Jefferson foresaw the destiny of the United States as a “marriage” of its various races, declaring that, in ”the natural progress of things,” Indians and whites “would meet and blend together… intermix, and become one people” (Wald 25). He invites (the Indians to “mix with us by marriage” and grandly prophesies, “your blood will run in our veins and will spread with us over this great island” (Wald 26). But even as Jefferson imagined the new nation as a “marriage” of whites and Indians, the subsequent generation of writers who assumed the responsibility of telling the story of th nation found it difficult to imagine what such a marriage would yield.

In her survey of American frontier writing in The Land Before Her (1984), Annette Kolodny observes a “studied literary silence on the subject of white-red intermarriage” (70). Scholars have since suggested that the uneasiness of the frontier romance with miscegenation stems from the sacred myths of  racial, national, and patriarchal accendance. Racial mixing represents a fundamental contradiction to the national ideology of racial separatism; therefore, the frontier romance, intent upon the creation of a “national” literature, registers this contradiction as a tense “silence.”

I will examine this “silence” more closely in Lydia Maria Child’s Hobomok: A Tale of Early-Times (1824), James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of The Mohicans (1826), and Catherine Maria Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie, or A Tale of Early Times in ihe Massachusetts (1827).  As these romances are confronted and confounded by the specter of miscegenation, they drift from the daylight world of the “historical,” the native realm of a solid “national” literature, into the nightmare world of me “gothic,” where racial hybridity is manifested not exactly as “silence” but more sharply as madness, degeneracy, and horror. Within these novels we find an intersection of science and sensationalism as the widely-held racial theory of “diminishing fertility” manifest itself in the romance as insanity or living death, the ineveitable “curse” invoked by the “unnatural” mingling of white and Indian blood. The presence of miscegenated women and “half-breed” figures confounds the foundational categories of the national identity imagined by these romances—white and red, civilization and nature, future and past—and, consequently, these figures are represented as irrational, perverse, or doomed, the recurring “nightmare” invading America’s dream of itself.

At the same time, a tradition of “hybrid texts” resists this widely disseminated myth of degeneration and present alternative visions of racial mixing to those provided by the critically sanctioned historical romances. James E. Seaver’s A Narrative of the the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison (1824), for example, published in the same years as Hobomok and equal to The Last of the Mohicans in popularity, offers a way to “read against” the The popularily of the narrative further suggests that, contrary to critical assumptions, audiences were perhaps more receptive to Jefferson’s idea of a racially mixed American future than were romance writers and reviewers.  Jemison’s over-looked success tells us that while reviewers strongly objected to considering miscegenation as part of the formula for a national literature, common readers were apparently less troubled by the prospect of a heterogeneous nation and less insistent on the separation of races as a necessary component of national identity. This apparent gap between the critical and popular responses suggests that…

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The Octoroon: Early History of the Drama of Miscegenation

The Journal of Negro Education
Volume 20, Number 4 (Autumn, 1951)
pages 547-557

Sidney Kaplan, Instructor In English
University of Massachusetts

From the moment of its birth the American democracy has appeared to some of its best champions as the perfect subject for Aristotelian tragedy. Could the democracy with an overwhelming reservation be anything other than the hero with a fatal flaw? The essence of slavery, complained Jefferson at the close of the Revolution, was the “perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other”; he trembled for his country when he reflected that God was just and that his justice could not sleep forever. One ramification of this peculiarly American tragedy—the “problem” of passion between black and white—has been a staple of our stage for almost a century. From Boucicault’s The Octoroon in the decade before Gettysburg, through O’Neill’s All God’s Chillun in the era of the first World War, to Hughes’s The Barrier of the current guilty hour, the drama of miscegenation has packed box and balcony throughout the land.

Putting aside the question of its dramatic merit, it is easy to see why Boucicault’s play, from the historian’s point of view, is the most interesting of the genre; for not only did The Octoroon for the first time, effectively and sympathetically, place a Negro in the center of an American stage, but also, in the troubled time of its premiere, despite all its meagerness as play or tract, it became a small portent of impending crisis and irrepressible conflict. As Joseph Jefferson wrote, thirty years after its first night, The Octoroon “was produced at a dangerous time”; for the slightest allusion to the peculiar institution served then only “to inflame the country, which was already at a white heat.”

Three days after John Brown had been hanged in Virginia, the curtain arose on The Octoroon in New York. On the evening of December 6, 1859, just as Brown’s coffin began the last lap on the journey North to the quiet Adirondack farms, the Winter Garden…

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Pinturas de Casta: Mexican Caste Paintings, a Foucauldian Reading

New Readings
School of Modern Languages, Cardiff University
Volume 10 (July 2009)
page 1-17

Nasheli Jiménez del Val
Cardiff University

This article looks at the genre of casta painting developed in colonial Mexico during the eighteenth century. The genre consists of a series of paintings representing the different racial mixes that characterised New Spain throughout the colonial period and that continue to play an important role in contemporary Mexican society. By referring to several Foucauldian concepts such as disciplinary power, biopower, normalisation, deviance and heterotopia, this essay aims to locate the links between this genre and prevailing discourses on race, with a particular focus on the ensuing institutional and political practices implemented in the colony during this period. Centrally, by focusing on this genre as a representational technology of colonial surveillance, the paper argues that discourses on race in New Spain oscillated between an ideal representation of colonial society, ordered and stabilised through rigid classificatory systems, and a real miscegenated population that demanded a more fluid understanding of the colonial subject’s societal value beyond the limitations of racial determinism.

It is known that neither the Indian nor Negro contends in dignity and esteem with the Spaniard; nor do any of the others envy the lot of the Negro, who is the “most dispirited and despised”. […] It is held as systematic that a Spaniard and an Indian produce a mestizo; a mestizo and a Spaniard, a castizo; and a castizo and a Spaniard, a Spaniard. It is agreed that from a Spaniard and a Negro a mulatto is born; from a mulatto and a Spaniard, a morisco; from a morisco and a Spaniard, a torna atrás; and from a torna atrás and a Spaniard, a tente en el aire. The same thing happens from the union of a Negro and Indian, the descent begins as follows: Negro and Indian produce a lobo; lobo and Indian, a chino; and chino and Indian, an albarazado, all of which incline towards the mulatto. [For more terms, see here.]

—Pedro Alonso O’Crowley, 1774.

Casta painting is a pictorial genre produced by colonial artists between the early 18th century and the early 19th century that consists of a series of paintings representing the different racial mixings that characterised the colony of New Spain. As a pictorial genre, it is constituted by a succession of images that show a male and female subject from different ethnic origins and the offspring that result from this combination. The three racial strands of Spaniard, Indian and Black initiate the series, with the possible combinations that derive from these crossing being depicted in detail, to the degree that even fifth or sixth degrees of derivations are often assigned specific names and traits…

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The Monster Inside: 19th Century Racial Constructs in the 24th Century Mythos of Star Trek

The Journal of Popular Culture
Volume 31, Issue 1 (Summer 1997)
pages 23–35
DOI: 10.1111/j.0022-3840.1997.3101_23.x

Denise Alessandria Hurd

That is the ineffaceable curse of Cain. Of the blood that feeds my heart, one drop in eight is black—bright red as the rest may be, that one drop poisons all the flood. Those seven bright drops give me love like yours, hope like yours—ambition like yours—life hung with passions like dew-drops on the morning flowers; but the one black drop gives me despair, for I’m an unclean thing—forbidden by the laws—I’m an Octoroon!

Zoe in The Octoroon, 1859

Myself, I think I got the worst of each… that [my Klingon side] I keep under tight control… some times I feel there’s a monster inside of me, fighting to get out… My Klingon side can be terrifying, even to me.

K’Ehleyr from Star Trek: The Next Generation, 1989

Judging from the above two quotes, not much has changed in 130 years of racial image management, The language may have become less poetical by the time of Star Trek, and the “Other” race less specifically marked as an existing ethnic group, but the construction of the Other, especially the Hybrid Other, even down to the implication of an inevitable atavistic biological essentialism when two races are mixed, remains the same. In the world of Star Trek, the society of the future is a pattern card of egalitarian homogeneity. Prejudice is gone and brotherhood reigns supreme, at least theoretically. It is just those pesky “alien” cultures that repeat outmoded cultural conflicts. Or is it? In this article I wish to examine how this television series, whose original intent was to explore and disprove the encoded prejudices of contemporary society by displacing this debate onto a future and presumably Utopian society, still tends to reify a particularly loaded image from nineteenth century psychology and anthropology in the United States: The Tragic Mulatto.

Beginning with the character of Spock in The Original Series (TOS) and on down to B’Elanna Torres on the newest series. Star Trek:  Voyager, (STV) the following familiar crisis is enacted: A Hybrid character…

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“The devil made the mulatto”: Race, religion and respectability in a Black Atlantic, 1931-2005

University of Toronto
2007
312 pages
Publication Number: AAT NR39517
ISBN: 9780494395172

Daniel R. McNeil, Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies
Newcastle University, United Kingdom

According to The Historical Journal there has only been one scholarly study of mixed- race history. This text—New People: Mulattoes and Miscegenation in the United States—fails to address events after 1930 in any detail, and ends its historical analysis with a discussion of the mixed-race people who committed themselves to a “New Negro” group. In an attempt to cover this gap in the academic literature, my dissertation analyses the creative artistry of individuals who were born after 1930 and were told, by governmental agencies in the US, UK and Canada, that they had a Black father and a white mother. My first case study looks at Philippa Schuyler, the daughter of George Schuyler, the most prominent African American journalist of the early twentieth century. I acknowledge that George Schuyler’s journalistic peers marketed his daughter as a “Negro” child prodigy during the 1930s and 1940s, but I also document how she fashioned herself as a “mulatto” writer or a vaguely aristocratic “off-white” femme fatale during the 1950s and 1960s. My second case study looks at Lawrence Hill, a writer who grew up in the suburbs of Toronto during the 1950s and 1960s and has achieved a degree of prominence in Canada by casting himself as a middle-class Black “race man” like his African American father, the first director of the Ontario Human Rights Agency. Subsequent case studies investigate the legacy of the “Black is beautiful” movements of the 1960s on a wider variety of individuals—from working-class folks in Nova Scotia and Merseyside to American idols—and provide further evidence for my argument that a Black identity has been masculinized in opposition to the stigma attached to a “mulatto” identity associated with young “brown girls”. In doing so, I draw heavily on the work of Otto Rank, W.E.B Du Bois and Frantz Fanon. In particular, I link Rank’s ideas about creative artistry – that it was a masculine attempt to give birth to a new self, community or nation—to the theories of Du Bois and Fanon that defined “honest intellectuals” in a Black Atlantic against mixed-race women and children.

Purchase the dissertation here.

Multiracial representations: Nishime examines Battlestar Galactica

University of Washington
Department of Communications
2010-11-15

Amanda Weber

LeiLani Nishime, Assistant Professor of Communication, is a self-proclaimed science fiction fan, so it seemed natural to her to set her research sights on the TV series Battlestar Galactica. Although science fiction is generally a genre about the future, it often reflects current social issues. Nishime is a scholar on multiracial and interracial studies, Asian American media representations, and Asian American subcultural production. In her study, “Aliens: Narrating U.S. Global Identity Through Transnational Adoption and Interracial Marriage in Battlestar Galactica,” she identifies visual and narrative representations of multiracial people…

Read the entire article and watch a short video clip here.