{"id":8105,"date":"2010-07-27T01:00:52","date_gmt":"2010-07-27T01:00:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=8105"},"modified":"2010-07-27T01:25:53","modified_gmt":"2010-07-27T01:25:53","slug":"fluidity-without-postmodernism-michelle-cliff-and-the-tragic-mulatta-tradition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=8105","title":{"rendered":"Fluidity without Postmodernism: Michelle Cliff and the \u201cTragic Mulatta\u201d Tradition"},"content":{"rendered":"

Fluidity without Postmodernism: Michelle Cliff and the \u201cTragic Mulatta\u201d Tradition<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

African American Review
\nVol. 32, No. 4 (Winter, 1998)
\npages 673-689<\/p>\n

Suzanne Bost<\/a><\/strong>, Associate Professor of English
\nLoyola University<\/em><\/p>\n

I am writing the story of my life as a statue… I wish they had carved me from the onyx<\/a> of Elizabeth Catlett<\/a>.\u00a0 Or molded me from the dark clay of Augusta Savage<\/a>.\u00a0 Or cut me from mahogany<\/a> or cast me in bronze.\u00a0 I wish I were dark plaster like Meta Warrick Fuller’s<\/a> Talking Skull<\/em>.\u00a0 But I appear more as Edmonia Lewis\u2019s Hagar\u2014<\/em>wringing her hands in the wilderness\u2014white marble figure of no homeland\u2014her striations caught within.\u00a0 (Cliff, Land<\/em> 85)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In \u201cThe Laughing Mulatto (Formerly a Statue) Speaks,\u201d Michelle Cliff<\/a> invokes past stereotypes of the mulatto<\/a> and the sculptors who remolded them. From Edmonia Lewis<\/a> (1844-1909)\u2014the half-black, half-Chippewa<\/a>sculpor who gained international fame with the help of abolitionists William Lloyd Garrison<\/a> and Lydia Maria Child<\/a>\u2014to Augusta Savage<\/a> (1892-1962)\u2014the Harlem Renaissance<\/a> artists who sculpted busts of W. E. B. Du Bois<\/a>, Frederick Douglass<\/a>, and Marcus Garvey<\/a>\u2014black artists have been reconstructing images of African Americans.\u00a0 The speaker of \u201cThe Laughing Mulatto\u201d identifies with racial \u201cbetweeenness,\u201d yet she also subverts racist conventions that privilege the whiteness within biracial African Americans. She wishes that her skin were darker: onyx, mahogany, or bronze, not white marble (Cliff, Land <\/em>85).\u00a0 Her\u00a0wish implicitly compares race to workable materials, as if racial identity were something that could be chiseled and molded by an artist…<\/p>\n

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

Fluidity without Postmodernism: Michelle Cliff and the \u201cTragic Mulatta\u201d Tradition African American Review Vol. 32, No. 4 (Winter, 1998) pages 673-689 Suzanne Bost, Associate Professor of English Loyola University I am writing the story of my life as a statue… I wish they had carved me from the onyx of Elizabeth Catlett.\u00a0 Or molded me […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,1196,8,25],"tags":[2758,2755,913],"class_list":["post-8105","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-literary-criticism","category-media-archive","category-women","tag-african-american-review","tag-michelle-cliff","tag-suzanne-bost"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8105","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=8105"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8105\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8105"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8105"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8105"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}