Mixed Race Studies

Stand Back Ladies and Gentlemen! The Wonders of the World! Conformity and Confrontation in Winnifred Eaton’s Freak Show Setting in “The Loves of Sakura Jiro and the Three-Headed Maid”

Winnifred Eaton Project Symposium
2007-03-15 through 2007-03-16
Owens Art Gallery
Mount Allison University, Sackville, New Brunswick, Canada

2007-03-16

Christine Mayor
Mount Allison University

The freak show claims true wonders but encourages fraud, offers multicultural exhibits only to reinforce white supremacy, and asserts authenticity while promoting an exotic and aggrandized racial performance. While many have critiqued Winnifred Eaton’s false persona, questioned her authenticity as an “armchair ethnographer,” and accused her of reinforcing Orientalist stereotypes, this essay will concentrate on her deployment of the freak show in the short story “The Loves of Sakura Jiro and the Three-Headed Maid” to challenge widely held American values at the turn of the century. As Pat Shea argues, Eaton’s fiction skilfully balances “concession and resistance,” ensuring commercial success and readership while parodying and subverting white supremacy (19). Eaton capitalises on the potential of the freak show to entice and entertain readers, thus giving her freer reign to critique aspects of the nation, the ideology of whiteness, and the entertainment industry, while playfully exploring her own sideshow hoax as Onoto Watanna.

Historically, the freak show is not simply a form of entertainment, but is also a powerful tool for defining the self through negation, and “allow[s] ordinary people to confront, and master, the most extreme and terrifying forms of Otherness they could imagine” (Adams 2). In the public setting of a sideshow, each audience member is encouraged to identify with the uniform, “normal”, mass, and is distanced from the exotic, disabled, and/or freakishly skilled “Other”. As Robert Bogdan argues,

Americans viewing such displays of non-Western people did not confront their own ethnocentrism…[but]merely [had] confirmed old prejudices and beliefs regarding the separateness of the “enlightened” and “primitive” worlds; they left the freak show reassured of their own superiority by such proofs of others’ inferiority. (197)

…In this manner, Eaton’s image of the freak show may serve as a metaphor for the entertainment industry and a defence of her own passing as Japanese. Eaton, as a mixed-race subject, stands in as a “racial freak” that aggrandizes and exoticises her own identity to gain wider marketability and popularity. Ferens explores in detail Eaton’s conceit of the freak show, stating, “The dime museum may be usefully interpreted as a trope for the popular publishing industry of which Winnifred was, by 1903, a seasoned worker. The two businesses have a similar social function and structure: a metropolitan location, a publisher/manager, a press agent, a stable of expendable writers/performers, and a broad, unsophisticated customer base” (147). The ease with which these two industries can be paralleled further highlights the various ways in which difference is produced and staged to be profitable. Eaton describes in her fiction, the tactics used by the sideshow manager to increase the interest in the acts, which are strikingly similar to the way Eaton packaged herself as an artist. Eaton created for herself a Japanese persona presented through a pen-name, pictures in exotic dress, and authority through racial and familial authenticity. Eaton’s Japanese persona was her commodity and allowed her work to be judged apart from Western literary standards, as, “The naïveté and lack of literary technique that would have disadvantaged her as a white writer suddenly became part of what reviewers recognized as the “peculiar charm” of her untutored style” (Ferens 118). Eaton’s passing thereby allowed her to simultaneously critique and exploit the dominant system, as well as forcing readers to question how we understand and construct the identities of others. Eaton’s playful and cynical arguments that appearances are all that matter in either industry, and that each person must compete as best they can, serve as a critique of the discriminatory American capitalist system and defend her own elaborate hoax…

Read the entire paper here.

Spring 2008 Feature: Acting on a Dream

Farmington First: Alumni Magazine
University of Maine, Farmington
Spring 2008

Marc Glass

The stages of H’Nette DeTroy’s dramatic life include theater, dance and even commercial casting

Looking at H’Nette DeTroy’s resume, you might think she suffers from career wanderlust. Since graduating from UMF in 2006, she’s been a nurse, a cheerleader and a bus-commuting business executive—not to mention a disgruntled gas-station patron, a terminally ill hospital patient and a drunk-driving fatality. A southern Maine-based actor, DeTroy takes pride in her many professional personas—whether that means extolling the virtues of an alternative-fuel Mercedes Benz in a television commercial, playing a nurse in a hospital training video, dramatizing the perils of operating under the influence in an MTV-aired public service announcement or taking to the stage in a community theater production of Disney’s High School Musical.

“It’s a lot of fun to lose yourself in a role, creatively making it whatever you want it to be,” said DeTroy on a rare day of downtime away from auditions, teaching children’s dance lessons and rehearsing with the Portland-based hip-hop dance company Rhythm Factor. “When I’m acting, dancing or singing, I lose all concept of time and the trivial stuff in life. This is something I love. It’s what life is about for me.”…

…With what she calls her “multiracial” background (courtesy of a German father and Vietnamese mother), DeTroy has been slating of sorts for most of her life.

“People have always asked me ‘What are you?’ or ‘Are you Latina?’ My mom is as third-world as you can get. Growing up in as unforgiving and wealthy a place as Fairfield County makes you aware of your identity. I’m used to defining myself in the first three seconds,” she said. “I remember growing up and thinking ‘there’s no one on TV who looks like me.’ Seeing Jennifer Lopez in the film Selena, a minority actress actually making it, was very motivational.”…

Read the entire article here.

Freedom’s Child: The Life of a Confederate General’s Black Daughter

Algonquin Books
1998
288 pages
ISBN: 9781565121867

Carrie Allen McCray (1913-2008)

When Carrie Allen McCray was a child, she was afraid to ask about the framed photograph of a white man on her mother’s dresser. Years later she learned that he was her grandfather, a Confederate general, and that her grandmother was a former slave. In her late seventies, Carrie McCray went searching for her history and found the remarkable story of her mother, Mary [Rice Allen], the illegitimate daughter of General J. R. Jones, of Lynchburg, Virginia. Jones would later be cast out of Lynchburg society for publicly recognizing his daughter. Freedom’s Child is a loving remembrance of how Mary spent her life beating down the kind of thinking that ostracized her father. She was a leader in the founding of the NAACP and hosted the likes of Langston Hughes and W.E.B. Du Bois as they plotted the war against discrimination at her kitchen table. Carrie McCray’s memories reward us with an extraordinarily vivid and intimate portrait of a remarkable woman.

Mixed-race Rose contestant snubs racist websites

Sunday Tribune, Dublin, Ireland
2008-08-03

Ken Sweeney

A mixed-race contestant who is competing in this year’s Rose of Tralee says she has no fears about travelling to Ireland to take part in the contest despite a series of racist remarks made against her on a website.

London Rose Belinda Brown (25) has been targeted by users of race hate website Stormfront.org since being selected in Cricklewood last month.

Born in Jamaica but raised in Ahoghill, Co Antrim, Irish-based racists have questioned Brown’s right to compete in the beauty pageant because of her mixed-race parentage.

“This mixed female is indeed no Rose of Tralee,” posted one member, War Maiden, on the site. “Last time I checked our women were pale-skinned maidens from our Emerald Isle, not some mud from London.”

Another, with the name White Patriot, wrote: “The London entrant for this year’s Rose of Tralee is a half caste mongrel. What the hell are the organisers thinking of? Whites who mix with blacks shouldn’t be surprised when they get treated like animals themselves. They are traitors to their race, culture and family. We have no sympathy for them.”

However in an interview with the Sunday Tribune, Belinda Brown said she was proud of her mixed-race ancestry and said she had no fears about travelling to Tralee for the contest which takes place in Kerry from 22-26 August…

Read the entire article here.

The “Quadroon-Plaçage” Myth of Antebellum New Orleans: Anglo-American (Mis)interpretations of a French-Caribbean Phenomenon

Journal of Social History
Published Online: 2011-11-13
DOI: 10.1093/jsh/shr059

Kenneth Aslakson, Assistant Professor of History
Union College, Schenectady, New York

Although Thomas Jefferson’s likely affair with his slave, Sally Hemmings, has sparked controversy since James Callender first made it public in 1802, no place has attracted more attention with regard to miscegenation than Louisiana, and particularly its chief city of New Orleans. The general consensus holds that the inhabitants of New Orleans were unusually open about interracial relationships (or at least heterosexual ones in which the man was white), due to the cultural influence of the French and Spanish, and nothing epitomized this more than the city’s famed “quadroon balls,” dances open to young free women of mixed ancestry and white gentlemen of means. According to lore, the “lovely and refined” quadroon woman came to the ball “dressed in the most fashionable gown and chaperoned by her mother” looking for a wealthy white gentleman. “After dancing with a man, if the girl were attracted, he would be allowed to speak with her mother to make ‘arrangements’… [which] would include a furnished home that [the woman of color] would own and financial arrangements for her and any children.” The relationship thus established was called plaçage and the woman une placée. The relationship was temporary and ended when the man took a white wife. Nevertheless, a woman of color greatly benefitted from the patronage of an elite white man and often used the money bestowed upon her to establish herself in business “usually as a dressmaker, milliner, or by operating a boarding house.” Thus, the “quadroon balls” and plaçage relationships “provided a comfortable lifestyle for the quadroon ladies who had very limited options during the period.”

While this story of the quadroon balls and plaçage is enticing, it is based on scanty evidence, and, therefore, this paper will refer to it as the quadroon-plaçage myth. To be sure, something like the…

Read or purchase the article here.

Jackie Kay wins Scottish Book of the Year

The Edinburgh Reporter
2011-08-26

Creative Scotland is delighted to announce that award winning poet and author, Jackie Kay, has been awarded the 2011 Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust Book of the Year, in partnership with Creative Scotland, for her autobiography Red Dust Road.

Jackie Kay received her £30,000 prize at a ceremony hosted by Dame Jenni Murray this afternoon at the Edinburgh International Book Festival.
 
Born in Edinburgh to a Scottish nurse and a Nigerian student, Kay was adopted at birth by a white couple and brought up in Glasgow.  Red Dust Road, published by Picador, is an autobiographical account of Jackie’s search to find her birth parents, a journey that is full of unexpected twists, turns and deep emotions.  In an amazing new chapter, a recent Guardian Podcast by Jackie Kay led to her making contact with her birth sisters for the first time…

Read the entire article and listen to the interview here.

Southern Free Women of Color In the Antebellum North: Race, Class, and a “New Women’s Legal History”

Akron Law Review
Volume 41, 1Number 3 (2007-2008)
pages 763-798

Bernie D. Jones, Associate Professor of Law
Suffolk University

• I. Configuring Race, Gender, and Class in American Legal History
• II. African-American Women in the Antebellum United States: Enslaved and Free Women Facing the Law
• III. Formulating an Abolitionist Law Practice: John Jolliffe
• IV. Conclusion

In thinking about the status of Southern slave women newly freed in the antebellum North, it is important to think about the ways in which they experienced race, gender, and class. According to Deborah Gray White, “[they] were slaves because they were black, and even more than sex, color was the absolute determinant of class in antebellum America.”1 These women were “[black] in a white society, slave in a free society, woman in a society ruled by men [as] female slaves [they] had the least formal power and were perhaps the most vulnerable group of antebellum Americans.” This was their reality, as a result of cultural and social practices founded in law. Legal elites developed as far back as the colonial period, a law of slavery based upon hierarchical notions of humanity seen as “natural.” Blacks were inferior to whites, and it was natural that they should be enslaved, as a matter of organic law. Southern social and economic demands necessitated this legal order.

In order to conceptualize race, gender, and class in American legal history today, it is important, first of all, to explain and discuss these topics within the contours of American legal thought. Race, gender, and class can be indicators of hierarchy and status in American society, especially when they are modulated through the institutional practices of politics and law. Within the realm of American legal thought over the past century, though, American lawyers have struggled with the extent to which they believed the law was indeed about power and politics. The following diagram, figure 1, “American Legal Thought, Late 19th Century into Today,” lists the various schools of thought which have been significant, and demonstrates the relationships among them…

…If anything, the Black laws indicate further the significance of race and class in “women’s legal history,” highlighting the ways in which black women could be disempowered as a matter of law. Mixed-race slave women were not always privileged by their ties to whiteness. If they had been enslaved, they could be returned to slavery if the relatives who owned them would deny them freedom, and when they were “free people of color,” they could be denied access to public education if they did not look “white enough.” A light-skinned mixed-race slave woman, Matilda Lawrence, from Missouri, accompanied her slave owner father in 1836 on trips into the North. She expressed an interest in becoming free, but he refused to manumit her. Easily passing as a white woman, she escaped into Cincinnati and found employment. Her father hired a professional slave catcher to capture her. Upon being apprehended, she was charged as a fugitive under the Act of 1793, and eventually removed from Cincinnati.

Not only did the Black laws threaten blacks’ interest in freedom and escaping from slavery, but it also denied them the chance to have their children educated in the public schools. These were for white children only. Thus, black children were to be educated privately. But those mixed-race black children who appeared “white” could go to school with whites, as happened in the case of the Williams family, headed by an octoroon man married to a white woman. He was of 1/8 black ancestry—one of his eight great-grandparents was black. Socially, the couple was taken to be white by all who knew them, but when they hoped to enroll their children in a local public school, they were barred, until the Ohio Supreme Court clarified what it meant to be “white.” Whiteness was not limited to ancestry, but to appearance. The children appeared white, their parents lived in a white world; for the purposes of school enrollment, the children were white.

The cases brought by formerly enslaved free women of color and their children for inheritances did not involve the drama of communities caught between abolitionist fervor and pro-slavery sentiment as found in the fugitive slave cases and the earlier cases which challenged the Black laws. It is of great significance, then, that these cases escaped the public scrutiny that the other cases generated, and as a result, have not been the focus of scholarly inquiry. They provide, however, another view of what abolitionist law practice entailed. The women were struggling to be defined as “free.” State institutions in their home states had carefully defined and proscribed definitions of “family” which did not include them. The relatives of the white men to whom they had biological ties never saw them as “family,” but saw them instead as property to be owned. Thus, lawyers and testators had to be resourceful at using legal institutions and doctrines…

Read the entire article here.

ENLT 252 Mestizas, Halfies, and Others

University of Virginia
Fall 2008

How does your family background affect the way that the way that you see yourself?  How others in the United States see you?  In this class we will investigate novels, short stories, and poems that foreground the multicultural and intercultural make-up of the United States.  Our texts are an alternate form of cultural history: they depict a range of interactions between various immigrant communities and the larger “American” culture, which as it turns out, has no single definition.  Our texts are written by women who are often assigned hyphenated labels to indicate their family origins—Sandra Cisneros is Mexican-American, Diana Abu-Jaber is Jordanian-American, and so on—and many of our works feature protagonists who are of mixed racial and ethnic heritage and who negotiate among several different cultural modes.  Some recurring themes of the course will be the experience of living in between two or more languages (many of the texts incorporate untranslated pieces of languages other than English) and the language act of naming and renaming (for instance in Marilyn Chin’s “How I Got That Name: An Essay on Assimilation.”)  We will see that it is not only the ethically “other” citizens who are influenced by the American experience but indeed that their languages and voices penetrate into and profoundly shape American experience as a whole, both in terms of literary content and in terms of formal accomplishment.

 In the course we will analyze literary moments of cross-cultural contact, stereotyping, and exchange, and our goal during the semester will likewise be to create a small exemplary community in which open exchanges can occur.  We will discuss and critique the terms “mestiza” and “halfie,” among other labels for people of mixed race and mixed cultural experience, and we will compare the use and implications of these colloquial terms to the purposes and political intentions of scholarly definitions by cultural critics such as Gloria Anzaldúa and Lila Abu-Lughod. We will also be strongly interested in questions of literary form.  For instance, what is significant about a novel or poem following a linear narrative characteristic of realism, in other words producing a “straight” take on identity and history?  What is at stake in the poem or novel that takes a more postmodern approach and emphasizes a fractured, heterogeneous, hybrid experience?  Course requirements include regular and well-prepared participation, three papers, email responses to two of the readings, one class presentation, one or two periods leading discussion, and an essay-based final exam.

Possible texts include:

Sandra Cisneros, Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories (Vintage)
Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/ La Frontera: The New Mestiza (Aunt Lute Books)
Richard Rodriguez, Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (Bantam)
Nella Larson, Passing (Penguin)
Danzy Senna, Caucasia (Riverhead)
Gish Jen, Mona in the Promised Land (Vintage)
Diana Abu-Jaber, Crescent (Norton)

Interview with Kym Ragusa: (Passing)

Reel New York: Season 2
thirteen: WNET New York
From Week Four (May 1997)

Kathy High, Series Curator

Series curator Kathy High conducted this telephone interview with Kym Ragusa in May, 1997.

Q: The first question I’d like to ask you, Kym, is what prompted you to make the piece? It’s really a beautiful and incredibly moving piece.

Kym Ragusa: Oh, thank you.

Q: I wondered if this had been a story you’d heard before, as a child, and that you asked your grandmother to tell. How did it come about?

KR: Actually, my grandmother had told me the story a bunch of times. But I noticed that every time she told me, it was a little different. It would be more or less detailed, or the year would change. There’d always be something that was different. And I thought it would be a good idea just to try to record the stories as she told me. Part of it was to see how she remembered the story because it was something really traumatic for her. And also really pivotal in her life. And I wanted to see at different times, how and why she remembered certain things and not others. And why, at certain times, she would not tell me certain things. She wouldn’t be explicit about certain things — like her relationship with the man she traveled with. Actually, I did it over a period of three years. Another reason was that she has cancer and she’s not well now, and so I felt like I wanted to do something for her, and to preserve this part of her life that’s really her own thing that she did.
 
Read the entire interview here.

Passing

Third World Newsreel
1995
Black & White
9 minutes
United States

Kym Ragusa

The videomaker’s grandmother recounts the tale of a trip she and her lover took through the segregated South of the 1950s. As her story unfolds—revealing as much in silences and gaps as it does in its actual narrative—a blues and gospel soundtrack provides other tales of miscegenation and resistance. The story is full of tensions around race, class and color and the anxieties produced by the racial climate and violent history of the South.

Screenings

• Charlotte Film/Video Festival 1997
• Reel New York, WNET-TV

Awards

• Women in the Director’s Chair, Juror’s Prize

For more information, click here.