The Optics of Interracial Sexuality in Adrian Tomine’s Shortcomings and Sherman Alexie’s The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven

Posted in Articles, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Native Americans/First Nation, United States on 2016-06-23 19:45Z by Steven

The Optics of Interracial Sexuality in Adrian Tomine’s Shortcomings and Sherman Alexie’s The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven

College Literature
Volume 41, Number 1, Winter 2014
pages 119-148
DOI: 10.1353/lit.2014.0004

Jolie A. Sheffer, Associate Professor, English and American Culture Studies
Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, Ohio

This essay focuses on the racial and sexual politics undergirding interracial relationships between men of color and white women. Alexie and Tomine’s works reveal how legal and cinematic histories of interracial romance continue to shape ethnic men’s sense of individual and community identity. An example of comparative ethnic-studies scholarship, this essay explores how minority subjects in the US are shaped by distinct racial logics. Alexie’s collection reflects the influence of the cinematic tropes of the Western and the history of US government attempts to weaken tribal ties on contemporary Native American male characters. Tomine’s graphic novel reveals the racial and sexual conventions of mainstream pornography and the individualist logic of the model minority myth on Asian-American men. Both authors suggest that queerness functions as an alternative ethical relation between parties, one grounded in equality rather than domination and relatively free of the visual logic of racialization.

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Intertextual Links: Reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin in James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man

Posted in Articles, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, United States on 2013-01-29 02:20Z by Steven

Intertextual Links: Reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin in James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man

College Literature
Volume 40, Number 1, Spring 2013
pages 121-138
DOI: 10.1353/lit.2013.0004

Robin Miskolcze, Associate Professor of English
Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, California

Though literary critics of James Weldon Johnson’s 1912 The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man convincingly regard the novel as reminiscent of the slave narrative, few readers have considered the scope and significance of Johnson’s reference to a major best-selling literary predecessor: Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Johnson’s explicit reference to Stowe’s 1852 novel early in his story solicits a reading of the intertextual links between the two novels. Specifically, I explore how Johnson’s narrator and Stowe’s Uncle Tom are connected by the symbol of the coin necklace, a gift from white men that carries a paternalistic force. In addition to Uncle Tom, I also analyze the similarities between Johnson’s narrator and Stowe’s biracial character, Adolph. Comparing Johnson’s and Stowe’s narrative choices for their biracial characters illustrates the trajectory of cultural politics involved in defining race and normative sexuality from the pre-Civil War years to the early twentieth century.

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“Death by Misadventure”: Teaching Transgression in/through Larsen’s “Passing”

Posted in Articles, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Passing on 2010-11-09 01:23Z by Steven

“Death by Misadventure”: Teaching Transgression in/through Larsen’s “Passing”

College Literature
Volume 37, Number 4
, Fall 2010
pages 120-144
E-ISSN: 1542-4286 Print ISSN: 0093-3139
DOI: 10.1353/lit.2010.0013

Jessica Labbé, Assistant Professor of English and Director of Writing Across the Curriculum
Greensboro College, Greensboro, North Carolina

This article provides college literature teachers with a detailed historical, theoretical, and critical analysis of Larsen’s popular novel. Using bell hooks’ groundbreaking approach to “transgressive” education, as described in Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, the article illustrates the means by which Passing can help teachers achieve hooks’ radical vision of learning. To this end, the author situates Larsen and her novel within an inclusive, kaleidoscopic vision of modernism and folds into this discussion Larsen’s modernist stylistic strategies. Related to these subversive strategies are the critical debates surrounding Larsen’s use/interrogation of “passing,” tragic mulatto, and (potentially) lesbian narratives. In addition to these “transgressive” interpretations of the text, the author reads Clare Kendry as a New Woman anthropologist figure and illustrates how our inability to decipher the cause of her demise is a testament to Larsen’s success as a “transgressive” modernist author.

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The Veils of the Law: Race and Sexuality in Nella Larsen’s Passing

Posted in Articles, Law, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, United States on 2010-09-12 02:29Z by Steven

The Veils of the Law: Race and Sexuality in Nella Larsen’s Passing

College Literature
Volume 22, Number 3 (October 1995)
Race and Politics: The Experience of African-American Literature
pages 50-67

Corinne E. Blackmer, Associate Professor of English
Southern Connecticut State University

When Nella Larsen, then a prominent young writer of the Harlem Renaissance, published her second and final novel, Passing, in 1929, the Supreme Court’s “separate but equal” interpretation of the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) had been law for over thirty years. Plessy turned on the issue of the constitutionality of so-called Jim Crow laws, which mandated racially-segregated facilities for whites and “coloreds” throughout the South. Homer Plessy, a resident of Louisiana who described himself as “seventh-eights Caucasian and one-eighth African blood” (1138), was forcibly rejected, after he refused to leave voluntarily, from the first-class, whites-only section of a railroad car in his home state. Declaring that “the mixture of colored blood was not discernible in him, and that he was entitled to every recognition, right, privilege, and immunity secured to the citizens of the United States of the white race,” Plessy argued that the Louisiana law violated his constitutional rights of habeas corpus, equal protection, and due process. The Supreme Court denied the validity of this reasoning on several counts, among them that various state laws forbade interracial marriage on the grounds, as the State of Virginia later argued unsuccessfully before the Court in Loving v. Virginia (1967), that “Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents … The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.” Second, in an egregious instance of conceptual blurring of categories of persons that implied, without submitting the proposition toloical scrutiny, that white males were intrinsically more ‘adult’ and ‘able’ than non-whites or women, the Court argued that most states had established “segregated” schools “for children of different ages, sexes and colors, and … for poor and neglected children” (Plessy 114). The Court avoided responsibility for promoting institutional racism and established the constitutionality of de jure segregation by stating that “the assumption that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority … is not by reason of anything found in the act, but solely because the colored race chooses to put the construction upon it” (1143). They made an invidious distinction between the cultural and political rights of whites and ‘coloreds’ on the basis of the intrinsic “reasonableness” of long-established cultural practices. Writing for a majority of seven, Justice Henry Brown allowed that while the officers, empowered to judge racial identity by outward appearances might conceivably err in their judgment, the “object of the [Fourteenth] amendment was undoubtedly to enforce the absolute equality of the two races before the law, but in the nature of things it could not have been intended to abolish distinctions based upon color, or to enforce social, as distinguished from political, equality, or a commingling of the two races upon terms unsatisfactory to either” (1140).

In the fifty-eight years between Plessy and the Court’s landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas (1954), which declared separate public facilities based on race inherently unequal,” many African-American authors pursued an actively critical engagement with the convoluted and contradictory terms of racial identity and identification set forth in Plessy. On the one hand, African-American letters faced the onerous burden of proving the cultural worth of black culture to an often doubting, condescending, and largely white audience. On the other hand, the legal decision and the Social Darwinism underlying it provided an unwelcome opportunity to thematize the willful ignorance and blindness informing racial segregation by exploring how racial stigmas were not founded in the “natural” superiority or inferiority of the races but rather constructed through historical prejudices and arbitrary (often illusory) social distinctions. Moreover, since Plessy not only denied the long if publicly unacknowledged history of interracial sexual unions (which had produced, among others, Homer Plessy as subject) but also strengthened existing miscegenation statutes by forbidding the social commingling of the races, narrative treatments of interracial sexual unions featuring characters who “passed” racially became an ideal vehicle through which to explore the inevitable intersection of racism (and, in some cases, sexism) with sexual taboos.

Seen in the light of the legal and cultural assumptions informing its production, Larsen’s Passing, the curious plot of which has thus far eluded satisfactory analysis, becomes a searching exploration and critique of the aesthetic, narrative, and ideological incoherences that confronted Larsen as an urbane African-American woman author who eschewed racial separatism and nineteenth-century racial uplift, rhetoric – which might in part explain why she abandoned her promising literary career after writing this novel.(5) Indeed, Passing, a relatively late example of this topos of American writing, represents both an original reconfiguration of and commentary on more conventional plots of racial “passing,” which typically center on a psychologically and culturally divided “tragic mulatto” figure, in such novels as James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man and Jessie Fauset’s Plum Bun, among others. While these novels offer trenchant critiques of institutional racism, they also emphasize the heavy personal costs of crossing over the color line” and thus in some measure reinforce the consequences of racial division in an equally separatist “national” literature. Passing, in contrast, stresses the interpretive anxieties and sexual paranoias that make convention-bound people reluctant to allow others the freedom to travel freely throughout the many worlds, identities, and sexualities of American society. Larsen’s novel not only explores a legally fraudulent inter racial union in the marriage between Clare Kendry and John Bellew, but also subtly delineates the intraracial sexual attraction of Irene Redfield for Clare, while the former projects her taboo desires for Clare onto her husband Brian. Ironically, Brian Redfield, who the text implies might be homosexual, evinces no sexual interest in women, but Irene nonetheless begins to suspect that Brian and Clare are conducting an illicit, clandestine affair. Since the term “passing” carries the connotation of being accepted for something one is not, the title of the novel serves as a metaphor for a wide range of deceptive appearances and practices that encompass sexual as well as racial “passing.” Focussed principally on the operation of chance and accident as well as the epistemological crises of unknowability that result from self-silencing and self-repression, Larsen’s novel ostensibly passes” for a conventional narrative of racial “passing.” …

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