{"id":11657,"date":"2011-01-22T21:51:54","date_gmt":"2011-01-22T21:51:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=11657"},"modified":"2011-10-07T01:03:10","modified_gmt":"2011-10-07T01:03:10","slug":"was-your-mama-mulatto-notes-toward-a-theory-of-racialized-sexuality-in-gayl-jones%e2%80%99s-%e2%80%9ccorregidora%e2%80%9d-and-julie-dash%e2%80%99s-%e2%80%9cdaughters-of-the-dust%e2%80%9d","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=11657","title":{"rendered":"Was Your Mama Mulatto? Notes toward a Theory of Racialized Sexuality in Gayl Jones\u2019s \u201cCorregidora\u201d and Julie Dash\u2019s \u201cDaughters of the Dust\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

Was Your Mama Mulatto? Notes toward a Theory of Racialized Sexuality in Gayl Jones\u2019s \u201cCorregidora\u201d and Julie Dash\u2019s \u201cDaughters of the Dust\u201d<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Callaloo<\/a>
\nVolume 27, Number 3<\/a> (Summer, 2004)
\npages 768-787
\nE-ISSN: 1080-6512, Print ISSN: 0161-2492
\nDOI: 10.1353\/cal.2004.0136<\/a><\/p>\n

Caroline A. Streeter<\/a><\/strong>, Associate Professor of English
\nUniversity of California, Los Angeles<\/em><\/p>\n

Gayl Jones\u2019s<\/a> novel Corregidora <\/em>(1975) and Julie Dash\u2019s<\/a> feature film Daughters of the Dust<\/a><\/em> (1991) are singular texts that use historical frameworks to comment upon post Civil-Rights- era<\/a> race and gender relations and identity formations. Daughters of the Dust<\/em>, the first feature film written and directed by Dash, was also the first film by an African-American woman to receive widespread theatrical distribution. Daughters<\/em> is an independent work that resists and contests many aspects of the Hollywood<\/a> film. Corregidora <\/em>was the first novel by Gayl Jones, a reclusive figure with a small but striking literary output. Both the novel and the film call attention to understudied aspects of the African diaspora. In Corregiilora<\/em>, Jones creates an unusual migration circuit that links mid-to-late twentieth-century African Americans living in Kentucky<\/a> to their slave ancestors in Brazil<\/a>. In Daughters of the Dust<\/em>, the plot concerns the persistence of African traditions among black people at the turn of the century living on the Sea Islands<\/a>. located off the coast of Georgia<\/a> and South Carolina<\/a>. Both works also highlight the crucial role of women in maintaining cultural memory for black communities. This essay concerns the ways in which Corregidora <\/em>and Daughters of the Dust <\/em>make compelling interventions that transform mulatto<\/a> characters\u2014\u201cracially mixed\u201d women of African descent who bear the phenotypical (physical) markers of \u201crace mixing\u201d\u2014into figures that help us to understand new things about sexual and racial normativity. Both texts effect a surprising deployment of a figure that has been symbolic of repressed histories and regressive discourses.<\/p>\n

Mulatta characters have long been controversial figures for scholars of African-American literature. In novels such as Clotelle<\/em>, or the Colored Heroine, A Tale of the Southern States<\/em> (William Wells Brown<\/a>, 1867), lola Leroy<\/em>, or Shadows Uplifted<\/em> (Frances Ellen Watkins Harper<\/a>, 1892), Megda <\/em>(Emma Dunham Kelley-Hawkins<\/a>, 1891), and Contending Forces: A Romance lllustrative of Negro Life North and South <\/em>(Pauline Hopkins<\/a>, 1900), mulatta characters are symbolic of traumatic histories of enslavement. In novels of the 1920s and 1930s, especially those associated with Harlem Renaissance<\/a> writers such as Nella Larsen<\/a> Quicksand<\/a><\/em> (1928) and Passing<\/a><\/em> (1929) and Jessie Fauset<\/a> There is Confusion<\/em> (1924), Plum Bun<\/a><\/em> (1928), The Chinaberry Tree <\/em>(1931), and Comedy American Style<\/em> ( 1933). mulatta characters represented access to class mobility and the possibility of escaping the stigma of blackness altogether through \u201cracial passing<\/a>.\u201d…<\/p>\n

Read or purchase the article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Was Your Mama Mulatto? Notes toward a Theory of Racialized Sexuality in Gayl Jones\u2019s \u201cCorregidora\u201d and Julie Dash\u2019s \u201cDaughters of the Dust\u201d Callaloo Volume 27, Number 3 (Summer, 2004) pages 768-787 E-ISSN: 1080-6512, Print ISSN: 0161-2492 DOI: 10.1353\/cal.2004.0136 Caroline A. Streeter, Associate Professor of English University of California, Los Angeles Gayl Jones\u2019s novel Corregidora (1975) […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,83,1196,8,6462,25],"tags":[4284,552,5260,5261,5262,566,5259],"class_list":["post-11657","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-brazil","category-literary-criticism","category-media-archive","category-passing-2","category-women","tag-callaloo","tag-caroline-a-streeter","tag-caroline-streeter","tag-corregidora","tag-daughters-of-the-dust","tag-gayl-jones","tag-julie-dash"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11657","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11657"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11657\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11657"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11657"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11657"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}