Mixed Race Studies

White Skin, White Masks: The Creole Woman and the Narrative of Racial Passing in Martinique and Louisiana

University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
2006
83 pages

Michael James Rulon

A thesis submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in the Curriculum of Comparative Literature

Through an examination of two Creole passing subjects from literary passing narratives of the twentieth century, this thesis simultaneously treats two problems that have been largely overlooked by contemporary scholarship: the role of the Creole racial identity in the genre of the passing narrative, as well as the possibility of racial passing within the context of a Creole society. In Walter White’s 1926 novel, Flight, and Mayotte Capécia’s 1950 novel, La négresse blanche, the protagonists’ difficulties in negotiating a stable racial identity reveal the inherent weakness of the racial binary that is essential to the very notion of racial passing, and they also show that Creoleness has failed to establish itself as a stable racial identity in the societies represented in both novels.

Table of Contents

• 1. Pawòl Douvan/Some Opening Words
• 2. Nwè, Blan èk Kréyòl/Black, White, and Creole
• 3. Mimi èk Isaure/Mimi and Isaur
• 4. Pasé pou Blan, Pasé pou Nwè/Passing for White, Passing for Black
• 5. Ovwè tè kréyòl/Goodbye, Creole Land
• 6. Conclusion: Èk alòs… /And so
• WORKS CITED

Read the entire dissertation here.

InSide/OutSide Cultural Hybridity: Greenstone as Narrative Provocateur

Australian Association for Research in Education (AARE)
International Education Research Conference 2003
AARE – NZARE
2003-11-30 through 2003-12-03
Auckland, New Zealand

Tess Moeke-Maxwell, HRC Post Doctoral Research Fellow
Department of Psychology
University of Waikato

This paper is a revised chapter located in my PhD thesis ‘Bringing Home The Body: Bi/multi Racial Maori Women’s Hybridity in Aotearoa/New Zealand (2003). An earlier version of this paper is to be published as a chapter in Provocations: On Sylvia Ashton-Warner and Excitability in Education. Editors: Cathryn McConaghy (University of New England) and Judith P. Robertson (University of Ottawa).

Toward evening—we know it is evening—a canoe puts off from the bank of That Side and sets off over the river. In it are Huia and Memory and Sire paddling back from That Side to This, all chanting a paddle song the old one has recently taught them, keeping instinctive time with the paddles, which is one sure time they know—any instinctive rhythm. It is in Maori of course.

Behold my paddle!
See how it flies and flashes;
It quivers like a bird’s wing
This paddle of mine….

But as they reach This Side landing an unrest stirs in Huia. Her allegiance to her koro on That Side confronts her feeling for Puppa on This Side. In the crossing of the polished surface of the river is the crossing from the brown to the white, although she’s too young to know it, and the emotional racial transition is not polished like the face of the river holding the gray of the sky in her waters and the glamorous gold of the trees; it is something with smudges on it, something with jagged angles. The racial transition is a sunken branch cutting the mirror surface (Ashton-Warner, 1966, pp. 63-4).

Essentially, this paper is a summary of the ideas presented in my doctoral thesis whereby I examined bi/multi racial Maori women’s cultural hybridity in Aotearoa/New Zealand. In my concluding chapter, I utilised Sylvia Ashton-Warner’s (1966) novel Greenstone to highlight bi/multi racial women’s hybridity in her portrayal of Huia’s coming and going, from one side of the river where she lives with her Pakeha family to the Other, the ancestral home of her people and the place where her Maori grandfather still lives. Ashton-Warner’s novel is situated after the First World War. She demonstrates how children of mixed racial ancestries were multiply located across different landscapes and cultures. In Greenstone, Hybrid-Huia’s corporeal body regularly travels backwards and forwards across the river/boundary separating her two cultural worlds, This Side and That Side. The crisscrossing between This Pakeha Side and That Maori Side is portrayed as a journey/process of metaphoric images and competing landscapes that need to be traversed to make the (cultural) transition to the Other Side possible…

Read the entire paper here.

Transatlantic Spectacles of Race: The Tragic Mulatta and the Tragic Muse

Rutgers University Press
2012-02-28
256 pages
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8135-4988-0
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8135-4987-3

Kimberly S. Manganellia, Associate Professor of 19th-Century British and American Literature
Clemson University, Clemson, South Carolina

The tragic mulatta was a stock figure in nineteenth-century American literature, an attractive mixed-race woman who became a casualty of the color line. The tragic muse was an equally familiar figure in Victorian British culture, an exotic and alluring Jewish actress whose profession placed her alongside the “fallen woman.”

In Transatlantic Spectacles of Race, Kimberly Manganelli argues that the tragic mulatta and tragic muse, who have heretofore been read separately, must be understood as two sides of the same phenomenon. In both cases, the eroticized and racialized female body is put on public display, as a highly enticing commodity in the nineteenth-century marketplace. Tracing these figures through American, British, and French literature and culture, Manganelli constructs a host of surprising literary genealogies, from Zelica to Daniel Deronda, from Uncle Tom’s Cabin to Lady Audley’s Secret. Bringing together an impressive array of cultural texts that includes novels, melodramas, travel narratives, diaries, and illustrations, Transatlantic Spectacles of Race reveals the value of transcending literary, national, and racial boundaries.

Where Is the Carnivalesque in Rio’s Carnaval? Samba, Mulatas and Modernity

Visual Anthropology
Volume 21, Issue 2 (2008)
pages 95-111
DOI: 10.1080/08949460701688775

Natasha Pravaz, Associate Professor of Anthropology
Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

This article chronicles the historical normalization of carnaval parades and samba performances in Rio de Janeiro, by looking at the progressive standardization of audiovisual imagery fueled by a nationalistic project based on cultural appropriation. Afro-Brazilian performance traditions have come to stand for Brazilian national identity since at least the 1930s, and practices of visual consumption such as shows de mulata (spectacles where Afro-Brazilian women dance the samba) have elevated “mixed-race” women to be icons of Brazilianness. While these practices have de-emphasized grotesque excess in order to fit scopophilic drives, they have failed to secure a firm grip over performers’ experiences.

Read or purchase the article here.

A Mixed Race Take On What It Means To Be ‘Free’

Tell Me More
National Public Radio
2011-06-24

NPR Staff

A lonely young New Yorker finds a puppy while jogging. A middle class couple tries navigating the treacherous waters of admission to a sought-after preschool. A new mother grows jealous of the chic and thin mom living across the hall.

It’s all stuff you may have seen before—but not quite. At least not if Danzy Senna has anything to say about it.

These are all characters in Senna’s new collection of short fiction, titled You Are Free. The stories start with the familiar, but soon take subtle turns to reveal racial and other tensions lurking not too far below the surface.

Senna herself is mixed race. Her father is half African-American and half Mexican, while her mother is Irish and English. Growing up in Boston, Senna was raised to self-identify as black.

“I think growing up black or growing up biracial is something that’s part of your daily language and your daily awareness of the world you’re living in,” she tells NPR’s Michel Martin.

But she doesn’t see her work being about race or mixed race. Instead, Senna uses race as the background of her fiction, as a way to understand the culture and characters…

Read the entire story here.
Read the transcript of the interview here.
Listen to the interview here (00:13:32).

White women’s complicity and the taboo: Faulkner’s layered critique of the “miscegenation complex”

Women’s Studies
Volume 22, Issue 4 (1993)
pages 497-506
DOI: 10.1080/00497878.1993.9978998

Karen M. Andrews
Kobe College, Japan

In Faulkner’s social milieu, the proscription against miscegenation between white women and black men was so deeply ingrained as to be “common sense.” White male hegemony promoted a double standard which tolerated one form of miscegenation, between white men and black women, while virulently prohibiting the other form. Miscegenation virtually came to mean only the taboo form, thus silencing the reality of white male exploitation of black women. As James Kinney argues, the “post-war apologists for racism tried to convert the rape victim into the rapist, to reverse reality in order to justify past and present inhumanity” (227).

In works such as Absalom, Absalom! and Go Down, Moses, Faulkner critiques the sexual and racial injustices wrought by this double standard. Moreover, he exposes the whites’ paranoid and often violent reactions to the taboo—the “miscegenation complex”—in several novels, particularly Light in August, and in stories, such as “Dry September,” [Read the full text here.] “Elly” and “Mountain Victory.” In “Dry September,” probably the most anthologized of his short fiction, Faulkner demystifies the “miscegenation complex” by exposing the complicity of whites, male and female, who exploit the taboo for personal and political gain.

“Dry September” entails a multilayered critique of the miscegenation/rape complex. At the most obvious level of analysis, Faulkner employs the character Hawkshaw as a counterhegemonic voice among the radical racists, Unlike the other white men gathered about the barbershop, Hawkshaw critiques the belief that any rumor of the interracial taboo involves a black…

Read or purchase the article here.

‘Horror and beauty in rare combination’: The miscegenate fictions of Octavia butler

Women: A Cultural Review
Volume 7, Issue 1 (1996)
pages 28-38
DOI: 10.1080/09574049608578256

Roger Luckhurst, Professor in Modern and Contemporary Literature
Birkbeck, University of London

Octavia Butler’s work is virtually unknown, and yet her ten novels and one short story collection constitute an astonishingly intricate and sustained meditation on the imbrication of race and gender across cultural and scientific discourses. By her own reckoning the only black woman science-fiction writer currently working, she has, since 1976, investigated the ambivalent legacies of slavery by sending a twentieth-century woman back in time to a Maryland plantation in 1815 (Kindred), envisioned a classically ‘sci-fi’ future (Patternmaster) only to explode its conventionality by tracing this future’s racial genealogy back first to contemporary Los Angeles (Mind of My Mind and Clay’s Ark) and then to seventeenth-century Africa (Wild Seed), and has also produced a stunning trilogy about inter-species hybridization which is at once rigorously within the bounds of revisionist evolutionary theory and yet also allegorizes a passage from the horror of miscegenation to the emergence of a literally catastrophic difference (Xenogenesis: Dawn Adulthood Riles, Imago).

Butler’s chance for recognition might have arrived in 1984 when her short story, ‘Bloodchild’ won both the Hugo and Nebula prizes, the science-fiction community’s major internal awards. A subtle and disconcerting story, ‘Bloodchild’ slyly rewrites the gendered anxieties of the ‘body horror’ genre by…

Read or purchase the article here.

Mixed Race: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow

Rafu Shimpo: Los Angeles Japanese Daily News
2011-06-19

Velina Hasu Houston

Recently I was honored with a Loving Award from the Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival (held June 11-12 at the Japanese American National Museum). The award and the meaning behind it has caused me to reflect on multiracial identity.

My parents married in 1954 after a nine-year courtship in Japan. When they left Japan, they arrived in the U.S., a country in which their marriage was illegal in 17 states and would remain so until 1967, two years before my father’s death.

In the landmark civil rights case Loving v. Virginia, the U.S. Supreme Court finally struck down laws against interracial marriage, honoring the marriage of Afro-Indian Mildred Loving and her white husband Richard (who also were second cousins).

I grew up in a community where being mixed race was a natural thing, at least for those of us who had foreign mothers and American fathers. We were multiracial, multiethnic, and multicultural — and often, like me, transnational. The idea of having a foot in at least two countries and being a blend of three or four ethnicities was par for the course…

Read the entire article here.

Turning Dreams to Chaos: Multiplicity and the Construction of Identity

Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, California
2003
249 pages
ISBN (eBook): 978-3-638-68960-1
Archive No.: V7499
DOI: 10.3239/9783638689601

Tamara Hollins

A Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Claremont Graduate University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate Field of English

This work will reflect on the mutability of meaning in the female mulatto body as well as on the mutability of perception by acknowledging the erroneous nature of race and its concrete results, by examining the valorization and undermining of racial essentialism and heterogeneity, and by revealing passing as bound by the social and legal restraints related to the physical body even as it interrogates racial classifications. Specifically, this study will explore how some nineteenth century, modern, and postmodern American narratives containing mulattoes and passing personas produce a resolution reiterating the structure of race or new subjectivities within or possibly without the color line. Through this exploration, the war between the homogenous Self and the different Other will play out. In an effort to unite a divided personality, the Other will counter attempts by the Self to maintain essentialism. The success lies not in the final outcome but in recognizing the subversive acts of the Other and the irrational tactics of the Self as continuously revealing the subjects as always already married and as surpassing mere essentialism into the multitudinous, heterogeneous One. Still, this work realizes that essentialism has a place in heterogeneity, even if essentialism is a logical error. Duality and conflict are inherent in heterogeneity, or the multitudinous One. The key is not to eradicate, in an essentialist manner, one and not the other, but to live in a state of awareness, respecting and accepting those who knowingly choose to construct identities within or without the color line.

Table of Contents

• Introduction: Reading Meaning in the Mixed Body
• Chapter One: Assimilating into What?: Stereotypes, Appearances, and Behavior
• Chapter Two: Eliminating the Tragic: Intersections of Christianity, Racial Uplift, and True Womanhood
• Chapter Three: Passing as Subversion and Reification
• Chapter Four: The Journey Home: Replacing Tragedy with Authority
• Chapter Five: Looking Within and Beyond Race with Irene, Clare, and Angela
• Chapter Six: From the Passing Mulatto to the Biracial Character: Race, Class, Gender, and Family
• Conclusion: The Community of Multiplicity

Purchase the dissertation here.

Panel by Hapa and Critical Mixed Race Studies Scholars and Artists

Oregon Nikkei Legacy Center
Japanese American History Museum
2011-08-04

Emily Momohara, Assistant Professor of Art
Art Academy of Cincinnati

Laura Kina, Associate Professor of Art, Media and Design
DePaul University

Dmae Roberts

Moderated by

Tim DuRoche, Director of Programs
World Affairs Council of Oregon

This talk will showcase their work as the artists talk about how they address hapa identity through art. Emily Momohara is currently an Assistant Professor of Art at the Art Academy of Cincinnati where she heads the photography major. Dmae Roberts is a two-time Peabody award-winning independent radio artist and writer who has written and produced more than 400 audio art pieces and documentaries for NPR and PRI programs. Laura Kina is Associate Professor of Art, Media, and Design; Global Asian Studies affiliated faculty member; and a distinguished Vincent de Paul Professor at DePaul University in Chicago, where she has also been involved in the emerging field of critical mixed race studies. This panel will be moderated by Tim DuRoche, Director of Programs for the World Affairs Council of Oregon.

For more information, click here.