Mixed Race Studies

Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects

Duke University Press
August 2010
264 pages
21 illustrations
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8223-4591-6
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-4609-8

Christina Sharpe, Associate Professor of English and Director of American Studies
Tufts University

Arguing that the fundamental, familiar, sexual violence of slavery and racialized subjugation have continued to shape black and white subjectivities into the present, Christina Sharpe interprets African Diasporic and Black Atlantic visual and literary texts that address those “monstrous intimacies” and their repetition as constitutive of post-slavery subjectivity. Her illuminating readings juxtapose Frederick Douglass’s narrative of witnessing the brutal beating of his Aunt Hester and Essie Mae Washington-Williams’s declaration of freedom in Dear Senator: A Memoir by the Daughter of Strom Thurmond, as well as the “generational genital fantasies” depicted in Gayl Jones’s novel Corregidora and a firsthand account of such “monstrous intimacies” in the journals of an antebellum South Carolina senator, slave-holder, and vocal critic of miscegenation. Sharpe explores the South African-born writer Bessie Head’s novel Maru—about race, power, and liberation in Botswana—in light of the history of the Khoi San woman Saartje Baartman, who was displayed in Europe as the “Hottentot Venus” in the nineteenth century. Reading Isaac Julien’s film The Attendant, Sharpe takes up issues of representations of slavery, display, and the sadomasochism of everyday black life. Her powerful meditation on intimacy, subjection, and subjectivity culminates in an analysis of the black and white silhouettes created by Kara Walker and the subtexts of the critiques leveled against the silhouettes and the artist.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction. Making Monstrous Intimacies: Surviving Slavery, Bearing Freedom
• 1. Gayl Jones’s Corregidora and Reading the “Days That Were Pages of Hysteria”
• 2. Bessie Head, Saartje Baartman, and Maru Redemption, Subjectification, and the Problem of Liberation
• 3. Isaac Julien’s The Attendant and the Sadomasochism of Everyday Black Life
• 4. Kara Walker’s Monstrous Intimacies
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

1111 ENG 126: Racial Passing, Black and White

The College of Saint Rose
Albany, New York
Fall 2009

Eurie Dahn, Assistant Professor of English

In this course, we will analyze depictions of racial passing in American literature. In particular, we will examine narratives where African Americans “pass” for white and vice versa. While the popularity of passing as a historical phenomenon is debatable, it is incontestably a source of literary richness. This course is also about interraciality and the meaning of race itself, as the possibility of passing exposes hidden ambiguities and anxieties about race in the United States. Texts we will read may include those by Jessie Fauset, Nella Larsen, James Weldon Johnson, Mark Twain, and Walter Mosley. This is a discussion-based course, so come prepared to participate. Fulfills diversity requirement.

Between Hoax and Hope: Miscegenation and Nineteenth-Century Interracial Romance

Literature Compass
Volume 3, Issue 4 (July 2006)
pages 648–657
DOI: 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2006.00345.x

Katharine Nicholson Ings, Associate Professor of English
Manchester College, North Manchester, Indiana

This essay surveys recent scholarship on interracial romance during the nineteenth century using the hoax Miscegenation pamphlet of 1863 as a lens. An anonymous and ironic piece of writing that promoted race-mixing from a deceptively Republican perspective, Miscegenation coined the titular term, newly situating interracial relationships within a Latinate, pseudo-scientific framework. It also encouraged romance between white women and black men, an endorsement that was designed to enrage its white male readership but in fact gave hope to some white women who were unable to articulate their interracial desire publicly. Using this double focus, I explore how nineteenth-century authors of interracial romance borrowed the language of science, such as “hybridity” and “crossing”; how they employed the concept of “blood-mixing” as both sexual and medicinal (via transfusions); and I read the Miscegenation pamphlet as a kind of scientific romance fiction itself.

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Illegal fictions : white women writers and the miscegenated imagination 1857-1869 (E. D. E. N. Southworth, Louisa May Alcott, Rebecca Harding Davis, Lydia Maria Child)

Indiana University
2000

Katharine Nicholson Ings, Associate Professor of English
Manchester College, North Manchester, Indiana

This dissertation examines how popular nineteenth-century white women writers depicted interracial romance in their fiction. I focus on E. D. E. N. Southworth, Louisa May Alcott, Rebecca Harding Davis, and Lydia Maria Child, authors who composed what I call illegal fictions, largely neglected works that explored the possibilities of interracial unions between blacks and whites. These authors, all abolitionists, denounce slavery in their works while simultaneously reflecting upon the limitations of the feminine roles that they were expected to play in society.

I approach their fictions through three critical lenses: racial theory, sentimental narrative theory, and biography to determine the implications of the hybrid individual, national, and textual identities present in the narratives and in the authors’ lives. On the one hand, these illegal fictions attempt to negotiate the tension between white women and black men and women, each of whom strove to be recognized as citizens. On the other hand, their fictions point to how the idea of miscegenation literally a mixing of races informed the creativity of these women authors during the years spanning the Civil War. At the imaginative level the authors offer visions of either a successful or failed multicultural America; at the generic level they engage in a blending of forms: slave narrative merges with the sentimental novel to initiate a dialogue between African and Caucasian American literary traditions.

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Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race, 2nd Edition

Routledge
1994-12-14
248 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-415-31183-0

Robert J. C. Young, Silver Professor of English and Comparative Literature
New York University

As one of the most important books in post-colonial studies, this book argues that contemporary theories on post-colonialism and ethnicity are disturbingly close to the colonial discourse of the nineteenth century.

Rather than marking ourselves off from patterns of thought which characterized Victorian racial theory, we show remarkable complicity with historical ways of viewing ‘the other’, both sexually and racially. ‘Englishness’, Young suggests, has been less fixed and stable than uncertain, fissured with difference and a desire for otherness.

In this updated new edition, the author revisits the ideas set out in the book in light of recent developments in post-colonial theory, including projects influenced by his own work. With this fresh intervention, Robert Young is set once again to re-energize his field and open new channels of debate.

The New Hollywood Racelessness: Only the Fast, Furious, (and Multiracial) Will Survive

Cinema Journal
Volume 44, Number 2, Winter 2005
pages 50-67

Mary C. Beltrán, Associate Professor of Media Studies
University of Texas, Austin

This article interrogates the rise of the “multiculti” action film and the casting of multiracial actors as Hollywood action film protagonists. These trends are examined in light of shifts in U.S. ethnic demographics and youth-oriented popular culture.

Recent Hollywood films such as Romeo Must Die (Andrzej Bartkowiak, 2000) and The Fast and the Furious (Rob Cohen, 2001) are notable for their multiethnic casts and stylized urban settings. Correspondingly, the key to the survival of the protagonists in these “multiculti” action narratives is their ability to thrive in environments defined by cultural border crossings and pastiche. Perhaps not coincidentally, the heroes who command these environments increasingly are played by biracial and multiethnic actors, such as Vin Diesel in The Fast and the Furious and XXX (Rob Cohen, 2002) and Russell Wong, who plays a pivotal role in Romeo Must Die.

This trend reflects contemporary shifts in U.S. ethnic demographics and ethnic identity, while subtly reinforcing notions of white centrism that are the legacy of the urban action movie. In particular, as I shall argue, the new, ethnically ambiguous protagonist embodies contemporary concerns regarding ethnicity and race relations with respect to the nation’s burgeoning cultural creolization and multiethnic population. The analysis presented here shall be situated in the history of Hollywood representations of the multiethnic inner city, as well as in relation to shifts in the country’s ethnic demographics, cultural interests, and popular culture…

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“Skinfolks” and “Kinfolks”: Racial Passing in American Films 1930-1960

Department of American Studies
University of Virginia
Summer 2002

Introduction

Characters with a desire to become something that they are not in order to escape their realities have been present from the earliest American films to the present. The popular encyclopedia of American cinema, Videohound, categorizes films with these characters under “Not-So-Mistaken-Identity”. Of these “not-so-mistaken identity” films, more than half of the characters in question are black passing as white. This reflects the American obsession with race, authenticity, and reinvention.

As characters whose racial identity could rest somewhere between black and white, passing characters have the potential to subvert racial categories by proving the falsity of the black and white racial binary. Elaine Ginsberg argued that the power of passing narratives is “its interrogation of the essentialism that is the foundation of identity politics, passing has the potential to create a space for creative multiple identities, to experiment with multiple subject positions, and to cross social and economic boundaries that exclude or oppress.” However in most popular American films, these characters are never allowed the freedom to define themselves and live with their choices.

Despite the possibilities their existence in a society anxious about interracial sex suggests, they are actually used most often to prove that it is not possible to transcend racial categories. And just in case the repeated humiliation, violence, and personal sacrifices they endure in the films did not persuade the audience to value stability in racial identity, more traditional, stereotypical black characters are always present, and usually placed at the moral center of the films, to reinforce racist definitions of blackness and whiteness…

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VIS409 Mixed Race Women’s Memoirs

Antioch University Midwest
Winter 2010

This course is designed as a multidisciplinary exploration of race, gender, and identity utilizing oral and written narratives of Black-white mixed race women from the mid-nineteenth century to the present as source material. Drawing from elements of cultural studies, African American studies, American studies, and women’s studies, students will construct critical and historical contexts for self-identity and perceptions of that identity in women of interracial descent.

An Anthology of Interracial Literature: Black-White Contacts in the Old World and the New

New York University Press
2004-02-01
675 pages
Cloth ISBN: 9780814781432
Paperback ISBN: 9780814781449

Edited by

Werner Sollors, Henry B. and Anne M. Cabot Professor of English Literature and Professor of African and African American Studies
Harvard University

A white knight meets his half-black half-brother in battle. A black hero marries a white woman. A slave mother kills her child by a rapist-master. A white-looking person of partly African ancestry passes for white. A master and a slave change places for a single night. An interracial marriage turns sour. The birth of a child brings a crisis. Such are some of the story lines to be found within the pages of An Anthology of Interracial Literature.

This is the first anthology to explore the literary theme of black-white encounters, of love and family stories that cross—or are crossed by—what came to be considered racial boundaries. The anthology extends from Cleobolus’ ancient Greek riddle to tormented encounters in the modern United States, visiting along the way a German medieval chivalric romance, excerpts from Arabian Nights and Italian Renaissance novellas, scenes and plays from Spain, Denmark, England, and the United States, as well as essays, autobiographical sketches, and numerous poems. The authors of the selections include some of the great names of world literature interspersed with lesser-known writers. Themes of interracial love and family relations, passing, and the figure of the Mulatto are threaded through the volume.

An Anthology of Interracial Literature allows scholars, students, and general readers to grapple with the extraordinary diversity in world literature. As multi-racial identification becomes more widespread the ethnic and cultural roots of world literature takes on new meaning.

Contributors include: Hans Christian Andersen, Gwendolyn Brooks, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Charles W. Chesnutt, Lydia Maria Child, Kate Chopin, Countee Cullen, Caroline Bond Day, Rita Dove, Alexandre Dumas, Olaudah Equiano, Langston Hughes, Victor Hugo, Charles Johnson, Adrienne Kennedy, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Guy de Maupassant, Claude McKay, Eugene O’Neill, Alexander Pushkin, and Jean Toomer.

Building the “Blue” Race: Miscegenation, Mysticism, and the Language of Cognitive Evolution in Jean Toomer’s “The Blue Meridian”

Texas Studies in Literature and Language
Volume 46, Number 2, Summer 2004
pages 149-180
E-ISSN: 1534-7303
Print ISSN: 0040-4691
DOI: 10.1353/tsl.2004.0008

Stephanie L. Hawkins, Assistant Professor of English
University of North Texas

Toomer’s vision of psychological evolution later realized and racialized in “The Blue Meridian” (1936) has its precursor in Cane’s closing chapter, the short drama “Kabnis,” and in the figure of Kabnis as a biracial subject struggling to find speech representative of his psychological experience. Kabnis’s ambivalence toward his black ancestry manifests in blood rhetoric that both highlights and undermines the purity of the plantation aristocracy that has contributed to his making. He declares, “My ancestors were Southern blue-bloods—”; “And black,” retorts Lewis, another educated black Northerner. Recognizing the pervasiveness of the one-drop rule for determining African descent—and the fact that Southerners frequently purged traces of black blood from their genealogical records—Kabnis argues that there “Aint much difference between blue and black” (108). There is a double recognition here: first, that black ancestry is inherent in the bodies of many who pass for white; and second, that as a…

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