Mixed Race Studies

El Que No Tiene Dingo, Tiene Mandingo: The Inadequacy of the “Mestizo” as a Theoretical Construct in the Field of Latin American Studies-The Problem and Solution

Journal of Black Studies
Volume 27, Number 2 (November 1996)
pages 278-291

Andrew Juan Rosa
Temple University

I am Yoruba, I am Lucumi, Mandingo, Congo, Carabli.
—Nicolás Guillén

The word “black” today covers a whole generation of folk from Kenya, to Brazil, to the United States.
—Gwendolyn Brooks

At a recent lecture at Temple University titled The African Presence in Puerto Rico, a young African woman from the island proclaimed to the audience that the Black experience in the United States is indeed unique and, because of her “mestizo” heritage, acculturation, racism, and struggle were not a part of her historical experience. As I looked on the face of my beautiful African sister, my heart shattered into a thousand little pieces. The lessons passed down to us from our African ancestors in the oral tradition—el que no tiene Dingo, tiene Mandingo—have finally fallen on deaf ears. Their struggle and perseverance to hold on to all that was Africa in the midst of brutal oppression had been, at this moment in time, for naught. The European had succeeded in colonizing the mind of my sister, for instead of locating herself within a rich tradition that dates…

University of North Florida Presents James Weldon Johnson Symposium

University of North Florida
Press Release
2012-03-29

Joanna Norris, Associate Director of Public Relations

he University of North Florida presents the James Weldon Johnson Symposium from noon to 4 p.m. Thursday, April 5, and from noon to 5 p.m. Friday, April 6, in the UNF Student Union Auditorium, Building 58W, Room 2704, in celebration of the centennial anniversary of the publication of James Weldon Johnson’s “Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man.”

The symposium will feature student and faculty performances, poetry readings as well as music and dance performances. The keynote speaker will be Dr. JeffriAnne Wilder, assistant professor in the UNF Department of Sociology and Anthropology. She will discuss “Black Americans and Colorism in the 21st Century,” while UNF student Erin Mulkey will perform “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing,” a song written by Johnson and is considered to be the Negro national anthem.

Additionally, there will be faculty and student presentations addressing the life of Johnson as well as his Jacksonville origins and connections. The event will conclude at 4 p.m. Friday, April 6, with a performance by the renowned McIntosh County Shouters, a group that performs the “Southeastern Ring Shout,” which is among the oldest surviving African-American performance traditions on the North American continent.

For more information, click here.

In Arizona, Censoring Questions About Race

The New York Times
2012-04-01

Linda Martín Alcoff, Professor of Philosophy
Hunter College, City University of New York

In recent weeks, the state of Arizona has intensified its attack in its schools on an entire branch of study — critical race theory. Books and literature that, in the state’s view, meet that definition have been said to violate a provision in the state’s law that prohibits lessons “promoting racial resentment.” Officials are currently bringing to bear all their influence in the public school curriculum, going so far as to enter classrooms to confiscate books and other materials and to oversee what can be taught.  After decades of debate over whether we might be able to curtail ever so slightly the proliferation of violent pornography, the censors have managed a quick and thorough coup over educational materials in ethnic studies.

I have been teaching critical race theory for almost 20 years. The phrase signifies quite a sophisticated concept for this crowd to wield, coined as it was by a consortium of theorists across several disciplines to signify the new cutting edge scholarship about race. Why not simply call it “scholarship about race,” you might ask? Because, as the censors might be surprised to find, these theorists want to leave open the question of what race is — if there is such a thing — rather than assuming it as a natural object of inquiry. Far from championing a single-minded program for the purpose of propaganda, the point of critical race theory is to formulate questions about race.

Arizona’s House Bill 2281, which was signed into law by Gov. Jan Brewer in May 2010, does not actually mention critical race theory, but the term has been all over the press with a “damning” image from 1990 of Barack Obama, then a Harvard law school student, hugging the law professor Derrick Bell, one of the field’s founders. State Superintendent Tom Horne devised the bill particularly to put a stop to what he describes as the “racist propaganda” of critical race theory, and now other conservatives are sounding the call against what they say is a “deeply disturbing theory.” Perhaps the negative publicity recently produced by the Republican stance on contraception has the party looking for a new target to shore up the base.

What the bill does say may sound to some ears as reasonable. It prohibits courses that “promote resentment toward a race or class of people,” that “advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals,” or that are “designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group.”  The reality, of course, is that ethnic studies teachers are constantly trying to get students from multiple backgrounds in our classes, and many of us have even endeavored to make these courses required for all. But the other two issues raised by the bill, concerning “resentment” and “ethnic solidarity,” are a bit more complicated…

…Yet those who believe that critical race theory aims to produce ethnic or racial “solidarity” may be surprised to find that most critical race theorists have some skepticism about the existence of race. In this they simply follow the anthropology profession, which declared some 50 years ago that the concept of race is an illusion. In a paper published in 1963, S. L. Washburn, the president of the American Anthropological Association, referred to the concept of race as “an antiquated biological notion.” He and others argued that there is simply no global coherency or consistent social practice in regard to the concept of race, and that the biological status of the term was a sham produced by suspect scientific methods. Character traits we associate with races, including intelligence, are produced, not found. Dividing people by race, others explained, was like identifying slides by the box they came in.

Many people who are familiar with the debates over racism — over its causes, its nature and its solution — may be unaware that the very category of race has been debated for decades, not only among anthropologists but also among biologists, sociologists, social psychologists and even philosophers. Human beings share over 99 percent of our genes across racial groups, and no single gene accounts for anything physical other than eye color, a rather insignificant attribute. Diseases often associated with racial groups are found in other groups, thus making them more likely to be the result of reproductive patterns than some biological foundation. If siblings — who share the largest amount of DNA — can be identified as being of different races because of the way they look (as is common in Latin America and in my own family), how can race be biological? There just is no clear cut way to map our social classifications of race onto a meaningful biological category. Debates today concern how to explain the historical development of the physical traits we associate with races, but nobody with any standing believes that the racial groups named in the Great Chain of Being actually exist. In short, scholars have become quite critical of the concept of race…

Read the entire article here.

Berlin Film Festival: Critics hail new Bob Marley documentary

The Telegraph
2012-02-16

Critics at the Berlin Film Festival have been unanimous in their praise of Kevin Macdonald’s new documentary ‘Marley’, which some have called the definitive biography of the reggae singer.

Oscar-winning documentary maker Kevin Macdonald has made what critics are calling the definitive biography of reggae legend Bob Marley, aided by the singer’s family and record label who have given the project their blessing.

The first authorised film of his life had its premiere at the Berlin Film Festival, and while questions about Marley remain, it goes some way to revealing the man behind the myth.

“I just felt like there weren’t any good films about him and a lot of misinformation,” Macdonald told Reuters this week…

…The film explores how Marley, who died of cancer in 1981 aged 36, was troubled by his mixed-race heritage, which was the source of bullying when he was a child. It also looks at how his many affairs and children out of wedlock took its toll on wife Rita and their daughter Cedella.
 
Marley had 11 children by seven mothers, according to several accounts of his life…

Read the entire article here.

Black Orpheus and the Merging of two Brazilian Nations

European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies
Number 71, October 2001
pages 107-115

Myrian Sepúlveda dos Santos, Associate Professor of Sociology
State University of Rio de Janeiro

The second cinematic remake of the play ‘Orfeu da Conceição’ has sparked a new debate among filmmakers and social scientists, bringing out opposing views on major aspects of Brazilian nationhood, such as race relations, bodily practices and the meaning of Carnival. The Brazilian poet Vinícius de Moraes wrote the original play, which was presented for the first time in Rio de Janeiro in 1956. This play is about a tragic love affair between two black characters, Orpheus and Eurydice, posed against the background of carnival in the city of Rio de Janeiro. Orpheus is a gifted musician who meets Eurydice during carnival. It so happens that after falling in love with Orpheus, Eurydice is killed by a man who represents the devil. The desperate Orpheus descends into Hell to rescue her. When he comes back home with the corpse of Eurydice, Mira, who was his former lover, kills him. Central to the play is the defence of the eternity of art set against the tragic reality of life.

Two films were produced based on this same play, and both directors claim to reveal the universal meaning of art against the background of a carnival feast associated with the Brazilian black population. The films were produced in 1959 and 1998. The first, Black Orpheus (Orfeu Negro) was directed by the French filmmaker Marcel Camus. It is mainly recognised for its utopian view in which love and passion, race relations and carnival are represented. The second film, entitled Orfeu, was directed by the Brazilian filmmaker Cacá Diegues, and has been praised for its commitment to the description of reality. In it, Diegues explored the commodification of bodies, racial conflicts, and the commercialisation of the carnival feast. This director previously belonged to the important movement of Brazilian filmmakers known as cinema novo, which tried to transform cinematic industrial productions into critical and artistic productions. He is also the director of acclaimed Brazilian films such as Bye Bye Brasil, Xica da Silva and Tieta. In his Orpheus film, Diegues used a set of sophisticated cinematic techniques in order to give the illusion of reality. While making the screenplay, he worked with an excellent group of intellectuals and cast many well-known celebrities of Rio’s cultural life rather than using professional actors.

As the latter production was not well received by international film critics, the Brazilian musician Caetano Veloso wrote a challenging article in the New York Times defending the recent remake. Veloso criticised the former internationally acclaimed version of the play for depicting Brazilians as exotics using outrageously fanciful colours and the general ‘voodoo for tourists’ ambience (Veloso 2000). Indeed, the film directed by Marcel Camus did win the Oscar for the Best Foreign Film and the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. It was considered the Best Foreign Film and the Best Film, respectively, by the New York Film Critics’ Circle and by the British Academy. In 1960 it received the Golden Globe Award. The acclaimed version of Black Orpheus attempted to produce an ageless representation of art and it fascinated foreign audiences. According to Veloso, however, the film was not well considered by Brazilians.Veloso happened not only to be the author of the soundtrack of the second film, but he also appeared in a short scene in this film, and his wife was one of the producers.

Despite his involvement with the production of the film, Veloso is absolutely right as he points out that although the first production is capable of completely engaging a foreign audience, the ambience of fun and happiness among all the characters is not attractive to most citizens of Rio. For them any possibility of self-recognition in the story diminishes from the earliest scenes. For most Brazilians, the first production seems to be one more in a long list of those commodities that were made para inglês ver, that is, produced according to a foreign idealization of Brazilian customs and dress. Therefore, the musician called attention not only to the diversity of interpretations, but also to the power associated with the different forums that appraise and legitimate the meaning of art. However, to what extent is it possible to affirm that whereas the first film is a mere fairy tale, the second fulfils the task of depicting reality? In addition, how are we to understand the influence of two different historical contexts upon these two films?

In this paper, I will investigate the two cinematic productions, considering them as part of processes that took place within different historical periods. In particular, I will be examining the issues of race relations and bodily pleasures within carnival, as they appear to be overriding in both versions of the play. I will consider that although each film can be seen as part of its respective time, they both represent two one-sided versions of the meaning of carnival practices in the city of Rio de Janeiro.

Whereas the first production was produced at the end of the 1950s when the Brazilian ideal of racial democracy was widely accepted, the second was produced at the end of the 1990s when mass media, violence and the rights of ethnic minorities constituted the political agenda of our times. In the second film, from the earliest scenes the focus is on poverty, shootings and injustice. The poor neighbourhood located on the hillsides of the city is continually invaded by brutal police forces, and Eurydice is senselessly killed by the leader of the drug trafficking gang. The decomposing corpses thrown at the edge of the hillside by drug dealers represented Hell…

…From Racial Democracy to Multiculturalism

On the subject of race relations in Brazil, the two cinematic productions of the Greek legend offer two dramatically different approaches. With its all-black cast, the first film brought about a remarkable revolution in the complex racial relations of Brazil. Even so, the cinematic images portray Rio’s natural beauty, the mesmerising sound of drums, and the festive manifestations of life, romanticising the conflict present among the poor and black population that inhabits the hillsides of the city. The film was produced at a time when the myth of racial democracy in Brazil was held, and it reinforced the myth. The more recent production is also very much a product of its time. It portrays racial conflict through the medium of racially radical rap lyrics as well through the images of a white man being executed by a group of predominantly black drug traffickers.

A series of studies developed in the 1970s completely transformed the contemporary approaches to race relations in Brazil as they showed that despite widespread miscegenation, race remained an important indicator of privilege in Brazilian society. Furthermore, they showed that blacks continue to occupy the lower rungs of the socio-economic scale (Hasenbalg 1979). This is a social and political issue that confronts citizens to this day. Based on these studies, many analyses of race relations concluded that the image of Brazil as a racially democratic nation is a fantasy essentially constructed either by the dominant classes or by the Brazilian elite. Based on the assertion that the myth of racial democracy obscures discrimination, many authors maintain that black people need to build their own identities separate from white values and beliefs. According to their analyses there would be an evolving process of ‘racialisation’ whereby Brazilian race relations would become more transparent (Guimarães 2000)…

Nevertheless, if it is true to say that, regardless of the social class to which black people belong, there is prejudice against them in Brazil, it is also true to say that to this day it is almost impossible to represent the majority of the Brazilian population in terms of a strict code of race. I would risk saying that, although the North-American dual model of race is beginning to be appropriated by some groups of the black movement in Brazil, the racial code, which would easily consider those to be of black or of African descent by either European or North American standards, is far from being recognised by the majority of the Brazilian population. Discrimination in Brazil does not occur according to the same mechanisms as it does in the United States. The idea of miscegenation is still widespread in Brazil. Although it involves exclusion of dark-skinned people and represents the mechanism by which racism operates, it also entails a wider acceptance of different cultures, values and beliefs. The Brazilian population defines itself according to more than three hundred terms that relate to race and colour. Although Brazilians are people who see themselves according to multiple definitions, including the opposition between blacks and whites, they are far from being limited to them.

It is also important to point out that the idea of miscegenation has been part of the idea of the nation since the 1930s. It is widely recognised that a new national identity was formulated during Getúlio Vargas’ populist government. This new identity promoted the image of a harmonious and homogeneous whole capable of including all citizens regardless of race, ethnic origins or colour. The imagery of the nation was constituted as the composite of diverse cultural elements such as samba, carnival, and feijoada, all of which are associated with the ‘Brazilian’ population. The Brazilian construction of nationalism conflated the ideas of miscegenation and nation, and this conflation can be considered as the result of a process of negotiation that has not yet been completely concluded.

Myths are not abstract constructions. They are continually manifested through the ways in which most Brazilians define themselves and interact with one another. Gilberto Freyre was one of the authors who first described in positive terms the process of widespread criss-crossing among different social and cultural populations. However, although Freyre has been praised for having pointed out that the blending process in Brazil was highly inclusive (Freyre 1930), he has not been sufficiently criticised for failing to call attention to the fact that the process of inclusion was often cynical and ambivalent. The process of inclusion did not include black people in the same way and in the same arenas as it did for white people. The recognition and positive values attributed to Brazilian miscegenation came with a series of other mythologies, such as the belief in the goodness of progressive whitening and the association between blacks and all sorts of hedonism. One should not overlook the resulting violence and inequalities that have occurred as a result of those contexts…

Read the entire article here.

Henry Ossawa Tanner: Modern Spirit

University of California Press
February 2012
304 pages
Paperback ISBN: 9780520270756
Hardback ISBN: 9780520270749

Anna O. Marley, Curator of Historical American Art
Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts

This beautiful book, companion publication to the exhibition of the same name, presents a complex overview of the life and career of the pioneering African American artist Henry O. Tanner (1859–1937). Recognized as the patriarch of African American artists, Tanner forged a path to international success, powerfully influencing younger black artists who came after him. Following a preface by David Driskell, the essays in this book—written by international scholars including Alan Braddock, Michael Leja, Jean-Claude Lesage, Richard Powell, Marc Simpson, Tyler Stovall, and Hélène Valance—explore many facets of Tanner’s life, including his upbringing in post–Civil War Philadelphia, his background as the son of a bishop in the African Methodist Episcopal church, and his role as the first major academically trained African American artist. Additional essays discuss Tanner’s expatriate life in France, his depictions of the Holy Land and North Africa, and the scientific and technical innovations reflected in his oeuvre. Edited and introduced by Anna O. Marley, this volume expands our understanding of Tanner’s place in art history, showing that his status as a painter was deeply influenced by his race but not decided by it.

“¿Y ahora qué vas a hacer, mulata?”: Hip choreographies in the Mexican cabaretera film Mulata (1954)

Women and Performance: a journal of feminist theory
Volume 18, Issue 3, November 2008
Special Issue: Sensualidades: Sounds and Movement in Latina/o Culture
pages 215-233
DOI: 10.1080/07407700802495951

Melissa Blanco Borelli, Lecturer of Dance Studies
University of Surrey

This essay examines the film Mulata (Martínez Solares 1954) starring Cuban vedette Ninón Sevilla through the various performances of mulata identity featured in the film. By introducing the theory of hip(g)nosis and the sentience corpo-mulata, these theoretical models demonstrate how a body racialized as mulata choreographs identity through gestures, bodily articulations, and socio-historically inscribed movement repertoires associated with this particular corporeality. The development of these terms intends to show the complexities that bodies add to history, as well as their impact on cultural production and notions of territoriality, nationalism and citizenship. These terms also highlight the pleasure, sensuality and affect involved in identity construction. Finally, by providing examples of these theories through a close reading of Ninón Sevilla’s performances of the title character in the film Mulata, the essay provides a way to rethink the mulata as something other than “tragic.”

Read the entire article here in HTML or PDF.

A Taste for Honey: Choreographing the Mulatta in the Hollywood Dance Film

International Journal of Performing Arts and Digital Media
Volume 5, Numbers 2 and 3 (December 2009)
pages 141-153

Melissa Blanco Borelli, Lecturer of Dance Studies
University of Surrey

This article examines the filmic representations of the mulatta body in the films Sparkle (1976), Flashdance (1983) and Honey (2003). More specifically, this article seeks to unravel how the Hollywood filmic apparatus engages with signifiers of raced sexuality and hierarchies of dance styles to enforce and reify mythic narratives about dance, dancing raced bodies and dance-making. By establishing a genealogy of the mulatta body in a US context through dance and/or performance films, these juxtapositions illustrate how the mulatta subject develops from a tragic figure (in Sparkle) to an independent and self-reliant one (in Honey). Critical dance studies provide the analytical framework by allowing a focus on particular choreographed and improvised dance sequences performed by each film’s respective mulatta protagonist.

The figure of the mulatta colours many cultural imaginaries with her specific narratives. One such narrative, the trope of the ‘tragic mulatta’ appears prominently, often obfuscating any other type of representation possible. As Hazel Carby writes, ‘the figure of the mulatt[a] should be understood and analysed as a narrative device of mediation’(1987:88), mediating between the white and black worlds said figure straddles. Couched in Enlightenment ideologies of race, the mulatta emerges as a tragic figure in that her genesis occurs from a violent union between two races — a ‘dominant white’ one, and a ‘subservient black’ one. Werner Sollors explains the etymology of the word mulatto:

of sixteenth century Spanish origin, documented in English since 1595, and designating a child of a black and a white parent, was long considered etymologically derived from ‘mule’; yet it may also come from the Arabic word muwallad (meaning “Mestizo” or mixed) (1999:128).

Even with skin that approximates ‘whiteness,’ the proverbial ‘taint’ or ‘drop’ of impure African blood condemns her and her value to be less than human, despite the fascination with her representation of ambiguity and varying skin colour gradations. The undervalued ‘figment of [the concept of] pigment’(1998:16) as DeVere Brody calls it, conversely added to her value as a popular sexual commodity for heterosexual male desire. As a filmic presence, the mulatta first appeared in D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915). Lydia, the mulatta mistress of the white abolitionist carpetbagger, appears independent, powerful, threatening, yet desirable. Film historian Donald Bogle attributes this connection between ‘the light-skinned Negress’ (2001:15) and desirability to a closer proximity to a white aesthetic ideal which gave ‘cinnamon-colored gals’ (2001:15) a chance at lead parts. Other films such as Imitation of Life (1934; 1959), Pinky (1949), Shadows (1959), and Devil in a Blue Dress (1995) utilize the trope of the mulatta and render her full of regret, emotionally unfulfilled, or sad and alone due to each film’s respective circumstances. As Charles Scruggs states, ‘the mulatta is a visible expression of the broken taboo, a figure bearing witness to the interconnection of the races, and the “site of the hybridity of histories”’ (2004:327). Fraught between desire, melancholy, and despair, the mulatta usually encounters a tragic fate, unable to escape these pre-scripted choreographies of her race. These characterizations prevent more complex representations of this racialised and gendered body primarily by constricting the notion of mulatta into narratives based on textual discursive practices. As a result, the mulatta figure suffers from rather limited representations unable to acknowledge her potentiality as something other than tragic.

In this article, I seek to vivify and corpo-realize mulatta representations by particularly focusing on films where mulattas use their bodies, specifically their hips in active mobilizations as performers, dancers, or choreographers. As I have argued elsewhere, my theory of hip(g)nosis exposes the contours of the hip as a site of cultural production, produced and deployed by historically racialized mulatta bodies in their negotiation of ‘blackness,’ ‘whiteness,’ the political economy of pleasure, and becoming. As a result, the excesses of the hip’s choreography, its existence as a product that can dazzle, dodge, divert and, of course, hip-notize locates it as/in a space where the enacting mulatta body achieves some agency through the different values imposed on it.

Thinking through and moving with the mulatta’s hip, I will examine the filmic representations of the mulatta body in the Hollywood film Honey (2003) starring Jessica Alba. More specifically, this article aims to unravel how the Hollywood filmic apparatus engages with signifiers of raced sexuality and hierarchies of dance styles to enforce and reify mythic narratives about dance, dancing raced bodies, and dance-making. In order to frame the discussion of how the mulatta body operates through the visual economy, I will establish a genealogy of this body in a U.S. context through two other dance/performance films: Sparkle (1976) and Flashdance (1983). These juxtapositions illustrate how the mulatta subject develops from a tragic figure (in Sparkle) to independent and self-reliant (in Honey) with dance acting as the analytical framework by focusing on particular choreographed and ‘improvised’ dance sequences performed by each film’s respective mulatta protagonist…

Read the entire article here.

Vogue Italia and Hoop Earrings

Havana Barbie’s thought on the arts
2011-08-23

Melissa Blanco Borelli, Lecturer of Dance Studies
University of Surrey

I have always loved to wear hoop earrings. In fact, they are my earrings of choice. Big and silver, that’s how I like them. Imagine my surprise and shock when I saw earrings I have always called hoop earrings called “Slave Earrings” by Italian Vogue. Really? Slave earrings? Vogue wants to link an ornamental accessory, a mark of indulgent aestheticism to a historically denigrated body that did not have the choice or power to choose how to look, let alone what to do? Even more appalling was the text (which has since been removed so as “not to offend” and are now called “ethnic earrings” … sigh):
 
“Jewellery has always flirted with circular shapes, especially for use in making earrings. The most classic models are the slave and creole styles in gold hoops. If the name brings to the mind the decorative traditions of the women of colour who were brought to the southern Unites States during the slave trade, the latest interpretation is pure freedom. Colored stones, symbolic pendants and multiple spheres. And the evolution goes on.”
 
I want to focus on the phrase “the decorative traditions of the women of colour.” Woman of colour is a charged label, especially when connected to the legacy of slavery, miscegenation, and sexual peccadilloes not just in the US South, but in Cuba, Haiti, Jamaica and other parts of the Caribbean as well. Historically, in the eighteenth and nineteenth century woman of colour meant creole, métisse, passe-blanc, mulatta, or mulattresse, i.e., the mixed race woman who was black… but not quite. With her many names and pigments, the woman of colour and “her decorative traditions” in the southern United States is often problematically romanticized through the stories of the quadroon balls of New Orleans where wealthy white men attended in search of sexual relationships. These women of colour negotiated liaisons called plaçage which were economically beneficial for themselves and their extended, often matrilineal family. Many of these women of colour were free and some even owned slaves…

Read the entire article here.

Beyond the Pale: Unsettling “Race” and Womanhood in the Novels of Harper, Hopkins, Fauset and Larsen

McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
December 1996
303 pages

Teresa Christine Zackodnik, Professor of English
University of Alberta, Canada

A thesis Submitted to the School of Graduate Studies in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor Of Philosophy

This dissertation proposes that writers like Frances Harper, Pauline Hopkins, Jessie Fauset, and Nella Larsen “talk out both sides” of their mouths, parodying the values of the black bourgeoisie, racialized notions of womanhood, and understandings of racial difference popular at the turn into the twentieth century. Using complex modes of address, these authors have written novels that in all likelihood were read in different directions by their white and African American readerships. I contend that these narratives would have placated their white readership with familiar forms, while simultaneously forging a sense of community with their African American readers in novels of a highly political nature which questioned and subverted definitions of womanhood and “race”. These “tragic mulatta” and “passing” novels, published from 1892 to 1931 are contextualized with an analysis of three cultural efforts to consolidate turn-of-the-century American beliefs regarding race and gender: legal statutes codifying racial identities, theories of racial difference, and notions of gender identity disseminated through the cult of domesticity. Because the mulatto is neither white nor black, her ambivalent identity and experience make parody a significant trope with which these authors interrogate identity. In order to “pass” for “true women” or for white, these mulatto characters utilize and parody the very qualities designed to ensure the “purity” of whiteness and womanhood. This study argues that such parodies access an African American tradition of parodic performance that played to and on white notions of “blackness” and constructions of white identity. Moving from a consideration of such “signifyin(g)” acts as a challenge to gender and racial identities represented by heroines who pass for “true women,” the study concludes with a consideration of how race, as a political category of description, is destabilized through the representation of heroines who choose to pass for white.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• CHAPTER 1: Codifying and Quantifying “Race” in Turn-of-the-Century America
• CHAPTER 2: Unsettling “Race” and Womanhood in Tum-of-the-Century America: Frances Harper’s Iola Leroy and Pauline Hopkins’s Contending Forces
• CHAPTER 3: Policing the Bounds of Race: Jessie Fauset’s The Chinaberry Tree and Nella Larsen’s Quicksand
• CHAPTER 4: Transgressions and Excess: Passing as Parodic Performance in Jessie Fauset’s Plum Bun and Nella Larsen’s Passing
• CONCLUSION: New Trajectories of Self-Definition

Read the entire thesis here.