Racial Passing: Masking Culture and Identity in America (HUM-596)

Posted in Course Offerings, Media Archive, Passing, United States on 2017-03-07 01:49Z by Steven

Racial Passing: Masking Culture and Identity in America (HUM-596)

San Diego State University
San Diego, California
Spring 2017

Michael Caldwell, Lecturer

New Course This Spring in Humanities!

It is a curious fact that in contemporary culture African Americans are often imitated by non-African Americans. Yet there was a time in American history when African Americans who could, chose to pass as white. What historical and social circumstances made such a choice possible? What does that choice suggest about the nature of identity: is it inherited or can we literally make of ourselves what we wish? What are the limits to self-construction? Though this course begins by looking at instances of African American passing, it moves forward to consider other assimilationist stances in American history, as well as more recent, strident efforts to resist assimilation. Throughout the course our goal will be to think hard about the factors that go into making and refining one’s identity.

For more information, click here.

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Building Multiracial Fortunes: Black Identity, Masculinity, and Authenticity Through the Body of T. Thomas Fortune, 1883-1907

Posted in Biography, Dissertations, History, Media Archive, United States on 2012-03-01 04:23Z by Steven

Building Multiracial Fortunes: Black Identity, Masculinity, and Authenticity Through the Body of T. Thomas Fortune, 1883-1907

San Diego State University
Fall 2011
69 pages

Guy Mount

A Thesis Presented to the Faculty of San Diego State University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts in History

This thesis examines the post-emancipation formation of African American identity, masculinity, and authenticity through the white skinned, multiracial body of T. Thomas Fortune, the premier African American newspaper editor of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. It argues that multiracial African American men like Fortune were central to the collective construction of an authentic black male identity between 1883 and 1907. Often functioning as foil characters in elaborate racial performances which characterized them as less authentic, less masculine, and more subject to racial disloyalty, Fortune and others who visually presented a racially ambiguous body challenged this narrowly drawn and internally imposed paradigm of orthodox black male authenticity while resisting its implications.

Emerging from chattel slavery in Florida and surviving a particularly violent strand of Reconstruction in Marianna County, Fortune relocated to New York City where he harnessed the power of the press to fight white racism and eventually enter the debates over a rapidly crystallizing image of black masculinity. In doing so he attempted to inscribe an alternative political meaning to interracial sexuality, the bodies of white skinned African Americans, and indeed, the very notion of authentic black manhood itself. All of these projects were informed by Fortune’s deeply rooted anxiety regarding his own white skinned body and what it signified within the black community.

Ultimately this formulation and the ongoing struggle over the meaning of blackness, was acted out by Fortune and others at the expense of black women. This process of defining black authenticity and black manhood effectively established a firm patriarchal order within elite African American discourse as it attempted to assert black manhood by controlling the sexualized bodies of black women while silencing their voices in the public sphere. In this way, white skinned African American male bodies can serve as a useful example of the complex problematic of what it means to be a gendered black subject in early Jim Crow America. What emerges, in the end, are complicated, dynamically engaged subjects trying to grasp at an authentic, stable identity that was always shifting, transforming, and at times, vanishing from sight.

The four chapters found here cover topics such as the emerging black nationalist movement, segregated insane asylums, the interracial marriage of Frederick Douglass to Helen Pitts in 1884, and the internal debates over the use of the terms ‘Negro,’ ‘colored,’ or ‘Afro-American’ to self-identify African Americans. Methodologically this thesis draws inspiration from Lacanian psychoanalysis, the linguistic work of Jacques Derrida, and the conception of the body, sexuality, and decentralized power networks as envisioned by Michel Foucault.

Read the entire thesis here.

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