Mixed Race Studies

Plaçage and the Performance of Whiteness: The Trial of Eulalie Mandeville, Free Colored Woman, of Antebellum New Orleans

American Nineteenth Century History
Volume 15, Issue 2, 2014
pages 187-209
DOI: 10.1080/14664658.2014.959818

Carol Wilson, Arthur A. and Elizabeth R. Knapp Professor of American History
Washington College, Chestertown, Maryland

Depictions of plaçage, a type of concubinage found in pre-Civil War New Orleans, have tended toward the romantic. A group of scholars have shown recently that, contrary to popular perception, many plaçage unions were no different from common-law marriages. This article takes a case-study approach to examine one such relationship in detail – one that was the subject of a legal challenge involving the fortune of perhaps the wealthiest free black woman in Louisiana. I apply Ariela J. Gross’s theory of “performance of whiteness” to demonstrate why free woman of color Eulalie Mandeville won her case over her white partner’s numerous white relatives at a time when free blacks in Louisiana and the rest of the nation were losing rights.

Read or purchase the article here.

Globalizing a Race to Publish an Encyclopedia

American Nineteenth Century History
Volume 11, Issue 1 (2010)
pages 79-94
DOI: 10.1080/14664651003616966

Michael Benjamin, Independent Scholar
African American Print Culture
Cleveland, Ohio, USA

In 1912, Daniel Alexander Payne Murray published a prospectus for his “Historical and Biographical Encyclopedia of the Colored Race throughout the World.” He promised to publish what literary historian Henry Louis Gates Jr., would describe as the “Grail” for black scholars. As Murray planned his encyclopedia in the first decade of the twentieth century, persons of African descent in the United States were killed and assaulted because of their race, and racial identification was as critical an issue as it was also ambiguous. Moreover, despite its ambiguity, or perhaps, because of it, race, in 1912 and since the Naturalization Act of 1790, had everything to do with American citizenship. In Murray’s time, whether a person was identified on the one hand as “white” or “octoroon” versus an identity as “black,” “Negro,” “mulatto,” or “quadroon” influenced whether or not that person could exercise his rights as an American citizen (with her rights barely entering the question). However, race, as Murray understood with its skin color codes shading the meaning of American citizenship, was much more a social construction than it was biological evidence of a person’s hereditary origins. Formulating a strategy in support of black American citizenship, Murray developed a global interpretation of the black American experience from a pragmatically ambiguous cultural practice to compose an identity for himself, his people, and his proposed encyclopedia.

Read or purchase the article here.

The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory [Review: Zack]

American Nineteenth Century History
Volume 11, Issue 2 (2010)
pages 269-270
DOI: 10.1080/14664658.2010.481885

Naomi Zack, Professor of Philosophy
University of Oregon

The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory
Tavia Nyong’o
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009
Pp. 230. ISBNs 978 0 8166 5612 7 and 978 0 8166 5613 4

If The Amalgamation Waltz were not a 230-page book, published by a university press, complete with scholarly apparatus, readers might think that Alan Sokal was at it again, this time with the bad taste to caricature postmodern treatments of mixed race—as though mixed race did not already have a history of tragedy in fiction and biography. But alas, Tavia Nyong’o’s jargon-ridden exercise in “mixed-race theory” probably is the sincere but feverish reworking of a doctoral dissertation written under great stress, which it purports to be. Most readers, after reviving from the stupor induced by grappling with the first half of the introduction, would probably simply recycle the book unread and have done with it. But, I am heartened by the fact that mixed race has become a sufficiently respectable intellectual topic to support publication of even such a failed effort.

Nyong’o’s major theme appears to be that the idea of racial miscegenation enables certain errors in the mass political memory (which is something like a Jungian collective unconscious, only structured by anxiety). The idea of racial miscegenation leads to a “miscegenation of time.” When time is miscegenated, temporal order gets disorganized, so that what people imagine as A preceding B is in reality a case of B preceding A. Thus, the idea of mixed race is imagined to come after the idea of pure race. But in reality, the idea of mixed race comes first and the idea of pure race is constructed as a defense against the nightmarish chaos and danger evoked by the idea of mixed race. However, to put it this way might be too literal, because Nyongo writes, “My method employs the archive as a practice of ‘countermemory’ but without the pretense of using it to build a complete or coherent historical narrative” (p. 7). Indeed, such a narrative is not possible insofar as the “spurious issue” of mixed race/hybridity/amalgamation is not a thing but a performance that defers solution of racial problems into some future in which it (m-r/h/a) will transcend race.

Although Nyongo begins The Amalgamation Waltz by castigating Americans for the assumption that that the history of race in the U.S. offers the final meanings of race words, the four chapters of the book are largely restricted to American history. Chapter one, “The Mirror of Liberty,” is about representations of Crispus Attucks, a mixed-race patriot or insurgent who was killed by British troops in the Boston Massacre on 5 March 1770. Nyong’o weaves Attucks’s role as a symbol of unresolved racial injustice in colonial times with reflection on a book in the Wellcome Library in London that is falsely described as bound in the “Tanned Skin of the Negro whose Execution caused the War of Independence.” Nyong’o notes that some books were in fact bound in human skin, a practice called “anthropodermic bibliopegy” (p. 37). Chapter two, “In Night’s Eye,” begins with a nineteenth-century story about a traveler in a coach at night, who informs his companions that the idea of amalgamation is used by anti-abolitionists to frighten and shock abolitionists. This notion of moral panic, based on imagery of sexual disorder, is further developed throughout the chapter, and Nyong’o makes a lucid case that such imagery was used by both sides of the slavery…

Read or purchase the review here.

Reconstruction, Segregation, and Miscegenation: Interracial Marriage and the Law in the Lower South, 1865-1900

American Nineteenth Century History
Volume 6, Issue 1
March 2005
pages 57-76
DOI: 10.1080/14664650500121827

Peter Wallenstein, Professor of History
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

On the eve of Congressional Reconstruction, all seven states of the Lower South had laws against interracial marriage. During the Republican interlude that began in 1867-68, six of the seven states (all but Georgia) suspended those laws, whether through judicial invalidation or legislative repeal. Yet by 1894 all six had restored such bans. The trajectory of miscegenation laws in the Lower South between 1865 and 1900 permits a reconsideration of the range of possibilities the Reconstruction era brought to public policy. More than that, it forces a reconsideration of the origins of the Jim Crow South. Legally mandated segregation in public transit, as C. Vann Woodward observed in 1955, took hold late in the century. But such segregation in public education, as Howard R. Rabinowitz pointed out with his formula ‘from exclusion to segregation,’ originated during the first postwar years. Segregation on the marital front – universal at the start of the period and again at the end, but relaxed in most Lower South states for a time in between – combined the two patterns into yet a third. Adding another layer of complexity was the issue of where the color line was located, and thus which individuals were classified on each side of it.

Read or purchase the article here.