Mixed Race Studies

Sniffing Elephant Bones: The Poetics of Race in the Art of Ellen Gallagher

Callaloo
Volume 19, Number 2, Spring 1996
E-ISSN: 1080-6512 Print ISSN: 0161-2492
pages 337-339
DOI: 10.1353/cal.1996.0074

Judith Wilson, Former Assistant Professor of African American Studies, Assistant Professor of Art History and Assistant Professor of Visual Studies
University of California, Irvine

What she said once, unforgettable, was that the stereotype is the distance between ourselves—our real, our black bodies—& the image

[T]he greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor; … for to use metaphors well is to see the similarity in dissimilars. —Aristotle, The Poetics Image

These three sites have been crucially linked in recent cultural theory and practice. Thirty years old and a native of New England, painter Ellen Gallagher has been described as working “in the gap between image and body (the gap that is language).” That understanding of her project, of course, simultaneously echoes and significantly revises a late modernist agenda epitomized by Robert Rauschenberg: “Painting relates to both art and life. Neither can be made. (I try to act in that gap between the two.)” Post-pop, post-painterly, and post-minimal, Gallagher operates in a space cleared by contemporary feminist, semiotic, black, and cultural studies discourses. Yet her art negotiates these busy intersections in a starkly independent fashion. In conversation, she readily shifts from charting the ancestry of Walt Disney’s Mickey Mouse (whose origins, she…

Optical Illusions: Images of Miscegenation in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century American Art

American Art
Volume 5, Number 3 (Summer, 1991)
pages 88-107

Judith Wilson, Former Assistant Professor of African American Studies, Assistant Professor of Art History and Assistant Professor of Visual Studies
University of California, Irvine

miscegenationn. [Latin miscere to mix + genus race…]: a mixture of races; esp: marriage or cohabitation between a white person an a member of another race.
—Webster’s Seventh  New Collegiate Dictionary

Today, most physical anthropologist do not believe that pure races ever existed.
—Bruce G. Trigger

What the matter came down to, of course, was visibility.  Anyone whose appearance discernibly connected him with the Negro was held to be such.
—Winthrop Jordon

“Race” is a peculiarly optical system of classification as Hugh Honour and Albert Boimehave observed. In the English-speaking world, it is a concept that characteristically stresses a single feature or color—value—and is structured by polarities “white” and “black,” “white” and “non-white,” “the white race” and “the darker races,” 0r “white people” and “people of color.” Miscegenation, the sexual union of individuals assigned to different racial categories, blurs such distinctions, thereby threatening race-based systems of social order and privilege. Indeed, as both anthropologist Bruce Trigger and philosopher Anthony Appiah have suggested, the age-old historical fact of miscegenation undermines the validity of race as either a scientific or a philosophical construct.

North American attitudes toward race are notoriously rigid and denial oriented in their insistence upon what anthropologist Virginia R. Dominguez has labeled “the binary system”:

Whereas descendants of Africans and Europeans in the United States, regardless of miscegenation, are typically allowed membership in only two racial categories—white and black—the Afro-Latin world… has long used miscegenation as a mechanism for the construction of a new category of people epistemologically separate from both whites and blacks.

North American practice is unique, not only in its tendency to view miscegenation primarily in African- versus European-American terms—a tendency that both excludes additional levels of genealogical complexity (e.g., the possibility of African, European, and Native American ancestry) and erases other histories (e.g., the record of anti-Asian sentiment and legislation, with its accompanying prohibitions of interracial sex). Thus reduced to a black-white issue, the sex-race conjunction has given rise to forms of literary and cinematic representation that are well known: American authors ranging from James Fenimore Cooper to William Faulkner have shared a preoccupation with the supposed tragedy of mixed ancestry, and filmmakers ranging from D. W. Griffith to Spike Lee have lamented the alleged horrors of interracial sex…

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