Mixed Race Studies

Mar Gallego 2003: Passing Novels in the Harlem Renaissance: Identity Politics and Textual Strategies. Forum for European Contributions in African American Studies. Münster: Lit Verlag. 214 pp. [Review]

Atlantis: Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies
Volume 26, Number 1 (2004)

Isabel Soto García
Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia  (UNED)

In her wide-ranging and ambitious work Passing Novels in the Harlem Renaissance: Identity Politics and Textual Strategies, Mar Gallego refers to W. E. B. Du Bois’ theory of double consciousness as “influential.” The reference is, at the very least, an understatement. Du Bois’ articulation of the African American experience, famously declared in the opening pages of The Souls of Black Folk (1903), as straddling, or simultaneously occupying, both sides of the perceptual divide—the unremitting sense of “twoness . . . two warring ideals in one dark body (11)”—is arguably the theoretical paradigm against which twentieth century African American expressive culture, particularly written culture, has been interpreted. Robert Stepto, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Paul Gilroy, all prominent late twentieth-century theorists of the experience of New World Africans, explicitly acknowledge an indebtedness to Du Bois. Without the Duboisian precedent, these writers would possibly not have elaborated their respective theories of call-and-response (Stepto 1979), signifying (Gates 1988) and the black Atlantic (Gilroy 1993)—all theories which are predicated on notions and strategies of doubleness; one may assume they would have formulated them differently.

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was born in 1868, one year after the First Reconstruction Act granting, among others, the right to vote to black males in Confederate States. His formative years, then, coincided with this initial period of postbellum optimism and progressive legislation, as well as post-Reconstruction reaction, culminating in such Supreme Court rulings as the notorious “separate but equal” Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896. Where Plessy and other court decisions erected a de jure wall of containment between black and white Americans and encoded the segregationist principle, Du Bois countered with double consciousness, taking the reader as it were beyond the veil—or at least lifting it to reveal what lay on the other side. That a potential white readership be invited to partake of African American consciousness is in and of itself a radically subversive gesture. If we are given the wherewithal to experience reality as an African American (“an American, a Negro”), then Du Bois is making a brazenly transgressive proposition: an invitation to engage in a sort of literary miscegenation.

Miscegenation or, in nineteenth-century terms, amalgamation, is the transgression at the heart of a rich body of writing that coincided with the first third of Du Bois’ life and the period—Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction—that preceded the publication of The Souls of Black Folk. This fiction was coincidentally organized around the literary embodiment—the mulatto—of Duboisian double consciousness, while it similarly subverted the artificial binarism encoded in Plessy. The mulatto genre can be said to date back at least to Louisiana-born Victor Séjour’s short story “Le Mulâtre” (1837), considered the earliest known work of African American fiction. William Wells Brown’s Clotel, or the President’s Daughter: A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States (1853) is held to initiate the genre by an African American writer in English. Clotel is representative of a further, related tradition, that of the passing novel, with its eponymous heroine crossing racial as well as gender lines (gender and racial passing is a frequent trope in antebellum slave narrative: see, for example, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom [1860] and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl [1861]).

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Mar Gallego. Passing Novels in the Harlem Renaissance: Identity, Politics and Textual Strategies [Review]

African American Review
Volume 38 (Winter 2004)
pages 720-723

Mar Gallego. Passing Novels in the Harlem Renaissance: Identity, Politics and Textual Strategies. Hamburg: Lit Verlag Munster, 2003. 214 pp.

Zhou Yupei

Until very recently, novels of passing that appeared during the Harlem Renaissance had been viewed as either assimilationist or collaborative with racist ideology. Mar Gallego’s Passing Novels in the Harlem Renaissance offers an opposing view by providing a detailed account of the subversive and parodying strategies employed in novels by four representative and controversial African American writers: James Weldon Johnson, George Schuyler, Nella Larsen, and Jessie Fauset. Gallego considers these authors’ parodying strategies as responses not only to social realities but to the idea of double consciousness and other literary traditions.

Gallego’s book opens with a rereading of Du Bois’s theory of “double consciousness” that reveals both the positive and the negative perspectives contained in the theory and connects it with the motif of passing. The positive refers to the notion of the “third self,” which results from the union of an African American ethnic identity and an American national identity, a notion that implies the possibility of a society in which African culture and American culture co-exist. The negative refers to the metaphor of the “veil,” which means the distorted and stereotypical image imposed upon African Americans, a metaphor that may produce negative duplicity in African American life. Gallego’s account of these contradictory perspectives achieves a dual purpose. First, it explains Du Bois’s inner conflict between his realistic conception of American society and his idealistic notion of double consciousness. Second, it alludes to the multiple and indeterminate character of double consciousness and links this notion to the Yoruba tradition of Esu-Elegbara, in which Henry Louis Gates, Jr. locates the “Signifying Monkey,” and finally the idea of double-voicedness central to Bakhtin’s theories of “heteroglossia” and “dialogization.” Such connections expose the parodying nature of double consciousness in spite of the inner conflict contained in it. Gallego’s reading of the notion of double consciousness constitutes a reasonable starting point and a convincing rationale for Gallego’s argument that the novels of passing under study respond in a complex way to double consciousness and strategically hide their negative attitudes toward racism under the cover of various means of seemingly cooperative representations. Gallego also lays out a theoretical framework of exploration in his subsequent chapters, each of which locates a writer’s parodying strategies in the historical context of the representation of African Americans and in the literary context of the genres of Western literature employed and subverted by the writer.

To incorporate issues of race and gender, Gallego also identifies in the first chapter double consciousness with the feminist notion of “divided identity,” designating, as Mary Hairston McManus does, the latter as “double double consciousness.” Reviewing earlier African American feminist criticism, Gallego concludes that this discourse involves “the subversion, inversion or variation of other discourses that marginalize African American women.” This summary anticipates his statement that the characterization of Larsen’s and Fauset’s mulatta figures of passing also involves the subversion, inversion, or variation of other racist or sexist discourses in literary tradition.

Each subsequent chapter is devoted to one of the four authors. In chapter two, Gallego argues that James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912) innovates the tradition of slave narratives by endowing it with subversive and ironic overtones, and revises Du Bois’s notion of double consciousness by calling into question the negative perspective of the theory. For Gallego, Johnson’s novel represents a new stage of the narrative tradition that traces its origin to Equiano’s “integrated narrative,” which integrates different voices, and Douglass’s “generic narrative,” which makes the narrator eventually dominate the different voices integrated by the narrative. Johnson uses such techniques as duality of voices, control over the narration, fictionalization of the narrative “I,” and rhetoric as a mask for subversion, techniques often found in either Equiano or Douglass. With these techniques Johnson effectively but trickily conveys his ironic and multivocal vision and makes his narrator successfully write himself into the text. The connection discovered by Gallego between Johnson’s text and Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk leads to the conclusion that Johnson’s novel negates both the positive image of the “Talented Tenth” and the idealistic possibility of a “third self.” Gallego states that Johnson’s representation of the phenomenon of passing questions cultural and racial categories and promotes heterogeneity. With abundant historical and textual evidence, Gallego defines Johnson as an important African American writer who initiates a model for the depiction of the mulatto condition and anticipates other novels of passing in the following decade…

Read the entire article here.

Passing Novels in the Harlem Renaissance: Identity Politics and Textual Strategies

Lit Verlag Munster
2003
224 pages
ISBN 3-8258-5842-1

Mar Gallego, Associate Professor of American Studies
University of Huelva (Spain)

Passing Novels in the Harlem Renaissance offers an insightful study of the significance of passing novels for the literary and intellectual debate of the Harlem Renaissance. Mar Gallego effectively uncovers the presence of a subversive component in five of these novels (by James Weldon Johnson, George Schuyler, Nella Larsen, and Jessie Fauset), turning them into useful tools to explore the passing phenomenon in all its richness and complexity. Her compelling study intends to contribute to the ongoing revision of the parameters conventionally employed to analyze passing novels by drawing attention to a great variety of textual strategies such as double consciousness, parody, and multiple generic covers. Examining the hybrid nature of these texts, Gallego skillfully highlights their radical critique of the status quo and their celebration of a distinct African American identity.

Half of the loonies in this country don’t think President Obama is American, the other half don’t think he’s Black.

Steven F. Riley, e-mail message to professor, April 30, 2011.

Multiracal In America

Ebony Magazine
May 2011

Adam Serwer

In The Mix: Being Biracial in America

When President Barack Obama checked “Black” on his census form last April, it was an actual news story. The Associated Press subhed [sub-headline] was lined with implicit anguish: “President Ticks One Box Concerning Racial Heritage on U.S. Census Form, Despite Mixed Heritage.” For some, it was a grand betrayal by the candidate who had run ads highlighting the fact that he had been raised by his White grandparents, the candidate who falsely presented himself as a living avatar of American racial progress.

The president, a self-identified “mutt,” could have chosen any number of options. He could have checked White and Black, as I have every year I’ve been old enough to fill out the census form myself.  But Obama had made his own reasoning clear in 2007 when 60 Minutes’ Steve Kroft asked him how he had decided he was Black. The president had a simple answer. “Well, I’m not sure I decided it. I think if you look African-American in this society, you’re treated as an African-American.” Put another way, there’s nothing contradictory about being biracial and being Black. Since there have been Black people on American soil, the children of Black and White parents have always been seen as Black. It’s only in the past few years that we’ve even begun to ask the question and that people of biracial parentage have begun giving different answers.

Even in 2010, biracial people are treated as a novelty or a contradiction. My parents pointedly did not raise me as one or the other.  I never found anything odd about being given children’s biographies of Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali as Hanukkah presents. But interracial relationships are hardly novel. During Reconstruction, Black Republicans in Tennessee attempted to pass a bill criminalizing sex  between Blacks and Whites to prevent rape and to stop White men from fathering illegitimate children and then abandoning them. Instead they only succeeded in passing a bill that prevented the recognition of marriages between Blacks and Whites, ensuring that White men could continue siring biracial children without being fathers to them.

Read more in the May issue of Ebony available on newsstands now!