Mixed Race Studies

Erasure and Recollection: Memories of Racial Passing

Peter Lang
September 2021
366 pages
13 fig. b/w.
Paperback ISBN:978-2-8076-1625-7
ePUB ISBN:978-2-8076-1627-1 (DOI: 10.3726/b18256)

Edited by:

Hélène Charlery, Professor of English Literature
University of Toulouse-Jean Jaurès, Toulouse, France

Aurélie Guillain, Professor of American Literature
University of Toulouse-Jean Jaurès, Toulouse, France

Many recent studies of racial passing have emphasized the continuing, almost haunting power of racial segregation even in the post-segregation period in the US, or in the post-apartheid period in South Africa. This “present-ness” of racial passing, the fact that it has not really become “passé,” is noticeable in the great number of testimonies which have been published in the 2000s and 2010s by descendants of individuals who passed for white in the English-speaking world. The sheer number of publications suggest a continuing interest in the kind of relation to the personal and national past which is at stake in the long-delayed revelation of cases of racial passing.

This interest in family memoirs or in fictional works re-tracing the erasure of some relative’s racial identity is by no means limited to the United States: for instance, Zoë Wicomb in South Africa or Zadie Smith in the UK both use the passing novel to unravel the complex situation of mixed-race subjects in relation to their family past and to a national past marked by a history of racial inequality.

Yet, the vast majority of critical approaches to racial passing have so far remained largely focused on the United States and its specific history of race relations. The objective of this volume is twofold: it aims at shedding light on the way texts or films show the work of individual memory and collective recollection as they grapple with a racially divided past, struggling with its legacy or playing with its stereotypes. Our second objective has been to explore the great variety in the forms taken by racial passing depending on the context, which in turn leads to differences in the ways it is remembered. Focusing on how a previously erased racial identity may resurface in the present has enabled us to extend the scope of our study to other countries than the United States, so that this volume hopes to propose some new, transnational directions in the study of racial passing.

Table of Contents

• Introduction – Hélène Charlery and Aurélie Guillain
• Part I: Memories of Racial Passing – Reconstructing Local and Personal Histories – From Homer Plessy to Paul Broyard
  • To Pass or Not to Pass in New Orleans – Nathalie Dessens
  • Racial Passing at New Orleans Mardi Gras; From Reconstruction to the Mid- Twentieth Century: Flight of Fancy or Masked Resistance? – Aurélie Godet
  • Passing through New Orleans, Atlanta, and New York City: The Dynamics of Racial Assignation in Walter White’s Flight (1926) – Aurélie Guillain
  • African American Women Activists and Racial Passing: Personal Journeys and Subversive Strategies (1880s– 1920s) – Élise Vallier-Mathieu
• Part II: Memory, Consciousness and the Fantasy of Amnesia in Passing Novels
  • “What Irene Redfield Remembered”: Making It New in Nella Larsen’s Passing – M. Giulia Fabi
  • Between Fiction and Reality: Passing for Non- Jewish in Multicultural American Fiction – Ohad Reznick
  • Experiments in Passing: Racial Passing in George Schuyler’s Black No More and Arthur Miller’s Focus – Ochem G.l.a. Riesthuis
  • Passing to Disappearance: The Voice/ Body Dichotomy and the Problem of Identity in Richard Powers’s The Time of Our Singing (2004) – Anne-Catherine Bascoul
• Part III: Memories of Racial Passing within and beyond the United States: Towards a Transnational Approach
  • “The Topsy-Turviness of Being in the Wrong Hemisphere” Transnationalizing the Racial Passing Narrative – Sinéad Moynihan
  • Passing, National Reconciliation and Adolescence in Beneath Clouds (Ivan Sen, 2002) and The Wooden Camera (Ntshaveni Wa Luruli, 2003) – Delphine David and Annael Le Poullennec
  • Transnational Gendered Subjectivity in Passing across the Black Atlantic: Nella Larsen’s Passing, Michelle Cliff ’s Free Enterprise and Zadie Smith’s Swing Time – Kerry-Jane Wallart
• About the Authors/ Editors
• Index

Mariage et métissage dans les sociétés coloniales: Amériques, Afrique et Iles de l’Océan Indien (XVIe–XXe–siècles) (Marriage and misgeneration [miscegenation?] in colonial societies: Americas, Africa and islands of the Indian ocean (XVIth–XXth centuries))

Peter Lang
2015
357 pages
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-0343-1605-7
DOI: 10.3726/978-3-0352-0295-3

Edited by:

Guy Brunet, Vice President
Société de Démographie Historique, Paris, France
also: Professor of History, University Lyon

La conquête de vastes empires coloniaux par les puissances européennes, suivie par des mouvements migratoires d’ampleur variable selon les territoires et les époques, a donné naissance à de nouvelles sociétés. Les principaux groupes humains, indigènes, sous différentes appellations, colons d’origine européenne et leurs descendants, et parfois esclaves arrachés au continent africain, se sont mélangés parfois rapidement et avec une forte intensité, parfois plus tardivement ou marginalement. Les unions, officialisées par des mariages ou restées consensuelles, provoqué l’apparition de nouvelles générations métisses et ainsi qu’un phénomène de créolisation. L’effectif de chacun de ces groupes humains, et l’existence éventuelle de barrières entre eux, ont produit des degrés de métissage très divers que les administrateurs des sociétés coloniales ont tenté de classifier. Les seize textes réunis dans cet ouvrage abordent la manière dont les populations se sont mélangées, ainsi que la position des métis dans les nouvelles sociétés. Ces questions sont abordées dans une perspective de long terme, du XVIe au XXe siècle, et à propos de nombreux territoires, du Canada à la Bolivie, des Antilles à Madagascar, de l’Algérie à l’Angola.

The conquest of large colonial empires by European powers, followed by migratory flows, more or less important depending on places and periods, gave birth to new societies. The most important human groups, indigenous, European born settlers and their descendants, and sometimes slaves snatched from the African continent, mixed, more or less early, more or less intensely. Unions, legally registered or not, and misgeneration [miscegenation?] lead to the appearance of mixed-blood generations and to a process of creolisation. The numerical strength of these human groups, and the existence of barriers between them, produced various degrees of misgeneration that the authorities of the colonial societies tried to identify and to classify. The sixteen texts gathered in this book study the way that these populations got mixed, and the place of mixed-blood people in the new societies. These issues are tackled in a long-term perspective, about various territories, from Canada to Bolivia, from the French West Indies to Madagascar, from Algeria to Angola.

The Black Irish Onscreen: Representing Black and Mixed-Race Identities on Irish Film and Television

Peter Lang Publishing
Reimagining Ireland. Volume 16
2013
203 pages
5 black and white illustrations
Paperback ISBN: 978-3-0343-0839-7
DOI: 10.3726/978-3-0353-0507-4

Zélie Asava, Lecturer and Programme Director of Video and Film
Dundalk Institute of Technology, Louth, Ireland

This book examines the position of black and mixed-race characters in Irish film culture. By exploring key film and television productions from the 1990s to the present day, the author uncovers and interrogates concepts of Irish identity, history and nation.

In 2009, Ireland had the highest birth rate in Europe, with almost 24 per cent of births attributed to the ‘new Irish’. By 2013, 17 per cent of the nation was foreign-born. Ireland has always been a culturally diverse space and has produced a series of high-profile mixed-race stars, including Phil Lynott, Ruth Negga, and Simon Zebo, among others. Through an analysis of screen visualizations of the black Irish, this study uncovers forgotten histories, challenges the perceived homogeneity of the nation, evaluates integration, and considers the future of the new Ireland. It makes a creative and significant theoretical contribution to scholarly work on the relationship between representation and identity in Irish cinema.

This book was the winner of the 2011 Peter Lang Young Scholars Competition in Irish Studies.

Contents

• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Positioning the Black Irish: Theoretical, Historical and Visual Contexts
• Chapter One: ‘No Blacks, No Dogs, No Irish’: Being Black and Irish in Neil Jordan’s The Crying Game (1992) and Breakfast on Pluto (2005)
• Chapter Two: Gendering the Other: Raced Women in Irish Television (Prosperity (RTE, 2007), Love is The Drug (RTE, 2004) and Fair City (RTE, 1989–present))
• Chapter Three: New Identities in the Irish Horror Film: Isolation (O’Brien, 2005) and Boy Eats Girl (Bradley, 2005)
• Chapter Four: Black and Mixed Masculinities in Irish Cinema: The Nephew (Brady, 1998), Irish Jam (Eyres, 2006) and The Front Line (Gleeson, 2006)
• Chapter Five: Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me: Trafficked (O’Connor, 2010) and the Multicultural Irish Thriller
• Chapter Six: The Raced Stranger in Contemporary Cinema: Between the Canals (O’Connor, 2011), Sensation (Hall, 2010), The Good Man (Harrison, 2012) and The Guard (McDonagh, 2011)
• Conclusion
• Framing the Future of the Black Irish Onscreen
• Bibliography
• Index

Invisible Woman: Growing Up Black in Germany

Peter Lang
2008
168 pages
ISBN 978-1-4331-0278-3 (paperback)

Ika Hügel-Marshall (Translated by Elizabeth Gaffney)

Invisible Woman: Growing Up Black in Germany, republished in a new annotated edition, recounts Ika Hügel-Marshall’s experiences growing up as the daughter of a white German woman and an African-American man after World War II. As an “occupation baby”, born in a small German town in 1947, Ika has a double stigma: Not only has she been born out of wedlock, but she is also Black. Although loved by her mother, Ika’s experiences with German society’s reaction to her skin color resonate with the insidiousness of racism, thus instilling in her a longing to meet her biological father. When she is seven, the state places her into a church-affiliated orphanage far away from where her mother, sister, and stepfather live. She is exposed to the scorn and cruelty of the nuns entrusted with her care. Despite the institutionalized racism, Ika overcomes these hurdles, and finally, when she is in her forties, she locates her father with the help of a good friend and discovers that she has a loving family in Chicago.

Gilberto Freyre: Social Theory in the Tropics

Peter Lang
2008
261 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-906165-09-3
Softcover ISBN: 978-1-906165-04-8

Peter Burke
University of Cambridge

Maria Lúcia G. Pallares-Burke
Centre for Latin American Studies
University of Cambridge

Gilberto Freyre was arguably the most famous intellectual of twentieth-century Latin America. He was active as a sociologist, a historian, a journalist, a deputy in the Brazilian Assembly, a novelist, poet and artist. He was a cultural critic, with a good deal to say about architecture, past and present, and a public intellectual, whose pronouncements on race, region and empire – not to mention sex – made him famous in some quarters and notorious in others.

The Masters and the Slaves, his most famous work, went through forty editions and has been translated into nine languages, made into a comic book and a television miniseries, while two directors (one of them Robert Rossellini) planned to turn it into a film. Yet he is not well known outside Brazil. Freyre was a major social thinker, one of the few who have not come from Western Europe or the USA, and this book argues that we should take account of the pioneering work of this gifted intellectual. His ideas are of particular relevance today for both political and academic reasons. His interest in gender, ethnicity, hybridity, identity, globalization, and capitalism ensures that his ideas are still provocative and topical, and ready to be introduced to a wider audience.

Contents

• The Importance Of Being Gilberto
• Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
• Masters and Slaves
• A Public Intellectual
• Empire and Republic
• The Social Theorist
• Gilberto Our Contemporary

Midnight’s Orphans: Anglo-Indians in Post/Colonial Literature

Peter Lang
2006
265 pages
Weight: 0.370 kg, 0.816 lbs
Paperback ISBN: 978-3-03910-848-0
Series: Studies in Asia-Pacific “Mixed Race”

Glenn D’Cruz, Senior Lecturer
School of Communication and Creative Arts
Deakin University, Australia

Anglo-Indians are the human legacy of European colonialism. These descendants of European men and Indian women regularly appear as disconsolate and degenerate figures in colonial and postcolonial literature, much to the chagrin of contemporary Anglo-Indians. Many significant writers, such as Rudyard Kipling, Maud Diver, John Masters, Salman Rushdie and Hari Kunzru, have created Anglo-Indian characters to represent the complex racial, social and political currents of India’s colonial past and postcolonial present.

This book is the first detailed study of Anglo-Indians in literature. Rather than simply dismissing the representation of Anglo-Indians in literary texts as offensive stereotypes, the book identifies the conditions for the emergence of these stereotypes through close readings of key novels, such as Bhowani Junction, Midnight’s Children and The Impressionist. It also examines the work of contemporary Anglo-Indian writers such as Allan Sealy and Christopher Cyrill.

Presenting a persuasive argument against ‘image criticism’, the book underscores the importance of contextualizing literary texts, and makes a timely contribution to debates about ‘mixed race’ identities, minoritarian literature and interculturalism.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter One: Seven Deadly Stereotypes
• Chapter Two: Regulating Bodies: Dangerous ‘Others’ and Colonial Governmentality
• Chapter Three: Beyond the Pale: Imperial Power and Scientific Regimes of Truth
• Chapter Four: The Poor Relation: Social Science and the Production of Anglo-Indian Identity
• Chapter Five: Midnight’s Orphans: Stereotypes in Postcolonial Literature
• Chapter Six: ‘The Good Australians’: Australian Multiculturalism and Anglo-Indian Literature
• Chapter Seven: Conclusion: Bringing it all Back Home
• Bibliography
• Index

The Passing Figure: Racial Confusion in Modern American Literature

Peter Lang
1998
142 pages
ISBN: 978-0-8204-4265-5

Juda Charles Bennett, Associate Professor of English
The College of New Jersey

How and when does literature most effectively uncover race to be a metaphor? The passing figure, a light-skinned African-American capable and willing to pass for white, provides the thematic focus to this provocative study. In exploring the social and cultural history of this distinctly American phenomenon, Bennett moves freely between literature, film, and music, arguing that the passing figure is crucial to our understanding of past and present conceptions of race.