Mixed Race Studies

The Passing of Anatole Broyard

Chapter in Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man
Random House
1997
256 pages
ISBN: 978-0-679-77666-6

Chapter pages: 180-214

Henry Louis Gates Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and the Director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research
Harvard University

In 1982, an investment banker named Richard Grand-Jean took a summer’s lease on an eighteenth-century farmhouse in Fairfield, Connecticut; its owner, Anatole Broyard, spent his summers in Martha’s Vineyard. The house was handsomely furnished with period antiques, and the surrounding acreage included a swimming pool and a pond. But the property had another attraction, too. Grand-Jean, a managing director of Salomon Brothers, was an avid reader, and he took satisfaction in renting from so illustrious a figure. Anatole Broyard had by then been a daily book reviewer for the Times for more than a decade, and that meant that he was one of literary America’s foremost gatekeepers. Grand-Jean might turn to the business pages of the Times first, out of professional obligation, but he turned to the book page next, out of a sense of self. In his Walter Mittyish moments, he sometimes imagined what it might be like to be someone who read and wrote about books for a living—someone to whom millions of readers looked for guidance.

Broyard’s columns were suffused with both worldliness and high culture. Wry, mandarin, even self-amused at times, he wrote like a man about town, but one who just happened to have all of Western literature at his fingertips. Always, he radiated an air of soigné self-confidence: he could be amiable in his opinions or waspish, but he never betrayed a flicker of doubt about what he thought. This was a man who knew that his judgment would never falter and his sentences never fail him.

Grand-Jean knew little about Broyard’s earlier career, but as he rummaged through Broyard’s bookshelves he came across old copies of intellectual journals like Partisan Renew and Commentary, to which Broyard had contributed a few pieces in the late forties and early fifties. One day, Grand-Jean found himself leafing through a magazine that contained an early article by Broyard. What caught his eye, though, was the contributor’s note for the article—or, rather, its absence. It had been neatly cut out, as if with a razor.

A few years later, Grand-Jean happened on another copy of that magazine, and decided to look up the Broyard article again. This time, the note on the contributor was intact. It offered a few humdrum details—that Broyard was born in New Orleans, attended Brooklyn College and the New School for Social Research, and taught at New York University’s Division of General Education. It also offered a less humdrum one: the situation of the American Negro, the note asserted, was a subject that the author “knows at first hand.” It was an elliptical formulation, to be sure, but for Anatole Broyard it may not have been elliptical enough.

Broyard was born black and became white, and his story is compounded of equal parts pragmatism and principle. He knew that the world was filled with such snippets and scraps of paper, all conspiring to reduce him to an identity that other people had invented and he had no say in. Broyard responded with X-Acto knives and evasions, with distance and denials and half-denials and cunning half-truths. Over the years, he became a virtuoso of ambiguity and equivocation. Some of his acquaintances knew the truth; many more had heard rumors about “distant” black ancestry (wasn’t here a grandfather who was black? a great-grandfather?). But most were entirely unaware, and that was as he preferred it. He kept the truth even from his own children. Society had decreed race to be a matter of natural law, but he wanted race to be an elective affinity, and it was never going to be a fair fight. A penalty was exacted. He shed a past and an identity to become a writer—a writer who wrote endlessly about the act of shedding a past and an identity…

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From Negro to Caucasian: or, How the Ethiopian is Changing His Skin

Pilot Publishing Company, San Francisco, California
1929
65 pages
Source: University of Michigan via The Hathi Trust Digital Library

Louis Fremont Baldwin

A concise presentation of the manner in which many Negroes in America … have abandoned their… afiliation with Negroes

A concise presentation of the manner in which many Negroes in America who, being very fair in complexion, with hair naturally or artificially free from kink, have abandoned their one-time affiiliations with Negroes, including their own relatives,  and by mingling at first commercially or industrially, then socially with Caucasians, have ultimately been absorbed by the latter.

Prepared and published at the request of the Society for the Amalgamation of the Races
New York, Paris and London
Pilot Publishing Company
617 Montgomery Street, San Francisco, Calif.

PREFACE

The reader is earnestly asked to accept as authentic and reliable the information that is given in this book. The writer is indebted to many friends throughout the country from the Atlantic to the Pacific and from the St. Lawrence to the Rio Grande.

These friends rendered valuable assistance enabling him to locate the individuals with whom he has held interviews related in the text, and from whom he was able to gather information that impressed him with the fact, of the enormous num ber of Colored Americans, who have sufficient ad mixture of bloods in their veins, to alienate them in appearance from the American Negro.

More startling still is the discovery of the great numbers of this contingent of the so-called Negro race, who have deserted-and forsaken kith and kin, and become merged with, or rather absorbed by the American Citizenry as the latter pursues the ordinary paths of trade, commerce, industry and professions, and . . and matrimony.

The reader will also recognize how complicated the situation—but this does not mean that the situation is necessarily calamitous,—but how difficult for any person, particularly those whose ancestors resided “In The South” to be perfectly sure that there is not “a drop of Negro blood in their veins!”  That it can be there, goes without saying, as the  incidents mentioned in the text that follows plainly show, but just as millions of Negroes—Negroes with fair complexions and perfectly straight hair,— those who have not “Crossed Over” as well as those who have, have white blood in their veins, why the author asks, can there not be millions of  persons who believe themselves to be white, yet  have Negro blood in their veins, obtained by the methods that it has been thought appropriate to  bring to the attention of the public through the publication of this book.

—THE AUTHOR.

Let the undersigned assure the readers of this book that after he had read the proof-sheets, he felt it his duty to give the author permission to add his personal testimony as to the prevalence of the practice alleged to be in vogue. He can confirm what is stated as occurring in so many instances, because a branch of his own family “Crossed Over” some few years ago, and has become completely absorbed in the white race.

—A. E. SHADD, Bishop of the United Holy Church of America; Western & Pacific Coast District

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Race and Identity in Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father: A Collection of Critical Essays

Edwin Mellen Press
June 2012
308 pages
ISBN10:  0-7734-1601-3; ISBN13: 978-0-7734-1601-7

Edited by:

Michael A. Zeitler, Associate Professor of English
Texas Southern University, Houston

Charlene T. Evans, Professor of English
Texas Southern University, Houston

This book examines significant aspects of President Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father both in relation to the African American literary tradition and to the context of the relevant historical and cultural productions that inform it. The authors view the book a work of literature and compare it to other works by black authors such as Toni Morrison, Frederick Douglass, and Ralph Ellison among others. Some authors contest the idea that the book was written during a pre-political stage in President Obama’s life because it was released to coincide with his first political campaign in Chicago, Illinois in the mid-1990’s. For autobiographical reasons the book is important because it shows various aspects of President Obama’s upbringing, and put in his own words his experience of being black in America. There is also a discussion of why he chose the less Americanized Barack when he went into college, rather than the homogeneous, whitened name Barry, which was the name he preferred in grammar school (out of being teased by other children)—and how he chose this name precisely because it constructed his identity as antithetical to the dominant paradigms of whiteness that he had been confined to while growing up in Hawaii. One article even describes President Obama’s father being ostracized from Kenyan politics after a coup d’etat forced a leader out of power who he had publically supported, which lead the family to America. It also tells the story of a turgid paternal influence on the young Barack Obama, where caught in a vicious cycle of perpetually working for his father’s approval, he spiraled into low self-esteem, which may have fueled his political ambitions later in life (as overcompensation for a lack of fatherly approval).

Table of Contents

• Foreword / Molefi Kete Asantei
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction / Michael A. Zeitler
• A Knot to Bind Our Experiences Together: Storytelling in Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father and Critical Race Theory / Erin Ponton Fiero
• No Apology for the Show: Performance and Oratorical Self-Creation in Obama, Douglass, and Ellison / Granville Ganter
• Slumming and Self-Making in Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father / David Mastey
• In Search of My Father’s Garden: Kenya as the Focal Point for the Study of a New Kind of Narrative in African American Autobiography / Claire Joly
• An Image of Africa: Race and Identity in Barack Obama’s Rewriting of Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’ / Michael Zeitler
• Obama, Ellison, and the Search for Identity / Rita Saylors
• Voices of His Mothers: Feminist Interventions and Identity in Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father / Letizia Guglielmo
• Queer Coherence: Loss and Hybridity in Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father / Patricia Harris Gillies
• The Search for Race and Masculine Identity in Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father / Dolores Sisco
• Beyond Race: Racial Transcendence in Jean Toomer’s Cane and Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father / Charlene T. Evans
• Glorious Burdens: A Lacanian Reading of Racial Passing, Inheritance, and Paternal Desire in Obama’s Dreams from My Father / Nicholas Powers

Ambivalent passages: racial and cultural crossings in Onoto Watanna’s The Heart of Hyacinth

MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S.
Volume 34, Number 1 (Spring 2009)
pages 211-229
DOI: 10.1353/mel.0.0004

Huining Ouyang, Professor of English
Edgewood College, Madison, Wisconsin

Appearing in the early fall of 1903 in time for the Christmas season, The Heart of Hyacinth, like other Japanese romances by Onoto Watanna (Winnifred Eaton), was widely promoted as a holiday gift book, enchanting readers with its “exquisite” Japanese design and its “delicate,” “charming” tale of Japan. For many, their pleasure in the novel’s Japanese appearance and sentiment was enhanced by their knowledge of its author’s alleged Japanese nativity or ethnicity. As one reviewer emphasizes: “We have a childish pleasure in things Japanese. . . . There is, therefore, a piquant pleasure for us in a story of Japanese life written by a native” (Heart, Republican). Similarly, another reviewer opens by introducing the author as “Onoto Watanna, the dainty little gentlewoman from Japan, who writes so delightfully of her native country” (“Heart,” Banner). Others, on the other hand, attribute the author’s “sympathy with Japanese life” (Kinkaid) or her portrayal of Japanese life “as seen from the inside” (Heart, Register) to her half-Japanese parentage. Thus, still largely convincing to the reading public, Watanna’s Japanese writing persona continued to allow her to dissimulate as an exemplar of the feminine, simple aesthetic and authentic ethnographer of Japan.

Watanna’s performance of Japaneseness, through her “Japanese” romances and especially her Japanese authorial persona, links her with the practice of “passing,” or the crossing of identity boundaries by those on the racial and cultural margins. An act of transgression, passing allows an individual in the liminal position, as Elaine K. Ginsberg puts it, to “assume a new identity, escaping the subordination and oppression accompanying one identity and accessing the privileges and status of the other” (3). As a woman of Chinese and English descent living and writing in an era of virulent anti-Chinese sentiments in North America, Onoto Watanna devised strategies of passing not only to escape personal and racial persecution but also to achieve authorship in a white-male-dominant literary marketplace. By appropriating the popular genre of Japanese romance and adopting the guise of an exotic half-Japanese woman writer, she exploited her white reading audience’s orientalist fantasies and enabled herself to achieve visibility and authority in a field dominated by such luminaries as Lafcadio Hearn, Pierre Loti, and John Luther Long.
 
In The Heart of Hyacinth, however, passing serves as not only a tactic of ethnic female authorship but also an important narrative strategy that governs both theme and plot. Although reviewers have variously described it as “an ideal gift-book,” “a Japanese idyll,” or a delicate “Japanese love story,” Watanna’s novel weaves, in effect, a complex narrative of identity in which she negotiates with orientalist binary constructions of the East and the West and explores through the Eurasian figure the promise and perils of boundary crossing. As its title suggests, Watanna’s novel centers on the tale of Hyacinth, a white American “orphan” who has been adopted and reared by a Japanese woman and who discovers her white racial origin when her American father attempts to claim her seventeen years after her birth. Although she eventually comes to terms with her white parentage, her heart belongs to her Japanese adoptive mother and to Komazawa, the Eurasian foster-brother she grew up with and with whom she now falls in love. However, like Watanna’s first novel, Miss Numè of Japan, The Heart of Hyacinth tells more than what its title seems to imply. Hyacinth’s struggles with her familial, cultural, and racial allegiances intersect with her adoptive Eurasian brother’s negotiations of his own mixed heritage. Despite her discovery of her white heritage, Hyacinth claims a Japanese identity and resists Western colonial paternalism, while Komazawa passes into British society and navigates his biraciality with apparent ease in his endeavors to become “English.”

A coming-of-age narrative of two Eurasians, one actual and the other metaphorical, Watanna’s novel thus imagines passing in two different forms. On the one hand, through Komazawa’s physical and…

The arresting eye: Race and the detection of deception

University of Southern California
December 2005
282 pages
Publication Number: AAT 3220115
ISBN: 9780542713217

Jinny Huh

A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (ENGLISH)

With increasing rates of miscegenation and racially invisible bodies, how is race to be determined? This dissertation examines the dynamics and discourse of race detection through a comparative analysis of detective fiction and passing narratives, two genres that witnessed a simultaneous rise during the mid-nineteenth century. I argue that the detective fiction genre in many ways prospers and responds to the anxiety of racial indecipherability by creating a systematic method of detection. By examining narratives of detection and passing written by both white and ethnic authors ranging from Arthur Conan Doyle and Earl Derr Biggers to Pauline Hopkins and Winnifred Eaton, among others, this study demonstrates that the politics and mechanics of race detection is highly specific to the eye of the gazer attuned to distinguishing the signs of race. For example, while Dupin and Holmes may exhibit mystically and supernaturally intuitive powers, Pauline Hopkins (author of the first African American detective in Hagar’s Daughter) shows that intuition and race detection is a necessary component of the African American community. On the other hand, Winnifred Eaton (the first Asian American novelist) responds to the obsession with detection by promoting a rhetoric of undetection in the emergence of Asian American fiction. Finally, in response to Eaton’s celebration of undetection within the Asian American context, Earl Derr Biggers’s Charlie Chan series demonstrate the anxieties of promoting an Asian American detective hero during the height of Yellow Peril paranoia.

In addition to examining the politics of race detection in literature, this dissertation also explores how numerous disciplines formulate their own concepts of “racial knowledges” via a discourse of detection (such as film studies, visual studies, law, ethnography, and literary history). As such, through a comparative focus which encompasses multiple levels (19th/20th century, male/female, British/American, African American/Asian American, literature/film), my study also addresses the potential threat and implications of racial erasure to Ethnic Studies specifically and Civil Rights overall.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgements
• Abstract
• Introduction
• Chapter One: Whispers of Norbury: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and the Modernist Crisis of Racial (Un)Detection
• Chapter Two: Intuitive Faculties and Racial Clairvoyance: Pauline Hopkins and the Emergence of Multiethnic Detective Fiction
• Chapter Three: The Legacy of Winnifred Eaton: Ethnic Ambidexterity, Undetection as Guerilla Tactics, and the Emergence of Asian American Fiction
• Chapter Four: “The Jaundiced Eye”: Charlie Chan and the Mysterious Disappearance of a Detective Hero
• Bibliography

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Crimes of passing: The criminalization of blackness and miscegenation in United States passing narratives

University of California, Los Angeles
2005
158 pages
Publication Number: AAT 3175169
ISBN: 9780542133046

Susan Elaine Bausch

A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature

Between approximately 1880 and 1925, large numbers of legally black Americans crossed the color line and identified as white; in common parlance, they “passed.” After Reconstruction, the South attempted to legislate the separation of the races by enacting “Jim Crow” laws that mandated segregation and prohibited miscegenation (at least within marriage). This meant that many passers were not just violating a social taboo by crossing the color line, they were also breaking the law. Even in the North, there were some anti-miscegenation laws on the books, although convention and prejudice probably played a bigger role in limiting mixed-race marriages. In effect, these laws made it a crime for a black person to do what a white person did, which means that blackness itself was criminalized.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter One: Imitation White and Secret Murderers: The Criminalization of Blackness in Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson
• Chapter Two: Feminine Transgressions: Crossing Racial and Sexual Boundaries in Nella Larsen’s Passing and the Rhinelander Case
• Chapter Three: Passing for What?: Joe Christmas’s Racial Uncertainty and Criminal Fate in William Faulkner’s Light in August
• Chapter Four: A Passing Success: The Cost of Mobility in James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man
• Conclusion
• Works Cited

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HIST 1133-Mongrel America: Miscegenation, Passing, and the Myth of Racial Purity

Cornell University
Fall 2012

Racial divisions have served as potent tools for consolidating power, upholding unjust practices, and shaping the American historical imagination. Whether in the form of slavery, segregation, extralegal violence, or the one-drop rule, the insistence on preserving racial distinctions reflects a desire among some Americans to cling to a myth of racial purity. Despite persistent efforts to enforce these boundaries, other Americans have consistently blurred, transgressed, and undermined these seemingly rigid racial categories. Drawing on texts by Thomas Jefferson, Nella Larsen, James Baldwin, and others, this class will explore the quixotic desire for white racial purity, the reality of ‘amalgamation,’ and the relationship between the two. Ultimately, students will analyze the impact of ‘Mongrel America’ on the ways in which Americans understand citizenship and their history.

The Paper Bag Principle: Class, Colorism, and Rumor and the Case of Black Washington, D.C.

University of Tennessee Press
2006-07-15
136 pages
9.2 x 6.3 x 0.7 inches
Cloth ISBN: 1-57233-462-2
Cloth ISBN-13: 978-1572334625

Audrey Elisa Kerr, Professor of English and Women Studies
Southern Connecticut State University

The Paper Bag Principle: Class, Colorism, and Rumor in the Case of Black Washington, D.C. considers the function of oral history in shaping community dynamics among African American residents of the nation’s capitol. The only attempt to document rumor and legends relating to complexion in black communities, The Paper Bag Principle looks at the divide that has existed between the black elite and the black “folk.”

While a few studies have dealt with complexion consciousness in black communities, there has, to date, been no study that has catalogued how the belief systems of members of a black community have influenced the shaping of its institutions, organizations, and neighborhoods. Audrey Kerr examines how these folk beliefs—exemplified by the infamous “paper bag tests”—inform color discrimination intraracially.

Kerr argues that proximity to whiteness (in hue) and wealth have helped create two black Washingtons and that the black community, at various times in history, replicated “Jim Crowism” internally to create some standard of exceptionalism in education and social organization. Kerr further contends that within the nomenclature of African Americans, folklore represents a complex negotiation of racism written in ritual, legend, myth, folk poetry, and folk song that captures “boundary building” within African American communities.

The Paper Bag Principle focuses on three objectives: to record lore related to the “paper bag principle” (the set of attitudes that granted blacks with light skin higher status in black communities); to investigate the impact that this “principle” has had on the development of black community consciousness; and to link this material to power that results from proximity to whiteness. The Paper Bag Principle is sure to appeal to scholars and historians interested in African American studies, cultural studies, oral history, folklore, and ethnic and urban studies.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Traditions and Complexion Lore
• 2. A National Perspective on Complextion Lore
• 3. Washington Society
• 4. Social Organization in Washington
• 5. School Lore: Beliefe and Practice in the Education of Black Washington
• 6. Complexion and Worship
• 7. One Drop of Black Blood, a Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

“Passing” in a White Genre: Charles W. Chesnutt’s Negotiations of the Plantation Tradition in “The Conjure Woman”

American Literary Realism, 1870-1910
Volume 27, Number 2 (Winter, 1995)
pages 20-36

Robert C. Nowatzki

When Charles Chesnutt’s collection of plantation tales The Conjure Woman was published in 1899, the immensely popular plantation tradition in fiction had become heavily codified and limited the formal and thematic possibilities of any new texts produced in that tradition. Thus, in writing The Conjure Woman, Chesnutt was largely restricted by the conventions of the plantation tradition in fiction. Yet he also had some limited success in transforming and critiquing the ideologies and conventions which informed that tradition. This essay focuses on the relations between The Conjure Woman, the plantation tradition in fiction, and late nineteenth-century beliefs regarding racial difference and racial relations. More specifically, my analysis examines Chesnutt’s use of the frame narrative device common in plantation fiction, as well as his depiction of the black storyteller, the contrast between his black storyteller and his white narrator, and his depictions of slavery. By analyzing these features of The Conjure Woman in the context of plantation fiction conventions and the predominant racial ideologies of the time, we can see how Chesnutt’s writing was determined by these ideologies and conventions, and conversely, how he was able to critique them.

The Conjure Woman and Its Predecessors

The Conjure Woman consists of seven stories: “The GoopheredGrapevine,” “Po’ Sandy,” “Mars Jeem’s Nightmare,” “The Conjurer’s…

Mining the garrison of racial prejudice: The fiction of Charles W. Chesnutt and turn-of-the-century White racial discourse

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
1995

Robert Carl Nowatzki

This dissertation analyzes the fiction of Charles Waddell Chesnutt (1858-1932), the first black fiction writer published by a major American firm and widely reviewed and read by white critics and readers. My analysis focuses on the conflict between Chesnutt’s anti-racism and his attempt to make his critiques less threatening to his white publishers, critics, and readers. In order to demonstrate the ideological and discursive forces that Chesnutt resisted, I juxtapose his works with fiction and nonfiction prose by popular white authors and reviews of his work by white critics.

Chapter One provides the biographical, historical, ideological, and literary contexts of Chesnutt’s work. Each of the following five chapters examines one of Chesnutt’s books of fiction alongside literature by whites which deals with similar subjects and often expresses popular racist assumptions that Chesnutt’s fiction contests. Each chapter also demonstrates how white reviewers of his work often reiterated the racism that he resisted and dismissed him as a biased “Negro” author. Chapter Two interprets Chesnutt’s collection of plantation tales The Conjure Woman (1899) along with plantation fiction by Thomas Nelson Page and Joel Chandler Harris and pro-slavery nonfiction essays by Page and Philip Alexander Bruce. Chapter Three examines the treatment of miscegenation and depiction of mulattoes in Chesnutt’s collection of stories The Wife of His Youth (1899) in conjunction with anti-miscegenation literature by Page, Thomas Dixon, Jr., William Smith, and William Calhoun. Chapter Four focuses on the issue of passing and the “tragic octoroon” convention in Chesnutt’s novel The House Behind the Cedars (1900) and in novels by William Dean Howells, Gertrude Atherton, and Albion Tourgée. Chapter Five analyzes how Chesnutt’s 1901 novel The Marrow of Tradition critiques the black disfranchisement, segregation, and racial violence defended by Page, Dixon, Calhoun, Smith, and Bruce. Chapter Six interprets Chesnutt’s critique of sectional conflict and the “New South Creed” in his 1905 novel The Colonel’s Dream along with Henry Grady’s 1886 “New South” speech and literature by Tourgee, Harris, Page, Dixon, and Bruce. Chapter Seven briefly surveys the neglect and subsequent recovery of Chesnutt’s fiction since his death, and emphasizes the importance of studying his work in its historical, ideological, and literary contexts.

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