Mixed Race Studies

The Limits of Literary Realism: Of One Blood’s Post-Racial Fantasy by Pauline Hopkins

Callaloo
Volume 36, Number 1, Winter 2013
pages 158-177
DOI: 10.1353/cal.2013.0049

Melissa Asher Daniels, Assistant Professor of English
University of Alabama, Birmingham

Fiction is of great value to any people as a preserver of manners and customs—€”religious, political and social. It is a record of growth and development from generation to generation. No one will do this for us; we must ourselves develop the men and women who will faithfully portray the inmost thoughts and feelings of the Negro with all the fire and romance which lie dormant in our history, and, as yet, unrecognized by writers of the Anglo-Saxon race.

—Pauline Hopkins, Contending Forces

In the preface to her first novel, an excerpt of which appears above, Pauline Hopkins offers a critical assessment of the cultural stakes of fiction. According to the prolific writer and editor, fiction and history should serve mutual ends: the uplifting of the race. Pointing to the artistic and archival merits of both disciplines, Hopkins implores her fellow African Americans to take up the pen. As Hopkins seems to suggest, fiction’s primary power lies in its pedagogical potential. Fiction has the ability to educate literate African Americans about their rich and painful past, and this past can in turn enrich literary production, as it is replete with material that might easily be adapted for the sake of artistic development and political agitation. Addressing African Americans specifically, Hopkins indicates that it is the responsibility of the race to produce the writers who will narrate this past “with all the fire and romance” that it deserves. Calling for a fiction of mimetic detail and romantic affect, Hopkins echoes white writer Albion Tourgée’s claim, made some several years before, that realism alone cannot convey “the grand truth which makes up the continued story of every life” (411).

In Of One Blood; or, the Hidden Self (1902-1903), Hopkins advances her views on the limitations of literary realism and puts her ideas about the aesthetic virtues of romantic fiction into practice. Published serially in the Colored American Magazine, the episodic novel blends realism with romance to explore issues of ancestry, miscegenation, and tangled kinship. In this respect, the novel is generically and thematically akin to much of nineteenth-century African American writing. But in some fundamental ways, Of One Blood is one of the most intricate, if not bewildering texts. Indeed, critics often describe it as “unruly”—taking their cue from the title of an anthology edited by John Cullen Gruesser. To be sure, the novel draws from several romantic traditions—the gothic, adventure, utopian genres—€”and adopts a bifurcated plot line—one American, one African—€”that splits the novel into two separate narratives. The text begins in America, focusing on Reuel’s racial passing, and culminates in Africa with his discovery of a hidden city that doubles as a metaphor for his hidden identity. Together, both the American and African sequences form a “realistic” and “romantic” meditation on blood, genealogy, and fantasies of racial difference circulating in the United States imaginary during the nadir.

Critics, however, have a tendency to overlook the novel’s realism or to under assess its romantic value. Some, following Eric Sundquist’s cue, read the book as “patently escapist” (569); while others, such as Adenike Marie Davidson and Yogita Goyal, more recently, situate it within a constellation of black nationalist and Pan-Africanist discourses advocating emigrationism. My trouble with these readings is twofold: first, critical assessments that describe the novel as “escapist” come off sounding slightly condemnatory; such readings carry a pejorative connotation that seem to suggest that the novel evades pressing political concerns confronting black Americans at the turn of the century or that it disavows literary realism (which it does not); second, analyses that take the novel’s “back to Africa” plot at face value are too literal, neglecting the novel’s fantastic and allegorical qualities in the service of advancing emigrationist readings. And while the novel is clearly in conversation with such discourses, it is more interested in promoting black consciousness and cultural distinctiveness than in advocating actual repatriation. An imaginative take on the problem of American racism,…

A Conversation with Lawrence Hill

Callaloo
Volume 36, Number 1, Winter 2013
pages 5-26
DOI: 10.1353/cal.2013.0072

Winfried Siemerling, Professor of English
University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

When Paul Gilroy in The Black Atlantic offered an alternative account of modernity that placed transnational, black transatlantic lives and cultures at the center, Canada was not on his map. Slavery, however, did not stop at the borders first of New France and then the Canada’s until it was abolished in the British Empire in 1834, and the Underground Railroad made Canada an important site of black writing especially after the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. To be fair, the current surge of impressively strong African Canadian writing, heralded by some authors and anthologies since the 1960s and 1970s, was still gathering steam in the early 1990s.

Lawrence Hill, a novelist and nonfiction writer whose parents immigrated to Canada from the United States after WWII, has become one of the most important contributors to black culture here. His first novel, Some Great Thing (1992), was followed by Any Known Blood (1997), a multi-generational border-crossing novel in which the allusively named Langston Cane V explores his own mixed race and family. In the process, he uncovers a forebear’s slave narrative that recounts his involvement in John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry. Hill’s third novel, The Book of Negroes (2007), is a neo-slave narrative in its entirety that redraws the map of Gilroy’s black Atlantic. The protagonist Aminata, abducted in West Africa, flees first from slavery in South Carolina, then from Americans taking control of New York in 1783, and finally from Nova Scotia to return to Africa. She travels to Sierra Leone in 1792, and from there sails to London to support the abolition of the slave trade. In Hill’s transfiguration of these historical events, Aminata herself becomes a scribe of Guy Carleton’s “Book of Negroes,” recording the 1783 black exodus from New York. The use of the word “Negroes” in Hill’s title, although taken from that historical document, has proven controversial, and the novel appeared in the United States, New Zealand, and Australia as Someone Knows My Name. A breakthrough for Hill internationally, the novel won among other awards the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize.

Hill’s work offers United States readers an especially inviting entrance into contemporary black Canadian literature, not only because of his fiction’s frequent transborder thematic but also since his nonfiction—€”for example Black Berry, Sweet Juice: On Being Black and White in Canada—often speaks to issues of race from a United States-Canadian comparative perspective. The following interview conversation, though concentrating on the novels, seeks to provide an introduction to his entire career, including his formative travels in Africa. It is divided by short subtitles for orientation and ease of reading.

Early Writing and Travels in Africa

Siemerling:

In your last novel, The Book of Negroes (named after a historical document but published in the United States as Someone Knows My Name), you thematize the back-to-Africa journey of 1,200 people from Nova Scotia to Sierra Leone in 1792, and you talk about the fact that it is the first one historically. We also know that for many people still today it is a very emotional and important event, to “go back” to Africa.

Hill:

Yes, and many people of African American or African Canadian origin are seeking some sort of validation from or connection with the motherland. It’s a connection with one’s extended family, metaphorically. Of course, why should a typical African who is selling coffee in his street stand in Niamey, Niger, look at some kid from Toronto and say “hey, here’s my brother.” Sorry, that’s just not going to happen, especially with the way I look, which to many of them was white. Many African Americans and African Canadians have observed this kind of rocky reception that they received. When I went there, I wanted to be welcomed as one of the race and have my blackness celebrated. I wanted to be brought into the arms of my people, in a way. And it’s a natural thing for a twenty-two-year-old to…

The Place in Between: An Interview with Esi Edugyan

Callaloo
Volume 36, Number 1, Winter 2013
pages 46-51
DOI: 10.1353/cal.2013.0070

Maaza Mengiste

Esi Edugyan’s 2011 Man Booker Prize finalist, Half-Blood Blues, opens with the lines, “Chip told us not to go out. Said, don’t you boys tempt the devil.” It is 1940 in Nazi-occupied Paris and the “boys” include Afro-German, Jewish, and African-American members of a jazz band who have recently fled an increasingly dangerous Berlin. They are living under a terrifying regime, trapped as much by the color of their skin as the curfews and constant presence of the Gestapo. Told from the perspective of Sid, an African-American bassist who left pre-civil rights era Baltimore to escape racial segregation, it is Hiero, the incomparably gifted trumpeter player, who holds the band together. But Half-Blood Blues is more than a book about music. Edugyan illuminates one of the forgotten victims of Nazi Germany’s ruthless quest for a racially “pure” state: the “Rhineland Bastards,” mixed-race Germans whose stories were lost when they went into hiding, fled, or disappeared into concentration camps. Hiero is one of those “mischlings,” and through him, we begin to understand how encompassing a denied history can be. But perhaps more than anything, this is a story about friendship, betrayal, loyalty, and the possibility of redemption through music. To read Half-Blood Blues is to hear jazz and the ache of regret through prose. Garnering nominations and awards internationally, the book has kept Edugyan on a busy, hectic schedule. It was my honor to have the chance to catch her in a quiet moment to talk about her book.

Mengiste:

I want to just jump right in and talk a little bit about the book’s setting and its characters. Part of the story takes place in 1940 Paris and Nazi Germany. What was your motivation for writing about this moment in history? What got you really interested in it, and these characters?

Edugyan:

I think I’ve always had a fascination with that period of history. It was such an extreme time in terms of what was happening everywhere, but especially in Europe, in those initial months when the Third Reich came to power. It was very fascinating for me. I had been living in Germany for about a year and a half, over two separate periods. The first time I was there for about thirteen months, learning German and really trying to immerse myself in the culture. And being a black woman living in Southern Germany, I started to wonder about the history of black people in Europe in general, but specifically in Germany. And so I did some research and discovered the story about the Rhineland Bastards—or the so-called “Rhineland Bastards.” That’s how I came to focus on this period that I had done quite a bit of reading on over my lifetime. It was interesting to me.

Mengiste:

When you were researching these Rhineland Bastards, these children born to black soldiers and German mothers in the period following WWI, what guided your decision to make your characters musicians?

Edugyan:

I have a very strong interest in music and grew up with a very strong interest in music even though I was never able to play the instruments very well. So, I’d been working on a project about a different kind of musician, a classical musician. And when I was in Germany, I started putting that aside and turning my sights to jazz musicians. And this was, in large part, because I quite love jazz. I’m not a huge expert on it, I’ll admit that, but what I’ve heard I really like. But also because I knew that Germany had gone through a big jazz age in the twenties, you know, there was a big avant-garde time after the First World War. So then you start to think about “well, what would happen to all of those musicians once the Third Reich took power?” And, you know, it was something that I certainly didn’t know anything about, so I just had to do…

Jean Toomer: The Fluidity of Racial Identity

Face to Face: A blog from the National Portrait Gallery
Smithsonian Institution
2012-07-20

Elizabeth Brevard, Intern
Catalog of American Portraits
National Portrait Gallery

Jean Toomer / Marjorie Content / Gelatin silver print, c. 1934 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution ©Susan L. Sandberg

An author, philosopher, and spiritual adviser, Washington, D.C., native Jean Toomer (1894–1967) challenged the accepted race and social labels during the mid-twentieth century. Toomer’s father left his wife and son in 1895, forcing the single mother to move in with her father, Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback, the former governor of Louisiana during Reconstruction and the first U.S. governor of African American descent.

Toomer was of European and African American ancestry, which sometimes allowed him to pass in society as a white man. For example, his registration for the draft identifies him as African American, but both of his certificates of marriage to white women list him as white (Byrd and Gates).

Most of his formative years were spent in all-white neighborhoods, although he attended the all-black Dunbar High School in Washington. The profound and varied racial influences within Toomer’s life would inspire his writing and his philosophical pursuit to transcend the self, as seen in his novel Cane and his poem “The Blue Meridian.”

After his graduation from high school in 1914, Toomer questioned the labeling of race according to skin color, instead embracing his self-appointed identity as an “American.” In his words:

I wrote a poem called “The First American,” the idea of which was that here in America we are in the process of forming a new race, that I was one of the first conscious members of this race. . . . I had seen the divisions, the separatisms and antagonisms . . . [yet] a new type of man was arising in this country—not European, not African, not Asiatic—but American. And in this American I saw the divisions mended, the differences reconciled—saw that (1) we would in truth be a united people existing in the United States, saw that (2) we would in truth be once again members of a united human race (Turner, ed., The Wayward and the Seeking, p. 121)…

Read the entire article here.

But along with collective responsibilities, we have individual responsibilities. There are some things, as black men, we can only do for ourselves. There are some things, as Morehouse Men, that you are obliged to do for those still left behind. As Morehouse Men, you now wield something even more powerful than the diploma you’re about to collect—and that’s the power of your example.

President Barack Obama, “Morehouse College Commencement Speech,” (Atlanta, Georgia, May 19, 2013). http://www.ajc.com/news/news/local/president-obamas-morehouse-commencement-speech/nXwqt/

Bullying Pulpit: Racism, Barack Obama and the Selective Call for Personal Responsibility

Tim Wise, Antiracist Essayist, Author and Educator
2013-05-19

Tim Wise

Sometimes, white privilege isn’t about stuff. It’s not always about better opportunities, or more money, or even greater access to those things than people of color.

Sometimes, white privilege is as simple as knowing that, generally speaking, if you’re white, you’ll be perceived as competent and hard-working until proven otherwise, while people of color — even those who have proven themselves competent and hard-working — will still be subjected to presumptions that they just might not be, and that somehow, they (but not you) need to be reminded of the importance of hard-work and personal responsibility, lest they (but never you) revert to some less impressive group mean.

To wit, President Obama’s commencement address today at Morehouse College — one of the nation’s preeminent institutions of higher learning, and perhaps its most famous historically black college or university — during which, among plenty of rather standard commencement speech boilerplate, the president lectured this year’s graduates about the importance of taking personal responsibility for their lives, and not blaming racism for whatever obstacles they may face in the future.

It’s hard to know what’s more disturbing.

Either that President Obama thinks black grads at one of the nation’s best colleges really need to be lectured about such matters; or, alternately, that White America is so desirous of exculpation for the history of racial discrimination that we need him to say such things, and he knows it, thereby feeding us the moral scolding of black men we so desperately desire and love to hear.

Either way, the result is tragic…

Read the entire article here.

Obama Urges Morehouse Graduates to ‘Keep Setting an Example’

The New York Times
2013-05-19

Mark Landler

ATLANTA — President Obama came to Morehouse College, the alma mater of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., on Sunday to tell graduates, 50 years after Dr. King’s landmark “I Have a Dream” speech in Washington, that “laws and hearts and minds have been changed to the point where someone who looks just like you can somehow come to serve as president of these United States.” [Read the transcript here.]

The president tied Dr. King’s journey to his own, speaking in forthright and strikingly personal terms about his struggles as a young man with an absent father, a “heroic single mom,” and the psychological burdens of being black in America.

He also issued a challenge to the graduating class, imploring the young men of Morehouse, the nation’s only historically black, all-male college, to be responsible family men, to set an example, and to extend a hand to those less privileged than them.

While Mr. Obama has struck these themes before, he has rarely done so in such unsparing terms. After a week in which his presidency seemed adrift on a sea of controversies, the speech served as both a reminder of his historic role and an emphatic change of subject.

“We know that too many young men in our community continue to make bad choices,” Mr. Obama said. “And I have to say, growing up I made quite a few myself. Sometimes I wrote off my own failings as just another example of the world trying to keep a black man down.”…

Read the entire article here.

Ellen Gallagher at Tate Modern

The Telegraph
2013-05-02

Alastair Smart, Arts Editor of the Sunday Telegraph

In this solid retrospective, America’s Ellen Gallagher subtly mixes pretty abstraction with reference to her black heritage, says Alastair Smart.

I sometimes feel sorry for artists today. Not in the sense that I’d make a £2 monthly donation for their welfare or anything.

Rather that today’s artist is expected to produce work that’s not just visually striking but conceptually clever. Brains must match looks, and woe betide anyone whose art isn’t deemed “deep” enough to inspire reams of post-structuralist theory.

America’s Ellen Gallagher, now the subject of a Tate retrospective, negotiates this tightrope better than most. Drawing on her mixed-race heritage (with a father from the Cape Verde Islands), she infuses works of minimalist abstraction with subtle references to black history.

Watery Ecstatic, her ongoing series of watercolours and incised paper collages, features all manner of delicately-rendered marine life: from eels, jellyfish and seaweed to fantastical sea monsters. Their intricacy recalls that of old whalers’ scrimshaw – with an unexpected twist…

Read the entire review here.

The Forging of the Cosmic Race: A Reinterpretation of Colonial Mexico. [Book Review]

The Journal of San Diego History
Volume 27, Number 3 (Summer 1981)

W. Michael Mathes (1936-2012), Professor of History
University of San Francisco

The Forging of the Cosmic Race: A Reinterpretation of Colonial Mexico. By Colin M. MacLachlan and Jaime E. Rodríguez O. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980. Bibliography. Illustrations. Index. Maps. 362 pages.

In general, Mexico’s colonial past has been interpreted as a negative experience by modern scholars. Within Mexico this interpretation is based primarily upon political concepts which idealize pre-Cortesian culture and condemn Spain as a cruel, autocratic nation which forcefully imposed itself upon Aztec civilization through bloody conquest. Foreign scholars either adhere to this “Black Legend” concept or, in a more revisionary sense, simply condemn colonialism as an institution. This new study presents a positive approach to the three centuries of Spanish domination in Mexico as an integral part of national evolution, not as a better-to-be forgotten period of darkness.

The basis for the development of Colonial Mexico, New Spain, is seen as mestizaje, the fusion of Indian and European culture which began with the conquest in 1519. In that Aztec and Spanish society shared more similarities than differences, mestizaje produced a dynamic new race, referred to by José Vasconcelos as “Cosmic,” the “Mexican.” As an integral part of society within New Spain, the mestizo is seen as the prime mover of economic growth and cultural homogeneity…

Read the entire review here.

Ellen Gallagher: AxME

Tate Modern: Exhibition
Bankside
London SE1 9TG
2013-05-01 through 2013-09-01

Ellen Gallagher is one of the most acclaimed contemporary artists to have emerged from North America since the mid-1990s. Her gorgeously intricate and highly imaginative works are realised with a wealth of virtuoso detail and wit. This is her first major solo exhibition in the UK, providing the first ever opportunity to explore an overview of her twenty-year career.

Gallagher brings together imagery from myth, nature, art and social history to create complex works in a wide variety of media including painting, drawing, relief, collage, print, sculpture, film and animation. The exhibition explores the themes which have emerged and recurred in her practice, from her seminal early canvases through to recent film installations and new bodies of work.

In her series of wig-map grid collages, Double Natural, POMP-BANG, and eXelento, Gallagher has appropriated and incorporated found advertisements for hair and beauty products from the 1930s to the late 1970s from publications such as Ebony, Our World, and Black Stars. These advertisements fostered ideals in black beauty through wigs and hair adornments, which Gallagher has then recontextualised, collaging the Afro wig elements and embellishing them with plasticine. As she comments: ‘The wig ladies are fugitives, conscripts from another time and place, liberated from the “race” magazines of the past. But again, I have transformed them, here on the pages that once held them captive.’…

For more information, click here.