Mixed Race Studies

Ambivalent examples: The multiple Creole subjects of Spanish American nineteenth-century narrative

University of Pennsylvania
2006
371 pages
Publication Number: AAT 3225427
ISBN: 9780542797194

Elisabeth L. Austin

This dissertation proposes a paradigm for 19th-century Spanish American Creole subjectivity that considers it to be a multiple, unstable construct rather than a coherent or constant entity. From this premise I explore exemplarity as a rhetorical mode that seeks to engage its reader’s subjectivity, and I posit that exemplary narrative becomes not only a site of subjectivity construction for the Creole reader but also a place for negotiating the problematics of the liberal order at the end of the 19th century. I maintain that reading exemplary narrative as an articulation of multiple Creole subjectivity allows us to study the contradictions and indeterminate pedagogy of many of these texts, and therefore to better analyze the ambivalence and problems they describe. My project investigates the work of four authors: Eugenio Cambaceres (Argentina), José Martí (Cuba), Clorinda Matto de Turner (Peru), and Juana Manuela Gorriti (Argentina). Cambaceres’s four novels—Potpourri: silbidos de un vago (1882), Música sentimental (1884), Sin rumbo (1885), and En la sangre (1887)—establish a social critique that culminates in the invention of a Creole national subject, depicted as a father figure for the future mestiza America, who is ultimately rendered non-viable within these narratives. Martí’s only novel, Lucía Jerez (1885), articulates a profound gender anxiety that threatens Martí’s ideal “natural man” and problematizes his dreams of solidarity and miscegenation as part of a future American identity. Matto’s Aves sin nido (1889) argues for liberal political intervention on behalf of Peruvian Indians while it simultaneously launches a critique of liberal ideology as an insufficient instrument of such change. Finally, I read Gorriti’s cookbook, Cocina ecléctica (1890), as a text that exemplifies multiple Creole subjectivity and negotiates authority and gender within irreducibly plural models of feminine subjectivity. These narratives profess pedagogical pretensions that are questioned and at times undermined within the texts themselves, and my dissertation argues that such contradictions illustrate rather than resolve the crises of Creole ideology and subjectivity brought about by the failure of Spanish American liberalism at the end of the 19th century.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• Introduction: The Creole as Problematic Subject(ivity)
• 1. (De)Constructing Creole America: Fractured Nineteenth-Century Power and Politics
• 2. Creole Fictions: Hybridity and Indeterminacy in Nineteenth-Century Spanish American Literature
• 3. The Ethics of Criollismo: National Subjectivity in Eugenio Cambaceres
• 4. Monstrous Progeny: Gender Trouble and Fragile Virility in Jose Marti’s Lucía Jerez
• 5. Bastardized Faith and Unanswered Prayers: Impotent Readership in Clorinda Matto de Turner’s Aves sin nido
• Conclusion: Creole Subjectivities Inside Out: Writing Culture and Authority in Juana Manuela Gorriti’s Cocina ecléctica
• Works Cited

Purchase the dissertation here.

Barack Obama’s Address to the 2004 Democratic National Convention: Trauma, Compromise, Consilience, and the (Im)possibility of Racial Reconciliation

Rhetoric & Public Affairs
Volume 8, Number 4, Winter 2005
pages 571-593
DOI: 10.1353/rap.2006.0006

David A. Frank, Professor of Rhetoric
Robert D. Clark Honors College
University of Oregon

Mark Lawrence McPhail, Dean of The College of Arts & Communication
University of Wisconsin, Whitewater

The two authors of this article offer alternative readings of Barack Obama’s July 27, 2004, address to the 2004 Democratic National Convention (DNC) as an experiment in interracial collaborative rhetorical criticism, one in which they “write together separately.” David A. Frank judges Obama’s speech a prophetic effort advancing the cause of racial healing. Mark Lawrence McPhail finds Obama’s speech, particularly when it is compared to Reverend Al Sharpton’s DNC speech of July 28, 2004, an old vision of racelessness. Despite their different readings of Obama’s address, both authors conclude that rhetorical scholars have an important role to play in cultivating a climate of racial reconciliation.

…Using an approach similar to that of Forde-Mazrui, Obama’s speech drew from his multiracial background to craft a speech designed to bridge the divides between and among ethnic groups. He writes in his moving autobiography, Dreams from My Father, “I learned to slip back and forth between my black and white worlds, understanding that each possessed its own language and customs and structures of meaning, convinced that with a bit of translation on my part the two worlds would eventually cohere.” Coherence, Obama writes, is a function of translation and the capacity to move between and among worlds. He was repulsed by whites who used racist language, and could not use the phrase “white folks” as a synonym for bigot as it was undercut by the memories of the love and nonracist impulses of his white mother and grandfather. His speech at the convention reflects, as McPhail notes, an ability to integrate competing visions of reality. Obama did so by using a rhetorical strategy of consiliencey where understanding results through translation, mediation, and an embrace of different languages, values, and traditions. This embrace was intended to inspire a “jumping together” to common principles…

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Reading The Human Stain through Charles W. Chesnutt: The Genre of the Passing Novel

Philip Roth Studies
Volume 2, Number 2 (Fall 2006)
pages 138-150
DOI: 10.1353/prs.2011.0066

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

This article historicizes The Human Stain, placing it in the genre of the passing novel. The analysis is filtered through a reading of Chesnutt’s passing fictions, particularly The House Behind the Cedars and The Quarry.

Philip Roth’s The Human Stain was published in 2000, the year I was on sabbatical writing my book, Whiteness in the Novels of Charles W. Chesnutt. At the time, and even more subsequently, I was struck by the surprising continuities between the passing fictions ot Chesnutt and other writers of his era and Roth’s representation of race in The Human Stain. One of Chesnutt’s novels in particular, The House behind the Cedars (1900), helps us see that although exactly one hundred years separate these two texts, little has changed with regard to race in America. Despite the dismantling of the legal system of American racial apartheid that had its origin in Chesnutt s lifetime, the American racial imagination remains largely intact, and we continue to insist on our racial binary, continue to maintain and police the color line. As Judy Scales-Trent has observed. “[W]hite America expends enormous resources in school and in the media to teach (about) the intrinsic rightness” of the color line, so that it won’t questioned and so that future generations will continue to “stand guard” (481). Of course, the genre in which this standing guard is most obvious is the passing narrative because the liminality of the “white negro” (to use a nineteenth-century locution) calls into question the supposed impermeability of the color line. In this article, I use Chesnutt’s work, both fiction and nonfiction, as a way of approaching the issue of passing and race in The Human Stain, and of exploring the persistence of racial essentialism in American thinking and the responses to that essentialism that maintain the existence of the color line.

Before going on to discuss the issue of race in particular texts, I need to unpack the term “racial essentialism.” As Adrian Piper makes clear in her important esaay “Passing tor White, Passing for Black,” the function of racial…

In Search of Something Akin to Freedom: Black Women, Slavery, and Power

Florida State University
2007
78 pages

Katrina Songanett Smith

A Thesis submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts
 
This thesis examines both historical and fictional representations of interracial relationships in the 18th century. My argument in this project is two-fold. First, I argue that some black women used sexual relationships with white men to gain advantages for themselves and their fellow slaves. Second, I argue that novelists of the time period re-wrote history in an attempt to erase the positive aspects of miscegenation.

Table of Contents

• Abstract
• Introduction
• Chapter One: Historical Accounts of Black Women’s Sexuality and Strategies of Resistance: The Narratives of Mary Prince, Thomas Thistlewood, John Stedman, Maria Nugent, and Janet Schaw
• Chapter Two: The Revenge of the Shrew: Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko
• Chapter Three: The Sacrifice of the Colored Woman in J.W. Orderson’s Creoleana
• Epilogue
• Works Cited

Read the entire thesis here.

Rosario Dawson and the Ambiguous Blackness of Latinidad

antenna
2012-08-05

Keara Goin

As has become abundantly clear to me over the course of my research, in the context of contemporary popular U.S. racial discourse, one is either Latina/o or Black, not both. Moreover, we see this phenomenon replicated in U.S. cinema, where characters played by Afro-Latina/o actors are racialized as Hispanic or African American and, usually, nothing in between. Actors like Christina Milian (who is of Afro-Cuban descent) and Zoë Saldana (who is of Dominican heritage) have dark enough skin that casting them as African American seems appropriate, if not the only option. While Michelle Rodriguez (who is of mixed Latino and Dominican descent), who can better embody a generic Latina look (Clara Rodriguez 1997), can easily play a Chicana from Los Angeles primarily based on her lighter (read: whiter) skin tone. Relying on dominant conceptions of racialization to construct a racial understanding of racially mixed and ambiguous actors, casting agents are often motivated by racialized casting practices (Kristen Warner 2010)…

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Liberating Blackness: The Theme of Whitening in Two Colombian Short Stories

Callaloo
Volume 35, Number 2, Spring 2012
pages 475-493
DOI: 10.1353/cal.2012.0074

Laurence E. Prescott, Professor
Department of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese
Pennsylvania State University

Hablaré del físico de los negros, casi como de carrera. Tienen dos cosas repugnantes para no gustar, el color negro y el mal olor. . . .

—Pbro. Felipe Salvador Gilii

The convert may have found spiritual salvation in the White Man’s faith; he may have acquired the White Man’s culture and learnt to speak his language with the tongue of an angel; he may have become adept in the White Man’s economic technique, and yet it profits him nothing if he has not changed his skin.

—Arnold Toynbee

The premium placed by many Negroes on a light shade of skin, straight hair, and Caucasian features, are all indicative of severely injured self-esteem and of the inferiority assumed in things Negro.

—Peter Loewenberg

And above all, the author must believe in black folk, and in the beauty of black as a color of human skin.

—W. E. B. Du Bois

In Black Skin, White Masks, a probing psychological exploration of the dynamics of racism and its effects on both Blacks and Whites, psychiatrist Frantz Fanon writes: “In the white world the man of color encounters difficulties in the development of his body schema. Consciousness of the body is solely a negating activity. The body is surrounded by an atmosphere of certain uncertainty” (110–111). As Fanon goes on to say, the equating of blackness with evil and ugliness stimulated white scientists to seek a means of removing “the burden of that corporeal malediction” (111). Simultaneously, that same malevolent identification prompted black people to go to extraordinary lengths to free themselves from their blackness, the alleged source of their discontent. Skin lighteners, hair straighteners, miscegenation, and “passing” are some of the more common methods that have been tried over the years. These preoccupations have not gone unnoticed by creative writers. In 1931 African American journalist and writer George S. Schuyler (1895–1977) published the humorously satirical novel Black No More, in which a black doctor discovers a process that changes black skin to white and transforms Negroid features to Caucasian in a matter of hours, thereby disrupting the racial status quo, bolstering the defenders of white racial purity and supremacy, and ruining black businesses and civil rights organizations.

Schuyler’s novel is probably the best-known African American work of fiction that deals with a physical transformation of black people to bring about group liberation and a “happy” resolution of “the race problem.” The theme and pursuit of whitening, however, is not confined to North American society and literature. It is also present in the cultures and literary and non-literary works of Latin America. Indeed, in the nation of Colombia, South America, whose citizens of African descent constitute a significant portion of the total population, both journalists and creative writers have shown a continuing interest in the physical whitening of black peoples. As early as 1883, for example, there appeared in the “Folletines” supplement of the Bogotá newspaper La Luz, a notice titled “No más negros” ‘No more Blacks,’ which reported on a doctor in South Carolina who was experimenting with “una agua milagrosa que da á la piel de los negros la blancura de la nieve” ‘a miraculous water which gives to Negroes’ skin the whiteness of snow.’ Lacking official confirmation of the extraordinary liquid, the authors of the note, associating the word “anti-negro” with “antidote,” wryly concluded: “Hasta que así sea y sepamos á qué atenernos, confesamos que el anti-negro nos parece un white lie” ‘Until it is so and we know on what to rely, we confess that the anti-black seems to us a white lie.’ Noteworthy, too, is the presence in both nineteenth- and twentieth-century publications of advertisements directed at women for products that lighten—and (thus) allegedly…

afro look: Die Geschichte einer Zeitschrift von schwarzen Deutschen

University of Massachusetts, Amherst
May 2000
245 pages
Publication Number: AAT 9978512
ISBN: 9780599844605

Francine Jobatey

Submitted to the Graduate School of the University  Massachusetts Amherst in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY, Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures

Purchase the dissertation here.

Shades of Passing (AAS 340 / ENG 391 / AMS 340)

Princeton University
Fall 2012-2013

Anne A. Cheng, Professor of English and African American Studies

This course studies the trope of passing in 20th century American literary and cinematic narratives in an effort to re-examine the crisis of identity that both produces and confounds acts of passing. We will examine how American novelists and filmmakers have portrayed and responded to this social phenomenon, not as merely a social performance but as a profound intersubjective process embedded within history, law, and culture. We will focus on narratives of passing across axes of difference, invoking questions such as: To what extent does the act of passing reinforce or unhinge seemingly natural categories of race, gender, and sexuality?

Sample reading list:
William Faulkner, Light in August
Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye
Nella Larsen, Passing
Chang-rae Lee, A Gesture Life
Douglas Sirk (director), Imitation of Life (film, 1959)
Woody Allen (director), Zelig (film, 1983)

Introduction: Passing, Imitations, Crossings

Humanities Research
Volume XVI. Number 1 (2010)

Monique Rooney, Lecturer and Honours Convenor
College of Arts and Social Sciences
Austrailian National University

When it was revealed that Anglo-Australian writer Helen Darville had passed as Ukrainian to publish a novel about the Holocaust, there was much public and scholarly debate about the nature of identity and the meaning of multiculturalism. Such ‘passing’ controversies have the capacity to unsettle everyday perceptions about personhood and about social classifications and identifications. The essays collected in this special issue of Humanities Research, ‘Passing, Imitations, Crossings’, explore the theme and act of ‘passing’ in a range of social, historical and cultural contexts. Put simply, passing is a type of border crossing, one that normally involves a movement from social disadvantage to advantage or from a socially stigmatised position to one that grants some privilege, or at least allows avoidance or evasion of group classification. Passing is distinct from other identity performances in that it generally refers to a surreptitious transgression of widely accepted social practices. That is, the passer normally masks the fact of his or her ‘true’ identity—he or she might rely on subterfuge or might remove him or herself from a telling context or simply suppress information that might lead to disclosure of his or her identity—in order to cross social boundaries. In the case of African-Americans, passing for white historically entailed crossing the social divide that separated black and white according to changing cultural, scientific and legal measurements of what constituted racial identity. As St Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton observed in their study of African-American social life in Chicago’s South Side in the 1930s, ‘there are thousands of Negroes whom neither colored nor white people can distinguish from full-blooded whites, it is understandable that in the anonymity of the city many Negroes “pass for white” daily, both intentionally and unintentionally’. The prospect of passing multiplies in societies in which the often anonymous flow of people sets the scene for opportunism, masquerade and other forms of role-playing. There are women who have cross-dressed as male to publish books or participate in war and gays and lesbians who have passed as straight to avoid homophobia. There are those who pass out of necessity, to escape war or life-threatening discrimination, and those who pass for greater gain or simply for the thrill of experiencing life on the ‘other side’, as passing provides the opportunity to temporarily or permanently depart from a designated identity.

The transport and communications revolution that took place in the United States at the end of the nineteenth and in the early decades of the twentieth centuries—a time also of great movement and mixing of diverse social groups in American cities, as well as a period of new strictures and the terrors of lynching—created a fertile context for passing. The many fictional and sociological recordings of African-Americans who ‘passed as white’ to cross the colour line, from the middle of the nineteenth century through to the 1950s and 1960s—when African-Americans began to win civil rights—suggests how prevalent the act was in a US context. In his encyclopedic study of ‘inter-racial’ themes in US history, Werner Sollors differentiates the passer from the parvenu (the social climber or upstart). While the act of passing potentially encompasses ‘the crossing of any line that divides social groups’—and Everett V. Stonequist argues that ‘passing is found in every race situation where the subordinate race is held in disesteem’—Sollors’ study locates the phenomenon firmly in US social history. In particular, Sollors connects passing with the burden of racial ancestry for the descendents of slaves. While the general expectation is that newly arrived immigrants will gradually assimilate, the descendents of slaves—in what Sollors calls America’s ‘hypodescent’ system—have been treated as members of a caste. African-Americans have been subject to a form of ‘ancestor-counting’ that reduces personhood to a racial part…

Read the entire article here.

“Recoil” or “Seize”?: Passing, Ekphrasis and “Exact Expression” in Nella Larsen’s Passing

Enculturation: A Journal of Rhetoric, Writing and Culture
Volume 3, Number 2, Fall 2001

Monique Rooney, Lecturer and Honours Convenor
College of Arts and Social Sciences
Austrailian National University

Part One: Deep Nothing

Mona Lisa’s famous smile is a thin mouth receding into shadow. Her expression, like her puffy eyes, is hooded. The egglike head with its enormous plucked brow seems to pillow on the abundant, self-embraced Italian bosom. What is Mona Lisa thinking? Nothing, of course. Her blankness is her menace and our fear.

—Camille Paglia

Camille Paglia’s analysis of “Mona Lisa,” the “world’s most famous painting” (155), plays on the ambiguous meaning of the spectacle—the visual image—in reading and writing practices. “Mona Lisa,” for Paglia, is an exemplary instance of the fascination and the anxiety surrounding the menacing power of the visual in Western epistemologies. She is an icon that is not only, as Paglia writes, “eternally watching” (154), she is also eternally watched. The Mona Lisa’s enigmatic smile displays but also dissembles the narcissism attributed to the feminised image. The portrait is often read as a nothing in and of itself but a something if it gestures, as the Mona Lisa’s smile appears to, towards the unreadable. Traditionally a sign of the “Mona Lisa”‘s intangibility, the smile in Paglia’s reading autoerotically evokes elusiveness through secrecy and distance (“receding into shadow”). The “Mona Lisa” wallows in this solipsism: she is “self-embraced” and enormous within the enclosure. Characteristically, Paglia’s polemic repudiates a more mysterious Mona Lisa beyond the surface of the painting, or a “thinking” woman who possesses an unreadable, interior, depth which transcends the limitations of the body. Her trivialisation of the much studied mysterious smile as hiding “nothing” is contradicted, however, by a close-up reading of the painting’s depth; she emphasises the “thin mouth receding into shadow,” the “hooded” eyes and the pillowed “brow.” The portrait overall evinces a grim determination to efface the representation of the feminine as vagina dentata, the toothed vagina or castrating woman. A disappearing line, the image retains its menacing reputation. For Paglia, the Mona Lisa’s threat is that she passes as an enigma.

Paglia’s ekphrasis of the famous face is of a partly open, partly closed surface. The description of deep “nothing” threatens the authority of the looking subject and is also thoroughly engaged in the pleasure of reading. According to Susan Stewart, it is an alluring opacity which places the human face at the centre of representations of subjectivity. “Because it is invisible,” writes Stewart, “the face becomes gigantic with meaning and significance” (125). The face is only ever visible to the other and it is a visibility that is elusive, revealing “a depth and profundity which the body itself is not capable of” (125). The eyes and mouth create the appearance of “depth,” as “openings onto fathomlessness, they engender the fearful desire to ‘read’ the expression of the face, for this reading is never apparent from the surface alone; it is continually confronted by the correction of the other” (127). The face appears to withhold its full meaning through openings such as the eyes and the mouth, stimulating the reader’s questing gaze which is always disrupted and fragmented by the broken surface. The act of looking, for Paglia and Stewart, delineates a process between subject and object which does not get beyond the surface but which generates meaning nonetheless…

…The passer is an objectified subject (for example black, female, homosexual) who refashions identity according to a superficial reading, or surface impression. In order to pass, the passer manipulates the body and the gaze so as to become legitimate. For example, the lightskinned black who passes for white synecdochically substitutes one part of the body (i.e., white skin) for the complete body (i.e., white identity). Passing for white utilises white skin as a part that stands in for a non-white body. This draws attention to two important aspects of racial identity. Firstly, the visible surface of the body is not necessarily a reliable or stable signifier of the body as a conclusively knowable entity. Secondly and contradictorily, for the passer, as an otherwise marginalised (because racialised) subject, the body’s visible surface becomes the central locus of an epistemology of identity, precisely because the body is misread as white. For the opportunistic passer, white skin functions as the point of a fraudulent entry into proper subjectivity and this inauguration (based on part not whole) destabilises the meaning of subjectivity per se. The white-looking-black proves the primacy and the ubiquity of skin as a visual surface that registers individuals as an identity, as the passer’s skin becomes a surface which dissembles a personal and social “black” history. In this sense, passing-for-white relies on skin as a bodily limit that opens up the possibility and privilege of being read and treated as white (and as a mainstream subject) but also punishingly closes the body’s past, its black heritage and history…

…Part Two: Reading and Writing the Passer

The passer is thus an enigma, a subject who is marked through his/her indeterminacy and whose attempt to escape categorisation is made visible in the passing narrative. This tension is explored in Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929), a novella which thematises both the racial and sexual passer (201). Passing is the story of two women, Clare Kendry and Irene Redfield, who are reunited after a long separation. Irene who occasionally passes for white tells Clare’s, the permanent passer’s, story. Irene lives in Harlem with her husband and her two sons where she does conscientious “race work” for the black community. Once childhood friends in their hometown Chicago, Irene and Clare are accidentally reunited while Irene is holidaying in Chicago and visiting her father. It is on this occasion that Irene discovers that Clare is passing for white and married to a racist white financier, John Bellew. Disturbed at finding Clare is passing for white, Irene discourages Clare’s desire for renewed friendship even though Irene can, and occasionally does, pass for white herself. Irene’s passing position is to some extent faceless (as narrator Irene evades self-description) whilst Clare’s passing body is obsessively and erotically pictured. In Passing, the permanent passer is spectacularised through the gaze of the casual passer who already partly knows what he/she looks for. As Edelman writes: “the fact of our ability to catch a glimpse of it [the faceless face of the homosexual] here bespeaks the possibility that we might not have done so had we not been prepared to identify what otherwise has the ability to ‘pass'” (219). Irene’s evasion is, typically, unsustainable: Clare eventually follows Irene back to Harlem where she becomes dangerously involved with Irene, her family and the “black” community. It is there that Clare’s hidden racial identity is eventually outed to her white husband. This outing, or what Butler refers to as a “killing judgment” (175), threatens Irene’s exposure and climaxes in her murder of Clare…

Read the entire article here.