Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

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Category: Passing

  • Alien Land

    “Alien Land” is the passionate and haunting story of a light-skinned black man who can pass as white in mid-twentieth-century America.

  • Women-Loving Women: Queering Black Urban Space during the Harlem Renaissance

    Women-Loving Women: Queering Black Urban Space during the Harlem Renaissance Women’s Studies 197: Senior Seminar 2010-06-07 Professor Lilith Mahmud Samantha Tenorio The experience of black “women-loving-women” during the Harlem Renaissance is directly influenced by what Kimberlé Crenshaw terms intersectional identity, or their positioning in the social hierarchies of race, gender, class, and sexual orientation that…

  • Multiculturalism and Morphing in “I’m Not There” (Haynes, 2007)

    Multiculturalism and Morphing in “I’m Not There” (Haynes, 2007) Wide Screen Volume 2, Number 1, June 2010 15 pages ISSN: 1757-3920 Published by Subaltern Media Zélie Asava ‘Passing’ narratives question fixed social categorisations and prove the possibility of self-determination, which is why they are such a popular literary and cinematic trope. This article explores ‘passing’…

  • Was first black priest black enough?

    Was first black priest black enough? Chicago Tribune 2010-05-02 Manya A. Brachear, Tribune reporter Healy, son of a plantation owner, isn’t mentioned as often as Tolton, who is being pushed for sainthood More than a year after some African-Americans scrutinized the blackness of the nation’s first black president, America’s Catholics are now wrestling with the…

  • Passing and the Fictions of Identity

    These essays consider a wide range of texts and moments from colonial times to the present that raise significant questions about the political motivations inherent in the origins and maintenance of identity categories and boundaries.

  • Near Black: White-to-Black Passing in American Culture (review)

    Near Black: White-to-Black Passing in American Culture (review) MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S. Volume 35, Number 1 (Spring 2010) E-ISSN: 1946-3170 Print ISSN: 0163-755X DOI: 10.1353/mel.0.0078 David Todd Lawrence, Associate Professor of English University of St. Thomas Passing narratives have long been a fixture of American literature. For African American authors, plots of racial…

  • Passing Fancy

    In the Jim Crow South, courts understood that rigidly enforcing the rules against mixed marriage would have been a disaster—for whites.

  • Crossing the Color Line: Racial Migration and the One-Drop Rule, 1600–1860

    Crossing the Color Line: Racial Migration and the One-Drop Rule, 1600–1860 Minnesota Law Review Volume 91, Number 3 (February 2007) pages 592-656 Daniel J. Sharfstein, Professor of Law Vanderbilt University “It ain’t no lie, it’s a natural fact, / You could have been colored without being so black…” —Sung by deck hands, Auburn, Alabama, 1915–161…

  • Fading to white, fading away: biracial bodies in Michelle Cliff’s Abeng and Danzy Senna’s Caucasia

    Fading to white, fading away: biracial bodies in Michelle Cliff’s Abeng and Danzy Senna’s Caucasia African American Review 2006-03-22 Michelle Goldberg However dissimilar individual bodies are, the compelling idea of common, racially indicative bodily characteristics offers a welcome short-cut into the favored forms of solidarity and connection, even if they are effectively denied by divergent…

  • Ambiguity and the Ethics of Reading Race and Lynching in James W. Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912)

    Ambiguity and the Ethics of Reading Race and Lynching in James W. Johnson’s “The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man” (1912) Current Objectives of Postgraduate American Studies (COPAS) Volume 10 (2009) ISSN: 1861-6127 Carmen Dexl University of Erlangen James Weldon Johnson’s novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912) discusses the causes, conditions, and implications of…