Mixed Race Studies

The Skyscraper’s Unseeing Eyes: Louis Sullivan, Nella Larsen, and Racial Formalism

American Literature
Volume 89, Issue 3
2017-09-01
DOI: 10.1215/00029831-4160846

Sue Shon

Since its inception, the skyscraper has served as an icon of American innovation, modernity, and freedom. Upholding this image has erased the racial thinking and racist practices foundational to this born-and-bred American architectural form. This essay restores the import of race to the skyscraper by reading formalist theories by the father of modern architecture, Louis Sullivan, alongside a work of African American modernist fiction, Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929). Reading Sullivan alongside Larsen explains how skyscrapers and blackness together have defined what gets seen as modern. The unexpected pairing reveals the visual racial logics built into skyscraper aesthetics and adds an architectural thread to the well-established scholarship on Larsen’s novel.

“A Plea for Color”: Nella Larsen’s Iconography of the Mulatta

American Literature
Volume 76, Number 4, December 2004
pages 833-869

Cherene Sherrard-Johnson, Professor of English
University of Wisconsin, Madison

The Negro poet portrays our group in poems, the Negro musician portrays our group in jazz, the Negro actor portrays our group generally with a touch of hilarity. . . . So why should the Negro painter, the Negro sculptor mimic that which the white man is doing, when he has such an enormous colossal field practically all his own; portraying his people, historically, dramatically, hilariously, but honestly.

—Archibald J. Motley Jr., “The Negro in Art”

While the name Archibald Motley brings instant recognition only to specialized scholars, two of Motley’s paintings are so well known that they have become, for many, visual embodiments of the Harlem Renaissance. Motley’s The Octoroon Girl (1925) and Blues (1929) have served as cover art for several editions of Harlem Renaissance literature, anthologies, and literary criticism. Blues, with its colorful, energetic composition incorporating the era’s insignia—jazz, the speakeasy, and interracialism—bespeaks musical innovation and artistic intellectualism. And the recurrent appearance of The Octoroon Girl, especially on the cover of women’s fiction, continues to reproduce its subject—the mulatta—as a predominant referent in the visual culture, art, and literature of the Harlem Renaissance era.

The Octoroon Girl, which Motley considered the best of his paintings, is the second of a series in which he uses color and composition to explore miscegenation. Motley claimed to be “sincerely interested in pigmentation of the skin in regard to the lightest type of colored person . . . consisting of one-eighth Negro blood and seven-eighths caucasian blood.” In this painting, he depicts a light-skinned, dark-haired, dark-eyed woman with high cheekbones, an aquiline nose, and rose-colored, pursed lips (see fig. 1). Sitting comfortably on a tapestry-like couch, one arm resting on a small table with two books and a moustached figurine, she is not perfectly centered in the portrait but situated slightly to the right, her head counterbalanced by a gold-framed landscape hanging on the wall. The dramatic contrast of dark and light forms a rich backdrop for the portrait of this clearly modern woman and her penetrating gaze. Her stylish clothing, gloves, and finely drawn, tapered hands indicate her middle-class status, while her frontal position and serious expression lend a dignity that Motley consistently conveys in his portraits. The only fracture in this otherwise graceful composition is the laughing figurine at her elbow. This mocking figure, resembling a clown, undermines the sitter’s poise and subtly disturbs the dignity of the design. The figurine reminds the viewer that the portrait is an image projected by the artist and draws attention to the artificiality in modern realist painting. Placed precisely to illuminate some otherwise hidden aspect of the sitter’s character, the laughing figure suggests there is something more to the sitter than Motley’s title, which directs the viewer’s reading of the painting as an “octoroon girl.” In serving as cover art for novels that thematize racial indeterminacy, this portrait gestures at a collective, visually inflected understanding of the aestheticized markers that created the mulatta, or passing, subject in African American literary and visual culture: physiognomy, exoticism, and the mysterious gaze.

Along with Motley’s haunting octoroon series, a preponderance of photography, visual art, and narrative texts produced during the Harlem Renaissance featured the mulatta as either heroine or primary subject, reinforcing her role as the representative New Negro woman. While the New Negro man was called upon to be an inventor, innovator, and artist, the New Negro woman appeared in roles that emphasized service and self-sacrifice, such as teachers, nurses, and librarians. These popular images of the New Negro woman enforced a genteel standard of behavior, appearance, and vocation that restricted real women’s agency and artistic expression—and ran counter to the modernizing impulse of the era. On the other hand, the image of the mulatta was frequently collapsed into the stereotype of the Jezebel. Motley’s painting A Mulatress…

Slippery Language and False Dilemmas: The Passing Novels of Child, Howells, and Harper

American Literature
Volume 75, Number 4, December 2003
pages 813-841

Julie Cary Nerad, Associate Professor of English
Morgan State University, Baltimore, Maryland

Conceived in slavery, gestated in racialist science, and bred in Jim Crow segregation, the U.S. race system calcified into a visual epistemology of racial difference based largely on skin color. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this visual schema of biological difference, despite fluctuation within racial categories—even within whiteness itself—was generally reduced to just white and nonwhite. This illusion of racial dichotomy sometimes allowed very light-skinned African Americans to choose between a black or a white identity. “The position of the pale [black] individual,” wrote African American psychiatrist Charles Gibson in 1931, “is analogous to that of a traveler who has come to a forked road. One branch of the fork is remaining Negro; the other is ‘passing for white.'” In Gibson’s schema, light-skinned African Americans could choose to retain their black identity and risk reverse discrimination within the darker-skinned community, or they could pass as white through an identity of deception, trading the ties of their African American family and friends for economic opportunity, a choice often conceptualized as crass materialism. Recent scholarship on passing for white has complicated Gibson’s simple binary of individual choice by recognizing racial passing as an aggressive political challenge to the ideological construct of race. As a form of performative trespass, many have argued, passing exposes race as a performative identity category, like gender and class. Recognizing this dimension of racial identity does not reduce the cultural and psychological significance of race; rather, it attempts to separate race from biology and the fallacious hierarchy of innate difference that has been used historically to justify systemic inequity and violence.

Despite its impetus, however, recent critical work on race often illustrates the degree to which the one-drop rule still has a toehold on American racial consciousness. “One drop” of “black blood” continues to imply a responsibility to blackness that academic deconstructions of race have not significantly altered. One goal of my essay is to investigate how continuing misconceptions about race as a biological imperative influence our readings of novels about racial passing, despite our acknowledgment that race is performative. The cause I identify here is twofold. First, the ideology of racial uplift and the tenacious persistence of the one-drop rule converge to influence our perceptions of race and our reading of passing novels. Racial uplift, with its debt of responsibility, has become a significant part of our racial ideology: if one’s family is African American, if one has any “drop” of black blood, then one has a responsibility to the race and should proclaim oneself black. That is, no matter how “white” one’s skin, we assume that passers are black and censure their attempts to live outside the bounds of that identity. This assumption evinces the tenacity of—and simultaneously reinforces—the one-drop rule.

Second, in focusing almost exclusively on passing as an intentional act of racial identification, scholars have regarded it as primarily a political challenge to the racial status quo. In many novels of passing, however, the characters’ sense of racial identity develops less consciously, in conjunction with (not simply in conscious opposition to) the racially marked socioeconomic and cultural spaces they inhabit. Legally black but corporeally white, these passers are initially unaware that their genetic heritage includes a “drop” of black blood. I call these critically neglected characters unintentional passers. They do not know that in the eyes of the law they are passing. Texts of unintentional passing, and there are many, destabilize notions of biologically constructed racial identity precisely because the passers are unaware that they are transgressing legal boundaries. The discrepancy between legal race categories and racial self-perceptions reveals how race functions in the United States to maintain socioeconomic inequalities by controlling an individual’s sense of identity and her place within family, community, and nation. Our own tendency to conceptualize these fictional characters as…

James Fenimore Cooper and the Invention of the Passing Novel

American Literature
Volume 84, Number 1 (March 2012)
pages 1-29
DOI: 10.1215/00029831-1540932

Geoffrey Sanborn, Associate Professor of Literature
Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York

Sanborn’s essay seeks to demonstrate that The Headsman, an overlooked 1833 novel by James Fenimore Cooper, is an allegory of racial passing. After showing that the dominant aim of this melodrama about a Swiss executioner’s family is to critique white American prejudice against African Americans, and that it does so by dramatizing the consequences of passing for three members of that family, Sanborn considers the implications of the fact that the end of the novel seems to reverse, or at least neutralize, that critique. Although Cooper is quite serious about the antiracist message of the novel, the involutions of its ending suggest that by impersonating characters whom he thinks of as light-skinned black people passing as white, Cooper seeks imaginative pleasures just as much as, if not more than, he advances political aims. It is worth considering, Sanborn concludes, whether the same may be said of other passing novels—whether the painful secret keeping of literary passers is, for writers and readers alike, more pleasurable than we have imagined.

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Jean Toomer: Fugitive

American Literature
Volume 47, Number 1 (March, 1975)
page 84-96

Charles Scruggs, Professor of English
University of Arizona

As a young boy, Jean Toomer attended a dinner party during which someone asked his famous grandfather, P. B. S. Pinchback, if he indeed had “colored” blood. The light-skinned former lieutenant governor of Louisiana answered enigmatically, “That is what I have claimed.” According to Toomer in his unpublished autobiography, Pinchback never cleared up the matter for his grandson. Toomer insisted that he never knew for sure whether or not he was part Negro.

If Toomer’s racial identity was a puzzle to himself, his attitudes toward himself as Negro have also puzzled his critics. Before the publication of Cane (1923), he seemed to advertise his dark blood. After 1923 he ambiguously referred to himself as “an American, simply an American”; and around 1930 he refused to be included in several Negro anthologies. In the same year he let it be known that he was actually “white,” blaming the confusion on Waldo Frank, who had given the impression in his introduction to Cane that Toomer was a Negro. What mystifies everyone, as Darwin Turner pointed out, is why in the summer of 1923 Toomer rejected “a racial identification which a few months earlier he had accepted as a matter of slight importance.”

Explanations have been offered for Toomer’s apparent apostasy…

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“White Slaves” and the “Arrogant Mestiza”: Reconfiguring Whiteness in The Squatter and the Don and Ramona

American Literature
Volume 69, Number 4 (December, 1997)
pages 813-839

David Luis-Brown, Associate Professor of Cultural Studies and English
Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, California

In Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona (1884) and The Squatter and the Don (1885) by Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton are indisputably political novels, representing conflicts over land, class position, and racial status in California in the 1870s. These novels represent Anglos, Californios, and Indians as struggling for social position following the U.S. annexation of one-half of Mexico as a result of the Mexican War of 1846-1848. However, although most critics view these texts as political, their insufficient historicization of narrative form has led them to misconstrue as antagonistic the relationship between form and reform in these novels. Despite the canon-expanding feminist criticism of Lauren Berlant, Ann Douglas, Jane Tompkins, and others, which has allowed us to read as politically engaged the previously marginalized genres of melodrama and romance, Michael Dorris associates melodrama in Ramona with improbable events, simplistic characterization, and chaste love; Rosaura Sánchez and Beatrice Pita split Squatter into “two tracks, one historical and one romantic.” Sánchez and Pita view the romance as a love story inadequate to Squatter’s historical content—conflicts over racial caste. According to the logic of such constricting definitions of romance, a politically engaged, protofeminist nineteenth-century sentimental text would be a contradiction in terms, a clearly untenable conclusion given recent feminist scholarship.

Feminist scholarship on sentimentalism has allowed us to grasp the point of view expressed by José Martí, an early admirer of Ramona. In the prologue to his 1888 translation of Ramona, Martí argues that Ramona’s sentimental qualities constitute its political strength…

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Resistance, Silence, and Placées: Charles Bon’s Octoroon Mistress and Louisa Picquet

American Literature
Volume 79, Number 1 (March 2007)
pages 85-112
DOI: 10.1215/00029831-2006-072

Stephanie Li, Assistant Professor of English
University of Rochester

In 1850, Mary Walker, a free woman of color, filed a petition in the Fourth District Court of New Orleans to enslave herself and her nine-year-old daughter to George Whittaker. Commenting on a similar case involving the voluntary enslavement of another free woman of color, the New Orleans Daily Picayune asserted that Amelia Stone “preferred” the liberty, security, and protection of slavery here, to the degradation of free niggerdom among the Abolitionists at the North, with whom she would be obliged to dwell, and in preference to which, she has sought the ‘chains’ of slavery.” With only this specious rationale, a political barb aimed at antislavery Northerners, there exists no historical record to explain Stone’s and Walker’s drastic choice. Nevertheless, we can offer some conjectures concerning the motives of women of color who sought enslavement. Throughout the nineteenth century, free people of color living in New Orleans were subjected to waves of discrimination that culminated in the ratification of laws restricting their mobility and basic liberties. They were required to carry proof of their freedom at all times, and their right of assembly was severely limited. An 1842 law required recently arrived free blacks to leave Louisiana. Had Walker been new to the state, enslavement would have been the only way for her to remain. Even if she had been born in Louisiana, she might have preferred the stability of enslavement to the troubles and insecurities of freedom.

In giving up her liberty, Walker made one final independent choice; she chose George Whitaker as her master. Perhaps she had some knowledge of his character and social position that led her to entrust her life and that of her daughter to him. He may have been her former…

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