Mar Gallego 2003: Passing Novels in the Harlem Renaissance: Identity Politics and Textual Strategies. Forum for European Contributions in African American Studies. Münster: Lit Verlag. 214 pp. [Review]

Posted in Articles, Book/Video Reviews, Passing, United States on 2011-05-03 02:50Z by Steven

Mar Gallego 2003: Passing Novels in the Harlem Renaissance: Identity Politics and Textual Strategies. Forum for European Contributions in African American Studies. Münster: Lit Verlag. 214 pp. [Review]

Atlantis: Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies
Volume 26, Number 1 (2004)

Isabel Soto García
Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia  (UNED)

In her wide-ranging and ambitious work Passing Novels in the Harlem Renaissance: Identity Politics and Textual Strategies, Mar Gallego refers to W. E. B. Du Bois’ theory of double consciousness as “influential.” The reference is, at the very least, an understatement. Du Bois’ articulation of the African American experience, famously declared in the opening pages of The Souls of Black Folk (1903), as straddling, or simultaneously occupying, both sides of the perceptual divide—the unremitting sense of “twoness . . . two warring ideals in one dark body (11)”—is arguably the theoretical paradigm against which twentieth century African American expressive culture, particularly written culture, has been interpreted. Robert Stepto, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Paul Gilroy, all prominent late twentieth-century theorists of the experience of New World Africans, explicitly acknowledge an indebtedness to Du Bois. Without the Duboisian precedent, these writers would possibly not have elaborated their respective theories of call-and-response (Stepto 1979), signifying (Gates 1988) and the black Atlantic (Gilroy 1993)—all theories which are predicated on notions and strategies of doubleness; one may assume they would have formulated them differently.

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was born in 1868, one year after the First Reconstruction Act granting, among others, the right to vote to black males in Confederate States. His formative years, then, coincided with this initial period of postbellum optimism and progressive legislation, as well as post-Reconstruction reaction, culminating in such Supreme Court rulings as the notorious “separate but equal” Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896. Where Plessy and other court decisions erected a de jure wall of containment between black and white Americans and encoded the segregationist principle, Du Bois countered with double consciousness, taking the reader as it were beyond the veil—or at least lifting it to reveal what lay on the other side. That a potential white readership be invited to partake of African American consciousness is in and of itself a radically subversive gesture. If we are given the wherewithal to experience reality as an African American (“an American, a Negro”), then Du Bois is making a brazenly transgressive proposition: an invitation to engage in a sort of literary miscegenation.

Miscegenation or, in nineteenth-century terms, amalgamation, is the transgression at the heart of a rich body of writing that coincided with the first third of Du Bois’ life and the period—Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction—that preceded the publication of The Souls of Black Folk. This fiction was coincidentally organized around the literary embodiment—the mulatto—of Duboisian double consciousness, while it similarly subverted the artificial binarism encoded in Plessy. The mulatto genre can be said to date back at least to Louisiana-born Victor Séjour’s short story “Le Mulâtre” (1837), considered the earliest known work of African American fiction. William Wells Brown’s Clotel, or the President’s Daughter: A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States (1853) is held to initiate the genre by an African American writer in English. Clotel is representative of a further, related tradition, that of the passing novel, with its eponymous heroine crossing racial as well as gender lines (gender and racial passing is a frequent trope in antebellum slave narrative: see, for example, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom [1860] and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl [1861]).

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Liminality and Transgression in Langston Hughes’ “Mulatto”

Posted in Articles, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive on 2011-02-21 01:33Z by Steven

Liminality and Transgression in Langston Hughes’ “Mulatto”

Cuadernos de investigación filológica (C.I.F.)
Number 26 (2000)
pages 263-271
ISSN: 0211-0547

Isabel Soto
Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia

This essay explores societal fear of the mulatto as charted by Langston Hughes’ play “Mulatto” (1931).  “Mulatto” dramatizes the demand for social incorporation by a mixed-race young man, Robert Norwood, who suffers a double exclusion: from a white body politic, and from the black community, by virtue of his claim to a white heritage.  I make extensive use of the terms ‘liminal’ and ‘liminality’ (taken from the work of anthropologist Victor Turner) to refer to Robert’s status, his attempts to redraw that status, and the representation of space in the play.  I argue that white characters’, and hence white society’s, refusal to grant Robert access their power structures reveals a complex anxiety or fear of the borderland or liminal creature that is the mulatto, born of transgression (and, in Robert’s case, ultimately a transgressor himself).  I will argue that the play is as much about female agency as it about the danger attendant on the (non-white) exercise of power.

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Boundaries Transgressed: Modernism and miscegenation in Langston Hughes’s “Red-Headed Baby”

Posted in Articles, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, United States on 2010-04-15 22:50Z by Steven

Boundaries Transgressed: Modernism and miscegenation in Langston Hughes’s “Red-Headed Baby”

Atlantic Studies
Volume 3, Issue 1 (April 2006)
pages 97 – 110
DOI: 10.1080/14788810500525499

Isabel Soto

This essay is an expanded and revised version of a paper read at the 8th International Conference On the Short Story in English, organized by the Instituto Universitario de Investigación en Enstudios Norteamericanos, Alcalá de Henares (Spain), 28–31 October 2004.

This essay argues that while Langston Hughes‘s short story “Red-Headed Baby” (from The Ways of White Folks) may initially seem to depart from the Hughes repertoire (through its dizzying modernist style, for one), it ultimately endorses the author’s signature concerns of race, genre transgression and imaginative appropriation of alterity. I also seek to historicize Hughes’s text, inscribing it within a modernist practice, studies of which have traditionally promoted the Euro-American paradigm of a dehistoricized “modernist construction of authorship through displacement” (Cora Kaplan). Few writers of the first third of the twentieth century have undertaken travel—figurative and literal—as intensely as Hughes has. His work is anchored in representations of displacement and “Red-Headed Baby” is no exception, with its miscegenation motif and sailor protagonist. Hence my reading of Hughes’s short story will also draw on modes of inquiry that promote displacement as central to an understanding of cultural practice. I draw substantially on Paul Gilroy‘s black Atlantic model and formulations of diaspora—not least because his influential work barely mentions Hughes, that most diasporic of modernist writers. I will argue that travel was aesthetically enabling for Hughes, enhancing what elsewhere I have termed his poetics of reciprocity or mutuality. Finally, Duboisian double consciousness also contributes to my discussion, which proposes a dialogic relationship between The Souls of Black Folks and The Ways of White Folks.

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