“Split At The Root”: The Reformation of The Mulatto Hero/Heroine

Posted in Articles, History, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, United States, Women on 2014-05-01 19:13Z by Steven

“Split At The Root”: The Reformation of The Mulatto Hero/Heroine

AmeriQuests (Online)
Vanderbilt University
Volume 6, Number 1
2008-11-18

Tia L. Gafford, Assistant Professor of English and Africana Studies
Mercer University

Frances E. W. Harper’s Iola Leroy offers a valuable insight on the development of a holistic and natural model for patriarchy in the 19th century. Harper combines normally diametrically opposed ideologies of masculinity and femininely in the characters of Dr. Frank Latimer and Iola Leroy who become cultural heros/heroines by embracing a Black consciousness. By addressing what she considers to be a more cohesive productive society, Harper contextualizes the mulatto racial and social visions against the backdrop of the post-Reconstruction South. Within this new radical mixed race, Dr. Latimer and Iola Leroy rescues this normative stereotypical version and redefines them as the pre-cursors of Alain Locke’s “New Negro.” By rejecting whiteness as a mean to emancipate themselves out of an otherwise racial bondage, Iola Leroy and Dr. Latimer embrace the “one drop” rule. By “casting themselves” into the racial “pot,” Harper sets the mulatto up to ideally “work for the people.”

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Coloring History and Mixing Race in Levina Urbino’s Sunshine in the Palace and Cottage and Louise Heaven’s In Bonds

Posted in Articles, History, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Slavery, United Kingdom, United States, Women on 2010-05-17 14:31Z by Steven

Coloring History and Mixing Race in Levina Urbino’s ‘Sunshine in the Palace and Cottage’ and Louise Heaven’s ‘In Bonds’

Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers
Volume 24, Number 2 (2007)
E-ISSN: 1534-0643, Print ISSN: 0748-4321
DOI: 10.1353/leg.2007.0018

Eric Gardner, Professor of English
Saginaw Valley State University, Michigan

While the figure of the “tragic mulatta” is writ large in American literature and literary criticism, this essay shares a recognition most recently advanced by William L. Andrews and Mitch Kachun: “What is remarkable though not always acknowledged . . . is the fact that the majority of beautiful mulattas in American novels before 1865 . . . do not end up unfulfilled” (xliii). Andrews and Kachun note that Metta Victoria Victor’s Maum Guinea, H. L. [Hezekiah Lord] Hosmer’s Adela [The Octooon], John T. Trowbridge’s Neighbor Jackwood, [Thomas] Mayne Reid’s The Quadroon, and E. D. E. N. Southworth’s Retribution feature mixed-race female characters who, though they “must endure a stint in slavery and withstand intimidation by lascivious slave owners and brutal overseers,” “more often than not . . . eventually encounter a northerner or a European on whose love they can rely” (lxv, n. 45; xliii). While it is still too early to make judgments about “the majority”-especially given that Andrews and Kachun’s own work illustrates that we need to be hesitant about assuming any “complete sets”-this essay shares the sense that mixed-race characters who are not “tragic mulattas” have been absent from our discussions for too long.

This absence is complicated by the disproportionately larger presence in our scholarship of archetypal examples of the tragic mulatta type in works such as Lydia Maria Child’s “The Quadroons,” William Wells Brown’s Clotel, and Elizabeth Livermore’s Zoë, even though these works were neither more popular nor exceedingly better than some of the novels noted by Andrews and Kachun. The reasons for this imbalance are complex and beyond the scope of this essay; it may come in part from Child’s early imprint on a vast amount of antislavery literature (including Brown’s story) and in part from the limited senses of racial definition that have dominated much contemporary scholarship. Regardless, the dominance of the figure of the tragic mulatta in our scholarship has limited our consideration of race and racial identity. This imbalance seems to me, for example, to be partially to blame for Lauren Berlant’s dismissal of the full range of types of political efficacy available to mixed-race characters-a formation scholars such as P. Gabrielle Foreman have challenged when applied to Black women’s texts. It has also, among other gaps, led many of us to locate the first real resistance to the figure of the tragic mulatta in works such as Child’s Reconstruction-era Romance of the Republic and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s Iola Leroy.

This essay thus begins by acknowledging that there were several early examples of a discourse of mixed-race heroines running counter to the figure of the tragic mulatta-one in which the mixed-race heroine not only avoids a tragic end but actually embraces her genealogy, uses her visual racial indeterminacy to aid nation-building and self-empowerment, and finds fulfillment in a multi-racial family housed within the larger Black community. Specifically, I examine two previously unknown mixed-race heroines who are ultimately far from tragic-indeed, who seem almost consciously constructed as revisions to the tragic mulatta type. This essay argues that, in different ways, the protagonists of both Levina B. Urbino’s Sunshine in the Palace and Cottage (1854) and Louise Palmer Heaven’s In Bonds (published in 1867 under the pseudonym Laura Preston) explode many of the expectations of the tragic mulatta type. Through this work, I hope to begin to re-imagine the contours of our sense of the mixed-race female character (tragic mulatta and otherwise) in American literature.

I focus on a pair of now unknown novels by now relatively unknown authors for a set of reasons. Both were popular in their day: Sunshine went through four editions (under different titles) in six years, and In Bonds, published in both San Francisco and New York, seems to have launched a successful if spotty career. Both have publication circumstances of interest to students of race: the publisher of Sunshine’s fourth edition (which carried the entirely new title The Home Angel) was Thayer and Eldridge, who also contracted to publish Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl before bankruptcy forestalled their doing so; the publisher of In Bonds founded the Overland Monthly and was a colleague of Mark Twain (who would, of course, write works key to considerations of race in American literature). Indeed, both books demonstrate a rich awareness of the literary discourses of race and race-mixing swirling around them. Though evidence about their composition is lacking, Sunshine repeatedly invokes and rewrites the language of the tragic mulatta figure, while In Bonds actually makes specific reference to Uncle Tom’s Cabin as part of the driving force in the novel’s plot (128-29). Though both novels and both authors are absent from contemporary critical work, Sunshine and In Bonds offer fascinating counterpoints to the dominant sense of the figure of the tragic mulatta and presage works that critics have treated as more revolutionary, such as Child’s Romance of the Republic and Harper’s Iola Leroy. Indeed, both Sunshine and (albeit a bit less so) In Bonds suggest that a mixed-race heroine who overcomes potential tragedy is central to America’s future…

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Mixed-Race Issues in the American and French Melodrama: An Analysis of the Imitation of Life Films (Stahl, USA, 1934; Sirk, USA, 1959) and Métisse (Kassovitz, France, 1993)

Posted in Arts, Books, Chapter, Europe, Media Archive, United States, Women on 2010-01-29 18:19Z by Steven

Mixed-Race Issues in the American and French Melodrama: An Analysis of the Imitation of Life Films (Stahl, USA, 1934; Sirk, USA, 1959) and Métisse (Kassovitz, France, 1993) In: Martin McLoone & Kevin Rockett, eds. Irish Films, Global Cinema, Studies in Irish Film 4.

Four Courts Press
2007
176 pages
Hardback ISBN: 978-1-84682-081-6

Zélie Asava
University College Dublin

The chapter analyses the positionalities of the mixed-race female protagonists of each film and the visualisation of their mixed-race identity.  It considers aspects of their struggle for self-definition against the director’s visual clues about their ‘true’ racial space.  It also explores the possibility in these films for a representation of mixed identity that surpasses the stereotypes of the ‘tragic mulatto’ torn between black and white worlds (as represented by mothers in the American films and lovers/parents in the French film).  Finally the article – as with my thesis – considers the limitations of American cinema in transcending binaried representations of race and the alternatives which French cinema offers, in order to consider the possibility for a mixed-race representative model which would visualise the multiplicity and ‘Third Space’, as Homi K. Bhabha put it, of mixed-race identity.

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The Dismissal of the “Mulatto”…

Posted in Excerpts/Quotes, Identity Development/Psychology on 2009-11-18 19:15Z by Steven

The dismissal of the “mulatto” through his emasculation is historically grounded: “so frequently did nineteenth century writers depict octoroons as delicate beauties that the word itself began to conjure up images of passive femininity. Although by definition an octoroon was either a male or a female with one-eighth Black blood, Black men in novels were rarely described as such.” There is, of course, an immense bibliography of work (primary and secondary) concerning the “tragic mulatto” as a typically female protagonist, who is unable to find her place in society because of her biracial heritage. This displacement has sexual implications, explains Cynthia Nakashima: “[b]ecause of the structure of power and domination in the American gender system… weakness and vulnerability can be very exciting and attractive when applied to females.” Although the mulatta narratives are intended to evoke sympathy, they often culled readerly desire instead.

Dunning, Stefanie. “Demystifying the Tragic Mulatta: The Biracial Woman as Spectacle.Stanford Black Arts Quarterly 2.3 (Summer/Spring 1997). 12-14.

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Demystifying the “Tragic Mulatta”: the Biracial Woman as Spectacle

Posted in Articles, Autobiography, Identity Development/Psychology, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Women on 2009-11-14 02:25Z by Steven

Demystifying the “Tragic Mulatta”: the Biracial Woman as Spectacle

Stanford Black Arts Quarterly
Stanford University
2.3 (Summer/Spring 1997)
Pages 12-14

Stafanie Dunning, Associate Professor and Director of Literature Program
Miami University, Ohio

“You know redbone girls got a problem.” —Cassandra Wilson, Blue Light ‘Til Dawn

“Indigenous like corn, like corn the mestiza is a product of crossbreeding, designed for preservation under a variety of conditions. Like an ear of corn, a female seed-bearing organ—the mestiza is tenacious, tightly wrapped in the husks of her culture.  Like kernels she clings to the cob; with thick stalks and strong brace roots, she holds tight to the earth—she will survive the crossroads.” — Anzaldua, Gloria. “La conciencia de la mestiza: Towards a New Consciousness.” in Making Face, Making Soul, Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Feminists of Color. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1990.

“They had splendid eyes, dark, luminous and languishing; lovely complexions and magnificent hair. — Harper, Francis. Iola Leroy. (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1988) p. 48.

 

To talk about the complexities of subjectivity is to enter into a discussion which necessarily locates itself at the intersection of race, clans, gender and sexuality. When thinking about my own subjective position, I am confronted by constructions that simultaneously identify, name, abridge and abstract me. Sometimes they help guide my thoughts about myself; at other times, they limit my thinking, reducing me to general categories of color, class, and desire. My present task, interrogation of a biracial subject position, is as much a gender discussion as it is a racial one. My investments in this discussion are deep; I am writing theoretically and distantly about myself— looking for truths about biraciality that I recognize in the words of other theorists, hoping to trace for myself and my audience one thread within a complex, unraveling cultural text. I am not interested here with how biracial subjects manage their subjectivites; such an approach inherently positions biraciality as problematic, the historical consideration of which falls beyond the scope of this project. Instead I will explore the way biracial subjectivity is gendered through its construction.

Women are the primary signifiers of miscegenation in literature and film. Likewise, the critical discourse on biraciality foregrounds the “tragic mulatta.” Yet, theorists regularly circumvent the issue of gender and theories lack interrogation of the point at which race and gender meet to sign biraciality. Visibility, i.e. what biracial people “look” like, makes up a significant part of biracial women’s experiences with uniracial onlookers. Moreover, visibility informs biracial women’s response to the uniracial “gaze.”  This paper posits that biraciality is read differently “along gender lines.” While discourses about “mulattos” efface biracial men, biracial women are discursively foregrounded as “exotic.” Effectively, biraciality is inscribed with a specifically female status: the desire of ‘uniracial’ onlookers to exoticize biracial women inform the “gaze” which casts biracial women, “spectacle.”…

Read the entire article here.

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Passing

Posted in Books, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Novels, Passing, Women on 2009-10-26 20:23Z by Steven

Passing

W. W. Norton & Company
September 2007
584 pages
5.2 × 8.4 in
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-393-97916-9

Nella Larsen

Edited by

Carla Kaplan, Davis Distinguished Professor of American Literature
Northeastern University

Nella Larsen is a central figure in African American, Modernist, and women’s literature.

Larsen’s status as a Harlem Renaissance woman writer was rivaled by only Zora Neale Hurston’s. This Norton Critical Edition of her electrifying 1929 novel includes Carla Kaplan’s detailed and thought-provoking introduction, thorough explanatory annotations, and a Note on the Text. An unusually rich “Background and Contexts” section connects the novel to the historical events of the day, most notably the sensational Rhinelander/Jones case of 1925. Fourteen contemporary reviews are reprinted, including those by Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Mary Griffin, and W. E. B. Du Bois. Published accounts from 1911 to 1935—by Langston Hughes, Juanita Ellsworth, and Caleb Johnson, among others—provide a nuanced view of the contemporary cultural dimensions of race and passing, both in America and abroad. Also included are Larsen’s statements on the novel and on passing, as well as a generous selection of her letters and her central writings on “The Tragic Mulatto(a)” in American literature. Additional perspective is provided by related Harlem Renaissance works. “Criticism” provides fifteen diverse critical interpretations, including those by Mary Helen Washington, Cheryl A. Wall, Deborah E. McDowell, David L. Blackmore, Kate Baldwin, and Catherine Rottenberg. A Chronology and Selected Bibliography are also included.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction
A Note on the Text
The Text of Passing
Backgrounds and Contexts
REVIEWS

  1. Mary Rennels – “Passing” Is Novel of Longings (April 27, 1929)
  2. Beyond the Color Line (April 28, 1929)
  3. Margaret Cheney Dawson – The Color Line (April 28, 1929)
  4. The Dilemma of Mixed Race: Another Study of Color-line in New York (May 1, 1929)
  5. Alice Dunbar-Nelson – As In a Looking Glass (May 3, 1929)
  6. W. B. Seabrook – Touch of the Tar-brush (May 18, 1929)
  7. Esther Hyman – Passing by Nella Larsen (June 1929)
  8. Aubrey Bowser – The Cat Came Back (June 5, 1929)
  9. Mary Griffin – Novel of Race Consciousness (June 23, 1929)
  10. W. E. B. Du Bois – Passing (July 1929)
  11. Mary Fleming Larabee – Passing (August 1929)
  12. Do They Always Return? (September 28, 1929)
  13. “M. L. H.” – Passing (December 1929)
  14. Passing (December 12, 1929)

CONTEMPORARY COVERAGE OF PASSING AND RACE

  1. When Is a Caucasian Not a Caucasian? (March 2, 1911)
  2. [Publisher’s Preface to the 1912 Edition of Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man]
  3. Writer Says Brazil Has No Color Line (October 1925)
  4. Blood Will Tell (July 24, 1926)
  5. Don Pierson – Does It Pay to “Pass?” (August 20, 1927)
  6. Juanita Ellsworth – White Negroes (May-June 1928)
  7. Lewis Fremont Baldwin – From From Negro to Caucasian, Or How the Ethiopian Is Changing His Skin (1929)
  8. Emilie Hahn – Crossing the Color Line (July 28, 1929)
  9. Caleb Johnson – Crossing the Color Line (August 26, 1931)
  10. Langston Hughes – Passing for White, Passing for Colored, Passing for Negroes Plus (1931)
  11. 75,000 Pass in Philadelphia Every Day (December 19, 1931)
  12. Careful Lyncher! He May Be Your Brother (January 21, 1932)
  13. Blonde Girl Was ‘Passing‘ (January 23, 1932)
  14. Swedish Negro Baby! (April 28, 1932)
  15. Virginia Is Still Hounding ‘White’ Negroes Who ‘Pass’ (June 29, 1935)

THE RHINELANDER/JONES CASE

  1. Mark J. Madigan – Miscegenation and “the Dicta of Race and Class”: The Rhinelander Case and Nella Larsen’s Passing (1990)
  2. Selected newspaper articles on the case (list pending)

AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND BIOGRAPHY

  1. About Nella Larsen
  2. Miss Nella Larsen Bids for Literary Laurels (May 12, 1928)
  3. Thelma E. Berlack – New Author Unearthed Right Here in Harlem (May 23, 1928)
  4. Mary Rennels – Behind the Backs of Books and Authors (April 13, 1929)
  5. [Letter about Nella Larsen] Jean Blackwell Hutson to Louise Fox (August 1, 1969)
  6. Thadious M. Davis – Nella Larsen’s Harlem Aesthetic (1989)
  7. George Hutchinson – Nella Larsen and the Veil of Race (1997)
  8. Larson on birth, Passing, and death
  9. Davis on birth, Passing, and death
  10. Hutchinson on birth, Passing, and death

Author’s Statements

  1. Nella Larsen Imes, “Author Statement,” 1926
  2. Nella Larsen Imes, Guggenheim Application
  3. [In Defense of Sanctuary]

Letters

  1. To Carl Van Vechten [1925]
  2. To Charles S. Johnson [August 1926]
  3. To Eddie Wasserman
  4. To Eddie Wasserman
  5. To Dorothy Peterson
  6. To Dorothy Peterson
  7. To Dorothy Peterson
  8. To Dorothy Peterson
  9. To Langston Hughes
  10. To Gertrude Stein
  11. To Carl Van Vechten
  12. To Carl Van Vechten

THE TRAGIC MULATTO(A)

  1. Lydia Maria Child – The Quadroons (1842)
  2. Williams Wells Brown– From Clotel (1853)
  3. Frances Harper – From Iola Leroy (1892)
  4. William Dean Howells – From An Imperative Duty (1892 or 83?)
  5. Kate Chopin – The Father of Désirée’s Baby (1893)
  6. Mark Twain – From Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894)
  7. Charles Chesnutt – From The House behind the Cedars (1900)
  8. Georgia Douglass Johnson – The Octoroon (1922)
  9. Countee Cullen – Near White (1925)
  10. Langston Hughes – Mulatto (1927)
  11. Fannie Hurst – From Imitation of Life (1933)

SELECTED WRITINGS ABOUT PASSING

  1. Frank Webb – From The Gairies and Their Friends (1852)
  2. Frances Harper – From Iola Leroy (1892)
  3. Charles Chesnutt – From House behind the Cedars (1900)
  4. James Weldon Johnson – From Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912)
  5. Jessie Redmon Fauset – The Sleeper Wakes (1920)
  6. Countee Cullen – Two Who Crossed a Line (1925)
  7. Walter White – From Flight (1926)
  8. Jessie Redmon Fauset – From Plum Bun (1928)
  9. Rudolph Fisher – From The Walls of Jericho (1928)
  10. George S. Schuyler – From Black No More (1931)
  11. Langston Hughes – Passing (1934)

SELECTED WRITINGS FROM THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE

  1. Joseph Seamon Cotter, Jr. – The Mulatto to His Critics (1918)
  2. Countee Cullen – Heritage (1925)
  3. W. E. B. Du Bois – Criteria of Negro Art (1926)
  4. Nella Larsen [Pseud. Allen Semi] – Freedom (1926)
  5. George S. Schuyler – The Negro-Art Hokum (1926)
  6. Carl Van Vechten – From Nigger Heaven (1926)
  7. From Negro Womanhood’s Greatest Needs: A Symposium (1927)

Criticism

  1. Nathan Irvin Huggins – [Schizophrenia from Racial Dualism]
  2. Mary Mabel Youman – Nella Larsen’s Passing: A Study in Irony
  3. Claudia Tate – Nella Larsen’s Passing: A Problem of Interpretation
  4. Mary Helen Washington – Nella Larsen: Mystery Woman of the Harlem Renaissance
  5. Cheryl A. Wall – Passing for What? Aspects of Identity in Nella Larsen’s Novels
  6. Deborah E. McDowell – [Black Female Sexuality in Passing]
  7. David L. Blackmore – “That Unreasonable Restless Feeling”: The Homosexual Subtexts of Nella Larsen’s Passing
  8. Jennifer DeVere Brody – Clare Kendry’s “True” Colors: Race and Class Conflict in Nella Larsen’s Passing
  9. Helena Michie – [Differences among Black Women]
  10. Judith Butler – Passing, Queering: Nella Larsen’s Psychoanalytic Challenge
  11. Ann duCille – Passing Fancies
  12. Kate Baldwin – The Recurring Conditions of Nella Larsen’s Passing
  13. Gayle Wald – Passing and Domestic Tragedy
  14. Catherine Rottenberg – Passing: Race, Identification, and Desire
  15. Miriam Thaggert – Racial Etiquette: Nella Larsen’s Passing and the Rhinelander Case

Nella Larsen: A Chronology
Selected Bibliography

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Race mixing: Jones’ research has ties to political, sports figures

Posted in Articles, Barack Obama, Census/Demographics, Media Archive, Social Science, United States on 2009-10-23 19:16Z by Steven

Race mixing: Jones’ research has ties to political, sports figures

Richmond Now
The Faculty, Staff and Student Newspaper
University of Richmond

By Joan Tupponce
April 2007

No one is more intrigued with news about presidential hopeful Sen. Barack Obama or professional golfer Tiger Woods than Dr. Suzanne W. Jones, professor of English and women, gender and sexuality studies. But it’s not Obama’s bid for the presidency or Woods’ latest handicap that has Jones’ attention—it’s their racial identity, or more specifically, how they and others view their mixed ancestry.

For more than 20 years, Jones has been writing about and teaching classes about literature that explores U.S. race relations, especially black-white relationships. The idea for her latest book project stems from one of the chapters in her 2004 book Race Mixing: Southern Fiction since the Sixties. In her new work, Jones will be looking at the reappearance of the racially mixed character in the contemporary American imagination through the study of fiction, memoirs and family histories.

Jones first became personally interested in the topic about 15 years ago. “I taught a student in my African-American literature class whose mother was white and whose father was black,” she recalls.

Jones was unaware of the student’s heritage until she read a paper the student had written about her racial identity. Jones, like others, had assumed the student was white…

…The mulatto character figured prominently in American literature in the 19th century. “The so-called ‘tragic mulatto’ was used to point out the tragedy of defining race the way we did in the United States,” she explains. According to Jones’ research, the character disappeared by the 1960s—the time of the Black Power movement—only to resurface in the 1990s.

“This reappearance of the mixed character is happening in part because the children of 1960s mixed marriages have grown up and are writing both fiction and nonfiction,” Jones says. “Also an intense debate about racial classification began in the early 1990s, spurred both by racially mixed people and some parents of mixed children, particularly white parents, who didn’t want their children to be defined by the old ‘one-drop’ rule. This debate eventually led to a change on the 2000 U.S. census form, which allowed people to check more than one racial or ethnic category.”…

Read the entire article here.

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Demystifying the Tragic Mulatta: The Biracial Woman as Spectacle

Posted in Articles, Identity Development/Psychology, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Women on 2009-10-21 01:14Z by Steven

Demystifying the Tragic Mulatta: The Biracial Woman as Spectacle

Stanford Black Arts Quarterly
Volume 2, Issue 3 (Summer/Spring 1997)
pages 12-14

Stefanie Dunning, Associate Professor
Miami University (of Ohio)

To talk about the complexities of subjectivity is to enter into a discussion which necessarily locates itself at the intersection of race, clans, gender and sexuality. When thinking about my own subjective position, I am confronted by constructions that simultaneously identify, name, abridge and abstract me. Sometimes they help guide my thoughts about myself; at other times, they limit my thinking, reducing me to general categories of color, class, and desire. My present task, interrogation of a biracial subject position, is as much a gender discussion as it is a racial one. My investments in this discussion are deep; I am writing theoretically and distantly about myself— looking for truths about biraciality that I recognize in the words of other theorists, hoping to trace for myself and my audience one thread within a complex, unraveling cultural text. I am not interested here with how biracial subjects manage their subjectivites; such an approach inherently positions biraciality as problematic, the historical consideration of which falls beyond the scope of this project. Instead I will explore the way biracial subjectivity is gendered through its construction.

Women are the primary signifiers of miscegenation in literature and film. Likewise, the critical discourse on biraciality foregrounds the “tragic mulatta.” Yet, theorists regularly circumvent the issue of gender and theories lack interrogation of the point at which race and gender meet to sign biraciality. Visibility, i.e. what biracial people “look” like, makes up a significant part of biracial women’s experiences with uniracial onlookers. Moreover, visibility informs biracial women’s response to the uniracial “gaze.” This paper posits that biraciality is read differently “along gender lines.” While discourses about “mulattos” efface biracial men, biracial women are discursively foregrounded as “exotic.” Effectively, biraciality is inscribed with a specifically female status: the desire of ‘uniracial’ onlookers to exoticize biracial women inform the “gaze” which casts biracial women, “spectacle.”

Read the entire article here.

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Neither Black Nor White Yet Both: Thematic Explorations of Interracial Literature

Posted in Books, History, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Monographs, Slavery on 2009-10-15 17:58Z by Steven

Neither Black Nor White Yet Both: Thematic Explorations of Interracial Literature

Oxford University Press
March 1997
592 pages
Hardback ISBN13: 9780195052824; ISBN10: 019505282X

Werner Sollors, Henry B. and Anne M. Cabot Professor of English Literature and Afro American Studies; Director of the History of American Civilization Program
Harvard University

Why can a “white” woman give birth to a “black” baby, while a “black” woman can never give birth to a “white” baby in the United States? What makes racial “passing” so different from social mobility? Why are interracial and incestuous relations often confused or conflated in literature, making “miscegenation” appear as if it were incest? When did the myth that one can tell a person’s race by the moon on their fingernails originate? How did blackness get associated with “the curse of Ham” when the Biblical text makes no reference to skin color at all?

Werner Sollors examines these questions and others in Neither Black Nor White Yet Both, a new and exhaustively researched exploration of “interracial literature.” In the past, interracial texts have been read more for a black-white contrast of “either-or” than for an interracial realm of “neither, nor, both, and in-between.” Intermarriage prohibitions have been legislated throughout the modern period and were still in the law books in the 1980s. Stories of black-white sexual and family relations have thus run against powerful social taboos. Yet much interracial literature has been written, and this book suggests its pervasiveness and offers new comparative and historical contexts for understanding it.

Looking at authors from Heliodorus, John Stedman, Buffon, Thomas Jefferson, Heinrich von Kleist, Victor Hugo, Aleksandr Sergeevic Puskin, and Hans Christian Andersen, to Lydia Maria Child, Harriet Beecher Stowe, William Wells Brown, Mark Twain, Charles Chesnutt, Kate Chopin, Cirilo Villaverde, Aluisio Azevedo, and Pauline Hopkins, and on to modern writers such as Langston Hughes, Jessie Fauset, Boris Vian, and William Faulkner, Sollors ranges across time, space, and cultures, analyzing scientific and legal works as well as poetry, fiction, and the visual arts, to explore the many themes and motifs interwoven throughout interracial literature. From the etymological origins of the term “race” to the cultural sources of the “Tragic Mulatto,” Sollors examines the recurrent images and ideas in this literature of love, family, and other relations between blacks, whites, and those of “mixed race.”

Sollors’ interdisciplinary explorations of literary themes yield many insights into the history and politics of “race,” and illuminate a new understanding of the relations between cultures through the focus on interracial exchanges. Neither Black Nor White Yet Both is vital reading for anyone who seeks to understand what has been written and said about “race,” and where interracial relations can go from here.

Table of Contents

  • List of Illustrations
  • Introduction:
  • Black—White—Both—Neither—In-Between xv
  • 1. Origins; or, Paradise Dawning 31
  • 2. Natus Æthiopus/Natus Albus 48
  • 3. The Curse of Ham; or, from “Generation” to “Race” 78
  • 4. The Calculus of Color 112
  • 5. The Bluish Tinge in the Halfmoon; or, Fingernails as a Racial Sign 142
  • 6. Code Noir and Literature 162
  • 7. Retellings: Mercenaries and Abolitionists 188
  • 8. Excursus on the “Tragic Mulatto”; or, the Fate of a Stereotype 220
  • 9. Passing; or, Sacrificing a Parvenu 246
  • 10. Incest and Miscegenation 285
  • Endings 336
  • Appendix A: A Chronology of Interracial Literature 361
  • Appendix B: Prohibitions of Interracial Marriage and Cohabitation 395
  • Notes 411
  • Selected Bibliography 523
  • Index 561
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Race and Mixed Race

Posted in Books, History, Media Archive, Monographs, Philosophy, Social Science, United States on 2009-10-13 15:38Z by Steven

Race and Mixed Race

Temple University Press
October 1993
232 pages
6×9
paper: EAN: 978-1-56639-265-5, ISBN: 1-56639-265-9
    
Naomi Zack, Professor of Philosophy
University of Oregon

In the first philosophical challenge to accepted racial classifications in the United States, Naomi Zack uses philosophical methods to criticize their logic. Tracing social and historical problems related to racial identity, she discusses why race is a matter of such importance in America and examines the treatment of mixed race in law, society, and literature.

Zack argues that black and white designations are themselves racist because the concept of race does not have an adequate scientific foundation.  The “one drop” rule, originally a rationalization for slavery, persists today even though there have never been “pure” races and most American blacks have “white” genes.

Exploring the existential problems of mixed race identity, she points out how the bi-racial system in this country generates a special racial alienation for many Americans. Ironically suggesting that we include “gray” in our racial vocabulary, Zack concludes that any racial identity is an expression of bad faith.

Table of Contents

Part I: The Existential Analysis
1. Introduction: Summary, Method, and Structure
2. The Ordinary Concept of Race
3. White Family Identity
4. Black Family Identity
5. Demography and the Identification of the Family
6. Mixed-Race Family Identity

Part II: The History of Mixed Race
7. Introduction to the History of Mixed Race
8. The Law on Black and White
9. Marooned!
10. The Harlem Renaissance: Cultural Suicide
11. Genocidal Images of Mixed Race
12. Mulattoes in Fiction
13. Alienation

Part III: The Philosophy of Anti-Race
14. Nobility versus Good Faith
15. Black, White, and Gray: Words, Words, Words

Notes
Select Bibliography
Index

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