Mixed Race Studies

Fresh Off the Boat Is Not Science Fiction

David Shih
2015-02-10

David Shih, Associate Professor of English
University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire

I have always known that moment of disappearance and the even uglier truth is that I have long treasured it. That always honorable-seeming absence. It appears I can go anywhere I wish. Is this my assimilation, so many years in the making? Is this the long-sought sweetness? —Chang-rae Lee, Native Speaker

Lost amid the well-deserved fanfare accompanying the premiere of ABC’s new prime-time comedy Fresh Off the Boat was the launch of another major-studio show featuring an Asian American family. Like Eddie Huang’s brainchild, it is a big-budget vehicle as well, with stars such as Olivia Munn, George Takei, Bill Nye, Mark Hamill, and Adrian Grenier lending their talents to its production. However, unless you are like me, a parent or caregiver to a preschool-aged child, you may not know what I’m talking about. Miles from Tomorrowland is an animated series for Disney Junior that made its debut only a few days after that of Fresh Off the Boat. (Disney-ABC owns both titles.) In this blog entry I will discuss these new shows, particularly how they represent extant and potential relationships between Asian Americans and other racial groups, particularly white people. What does it mean that traditional and social media have christened Fresh Off the Boat as the “Asian American” show, while the publicity for Miles from Tomorrowland makes no mention of race? The latter is a “postracial” narrative while the former is decidedly “racial” in its intent and reception.

Miles from Tomorrowland chronicles the planet-hopping adventures of a family of four, members of an institution familiar to anyone who has visited the Magic Kingdom–the “Tomorrowland Transit Authority.” The star of the show is Miles Callisto, an intrepid young boy who learns about science while solving problems with his creative use of technology. His mother, Phoebe, is the captain of their spaceship. Father Leo and sister Loretta round out the foursome. With the exception of Leo, who is white, the other Callistos are of Asian descent. To be clear, nothing from the official publicity for Miles from Tomorrowland overtly states that Phoebe is an Asian American. The voice actor for Phoebe is the well-regarded Olivia Munn, whose mother is Chinese. Just to be sure, I contacted the creator of the show, Sascha Paladino. Paladino told me that Miles is Chinese American. Moreover, Paladino revealed, later episodes of the show will explore Miles’ Chinese heritage. Targeted at preschoolers, the show is a developmentally-appropriate multicultural narrative: the star is a mixed-race boy who maintains a connection to his ethnic identity, and the Asian American characters do not exhibit any stereotypical behaviors. It promises to honor cultural diversity while understanding it as no barrier to social potential. My mixed-race son loves it, and I’m glad that there is once again an animated protagonist who shares his heritage…

Read the entire article here.

One Playwright’s ‘Obligation’ To Confront Race And Identity In The U.S.

Code Switch: Frontiers of Race, Culture and Ethnicity
All Things Considered
National Public Radio
2015-02-16

Jeff Lunden

Playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins may be only 30 years old, but he’s already compiled an impressive resume. His theatrical works, which look at race and identity in America, have been performed in New York and around the country. Last year, Jacobs-Jenkins won the best new American play Obie Award for two of his works, Appropriate and An Octoroon.

An Octoroon is currently playing at Theater for a New Audience in New York…

…Over the past five years, the young playwright has written a trilogy of highly provocative and fantastical explorations of race in America. In Neighbors, a family of minstrels in blackface moves in next to a contemporary mixed-race family. In Appropriate, a white family discovers their dead father belonged to the KKK. His latest, An Octoroon, is a loose adaptation of a play written more than 150 years ago that deals with identity and race.

“They are all kind of like me dealing with something very specific, which has to do with the history of theater and blackness in America and form,” he says. “And also, my obligation, as a human being with regards to any of these themes.”

It is Jacob-Jenkins’ self-examination that drove Ben Brantley, the chief drama critic for The New York Times, to rank An Octoroon on the top of his best pays list last year. He saw it at Soho Rep, a tiny off-Broadway theater.

“[Jacobs-Jenkins] starts off from self-consciousness, which you would think would be a crippling place for a playwright to begin,” Brantley says.”But his self-consciousness isn’t just particular; it’s national, it’s universal. And it’s the self-consciousness of realizing that we don’t have the vocabulary, the tools to discuss race.”

The play, based on a 1859 melodrama by the Irish-Anglo playwright Dion Boucicault, tells the story of a young man who’s about to inherit a plantation and falls in love with a woman who is an octoroon — seven-eighths white, one-eighth black.

Director Sarah Benson points out that, in the original, all the parts had to be played by white actors…

Read the entire article here. Listen to the story here. Download the audio here. Read the transcript here.

Charcoal and Cinnamon: The Politics of Color in Spanish Caribbean Literature

University Press of Florida
2000-04-09
192 pages
6 x 9
Cloth ISBN 13: 978-0-8130-1736-5
Paper ISBN 13: 978-0-8130-2717-3

Claudette M. Williams, Senior Lecturer
Department of Modern Languages and Literatures
University of the West Indies, Kingston, Jamaica

Charcoal and Cinnamon explores the continuing redefinition of women of African descent in the Caribbean, focusing on the manner in which literature has influenced their treatment and contributed to the formation of their shifting identities.

While various studies have explored this subject, much of the existing research harbors a blindness to the literature of the non-English-speaking territories. Claudette Williams bases her analyses on poetry and prose from Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic and enhances it by comparing these writings with the literatures of the English- and French-speaking Caribbean territories.

Williams also questions the tendency of some of the established schools of feminism to de-emphasize the factor of race in their gender analyses. A novel aspect of this work, indicated by the allusion to “charcoal” and “cinnamon” in its title, is its focus on the ways in which many writers use language to point to subtle distinctions between black and brown (mulatto) women.

The originality of Williams’s approach is also evident in her emphasis on the writer’s attitudes toward race rather than on the writer’s race itself. She brings to the emotionally charged subject of the politics of color the keen analysis and sustained research of a scholar, as well as the perceptive personal insights of an African-ancestored Caribbean woman.

Though the main focus is on literary works, the book will also be a valuable reference for courses on Caribbean history, sociology, and psychology.

Identity as Skin Color: Performing a “White” Identity in Caucasia

Scholars: Journal of Undergraduate Research
Issue 16 – Winter 2011
McKendree University Online Journal of Undergraduate Research
Lebanon, Illinois

Anastasia Bierman

‘My body would fill in the blanks, tell me who I should become, and I would let it speak for me,’ says Birdie Lee, the lost and searching multiracial protagonist of Danzy Senna’s novel Caucasia (Senna 1). The ‘blanks’ are her identity, agency, and individuality. Satirically, Birdie acknowledges the impossibility of a body speaking for a person, but she also points out that with race, a person’s body does speak for him/her. Danzy Senna, in writing Caucasia, exposes identity and the race one affiliates with as a facade someone can assume rather than a concrete, unchangeable sense of self. As Birdie shows throughout the novel, identity is perception as she takes on the identity of Jesse Goldman, a young Jewish girl, in a small, racist New Hampshire town while she is really a young half-black, half-white girl who grew up in Boston during the racial upheaval of the 1970s. The novel follows Birdie from ages 8 to 14, from Boston to New Hampshire back to Boston again. Birdie’s parents, Deck and Sandy Lee, strive to create a family blind to the racial stratification surrounding them. Living blind to race eventually destroys the family and forces them to play the racial game, causing the family to split up and separating the sisters, Cole, Birdie’s darker and older sister, and Birdie. In this separation, they revert to the roles they are most able to fit, not the ones in which they most identify. For Sandy and Birdie, it is White, and for Deck and Cole, it is Black. Birdie loses her true sense of identity by passing and performing as opposed to possessing it. She feels fragmented and disembodied, looks to other people for her own sense of self, developing a double consciousness.

Race is like a crayon box configuration; it attempts to assign a distinct name to a color that could have various hues. A ‘black’ person is anyone with a brown tint to their skin while a ‘white’ person is more or less a peach colored person. As it relates to a person, the colors ‘black’ and ‘white’ are not exactly what they seem to be. Anyone with lighter complexion can be categorized as white even though the person’s ethnicity can be anything from Italian to Asian-American. Critics Joan Ferrante and Prince Browne Jr. agree with this by pointing out, ‘Whether people fit into a racial category or not, the categories remain central to how people think about their own identity and the racial identity of others’ (Ferrante 113). The key is the physical appearance and the perception of that physical appearance to others. Performing identity, however, is only essential because of the many problems race creates for Birdie Lee and her family. Race, in Caucasia, permeates everything around the Lee family, even the construction of the family. The effect, psychologically and socially, is the breakdown of their family unit, loss of relationships, and obsessive focus on color…

Read the entire article here.

Association for Critical Race Art History: Building a Multiracial American Past

CAA 103rd Annual Conference
College Art Association
New York, New York
2015-02-11 through 2015-02-14

Session Location/Time:
New York Hilton Midtown
2nd Floor, Sutton Parlor Center
1335 Avenue of the Americas
New York, New York 10019
2015-02-11, 12:30-14:00 EST (Local Time)

Charles Paxson, Learning is Wealth. Wilson, Charley, Rebecca, and Rosa. Slaves from New Orleans, 1864

Free and open to the public.

Chair:

Susanna Gold, Assistant Professor of Art History
Tyler School of Art, Temple University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; New York Public Library, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture

Panelists:

“The Drop Sinister: Harry Watrous’s Visualization of the ‘One Drop Rule’”
Mey-Yen Moriuchi, Assistant Professor of Art History
La Salle University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

“You Are What You Eat: Racial Transformation and Miscegenation in Nineteenth-Century Representations of Food”
Shana Klein
Department of Art History
University of New Mexico

“‘Half-Breed’: Picturing Native American Identity in the Early Nineteenth Century”
Elizabeth W. Hutchinson, Associate Professor of Art History
Barnard College, Columbia University

For more information, click here.

The mixed-race girl’s guide to the art of passing: racial simulations in Danzy Senna’s Caucasia and Nella Larsen’s Quicksand

Florida Atlantic University
May 2014
65 pages

Gyasi S. Byng

A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of the Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts, Florida Atlantic University

Racial identifications are continually influenced by and constructed through one’s environment. Building on Jean Baudrillard’s “The Precession of Simulacra” and Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, this thesis argues that houses and clothing are the material objects that allow characters Birdie Lee from Danzy Senna’s Caucasia and Helga Crane from Nella Larsen’s Quicksand to construct their mixed race identities. Birdie Lee’s childhood home is the place where she develops a mixed race identity. When she leaves that home, she is forced to take on simulacra in order to pass for white. Without a stable childhood or adult home, Helga Crane’s wardrobe becomes the space where she unconsciously develops a mixed race identity. Her clothing choices allow her to simulate an entirely black identity that masks her mixed race heritage. Ultimately, the fates of Birdie and Helga are determined by whether or not they can occupy a space that is accepting of their mixed race identities.

Read the entire thesis here.

Rewriting the Passing Novel: Danzy Senna’s Caucasia

The Griot
Volume 26, Issue 2, Fall (October 2007)
14 pages

Kathryn Rummell, Professor of English
California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo

Passing (here, signifying African Americans passing for whites) has long been a fixture of the American social landscape. Passers have masqueraded for a variety of reasons, the most common being to flee from slavery, to Improve their economic situation, and of course to escape racism. The practice of passing, according to Werner Sollors in Neither Black Nor White, Yet Both, reached the height of its popularity from the nineteenth through the middle of the twentieth century (Sollors 247), and the majority of narratives of passing were written during this era. These narratives were especially popular during the Harlem Renaissance, when writers such as Jessie Fauset, Nella Larsen, and James Weldon Johnson employed the motif of passing to explore the psychological, emotional, and intellectual dilemmas involved In passing for white. Novels of passing typically share several characteristics: interracial sex, fear of discovery, feelings of guilt and betrayal, and the struggle to find and claim an identity. Perhaps because of the Renaissance’s emphasis on racial pride and solidarity, these novels of passing often indict the passers, portraying them as so-called tragic mulattoes or racial sell-outs. For Instance, Clare Kendry falls (or is pushed) to her death at the end of Larsen’s Passing, and Johnson’s unnamed narrator In Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man wonders If by passing he “sold [his] birthright for a mess of pottage” (211). These portrayals highlight the raclalized social structure of the early twentieth century: mixed-race Individuals often felt trapped in a society that recognized only two racial identities: white and black…

Read the entire article here.

“A Plea for Color”: Nella Larsen’s Iconography of the Mulatta

American Literature
Volume 76, Number 4, December 2004
pages 833-869

Cherene Sherrard-Johnson, Professor of English
University of Wisconsin, Madison

The Negro poet portrays our group in poems, the Negro musician portrays our group in jazz, the Negro actor portrays our group generally with a touch of hilarity. . . . So why should the Negro painter, the Negro sculptor mimic that which the white man is doing, when he has such an enormous colossal field practically all his own; portraying his people, historically, dramatically, hilariously, but honestly.

—Archibald J. Motley Jr., “The Negro in Art”

While the name Archibald Motley brings instant recognition only to specialized scholars, two of Motley’s paintings are so well known that they have become, for many, visual embodiments of the Harlem Renaissance. Motley’s The Octoroon Girl (1925) and Blues (1929) have served as cover art for several editions of Harlem Renaissance literature, anthologies, and literary criticism. Blues, with its colorful, energetic composition incorporating the era’s insignia—jazz, the speakeasy, and interracialism—bespeaks musical innovation and artistic intellectualism. And the recurrent appearance of The Octoroon Girl, especially on the cover of women’s fiction, continues to reproduce its subject—the mulatta—as a predominant referent in the visual culture, art, and literature of the Harlem Renaissance era.

The Octoroon Girl, which Motley considered the best of his paintings, is the second of a series in which he uses color and composition to explore miscegenation. Motley claimed to be “sincerely interested in pigmentation of the skin in regard to the lightest type of colored person . . . consisting of one-eighth Negro blood and seven-eighths caucasian blood.” In this painting, he depicts a light-skinned, dark-haired, dark-eyed woman with high cheekbones, an aquiline nose, and rose-colored, pursed lips (see fig. 1). Sitting comfortably on a tapestry-like couch, one arm resting on a small table with two books and a moustached figurine, she is not perfectly centered in the portrait but situated slightly to the right, her head counterbalanced by a gold-framed landscape hanging on the wall. The dramatic contrast of dark and light forms a rich backdrop for the portrait of this clearly modern woman and her penetrating gaze. Her stylish clothing, gloves, and finely drawn, tapered hands indicate her middle-class status, while her frontal position and serious expression lend a dignity that Motley consistently conveys in his portraits. The only fracture in this otherwise graceful composition is the laughing figurine at her elbow. This mocking figure, resembling a clown, undermines the sitter’s poise and subtly disturbs the dignity of the design. The figurine reminds the viewer that the portrait is an image projected by the artist and draws attention to the artificiality in modern realist painting. Placed precisely to illuminate some otherwise hidden aspect of the sitter’s character, the laughing figure suggests there is something more to the sitter than Motley’s title, which directs the viewer’s reading of the painting as an “octoroon girl.” In serving as cover art for novels that thematize racial indeterminacy, this portrait gestures at a collective, visually inflected understanding of the aestheticized markers that created the mulatta, or passing, subject in African American literary and visual culture: physiognomy, exoticism, and the mysterious gaze.

Along with Motley’s haunting octoroon series, a preponderance of photography, visual art, and narrative texts produced during the Harlem Renaissance featured the mulatta as either heroine or primary subject, reinforcing her role as the representative New Negro woman. While the New Negro man was called upon to be an inventor, innovator, and artist, the New Negro woman appeared in roles that emphasized service and self-sacrifice, such as teachers, nurses, and librarians. These popular images of the New Negro woman enforced a genteel standard of behavior, appearance, and vocation that restricted real women’s agency and artistic expression—and ran counter to the modernizing impulse of the era. On the other hand, the image of the mulatta was frequently collapsed into the stereotype of the Jezebel. Motley’s painting A Mulatress…

“A Spirit that Nursed a Grievance:” William Plomer’s “The Child of Queen Victoria”

English in Africa
Volume 39, Number 2 (2012)
DOI: 10.4314/eia.v39i2.7

M Shum

When William Plomer’s The Child of Queen Victoria and Other Stories was published by Jonathan Cape in 1933, his literary reputation was well established: he was the author of two novels, two volumes of short fiction, and three collections of poetry. In addition, he was widely regarded in British literary circles as a significant talent. Edward Garnett, for example, the reader for Cape and the first person in publishing to recognise the talents of Lawrence and Conrad, wrote in a report on The Child of Queen Victoria and Other Stories that “Plomer is certainly the most original and keenest mind of the younger generation” (quoted in Alexander 1990, 192). In short, at the time of writing this story Plomer was operating within a milieu dramatically different from the geographical and artistic isolation in which, aged only nineteen, he had written Turbott Wolfe (1925), the novel on which his South African literary reputation rests. Yet one of the many fascinations of “The Child of Queen Victoria” is that it entails a fairly exact reprise, in the realist mode, of the central thematic strand of his first novel: interracial sex or ‘miscegenation.’ A question immediately arises: what motivated the return to this vexed thematic, and what did Plomer seek to accomplish in this second attempt that, we must assume, he was not able to accomplish in the first?

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Mutt, Monster or Melting-Pot? Mixed-Race Metaphor and Obama’s Ambivalent Hybridity

Ada: A Journal of Gender New Media & Technology
Issue #6: Hacking the Black/White Binary (January 2015)

Nathan Rambukkana, Assistant Professor of Communication Studies
Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

‘ObamaNation raped & killed 1,000 Christians’

Kenyan citizen Hussein Obama spent $1-million in US campaign funds to massacre 1,000 Christians in British Kenya, after his Communist cousin lost the presidential election. 800 Christian churches were arsoned [sic], with dozens of people cooked alive. Men and women were raped by Obama supporters. To stop the violence, the Kenyan government was extorted by Obama to make his cousin ‘prime minister’, a job that did not exist.

—Anonymous, piratenews.org, October 25, 2008

‘Obama’s Brother in China’

If elected, Obama would be the first genuinely 21st-century leader. The China-Indonesia-Kenya-Britain-Hawaii web mirrors a world in flux. In Kenya, his uncle Sayid, a Muslim, told me: ‘My Islam is a hybrid, a mix of elements, including my Christian schooling and even some African ways. Many values have dissolved in me.’

Obama’s bridge-building instincts come from somewhere. They are rooted and proven. For an expectant and often alienated world, they are of central significance.

—Roger Cohen, New York Times, March 17, 2008 [1]

The above two textual excerpts from the period between February 10, 2007 when Obama announced he was running for the Democratic nomination, and November 4, 2008 when he was elected president, are metonymic of the polar opposite ways Barack Obama’s particular hybrid identity is framed and reflected on in the digital public sphere. While the sources are divergent in terms of scope and reach—a mainstream newspaper site and an underground website—the black and white binary of the way they articulate hybridity marks them as part of the same discursive process: one of skinning (Ahmed and Stacey 2001) a powerful and prominent mixed-race subject. This short paper collects some of these varied but linked representations, using a broadly Foucauldian genealogical discourse analysis (Foucault 1980), working together academic and popular discourses and analyzing them in tandem; mixing theory, memory, reflection, and discovery into an archeology of the present cultural moment that pries open the layers of meaning inherent to culture itself.[2] This flexible method allows us to investigate what these prominent representations of mixed-race and hybrid identities do, situated as they are in such a prominent position: attached to a figure as he contended for and then assumed the most privileged seat of power in the US — arguably even world — context.

Drawing on Sara Ahmed and Jackie Stacey’s (2001) concept of dermographia, or skin writing, this paper attempts to read the ways that Obama’s skin, as text, is an effect of the various and overlapping ways it is ‘surfaced’ in discourse. At once a real and material organ that wraps and envelops what is currently the world’s most protected of bodies,[3] Obama’s skin is also ‘dependent on regimes of writing that mark the skin in different ways or that produce the skin as marked’ (Ahmed and Stacey 2001, 15). As such, the skin of the ‘leader of the free world’ is at once a private and storied flesh, and a public text that emerges in the intertextual dermographia of its multiform figurings. In fact, writing may even be thought of as a form of skin (Ahmed and Stacy 2001, 15), a second skin that acts as discursive layer between ourselves and the world. The skins of hybrids of multiple sorts are ones that are ambiguously written or written upon: fetishized and demonized, worked on and managed from without and within, hybrids are by nature and nurture hacks of the binaries they straddle, and inherently political as such—though not always through a progressive politics. Many times a hybrid figure, Obama’s body is fetishized, demonized and detailed across the political spectrum both as signifying object and as symbol of multiple politics.

Much has been said about Barack Obama’s body. Even preceding his presidency, Obama was often discussed in a metaphorical manner in the public sphere. Born in Hawai’i to a white mother of mostly English decent, and a Black Kenyan father; raised for a time in Indonesia, and with an Indonesian step-father; and a late-in-life Christian from a family tree containing both Christian and Muslim roots (“Barrack” 2014), his mixed-race, mixed-ethnicity and mixed-religious heritage position him as a hybrid figure par excellence. Coverage on Obama collects the full range of charged metaphor and imagery that prehends to hybridity generally and multiraciality specifically: that of the monstrous chimera, insidious half-breed, or untrustworthy mongrel on the one hand, and of the global-citizen, multiculturalism, bridge, and melting-pot America on the other. But this dense layering of tropes cannot be divided into ‘good’ hybridity metaphor and ‘bad’, for in addition to the strong links between the negative tropes, structural racism and Islamaphobia, the positive tropes that attach to hybridity generally, and modern mixed-race identities specifically, are also discursively implicated with other problematic ideologies such as top-down globalization (Kraidy 2005, 148), the facile ideals of a non-critical post-racial or race-blind society (Sharma and Sharma 2012), and even colonial narratives such as ‘the American Dream’ (Berlant 1997). Accordingly, both the positive and the negative tropes used to mark his hybridity are fraught with intertextual meaning, legacies of power, and politics of privilege…

Read the entire article here.