Mixed Race Studies

An Anthology of Interracial Literature: Black-White Contacts in the Old World and the New

New York University Press
2004-02-01
675 pages
Cloth ISBN: 9780814781432
Paperback ISBN: 9780814781449

Edited by

Werner Sollors, Henry B. and Anne M. Cabot Professor of English Literature and Professor of African and African American Studies
Harvard University

A white knight meets his half-black half-brother in battle. A black hero marries a white woman. A slave mother kills her child by a rapist-master. A white-looking person of partly African ancestry passes for white. A master and a slave change places for a single night. An interracial marriage turns sour. The birth of a child brings a crisis. Such are some of the story lines to be found within the pages of An Anthology of Interracial Literature.

This is the first anthology to explore the literary theme of black-white encounters, of love and family stories that cross—or are crossed by—what came to be considered racial boundaries. The anthology extends from Cleobolus’ ancient Greek riddle to tormented encounters in the modern United States, visiting along the way a German medieval chivalric romance, excerpts from Arabian Nights and Italian Renaissance novellas, scenes and plays from Spain, Denmark, England, and the United States, as well as essays, autobiographical sketches, and numerous poems. The authors of the selections include some of the great names of world literature interspersed with lesser-known writers. Themes of interracial love and family relations, passing, and the figure of the Mulatto are threaded through the volume.

An Anthology of Interracial Literature allows scholars, students, and general readers to grapple with the extraordinary diversity in world literature. As multi-racial identification becomes more widespread the ethnic and cultural roots of world literature takes on new meaning.

Contributors include: Hans Christian Andersen, Gwendolyn Brooks, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Charles W. Chesnutt, Lydia Maria Child, Kate Chopin, Countee Cullen, Caroline Bond Day, Rita Dove, Alexandre Dumas, Olaudah Equiano, Langston Hughes, Victor Hugo, Charles Johnson, Adrienne Kennedy, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Guy de Maupassant, Claude McKay, Eugene O’Neill, Alexander Pushkin, and Jean Toomer.

Building the “Blue” Race: Miscegenation, Mysticism, and the Language of Cognitive Evolution in Jean Toomer’s “The Blue Meridian”

Texas Studies in Literature and Language
Volume 46, Number 2, Summer 2004
pages 149-180
E-ISSN: 1534-7303
Print ISSN: 0040-4691
DOI: 10.1353/tsl.2004.0008

Stephanie L. Hawkins, Assistant Professor of English
University of North Texas

Toomer’s vision of psychological evolution later realized and racialized in “The Blue Meridian” (1936) has its precursor in Cane’s closing chapter, the short drama “Kabnis,” and in the figure of Kabnis as a biracial subject struggling to find speech representative of his psychological experience. Kabnis’s ambivalence toward his black ancestry manifests in blood rhetoric that both highlights and undermines the purity of the plantation aristocracy that has contributed to his making. He declares, “My ancestors were Southern blue-bloods—”; “And black,” retorts Lewis, another educated black Northerner. Recognizing the pervasiveness of the one-drop rule for determining African descent—and the fact that Southerners frequently purged traces of black blood from their genealogical records—Kabnis argues that there “Aint much difference between blue and black” (108). There is a double recognition here: first, that black ancestry is inherent in the bodies of many who pass for white; and second, that as a…

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Stalking the Biracial Hidden Self in Henry James’s The Sense of the Past and “The Jolly Corner”

The Henry James Review
Volume 25, Number 3, Fall 2004
pages 276-284
E-ISSN: 1080-6555,
Print ISSN: 0273-0340
DOI: 10.1353/hjr.2004.0027

Stephanie L. Hawkins, Assistant Professor of English
University of North Texas

This essay argues that, for James, the visible face and body conceal some genetic “reality” or heritage, which he figures in both The Sense of the Past and “The Jolly Corner” as the specter of unacknowledged racial difference. In both works, James fuses evolutionary biology and the ghostly, thematizing turn-of-the-century anxieties regarding miscegenation. By transforming a narrative of time travel into one of racial passing, James both literalizes the psychological phenomenon of a “hidden self” and exposes the central paradox of double-consciousness: the simultaneous recognition and rejection of one’s “hidden” racial differences and sense of estrangement from the national family.

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Variablity in Race Hybrids

American Anthropologist
Volume 40, Issue 4 (October-December 1938)
pages 680–697
DOI: 10.1525/aa.1938.40.4.02a00090

Wilson D. Wallis (1886-1970)

In his revised edition of The Mind of Primitive Man [Read here], Professor [Franz] Boas warns against assuming “on the basis of a low variability that a type is pure, for we know that some mixed types are remarkably uniform. This has been shown for American Mulattoes, Dakota Indians, and made probable for the city population of Italy.” In a footnote to that passage he refers to the studies of Herskovits, Sullivan, and Boas, respectively, presumably in support of this position. Inasmuch as the test of variability used in those studies is the standard deviation of dimensions, and, for reasons which I shall indicate, this is not an acceptable test of variability for this purpose, it seems proper to reexamine the data on variability of race hybrids.

Although several studies have been devoted to the results of race crossing, there are few definitive results. Some studies suggest hybrid vigor, that is, increase in dimensions over one or both parental strains. Other studies indicate that race hybrids are inferior to one or both parental strains. Some indicate that hybrids are less variable than parental strains; others, that they are more variable. The character of the results may, of course, depend upon the races crossed and upon proximity to original crossing; but on these matters there is little well attested information. Sullivan and Boas find half-breeds among Sioux and other groups taller than pure bloods among each sex. Wissler, in a series of Oglala Dakota, finds half bloods slightly shorter than full bloods. As Sullivan remarks: “NO satisfactory solution of these contradictory results can be given so long as our series are incomplete in lacking the measurements on the whites with whom the Indians have mixed.” When all the data are considered, it is not clear that in race crossing any physical trait behaves as a Mendelian recessive or dominant-despite portrayals in fiction. In Hawaiian-European hybrids in Hawaii, however, Dunn finds evidence that the brachycephaly of Hawaiians is inherited as a dominant, and the European type of head (? dolchocephaly) reappears as a recessive in later hybrid generations. Hawaiians are said to contribute to the cross relatively more dominant factors than do Europeans.  He finds evidence, also, of “segregation of ‘racial’ characters such as nose form, hair form, hair and skin color in diverse combinations in the F and backcross generation.” There is, however, no evidence of Mendelian inheritance in the ratios with which these traits occur, and no evidence of Mendelian inheritance of a cluster of traits…

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Biological and Social Consequences of Race-Crossing

American Journal of Physical Anthropology
Volume 9, Issue 2 (April/June 1926)
pages 145–156
DOI: 10.1002/ajpa.1330090212

W. E. Castle (1867-1962)
Bussey Institution, Harvard University

What constitute the essential differences between human races seems to be a question difficult for anthropologists to agree upon but from a biologist’s point of view those appear to be on safe ground who base racial distinctions on easily recognizable and measurable differences perpetuated by heredity irrespective of the environment.  See Hooton, 1926.  It is still a moot question how races originate, not merely in man, but also among lower animals and plants.  At one time natural selection was thought to be an all-sufficient explanation of the matter, but the more carefully the question is studied and the more exact and experimental in character the data which enter into its solution, the more fully we become convinced that forms of life are rarely static, that organic is the rule rather than the exception. Change is inevitable and is not limited to useful or adaptive variations.  Natural selection undoubtedly determines the survival of decidedly useful variations, which arise for any reason, and also the extinction of those which are positively harmful, but a host of there variations fall in neither of these categories and survive among the descendants as a matter of course, quite unaffected by natural selection.

The experimental study of evolution indicates that genetic (hereditary) variations are all the time arising, and with especial frequency in such organism are bisexual and cross-fertilized.

In a state of nature no species can long be separated by geographical barriers into  non-interbreeding groups, without the origins of specific or racial differences between such groups…

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