{"id":9735,"date":"2010-10-24T01:33:27","date_gmt":"2010-10-24T01:33:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=9735"},"modified":"2010-10-24T01:33:42","modified_gmt":"2010-10-24T01:33:42","slug":"nella-larsen-and-the-veil-of-race","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=9735","title":{"rendered":"Nella Larsen and the Veil of Race"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"Stable URL: http:\/\/www.jstor.org\/stable\/490290\" target=\"_blank\"><strong><em>Nella Larsen and the Veil of Race<\/em><\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n<p>American Literary History<br \/>\nVolume 9, Number 2 (Summer, 1997)<br \/>\npages 329-349<\/p>\n<p><strong>George Hutchinson<\/strong><\/p>\n<blockquote><p><em>People see what they want to see, and then they\u2019ll claim you.\u00a0 Not claim you, but label you. Because it\u2019s not really about claiming you.\u00a0 The white people don\u2019t want you around.\u00a0 You\u2019re not really white\u2026 And for Blacks\u2014and it\u2019s not for all Blacks\u2014there\u2019s sort of this feeling that, yeah, she is black and yes, we\u2019ll call her black, but she\u2019s not black like we are\u2026 I was recognized by the black community as an outstanding black student, of course.\u00a0 That used to upset me, that they would claim me because I did well academically, but I wasn\u2019t a part of their world.<\/em><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: right;\">Heidi Durrow, daughter of Danish mother and African-American father, quoted in Lise Funderburg, <em>Black, White, Other<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>White studies of cultural <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Syncretism_(linguistics)\" target=\"_blank\">syncretism<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Transnationalism\" target=\"_blank\">transnationalism<\/a>, and \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=686\" target=\"_blank\">hybridity<\/a>\u201d have lately become all the rage, there is one area in which claims of racially \u201chybrid\u201d identity are still subtly resisted, quietly repressed, or openly mocked.\u00a0 The child of both black and white parents encounters various forms of incomprehension in a society for which \u201cblackness\u201d and \u201cwhiteness\u201d seems to constitute two mutually exclusive and antagonistic forms of identity.\u00a0 Moreover, the shift to terms presumably marking ethnic or cultural descent\u2014\u201cEuropean\u201d and \u201cAfrican\u201d\u2014has done little to clarify the situation of those \u201cblack\u201d subjects who are at the same time, say, German, or, as in the case of the young woman quoted above, Danish-American.<\/p>\n<p>For more than a decade, the strongest <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Nella_Larsen\" target=\"_blank\">Nella Larsen<\/a>\u00a0scholarship has been motivated by a reaction against earlier approaches to her fiction that stressed the importance of biracial subjectivity, connected to fiction of the \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=454\" target=\"_blank\">tragic mulatto<\/a>.\u201d\u00a0 The best recent criticism tends to focus on other issues, particularly feminist themes.\u00a0 Often the difficulties of Larsen\u2019s mulatto characters are treated as metaphors for supposedly more important issues such as black and\/or female identity generally\u2026<\/p>\n<p>Read or purchase the article <a href=\"https:\/\/www.jstor.org\/action\/ecommPurchase\/10.2307\/490290\" target=\"_blank\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Nella Larsen and the Veil of Race American Literary History Volume 9, Number 2 (Summer, 1997) pages 329-349 George Hutchinson People see what they want to see, and then they\u2019ll claim you.\u00a0 Not claim you, but label you. Because it\u2019s not really about claiming you.\u00a0 The white people don\u2019t want you around.\u00a0 You\u2019re not really [&hellip;]<\/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],"tags":[903,3136,65,64,87],"class_list":["post-9735","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-literary-criticism","category-media-archive","tag-american-literary-history","tag-george-hutchinson","tag-heidi-durrow","tag-heidi-w-durrow","tag-nella-larsen"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9735","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=9735"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9735\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9735"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9735"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9735"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}