{"id":63572,"date":"2022-03-29T01:53:58","date_gmt":"2022-03-29T01:53:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=63572"},"modified":"2022-03-29T01:54:25","modified_gmt":"2022-03-29T01:54:25","slug":"james-weldon-johnsons-feminization-of-biraciality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=63572","title":{"rendered":"James Weldon Johnson’s Feminization of Biraciality"},"content":{"rendered":"

James Weldon Johnson’s Feminization of Biraciality<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Twentieth-Century Literature<\/a>
Volume 67, Number 4, December 2021<\/a>
pages 385-406<\/p>\n

Rafael Walker<\/strong><\/a>, Assistant Professor of English
Baruch College, City University of New York<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

In considering fictions centered on characters of mixed Black-and-white parentage, critics tend to assimilate these stories into African American literary paradigms\u2014in much the same way that, in real life, America<\/a> considers biracial people as simply black. Working against this reductive reflex, this essay reads James Weldon Johnson’s<\/a> 1912 novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man<\/em><\/a> as a serious exploration of biracial identity and experience. Specifically, the article argues that Johnson draws on early twentieth-century conceptions of femininity as a vehicle for rendering mainly three facets of the lives of many biracial men: (1) hypervisibility (in a world obsessed with skin color), (2) sexuality (when identification is distorted), and (3) self-determination (where a racial hierarchy appears to eliminate agency). In its conclusion, the article suggests that the prevailing tendencies among readers of the novel to condemn the ex-colored man stems from an investment in the trope of the “tragic mulatto<\/a>“\u2014a plot device that at once sentimentalizes the fates of biracial characters and links those fates inextricably to biology rather than ideology.<\/p>\n\n\n

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

Working against this reductive reflex, this essay reads James Weldon Johnson’s 1912 novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man as a serious exploration of biracial identity and experience.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,1196,8],"tags":[1307,22792,33345],"class_list":["post-63572","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-literary-criticism","category-media-archive","tag-james-weldon-johnson","tag-rafael-walker","tag-twentieth-century-literature-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63572","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=63572"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63572\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":63577,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63572\/revisions\/63577"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=63572"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=63572"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=63572"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}