The Flesh of Amalgamation: Reconsidering the Position (and the Labors) of Blackness

Posted in Articles, Book/Video Reviews, History, Media Archive, United States on 2013-07-04 03:12Z by Steven

The Flesh of Amalgamation: Reconsidering the Position (and the Labors) of Blackness

American Quarterly
Volume 65, Number 2, June 2013
pages 437-446
DOI: 10.1353/aq.2013.0021

Tryon P. Woods, Assistant Professor of Sociology, Anthropology, and Crime & Justice Studies
University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth

The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance and the Ruses of Memory.
By Tavia Nyong’o. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2009. 230 pages.

Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracilism.
By Jared Sexton. Minneapolis; University of Minnesota Press, 2008. 345 pages.

The story that cannot be told must not-tell itself in a language already contaminated, possibly irrevocably and fatally. . . . And only in not-telling can the story be told; only in the space where it’s not told—literally in the margins of the text, a sort of negative space, a space not so much of non-meaning as anti-meaning.

NourbeSe Philip

In the postscript to her indomitable poetic treatise on black life and death in the making of the modern world, M. NourbeSe Philip writes of the ongoing mutilation of black humanity through the language of the legal text. She finds, for example, no word for recovering the millions of Africans buried in the “liquid grave” of the Middle Passage: “I find words like resurrect and subaquatic but not ‘exaqua.’ Does this mean that unlike being interred, once you’re underwater there is no retrieval—that you can never be ‘exhumed’ from water?” In the face of this historical cataclysm, Philip uses her poetry to foment a disorder of her own, in search of yet another site of maroonage from what Saidiya Hartman terms slavery’s afterlife. To “release the story that cannot be told,” Philip mutilates the text herself, seeking to “literally cut it into pieces, castrating verbs, suffocating adjectives, murdering nouns, throwing articles, prepositions, conjunctions overboard, jettisoning verbs.”

I find it compelling to consider how Philip’s meditations might extend to the contemporary study of race. Is there an imposition of meaning perpetuating a similar kind of violence on the black subject of critical race studies? Within the American studies community, for instance, there seem to be parallel discussions on race. The primary distinction between these two tracks hinges on what to make of racial blackness, a splitting reminiscent of “the presence of excised Africans” explored by Philip (199). Is blackness but one among a diversity of subjectivities and, historical particulars notwithstanding, essentially no different from these other positions, identities, and experiences in terms of authorizing analyses of suffering and struggle? Or is the rupture that blackness represents so essential to the formation of the social itself that any analysis of violence or injustice that is not centered in, derived from, or accountable to the suffering of African-descended peoples risks missing the crux (as opposed to the totality) of the social formation?

Tavia Nyong’o’s Amalgamation Waltz and Jared Sexton’s Amalgamation Schemes offer answers to these questions that might discomfit many American studies scholars. Indeed, perhaps their interventions into the matter of racial blackness and its place within the various analytic frameworks of American studies scholars has something to do with their heretofore quiet reception. While both books have been duly reviewed in a handful of journals, thus far they have enjoyed only scant critical engagement from American studies scholars. American studies has become a scholarly community that takes pride in its activist bona fides, that foregrounds its commitment to progressive politics, and that positions social justice as central to its avowed raison d’être. With this in mind, I am wondering if this reluctance to engage indexes Philip’s description of “slavery—the story that simultaneously cannot be told, must be told, and will never be told” (206).

In the June 2012 issue of American Quarterly, this two-track discourse on race was on full display. Dylan Rodríguez wrote a gentle indictment of the response to the public spectacle of state violence on November 18, 2011, at the University of California, Davis, when campus police pepper sprayed students engaged in nonviolent civil disobedience as part of the Occupy movement. Rodríguez rightfully contrasts the outrage and moral indignation from left-liberal quarters, which was both national and international because of the viral spread of video footage from the incident across social media, against the UC Davis police with what he calls “a broader, commonsense conspiracy of silence” about the larger logic of racist state violence, for which policing is the most visible and fundamental expression. Rodríguez is careful to include brown with black in the category…

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Where in the World Is Juan—and What Color Is He?: The Geography of Latina/o Racial Identity in Southern California

Posted in Articles, Census/Demographics, Latino Studies, Media Archive, Social Science, United States on 2013-07-02 01:03Z by Steven

Where in the World Is Juan—and What Color Is He?: The Geography of Latina/o Racial Identity in Southern California

American Quarterly
Volume 65, Number 2, June 2013
pages 309-341
DOI: 10.1353/aq.2013.0020

Laura Pulido, Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity
University of Southern California

Manuel Pastor, Professor of Sociology and American Studies and Ethnicity
University of Southern California

Recently there Recently there has been a robust discussion on the question of Latina/o racial subjectivity, particularly whether Latinas/os are more apt to identify as “white” or as people of color. Scholars focused on contemporary identification patterns have examined key variables, including age, education, income, and nativity in an effort to understand Latinas/os’ racial choices. However, dimensions of time and space are frequently unanalyzed. Focusing on the seven-county region of Southern California—home to the United States’ largest concentration of Latinas/os—we use the American Community Survey (2008-10) to consider a range of variables, including spatial and temporal characteristics, to better understand Latina/o, especially Mexican American, racial subjectivity. Focusing on Latinas/os who identify as either “white” or “some other race” and utilizing a regression analysis to isolate the relative impact of each variable, we find that Latinas/os who live in more segregated neighborhoods as well as those who live among a high proportion of Latinas/os, are more likely to identify as “some other race.”

In 1980. for the first time, the US Census Bureau broadly allowed respondents to identity themselves as Latinas/os or Hispanics, in addition to designating their “race.” To the surprise of some, 38 percent of the newly minted Latinas/os rejected the usual race categories, marking “some other race” (SOR) rather than white, black. Asian, or Native American. Thinking that matters might change as respondents became accustomed to the forms. Census authorities grew more concerned when in 1990 43 percent of Latinas/os marked SOR. Believing that the issue might be related to question sequencing—respondents were asked to identify race first, then Hispanicity—the sequence of the questions was reversed in 2000. The logic of the Census Bureau: perhaps once respondents were able to mark the Latina/o identification, they would then be more willing to mark a standard racial category as requested. That year, the percentage of Latinas/os marking SOR stayed relatively steady at 42 percent, with an additional 6 percent choosing a new multirace category. Looked at another way. the share marking “white” fell from 52 percent to 48 percent between 1990 and 2000.

The popularity of the SOR designation should not have been a surprise to Census bureaucrats: Latinas/os, especially ethnic Mexicans, have long been seen as nonwhite in the popular and political imagination, and since the Chicana/o movement many have embraced a nonwhite identity. At the same time, Latinas/os racial subjectivity has attracted considerable scholarly attention over the last decade, including examinations of how “whiteness” may be open to peoples who were previously considered nonwhite (including Asians and Latinas/os), how the multiracial experience affects racial and color identification, and how racial subjectivity is contested within families and communities that seem, at first glance, to be racially similar.  While obviously a matter of academic interest, racial subjectivity also has significant political consequences. Since Latinas/os became the largest “racial minority” in 2000. scholars and activists alike are grappling with how Latinas/os will intersect with the existing…

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The Octoroon and English Opinions of Slavery

Posted in Articles, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Slavery, United Kingdom, United States on 2011-12-17 19:31Z by Steven

The Octoroon and English Opinions of Slavery

American Quarterly
Volume 8, Number 2 (Summer, 1956)
pages 166-170

Nils Erik Enkvist
Akademi Abo, Finland

After his great successes, and notably that of Colleen Bawn, Dion Boucicault became something of a leading figure among English-speaking playwrights, while the critics as well as the public eagerly watched his prolific pen. In the summer of 1861, everyone in London knew he was about to produce his topical play about slavery, which had been so favorably received in the United States. This was indeed a subject well cut out for his cosmopolitan powers; when, after considerable delay, The Octoroon was finally presented at the Adelphi Theatre on Monday, November 18th, 1861, it came as a shock both to the playwright and to the critics that the fifth act was hailed by the audience with many rude noises. The reasons for this were debated at some length in the London papers; they provide a significant insight into Anglo-American relations at that time.

As readers of Professor Quinn’s Representative American Plays will recall, the story of The Octoroon was based upon the fact that a white man could not marry the one-eighth-Negro slave girl he loved. In the original fifth act Zoe had poisoned herself to preserve her maiden purity from the ruffianly overseer who had bought her. It was Zoe’s suicide that finally roused the tempers of the English audience. Possibly they felt cheated, having read in their playbills how Southerners sometimes escaped the predicament of the present hero and heroine by cutting their veins and mixing their blood, which, technically, sufficed to make a colored person of a white man. This hoary stock device was not used, and the tragic impact of the octoroon

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Fixing the Color Line: The Mulatto, Southern Courts, and Racial Identity

Posted in Articles, History, Identity Development/Psychology, Law, Media Archive, Slavery, United States on 2010-03-08 19:36Z by Steven

Fixing the Color Line: The Mulatto, Southern Courts, and Racial Identity

American Quarterly
Volume 53, Number 3 (September 2001)
pages 420-451
E-ISSN: 1080-6490
Print ISSN: 0003-0678
DOI: 10.1353/aq.2001.0033

Teresa Zackodnik, Professor of English
University of Alberta, Canada

In July 1857 Abby Guy sued for her freedom and that of her four children in an Arkansas court. The court records state that Abby Guy had been supporting herself and her children by farming and selling her own crops. The Guy family “passed as free persons”: Abby’s oldest daughter “boarded out” so that she could attend school, and the family “visited among white folks, and went to church, parties, etc.,–[such that one] should suppose they were white.”  Following these accounts of where and how the Guys lived, the court required that the family be presented for physical inspection by the jury, which was to base its decision of whether Abby Guy and her children were black or white, slave or free, on their appearance as well as on any testimony offered: “Here the plaintiffs were personally presented in Court, and the judge informed the jury that they… should treat their… inspection of plaintiffs’ persons as evidence.”  Following their evidentiary “inspection” of the Guy family, the jury was told that the Guys had lived as “free persons” in Arkansas since 1844. In 1855 they moved to Louisiana where a Mr. Daniel “took possession of them as slaves” roughly two years later, claiming that Abby Guy “came with . . . [him] from Alabama to Arkansas” as his slave.  Witnesses for Daniel testified that Abby’s mother, Polly, was said to have been “a shade darker than Abby,” such that they “could not say whether Polly was of African or Indian extraction.”…

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