Mixed Race Studies

Obama’s mixed ancestry generates some of the new uncertainty about blackness. The white part of his genetic inheritance is not socially hidden, as it often is for “light-skinned blacks” who descend from black women sexually exploited by white slaveholders and other white males. Rather, Obama’s white ancestry is right there in the open, visible in the form of the white woman who, as a single mother, raised Obama after his black father left the family to return to his native Kenya. Press accounts of Obama’s life, as well as Obama’s own autobiographical writings, render Obama’s whiteness hard to miss. No public figure, not even Tiger Woods, has done as much as Obama to make Americans of every education level and social surrounding aware of color-mixing in general and that most of the “black” population of the United States, in particular, are partially white. The “one-drop rule” which denies that color is a two-way street is far from dead, but not since the era of its legal and social consolidation in the early 1920s has the ordinance of this rule been so subject to challenge.

David A. Hollinger, “Obama, The Instability of Color Lines, and the Promise of a Postethnic Future,” Callaloo: A Journal of African Diaspora Arts and Letters, Volume 31, Number 4 (2008): 1033-1037. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/cal.0.0282.

Toward a Narratology of Passing: Epistemology, Race, and Misrecognition in Nella Larsen’s Passing

Callaloo
Volume 35, Number 3, Summer 2012
pages 778-794
DOI: 10.1353/cal.2012.0078

Gabrielle McIntire, Professor of English
Queens University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada

In one of his posthumously published essays Georges Bataille poses a question that we might borrow to consider the narratological and epistemological quandaries at the heart of Nella Larsen’s telling of racial unbelonging in her 1929 novella, Passing. Bataille writes, “why must there be what I know? Why is it a necessity? . . . In this question is hidden—it doesn’t appear at first—an extreme rupture, so deep that only the silence of ecstasy answers it” (109). Bataille queries the necessary binding of ontology and epistemology—that mysterious and what he calls “divine” strangeness that what and how we know, and the language we use to conceptualize the world, inevitably condition our ways of being. I want to suggest that Larsen’s novella works its way toward some similar questions. What happens in 1920s Harlem when one’s skin color does not announce a clearly decipherable racial genealogy? How does one know how to belong to a “race” when race itself is inordinately prone to the mutable semiotics of skin and the prejudices of its (always racially traversed) readers? How does “race” bind communities and ban its outlaws? Further, how do we discover the truth content of a story concerned with racial, sexual, and familial belonging whose heroine/anti-heroine, Irene Redfield—the figure with whom the omniscient narrator is most identified—develops relationships with both her husband, Brian, and her childhood friend, Clare Kendry, in conjunction with a severely limited (and possibly paranoid) epistemological frame? Must what Irene knows function as the limit of what we, as readers, know? In seeking to answer these questions, I want to propose that Passing still takes us to the largely inarticulable limits of both race and desire—how they mean, and how they function together—by performatively embedding confusions about the legibilities of race and desire within a commensurately riddled narration where none of its plot-lines or dominant preoccupations (with the ethics and allures of passing, with anxieties about an extramarital affair, or with the lesbian-erotic subtext) submit to a definitive reading. Instead, all of these polyvalent concerns co-exist in a matrix of meaning which suggestively proposes that an echolalic symmetry exists between broken sexual and racial epistemes and the tasks of their telling.

Critics, though, often want to insist that Passing can be read to produce very particular (often hierarchized) answers about the relative importance of its homoerotic, racial, and psychological concerns. Instead of pursuing a line of inquiry that would propose another variant on the ambiguities of the story, I want to suggest that part of why this novella continues to fascinate is because of its mise en abîme structure of indecipherability. The story draws us in so powerfully because Larsen’s palimpsestic layering of race with desire’s own signal unknowability approximates the enigmatic bind between knowledge and power that animates the projects of both reading and telling. As if it were a detective story, just as we think we have discovered and joined all the pieces of its puzzle, Passing surprises us and asks us to double back and look again. The proliferation of interpretive possibilities within this short narration mimics the stress lines at play in twentieth- and twenty-first century American culture around what it means to inhabit African American-ness, or to know race, with Larsen insisting that sexual, racial, and psychic un-narratability together provoke us and draw us into a maze of epistemological unrest. Ultimately Larsen shows us that the vagaries of narration and interpretation are as prone to misrecognitions and mistakes as are race and desire; in other words, she reveals that race and desire are structured as forms of narration and are thus replete with potentially hazardous misreadings. In the process, Larsen offers a book that seems to “pass” for a readable document and yet ceaselessly withholds resolution on multiple levels at once.

Part of what Larsen achieves in her interrogation of modes of passing is a warning against sealed epistemologies or…

Liberating Blackness: The Theme of Whitening in Two Colombian Short Stories

Callaloo
Volume 35, Number 2, Spring 2012
pages 475-493
DOI: 10.1353/cal.2012.0074

Laurence E. Prescott, Professor
Department of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese
Pennsylvania State University

Hablaré del físico de los negros, casi como de carrera. Tienen dos cosas repugnantes para no gustar, el color negro y el mal olor. . . .

—Pbro. Felipe Salvador Gilii

The convert may have found spiritual salvation in the White Man’s faith; he may have acquired the White Man’s culture and learnt to speak his language with the tongue of an angel; he may have become adept in the White Man’s economic technique, and yet it profits him nothing if he has not changed his skin.

—Arnold Toynbee

The premium placed by many Negroes on a light shade of skin, straight hair, and Caucasian features, are all indicative of severely injured self-esteem and of the inferiority assumed in things Negro.

—Peter Loewenberg

And above all, the author must believe in black folk, and in the beauty of black as a color of human skin.

—W. E. B. Du Bois

In Black Skin, White Masks, a probing psychological exploration of the dynamics of racism and its effects on both Blacks and Whites, psychiatrist Frantz Fanon writes: “In the white world the man of color encounters difficulties in the development of his body schema. Consciousness of the body is solely a negating activity. The body is surrounded by an atmosphere of certain uncertainty” (110–111). As Fanon goes on to say, the equating of blackness with evil and ugliness stimulated white scientists to seek a means of removing “the burden of that corporeal malediction” (111). Simultaneously, that same malevolent identification prompted black people to go to extraordinary lengths to free themselves from their blackness, the alleged source of their discontent. Skin lighteners, hair straighteners, miscegenation, and “passing” are some of the more common methods that have been tried over the years. These preoccupations have not gone unnoticed by creative writers. In 1931 African American journalist and writer George S. Schuyler (1895–1977) published the humorously satirical novel Black No More, in which a black doctor discovers a process that changes black skin to white and transforms Negroid features to Caucasian in a matter of hours, thereby disrupting the racial status quo, bolstering the defenders of white racial purity and supremacy, and ruining black businesses and civil rights organizations.

Schuyler’s novel is probably the best-known African American work of fiction that deals with a physical transformation of black people to bring about group liberation and a “happy” resolution of “the race problem.” The theme and pursuit of whitening, however, is not confined to North American society and literature. It is also present in the cultures and literary and non-literary works of Latin America. Indeed, in the nation of Colombia, South America, whose citizens of African descent constitute a significant portion of the total population, both journalists and creative writers have shown a continuing interest in the physical whitening of black peoples. As early as 1883, for example, there appeared in the “Folletines” supplement of the Bogotá newspaper La Luz, a notice titled “No más negros” ‘No more Blacks,’ which reported on a doctor in South Carolina who was experimenting with “una agua milagrosa que da á la piel de los negros la blancura de la nieve” ‘a miraculous water which gives to Negroes’ skin the whiteness of snow.’ Lacking official confirmation of the extraordinary liquid, the authors of the note, associating the word “anti-negro” with “antidote,” wryly concluded: “Hasta que así sea y sepamos á qué atenernos, confesamos que el anti-negro nos parece un white lie” ‘Until it is so and we know on what to rely, we confess that the anti-black seems to us a white lie.’ Noteworthy, too, is the presence in both nineteenth- and twentieth-century publications of advertisements directed at women for products that lighten—and (thus) allegedly…

The Afro-Latin@ Reader: History and Culture in the United States (review)

Callaloo
Volume 35, Number 2, Spring 2012
pages 548-551
DOI: 10.1353/cal.2012.0030

Daynali Flores-Rodriguez, Adjunct Professor of Spanish
Inter-American University of Puerto Rico

Jiménez Román, Miriam, and Juan Flores, eds. The Afro-Latin@ Reader: History and Culture in the United States. Durham: Duke UP, 2010.

Published a year before the United Nations declared 2011 the International Year for People of African Descent, The Afro-Latin@ Reader: History and Culture in the United States, takes a deeper look into the complex world of ethnic and race relations in America. Miriam Jiménez Román, the executive director of Afro-Latino Forum, a research and resource center for Black Latinos in the US, and Juan Flores, Director of Latino Studies at NYU, engage Afro-Latin@s as a population that “bridge various communities even as they constitute a community in their own right” (xiii). Similar to Henry Louis Gates’s Black in Latin America (2011) a four-part documentary series shown earlier this year on PBS that explores the influence of African descent in Latin America, The Afro-Latin@ Reader focuses “on the strategically important but still largely understudied United States context of Afro-Latin@ experience” (3). Both are proof of an emerging interest in transnational relations of race as a way to challenge the homogenizing effects of national and regional constructs of identity.

The complex history of ethnic and racial movements in the United States is traditionally framed within a socially-progressive agenda intended to reveal and denounce hidden histories of racialization, colonization, exploitation and social mobilization still experienced by many. In their zeal to be acknowledged and recognized as equals in mainstream society, ethnic and racial groups often articulate identity in terms that foster the same practices of cultural disenfranchisement these groups were denouncing in the first place.

Likewise, in Latin America, the myth of racial democracy based on “mestizaje” or mixed race, is still touted as one of the most defining traits of a pan-ethnic cultural identity. Since slavery was a systematic practice brought upon Latin America by European colonizers and later adopted and asserted by the United States (considered the ideological and practical heir of Europe), racial discrimination and prejudice is considered a foreign problem that attests to the immorality of imperialist and colonial practices and a strategic attempt to distract and divide Latin Americans from their common goal to resist these advances. Indigenous and black identities are accepted (in that order) as long as they do not compromise the traditional discourse of racial harmony that makes Latin Americans stand strong against the neocolonial threat, represented by the United States.

The editors of The Afro-Latin@ Reader: History and Culture in the United States make a compelling effort to reveal the subtle and complex negotiations of social identity that take place when these two paradigms clash. While oral narratives and testimonies are a common point of departure for historians and social scientists alike, the material included in the collection demonstrates an innovative approach that encourages readers to keep reflecting on the contributions made by Afro-Latin@s, far beyond the strict academic setting that so strongly divides experience from theory. Voices of the past acquire a new meaning for our own times. Arturo Alfonso Schomburg’s plea for the establishment of a Chair of Negro History in 1913 demonstrates his relevance as a pioneer for Black Studies and resonates stronger nowadays, where ethnic studies (specifically Latin@ and Chican@ studies) are threatened amidst accusations of reverse racism and/or the false premises of a post-racial America heightened by Barack Obama’s election in 2008. The essays by Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof and Evelyne Laurent-Perrault not only describe the world of tense racial coalitions and segregation Schomburg inhabited but how his legacy is kept alive and still facilitates the conversation about what it means to be an Afro-Latin@.

The strength of this collection is the diverse array of materials suitable for those reflecting comparatively on issues of race, ethnicity, and identity, whether for the first time or for the hundredth. The Afro-Latin@ Reader uses academic essays, memoirs, poetry, literature, interviews, Census statistics, short stories, music, film, and popular culture to establish a much needed conversation on the social othering of Latin@s…

Passing For What? Racial Masquerade and the Demands of Upward Mobility

Callaloo
Volume 21, Number 2, Spring 1998
pages 381-397
DOI: 10.1353/cal.1998.0108

Phillip Brian Harper, Erich Maria Remarque Professor of Literature; Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis, English
New York University

Ends and Means: The Social-Critical Significance of Racial Passing in the U.S. Context

The preposition “for” in the main title of my essay carries a deliberate dual significance, simultaneously constituting a synonym for “as” and indicating the (provisionally indeterminate) end of the activity I plan to interrogate here. For it has come to my attention over the last few years that racial passing—and the narratives that conventionally bring it to light—serves a function that escapes many students of the practice, by which I mean many of the students I teach. These readers of the racial passing narrative—chiefly enrollees in my African-American literature courses—tend to see it in psychic-orientational terms, as signifying only the protagonist’s disavowal of an identity that proper race pride and healthy self-regard would lead him or her enthusiastically to embrace. It is generally only after a fair amount of cajoling that they can acknowledge the material gain potentially enjoyed by anyone who, while legally designated as black, lives successfully as white for a significant time—that particular masquerade being the one generically conjured by the term “racial passing” in the U.S. context.

And yet there are other modes of racial masquerade than the one in which a light-skinned black “passes for” white; and there are other functions typically served by racial passing per se than the accomplishment of a merely individualist objective. Limited though these general functions may be, their critical utility is not insignificant; which is why, before I consider as what one might pass (the possibilities for which are much more numerous than we might expect, even within the limited field described by the oversimplifying white/black binary that governs U.S. racial culture), I should elaborate clearly to what purpose passing ordinarily works. It is against this generalized societal function that the meanings of some particular instances of racial passing—which I interrogate below—take shape.

I am at a great advantage in undertaking this task of elaboration, in that a substantial part of the work has already been done for me. Indeed, the last several years have brought numerous insightful analyses of the social-expository function typically served by racial passing, which, in the summary offered by Amy Robinson, is to reveal “‘race’ . . . as a construct, an arbitrary principle of classification that produces the ‘racial’ subject in the very act of social categorization.” The possibility of passing’s functioning in this way derives from the specifically visual means by which racial identity is registered in U.S. culture, where, as Robinson puts it, “appearance is assumed to bear a mimetic relation to identity, but in fact does not and can not.” These conditions make it “easy to bypass the rules of representation and claim an identity by virtue of a ‘misleading’ appearance” (250). Thus, Robinson suggests, passing “jeopardizes the very notion of race as a biological essence, foregrounding the social contexts of vision by calling into question the ‘truth’ of the object in question” (241), and thereby “emerges as a challenge to the very notion of the visual as an epistemological guarantee” (250).

While racial passing does do this, however, it is important to remember that this is effectively all that it does, and that it generally does even this relatively little only under certain self-defeating conditions. This latter constraint inheres in the fact that, for an instance of passing to register as a challenge to the logic of racial identification, it must disclose itself as an instance of passing in the first place, which disclosure typically would also constitute the failure of the act. For, as Robinson notes, “the mark of . . . success” for any instance of passing ordinarily consists “precisely in its inconspicuousness” (243)—its inability to be perceived at all, let alone as a threat…

Clare Kendry’s “True” Colors: Race and Class Conflict in Nella Larsen’s Passing

Callaloo
Volume 15, Number 4 (Autumn, 1992)
pages 1053-1065

Jennifer DeVere Brody, Professor of Drama
Stanford University

Interpretations of Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929) often have failed to explain the complex symbolism of the narrative. Indeed, dismissive or tendentious criticisms of the text have caused it to be eclipsed by Larsen’s “earlier and more intriguing” book, Quicksand (1928). This essay reexamines Passing as a work concerned with the simultaneous representation and construction of race and especially class, within a circumscribed community. As such, my paper contributes to debates within Black feminist criticism about the value of these aspects of identity in relation to the production of black female subjectivities. I contend that the novel’s main characters are neither purely “psychological” beings, as Claudia Tate asserts, nor are they essentially “sexual” creatures, as Deborah McDowell argues. Rather, I read Irene Redfield and Clare Kendry as representatives of different ideologies locked in struggle for dominance.

In her introduction to Passing Deborah McDowell one of the most astute critics of Larsen’s work, states that “many critics have been misled by the novel’s epigraph … [since] it invites the reader to place race at the center of any critical interpretation.” It would appear that McDowell herself has been misled by Passing’s obviously unreliable narrator. So too, McDowell seems to agree with Claudia Tate’s belief that, “Race is peripheral to Passing. It is more a device to sustain the suspense than a compelling social issue.” I disagree with these assertions because it seems to me that the text is “all about race” or rather, the mediation of race in relation to sexuality and class.

McDowell recognizes certain tropes employed by Larsen and, like many other critics, she maintains that Irene Redfield is the primary referent of the novel’s title. Ultimately, however, McDowell is unable to give a full explication of the texf s meaning since she tries to read/uce the text as a tale of latent sexual passion without discussing the key issues of race and class. Thus, while her discussion is certainly valuable, one might also say that it reifies sexuality at the risk of not exploring how sexuality is connected inextricably with other historically produced phenomena such as race and class. In order to sustain her ingenious reading of Passing as a tale that “passes for straight” and sublimates lesbian desire, McDowell misses the more intricate implications addressed by Larsen’s work. The iconography McDowell reads as sexual is simultaneously racial: it also expresses class positionality. For example, the objective correlative envelope used in the first paragraph of the novel signifies not only the “sexual” (McDowell reads it as a “metaphorical vagina”) but also the sender’s race (alien) and class (elite). Thus, my reading emends McDowell’s by insisting on the importance of race and class in Passing.

If race as well as class conflict must occupy a primary position in any discussion of…

Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism (review)

Callaloo
Volume 34, Number 1 (Winter 2011)
pages 208-210
E-ISSN: 1080-6512; Print ISSN: 0161-2492
DOI: 10.1353/cal.2011.0007

Kirin Wachter-Grene
University of Washington, Seattle

Jared Sexton. Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008.

Anxieties about American multiracial identity and practices, known in the nineteenth century as “amalgamation” or “miscegenation,” have been percolating in the national imagination for centuries. Since the 1980s, however, this cultural fascination has become explicitly politicized across sundry civic and intellectual landscapes, and since referred to as “multiracialism” or “mestizaje” (“mixture”). Broadly speaking, multiracialism, while re-structuring racial/ethnic classifications, curiously strives to provide freedom from being identified as or self-identifying as explicitly racialized. It is, in essence, a call for a supra-racial, or post-racial society. While the socio-political complications of this proposal have been the subject of recent scholarly work, the sexual politics of the multiracial movement have gone largely critically unexamined.

In his first book, Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism, Jared Sexton argues that multiracial politics, presented as the solution to racial controversy in the post-civil rights United States, actually reifies racial essentialism, evokes and implements antiblack racism, and denounces decades of black theoretical work and organizing traditions in its ultimate attempt to de-legitimize blackness as a viable political, social, and sexual identity. Lewis Gordon, Minkah Makalani, and Rainier Spencer have constructed similar arguments about the supposed inherent antiblack racism prevalent in multiracial politics, but Sexton, while acknowledging and extending their insights, integrates a strong argument about sexual politics into the prevailing discourse. He argues that multiracialism is not, as it claims, a political antithesis to white supremacy or sexual racism. Rather, multiracialism codifies normative sexuality within and across the color line with disastrous effects, producing a desexualization of race, and a deracialization of sex that reinforces racist sexual pathologies. Exposing the inextricable relation between sexuality and racism, specifically in regards to multiracialism’s articulations of interracial sex (defined by Sexton as a relationship in which one of the partners is black), comprises the bulk of this work. Throughout the book the terms “multiracialism” and “interracialism” are primarily used by Sexton to examine relations between blacks and whites or blacks and non-white, non-black people. Rarely does he apply the terms to analyze relations between other racial groups, a theoretical move that at times is awkwardly articulated and exclusionary, but integral to Sexton’s thesis that blackness is the matrix through which racialization is constructed, and that multiracialism engenders a denial of specifically black legitimacy.

Multiracialism strives to disarticulate mixed race individuals from the one-drop rule of hypodescent—the rule that was wielded in nineteenth-century America to render all mixed race individuals black by law. Multiracialism, Sexton argues, is an epistemological denouncement of systems of racial classification, not of racism itself. It is the goal of contemporary multiracialism to allow for mixed race individuals to self-identify as “mixed” (i.e., Sexton argues, not black). Claiming to be “mixed” and more broadly, claiming a “mestizo” (4) American nationalism is erroneous, in that it disregards the de facto Atlantic hybridity of all black subjects, and propagates a neoliberal “color blind” ideology that is really an amalgamation of whiteness actively striving to eradicate blackness from the cultural ethnic makeup. “Because the disassociation of multiracial people from racial whiteness is historically intractable,” Sexton writes, “the description of ‘the offspring of these unions’ as ‘neither one race or another’ is an artifice, a means of more subtly declaring that ‘mixed race’ should never have been viewed merely as a ‘subset’ of ‘blackness'” (74). In other words, though the multiracial movement strives to eradicate white supremacist tendencies by disarticulating notions of racial essentialism, it succeeds only in reifying those same racialized categories. If one is mixed and, in essence, claiming neither race, one is suggesting that there are pure races with which to disidentify, particularly the race of “pure” blackness because whiteness is normative and historically obstinate. Ultimately, it is this amalgamated form of “whiteness” that Sexton posits as the ideological goal of multiracial advocates…

Read the entire review here.

In the Place of Clare Kendry: A Gothic Reading of Race and Sexuality in Nella Larsen’s Passing

Callaloo
Volume 34, Number 1, Winter 2011
pages 143-157
DOI: 10.1353/cal.2011.0024

Johanna M. Wagner
Maastricht University

Feeling her colour heighten under the continued inspection, she slid her eyes down. What, she wondered, could be the reason for such persistent attention? Had she, in her haste in the taxi, put her hat on backwards? Guardedly she felt at it. No. Perhaps there was a streak of powder somewhere on her face. She made a quick pass over it with her handkerchief. Something wrong with her dress? She shot a glance over it. Perfectly all right. What was it?

—Nella Larsen, Passing

In a book where the protagonist prides herself in knowing who she is, the final question in the epigraph above is indicative of Irene Redfield’s willful self-ignorance. It is also a reasonable question readers have had about the protagonist and her relationship with the notorious Clare Kendry. What was it between the two women that in the end warrants Clare’s demise? The answer to this question lies somewhere within Irene’s need for ontological certainty—sureness in the knowledge of her own being—that begets security in every aspect of her life. Irene’s security is based on, among other things, stasis. When we meet her, Irene has already meticulously defined and secured her concepts of race and sex and relegated them to their respective compartments in her psyche, never to be revisited. For revisiting either of these ideas would surely breach the serene outlook she entertains about her life. It is her resolve to maintain security that drives the action of the novel and will illuminate what it “was” in Clare that incites such anxiety.

On the roof of the Drayton, unsure of why she elicits a stranger’s scrutiny, Irene responds to the stubborn stare by inspecting herself, mentally running through a list of possible reasons for this unsettling attention (Larsen 149). Her mind whirls as she attempts to pinpoint what it is about her appearance that might be worthy of this penetrating gaze. It is not until after she has exhausted the list of possible material/physical anomalies that she finally resolves to ignore the woman and “let her look!” (149). Ironically, however, foreshadowed by her heightening “colour,” at length Irene suspects “it” may be something less visual, less tangible than her hat, makeup, or dress: “Gradually there rose in Irene a small inner disturbance, odious and hatefully familiar. She laughed softly, but her eyes flashed. Did that woman, could that woman, somehow know that here before her very eyes on the roof of the Drayton sat a Negro?” (150). This early scene is indicative of Irene’s incongruous character. She prides herself in her bourgeois participation toward racial uplift, and yet race does not cross her mind until there is no other alternative. It is a remarkable juxtaposition between the title of the novel Passing, which implies race as no less than the major theme, and the absentminded protagonist who pinpoints the issue only after she has ruled out all else. It is no wonder criticism of Passing has struggled with its importance. Because Irene’s interest in race proves sparse and erratic, the reader may resist its significance to the novel, and certainly to Irene, altogether.

Ambiguity surrounding the issue of race is not the only thing vague in Larsen’s novel. The book has a penchant for opacity: the unreliable narrator, the conflation of protagonist with antagonist, the shocking and uncertain ending; critics have been flustered by this murkiness since its publication. For example, in his 1958 book The Negro Novel in America, Robert A. Bone dismisses the novel as Larsen’s “less important” one, preferring Larsen’s other work Quicksand (101). His dismissive attitude is illustrated through his irritation by certain structural features in Passing. For Bone, “a false and shoddy denouement prevents the novel from rising above mediocrity” (102). Hoyt Fuller has similar concerns; in his introduction to the 1971 publication of Passing, he asserts that Larsen’s “deliberate scene setting” is reminiscent of a “mediocre home magazine story teller” (18). Because these critics position the work within the realm of the “typical” passing novel (Bone 101) and presume the tragic mulatto myth to explain any social or psychological issues, themes such as “race” are relegated to the background of their criticism while their interests in convention and composition are foregrounded…

Read the entire article here.

Articulating Space: The Free-Colored Military Establishment in Colonial Mexico from the Conquest to Independence

Callaloo
Volume 27, Number 1 (Winter 2004)
pages 150-171
DOI: 10.1353/cal.2004.0052

Ben Vinson, III, Vice Dean for Centers, Interdepartmental Programs, and Graduate Programs
Johns Hopkins University

Introduction: Questioning the Question of Non-White Military Service in Colonial Mexico

At the close of the seventeenth century, even with Spain feeling the heat of war and with streams of pirate raids still punishing the coastlines of the crown’s New World holdings, Spanish bureaucrats cringed when considering the prospect of using black troops to defend their possessions. Francisco de Seijas y Lobera, the former alcalde mayor (district governor) of Tacuba, a distinguished member of the Spanish gentry, a scientist, merchant, and a traveler, seemed to capture the spirit of the times in his fourteen-volume history of the Spanish kingdom. Written between 1702–1704 as a counseling guide for the new monarch, Philip V, Seijas dedicated an entire tome exclusively to Mexican affairs. Within, he described in detail the existing military landscape, the scope of enemy threats, the parameters of existing defenses, and most importantly, he offered a series of recommendations for improving the mechanisms for protecting the crown’s borders. During times of emergency, Seijas suggested that Mexico could probably count upon the military services of 200,000 coastal and frontier defenders. His estimates tallied that a full 175,000 of these would be drawn from the negro, mulatto, pardo, Indian, and mestizo racial classes.

But in his enthusiasm for advocating the expansion of the military to include nonwhites, Seijas also revealed certain prejudices that seemed characteristic of his times. Sure, negros and mulattos (i.e. free-coloreds) could be called upon to serve; however, the terms of their service had to be constricted:

With respect to the formation of the two companies, considering (as one should) that the said negros and mulatos cannot be allowed to use swords and daggers, sharp weapons, or firearms of any type… it is not convenient or safe for the service of the king that the tremendous number of negro and mulatto rabble that exist (sic) in the Indies use such weapons. This is because they could use these arms to revolt. Moreover, there is no just or political reason why these people, who are of the same species as slaves (being their offspring), should enjoy the same privileges (preeminencias) as Spaniards. For these reasons, and because [negros and mulattos] have already been involved in many uprisings and tumults in the Indies, it is best for the crown that free negros and mulattos not be permitted to use offensive or defensive weapons.

Seijas proceeded to state that only salaried, full-time free-colored soldiers should be allowed to carry such armament. By contrast, the bulk of his proposed negro and mulatto militia forces, including mounted lancers, were to wield long spears and machetes, weapons that were light, easy to handle, and that could inflict harm on the enemy while minimizing the threat to the colony itself. Junior and senior officers within these militia units might be permitted to carry daggers, swords, and pistols, but mainly to demarcate differences in rank and to inspire their loyalty to the Spanish crown.

I provide Seijas’ comments here because they are emblematic of larger trends that permeated the colonial world. They reveal, in stark terms, the predicament of partial citizenship experienced by colonials of color. On the one hand, from as early as the 16th century, mulattos, negros, and pardos were processed in the colonial social framework as gente de razón (rational people). They were distinguishable from Indians in this respect and placed on par with Spaniards in that they were considered “responsible” for their own actions in ways that could be upheld in colonial courts. In other words, whites, mestizos, and free-coloreds participated in the same colonial legal sphere, one that was, in many ways, distinct from Indians. But on the other hand, the shadow of slavery followed the mulatto and negro population into freedom. Their heritage caused them to be described simultaneously as gente de razón and gente vil (base folk), which referenced a supposedly innate set of vices that were inextricably linked to their African bloodlines. Miscegenation with white colonists theoretically extended the possibility of “improving” these “malicious” traits by blending them with the benefits of Spanish “whiteness.” However, more often than not, racial mixture was believed to accentuate the worst racial qualities. Hence, under the rubric of the caste system that gradually evolved over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, free-coloreds were routinely described as haughty, cruel, shiftless, prone to licentiousness, and malevolent. Partly in an effort to contain these vices and to prevent them from “contaminating” the indigenous population, restrictive legislation was decreed, resulting in a deeper, formal articulation of the Spanish colonial caste system.

As the differences between black and white, free-colored, and mestizo began to  sediment, at the same time the distinctions between them began to blur. The phenomenon of partial citizenship rested on the ambiguity produced by questions over the proper station of peoples of color. The military was one arena where the seemingly contradictory elements of caste clarity and caste doubt played themselves out. Beginning in medieval times and extending into the sixteenth century, military service, particularly mounted duty, was construed as a marker of nobility. On a more abstract level, bearing arms in the name of the king was one of the greatest tangible expressions of Spanishness that one could project. Implicit in the act of dressing for combat was expressing interest in defending the colonial order. That meant upholding the principles of conquest, supporting the caste framework of racial dominance with its inherent favoring of white privilege, and sanctioning colonial modes of exploitative labor (including slavery). Yet at the same time, the act of having nonwhites participating in the military establishment threw these issues into question. To what extent were free-colored actions reflective of their commitment to the colonial regime, and to what extent were they not? Did their fragmented, partial citizenship produce fragmented and partial loyalties? How did their participation in the military alter its mission and objectives? How did their participation affect and shape the policies of the colonial state? What were the types of interactions that existed between the state and free-colored military actors?

This article takes these concerns as a point of departure for examining the way free-coloreds became integrated into the colonial Mexican military establishment. But it is important to point out that the focus here is on militia duty, not regular army service. This is a significant distinction. Militias represented localized, provincial expressions of a broader military apparatus. In other words, some of the objectives of imperial service that existed within the regular army, and that often went unquestioned by regular soldiers, became re-worked, filtered, and re-articulated at the local level. Militiamen brought to the military specific understandings of the functioning of the state that emanated from their provincial experiences. As militiamen, they projected their local worlds unto imperial affairs. Regular troops, arguably, represented more concrete instruments of imperial control. As a consequence, the militia probably wielded more social power. Through its chain of command, the militiamen held the attention of high officials such as the viceroy, the auditor de guerra (senior military justice official), and top administrators in the treasury department. Militiamen, even those at the lowest levels, could utilize both the symbolic and material support they acquired from senior crown bureaucrats to frontally contest the policies of local and regional officials. They could also use their political capital to fortify patron-client relationships, to secure privileges for their townships (such as fishing and land rights), to cement racial and regional identities, and even to undermine the structures of racial privilege by challenging the meaning of caste legislation. For instance, matters such as tribute policy could be re-examined in context of the services that free-coloreds rendered in uniform. In more dramatic instances (as occurred in seventeenth and eighteenth century Cuba), militia service could transform the meaning of slavery itself, providing access for people in bondage to become office-holding vecinos (landed citizens or residents) and therefore, eligible for participation in the political life of colonial affairs.  The history offered below provides some flashpoints of duty, tracing a number of the key moments in the evolution of the colonial Mexican free-colored militia institution, while examining some of its concrete effects on the colony’s pardos, mulattos, and negros. At various points throughout the article, the interplay between the militiamen’s local (sometimes racialized) understanding of service and the broader imperial perspective of duty will be highlighted…

Read the entire article here.

Showing Her Colors: An Afro-German Writes the Blues in Black and White

Callaloo
Volume 26, Number 2, Spring 2003
pages 306-319
DOI: 10.1353/cal.2003.0045

Karein Kirsten Goertz, Lecturer of Germanic Language and Literature
University of Michigan

This essay undertakes a detailed analysis of May Ayim’s Blues in Schwarz Weiss and examines her development of what she terms Ayim’s “hybrid language”—an expressive poetic style in which African and German elements are not mutually exclusive but rather two interwoven strands that Ayim brings together to articulate the texture of her identity as a Black German. Goertz contends that Ayim’s use of complex forms of irony and displacement constitutes a sophisticated practice of “defamiliarization” that represents an important new signifying practice in German literary expression.

I am who I am, doing what I came to do, acting upon you like a drug or a chisel to remind you of your me-ness as I discover you in myself.
—Audre Lorde

That bird is wise, look. Its beak, back turned, picks for the present what is best from ancient eyes, then steps forward, on ahead to meet the future, undeterred.
—Kayper-Mensah

Through her poetry, essays and political activism. May Ayim sought to dissolve the socially and politically constructed borders that continued to exist after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. To her, the post-unification “new German solidarity” with its nationalistic rhetoric of Heimat (homeland), Volk (the people) and Vaterland (fatherland) signaled a redrawing of the line between those who were considered part of the German collective and those who were not; the previous ideological and geopolitical faultline between Fast and West was being replaced by a division along ethnic lines. Afro-Germans and other ethnic minorities living in Germany recognized that “the new ‘We’ in ‘this our country’ did and does not make room for everyone.” Rather than feeling summoned by this newly constructed collective identity, they understood it to be a place of confinement or delimitation and exclusion: “ein eingrenzender und ausgrenzender Ort” (Ayim, “Das Jahr” 214). Ayim’s spatial description of the pronoun signals that the repercussions of its limited parameters are real and practical, as well as psychological. Unable to identify with the new definition of the first-person possessive pronoun, she invariably finds herself cast into its second-person negative.

The title poem of Ayim’s first poetry volume, Blues in Schwarz Weiß (Blues in Black and White), published in 1995, traces the process of marginalization along color lines, with German unification as one of its more recent manifestations. To explain the age-old dynamic between black and white, she references the African-American tradition of the blues: during the celebration of German unity, some rejoiced in white, while others mourned on its fringes in black—together they danced to the rhythm of the blues. The blues were born out of the experience of oppression, but, as Angela Davis points out, blues also offers the key to transcending the racial and gender imbalance…

Read or purchase the article here.