Mixed Race Studies

Hybridity and Whiteness in Claudine C. O’Hearn’s Half and Half: Writings on Growing up Biracial and Bicultural

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
Volume 7, Issue 3 (September 2005)
9 pages

Heather Latimer
Simon Fraser University

In her paper, “Hybridity and Whiteness” in Claudine C. O’Hearn’s Half and Half: Writings on Growing up Biracial and Bicultural, Heather Latimer examines the autobiographical collection Half and Half: Writings on Growing up Biracial and Bicultural assembled and edited by Claudine C. O’Hearn. Latimer’s analysis reveals how current models of hybridity theory are performed, articulated, and exemplified in the texts of O’Hearn’s volume. In her analysis, Latimer explores the anxiety and tension about whiteness within hybridity theory, often reflected in the performance of hybrid aesthetics. Latimer argues that while some authors in Half and Half avoid talking about whiteness as a way to establish legitimate hybrid identities, this avoidance actually resinscribes an authenticity to their identities which in turn replicates the very oppressive processes of identity formation they are attempting to write against. Latimer sees other authors in the volume, however, as disrupting the stability and invisibility of whiteness by performing a type of hybridity that makes visible the made-up and constructed nature of all racial identities.

Read the entire article here.

Review of Elizabeth M. Smith-Pryor’s Property Rites: The Rhinelander Trial, Passing, and the Protection of Whiteness (University of North Carolina Press, 2009)

History News Network
December 2009

Renee Romano, Associate Professor of History
Oberlin College

“Property Rites: The Rhinelander Trial, Passing, and the Protection of Whiteness” (University of North Carolina Press, 2009)

On a fall evening in 1921, eighteen-year old Leonard “Kip” Rhinelander, the son of one of New York’s oldest and wealthiest families, met Alice Jones, a 22-year old maid. After a complicated romance, the two married in 1924. But only one month after their wedding, news reports began to circulate that Rhinelander’s new bride was “colored,” the daughter of a white British mother and a father of “colored” West Indian origins. Under intense pressure from his family, Leonard deserted his new wife and appealed to the New York courts to annul his marriage on the grounds that Alice had deceived him about her race. The 1925 Rhinelander annulment trial became a media spectacle, and as historian Elizabeth Smith-Pryor asserts in her fine new book, a “social drama” that revealed the anxieties of white northerners about racial instability in response to sweeping cultural and demographic changes during the Jazz Age.

Closely analyzing the Rhinelander trial in the historical context of the 1920s, Smith-Pryor explores why the public became obsessed with the tale of Kip Rhinelander and Alice Jones and what that obsession reveals about the expansion and strengthening of racial hierarchies in the North in the period after the Great Migration. Two migrations—that of immigrants from eastern and southern Europe to the United States, and that of southern blacks to northern cities—intensified anxieties in the North about how to determine race and how to uphold and maintain racial boundaries in the 1920s. Whites sought to find new ways to shore up the boundaries of race, and as Smith-Pryor ably demonstrates, although Alice ultimately won the case, the Rhinelander trial became an important site for reasserting notions of race that served to uphold and maintain privilege…

Read the entire book review here.

Thinking outside the box: Racial self-identification choice among mixed heritage adolescents

University of Pennsylvania
2009
234 pages
ISBN: 9781109236088

Michele Munoz-Miller

A Dissertation in Education Presented to the Faculties of the University of Pennsylvania in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

The purpose of this study was to explore how and why adolescents of mixed racial heritage racially self-identify the way they do. Identification choice was defined using an adult-based identity typology (Brunsma & Rockquemore, 2001): (a) consistently monoracial (singular), (b) consistently multiracial (border), or (c) inconsistent (protean). Three sub-groups of multiracial adolescents were analyzed separately, based on their self-reported racial parentage: non-Blacks, Black/non-American Indians, and Black/American Indians. Using an identity-focused cultural ecological model (Spencer, 2006), adolescents’ perceptions of their risks and protective factors (sociodemographics), as well as their beliefs about the oppression of non-Black minorities in the United States, were investigated in terms of how well (and in what combination) they predicted self-identification choice, both across race question formats and over time.

Findings suggested that there were different personal and contextual factors implicated in self-identification choice for each sub-group of adolescents. For non-Blacks, generational proximity to racial mixture, the percentage of Blacks in one’s neighborhood, and attitudes about racial oppression in the United States were strong predictors of racial self-identification choice. Among Black/non-American Indians, these characteristics were joined by self-perceived skin tone, academic achievement level, and age in their predictive effects. Among Black/American Indians, age, self-perceived skin tone, and attitudes about racial oppression exhibited strong main effects. There was an additional interaction effect found within this group between neighborhood diversity, skin tone, and the perception of the oppression of non- black minorities in the U.S.

This work suggests that self-identification choice is linked to adolescents’ perceptions of their risks and protective factors as well as their attitudes regarding the racial climate of the United States. Providing additional nuance to the literature are the differences found across racial parentage groups. By engaging a phenomenologically focused cultural ecological framework, both self-appraisal and reactive coping processes are revealed as central to racial identity development for this understudied population. Representing a mere slice of a broader research agenda, this project contributes a unique and important perspective to the emergent body of research on the rapidly growing population of multiracial Americans.

Table of Contents

• List of Tables viii
• List of Figures x
• Chapters
  • I. Introduction
    • Racial self-identification
    • Complications of race research
    • Race versus ethnicity
    • Methodological qualifications of the present study
  • II. Literature review
    • The United States multiracial population
    • Multiracial identity research
    • Methodology: How multiracial individuals racially self-identify
    • Process: Why multiracial individuals racially self-identify the way they do
    • Identity Typology
    • Factors that influence racial self-identification choice
    • The special case of Black/American Indians
    • Symbolic ethnicity 82
    • Phenomenological Variant of Ecological Systems Theory
    • The Present Study
      • Component 1: Net vulnerability level
      • Component 2/3: Primary reactive coping processes
      • Component 3: Reactive coping response
    • Strengths of the present study
  • III. Method
    • Study background
    • Procedure
    • Sample
  • IV. Results
    • Preliminary Analyses
    • Research questions and hypothesis testing
  • V. Discussion
    • Overview of findings
    • Population breakdowns
    • Incidence and proportion of identity types
    • Predictive effects of independent variables
      • Component 1: Net vulnerability variables
      • Component 2/3: Primary reactive coping process variable
    • Limitations of the study
    • Implications for future research
    • Conclusion
• References

List of Tables

1. Net vulnerability sample characteristics: Age, gender, academic achievement, and city
2. Net vulnerability sample characteristics: Generational proximity to racial mixture
3. Net vulnerability sample characteristics: Skin tone
4. Net vulnerability sample characteristics: Neighborhood diversity
5. Net vulnerability sample characteristics: Racial combination group
6. Rotated factor pattern for entire sample
7. Oppression perception mean scores
8. Multiracial populations by question format
9. Incidence and proportion of identity types across all datasets and racial combinations
10. Year 1 log odds estimates of identity types for non-Blacks: Format variability
11. Year 2 log odds estimates of identity types for non-Blacks: Format variability
12. Year 1 log odds estimates of identity types for Black/non-American Indians: Format variability
13. Year 2 log odds estimates of identity types for Black/non-American Indians: Format variability
14. Year 1 log odds estimates of identity types for Black/American Indians: Format variability
15. Year 2 log odds estimates of identity types for Black/American Indians: Format variability
16. Log odds estimates of identity types for non-Blacks: Temporal variability
17. Log odds estimates of identity types for Black/non-American Indians: Temporal variability
18. Log odds estimates of identity types for Black/American Indians: Temporal variability
19. Summary of findings for non-Blacks across variability types
20. Summary of findings for Black/non-American Indians across variability types
21. Summary of findings for Black/American Indians across variability types

List of Figures

1. Phenomenological Variant of Ecological Systems Theory
2. Engaged components of PVEST

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“A gallant heart to the empire.” Autoethnography and Imperial identity in Mary Seacole’s Wonderful Adventures

Philological Quarterly
Volume 83, Number 2, Spring, 2004

Sarah Salih, Professor of English
University of Toronto

A portrait of Mary Seacole in oils, c. 1869, by the obscure London artist Albert Charles Challen (1847–81). The original was discovered in 2003 by historian Helen Rappaport, and acquired by the National Portrait Gallery in London in 2008.

It seems fitting that the bi-centenary year of Mary Seacole’s birth has been marked by a spate of discoveries and publications about the author of Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands (1857). In January 2005 a “lost” portrait of Seacole, painted in 1879 by an obscure London artist named Albert Challen, was placed on view in the National Portrait Gallery. Coincidentally, Jane Robinson’s rather clumsily-titled biography, Mary Seacole: The Charismatic Black Nurse Who Became a Heroine of the Crimea, was published only weeks later, and in the same month the Home Office named one of its new buildings after Mary Seacole. (1) To round off these events, a Channel 4 documentary screened in April 2005 revealed the identity of Seacole’s husband Horace (hitherto unknown), and Wonderful Adventures was published as a Penguin Classic at the beginning of that year. (2) Assuredly, Seacole is enjoying a second heyday (albeit a posthumous one), having already taken her place amidst a burgeoning group of “Great Black Britons” whose achievements are receiving belated recognition. (3) This is not to imply that Seacole has been rescued from obscurity: between her death in 1881 and Alexander and Dewjee’s edition of Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands almost a century later, a steady trickle of articles and publications concerning Seacole appeared both in Britain and Jamaica. Moreover, since 1984, Seacole has received increasing academic attention, and she has long been installed as a figurehead for a number of different groups including Jamaicans, black British people and nurses.

Still, it does seem to be the case that during the last decade or two, “Seacole” has become something of a brand name for Caribbean nurses, so-called “ethnic minorities” in Britain, and Jamaicans both patriate and expatriate. There are already numerous buildings called “Mary Seacole” in Britain and Jamaica, and a Mary Seacole Street almost came into existence in London during the 1990s. (4) It is not only Seacole’s name that is being invoked; people are also reading her text, or sections of it, since it is widely available in its entirety (Wonderful Adventures has been issued at least three times since Alexander and Dewjee’s 1984 edition) and in excerpted form. Moreover, there is a growing canon of critical literature about Seacole and her autobiography, and well-known scholars such as Moira Ferguson and Simon Gikandi have tackled the thorny question of Seacole’s national, cultural and racial identifications–a question on which I wish to focus here. Certainly, Seacole has been adopted by different groups both inside and outside the academy, and she has been made to stand for (not always complementary) national, racial and cultural causes. Is there something about Seacole’s text that lends itself to these multiple interpretations? Why does “Seacole” mean so many different things to so many different people? Both in the country of her birth (Jamaica) and the country she adopted (Britain), Seacole is a national heroine, and yet sometimes it does seem as though the Seacole text (by which I mean Wonderful Adventures, as well as reconstructions of “Mary Seacole” by different generations of critics) is being pulled in quite different directions. Can Seacole be “black,” “British,” and “Jamaican” at the same time? If these ontological vectors are in fact compatible, then is it important for contemporary readers and critics to take into account how Seacole constructed herself; or how she was constructed by her nineteenth-century contemporaries?…

…Reading Wonderful Adventures as a transcultural autoethnography in conjunction with the responses of Seacole’s nineteenth-century critics to both author and text will yield broader insights into the construction and representation of “mixed race” women, both now and in Seacole’s era. My analysis of Wonderful Adventures will accordingly draw on the growing cluster of paratexts that has surrounded Seacole’s autobiography since the time of its publication. In particular, I wish to dwell on how Jamaican and British newspaper articles featuring Seacole exemplify Benedict Anderson’s idea of national identity as an imagined, textual community that is linguistically, rather than consanguineously, constructed. It is my hope that such a discussion will contribute to a more wide-ranging investigation into the naming, representation and construction of the “mixed race” female subject in imperial contexts….

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The Silence of Miss Lambe: Sanditon and Fictions of ‘Race’ in the Abolition Era

Eighteenth-Century Fiction
Volume 18, Issue 3 (Spring 2006)
pages 329-353

Sarah Salih, Professor of English
University of Toronto

Although it would be difficult to argue that Sanditon (1817) is “historical” in any immediately obvious sense, it is nonetheless clear that the social history of England is central to Jane Austen’s last, unfinished text. Critics appear to agree that the novel, which, as Warren Roberts points out, was written during a period of social turbulence in England, reflects anxieties about the shift from one socio-economic structure to another. Once a fishing village and agricultural community, Sanditon has been “perverted” into a resort, a “sandy town,” where the sea is an exploitable resource and invalidism is a social activity engaged in by characters who are “urban, rootless, irresponsible and self-indulgent.” As Tony Tanner puts it, “[Sanditon is] a little parable of change—supersession, supplanting, and substitution.” These are certainly accurate characterizations, and yet the majority of the novel’s commentators overlook what Edward Said would call its “geographical problematic,” the fact that the seaside resort is dependent on economic resources from outside—from other areas of England, and, it seems, from England’s Caribbean colonies. I am referring to Miss Lambe, Austen’s only “brown” character—so briefly invoked and so tantalizingly incomplete. Certainly, Miss Lambe does not take up much of Sanditon’s eleven and a half chapters, and as my title suggests, she never utters a word. All the same, the characters’ allusions to the “West India” contingent, along with Miss Lambe’s presence in the text, certainly warrant closer critical attention than they have hitherto received.

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You Have Given Me a Country

Sarabande Books
2010-08-15
208 pages
9 x 6
Paperback ISBN: 13: 978-1-932511-82-6

Neela Vaswani, Teacher in the Master of Fine Arts in Writing Program
Spalding University

You Have Given Me a Country is a mixed-genre exploration of blurred borders, identity, and what it means to be bicultural. Combining memoir, history, and fiction, the book follows the paths of the author’s Irish-Catholic mother and Sindhi-Indian father on their journey towards each other and the biracial child they create. Vaswani’s second full-length work thematically echoes such books as The Color of Water, Running in the Family, or Motiba’s Tatoos, but is entirely unique in approach, voice, and story. The book reveals the self as a culmination of all that went before it, a new weave of two varied, yet ultimately universal backgrounds, that spans continents, generations, languages, wars, and, at the center of it all, family.

Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects

Duke University Press
August 2010
264 pages
21 illustrations
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8223-4591-6
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-4609-8

Christina Sharpe, Associate Professor of English and Director of American Studies
Tufts University

Arguing that the fundamental, familiar, sexual violence of slavery and racialized subjugation have continued to shape black and white subjectivities into the present, Christina Sharpe interprets African Diasporic and Black Atlantic visual and literary texts that address those “monstrous intimacies” and their repetition as constitutive of post-slavery subjectivity. Her illuminating readings juxtapose Frederick Douglass’s narrative of witnessing the brutal beating of his Aunt Hester and Essie Mae Washington-Williams’s declaration of freedom in Dear Senator: A Memoir by the Daughter of Strom Thurmond, as well as the “generational genital fantasies” depicted in Gayl Jones’s novel Corregidora and a firsthand account of such “monstrous intimacies” in the journals of an antebellum South Carolina senator, slave-holder, and vocal critic of miscegenation. Sharpe explores the South African-born writer Bessie Head’s novel Maru—about race, power, and liberation in Botswana—in light of the history of the Khoi San woman Saartje Baartman, who was displayed in Europe as the “Hottentot Venus” in the nineteenth century. Reading Isaac Julien’s film The Attendant, Sharpe takes up issues of representations of slavery, display, and the sadomasochism of everyday black life. Her powerful meditation on intimacy, subjection, and subjectivity culminates in an analysis of the black and white silhouettes created by Kara Walker and the subtexts of the critiques leveled against the silhouettes and the artist.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction. Making Monstrous Intimacies: Surviving Slavery, Bearing Freedom
• 1. Gayl Jones’s Corregidora and Reading the “Days That Were Pages of Hysteria”
• 2. Bessie Head, Saartje Baartman, and Maru Redemption, Subjectification, and the Problem of Liberation
• 3. Isaac Julien’s The Attendant and the Sadomasochism of Everyday Black Life
• 4. Kara Walker’s Monstrous Intimacies
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

Plum Bun: A Novel without a Moral

Beacon Press
Published in 1929
408 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-080700919-2
Size: 5-3/8″ X 8″ Inches

Jessie Redmon Fauset

Written in 1929 at the height of the Harlem Renaissance by one of the movement’s most important and prolific authors, Plum Bun is the story of Angela Murray, a young black girl who discovers she can pass for white. After the death of her parents, Angela moves to New York to escape the racism she believes is her only obstacle to opportunity. What she soon discovers is that being a woman has its own burdens that don’t fade with the color of one’s skin, and that love and marriage might not offer her salvation.

The Tapestry of Walter White’s Contradictions [Book Review]

Sewanee Review
Volume 118, Number 3, Summer 2010
pages lxxxii-lxxxiv
E-ISSN: 1934-421X
Print ISSN: 0037-3052

Sanford Pinsker, Emeritus Professor of English
Franklin and Marshall College, Lancaster, Pennsylvania

Tom Dyja. “Walter White: The Dilemma of Black identity in America”.  The Library of African American Biography.  Lanham, Maryland: Ivan R. Dee Publishsers, 2008.  224 pp.. (hardcover).  ISBN1-56663-766-X / 978-1-56663-766-4.

In the early stages of his campaign for the presidency, many blacks regarded Barack Obama as too “white”; later many whites regarded him as too “black.” To his credit the biracial Obama presented himself as a mainstream American—and, more than that, as an exemplar of the postracial age. He did not play the race card although others, alas, did. No doubt there are still many folks, most of them over sixty, who are as ignorant, as mean-spirited, and as prejudiced as were their forefathers. Racial identity, always complicated, always contentious, is a current that alternates between how people are defined by others and how they define themselves.

The now nearly forgotten Walter White (1893–1955) belongs to an earlier time when lynching was commonplace in the Jim Crow South, and when the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People spent much of its time trying to get federal antilynching laws passed. Because White was fair-skinned—and had blond hair and blue eyes to boot—he could not only “pass” for white, but also play the trickster in the bargain: White would amble into a small southern town, posing as an insurance salesman (which he had, in fact, been for the black-owned Standard Life Insurance Company) and engage the locals in conversation about a recent local lynching. For their part the rednecks were happy to oblige, often bragging about what had occurred in bloodcurdling…

Read or purchase the review here.

1111 ENG 126: Racial Passing, Black and White

The College of Saint Rose
Albany, New York
Fall 2009

Eurie Dahn, Assistant Professor of English

In this course, we will analyze depictions of racial passing in American literature. In particular, we will examine narratives where African Americans “pass” for white and vice versa. While the popularity of passing as a historical phenomenon is debatable, it is incontestably a source of literary richness. This course is also about interraciality and the meaning of race itself, as the possibility of passing exposes hidden ambiguities and anxieties about race in the United States. Texts we will read may include those by Jessie Fauset, Nella Larsen, James Weldon Johnson, Mark Twain, and Walter Mosley. This is a discussion-based course, so come prepared to participate. Fulfills diversity requirement.