Mixed Race Studies

Why Are People Different?: Multiracial Families in Picture Books and the Dialogue of Difference

The Lion and the Unicorn
Volume 25, Number 3
September 2001
pp. 412-426
E-ISSN: 1080-6563
Print ISSN: 0147-2593
DOI: 10.1353/uni.2001.0037

Karen Sands-O’Connor

The issue of race has often been contentious in children’s literature, from controversies over Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, to Bannerman’s Little Black Sambo, to Keats’s The Snowy Day, to Herron’s Nappy Hair. How race is portrayed and who portrays it have been crucial for many critics. Violet J. Harris suggests this preoccupation with cultural authenticity, as she terms it, centers on “individual books and their portrayals of people of color, as well as the representation of specific aspects of their cultures such as values, customs, and family relationships” (40-41). Francis Wardle counters, “presenting the Black race and cultural group as a single, unified, world-wide entity is not only inaccurate, but denies the tremendous richness of economic, cultural, linguistic, national, political, social and religious diversity that exists in the world-wide Black community” (“Mixed-Race Unions” 200). This insistence on cultural authenticity poses even more problems when more than one culture is portrayed within a family, and it is perhaps for this reason that little has been written on the multiracial family as portrayed in literature.

Even when the multiracial family is alluded to in criticism, the reference is rarely followed up. For example, Pat Pinsent comments in her chapter on “Race and Ethnic Identity” that “today there are few communities with any claim to be racially ‘pure’; in modern society there has been a considerable amount of intermarriage which has blurred any such distinctions even further” (91)…

Inexacting Whiteness: Blanqueamiento as a Gender-Specific Trope in the Nineteenth Century

Cuban Studies
Volume 36, 2005
pages 105-128
E-ISSN: 1548-2464
Print ISSN: 0361-4441
DOI: 10.1353/cub.2005.0033

Gema R. Guevara, Associate Professor, Languages & Literature and Associate Professor, Spanish Section
University of Utah

In Cuba, race, nation, and popular music were inextricably linked to the earliest formulations of a national identity. This article examines how the racialized discourse of blanqueamiento, or whitening, became part of a nineteenth-century literary narrative in which the casi blanca mulata, nearly white mulatta, was seen as a vehicle for whitening black Cubans. However, as the novels of Cirilo Villaverde and Ramón Meza reveal, the mulata’s inability to produce entirely white children established the ultimate unattainability of whiteness by nonwhites. This article analyzes the fluidity of these racial constructs and demonstrates that, while these literary texts advocated the lightening of the nation’s complexion over time, they also mapped the progressive “darkening” of Cuban music as popular culture continued to borrow from black music.

Read the entire article here.

‘Toubab La!’ Literary Representations of Mixed-Race Characters in the African Diaspora

Cambridge Scholars Publishing
July 2007
453 pages
ISBN13: 9781847182319
ISBN: 1-84718-231-3

Ginette Curry, Professor of English
Florida International University

The book is an examination of mixed-race characters from writers in the United States, The French and British Caribbean islands (Martinique, Guadeloupe, St. Lucia and Jamaica), Europe (France and England) and Africa (Burkina Faso, South Africa, Botswana and Senegal). The objective of this study is to capture a realistic view of the literature of the African diaspora as it pertains to biracial and multiracial people. For example, the expression “Toubab La!” as used in the title, is from the Wolof ethnic group in Senegal, West Africa. It means “This is a white person” or “This is a black person who looks or acts white.” It is used as a metaphor to illustrate multiethnic people’s plight in many areas of the African diaspora and how it has evolved. The analysis addresses the different ways multiracial characters look at the world and how the world looks at them. These characters experience historical, economic, sociological and emotional realities in various environments from either white or black people. Their lineage as both white and black determines a new self, making them constantly search for their identity. Each section of the manuscript provides an in-depth analysis of specific authors’ novels that is a window into their true experiences.

The first section is a study of mixed race characters in three acclaimed contemporary novels from the United States. James McBride’s The Color of Water (1996), Danzy Senna’s Caucasia (1998) and Rebecca Walker’s Black White and Jewish (2001) reveal the conflicting dynamics of being biracial in today’s American society. The second section is an examination of mixed-race characters in the following French Caribbean novels: Mayotte Capécia’s I Am a Martinican Woman (1948), Michèle Lacrosil’s Cajou (1961) and Ravines du Devant-Jour (1993) by Raphaël Confiant. Section three is about their literary representations in Derek Walcott’s What the Twilight Says (1970), Another Life (1973), Dream on Monkey Mountain (1967) and Michelle Cliff’s Abeng (1995) from the British Caribbean islands. Section four is an in-depth analysis of their plight in novels written by contemporary mulatto writers from Europe such as Marie N’Diaye’s Among Family (1997), Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000) and Bernardine Evaristo’s Lara (1997). Finally, the last section of the book is a study of novels from West African and South African writers. The analysis of Monique Ilboudo’s Le Mal de Peau (2001), Bessie Head’s A Woman Alone: Autobiographical Writings (1990) and Abdoulaye Sadji’s Nini, Mulâtresse du Sénégal (1947) concludes this literary journey that takes the readers through several continents at different points in time.

Overall, this comprehensive study of mixed-race characters in the literature of the African diaspora reveals not only the old but also the new ways they decline, contest and refuse racial clichés. Likewise, the book unveils how these characters resist, create, reappropriate and revise fixed forms of identity in the African diaspora of the 20th and 21st century. Most importantly, it is also an examination of how the authors themselves deal with the complex reality of a multiracial identity.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I. THE UNITED STATES
  • Chapter 1: James McBride’s The Color of Water (1996): A Journey Beyond Black and White
  • Chapter 2: Danzy Senna’s Caucasia (1998): The Surviving Canary
  • Chapter 3: Rebecca Walker’s Black White and Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self (2001): The Chameleon Experience
• PART II. THE FRENCH CARIBBEAN ISLANDS
  • Chapter 4: Mayotte Capécia’s I am a Martinican Woman (1948): “My father is Black, My Mother is Brown, and I, Am I White?” (Martinican Riddle)
  • Chapter 5: Michèle Lacrosil’s Cajou (1961): The Anti-Narcissus
  • Chapter 6: Raphaël Confiant’s Ravines du Devant-Jour (1993): Ethnostereotypes in Martinique
• PART III. THE BRITISH CARIBBEAN ISLANDS
  • Chapter 7: The Racial Paradox of Derek Walcott in What the Twilight Says (1970), Derek Walcott: Another life (1973) and Dream on Monkey Mountain (1967)
  • Chapter 8: Michelle Cliff’s Abeng (1995): A Near-White Jamaican Woman’s Quest for Identity
• PART IV. EUROPE
  • Chapter 9: Marie N’Diaye’s Among Family (1997): A Desperate Search for Caucasian Identity
  • Chapter 10: Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000): The Concept of Englishness in the 21st Century
  • Chapter 11: Bernardine Evaristo’s Lara (1997): Transculturality in England: Oyinbo, Whitey, Morena, Nig Nog, Nigra!
• PART V. AFRICA
  • Chapter 12: Monique Ilboudo’s Le Mal de peau (2001): Colonization and Forced Hybridity
  • Chapter 13: Bessie Head’s A Woman Alone: Autobiographical Writings (1990): White-on-Black and Black-on-Black Racial Oppression in Southern Africa
  • Chapter 14: Abdoulaye Sadji’s Nini, Mulâtresse du Sénégal (1947): “Toubab La!”
• Conclusion
• Works Cited
• Primary Sources
• Critical Sources
• Index

Read a preview  here.

The Libertine Colony: Creolization in the Early French Caribbean

Duke University Press
May 2005
408 pages
19 b&w photographs
Cloth ISBN: 0-8223-3453-4, ISBN13 978-0-8223-3453-8
Paperback ISBN: 0-8223-3465-8, ISBN13 978-0-8223-3465-1

Doris Garraway, Associate Professor of French
Northwestern University

Presenting incisive original readings of French writing about the Caribbean from the inception of colonization in the 1640s until the onset of the Haitian Revolution in the 1790s, Doris Garraway sheds new light on a significant chapter in French colonial history. At the same time, she makes a pathbreaking contribution to the study of the cultural contact, creolization, and social transformation that resulted in one of the most profitable yet brutal slave societies in history. Garraway’s readings highlight how French colonial writers characterized the Caribbean as a space of spiritual, social, and moral depravity. While tracing this critique in colonial accounts of Island Carib cultures, piracy, spirit beliefs, slavery, miscegenation, and incest, Garraway develops a theory of “the libertine colony.” She argues that desire and sexuality were fundamental to practices of domination, laws of exclusion, and constructions of race in the slave societies of the colonial French Caribbean.

Among the texts Garraway analyzes are missionary histories by Jean-Baptiste Du Tertre, Raymond Breton, and Jean-Baptiste Labat; narratives of adventure and transgression written by pirates and others outside the official civil and religious power structures; travel accounts; treatises on slavery and colonial administration in Saint-Domingue; the first colonial novel written in French; and the earliest linguistic description of the native Carib language. Garraway also analyzes legislation—including the Code noir—that codified slavery and other racialized power relations. The Libertine Colony is both a rich cultural history of creolization as revealed in Francophone colonial literature and an important contribution to theoretical arguments about how literary critics and historians should approach colonial discourse and cultural representations of slave societies.

Table of Contents

• Illustrations
• Preface
• Introduction: Creolizaton in the Old Regime Chapter One: Border of Violence, Border fo Desire: The French and the Island Caribs
• Chapter Two: Domestication and the White Noble Savage
• Chapter Three: Creolization and the Spirit World: Demons, Violence, and the Body
• Chapter Four: The Libertine Colony: Desire, Miscegenation, and the Law
• Chapter Five: Race, Reproduction, and Family Romance in Saint-Domingue
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index

Crossing the Line: Racial Passing in Twentieth-Century U.S. Literature and Culture

Duke University Press
July 2000
272 pages
12 b&w photographs
Cloth ISBN: 0-8223-2479-2, ISBN13: 978-0-8223-2479-9
Paperback ISBN: 0-8223-2515-2, ISBN13: 978-0-8223-2515-4

Gayle Wald, Professor of English
George Washington University

As W. E. B. DuBois famously prophesied in The Souls of Black Folk, the fiction of the color line has been of urgent concern in defining a certain twentieth-century U.S. racial “order.” Yet the very arbitrariness of this line also gives rise to opportunities for racial “passing,” a practice through which subjects appropriate the terms of racial discourse. To erode race’s authority, Gayle Wald argues, we must understand how race defines and yet fails to represent identity. She thus uses cultural narratives of passing to illuminate both the contradictions of race and the deployment of such contradictions for a variety of needs, interests, and desires.

Wald begins her reading of twentieth-century passing narratives by analyzing works by African American writers James Weldon Johnson, Jessie Fauset, and Nella Larsen, showing how they use the “passing plot” to explore the negotiation of identity, agency, and freedom within the context of their protagonists’ restricted choices. She then examines the 1946 autobiography Really the Blues, which details the transformation of Milton Mesirow, middle-class son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, into Mezz Mezzrow, jazz musician and self-described “voluntary Negro.” Turning to the 1949 films Pinky and Lost Boundaries, which imagine African American citizenship within class-specific protocols of race and gender, she interrogates the complicated representation of racial passing in a visual medium. Her investigation of “post-passing” testimonials in postwar African American magazines, which strove to foster black consumerism while constructing “positive” images of black achievement and affluence in the postwar years, focuses on neglected texts within the archives of black popular culture. Finally, after a look at liberal contradictions of John Howard Griffin’s 1961 auto-ethnography Black Like Me, Wald concludes with an epilogue that considers the idea of passing in the context of the recent discourse of “color blindness.”

Wald’s analysis of the moral, political, and theoretical dimensions of racial passing makes Crossing the Line important reading as we approach the twenty-first century. Her engaging and dynamic book will be of particular interest to scholars of American studies, African American studies, cultural studies, and literary criticism.

Table of Contents

• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Race, Passing, and Cultural Representation
• 1. Home Again: Racial Negotiations in Modernist African American Passing Narratives
• 2. Mezz Mezzrow and the Voluntary Negro Blues
• 3. Boundaries Lost and Found: Racial Passing and Cinematic Representation, circa 1949
• 4. “I’m Through with Passing”: Postpassing Narratives in Black Popular Literary Culture
• 5. “A Most Disagreeable Mirror”: Reflections on White Identity in Black Like Me
• Epilogue: Passing, “Color Blindness,” and Contemporary Discourses of Race and Identity
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

Between Totem And Taboo: Black Man, White Woman in Francographic Literature

University of Exeter Press
2001
292 pages
Hardback ISBN: 9780859896498
BIC Code: 1HFD, 2ADF, 3JF, 3JH, 3JJ

Roger Little

Between Totem and Taboo picks its way judiciously through a minefield of prejudice, myth and stereotypes.  It is the first book to explore the literary representation by authors black and white, male and female, of interracial relations between France and her former territories in West Africa through the special nexus of the white woman and the black man.

Presented as a text-based chronological exploration of the relationship from 1740 to the present day, it reveals how racism distorted such relations for a quarter of a millennium.  It will fascinate anyone seriously interested in Black studies, Women’s studies and Postcolonial studies, who will find in it not only many unknown or unconsidered texts but a new angle of approach to their research.  All quotations are in French and English.

Roger Little was Professor of French (1776) at Trinity College Dublin until his retirement in 1998. He has an outstanding record of scholarship in French and francophone writing, with particular interests in sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean. His academic work has mainly concentrated on modern French poetry and the representation of Blacks in Francographic literature. He has edited several volumes of Textes littéraires for University of Exeter Press. The French government has conferred upon him the rank of Chevalier de l’Ordre National du Mérite and he has been awarded the Prix de l’Académie française: médaille de vermeil du rayonnement de la langue française.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgements
• Some Key Dates
• Introduction: Between Totem and Taboo
• 1. Eighteenth-century Enwhitenment
• 2. From Taboo to Totem
• 3. Traditions and Transitions
• 4. Opposite genders, Opposite Agendas
• 5. The French Empire Writes Back
• 6. Struggles for Independence
• 7. The Freedom to Choose
• 8. Liberty and Licence
• 9. Full Circle
• Conclusion: Beyond Difference and Indifference
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index

Dilution Anxiety and the Black Phallus

Ohio State University Press
July 2008
224 pages
6×9
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8142-5168-3
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8142-1091-8
CD ISBN: 978-0-8142-9171-9

Margo Natalie Crawford, Associate Professor of English
Cornell University

After the “Black is Beautiful” movement of the 1960s, black body politics have been overdetermined by both the familiar fetishism of light skin as well as the counter-fetishism of dark skin. Moving beyond the longstanding focus on the tragic mulatta and making room for the study of the fetishism of both light-skinned and dark-skinned blackness, Margo Natalie Crawford analyzes depictions of colorism in the work of Gertrude Stein, Wallace Thurman, William Faulkner, Black Arts poets, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and John Edgar Wideman. In Dilution Anxiety and the Black Phallus, Crawford adds images of skin color dilution as a type of castration to the field of race and psychoanalysis. An undercurrent of light-skinned blackness as a type of castration emerges within an ongoing story about the feminizing of light skin and the masculinizing of dark skin. Crawford confronts the web of beautified and eroticized brands and scars, created by colorism, crisscrossing race, gender, and sexuality. The depiction of the horror of these aestheticized brands and scars begins in the white-authored and black-authored modernist literature examined in the first chapters. A call for the end of the ongoing branding emerges with sheer force in the post–Black movement novels examined in the final chapters.

Read excerpts from the book here.

An Inter-Racial Love Story in Fact and Fiction: William and Mary King Allen’s Marriage and Louisa May Alcott’s Tale, ‘M.L.’

History Workshop Journal
2002
Volume 53, Number 1
pages 17-42
DOI: 10.1093/hwj/53.1.17

Sarah Elbert, Professor Emerita of History
The State University of New York, Binghamton

William G. Allen, the child of a free mulatto mother and a white father, was born about 1820, raised by a free black family,and taught probably by ‘educated foreigners’; among the Federal Troops stationed in Fortress Monroe. In 1838 a New York clergyman accepted Allen in his newly-opened school and then recommended his pupil to Gerrit Smith, a prominent New York abolitionist who supported black students at Oneida Institute in upstate New York.  There Allen developed close ties to leaders of the black abolitionist movement. Allen taught fugitive slaves in Canada and co-edited the National Watchman, an abolitionist newspaper in Troy, New York. By 1847 Allen was in Boston clerking for Ellis Gray Loring, an abolitionist lawyer, and also lecturing, writing, and agitating for immediate abolition, racial equality, ‘amalgamation’, and Africa’s importance in the history of world civilization.  Appointed a professor of Greek Language and Literature at New York Central College in McGrawville, upstate New York, he was among pioneers in coeducation and inter-racial education. Allen courted Mary E. King, a white student there. The couple first met little opposition from her family but their toleration quickly vanished when the couple’s engagement prompted an anti-abolitionist and certainly an anti-‘amalgamation’ mob of 500 ‘gentlemen of property and standing’ who prepared to tar and feather Allen and roll him in a nail-studied barrel.  Allen fled to Syracuse, New York, where Jeremiah Loguen and the Reverend Samuel J. May (uncle of Louisa May Alcott) we reactive radical abolitionists and conductors for slaves escaping on the ‘Underground Railway’.  King and Allen then married in New York City and fled to England. Allen lectured in Leeds, Bradford, and Newcastle in 1853 and he wrote their story in ‘The American Prejudice against Color’ and ‘A Personal Narrative’. The pamphlets published in Dublin and London were sent to Samuel J. May and Louisa May Alcott was visiting the May family during the months of the Allen-King incident and its sensationalist treatment in the local papers. Alcott fictionalized the King-Allen romance in her story ‘M.L.’, (now reprinted in Louisa May Alcott on Race, Sex and Slavery, Northeastern University Press, 1998).  Professor R. J. M. Blackett traced the Allens’ years in England and Ireland but found no record of the couple or their children after 1878, when they were living in Notting Hill, London, impoverished and dependent upon friends for support.  Both were dedicated teachers, devoted to the education of poor boys and girls. Allen was the principal of the Caledonian Training School in Islington1863, but Englishmen too were not lacking in racism and his school was resented by competitors who drove him out. (See Blackett,’William G. Allen: the Forgotten Professor’, Civil War History26:2, pp. 39–51). This article brings together Alcott’s tale and the events upon which it was based, in the context of abolitionist culture and activity in upstate New York and New England, and of Alcott’s life, politics, and writing.

Read or purchase the entire article here.

Louisa May Alcott On Race, Sex, And Slavery

Northeastern University Press
University Press of New England
1997
160 pages
EAN: 978-1-55553-307-6

Louisa May Alcott

Edited by

Sarah Elbert, Professor Emerita of History
The State University of New York, Binghamton

The passionate supporter of abolition and women’s rights speaks out on the most controversial issues of the day.

Louisa May Alcott championed women’s causes in gothic tales of interracial romance and in newspaper articles published during the Civil War. Drawn from her service as a nurse in a Union hospital as well as from her radical abolitionist activities, these writings allow Alcott to comment boldly on unstable racial identities, interracial sex and marriage, armed slave rebellion, war, and the links between the bondage of slaves and the conditions of white womanhood. A comprehensive introduction situates Alcott and her family within the network of antebellum reformers and unmasks her personal and literary struggles with the boundaries of race, sex, and class.

Demystifying the “Tragic Mulatta”: the Biracial Woman as Spectacle

Stanford Black Arts Quarterly
Stanford University
2.3 (Summer/Spring 1997)
Pages 12-14

Stafanie Dunning, Associate Professor and Director of Literature Program
Miami University, Ohio

“You know redbone girls got a problem.” —Cassandra Wilson, Blue Light ‘Til Dawn

“Indigenous like corn, like corn the mestiza is a product of crossbreeding, designed for preservation under a variety of conditions. Like an ear of corn, a female seed-bearing organ—the mestiza is tenacious, tightly wrapped in the husks of her culture.  Like kernels she clings to the cob; with thick stalks and strong brace roots, she holds tight to the earth—she will survive the crossroads.” — Anzaldua, Gloria. “La conciencia de la mestiza: Towards a New Consciousness.” in Making Face, Making Soul, Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Feminists of Color. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1990.

“They had splendid eyes, dark, luminous and languishing; lovely complexions and magnificent hair. — Harper, Francis. Iola Leroy. (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1988) p. 48.

 

To talk about the complexities of subjectivity is to enter into a discussion which necessarily locates itself at the intersection of race, clans, gender and sexuality. When thinking about my own subjective position, I am confronted by constructions that simultaneously identify, name, abridge and abstract me. Sometimes they help guide my thoughts about myself; at other times, they limit my thinking, reducing me to general categories of color, class, and desire. My present task, interrogation of a biracial subject position, is as much a gender discussion as it is a racial one. My investments in this discussion are deep; I am writing theoretically and distantly about myself— looking for truths about biraciality that I recognize in the words of other theorists, hoping to trace for myself and my audience one thread within a complex, unraveling cultural text. I am not interested here with how biracial subjects manage their subjectivites; such an approach inherently positions biraciality as problematic, the historical consideration of which falls beyond the scope of this project. Instead I will explore the way biracial subjectivity is gendered through its construction.

Women are the primary signifiers of miscegenation in literature and film. Likewise, the critical discourse on biraciality foregrounds the “tragic mulatta.” Yet, theorists regularly circumvent the issue of gender and theories lack interrogation of the point at which race and gender meet to sign biraciality. Visibility, i.e. what biracial people “look” like, makes up a significant part of biracial women’s experiences with uniracial onlookers. Moreover, visibility informs biracial women’s response to the uniracial “gaze.”  This paper posits that biraciality is read differently “along gender lines.” While discourses about “mulattos” efface biracial men, biracial women are discursively foregrounded as “exotic.” Effectively, biraciality is inscribed with a specifically female status: the desire of ‘uniracial’ onlookers to exoticize biracial women inform the “gaze” which casts biracial women, “spectacle.”…

Read the entire article here.