Mixed Race Studies

The De(con)struction of Black/White Binaries: Critiques of Passing in Charles Waddell Chesnutt’s “The Wife of His Youth” and Other Stories of the Color Line

Callaloo
Volume 37, Number 3, Summer 2014
pages 676-691
DOI: 10.1353/cal.2014.0106

Tanfer Emin Tunç, Professor of American Culture and Literature
Hacettepe University, Ankara, Turkey

When asked to elaborate on the “Negro Problem,” or the co-existence of racial inequality and democracy in the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century, African American historian W. E. B. Du Bois conveyed that the “’Negro problem’ of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.” Kelly Miller, his contemporary and fellow National Association for the Advancement of Colored People activist, proposed a radical solution to this American dilemma: the “Negro must get along, get white, or get out” (qtd. in Brown 275). Thus the official word that African Americans received from the NAACP, arguably the most influential civil rights organization of the early-twentieth century, was that the color line, or the divide along racial lines (usually black and white), would dominate the lives of African Americans for the next hundred years. Moreover, only three solutions existed: “get along” (accommodate); “get white” (assimilate); or “get out” (leave the United States), which many individuals, including artists such as Josephine Baker, eventually did. Miller’s second solution to the Negro problem—”get white”—caused the greatest controversy within the black intellectual community for obvious reasons. Many activists, including Marcus Garvey and his supporters, believed that the future of African Americans lay not in their ability to disappear into the white race, but in their blackness—that is, their ability to resist “miscegenation” and the dominant racial hegemony of the United States.

The battle that emerged along the color line during the turn of the twentieth century was chronicled in American literature, specifically through the works of writer Charles Waddell Chesnutt who devoted his entire career to the “Negro problem” (See Wright and Glass). Born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1858, but raised in Fayetteville, North Carolina, Euro-American in appearance but of African American heritage, Chesnutt straddled multiple worlds: North, South, black, and white. Early on in his life, he developed a double consciousness which shaped his career as a fiction writer, essayist, pedagogue, political commentator, lawyer, and legal stenographer at a time when African Americans could not even serve on juries or testify on their own behalf. This double consciousness also influenced his personal life, which he spent in the interstices of the black and white worlds (Ferguson, Introduction 2–3). Chesnutt maintained that because of the intractable racism of American society, the solution to the “Negro problem” lay not in one of Miller’s three solutions, but in the hands of middle class, educated, progressive “color line” blacks such as himself—individuals who transcended categorization by straddling the racial and cultural divide, especially between urban whites and rural blacks (Ferguson, Introduction 5; Ferguson, “Chesnutt’s Genuine Blacks” 113). Moreover, “Chesnutt’s recognition of, and emphasis on, these interstices, the in-between-ness of race, disturb[ed] turn-of-the-century race science; they exposed the color line as flexible and mutable, a barrier with real social consequences, but nevertheless a biological fiction” (Toth 77).

In essays such as “What Is a White Man?” and “The Future American,” Chesnutt describes race as “a modern invention of white people to perpetuate the color line.” He believed that racial fusion or “amalgamation” would eventually (when racist legal restrictions on interracial marriage were revoked) bring an end to race as a category of identity by creating a mestizo, all-inclusive, “future American ethnic type” who defied boundaries: “there would be no inferior race to domineer over; there would be no superior race to oppress those who differed from them in racial externals” (qtd. in McElrath, Leitz, and Crisler 125, 232). Because, as he argued, whiteness was a cultural fiction (“black and Indian blood” already flowed in the veins of many Southern whites), Chesnutt’s utopic vision of American race relations, and plan for the elimination of prejudice and “racial discord,” hinged not on peoples of color assimilating into the dominant white race, which he believed was already “impure,” but in the flexibility and adaptability of hybridity (McElrath, Leitz, and Crisler 125, 232; Fleischmann 466). For Chesnutt, the “future American” would be an “admixture” of races, ethnicities, and consciousnesses.

Although Chesnutt was proud of his black heritage, he understood why some individuals who lived along the color line perceived…

Reading Race in Nella Larsen’s Passing and the Rhinelander Case

African American Review
Voluume 46, Numbers 2-3, Summer/Fall 2013
pages 345-361
DOI: 10.1353/afa.2013.0076

Rebecca Nisetich, Assistant Director, Honors Program
University of Southern Maine

Toward the end of Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929), the protagonist Irene Redfield imagines how her friend Clare Kendry’s racist husband might react if he discovers his wife’s “true” racial identity: “What if Bellew should divorce Clare? Could he? There was the Rhinelander case.” This essay argues that what seems like a casual reference to a contemporary event actually underscores a central theme of the novel: the Rhinelander case and Passing both illustrate the problematic ways Americans sought to categorize mixed-race individuals in the 1920s, but while the Rhinelander verdict denies the existence of a middle ground between racial absolutes, the novel affirms it. Larsen directly references the Rhinelander case only once, but its themes echo throughout the text of Passing, which challenges the visibility of race and the conception of racial identity as intimately connected to one’s essential self. Irene’s reference calls to mind a very public trial that forced Americans to question their understanding of racial difference. In Passing, Larsen explores the conceptions of race as a real physical fact and as an imagined social construct, and challenges the logic of “common knowledge” and visibility in assigning racial identity to individuals.

Read the entire article here.

“Where a Man is a Man”?: Ancestral Possibilities in Charles Chesnutt’s Paul Marchand, F.M.C.

African American Review
Volume 46, Numbers 2-3, Summer/Fall 2013
pages 397-411
DOI: 10.1353/afa.2013.0048

Susan M. Marren, Associate Professor
University of Arkansas

This essay reads Charles Chesnutt’s Paul Marchand, F.M.C. not as a historical romance (as Chesnutt’s contemporaneous publishers deemed it) but rather as a peculiarly modernist passing novel. It argues that the novel’s hybrid possibilities stage a confrontation between an eighteenth-century standard of impartial “right reason” and the racially pluralistic world of nineteenth-century New Orleans.

The Octoroon

Broadview Press
2014-05-16 (orignially published in 1859)
136 pages
Paperback / PDF / ePub
ISBN: 9781554812110 / 1554812119

Dion Boucicault

Edited by:

Sarika Bose, Lecturer of English
University of British Columbia

Joseph Black, Professor of English
University of Massachusetts, Amherst

et al.

Regarded by Bernard Shaw as a master of the theatre, Dion Boucicault was arguably the most important figure in drama in North America and in Britain during the second half of the nineteenth century. He was largely forgotten during the twentieth century—though he continued to influence popular culture (the iconic image of a woman tied to railway tracks as a train rushes towards her, for example, originates in a Boucicault melodrama). In the twenty-first century the gripping nature of his plays is being discovered afresh; when The Octoroon was produced as a BBC Radio play in 2012, director and playwright Mark Ravenhill described Boucicault’s dramas as “the precursors to Hollywood cinema.”

In The Octoroon—the most controversial play of his career—Boucicault addresses the sensitive topic of race and slavery. George Peyton inherits a plantation, and falls in love with an octoroon—a person one-eighth African American, and thus, in 1859 Louisiana, legally a slave. The Octoroon opened in 1859 in New York City, just two years prior to the American Civil War, and created a sensation—as it did in its subsequent British production.

This new edition includes a wide range of background contextual materials, an informative introduction, and extensive annotation.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• A Note on the Text
• The Octoroon; or, Life in Louisiana
• Appendix A: American Reviews
  • 1. “‘The Octoroon.’ A Disgrace to the North, a Libel on the South,” Spirit of the Times; A Chronicle of the Turf, Agriculture, Field Sports, Literature and the Stage (17 December 1859)
  • 2. From “The Octoroon,” The Charleston Courier, Tri-Weekly (22 December 1859)
  • 3. From “Winter Garden–First Night of ‘The Octoroon,'” The New York Herald (7 December 1859)
• Appendix B: English Reviews
  • 1. “Saving the Octoroon,” Punch (21 December 1861)
  • 2. From “Theatres and Music,” John Bull (Saturday, 23 November 1861)
  • 3. From “Adelphi” (Review of The Octoroon), The Athenaeum (23 November 1861)
  • 4. “Pan at the Play,” Fun (Saturday, 30 November 1861)
  • 5. “Adelphi Theatre” (Review of Revised Play), The Times [London] (12 December 1861)
• Appendix C: Letters to Editors Concerning the Lawsuit
  • 1. “The Octoroon Conflict: Financial and Political View of the Case–Letter from Mrs. Agnes Robertson Boucicault,” The New York Herald (Friday, 16 December 1859)
• Appendix D: A Selection of Letters from Boucicault Defending the Content of The Octoroon
  • 1. “Letter from the Author of the ‘Octoroon,'” The New York Herald (7 December 1859)
  • 2. “The Octoroon Gone Home,” New York Times (9 February 1860)
  • 3. “‘The Octoroon’: To the Editor of the Times,” The Times [London] (Wednesday, 20 November 1861)
• Appendix E: Boucicault on Acting
  • 1. From Dion Boucicault, “The Art of Acting” (1882)
• Appendix F: Alternative Endings
  • 1. The Illustrated London News (14 December 1882)
  • 2. “Music and the Drama,” Bell’s Life in London and Sporting Chronicle (Sunday, 15 December 1861)
  • 3. From The Octoroon: Founded on Dion Boucicault’s Celebrated and Original Melodrama (1897)
  • 4. From Dion Boucicault, The Octoroon, Lacy’s Acting Edition, No. 963 (c. 1861)
  • 5. From Dion Boucicault, The Octoroon: A Drama in Three Acts (26 October 1861)
• Appendix G: On Slavery
  • 1. From Dion Boucicault, unpublished note, Theatre Museum, London (1861)
  • 2. From Fredrika Bremer, “Fredrika Bremer Sees the New Orleans Slave Market” (1853)
  • 3. From Civil Code of the State of Louisiana
• Appendix H: Illustrations
  • 1. From The Illustrated London News (30 November 1861)
  • 2. Cover, Reynolds Miscellany (4 January 1862)
  • 3. Cover, The Octoroon (Dick’s Standard Plays)
• Permissions Acknowledgments

One Drop of a Father’s Love

Biracials Learning About African-American Culture (B.L.A.A.C)
Sunday, 2014-06-15

Zebulon Miletsky, Assistant Professor of Africana Studies
Stony Brook University, State University of New York

This week I had the pleasure of attending a one-woman show by Television and Film actress, Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni, called “One Drop of Love” a multimedia solo performance put on at the Brooklyn Historical Society. It was phenomenal. Not only was it brilliant in its exposition of the social and historical dimensions of race, but it alsobrought a human dimension to the oft-complicated question of mixed race in America.  The context alone was compelling.  In the next room, the critically praised exhibit on Brooklyn Abolitionists entitled “In Pursuit of Freedom”, rich with the documentation and exhibits about slavery and its abolition, much of it the raw material and subtext of the play we were about to witness. The day of the performancealso happened to be “Loving Day”, an annual celebration ofthe anniversary of the 1967 United States Supreme Court decision “Loving v. Virginia” which struck down all anti-miscegenation laws in the U.S. The decision was followed by an increase in interracial marriages, although not necessarily all “black/white” ones, and it is commemorated annually on what is now Loving Day, June the 12th…

Read the entire review here.

Positioning of the Mixed Race Author and Mixed Race Protagonist in British Children’s Literature

Critical Pedagogies: Equality and Diversity in a Changing Institution
2014-07-23

Ludovic Foster, Ph.D. Candidate
Department Gender Studies
University of Sussex, United Kingdom

I would like to examine a few of the issues around the positioning of the mixed race child, and mixed race identified author in a literary context. Considering the mixed race child in this context is particularly important and necessary in a society where the marginalization of non- binary identities is embedded within foundational ideologies and power structures of the white supremacist heteropatriarchy in which historically binary ways of thinking have also often been used as a tool of Western colonial oppression. Such hierarchical ideologies have been driven by imperialist, global, capitalist economies for reasons such as nation building. Many of these aforementioned factors have contributed to some societies actively encouraging the perpetration and overwhelming dominance of normative mono sexual, racial and gender identities.

The mixed child as a character could be said to stand as a figure of resistance against such normative symbolism. When writing about the subject of multiracialism, I am conscious of the inherent historical global and cultural changeability and instability of language when it comes to describing mixed race people and it means to be mixed race; and the fact that the term mixed race can describe a wide range and intersections of racial, ethnic and cultural identities such multifold identities that are not dependant on whiteness for validity.

“The term ‘mixed race’ itself may not reflect the complexity of its own formation through historical entanglements and contemporary redefinitions. This may account for the gradual displacement of ‘mixed race’ by a notion of ‘multiraciality’ that points to multiplicity being the form of contemporary identity itself” (Parker, Song 2001: 8). There is a very complex and nuanced global cultural history of people defined as “mixed race,” and I am aware that even the term “mixed race” itself could be seen as upholding a system that gives credibility to the notion of a singular and “pure” mono race. Although I believe that all people are “mixed” to some degree there is a very particular political, cultural and racialized positioning inherent in being identified as first generation mixed race in certain national transnational and global social and economic contexts. I suggest that the global cultural influence of the American hierarchical racial ideology and classification system known as the “one drop rule”, a hypodescent system which is embedded in a history of white supremacy, and the economics of slavery and racial segregation, has had a particular global and cultural impact on the way we think about what it means to have a mix of African and European ancestry…

Read the entire article here.

‘Stunning Portraits of Mixed Race Families’?: Slate’s Human Zoo of Race Mongrelization

We Are Respectable Negroes: Happy Non-Threatening Coloured Folks, Even in the Age of Obama
Wednesday, 2014-06-25

Chauncey DeVega, Editor and Founder

Am I the only person who found Slate.com’s photo essay “Stunning Portraits of Mixed Race Families” to be very problematic?

To my eyes, it contains and channels the echoes of race science and eugenics wrapped in a veneer of praise and curiosity for “unusual” and “fascinating” bodies.

Questions of race and representation were and remain central to the dynamics of the global color line. The ways in which certain types of people and bodies are visually represented through film, photographs, paintings, and other mediums reflect the dynamics of power.

Whose eyes are “we” seeing through? What assumptions are driving the Gaze? How are the bodies and people in visual images posed and positioned relative to one another? Who is included? What types of people and bodies are excluded?…

…The contemporary American fascination with “mixed race” and “biracial” identity is a reflection of changing demographics and globalization; it is also a surrender to and performance of a shallow type of faux cosmopolitanism.

Ironically, the race scientists of Nazi Germany and the United States, as well as the photographer Cyjo (whose work was featured in Slate’s essay) who fetishize and find something “stunning” or “interesting” about “mixed race” and/or “biracial” people (what are fictive identities, social constructs, as there is only one race, the human race) share some common assumptions.

One, that those types of “racial” identities are somehow new or novel. In fact, human history is a story of “miscegenation” and “interracial” intimacy. Two, that those types of bodies and individuals merit study and analysis because there is some connection, either implied or explicitly stated, between genes, color, culture, destiny, and personal, as well as national “character”…

Read the entire article here.

Elective Race: Recognizing Race Discrimination in the Era of Racial Self-Identification

Georgetown Law Journal
Georgetown University, Washington, D.C.
Volume 102, Issue 5 (2014)
pages 1501-1572

Camille Gear Rich, Associate Professor of Law
University of Southern California, Gould School of Law

This Article posits that we are in a key moment of discursive and ideological transition, an era in which the model of elective race is ascending, poised to become one of the dominant frameworks for understanding race in the United States. Because we are in a period of transition, many Americans still are wedded to fairly traditional attitudes about race. For these Americans, race is still an objective, easily ascertainable fact determined by the process of involuntary racial ascription—how one’s physical traits are racially categorized by third parties. The elective-race framework will challenge these Americans to recognize other ways in which people experience race, including acts of voluntary affiliation as well as selective and conditional affiliations. Importantly, even if one concludes that most Americans still hold traditional, ascriptive-based understandings of race, there is evidence that elective race is steadily gaining influence in certain quarters, shaping government institutions’ formal procedures as well as certain Americans’ racial understandings.

To improve the clarity and precision of discussions about elective race, this Article outlines the key premises and norms associated with this ideological framework. My primary goal is to help courts and scholars understand the basic tenets and tensions that are likely to be present in plaintiffs’ elective-race claims. Although some scholars have trivialized racial self-identification interests or represented them as a threat to antidiscrimination law, my project is to show that racial self-identification decisions matter in concrete ways because they can trigger serious race-based social sanctions that are a core antidiscrimination law concern. Indeed, as we will see, voluntary racial-affiliation decisions can and do trigger race-based resentment, rejection, and social sanction when race-based resentment, rejection, and social sanction when they do not match certain expected or established American understandings about the boundaries of racial categories. Moreover, I predict that, though the number of cases that sound in the nature of elective race may be small at present, we should expect to see more cases of this kind given both the increased focus Americans place on the interest in racial self-identification and the shift toward institutional protocols that are intended to accommodate this interest. The elective-race cases will challenge courts, forcing them to decide whether Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Title VII) should recognize the autonomy claims of individuals who are injured in the workplace by the social and formal processes of involuntary racialization. Courts will be asked to rule on cases that suggest that an employee’s dignity interests are unjustly frustrated when other fail to respect the employee’s right to racial self-definition.

Read the entire article here.

Radical Love: A Transatlantic Dialogue about Race and Mixed Race

Asian American Literary Review
Volume 4, Issue 2, Pandora’s Box (2013)
pages 15-26

Daniel McNeil, Ida B. Wells-Barnett Professor of African and Black Diaspora Studies
DePaul University, Chicago, Illinois

Leanne Taylor, Assistant Professor of Education
Brock University, St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada

Boy meets girl. Boy makes the girl laugh with some playful jibes about his English accent and her “cynical Canadian” response to a talk about radical love in America. Girl gives boy a lingering, flirtatious handshake. Boy resists the urge to say, “this could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”

This is a transatlantic love story informed by the neurotic heroes of the Facebook era as much as the stoic men of 1940s Hollywood or the stubborn women of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. The boy displays similar levels of social awkwardness and ambition to the character of Marc Zuckerberg, one of the founders of Facebook, in The Social Network. Yet he has a modicum of charm and is able to craft some touching emails to the girl when he returns to England. The girl is far more interesting than any of the female characters in The Social Network and sparks back some funny Facebook messages from Canada. After reconnecting in Toronto in January 2011, they start to communicate via Blackberry instant messenger and send each other letters, books and poetry. Their conversations provide a revealing glimpse into the politics and poetics of mixed race relationships. For whereas the transracial, transdisciplinary and transnational field of mixed race studies tends to focus on the love between “interracial couples” and their children, their romantic back and forth offers a revealing glimpse into the love between two people defined as mixed race.

Read the entire article here.

Race, Romance, and Rebellion: Literatures of the Americas in the Nineteenth Century. Colleen C. O’Brien. [Orihuela]

MELUS: Multi-Ethnic LIterature of the United States
Published Online: 2014-06-05
DOI: 10.1093/melus/mlu027

Sharada Balachandran Orihuela, Assistant Professor of English
University of Maryland

Race, Romance, and Rebellion: Literatures of the Americas in the Nineteenth Century. Colleen C. O’Brien. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2013. 224 pages. $65.00 cloth; $24.50 paper; $65.00 electronic.

Colleen C. O’Brien’s Race, Romance, and Rebellion: Literatures of the Americas in the Nineteenth Century examines American rebel-romances written in the era of reform (1835-70) that engage with concepts as broad and contentious as race, gender, and rights in nineteenth-century America. In part, this project is indebted to the close relationship O’Brien sees between romanticism, with its ideals of freedom and emancipation, and rebellion, the necessary political outcome of a quest for freedom. Such rebellion is transfigured into the romances O’Brien studies, since a number of novels she examines center on transcendent affective relationships with liberatory outcomes. New world romances, she suggests, envision the expansion of rights and freedom to a range of different populations and respond to the changing geopolitical climate ushered in by colonial expansion. O’Brien thus directs her attention to cross-racial romances as existing in dialogic relation to the “myths of revolutionary origin in the United States and Haiti and the definitions of freedom each created” (xi).

For O’Brien, these myths of revolutionary origin or rebellion allude to the revolutionary fights for freedom in the American and Haitian contexts, as well as to the rejection of patriarchal authority. However, as demonstrated in her first chapter, American rebellion is also used to justify the white supremacist backlash that resulted from increasing demands for rights across the Americas. Rebellion thus addresses possibility as much as anxiety about national expansion and possible incorporation. O’Brien examines amalgamation—taken to mean both literary and geographical expansion—as well as the literary representations of cross-racial love and “the amalgamation of abolition and suffrage interests through the expansion of citizenship rights.”…