Mixed Race Studies

Henry Ossawa Tanner’s Negotiation of Race and Art: Challenging “The Unknown Tanner”

Journal of Black Studies
Published online before print 2011-03-17
DOI: 10.1177/0021934710395588

Naurice Frank Woods, Visiting Assistant Professor of African American Studies
University of North Carolina, Greensboro

This essay is a response to an article recently published by Will South titled “A Missing Question Mark: The Unknown Henry Ossawa Tanner” in the journal Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide. Tanner was the foremost African American artist of the late 19th century. He has emerged as an exemplar of Black achievement in the arts and is now included in the canon of American art of that period. While Tanner labored to remove the equation of race as the defining factor for his artistic output, he never lost sight of his racial identity. South’s article suggests otherwise and he reconstructs Tanner as a “tragic mulatto” who, on several occasions, passed as White to advance his career and social standing. South’s conclusion seriously jeopardizes Tanner’s hard-fought reputation and greatly diminishes his celebrated cultural significance. I weigh South’s evidence against documented sources and conclude that Tanner unabashedly affirmed his “Blackness” throughout his life and art.

Read or purchase the article here.

Painting the World’s Christ: Tanner, Hybridity, and the Blood of the Holy Land

Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide: a journal of ninetheenth-century visual culture
Volume 3, Issue 2 (Autumn 2004)

Alan C. Braddock, Assistant Professor of Art History
Tyler School of Art, Temple University

Henry Ossawa Tanner’s global vision of Christ circa 1900 projected an ideal of hybridity that embodied the artist’s personal resistance not only to racial stereotypes but also to racial thinking as such.

In 1899, Henry Ossawa Tanner painted Nicodemus Visiting Jesus (fig. 1), based on a story from the Gospel of John in which Christ tells a Jewish Pharisee of miraculous visionary powers available to those who are born again. By signing the painting “H. O. Tanner, Jerusalem, 1899,” the artist touted his firsthand knowledge of Palestine, where he spent eleven months on two separate trips between 1897 and 1899. The Nicodemus is one of several paintings with biblical subjects that Tanner produced around 1900 after expatriating himself from the United States. Frustrated by pervasive racial discrimination on account of his African ancestry, Tanner left Jim Crow America in 1894 to live in France for the rest of his life, except for occasional family visits to Philadelphia and artistic expeditions to Palestine and North Africa.

By 1900, Tanner had become an international success—exhibiting regularly at the Paris Salon, winning awards, and attracting more critical praise than many American artists, including his former teacher at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Thomas Eakins. In 1897, Tanner’s The Resurrection of Lazarus (fig. 2) was exhibited to great acclaim at the Salon, awarded a medal, and purchased by the French government for its Luxembourg Gallery of contemporary art. Expatriation in Europe actually enhanced Tanner’s artistic reputation in America during these years, for he exhibited often in New York, Chicago, Pittsburgh, and Philadelphia. In 1900 the Nicodemus was purchased by the Pennsylvania Academy and awarded the prestigious Lippincott Prize. Yet it was only in the European art world and in biblical subject matter that Tanner found what he called “a perfect race democracy.”…

…The present article focuses precisely upon Tanner’s ambiguous racial construction of Christ circa 1900, a topic overlooked in previous scholarship on the artist but one having significant consequences for our historical understanding of his work and more broadly for how we interpret American art and identity from an international postcolonial perspective. Put simply, I argue that Tanner and his biblical paintings at the turn of the twentieth century—especially the Nicodemus and others depicting Christ as a figure of universality—offered a critique not simply of racism, but of “race” itself as an epistemological category. In that respect, Tanner’s work offers an important international model for de-colonizing art by interrogating race at a moment when the dominant culture in the United States was deeply invested in segregation and difference. Those investments, of course, were articulated most famously in the Supreme Court’s Plessy v. Ferguson ruling of 1896, allowing individual states to establish “separate but equal” public facilities based on racial difference. Such institutionalized segregation prompted W. E. B. Du Bois to identify the “color-line” as the “problem of the twentieth century.”

For Tanner, however, the problem was not simply one of crossing or negotiating the “color-line” in painting but rather how to put that line, and the very idea of race, under erasure by highlighting the elusiveness—and therefore the universality—of Christ’s identity. What makes Tanner’s case especially interesting is the relationship that obtained between his pictures and his person, seen here in a photograph of around 1900, when he was about 40 years old (fig. 4). Tanner was a relatively light-skinned man whose complexion and physiognomy did not conform to stereotypical conceptions of blackness, but rather prompted a variety of (often overlapping) racial identifications, including “mulatto,” “Latin,” and even “Aryan.” In the eyes of many contemporaries, Tanner and his work were complex hybrids that resisted clear racial definition, in a manner akin to the universality of Christ and the demography of the Holy Land. My purpose here is to examine the visual and historical evidence of that resistance by closely reading a selection of Tanner’s paintings in relation to various writings by contemporary critics and by the artist himself…

Read the entire article here.

Affirming Blackness: A Rebuttal to Will South’s “A Missing Question Mark: The Unknown Henry Ossawa Tanner”

Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide: a journal of ninetheenth-century visual culture
Volume 9, Issue 2 (Autumn 2010)

Naurice Frank Woods, Visiting Assistant Professor of African American Studies
University of North Carolina, Greensboro

George Dimock, Associate Professor of Art History
University of North Carolina, Greensboro

Will South’s recent article proposing a heretofore “unknown” Henry Ossawa Tanner who was conflicted about his African American identity and who, while in France, sought to pass as white demonstrates an impressive mastery of archival sources and a flair for persuasive re-interpretation. It is all the more problematic therefore that he misinterprets the available evidence and thereby diminishes the cultural significance of Tanner’s work. Most ingeniously, South builds an elaborate yet spurious argument by restoring a question mark to Tanner’s declaration “Now am I a Negro?” in a famous epistolary exchange with art critic Eunice Tietjens in 1914. In so doing he refashions the foremost African American artist of the nineteenth century as a tragic mulatto—a man who saw himself “as mostly white,” who worked while in France to “systematically…remove race from the equation of his life,” and was willing “to conceal the African American component of his extraction.” South concludes with a critical appraisal that undermines the integrity of Tanner’s art by claiming that “his achievements, ultimately, were grounded in a life of complex compromise lived in between his blackness and his whiteness.”

With or without the missing punctuation, Tanner’s response to Tietjens resounds as his most important statement on race. It reflects his utter frustration with America’s practice of applying a rule of hypodescent (the “one-drop rule“) that defined him as an innately inferior being and constricted his opportunities as artist and citizen. What Tanner was rejecting in his response to Tietjens was not his race but the American art establishment’s continual labeling of him as “Negro” whenever his talent was evaluated. By way of contrast, the Paris art world showed “steadily increasing interest” in his work, linking him with his fellow countrymen, James McNeill Whistler and John Singer Sargent, without “slight[ing] his art in the exploitation of his race” as was the custom in the U.S. press. Tanner considered himself principally an American artist and he affirmed his right to join the ranks of the cultural elite based on artistic merit and racial equality. Tanner’s life and art challenged his nation’s disingenuous notions of race. When taken in context, his question to Tietjens, “Now am I a Negro?” is far from being a renunciation of his black ancestry and heritage as South would have it. Rather it functions rhetorically as sardonic irony in response to the cruelties and stupidities of white racism…

Read the entire article here.

The Blackfoot Tribe of the Midsouth

American Society of Ethnohistory Conference
“Blackfoot, Redbones, Brass Ankles and Pied Noir: Colorful Identities, Creative Strategies American Society of Ethnohistory conference”
Santa Fe, New Mexico
2005-11-18 through 2005-11-20
2005-11-19

Carol A. Morrow, Professor of Anthropology
Southeast Missouri State University

Over the years, I have had a number of African-American students identify themselves as having Native American heritage.  Occasionally they claim descent from the ‘Blackfoot tribe’, but they always have a southern heritage.  Most students don’t know much more than just the term, Blackfoot, but one student explained that Blackfoot meant a blend of African and Cherokee heritage.  Given our location on the Trail of Tears, Cherokee heritage is common; the Blackfoot tribe is something else entirely.  This paper reviews the use of the Blackfoot term throughout the Midsouth.

Over the years, I have had a number of students in my North American Indians classes who have self-identified as Blackfoot, or Cherokee and Blackfoot, or in one case, Choctaw and Blackfoot.  I would always ask them if they had ties or relatives in Montana, and with one exception, they all said NO. The one exception is the blond blue-eyed young man, who in fact, did have relatives in Montana.

I teach at Southeast Missouri State, which is in Cape Girardeau and the Cherokee Trail of tears passed through our community in 1838-1839.  Additionally, there was a large community of Cherokee Indians that lived to the sound of our area in Arkansas territory, and many pushed north into Missouri when they were moved in 1828 West into Indian territory (these were the Old Settlers).  So we have always had a number of people in the area of Cherokee ancestry.  But Blackfoot Indian is another story entirely.  Finally, I realized that the Blackfoot students were African-American.  My African-American students almost always had Indian blood, but it took me a while to figure out that they were the only ones that claimed Blackfoot blood…

Read the entire paper here.

The First Black Prairie Novel: Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance’s Autobiography and the Repression of Prairie Blackness

Journal of Canadian Studies/Revue d’études canadiennes
Volume 45, Number 2 (Spring 2011)
pages 31-57
E-ISSN: 1911-0251; Print ISSN: 0021-9495
DOI: 10.1353/jcs.2011.0022

Karina Vernon, Assistant Professor of English
University of Toronto

This essay situates Chief Buffalo Child’s Long Lance: The Autobiography of a Blackfoot Indian Chief (1928) within the cultural context of its production, the anti-Black racial climate of the Canadian Prairies in the early part of the twentieth century, in order to analyze the textual repression of its author’s Blackness. Although the Autobiography has been discredited as a fraud because, as Donald B. Smith discovered, Long Lance was not in fact Blackfoot as the Autobiography claims, but “mixed blood” from North Carolina, this essay reclaims it as the first novel penned on the Prairies by a Black author, for it tells a true—more metaphorical and allegorical than factual—story about the desire on the part of displaced “new” world Blacks for Indigenous status and belonging. This essay examines the implications of claiming the Autobiography as the first Black prairie novel and explores how reading it as fiction rather than autobiography extends our understandings of “passing,” racial identification and transformation.

Cet article situe l’autobiographie Long Lance: The Autobiography of a Blackfoot Indian Chief (1928) du Chef Buffalo Child dans le contexte culturel de sa production—le climat racial anti-Noirs des Prairies canadiennes au début du XX^e siècle—afin d’analyser la répression textuelle de son auteur noir. Donald B. Smith a par la suite considéré cette autobiographie comme une imposture, ayant découvert que Long Lance ne faisait pas partie de la confédération des Pieds-Noirs, mais était plutôt un « sang-mêlé » de la Caroline du Nord. Cependant, l’auteur du présent article considère cette autobiographie comme le premier roman écrit dans les Prairies par un Noir puisqu’il raconte une histoire vraie—quoique plus métaphorique et allégorique que factuelle—du désir des Noirs déplacés du « Nouveau » Monde d’acquérir le statut d’indigène et d’appartenir à leur monde. L’article examine les conséquences de la classification de cette pseudo-autobiographie comme le premier roman des Prairies écrit par un Noir et explore les manières dont sa lecture en tant qu’œuvre de fiction plutôt qu’autobiographie nous aide à mieux comprendre le concept de « passage », d’identification et de transformation raciales.

Read or purchase the article here.

A Gathering of Rivers: Indians, Métis, and Mining in the Western Great Lakes, 1737-1832

University of Nebraska Press
2000
233 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8032-8293-3

Lucy Eldersveld Murphy, Professor of History
Ohio State University, Newark

In A Gathering of Rivers, Lucy Eldersveld Murphy traces the histories of Indian, multiracial, and mining communities in the western Great Lakes region during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. For a century the Winnebagos (Ho-Chunks), Mesquakies (Fox), and Sauks successfully confronted waves of French and British immigration by diversifying their economies and commercializing lead mining.

Focusing on personal stories and detailed community histories, Murphy charts the changed economic forces at work in the region, connecting them to shifts in gender roles and intercultural relationships. She argues that French, British, and Native peoples forged cooperative social and economic bonds expressed partly by mixed-race marriages and the emergence of multiethnic communities at Green Bay and Prairie du Chien. Significantly, Native peoples in the western Great Lakes region were able to adapt successfully to the new frontier market economy until their lead mining operations became the envy of outsiders in the 1820s.

The harm done by racial mixtures I believe is much wider than the scope of this paper. Its importance as a factor in asthma, eczema and spasmophilia are beyond question to me. So wrapped up it seems are racial mixtures with the ailments of mankind, that I have almost reached the stage that I would dogmatically assert that “If you show me a family where the doctor is metaphorically always on the doorstep, I will show you a family of profound racial mixture.”

Frank N. Walker, M.B., “Sterility Among Hybrids,” The Canadian Medical Association Journal, Volume 16, Number 6 (June 1926): 661-665. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1708963/pdf/canmedaj00465-0083.pdf.

Living Out Loud: (De)Constructing the Multiracial Individual

Stanford University
2011-05-19
55 pages

Stephanie Otani-Sunamoto

Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for Department Honors in Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity at Stanford University

Although mixed race people have existed throughout American history, being mixed race was either stigmatized or an unrecognized identity option until the Multiracial Movement began in the late 1980’s. The past twenty years have brought an unparalleled rise in Mixed Race consciousness. On a political level, advocates successfully campaigned for Census reclassification in the form of a “Mark one or more” option on the Census 2000. Mixed Race scholars, activists, writers and artists were active in creating a new, cosmopolitan “Mixed Race Person.” All the while they proclaimed that they fighting against racism and representing a largely marginalized community.

This thesis takes a critical approach to the messages about what it means to be “Mixed Race” that proliferate in the media and in academia: Mixed Race people have “the best of both worlds” and the act of choosing one racial and/or cultural identity forces the multiracial person to deny part of who her or she is. I argue that the academic and popular conceptualizations of Mixed Race actually reinforce the racial/racist ideologies Multiracial activists claimed to be so oppressive. These problematic ideas are a direct result of one of the driving forces for Mixed Race activism and scholarship: the desire to legitimize multiracial families. In doing so, one particular narrative of mixed race identity and authenticity has prevailed. I call for a more nuanced vision of Mixed Race personhood that allows for non-traditional family structures and does not impose any ideals of authenticity upon the mixed race individual. I will then present a literary nonfiction piece, Outside/Inside, based on my own life as a counter-example to the common narratives seen in Mixed Race literature and representations.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Theoretical Framework
• Building a Mixed Race History
• Mixed Race Literature and Constructions of Multiracial Personhood
• Towards a Productive Mixed Race Consciousness
• Conclusion
• Works Cited

Introduction

I’m mixed. I’m not one or the other.
Interracial mixing is the future. Pretty soon, everyone will be mixed.
Mixed race people are so beautiful.
I don’t have to choose between my parents.
You are so exotic.
What is your ethnicity?
I love being mixed because people can’t place me into any categories.
Do you have anything else “in” you?
I am the best of both worlds.
Mixed race people aren’t as racist because they are a sign that old racial barriers are breaking down.

These statements, whether in the form of words or images, have been the soundtrack playing in my ears for all of my adult life. Three years ago, I started paying attention to the messages that surrounded me about Mixed Race and race in general. Everyone seemed to have opinions about where ambiguous bodies, including mine, belonged.

Academic literature on Mixed Race identity formation told me that mixed race people were in a position that is largely defined by the struggle to find legitimation from “both their cultures.” Cultures. The mixed race people I saw in videos and read in books talked about cultures as though they were tangible objects given to them the day they came home from the hospital and were told, Take these and make use of all of them. I knew that was not how race worked. Race was a physical categorization; it does not fully explain how the individual identity is internalized and made meaning.

But there were some divergent voices. Michele Elam argues that Multiracial advocates have framed their arguments as “ahead of the times” and in doing so have painted those who choose to criticize their efforts as conservative, even backwards. Michele Elam, Kimberly McClain DaCosta and Kim Williams are among the few who have taken a critical approach to studying the Mixed Race Movement through analyzing literature and entertainment, Multiracial organizations and marketing, and political strategies, respectively. While their works make important contributions, I believe that there is still much more room for nuance in the discussion about Mixed Race, particularly subjectivities.

The disconnect between what I knew about race and what I have read about Multiraciality led me on a roundabout journey to the research questions that drive this piece. The term Mixed Race implies that there are two (or more) essences being mixed, but how can that be if race isn’t real? If a new group has been created, new boundaries for group membership have also been created. Who stands inside and outside the boundaries of the new Mixed Race group? Are there other narratives in this movement that have been overlooked? Where is my place in all of this discourse?

I have created a framework that critiques popular ideas about Mixed Race and offers suggestions for the future of Mixed Race scholarship. I will discuss how the simultaneous denial and exploitation of multiracial people historically and the example of empowerment provided by the Civil Rights Movement spurred a group of people to give positive meaning to the word Multiracial. I will analyze the ways in which current representations and theorizations of Mixed Race identity conflate racial and ethnic identity formation. I argue that this has happened because Multiracial organization was motivated by the desire to validate the concept of a Multiracial Family. I will conclude by suggesting ways to for Mixed Race scholarship to move beyond advocacy and focus on the experiences of multiracial bodies, not multiethnic people.

Perhaps by presenting a voice that diverges from the monolithic entity that is Mixed Race Studies in 2011, it can provide a pathway for other types of stories we have yet to hear…

Read the entire thesis here.