Mixed Race Studies

Study analyzes ambiguities in the works of Aluísio Azevedo

Agência FAPESP: News Agency of the Sao Paulo Research Foundation
2011-06-08

Karina Toledo

Agência FAPESP —The Mulatto, by Aluísio Azevedo, is a title that refers to the collective human state. It does not mention a character or a specific situation, but rather a human category that is very important for understanding the process of Brazil’s formation.

This analysis is presented by sociologist Rodrigo Estramanho de Almeida in the book A realidade da ficção. Ambiguidades literárias e sociais em ‘O Mulato’ de Aluísio Azevedo (The reality of fiction. Literary and social ambiguities in “The Mulatto” by Aluísio Azevedo), released by Alameda Casa Editorial on March 15. 

The starting point for this analysis is the second book published by Aluísio Azevedo, The Mulatto. The researcher analyzes the contradictions found in this book, as these contradictions marked the entire literary trajectory of the Maranhão author. Critics normally divide Azevedo’s work into two categories: engaged (or activist) romance, filled with social criticism, and feuilletonesque novels. 

“This ambiguity remains throughout the career of Aluísio. The writer himself made it clear in correspondence and newspaper texts that he was conscious of it and struggled with it. But I try to show that there is continuity in his works,” commented Estramanho de Almeida in an interview with Agência FAPESP…

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More than a “Passing” Sophistication: Dress, Film Regulation, and the Color Line in 1930s American Films

WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly
Volume 41, Numbers 1 & 2, Spring/Summer 2013
pages 60-86
DOI: 10.1353/wsq.2013.0048

Ellen Scott, Assistant Professor of Media Studies
Queens College, City University of New York

When we think of African American representations of 1930s Hollywood, we likely first envision the maid or butler—Hattie McDaniel as Mammy in Gone with the Wind (1939) or Gertrude Howard as Beulah Thorndyke in I’m No Angel (1933). These films arguably normalize black servitude as an inevitable part of an intractable and glamorous class system. Ramona Curry argues that Mae West’s maids “augment West’s featured—and fetishized—status, enhancing the star’s aura of power and sexual allure through their roles as servants and through their vividly contrasting visual presence, their dark skin, hair and costumes, setting off West’s shimmering bleached-blonde whiteness” (1996, 87). However, the composite image I describe above rests on a vague impression that black characters were uniformly servants and that onscreen servants always appeared in uniform. Take, as a counterexample, Morning Glory (1933), where maid Emma (Sana Rayya) seems to step out of the margins when she changes from her uniform into her fashionable leisure clothes. What is surprising is that despite Emma’s narrative insignificance, the transition is emphasized by lighting and framing—and an audacious saunter (fig. 1). Her placement at the center of the frame, between the arguing white protagonists, interrupts narrative attention, raising perhaps the ultimate cinematic question: who is she? The uniform, black and white and designedly nondescript, helps to set up the subsequent dramatic reveal of her flattering furs and hat, heightening the suddenness of the camera’s central attention to her and highlighting the inability of her uniform to contain or represent its wearer.

While the servant image was clearly the dominant black Hollywood representation during this era, it is also true that sometimes dress communicated a subtle roundness to black women’s characters and an interracial parity at a moment when censorship threatened overt statements of racial equality and images of white and black intimacy.

The Motion Picture Producer and Distributors of America’s Production Code of 1930 (commonly known as the “Hays Code”) famously repressed onscreen sexuality. But race was a part of a more daring, turmoil-ridden early Depression-era pre-Code cinema, which registered the desperate revolt of fallen women and forgotten men against a failing social system (Doherty 1999, 256). Accordingly, race also became a regulatory concern, as seen in the Code clause barring “miscegenation” and in the industry policy against racially motivated lynching (Courtney 2005; Wood 2009, 229). Costume, however, was a realm generally outside of censors’ close scrutiny in the 1930s and was thus a freer space of racial inscription than the narrative. Not only was costume essential to Depression-era screen narratives of class rise (and fall); it sometimes operated to complicate the narrative, threatening to distract viewers with its overwrought embellishment of a character’s affect and personality or glamorizing the “low” figures—the gold digger and the fallen women—that censors reviled (Gaines 1990, 188; Foster 2007; Jacobs 1997, 58-59). The lack of racial fixity in some 1930s Hollywood films revealed, if only incompletely, black women’s modern, urban personalities and small-scale revolts against the color line. Through motifs in dress—the quick-changing maid, interracial sartorial and sardonic parity, and stylized idealization of interracial spaces—aspects of these films silently normalized racial similarity and undermined the uniform servitude of the 1930s black image.

In these surprising moments black women stepped out of their prescribed subservience to glamorously become the center point of the camera’s gaze in ways that cast doubt on the naturalness of black inferiority and sometimes disrupted prevailing narratives of gender, race, and power. I begin with analysis of several pre-Code-era films and end with readings of Code-era films starring light-skinned black actress Fredi Washington, who became the vessel for dress-borne tensions about the color line latent in earlier films. Following Robert Stam’s call to resuscitate marginalized ethnic “voices” from Hollywood texts, I magnify those brief but arresting moments to which black spectators often attended where hidden worlds and selves come to the sartorial surface (Stam 1991; Everett 2000; Regester 2010). The unassuming configuration of an egalitarian ethos through…

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Keeping Pictures, Keeping House: Harriet and Louisa Jacobs, Fanny Fern, and the Unverifiable History of Seeing the Mulatta

ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance
Volume 59, Number 2, 2013 (No. 231 O.S.)
pages 262-290
DOI: 10.1353/esq.2013.0022

Michael A. Chaney, Associate Professor of English
Dartmouth College

Daguerreotype of Louise Jacobs. From the Fanny Fern and Ethel Parton Papers, 1805-1982, courtesy of the Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College.

Tucked away in Box Three, Folder Thirteen of the Fanny Fern papers held at Smith College is a daguerreotype of a subject officially designated as an unidentified woman. The represented figure does not stand out among the dozen or so other daguerreotypes in the collection. If, as Shawn Michelle Smith has argued, nineteenth-century “photography was used to locate individual bodies within a genealogy of familial hereditary traits and racial characteristics,” this image works post facto to produce a similar effect. Little distinguishes the faded propriety of this young woman seated in an anonymous interior from the other girls in Fern’s collection, such as her daughters Grace and Ellen Eldredge. What does distinguish the photograph, beyond its contents, is the oddity of its existence in the collection. The fact that there is a stray photo at all is curious in a collection so selectively devoted to so few subjects. Indeed, Grace Eldredge alone accounts for nearly half of the dozen subjects pictured, while her father Charles (Fern’s first husband) accounts for three.

A note in the finding aid identifies the sitter as Louisa Jacobs, Harriet Jacobs’s quadroon daughter. That the subject could be Louisa is supported by certain historical “facts” —Jacobs and her white-looking daughter spent time in Fern’s household. But on the other side of this notion of history as a set of verifiable facts is the regime of affect and feeling that surrounds the mulatta, a fascination that pervaded nineteenth-century American culture and the literature it produced. It is only with reluctance while scrutinizing the unidentifiable young woman that one dispels that urge so often discussed in nineteenth-century tragic mulatta narratives to discern traces of African heritage. Putting aside the possibilities that this is not a picture of Jacobs, we are still left to wonder what secret intimacy warrants the inclusion of this unidentified woman in such a closed gallery. As intertext, the image provides a different type of evidence—a suggestive form of evidence—for the rhetorical and psycho-social, if not historical, actualities that circumscribe Fern and Jacobs. These actualities cohere within a discourse of domesticity and the enclosed scenes that that discourse entails, which play out in gaps and silences behind history’s closed doors.

We need not confirm the identity of the photographed subject in order to use the association of sitter and image as an occasion to interrogate the bonds of affiliation that connect Harriet and Louisa Jacobs to Fanny Fern (a.k.a. Sara Willis). It is the burden of this essay to take up these speculations. The method behind such speculation requires a form of “creative hearing” that William L. Andrews advocates for reading slave narratives. To dwell in the seams, gaps, and cuts—those unspeakable or unknowable blind spots that frame the image—it is necessary that we employ a mode of creative seeing. As with Andrews’s formulation, what is seen is less a fiction invented by the critic than a textual provocation—a call to which we are solicited to respond. Accordingly, as we dwell in the fold where the material and the speculative collapse, possibilities emerge for rethinking sentimentalism and its attendant scripts of race, gender, authorship, and domestic labor.

Creative Seeing: An Analysis of the Unverifiable Photograph

The unidentified daguerreotype exists at the threshold of the speculative and the material. To explain, let us begin with the material dimension of the image, which is the same for any daguerreotype. The material daguerreotype is an artifact of a densely contextualized historical archive, in this case, one that subtends the life of Fanny Fern, her family and private life as well as her literary career as a connoisseur of affect. The speculative dimension of the image, which we shall employ in our creative seeing, derives from the conditions of possibility that enclose the subject. We can never know if this is indeed a photograph of Louisa Jacobs; nevertheless, clues in the archive invite speculation beyond the facts supported by conventional approaches to biographical evidence. Indeed…

Blackness in Germany: Locating “Race” in Johannes Schaaf’s 1986 Film Adaptation of Michael Ende’s Fantasy Novel Momo

Focus on German Studies
Volume 19 (2012)
pages 133-148

Benjamin Nickl
Georgetown University

Michael Ende’s 1973 fantasy novel, Momo first became popular in West Germany. Decades later, the book remained successful in the unified Republic. Intended as a piece of alternative literature for children, the story advocates resistance to consumerism, capitalism, and the time bind, in which free market economies situate members of the working population. The novel’s protagonist is the titular character, a small girl named “Momo.” She fights her adversaries, the “Gray Agents,” who are sent by the “Timesaving Bank” to steal mankind’s unused time and use it to sustain their lives. What allows for Momo’s resistance to the time-thieves is her state of innocence, a natural purity which prevents the young heroine from falling prey to Western civilization’s dogma of capitalism.

Ende’s original text, which is now in its 47th edition, never explicitly connects Momo as a symbol of pristine nature to non-white notions of race. However, the cinematic adaptation does exactly that. Cast in the role of Momo, then eleven-year-old Afro-German actress Radost Bokel was the visibly “exoticized” female lead. Her race set Bokel apart from her white cast members in the German-Italian production. Director Johannes Schaaf chose to define Momo in the context of a racial discourse to construct knowledge about otherness as ethnic difference. I read this as an exclusion of ethnic minorities in Germany, underscored by German film’s long tradition of nationalism based on ethnic affiliation.

Schaaf’s adaptation perpetuates a racial bias, which occupies a large part of the country’s ethnic history. The film exemplifies the projection of identities on the black body and performative manifestations of (black) identity, which were authored by a white majority despite the actual presence of individuals who identify as black. In the 1960s and 1970s, for instance, “becoming black” was a widespread phenomenon in West Germany. In the wake of the nation’s politicized student movement in 1968 (“68’er Studentenbewegung”), a great part of the white population imagined “blackness” as a way to express (national-political) innocence and justified anger over being the victim of capitalist rule. White people appropriated racial features of the black body, which they believed was unrightfully oppressed by the establishment; hence they made claims to socio-cultural aspects of both Afro-German and Afro-American identity. Especially the German youth expressed their white afrophilia in terms of fierce socio-politic engagement and wide circulation of cultural products branded as “Afroblack”…

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Schwarzsein, Weißsein, Deutschsein: Racial Narratives and Counter-discourses in German Film After 1950

Duke University
2012
286 pages

Michelle René Eley

Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Carolina-Duke Program – German Studies in the Graduate School of Duke University

This dissertation uses film to explore shifts in conceptions of race, cultural identity and national belonging in Germany from the 1950s West Germany to contemporary reunified Germany. Through the analysis of several German productions featuring Black characters in major narrative or symbolic roles, it identifies narrative and cinematic techniques used to thematize and problematize popular German conceptions of race and racism and to utilize race as a dynamic and flexible symbolic resource in defining specific identity borders. The dominant discourse around the concept of race and its far-reaching implications has long been impeded by the lack of a critical German vocabulary. This gap in mainstream German language is in large part a consequence of the immutable association between “race” (in German, Rasse) as a term, and the pro-Aryan, anti-Semitic dogma of National Socialist ideology. As Germany struggles to address racism as a specific problem in the process of its ongoing project to rehabilitate national identity in a post-colonial era indelibly marked by the Second World War, the films discussed in this work—Toxi (R.A. Stemmle, 1952), Gottes zweite Garnitur (P. Verhoeven, 1967), Angst essen Seele auf (R.W. Fassbinder, 1974), Die Ehe der Maria Braun (R.W. Fassbinder, 1979), Alles wird gut (Maccarone, 1998) and Tal der Ahnungslosen (Okpako, 2003)—provide evidence of attempts to create counter-discourses within the space of this language gap.

Using approaches based primarily in critical race and film studies, the following work argues that these films’ depictions of racism and racial conflict are often both confined by and add new dimension to definitions of Blackness and of conceptions of race and racism in a German context. These attempts at redefinition reveal the ongoing difficulties Germany has faced when confronting the social and ideological structures that are the legacy of its colonialist and National Socialist history. More importantly, however, the films help us to retrace and recover Germany’s history of resistance to that legacy and expand the imaginative possibilities for using poetic politics and communities of coalition to affect social change.

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Image Matters: Archive, Photography, and the African Diaspora in Europe

Duke University Press
2012
256 pages
118 photographs, 10 illustrations
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-5074-3
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8223-5056-9

Tina M. Campt, Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies and Director of the Africana Studies Program
Barnard College

In Image Matters, Tina M. Campt traces the emergence of a black European subject by examining how specific black European communities used family photography to create forms of identification and community. At the heart of Campt’s study are two photographic archives, one composed primarily of snapshots of black German families taken between 1900 and 1945, and the other assembled from studio portraits of West Indian migrants to Birmingham, England, taken between 1948 and 1960. Campt shows how these photographs conveyed profound aspirations to forms of national and cultural belonging. In the process, she engages a host of contemporary issues, including the recoverability of non-stereotypical life stories of black people, especially in Europe, and their impact on our understanding of difference within diaspora; the relevance and theoretical approachability of domestic, vernacular photography; and the relationship between affect and photography. Campt places special emphasis on the tactile and sonic registers of family photographs, and she uses them to read the complexity of “race” in visual signs and to highlight the inseparability of gender and sexuality from any analysis of race and class. Image Matters is an extraordinary reflection on what vernacular photography enabled black Europeans to say about themselves and their communities.

Rereading Pauline Johnson

Journal of Canadian Studies/Revue d’études canadiennes
Volume 46, Number 2, Spring 2012
pages 45-61
DOI: 10.1353/jcs.2012.0018

Carole Gerson, Professor of English
Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada

This essay argues for a broader appreciation of Pauline Johnson’s creative range and poetic accomplishment. Rereading her work in relation to some of J. Edward Chamberlin’s ideas about narrative and about home brings fresh perspectives to her writing and reception in relation to her reversal of the White masculine gaze in her representations of Native peoples, Canadian history, wilderness, and gender. Her first Euro-Canadian audience used her work to assist with their own indigenization and help them feel at home in Canada. Because most current readers construct Johnson as figure of resistance, concentrating on a small selection of her poetry on Native topics, they continue to ignore her poems that invoke a female voice to possess the wilderness, along with her innovative erotic verse that reinhabits the female body by empowering the female gaze.

Having written extensively about Pauline Johnson in the past—most recently in relation to celebrity (Gerson 2012)—I welcome the opportunity created by this collection of essays associated with the Grand River Forum to bring some of J. Edward Chamberlin’s observations about storytelling to bear on my current interest in returning approaches to Johnson. My goal is to bring fresh attention to the craft and range of her poetry and to the complexity of her reception. Chamberlin’s analysis of narrative as essential to human experience, however contradictory the stories on a given topic might seem, is amply borne out by the unusual life and career of Emily Pauline Johnson (1861-1913). The well-known part-Mohawk poet was closely associated with the Grand River region, where she honed her skills in canoeing and authorship, her talents converging in…

“A Very Different Looking Class of People”: Racial Passing, Tragedy, and the Mulatto Citizen in American Literature

University of Southern Mississippi
2013-02-18
81 pages

Stephanie S. Rambo

Honors Prospectus Submitted to the Honors College of The University of Southern Mississippi In Fulfillment Bachelors of Arts In the Department of English

This project explores the mulatto citizen as one who prevails against tragedy, uses passing as an escape route to freedom and equality, and establishes a fixed racial identity in a color struck world. In nineteenth-century American literature, the mulatto penetrates a seemingly solid world of color to reveal racial anxieties of the time. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or Life Among the Lonely (1852), William Wells Brown’s Clotel, or the President’s Daughter (1853), Frank J. Webb’s The Garies and Their Friends (1857) and Frances E.W. Harper’s Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted depict these mulatto characters as agents of social change. Each of these texts present the figure of the mulatto in a historical context, as a slave in the South and free/freedman in the antebellum North. Considering these various genres (esp. the blending of fiction and nonfiction at times), this study examines how different authors take a political stance by using the mulatto figure to define U.S. citizenship.

Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a foundational text due to the political response during Abraham Lincoln’s administration and from abolitionists worldwide. Stowe represents those minorities excluded from the democratic process, namely African Americans and women who were both disenfranchised. I examine political fiction by Brown, Webb, and Harper due to their depictions of the laws of slavery and African Americans’ civil rights struggles throughout the nineteenth century. Most of these American writers were excluded themselves from the political process. Therefore, I consider these writers most capable to present the voice of the marginal, mulatto citizen.

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2nd Story’s “Cruel Summer” Ends Up Sweet

Gapers Block
Chicago, Illinois
2013-08-01

Ines Bellina

The night’s theme may have been “Cruel Summer: Stories of Learning the Hard Way,” but 2nd Story‘s first-ever appearance at City Winery last Monday gave audience members the giddy feeling of a summer fling. Combining storytelling and live music against the backdrop of the gorgeous City Winery stage, the event was perhaps one of the most carefully crafted storytelling soirees of the season. Director and curator Jess Kadish turned a mundane Monday evening into one hell of a summer bash…

…Take the second storyteller, Khanisha Foster. Her heartbreaking (and often laugh-out-loud funny) account of trying to make it as an actor despite her ethnically ambiguous looks showcased her chameleon-like ability to imitate everyone from a shady theater director to Gilda Radner. Foster’s performance was easily the most bittersweet of the night. Her vulnerability was palpable as she described the struggles of wanting to be seen as a talented thespian while being obscured by her “Latina” looks. (Foster’s mother is white and her father is black.) Her versatility as an actor allowed her to easily transition from one character to another, making the piece even more poignant…

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Her Mammy’s Daughter: Symbolic Matricide and Racial Constructions of Motherhood in Charles W. Chesnutt’s “Her Virginia Mammy”

49th Parallel: An Interdisciplinary Journal of North American Studies
Issue 16: Autumn 2005
ISSN: 1753-5794

Laura Dawkins, Professor of English
Murray State University, Murray, Kentucky

The black mother in slavery and beyond has inspired a growing body of contemporary literature by African-American women.  Following Margaret Walker’s lead in her 1942 poem “Lineage,” and—more famously—Alice Walker’s example in her landmark essay, “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens” (1983), a significant number of black women writers have honored their foremothers in poetry, fiction, and memoir. Indeed, the celebratory strain in African-American women’s writings about maternal influence upon their lives and work has been so pronounced that Marianne Hirsch, discussing the pervasiveness of daughterly “matrophobia” in twentieth-century literature, admits that she cannot comfortably include works by black women in her parade of examples, since so many of these writers—in contrast to their white contemporaries—seem determined to avoid any hint of “mother-blame” in both fictional and non-fictional works.  Pointing out the “tremendously powerful need [for black women writers] to present to the public a positive image of black womanhood,” Hirsch quotes E. Frances White’s declaration of the African-American woman’s singular obligation to suppress less-than-ideal portrayals of black maternal figures: “How dare we admit the psychological battles that need to be fought with the very women who taught us to survive in this racist and sexist world?  We would feel like ungrateful traitors” (177).

Yet according to Mary Helen Washington, the absence of “matrophobia” in works by contemporary black women writers reflects not a suppression of the issue of mother-daughter conflict (as Hirsch and White suggest), and an impossible idealization of maternal influence (such as critic Dianne Sadoff finds in Walker’s essay), but the actual healthy state of affairs between black mothers and daughters.  Washington affirms the “generational continuity between [black daughters] and their mothers,” an enduring bond that inspires many African-American women writers to “name their mothers as models,” and to “challenge the fiction of mother-daughter hostility” (160).  In Washington’s view, black mothers and daughters, both because of and in spite of the painful historical legacy they share, do not succumb to the anger and upheaval associated with the traditional mother-daughter relationship…

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