Mixed Race Studies

Racial Etiquette: Nella Larsen’s Passing and the Rhinelander Case

Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism
Volume 5, Number 2, 2005
pages 1-29
E-ISSN: 1547-8424
Print ISSN: 1536-6936
DOI: 10.1353/mer.2005.0013

Miriam Thaggert, Associate Professor of English and African-American Studies
University of Iowa

In Passing Nella Larsen seems to suggest that identity is a hazy fiction one tells that outward appearances and surface events only partly confirm. Rather than directly stating their thoughts, characters communicate through an exchange of looks—particularly her two light-skinned female characters, Irene and Clare. These subtle forms of expression heighten the sense of uncertainty throughout the novel. The reader never learns explicitly the reason for Clare’s fall out of a window, the reality of a homosexual longing between Clare and Irene, or the true nature of the relationship between Clare and Irene’s husband. This indeterminacy extends to the racial identity of Larsen’s characters, an identity not always easily discernible because of the characters’ mixed racial background and their inclination to “pass.”  Without adequate markings or clues, any reading, whether of identities or situations, is flawed or incorrect.

A brief, almost offhand, remark Irene makes refers to a legal trial in which these issues of knowledge, passing, and the gaze combined in a process to interrogate the race and veracity of a woman. The Rhinelander case was an annulment proceeding in which wealthy, white Leonard Kip Rhinelander sued his wife, Alice Beatrice Jones, for fraud. Leonard claimed he did not know that his light-skinned wife was “colored,” the daughter of a white woman and a dark-skinned cab driver.  Larsen’s reference to the Rhinelanders occurs only once, near the end of the novel, after Irene suspects that her husband, Brian, is having an affair with Clare…

Read or purchase the article here.

Gothic Passages: Racial Ambiguity and the American Gothic

University of Iowa Press
2003
186 pages
Cloth ISBN: 0-87745-824-3, 978-0-87745-824-1
eBook ISBN: 1-58729-420-6 978-1-58729-420-4

Justin Edwards, Professor of English
Bangor University, Bangor, Wales

This groundbreaking study analyzes the development of American gothic literature alongside nineteenth-century discourses of passing and racial ambiguity.

By bringing together these areas of analysis, Justin Edwards considers the following questions. How are the categories of “race” and the rhetoric of racial difference tied to the language of gothicism? What can these discursive ties tell us about a range of social boundaries—gender, sexuality, class, race, etc.—during the nineteenth century? What can the construction and destabilization of these social boundaries tell us about the development of the U.S. gothic?

The sources used to address these questions are diverse, often literary and historical, fluidly moving between “representation” and “reality.” Works of gothic literature by Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Frances Harper, and Charles Chesnutt, among others, are placed in the contexts of nineteenth-century racial “science” and contemporary discourses about the formation of identity. Edwards then examines how nineteenth-century writers gothicized biracial and passing figures in order to frame them within the rubric of a “demonization of difference.” By charting such depictions in literature and popular science, he focuses on an obsession in antebellum and postbellum America over the threat of collapsing racial identities—threats that resonated strongly with fears of the transgression of the boundaries of sexuality and the social anxiety concerning the instabilities of gender, class, ethnicity, and nationality.

Gothic Passages not only builds upon the work of Americanists who uncover an underlying racial element in U.S. gothic literature but also sheds new light on the pervasiveness of gothic discourse in nineteenth-century representations of passing from both sides of the color line. This fascinating book will be of interest to scholars of American literature, cultural studies, and African American studies.

Voices from the Gaps: Kym Ragusa

Voices from the Gaps
University of Minnesota
2007-04-24

Shalee Dettmann
Joey Grihalva
Jenna Fodness
Gaushia Thao

I don’t know where I was conceived, but I was made in Harlem. Its topography is mapped on my body: the borderlines between neighborhoods marked by streets that were forbidden to cross, the borderlines enforced by fear and anger, and transgressed by desire. The streets crossing east to west, north to south, like the web of veins beneath my skin.

 The Skin Between Us (26)

In the prologue of her acclaimed memoir, The Skin Between Us, Kym Ragusa writes of a journey she took in 1999 to her paternal ancestors’ home of Messina, Italy. A year after the death of her two grandmothers—the central figures in her personal life, each representing her Italian and African-American heritage respectively—Ragusa embarks on a search for clues about her identity. This journey is symbolic of her artistic work as she is constantly involved in the formulation and explication of what it means to be multicultural.

Kym Ragusa was born February of 1966 in Manhattan, NY. Ragusa comes from a mixed background: her mother is African American and her father is Italian. Ragusa’s ancestors on her mother’s side were brought to the United States as African slaves…

Read the entire article here.

Francophone Women: Between Visibility and Invisibility

Peter Lang Publishing Group
2010
146 pages
Hardback ISBN 978-1-4331-0803-7

Edited by

Cybelle H. McFadden, Assistant Professor of French
University of North Carolina, Greensboro

Sandrine F. Teixidor, Assistant Professor of French Studies
Randolph-Macon College, Ashland, Virginia

Francophone Women: Between Visibility and Invisibility underscores the writing of authors who foreground the female body and who write across geographical borders, as part of a global literary movement that has the French language as its common denominator. This edited collection exposes how female authors portray the tensions that exist between visibility and invisibility, public and private, presence and absence, and excess and restraint when it is linked to femininity and the female body.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Preface

1. Corporeal Performance and Visible Gender Position in Colette’s The Pure and the Impure. Marion Krauthaker
2. After-Images of Muslim Women: Vision, Voice, and Resistance in the Work of Assia Djebar. Mary Ellen Wolf
3. The Gaze beneath the Veil: Portrait of Women in Algeria and Morocco. Sandrine F. Teixidor
4. Vision, Voice, and the Female Body: Nina Bouraoui’s Sites/Sights of Resistance. Adrienne Angelo
5. The Métis Body: Double Mirror. Caroline Beschea-Fache
6. The Body, Sexuality, and the Photo in L’Usage de la photo. Cybelle H. McFadden

Contributors
Index

From: The Métis Body: Double Mirror

DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM? I AM THE ONE YOU CAN’T LEAVE ALONE.  The one who puzzles you, intrigues you.  I am the original definition of “exotic.” Acceptable in many ways, the cafe au lait of life, more palatable because I am diluted…  They call me white, they call me black… they’ve called me everything in between.
Camille Hernandez-Ramdwar

In their novels Garçon manqué (2000) and 53cm (1999), Nina Bouraoui and Sandrine Bessora, respectively, portray characters born of parents belonging to different racialized groups and raise the issues defining métissage.  As they form corporeal representation of the concept, they describe the métis experience in the Francophone context.  The complexity of defining the concept of métissage involves examining both races, since they shape the perception of the métis by the Other and by the subject itself; it also entails discussing the racial tensions that play out in corporeal ways.  Using the work of Bouraoui and Bessora, I will analyze how the conception of a world based on dichotomies and binary oppositions, reinforced by racial categorization, affects and disturbs the construction of métis identities in the texts…

CRN 47519/47520-Mixed Race Asian Americans

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Fall 2008

Kent Ono, Professor of Asian American Studies, Communication, and Institute of Communications Research

Part of Asian American Ethnic Groups (AAS-450)

This course provides an introduction to the study of mixed race Asian Americans. From discussions of famous mixed race people, such as Tiger Woods, Keanu Reeves, Kristin Kreuk, Dean Cain, and Rob Schneider to research about interracial dating, interracial families, mixed race children, and multiracial activism, the course provides an understanding of theories of race, identity, and culture as they relate to biracial and multiracial Asian Americans. The course provides a theoretical understanding of racial identity formation, focusing at first on more general theories of race, and then moving to the more specific issues of multiracial identity and politics. Analysis of TV, film, and cyberspace images of mixed race Asian Americans will also lead to an understanding of the social context of our everyday experiences. Through readings, lectures, discussions, and course assignments, students will gain a broader understanding of race and its application to people of mixed racial heritage.

Interrogating Identity Construction: Bodies versus Community in Cynthia Kadohata’s In the Heart of the Valley of Love

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies
Volume 1 (2010)
pages 61-69

Nicole Myoshi Rabin, Instructor of Liberal Arts & Interdisciplinary Studies
Emerson College, Boston. Massachusetts

In an interview for the journal MELUS, Hsiu-chuan Lee claims that Cynthia Kadohata suggests her novel In the Heart of the Valley of Love does not directly take “any specific ethnicity as its central concern,” nor deal explicitly with the “identity issue” (165, 179).  Despite these assertions by the author, In the Heart of the Valley of Love is mainly taught at the university level in Asian American Literature courses.  While Kadohata’s novel has been established within this specific canon of Asian American Literature, her novel deals with issues that resonate among all racial groups. This paper considers the ways in which Kadohata creates an imagined future not wholly detached from issues of race and identity, but where the conceptualization of race-based identity is conceived by means of self-fashioning and self-signifying. In the novel’s “futuristic” American society, concerns of class and the divides of wealth between the white “richtowns” and the multiracial majority may seem to be the central themes, but issues of race and issues of class become conflated in the novel, and Kadohata uses more subtle ways to discuss issues of racial difference.  What Kadohata suggests through her novel In the Heart of the Valley of Love is not that racialized bodies cease to be of importance in American society, but that race as a critical factor in identity formation and categorization must be reframed by self-signification and social interactions.

…Kadohata’s indictment of current racial understanding goes further as Francie, the mixed race narrator, is marginalized by our current monoracial understanding of race as the determinant factor of identity. She says, “I enjoyed the feeling of the heat making my loose shorts billow around my yellow-brown legs—the yellow from my Japanese mother, the brown from my Chinese-black father” (22). Viet Thanh Nguyen suggests in Race and Resistance that Francie embodies “the novel’s conception of nonwhite identity as being a mélange of different ethnic and racial backgrounds” (150). While the narrator does occupy the space of the raced majority within the novel, her value as a mixed race character does not end at being the embodiment of the “novel’s conception” of a “nonwhite identity.” Francie as a mixed-race subject maintains her position as marginalized in our current understanding of racial categorization. Keeping with the notion of the body, Kadohata locates Francie’s indeterminacy in her yellow-brown skin, which is not easily identified as one race or another, until Francie herself declares where she “belongs.” Knowing what races and ethnicities Francie belongs to serves a purpose beyond making her a mixture of incongruent elements of race and therefore some sort of representative of everything “nonwhite” as Nguyen suggests; her “parts” are named, and so while she may embody the majority within the text, she is still marginalized by our current understanding of race along monoracial lines. By making the protagonist a “mélange,” Kadohata renders this multiracial character incapable of being assigned identity by physical racial markers and forces Francie to seek a different means by which she must forge an identity…

Read the entire article here.

“What is In My Blood?”: Contemporary Black Scottishness and the Work of Jackie Kay [Book Chapter]

Literature and Racial Ambiguity
Rodopi B.V.
2002-09-15
328 pages
ISBN-10: 9042014180
ISBN-13: 978-9042014183
pp. 1-25(25)

edited by Teresa Hubal and Neil Brooks

Peter Clandfield, Assistant Professor of English Studies
Nipissing University, North Bay, Ontario, Canada

The work of the Scottish writer Jackie Kay (b. 1961) not only refutes simplistic definitions of race and racial attributes, but also challenges utopian idea(l)s about racial and cultural hybridity as a condition that, in itself, resolves problems arising from racial differences—that is, from dissimilarities, conflicts, and things in between. In her 1985 poem “So you think I’m a mule?,” Kay, who is of mixed black-white (African-British) biological parentage, voices what sounds like an unequivocal rejection of white attempts to theorise about people of obviously complex racial ancestry:

If you Dare mutter mulatto
hover around hybrid
hobble on half-caste
and intellectualize on the
“Mixed race problem”,
I have to tell you:
take your beady eyes offa my skin;
don’t concern yourself with
the  “dialectics of mixtures”;
don’t pull that strange blood crap
on me Great White Mother.
Say I’m no mating of a she-ass and a stallion
no half of this and half of that
to put it plainly purely
I am black (lines 29-43)

This 66-line poem is given in full as an epigraph to Heidi Safia Mirza’s Introduction to Black British Feminism: A Reader (Routledge, 1997), where it serves as a strong statement about the determination of black British women to set their own agendas. In the context of Kay’s own evolving career, though, the poem’s significance is much more ambiguous. While its speaker states emphatically that she is black and is “not mixed up” (line 50) about race, mixedrace voices in Kay’s more recent works are less certain. Without being “mixed up” in the sense of being confused or incoherent, these works delineate complex emergent forms of racial and cultural identity that undermine fixed concepts not only of Britishness, blackness, or black Britishness but also of hybridity itself…

Read the entire chapter here.

AAS 434-Constructions of Racial Ambiguity
University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Spring 2010

Rainier Spencer, Professor and Director, Afro-American Studies Program

Interdisciplinary study of miscegenation, mulattos, and passing in the United States. Focuses on the Afro-American context, using historical, literary, and cinematic sources in order to grapple with and gain an understanding of the complexities of American race and mixed-race, both past and present.

Mixed bodies, separate races: The trope of the “(tragic) mulatto” in twentieth-century African literature

McMaster University (Canada)
2007
251 pages
AAT NR57539

Diana Adesola Mafe, Assistant Professor of English
Denison University

This dissertation proposes that the American literary trope of the “tragic mulatto” has both roots and resonances in sub-Saharan Africa. The concept of the mulatto, a person of mixed black and white heritage, as a tragic, ambiguous Other evolved primarily from nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American fiction. I argue, however, that the mulatto occupies a similarly vexed discursive space in the historiography of sub-Saharan Africa and contemporary African literature. After contextualizing the American trope through such postbellum novels as James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912) and Nella Larsen’s Quicksand (1928), I track the emergence of specific racially mixed populations in sub-Saharan Africa as a result of trade, migration, and colonialism. My historical survey of such mixed race communities as the Afro-Portuguese lançados of Senegambia and the Coloured people of South Africa brings to light the remarkable currency of (tragic) mulatto stereotypes across time and space. Having established the circulation of mulatto stereotypes in (pre-)colonial sub-Saharan Africa, I consider how two contemporary mixed race South African writers engage with such stereotypes in their work. This study argues that twentieth-century Coloured writers Bessie Head and Arthur Nortje realize the trope of tragic mixedness in their respective lives and writing. Head and Nortje reflect the rigid apartheid ideology of their native South Africa and assign universality to the “plight” of being mixed race in a segregationist society. But both writers also use their (gendered) identities as “tragically mixed” to challenge the policed racial categories of apartheid, subverting fixity through, paradoxical performances of Self. I conclude my study in the post-civil rights and post-apartheid arena of the twenty-first century, using my own experiences as an African “mulatta” and the current field of mixed race studies to illustrate how paradox itself is indispensable to progressive readings and imaginings of mixed race identity.

Table of Contents

• CHAPTER ONE: The Evolution of the “Tragic Mulatto” Trope in American Literature: An Introduction
• CHAPTER TWO: The White Man’s “Other” Burden: (Pre-)Colonial Race Mixing in the “Dark Continent”
• CHAPTER THREE: A Mulatta in Motabeng: Bessie Head’s A Question of Power as African Tragic Mulatta Fiction
• CHAPTER FOUR: A Portrait of the (Tortured) Artist as a Young (Coloured) Man:Reading Arthur Nortje
• CHAPTER FIVE: The Premise/Promise of Paradox: Concluding Theories and Reflections from a New Millennium “Mulatta”
• BIBLIOGRAPHY

Purchase the dissertation here.

Hybridity and Whiteness in Claudine C. O’Hearn’s Half and Half: Writings on Growing up Biracial and Bicultural

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
Volume 7, Issue 3 (September 2005)
9 pages

Heather Latimer
Simon Fraser University

In her paper, “Hybridity and Whiteness” in Claudine C. O’Hearn’s Half and Half: Writings on Growing up Biracial and Bicultural, Heather Latimer examines the autobiographical collection Half and Half: Writings on Growing up Biracial and Bicultural assembled and edited by Claudine C. O’Hearn. Latimer’s analysis reveals how current models of hybridity theory are performed, articulated, and exemplified in the texts of O’Hearn’s volume. In her analysis, Latimer explores the anxiety and tension about whiteness within hybridity theory, often reflected in the performance of hybrid aesthetics. Latimer argues that while some authors in Half and Half avoid talking about whiteness as a way to establish legitimate hybrid identities, this avoidance actually resinscribes an authenticity to their identities which in turn replicates the very oppressive processes of identity formation they are attempting to write against. Latimer sees other authors in the volume, however, as disrupting the stability and invisibility of whiteness by performing a type of hybridity that makes visible the made-up and constructed nature of all racial identities.

Read the entire article here.