Mixed Race Studies

A Free Man of Color [Theater Review]

The Faster Times
2010-11-18

Johnathon Mandell

Opening Date: 2010-11-18
Closing Date: 2011-01-09

Written by John Guare
Directed by George C. Wolfe

As “A Free Man of Color” begins, its hero, an ex-slave, is a bewigged, bejeweled fop who is the wealthiest and most sexually desirable man in New Orleans. Like the character, the play seems to have everything going for it: deeply talented creators, an exciting cast, splendid costumes, a fascinating period in American history. By the end of the play, the character has been destroyed, in a harrowing half hour that is the dramatic and theatrical highlight of the piece. Long before that end, however, the average theatergoer is likely to feel let down by John Guare’s new play. If it frustrates our expectations, “A Free Man of Color”—ambitious, inventive, daring, sprawling—is an honorable failure with much to recommend it, even while it is difficult to sit through.

Set largely in New Orleans between 1801 and 1806, but wandering around the world, the play, which has now opened at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater, presents the complex intrigue surrounding the Louisiana Purchase, which doubled the size of the United States, and imagines the effects of these actual historical events on fictitious characters.

The historical tidbits sprinkled throughout the play are tantalizing, especially those with contemporary parallels. To pick one of the more obscure examples: If the 21st century has civil unions for gay people, early 19th century New Orleans had plaçage, an arrangement between a white man and a woman of color…

Read the entire review here.

The Quadroon Ball on stage one week only Oct. 13-17 [2010]

Lone Star College
The Woodlands, Texas
2010-09-22

Lone Star College-CyFair Drama Department presents Damon Wright’s play “The Quadroon Ball” on stage Oct. 13 through Oct. 17 [2010].

“The Quadroon Ball” is a moving drama taking place in New Orleans just prior to the Civil War.  It focuses on the women of mixed race who were prized for their beauty and yet regarded as second-class citizens, said LSC-CyFair Director Ron Jones. The play traces the life of a beautiful Quadroon woman (one quarter black and three quarters white) whose life is affected both by the man of royalty who loves her and the presence of slavery in society.

With a cast of 22 community and college actors, this poignant and elegant story begins as Jeanette is introduced at a cotillion for women of her stature and continues for 20 years, marking her rise to fame and her ultimate demise.

According to The New York Times, “Damon Wright’s ‘The Quadroon Ball’ is an intelligent, affecting new play about race, family, honor and freedom.”  Jones adds that this play is for mature audiences only due to adult subject matter and graphic language.

Performing Miscegenation: Rescuing The White Slave from the Threat of Interracial Desire

Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism (ISSN 0888-3203)
Volume 13, Number 1 (Fall 1998)
pages 71-86

Diana R. Paulin, Assistant Professor of English and American Studies
Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut

This examination of Bartley Campbell’s 1882 play, The White Slave, emerges out of a comprehensive study of the way in which representations of black/white unions in late nineteenth- and early twentieth- century U.S. drama and fiction invoke anxieties about the impact of interracial contact, while simultaneously rehearsing the multiple possibilities of these transgressive relationships. Because of the way in which black/white, or interracial, intimate alliances have symbolized both explicit acts of racial transgression in and of themselves and implicit threats to essentialized racial categories, their representation creates space for complex readings of these racial identities. In fact, the ambivalent and liminal space in which interracial desire is most frequently represented does not merely complicate race, it provides a place for more productive and multivalent articulations of black and white subjectivities. Campbell’s play offers a useful site for exploring these issues because of the way in which it complicates black and white by “playing out” the possibility of an erotic cross-racial relationship. At the same time, through a multitude of complex plot twists and unexpected revelations, the logic of play’s narrative undermines the legitimacy of interracial unions and, thereby, helps to minimize their disruptive potential. By using the explosive and contested space of the play’s narrative, this reading helps to foreground moments in the past when blackness and whiteness are destabilized in a manner that reinforces current anti-essentialist debates about race and identity.

My reading of The White Slave suggests the way in which the play engages in multiple racial performances and depicts race in performative terms. That is to say that the play produces an interracial union that is part of a broader performance—a performance of multiple articulated racial subjectivities, of miscegenation, of hierarchical power relations—that simultaneously challenges and reinforces what it attempts to represent. The contradictions produced by these cross purposes demonstrate the ambivalence that usually characterizes depictions of interracial unions. For, while most portrayals of cross-racial relationships indicate that they will fail, they also leave many of the conflicting issues and possibilities generated by the union unresolved and unexplored. This ambiguity not only complicates these representations of intimate black/white relations, it also provides a starting point for rearticulating the complexity of racial identities that are, more often than not, defined in opposition to each other…

…Historicizing Miscegenation

The word miscegenation—a derogatory term for cross-racial sexual relations—was popularized in the United States by pro-slavery journalist David Croly in 1863. His inflammatory pamphlet, “Miscegenation: The Theory of the Blending of the Races, Applied to the White Man and the Negro,” intentionally played on the fears of many white Americans by disingenuously advocating interracial marriage and by suggesting that mixed races were superior to “pure” ones. Although cross-racial unions were not new and sexual relations between white planters and their black slaves were tenuously accepted as one of the unfortunate evils of slavery, this sensational document stirred up many anxieties about the negative effects of black and white sexual contact…

Read the entire article here.

Hybridity in Cooper, Mitchell and Randall: Erasures, Rewritings, and American Historical Mythology

McGill University, Montreal
Department of English
August, 2004
86 pages

Marie Thormodsgard

Submitted in partial fulfillment for a Masters degree in English

This thesis starts with an overview of the historical record tied to the birth of a new nation studied by Alexis de Tocqueville and Henry Steele Commager. It singles out the works of Henry Nash Smith and Eugene D. Genovese for an understanding, respectively, of the “myth of the frontier” tied to the conquest of the American West and the “plantation myth” that sustained slavery in the American South. Both myths underlie the concept of hybridity or cross-cultural relations in America. This thesis is concerned with the representation or lack of representation of hybridity and the roles played by female characters in connection with the land in two seminal American novels and their film versions—James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans, and Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind—and Alice Randall’s rewriting of Mitchell’s novel, The Wind Done Gone, as a point of contrast. Hybridity is represented in the mixed-race bodies of these characters. Mitchell’s novel, and its film version in particular, create images which, according to bell hooks, “in the space of popular media culture black people in the U.S. and black people globally often look at [them]selves through images, through eyes that are unable to truly recognize [them], so that [they] are not represented as [them]selves but seen through the lens of the oppressor” (Yearning 155). I analyze how this “lens” has created a selective American cultural memory that leaves out the syncretism that is part of the American historical record and privileges the fostering of notions ofracial “purity.” My overall argument links the recurrent patterns of destruction visited on the hybrid bodies of mixed-race females with the destruction of the environment. This thesis demonstrates how literary and cinematic representations in American popular culture siphon lived history into cultural memory through the use and misuse of the hybrid female body.

The first chapter addresses James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans; concentrating on the characterization of Cora, who in the text is of mixed Caribbean ancestry, and is sacrificed for the “pure” American ideal to develop. The 1992 film version, however, erases Cora’s mixed-ethnicity and sacrifice while she still stands for the figure of the frontier heroine. The second chapter focuses on Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind and the 1939 film version. While Mitchell does not directly confront the issue of racial mixing, the Reconstruction half of the text portrays the Klu Klux Klan as resulting from a fear of white women and former slaves reproducing and therefore is representative of the South’s mythology and identity politics. The film erases Mitchell’s single hybrid character, Dylcie, and all references to hybridization and the KKK. The third chapter concentrates on Alice Randall’s The Wind Done Gone, which deconstructs the racial markers of polarized pigmentations in the original text. Essentially, Randall’s novel brings out what was left out of both Mitchell’s novel and its film version: the distorted notion of racial “purity” among slaves and slaveowners.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter One: Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans
• Chapter Two: Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind
• Chapter Three: Randall’s The Wind Done Gone
• Conclusion
• Works Cited

Read the entire thesis here.

Eurafricans in Western Africa: Commerce, Social Status, Gender, and Religious Observance from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century [Book Review]

H-Africa
H-Net Reviews
March 2004

Eric S. Ross, Coordinator, School of Humanities and Social Sciences
Al Akhawayn University, Ifrane, Morocco

George Brooks’s Eurafricans in Western Africa is the sequel to his Landlords and Strangers (1993). This book covers Western African coastal trading networks from the Senegal River to Cape Palmas (including the Cape Verde Islands) from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. Brooks uses the term “Eurafrican” to designate Luso-Africans, Franco-Africans, and Anglo-Africans, the offspring of the union of transient European male traders and African women, often of elite social status. The term is meant to emphasize the greater African heritage of the mothers, as opposed to the Portuguese, French, or English heritage of the fathers.

As the subtitle indicates, the book deals extensively with social status, religion, and gender-related issues among Eurafricans. According to Brooks, African laws regarding inheritance and property rights largely determined the social status of Eurafricans, and these laws differed considerably depending on whether a society was acephalous or politically stratified. Religious observances and gender roles, in turn, depended on social status. Brooks makes good use of primary sources, particularly the accounts of Portuguese, French, Dutch, and English travelers and traders, nearly all of them men. In the preface, the author recognizes that his assessment of Eurafricans is limited by these informants and observers, who were “misinformed, self-serving, and imbued with racial prejudice” (p. xi). Also, only the most “successful” Eurafricans, of elite status, have survived in the historical record; porters, mariners, servants, and slaves, as all too often, re main anonymous seen but not heard…

Read the entire review here.

Hierarchies of whiteness in the geographies of empire: Thomas Thistlewood and the Barrets of Jamaica

New West Indian Guide / Nieuwe West-Indische Gids
Volume 80, Numbers 1&2 (2006)
pages 5-43
DOI: 10.1163/13822373-90002486

Cecilla A. Green, Associate Professor, Sociology
Maxwell School of Syracuse University

Shows how a racial solidarity between whites in colonial Jamaica during slavery developed, but covered class differences between whites. Author examines the differences between the lesser-white, socially mobile settlers, and the upper plantocracy. She looks especially at social-structural factors, in particular genealogy and reproduction, that separated upper plantocratic families and dynasties, with connections with Britain, e.g. through absentee plantation owners, from less wealthy white settlers, that obtained intermediate positions as overseers, and generally were single males. She relates this further to the context with a white minority and a majority of slaves, and with relatively less women than men among the whites, that influenced differing reproductive patterns. The upper-class tended to achieve white marrying partners from Britain, alongside having children with slaves or people of colour, while lower-class whites mostly reproduced only in this last way. Author exemplifies this difference by juxtaposing the family histories and relationships, and relative social positions of Thomas Thistlewood, an overseer who came alone, and had an intermediate position, and the upper-class wealthy Barrett family, who were large land and slave owners, and established a powerful white dynasty in Jamaica, with British connections, over centuries, and that also included, sidelined, coloured offspring.

…Even here there are important qualifications. Thistlewood is not a candidate for the dual marriage system who decides to forego the benefits of a White wife in part because of the assurance of other conditions of reproduction that guarantee full maintenance of class status. This is true, for example, of George Goodin Barrett, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s great-uncle, discussed below, who mates exclusively (at least, in self-acknowledged terms) with a mulatto slave, Elissa Peters. Their children suffer a fate not untypical of the offspring of such couplings: they are not given the Barrett name, but they are sent to England to be schooled and domiciled according to the terms of their father’s will, and they receive secondary (and inevitably contestable) bequests. Thistlewood, in contrast, gives his son John his name. He does not have the economic wherewithal or the genealogical amplitude and latitude to school him in England, and evinces no aspirations or plans to that effect. John is schooled locally and is later apprenticed to a master carpenter, William Hornby.

It should be pointed out here that not all large planter names were so closely guarded (outside of the widespread process of giving estate slaves the surnames of their owners). Another strategy, pursued by Martin or Martyn Williams, the dually married husband of George’s properly pedigreed first cousin (who later becomes the widowed mistress of George’s brother), was to both pass on the name and petition the courts to declare his illegitimate mixed-race children, whose mother was a free Black woman, legally White. To complicate matters, there is a third option that both Williams’s “dual marriage” obligations and the changed inheritance laws of his and George’s time preclude him from pursuing (whatever his personal inclinations): bequeathing his main properties to Colored heirs. His properties are passed on to his legitimate White heirs. The case of Molly or Mary Cope (née Dorill), the fully endowed illegitimate quadroon daughter of Thistlewood’s late employer (now his employer, under coverture of her White husband) is different, but in part only because of the absence of competing claims from a “legitimate” White family. She appears to us, through the admittedly limited medium of Thistlewood’s cryptic daily log, as the tragic dupe of a strategy to re-inscribe and recover a proper plantocratic and racial destiny for the at-risk property and lineage of her paternal ancestry. Once she has fulfilled all the right conditions she becomes practically dispensable. She confides to Thistlewood that her husband “wants her to cut the entail off and settle upon him for life” (Hall 1999:70). She is being pressed to transfer title to the estate to her abusive and incompetent White husband…

Read the entire article here.

The Octoroon: Early History of the Drama of Miscegenation

The Journal of Negro Education
Volume 20, Number 4 (Autumn, 1951)
pages 547-557

Sidney Kaplan, Instructor In English
University of Massachusetts

From the moment of its birth the American democracy has appeared to some of its best champions as the perfect subject for Aristotelian tragedy. Could the democracy with an overwhelming reservation be anything other than the hero with a fatal flaw? The essence of slavery, complained Jefferson at the close of the Revolution, was the “perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other”; he trembled for his country when he reflected that God was just and that his justice could not sleep forever. One ramification of this peculiarly American tragedy—the “problem” of passion between black and white—has been a staple of our stage for almost a century. From Boucicault’s The Octoroon in the decade before Gettysburg, through O’Neill’s All God’s Chillun in the era of the first World War, to Hughes’s The Barrier of the current guilty hour, the drama of miscegenation has packed box and balcony throughout the land.

Putting aside the question of its dramatic merit, it is easy to see why Boucicault’s play, from the historian’s point of view, is the most interesting of the genre; for not only did The Octoroon for the first time, effectively and sympathetically, place a Negro in the center of an American stage, but also, in the troubled time of its premiere, despite all its meagerness as play or tract, it became a small portent of impending crisis and irrepressible conflict. As Joseph Jefferson wrote, thirty years after its first night, The Octoroon “was produced at a dangerous time”; for the slightest allusion to the peculiar institution served then only “to inflame the country, which was already at a white heat.”

Three days after John Brown had been hanged in Virginia, the curtain arose on The Octoroon in New York. On the evening of December 6, 1859, just as Brown’s coffin began the last lap on the journey North to the quiet Adirondack farms, the Winter Garden…

Read or purchase the article here.

Miscegenation: the theory of the blending of the races, applied to the American white man and negro.

H. Dexter, Hamilton & Co.
1864
76 pages
Source: Wilson Anti-Slavery Collection of The University of Manchester, The John Rylands University Library

David Goodman Croly

The Wilson Anti-Slavery Collection is a collection of 19th-century anti-slavery pamphlets received in 1923 from the executors of Henry Joseph Wilson (1833-1914), the distinguished Liberal Member of Parliament for Sheffield. The collection is of particular importance for the study of the activities of the provincial philanthropic societies, such as the Birmingham and Midland Freedmen’s Aid Association, the Birmingham and West Bromwich Ladies’ Negro’s Friend Society, the Glasgow Emancipation Society, the Manchester Union and Emancipation Society, and the Sheffield Ladies Female Anti Slavery Society. Of interest is the prominent role of women in the movement, who formed themselves into societies which lobbied MPs and printed pamphlets on the conditions of slaves. Here we have details of what was sold at their bazaars to raise funds and lists of names of subscribers, the minutiae which bring alive the history of the movement.

Note from Steven F. Riley: This pamphlet coined the term “miscegenation.”

Read the pamphlet here.

Seeds of Rebellion in Plantation Fiction: Victor Séjour’s “The Mulatto”

Southern Spaces
An interdisciplinary journal about regions, places, and cultures of the American South and their global connections
2007-08-28

Ed Piacentino, Professor of English
High Point University, High Point, North Carolina

This essay examines Victor Séjour’s “The Mulatto” (1837), a short story acknowledged as the first fictional work by an African American. Through its representation of physical and psychological effects, Séjour’s story, a narrative of slavery in Saint-Domingue, also inaugurated the literary delineation of slavery’s submission-rebellion binary. The enslaved raconteur in “The Mulatto” voices protest and appeals to social consciousness and sympathy, anticipating the embedded narrators in works of later writers throughout the Plantation Americas.

Sections:

• Introduction
• Liberated Narrative Voice
• Restricted Space
• Clotel’s Rebellion
• Local Color
• Conclusion & Notes
• Recommended Resources
• “The Mulatto”

Introduction

A little-known story first translated into English in 1995 by Philip Barnard for The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, “Le Mulâtre” (“The Mulatto”) by Victor Séjour (1817-1874), a New Orleans free man of color, was initially published in the March 1837 issue of Cyrille Bisette’s Parisian abolitionist journal La Revue des Colonies. La Revue was a monthly periodical of “Colonial Politics, Administration, Justice, Education and Customs” owned and sponsored by a “society of men of color.” A recent immigrant to Paris, Séjour was in an amenable environment among kindred spirits who shared his sentiments about slavery.

…Although little known in its era, “The Mulatto” presents the binary of submission and rebellion that became a motif in U.S. based slave narratives and novelized autobiographies treating racialized sexual harassment and/or exploitation of mulattas such as Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of Slave Girl, antislavery novels such as William Wells Brown’s Clotel or; The President’s Daughter and Hannah Crafts’s The Bondwoman’s Narrative, and even late nineteenth-century southern local color stories with embedded former slave storytellers, such as Charles Waddell Chesnutt’s Uncle Julius. In exposing the brutality of the slave system, such as the impact of miscegenation on persons of mixed race; the sexual violation of enslaved persons; and the physical and psychological brutalities of slavery—particularly the devastating effects on family life of whites as well as on blacks—“The Mulatto” deploys strategies for antislavery protest writing that will appear in antebellum slave narratives and anti-slavery novels and in postbellum fiction about slavery…

Read the entire article here.

Rachel Knight: Slave, White Man’s Mistress and Mother to a Movement

Johnathon Odell: Discovering Our Stories
2010-09-20

John Odell

Rachel’s Children

I can’t help but think of the Old Testament Abraham when I hear stories about Newt Knight. Both men sired children by a wife and a slave. In Newt’s case it was Serena and Rachel. With Abraham, Sara and Hagar. According to religious texts, one of these women went on to become the matriarch of God’s chosen people. Exactly which one, depends on what you happen to be reading, your Bible or your Koran. Jews and Christians claim the wife Sarah and Muslims claim the handmaiden Hagar. Several Crusades were launched trying to settle that matter.

In Jones County, there’s always been a fierce crusade of competing stories about Rachel, the white account versus the black account. Like most stories, the white interpretation gets written down and called history, while the black story gets handed down by word-of-mouth and called folklore.

Growing up as a white boy, I swore by Ethel Knight’s written-down version. According to her, Rachel was a light-skinned temptress with blue-green eyes and flowing chestnut hair. But evil as the day is long. Ethel alternately calls her a vixen, a witch, a conjure woman, a murderer and a strumpet.

Serena, Newt’s white wife, is but an innocent captive, forced a gunpoint to live in this den of iniquity, and like Newt, powerless as Rachel’s sorcery wrecked and degraded their family.

As a child of Jim Crow, this narrative satisfied my budding sensibilities about race. In my white-bubble world, there could never be any possibility of true love or affection between a white man and a black woman. Nor would any white man sire children by a black woman and then choose to live amongst his mixed-race offspring. Unless of course, the black woman had either seduced him unmercifully or mysteriously conjured him, or both. It just wasn’t possible that he actually loved her, or her children.

Imagine my surprise when I heard, as they say, “the rest of the story.” It was as shocking as sitting down in church and listening to the preacher get up and declare from the pulpit that Abraham’s birthright went to Hagar’s kid Ishmael, instead of Sarah’s son, Isaac, and it was we Christians who were the infidels!  Boy would that turn some peoples world upside down!…

Read the entire essay here.