Mixed Race Studies

‘Black Is’ and ‘Black Ain’t’: Performative Revisions of Racial ‘Crisis’

Culture, Theory and Critique
Volume 47, Issue 2 (2006)
Pages 149-163
DOI: 10.1080/14735780600961619

Nadine Ehlers, Assistant Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies
Georgetown University

Race is rigorously policed through, and predicated on, a crisis of maintaining a claim to supposed racial ontology. The language of crisis pervades race; yet crisis is only brought into focus—shows itself—when racial ontology is called into question or threatened as an axiomatic reality. This essay argues, however, that it is crisis, in the form of the imperative regulatory call to race or the intricate operations of racialising discipline that constitutes raced subjects. The crisis is one of belonging or of successfully representing a ‘racial truth’. The objective of this analysis is to demonstrate that it is when race is viewed as performative that crisis becomes evident as the ever-present condition of racial identity formation. From this vantage point, the concept of crisis as a point of danger can be revised to be seen as a turning point when an important change can take place: then, crisis might be envisaged as a positive means through which to imagine and realise new enactments of racial being.

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Retroactive phantasies: discourse, discipline, and the production of race

Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture
Volume 14, Issue 3 (2008)
Pages 333-347
DOI: 10.1080/13504630802088219

Nadine Ehlers, Assistant Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies
Georgetown University

The present inquiry considers how the practice and notion of race can be figured as a type of discipline that functions to achieve the subjection of the individual—to form the individual as a racial subject. Focusing on the constructions of blackness and whiteness within US racial rhetoric, and engaging the work of Michel Foucault and Judith Butler, I propose that racial identity is a retroactive phantasy that is always conditional on the subject enacting the very power that marks them: the formation and maintenance of subjectivity is premised on the individual being formed and forming themselves in relation to a normalized identity site and is, thus, always an action. Precisely due to this necessity to act, and to the incoherence of power, innovative acts of anti-discipline re-negotiate the ways in which racial subjectivity is lived and realized.

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Prologue: the riddle of race

Patterns of Prejudice
Volume 45, Issue 1 & 2 (Special Issue: Obama and Race) (2011)
Pages 4-14
DOI: 10.1080/0031322X.2011.563141

Emily Bernard, Associate Professor of English and ALANA [African Americans, Latinos/as, Asian Americans and Native Americans] US Ethnic Studies
University of Vermont

James Vellacott, ‘President Obama shakes the hand of PC Michael Zamora on the way into Number 10’, London, 1 April 2009. Credit: Mirrorpix.

Bernard explores the myth of racelessness as it is currently circulating in American social discourse. The election of the first black American president has unleashed the term across the cultural landscape, from the mainstream media to the classrooms in which she teaches African American literature. Students use the term as a twenty-first-century incarnation of the civil rights-era concept of colour blindness. But racelessness does not represent an aspiration for equality as much as it represents an ambition to turn away from the realities of difference. It is code for a common ambition to avoid the realities of institutional racial inequalities, as well as personal experiences of cultural difference. The myth of racelessness intersects uncomfortably with current academic discourse that promotes the view of race as a social construction. Scientifically proven and irrefutably true, this discourse does not allow any room for the social experience of race and racial difference as it is lived by everyone every day, whether we like it or not. The election of President Barack Obama is a portal on to this current confusion about the concept of race, specifically, and blackness, in particular. Many pundits have speculated that Obama would not have been electable if he had had dark skin, if he were irrefutably black, in colour and culture. The fact that he himself has elected to call himself ‘black’ serves as the platform of Bernard’s essay on the case of race in the United States.

Post black

A classroom at an Ivy League university. A black professor at the helm. The audience, a palette of skin colours. Black, white and brown bodies have come here for answers: answers to the puzzle of race.

The professor calls herself African American but she was born in Italy, not in the United States, and has she never been to Africa. Her racial identity is born of a sense of affinity; it is, essentially, a choice. Because her skin is brown, no one questions this choice. Everyone in this room, in fact, equates this affinity with authority, which is why her lecture on the meaning of race goes unchallenged.

Today, the professor is not really talking about race, but not-race. She tells us, her multicoloured audience, that race no longer holds meaning, that it never held meaning, that it is a fiction or, in academic language, a construction.

Most of us, including me, nod our heads. That is, except for one young woman, a student at the law school, who raises her hand and waits to be recognized.

‘Look, I don’t really understand what you mean when you say that “race is a construction”. Race is real, and I know what it is. I’m black. It’s where I’m from and how I live.’

The professor turns to address the woman directly. Her tone is agreeable and her gestures are sympathetic, but her language does not change. She continues to speak in the artful theoretical vocabulary that has brought her to international prominence. She seems as frustrated as the young woman that her words cannot bridge the gulf between them. In the academic world in which I was trained, we were taught to view lived experience with suspicion, and to dismiss emotion as a meaningful category of analysis. Time is up. People stand to speak to the professor, to thank her for her insights and congratulate her on her work, except for the law student, who heads directly for the door.

Such dramas are being played out in classrooms around the country these days, including my own…

…Race is a fiction. When we use it to narrate our experience in the world, we take the easy way out, and neglect other factors that name and place us. The easy way out is a one-way street; our real lives are lived at the intersections, where race meets class meets gender and so on. Inextricably intertwined is what we are; the boundaries to which we pledge ourselves do not exist. Underneath the umbrella of race, categories like gender, sexuality, class, even geography, are also invisibly huddled. Each of these categories contains its own story, a story that intersects with the story of race, but a story that race alone cannot encompass. In other words, a different kind of blackness—a different story—is lived in, say, Northern California than in rural Mississippi. To be gay, black and rich—or straight, white and poor—in these respective places adds more meaning to the experience of race than the term ‘race’ can communicate. Identity honours no borders, neither in language nor in life.

But the fact that race is a fiction does not rob it of meaning. Certainly, race is an invention, but that doesn’t make it untrue…

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How to read Michelle Obama

Patterns of Prejudice
Volume 45, Issue 1 & 2 (Special Issue: Obama and Race) (2011)
Pages 95 – 117
DOI: 10.1080/0031322X.2011.563149

Maria Lauret, Reader in American Studies
University of Sussex, Brighton, United Kingdom

Michelle Obama’s role as the first African American First Lady is more than merely symbolic. Her self-representation as a professional woman, mother and spouse is directed towards a wider representativeness that is new in American political discourse. As a descendant of slaves and slave owners whose American ancestry can be traced back to the 1850s, she can lay claim to an African American legacy that the President lacks. As a result, some of her more controversial statements during the presidential campaign about the black family, class mobility and national pride need to be read in the context of an African American literature and historiography that challenges the American creed of equality, liberty and unconditional love of one’s country. Michelle Obama’s family history, her Princeton undergraduate thesis and her own words in interviews are analysed here in the discursive context of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Richard Powers’s The Time of Our Singing, and Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave-girl, as well as the historiography of the civil rights movement. Such a reading reveals how Michelle Obama’s background weaves the legacy of slavery into the American fabric, and shows that a redemptive construction of American history—in which the success of the civil rights movement of the 1960s and the Obama presidency are taken as fulfilment of the American creed (and of Martin Luther King’s dream)—must be refused if a new national self-definition with African America at its heart is to take its place.

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Although the history of racial passing does not evoke the clearcut ethical responses that we have to slavery it is an important part of the larger story of racism and racial repression in this country. The frequency of passing is further evidence of the fraudulence of race as a meaningful construct for other than divisive exploitation. The experiences of the black Creole men and women that I have focused on are examples of the extreme risks African-Americans born at the turn-of-the-century often felt forced to take to circumvent a poverty that was socially engineered by white supremacists who wanted to preserve decent paying jobs for whites. Therefore, to read the history of “passing” as a tragic mulatto story of self-hatred, or as evidence of a “devil may care,” Caribbean-style multiracial identity in South Louisiana is to misread the history of American race relations…

Arthé A. Anthony, “‘Lost Boundaries’: Racial Passing and Poverty in Segregated New Orleans,” The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association, Volume 36, Number 3 (1995): 310.

“Lost Boundaries”: Racial Passing and Poverty in Segregated New Orleans

The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association
Volume 36, Number 3 (Summer, 1995)
pages 291-312

Arthé A. Anthony, Professor of American Studies, Emeritus
Occidental College, Los Angeles

On sunny summer Sunday afternoons in Harlem
when the air is one interminable ball game
and grandma cannot get her gospel hymns
from the Saints of God in Christ
on account of the Dodgers on the radio,
on sunny Sunday afternoons
when the kids look all new
and far too clean to stay that way,
and Harlem has its
washed-and-ironed-and-cleaned-best out,
the ones who’ve crossed the line
to live downtown
miss you,
Harlem of the bitter dream,
since their dream has
come true.

—Langston Hughes, 1951

Racial passing is a well-known theme in pre-World War II African-American literature. Adrian Piper’s recent essay, “Passing for White, Passing for Black,” is an example of continued interest in the topic. In addition, “passing” is used in cultural studies as a metaphor for masking the real-and most often marginalized-self. This article examines racial passing, with an emphasis on the lives of black Creole women, in relation to the economic impact of racial repression and segregation on black life in New Orleans. My conclusions are drawn, in large part, from an analysis of thirty extensive oral history interviews that I conducted with eighteen women and twelve men born between 1885 and 1905, and living in downtown New Orleans in 1977. Each of the men and women that I interviewed thought of themselves as “Creole,” and participated in the familial and social networks of the city’s black Creole community.

Their occupations and educations were representative of the choices then available in New Orleans. All of them worked, although the kind of work that they did changed over the life cycle; they were primarily cigar makers, seamstresses, skilled craftsmen in the building trades, postal carriers, printers, and school teachers. A few of them attended the city’s private high schools and normal schools, an accomplishment that has to be understood within the context of the limited availability of an education-private or public-for African-Americans at the turn of the century. Many others were forced to terminate their educations, in more than one instance as early as the third grade, to begin working, whereas others finished apprenticeships. Their personal lives were equally varied as reflected in the extended, nuclear and augmented households in which they lived, and their individual experiences with parenting, divorce and remarriage, as well as widowhood and desertion. Most, but not all of them, were Catholics. Despite their individual differences, as a group the Creoles of color that I interviewed shared first-hand experiences with hard work and racial discrimination. The women-a group that has been overlooked in New Orleans historiography-experienced both racial and sexual discrimination.

Each of the men and women I interviewed offered insightful interpretations of the worlds in which they lived. They were all very familiar with the myriad practices of racial passing; although they were not all light-skinned, they all knew of individuals-often a parent, spouse or friend-who had passed. More important than examples of the intricate mechanics of passing were their observations about the reasons individuals did so. Lillian Gelbart Simonet, for example, born in 1904, identified a relationship between passing for white and poverty when she remarked:

There are whole families of these people in New Orleans, (who are not necessarily Creoles), who have just been absorbed and gone to various parts of the country and they’re white. Sometimes you just can’t blame them because they have had a hard time. Creole people, with all of the airs, had a hard time to get along [because] they [the young women] would not be domestics. Some were fortunate enough to get work at El Trelles, a cigar factory . . . and Wallace Marine had a cigar factory . . . they weren’t prepared to do any kind of work that required any kind of education at all because half of them hadn’t finished high school.”

The observations of Mrs. Simonet, a retired public school teacher, call attention to the limited opportunities available to the majority of black Creoles who were poor and uneducated, unlike herself.

In the larger scheme of twentieth-century American race categorization, individuals were either black or white. Individual whites may have had preferences for light-skinned or dark-skinned African-Americans in their employ.  But overall the ethnic and cultural nuances and phenotypical differences that were critical to the intraracial dynamics of the black community were disregarded by whites in the segregated economy of New Orleans in the 1900s-1920s. Many Creoles of Color consequently were willing to accept the risks of passing for white rather than suffer the deteriorating material and social conditions endured by persons living and working as “colored.”…

…Although the history of racial passing does not evoke the clearcut ethical responses that we have to slavery it is an important part of the larger story of racism and racial repression in this country. The frequency of passing is further evidence of the fraudulence of race as a meaningful construct for other than divisive exploitation. The experiences of the black Creole men and women that I have focused on are examples of the extreme risks African-Americans born at the turn-of-the-century often felt forced to take to circumvent a poverty that was socially engineered by white supremacists who wanted to preserve decent paying jobs for whites. Therefore, to read the history of “passing” as a tragic mulatto story of self-hatred, or as evidence of a “devil may care,” Caribbean-style multiracial identity in South Louisiana is to misread the history of American race relations…

Read or purchase the article here.

Racial Imperatives: Discipline, Performativity, & Struggles against Subjection

Indiana University Press
2011-12-23
236 pages
Paper 6 x 9
ISBN: 978-0-253-22336-4

Nadine Ehlers, Professor
Department of Sociology and Social Policy
University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia

Nadine Ehlers examines the constructions of blackness and whiteness cultivated in the U.S. imaginary and asks, how do individuals become racial subjects? She analyses anti-miscegenation law, statutory definitions of race, and the rhetoric surrounding the phenomenon of racial passing to provide critical accounts of racial categorization and norms, the policing of racial behavior, and the regulation of racial bodies as they are underpinned by demarcations of sexuality, gender, and class. Ehlers places the work of Michel Foucault, Judith Butler’s account of performativity, and theories of race into conversation to show how race is a form of discipline, that race is performative, and that all racial identity can be seen as performative racial passing. She tests these claims through an excavation of the 1925 “racial fraud” case of Rhinelander v. Rhinelander and concludes by considering the possibilities for racial agency, extending Foucault’s later work on ethics and “technologies of the self” to explore the potential for racial transformation.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• 1. Racial Disciplinarity
• 2. Racial Knowledges: Securing the Body in Law
• 3. Passing through Racial Performatives
• 4. Domesticating Liminality: Somatic Defiance in Rhinelander v. Rhinelander
• 5. Passing Phantasms: Rhinelander and Ontological Insecurity
• 6. Imagining Racial Agency
• 7. Practicing Problematization: Resignifying Race
• Bibliography
• Index

From Mariage à la Mode to Weddings at Town Hall: Marriage, Colonialism, and Mixed-Race Society in Nineteenth-Century Senegal

The International Journal of African Historical Studies
Volume 38, Number 1 (2005)
pages 27-48

Hilary Jones, Assistant Professor of African History
University of Maryland

The institution of marriage served as the basis for the formation of mixed-race society in Senegal’s coastal towns. In the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, African and Afro-European women called signares entered into temporary marital unions with European merchants and officials stationed on the island of Saint Louis. These marriage practices, known in French as manage a la mode du pays, closely resembled notions of engagement and marriage found among Wolof populations of the mainland. By the early nineteenth century, the mixed-race inhabitants of the islands increasingly combined new concepts of marital exchange and ceremonial practices learned from visiting Catholic priests and European settlers with local marriage traditions. Writing in the 1840s, Abbe David Boilat, a member of the “indigenous clergy” and son of a signare, called for the Christian population to eliminate superstitious practices and abandon manage a la mode du pays. He advised Christian families to base their society on the “sacred ties of marriage” by adhering to marriage contracts that strictly conformed to the expectations of the Catholic Church and the requirements of the French state. By the establishment of Third Republic France in 1870, Senegal’s “mulatto” population no longer followed the marital practices of their foremothers but rather insisted on marital unions sanctioned by the Church and considered legal according to French civil law. For these families, the ritual ot declaring the intention to be married at town hall and having an officer of the civil state record it in the civil registry became an integral part of the marriage ceremony.

What accounted for this shift? How and why did men and women of mixed racial ancestry coming of age in late nineteenth-century Senegal develop new marriage strategies? A number of scholars have examined the formation and development of urban and coastal societies in British West Africa. These studies…

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Walking in Two Worlds: Mixed-Blood Indian Women Seeking Their Path

Caxton Press
2006
264 pages
6 x 9
Paper ISBN: 0-87004-450-8

Nancy M. Peterson

Nancy M. Peterson tells the stories of mixed-blood women who, steeped in the tradition of their Indian mothers but forced into the world of their white fathers, fought to find their identities in a rapidly changing world.

In an era when most white women had limited opportunities outside the home, these mix-blood women often became nationally recognized leaders in the fight for Native American rights. They took the tools and training whites provided and used them to help their people. They found differing paths—medicine, music, crafts, the classroom, the lecture hall, the stage, the written word—and walked strong and tall.

These women did far more than survive; they extended a hand to help their people find a place in a hard new future.

Cave Canem Prize Winner Iain Haley Pollock: An Interview

Michigan Quarterly Review
February 2011

Dilruba Ahmed

Meet Iain Haley Pollock: Philadelphia-based poet, English teacher at Chestnut Hill Academy, and co-host with his partner Naomi of an occasional culinary smackdown based on “Iron Chef.”  Iain’s first book of poems, Spit Back a Boy, won the 2010 Cave Canem Poetry Prize and will be published in June 2011 by the University of Georgia Press.  I conducted the following interview with Iain via e-mail, but you might imagine the ambient noise of Hobbes Coffeshop in Swarthmore, PA, where Iain and I have met from time to time to talk about poems:  a whirring espresso machine and clattering mugs.  Fork tines clinking into bowls of an elusive truffled macaroni that suddenly disappeared from the local menu.  The tap-tap of Iain adding more ketchup* to his macaroni.  And amid the clamor of the everyday, the sound of Iain reading aloud a remarkable poem called “Chorus of X, the Rescuers’ Mark,” a poem that I am thrilled to share here in an audio clip as part of this interview, along with Iain’s comments on the major preoccupations of his manuscript, poetic inspiration and form, and the recent controversy over Tony Hoagland’s poem, “The Change.”
 
Tell us a bit about the book’s evolution.  When did you begin these poems? Did you envision them as part of a manuscript when you began, or did some themes and threads emerge as your work unfolded?

Well, I’m a grandiose sum’bitch, so I think of poems (and evolution) in terms of space and time.  While the places I’d lived before–Southern California, D.C., Utica, Boston–factored into the content of poems, they were all written in Syracuse, Greensburg, Pa. and Philadelphia.  And the poems are located in time between the first Portuguese incursions into Africa and waiting, about two years ago, for my partner Naomi to come home from work.  In writing about moments along this continuum, I was drawn to the presence of history in the daily and of the daily in history.
 
I never thought of the poems as a cohesive manuscript–I aimed for “best words, best order”–but was surprised to see themes emerge from my preoccupations of the past several years: race mixing, death, and marriage…

…In “Port of Origin: Lancaster,” you write of a speaker who knows of his “black mother’s blood” as well as his “white father’s city.” Is this speaker twice exiled, so to speak? How does your speaker grapple with his hybrid identity (if that’s an accurate description)? In the “The Recessive Gene,” for example, we see him attempt to “scrape” his way to a new complexion.

Someone once called me a “hybrid” at a party. Made me proud to have such an obviously small carbon footprint, but the intent was likely to package me into the de rigueur post-colonial theory of the moment. I’ll leave to the critics any thoughts about the Calibanic nature of my speakers. I’m hoping that in the poems about mixed-race identity that mixed-race folks see some of their own experience in the poems, and that other folks find a reflection of any doubleness in their own identity…

Read the entire article here.