{"id":9827,"date":"2010-10-31T01:45:49","date_gmt":"2010-10-31T01:45:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=9827"},"modified":"2010-10-31T02:53:34","modified_gmt":"2010-10-31T02:53:34","slug":"optical-illusions-images-of-miscegenation-in-nineteenth-and-twentieth-century-american-art","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=9827","title":{"rendered":"Optical Illusions: Images of Miscegenation in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century American Art"},"content":{"rendered":"

Optical Illusions: Images of Miscegenation in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century American Art<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

American Art
\n<\/a>Volume 5, Number 3 (Summer, 1991)
\npages 88-107<\/p>\n

Judith Wilson<\/a><\/strong>, Former Assistant Professor of African American Studies, Assistant Professor of Art History and Assistant Professor of Visual Studies
\nUniversity of California, Irvine<\/em><\/p>\n

miscegenation<\/a>n. [Latin miscere to mix + genus race…]: a mixture of races; esp: marriage or cohabitation between a white person an a member of another race.<\/em>
\n\u2014Webster’s Seventh \u00a0New Collegiate Dictionary<\/p>\n

Today, most physical anthropologist do not believe that pure races ever existed.<\/em>
\n\u2014Bruce G. Trigger<\/a><\/p>\n

What the matter came down to, of course, was visibility.\u00a0 Anyone whose appearance discernibly connected him with the Negro was held to be such.
\n<\/em>\u2014Winthrop Jordon<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cRace\u201d is a peculiarly optical system of classification as Hugh Honour<\/a> and Albert Boime<\/a>have observed. In the English-speaking world, it is a concept that characteristically stresses a single feature or color\u2014value\u2014and is structured by polarities \u201cwhite\u201d and \u201cblack,\u201d \u201cwhite\u201d and \u201cnon-white,\u201d \u201cthe white race\u201d and \u201cthe darker races,\u201d 0r \u201cwhite people\u201d and “people of color.\u201d Miscegenation, the sexual union of individuals assigned to different racial categories, blurs\u00a0such distinctions, thereby threatening race-based systems of social order and privilege. Indeed, as both anthropologist Bruce Trigger and philosopher Anthony Appiah<\/a> have suggested, the age-old historical\u00a0fact of miscegenation undermines the validity of race as either a scientific or a philosophical construct.<\/p>\n

North American attitudes toward race are notoriously rigid and denial oriented in their insistence upon what anthropologist Virginia R. Dominguez<\/a> has labeled \u201cthe binary system\u201d:<\/p>\n

Whereas descendants of Africans and Europeans in the United States, regardless of miscegenation, are typically allowed membership in only two racial categories\u2014white and black\u2014the Afro-Latin world… has long used miscegenation as a mechanism for the construction of a new category of people epistemologically separate from both whites and blacks.<\/em><\/p>\n

North American practice is unique, not only in its tendency to view miscegenation primarily in African- versus European-American terms\u2014a tendency that both excludes additional levels of genealogical complexity (e.g., the possibility of African, European, and Native American ancestry) and erases other histories (e.g., the record of anti-Asian sentiment and legislation, with its accompanying prohibitions of interracial sex). Thus reduced to a black-white issue, the sex-race conjunction has given rise to forms of literary and cinematic representation that are well known: American authors ranging from James Fenimore Cooper<\/a> to William Faulkner<\/a> have shared a preoccupation with the supposed tragedy of mixed ancestry, and filmmakers ranging from D.\u00a0W. Griffith<\/a> to Spike Lee<\/a> have lamented the alleged horrors of interracial sex…<\/p>\n

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

Optical Illusions: Images of Miscegenation in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century American Art American Art Volume 5, Number 3 (Summer, 1991) pages 88-107 Judith Wilson, Former Assistant Professor of African American Studies, Assistant Professor of Art History and Assistant Professor of Visual Studies University of California, Irvine miscegenationn. [Latin miscere to mix + genus race…]: a mixture […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1649,12,459,1196,8,20],"tags":[4278,4279],"class_list":["post-9827","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anthropology","category-articles","category-history","category-literary-criticism","category-media-archive","category-usa","tag-american-art","tag-judith-wilson"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9827","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=9827"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9827\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9827"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9827"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9827"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}