Mixed Race Studies

Scientific Racism and the Emergence of the Homosexual Body

Journal of the History of Sexuality
Volume 5, Number 2 (October, 1994)
pages 243-266

Siobhan Somerville, Associate Professor
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

One of the most important insights developed in the fields of lesbian and gay history and the history of sexuality has been the notion that homosexuality and, by extension, heterosexuality are relatively recent inventions in Western culture, rather than transhistorical or “natural” categories of human beings. As Michel Foucault and other historians of sexuality have argued, although sexual acts between two people of the same sex had been punishable through legal and religious sanctions well before the late nineteenth century, they did not necessarily define individuals as homosexual per se. Only recently, in the late nineteenth century, did a new understanding of sexuality emerge, in which sexual acts and desires became constitutive of identity. Homosexuality as the condition, and therefore identity, of particular bodies is thus a production of that historical moment.

Medical literature, broadly defined to include the writings of physicians, sexologists, and psychiatrists, has been integral to this historical argument. Although medical discourse was by no means the only—nor necessarily the most powerful—site of the emergence of new sexual identities, it does nevertheless offer rich sources for at least partially understanding the complex development of these categories in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Medical and sexological literature not only became one of the few sites of explicit engagement with questions of sexuality during this period but also held substantial definitional power within a culture that sanctioned science to discover and tell the truth about bodies.

As historians and theorists of sexuality have refined a notion of the late nineteenth-century “invention” of the homosexual, their discussions have drawn primarily upon theories and histories of gender. George Chauncey, in particular, has provided an invaluable discussion of the ways in which paradigms of sexuality shifted according to changing ideologies of gender during this period. He notes a gradual change in medical models of sexual deviance, from a notion of sexual inversion, understood as a reversal of one’s sex role, to a model of homosexuality, defined as deviant sexual object choice. These categories and their transformations, argues Chauncey, reflected concurrent shifts in the cultural organization of sex/gender roles and participated in prescribing acceptable behavior, especially within a context of white middle-class gender ideologies.

While gender insubordination offers a powerful explanatory model for the “invention” of homosexuality, ideologies of gender also, of course, shaped and were shaped by dominant constructions of race. Indeed, although it has received little acknowledgment, it is striking that the “invention” of the homosexual occurred at roughly the same time that racial questions were being reformulated, particularly in the United States. This was the moment, for instance, of Plessy v. Ferguson the 1896 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that insisted that “black” and “white” races were “separate but equal.” Both a product of and a stimulus to a nationwide and brutal era of racial segregation, this ruling had profound and lasting effects in legitimating an apartheid structure that remained legally sanctioned for over half of the twentieth century. The Plessy case distilled in legal form many widespread contemporary fears about race and racial difference at the time. A deluge of “Jim Crow” and antimiscegenation laws, combined with unprecedented levels of racial violence, most visibly manifested in widespread lynching, reflected an aggressive attempt to classify and separate bodies as either “black” or “white.”

Is it merely a historical coincidence that the classification of bodies as either “homosexual” or “heterosexual” emerged at the same time that the United States was aggressively policing the imaginary boundary between “black” and “white” bodies? Although some historians of sexuality have included brief acknowledgment of nineteenth-century discourses of racial difference, the particular relationship and potentially mutual effects of discourses of homosexuality and race remain unexplored. This silence around race may be due in part to the relative lack of explicit attention to race in medical and sexological literature of the period. These writers did not self-consciously interrogate race, nor were those whose gender insubordination and sexual transgression brought them under the medical gaze generally identified by race in these accounts. Yet the lack of explicit attention to race in these texts does not mean that it was irrelevant to sexologists’ endeavors. Given the upheavals surrounding racial definition during this period, it is reasonable to imagine that these texts were as embedded within contemporary racial ideologies as they were within ideologies of gender.

Take, for instance, the words of Havelock Ellis, whose massive Studies in the Psychology of Sex was one of the most important texts of the late nineteenth-century medical and scientific discourse on sexuality. “I regard sex as the central problem of life,” began the general preface to the first volume. Justifying such unprecedented boldness toward the study of sex, Ellis explained, “And now that the problem of religion has practically been settled, and that the problem of labour has at least been placed on a practical foundation, the question of sex—with the racial questions that rest on it—stands before the coming generations as the chief problem for solution.” Despite Ellis’s oddly breezy dismissal of the problems of labor and religion, which were far from settled at the time, this passage points suggestively to a link between sexual and racial anxieties. Yet what exactly did Ellis mean by “racial questions”? More significantly, what was his sense of the relationship between racial questions and the question of “sex”? Although Ellis himself left these issues unresolved, his elliptical declaration nevertheless suggested that a discourse of race—however elusively—somehow hovered around or within the study of sexuality.

In this article, I offer speculations on how late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century discourses of race and sexuality might be not merely juxtaposed, but brought together in ways that illuminate both. I suggest that the concurrent bifurcations of categories of race and sexuality were not only historically coincident but in fact structurally interdependent and perhaps mutually productive. My goal, however, is not to garner and display unequivocal evidence of the direct influence of racial categories on those who were developing scientific models of homosexuality. Nor am I interested in identifying individual writers and thinkers as racist or not. Rather, my focus here is on racial ideologies, the cultural assumptions and systems of representation about race through which individuals understood their relationships within the world. My emphasis lies in understanding the relationships between the medical/scientific discourse around sexuality and the dominant scientific discourse around race during this period, that is, scientific racism.

My approach combines literary and historical methods of reading, particularly those that have been so crucial to lesbian and gay studies—the technique of reading to hear “the inexplicable presence of the thing not named,” of being attuned to the queer presences and implications in texts that do not otherwise name them. Without this collective project to see, hear, and confirm queer inflections where others would deny their existence, it is arguable that gay and lesbian studies itself, and particularly our knowledge and understanding of the histories, writing, and cultures of lesbians and gay men, would be impoverished, if not impossible. In a similar way, I propose to use the techniques of queer reading, but to modulate my analysis from a focus on sexuality and gender to one alert to racial resonances as well.

My attention, then, is focused on the racial pressure points in exemplary texts from the late nineteenth-century discourse on sexuality, including those written by Ellis and other writers of the period who made explicit references to homosexuality. I suggest that the structures and methodologies that drove dominant ideologies of race also fueled the pursuit of scientific knowledge about the homosexual body: both sympathetic and hostile accounts of homosexuality were steeped in assumptions that had driven previous scientific studies of race. My aim is not to replace a focus on gender and sexuality with that of race but, rather, to understand how discourses of race and gender buttressed one another, often competing, often overlapping, in shaping emerging models of homosexuality.

I suggest three broadly defined ways in which discourses of sexuality seem to have been particularly engaged, sometimes overtly, but largely implicitly, with the discourse of scientific racism. All of these models pathologized both the nonwhite body and the nonheterosexual body to greater or lesser extents. Although I discuss these models in separate sections here, they often coexisted, despite their contradictions. These models are speculative and are intended as a first step toward understanding the myriad and historically specific ways that racial and sexual discourses shaped each other at the moment that homosexuality entered scientific discourse…

…The Mixed Body

The emergence of evolutionary theory in the late nineteenth century foregrounded a view of continuity between the “savage” and “civilized” races, in contrast to earlier scientific thinking about race, which had focused on debates about the origins of different racial groups. Proponents of monogeny, on the one hand, argued that all races derived from a single origin. Those who argued for polygeny, on the other hand, argued that different races descended from separate biological and geographical sources, a view, not coincidentally, that supported segregationist impulses. With Darwin’s publication of Origin of the Species in 1859, the debate between polygeny and monogeny was replaced by evolutionary theory, which was appropriated as a powerful scientific model for understanding race. Its controversial innovation was its emphasis on the continuity between animals and human beings. Evolutionary theory held out the possibility that the physical, mental, and moral characteristics of human beings had evolved gradually over time from apelike ancestors. Although the idea of continuity depended logically on the blurring of boundaries within hierarchies, it did not necessarily invalidate the methods or assumptions of comparative anatomy. On the contrary, the notion of visible differences and racial hierarchies were deployed to corroborate Darwinian theory.

The concept of continuity was harnessed to growing attention to miscegenation, or “amalgamation,” in social science writing in the first decades of the twentieth century. Edward Byron Reuter’s The Mulatto in the United States, for instance, pursued an exhaustive quantitative and comparative study of the mulatto population and its achievements in relation to those of “pure” white or African ancestry. Reuter traced the presence of a distinct group of mixed-race people back to early American history: “Their physical appearance, though markedly different from that of the pure blooded race, was sufficiently marked to set them off as a peculiar people.” Reuter, of course, was willing to admit the viability of “mulattoes” only within a framework that emphasized the separation of races. Far from using the notion of the biracial body to refute the belief in discrete markers of racial difference, Reuter perpetuated the notion by focusing on the distinctiveness of this “peculiar people.”

Miscegenation was, of course, not only a question of race but also one of sex and sexuality. Ellis recognized this intersection implicitly, if not explicitly. His sense of the “racial questions” implicit in sex was surely informed by his involvement with eugenics, the movement in Britain, Europe, and the United States that, to greater or lesser degrees, advocated selective reproduction and “race hygiene.” In the United States, eugenics was both a political and scientific response to the growth of a population beginning to challenge the dominance of white political interests. The widespread scientific and social interest in eugenics was fueled by anxieties expressed through the popularized notion of (white) “race suicide.” This phrase, invoked most famously by Theodore Roosevelt, summed up nativist fears about a perceived decline in reproduction among white Americans. The new field of eugenics worked hand in hand with growing antimiscegenation sentiment and policy, provoked not only by attempts for political representation among African-Americans but also by the influx of large populations of immigrants. As Mark Haller has pointed out, “Racists and [immigration] restrictionists . . . found in eugenics the scientific reassurances they needed that heredity shaped man’s personality and that their assumptions rested on biological facts.” Ellis saw himself as an advocate for eugenics policies. As an active member of the British National Council for Public Morals, Ellis wrote several publications concerning eugenics, including The Problem of Race Regeneration, a pamphlet advocating “voluntary” sterilization of the unfit as a policy in the best interest of “the race.” In a letter to Francis Galton in 1907, Ellis wrote, “In the concluding volume of my Sex ‘Studies’ I shall do what I can to insinuate the eugenic attitude.”

The beginnings of sexology, then, were related to and perhaps even dependent on a pervasive climate of eugenicist and antimiscegenation sentiment and legislation. Even at the level of nomenclature, anxieties about miscegenation shaped sexologists’ attempts to find an appropriate and scientific name for the newly visible object of their study Introduced in 1892 through the English translation of Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis, the term “homosexuality” itself stimulated a great deal of uneasiness. In 1915, Ellis reported that “most investigators have been much puzzled in coming to a conclusion as to the best, most exact, and at the same time most colorless names [for same-sex desire].” Giving an account of the various names proposed, such as Ulrichs’s “Uranian” and Westphal’s “contrary sexual feeling,” Ellis admitted that “homosexuality” was the most widespread term used. Far from the ideal “colorless” term, however, “homosexuality” evoked Ellis’s distaste for its mixed origins: in a regretful aside, he noted that “it has, philologically, the awkward disadvantage of being a bastard term compounded of Greek and Latin elements” (p. 2). In the first edition of Sexual Inversion, Ellis had stated his alarm more directly: “‘Homosexual’ is a barbarously hybrid word.” A similar view was expressed by Edward Carpenter, an important socialist organizer in England and an outspoken advocate of homosexual and women’s emancipation at this time. Like Ellis, Carpenter winced at the connotations of illegitimacy in the word: “‘homosexual,’ generally used in scientific works, is of course a bastard word. ‘Homogenic’ has been suggested, as being from two roots, both Greek, i.e., ‘homos,’ same, and ‘genos,’ sex.” Carpenter’s suggestion, “homogenic,” of course, resonated both against and within the vocabularies of eugenics and miscegenation. Performing these etymological gyrations with almost comic literalism, Ellis and Carpenter expressed pervasive cultural sensitivities around questions of racial origins and purity. Concerned above with legitimacy, they attempted to remove and rewrite the mixed origins of “homosexuality.” Ironically, despite their suggestions for alternatives, the “bastard” term took hold among sexologists, thus yoking together, at least rhetorically, two kinds of mixed bodies—the racial “hybrid” and the invert.

Although Ellis exhibited anxieties about biracial bodies, for others who sought to naturalize and recuperate homosexuality, the evolutionary emphasis on continuity offered potentially useful analogies. Xavier Mayne, for example, one of the earliest American advocates of homosexual rights, wrote, “Between whitest of men and the blackest negro stretches out a vast line of intermediary races as to their colours: brown, olive, red tawny, yellow.” He then invoked this model of race to envision a continuous spectrum of gender and sexuality: “Nature abhors the absolute, delights in the fractional. . . . Intersexes express the half-steps, the between-beings ” In this analogy, Mayne reversed dominant cultural hierarchies that privileged purity over mixture. Drawing upon irrefutable evidence of the “natural” existence of biracial people, Mayne posited a direct analogy to a similarly mixed body, the intersex, which he positioned as a necessary presence within the natural order.

Despite Carpenter’s complaint about “bastard” terminology, he, like Mayne, also occasionally appropriated the scientific language of racial mixing in order to resist the association between homosexuality and degeneration. In The Intermediate Sex, he attempted to theorize homosexuality outside of the discourse of pathology or abnormality; he too suggested a continuum of genders, with “intermediate types” occupying a place between the poles of exclusively heterosexual male and female. In an appendix to The Intermediate Sex, Carpenter offered a series of quotations supporting his ideas, some of which drew upon racial analogies: “Anatomically and mentally we find all shades existing from the pure genus man to the pure genus woman. Thus there has been constituted what is well named by an illustrious exponent of the science ‘The Third Sex.’ … As we are continually meeting in cities women who are one-quarter, or one-eighth, or so on, male … so there are in the Inner Self similar half-breeds, all adapting themselves to circumstances with perfect ease.” Through notions of “shades” of gender and sexual “half-breeds,” Carpenter appropriated dominant scientific models of race to construct and embody what he called the intermediate sex. These racial paradigms, in addition to models of gender, offered a Carpenter a coherent vocabulary for understanding and expressing a new vision of sexual bodies…

Read the entire article here.

Interracial Encounters: Reciprocal Representations in African and Asian American Literatures, 1896–1937 by Julia H. Lee (review)

Journal of Asian American Studies
Volume 16, Number 3, October 2013
pages 340-342
DOI: 10.1353/jaas.2013.0025

Caroline H. Yang, Assistant Professor of Asian American Studies, English
University of Illinois, Chicago

Interracial Encounters: Reciprocal Representations in African and Asian American Literatures, 1896-1937, by Julia H. Lee. New York: New York University Press, 2011. xi + 219 pp. ISBN: 9780814752555.

That 1896 is a defining year in the history of segregation and unequal citizenship in the United States is obviously common knowledge in critical race studies. What Julia Lee teaches us about the moment in Interracial Encounters is probably not: that the Chinese figured significantly in Plessy v. Ferguson as a crucial component in both the majority and dissenting opinions on whether or not segregation based on race—specifically, blackness—was constitutional. According to Lee, the discourse of what it meant to be Chinese was influential to the definition of what it meant to be black, as both opinions adjudicated the placement of black bodies on a black–white racial binary through the figure of the Chinese. Naming the Plessy case as “the document that most dramatically reveals the ways that the figure of the Negro and the Asiatic were intertwined in this period” (42), Lee suggests in the rest of her book that 1896 was significant in not only instituting segregation but also inaugurating a particular brand of misreading. And this common misreading about the Plessy case has glossed over and continues to make invisible what she calls “encounters” between African Americans and Asians during this time, encounters wrought by the complexities of the historical moment following black emancipation and enfranchisement, as well as labor migrations from Asia.

Interracial Encounters demonstrates that not accounting for the significance of Chineseness in how blackness was defined in the Plessy case had a critical role in how race was understood in the United States for much of the twentieth century. In this way, Lee’s close reading of the Plessy case speaks to her book’s methodological interventions. It shows the importance of literary studies in not just historical analyses of texts that have been read heretofore as concerning only blacks and whites but also Afro-Asian critique. As part of a vibrant and rising field of study that teases out Afro-Asian connections and disconnections, Lee’s book makes clear why many of its proponents are Asian Americanists whose approach to critical race studies is shaped by their understanding of the vicissitudes and contradictions of the Asian racial form in the United States. Quite simply, the reading practice developed in Lee’s book is original and insightful, and it brings to light figures and forms in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century literatures that have often been rendered as insignificant nonpresence unrelated to other racialized figures.

With a deep interest in writing a “historicizing project” (9), Lee points to a wide-ranging archive of minstrel show sheet music, political cartoons, and films, as well as literature, to explain that African Americans and Asians were the most rampantly compared minority groups in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She also writes that the process of racializing the two groups was mutually constitutive and essential in the creation of the “fantasy of modern American identity” (21). Despite this, Lee argues that if and when they are remembered together in this period, they are seen as either antagonistic opposites or natural allies bonded together in solidarity based on shared experience of discrimination, violence, and exclusion. Against this way of thinking, Lee argues that we need to study not just the hegemonic ways in which blackness and Asianness became meaningful but also the ways in which African American and Asian American literatures contributed to and challenged the process of racial meaning making.

As such, save for one substantive chapter that explores the representations of African Americans and Asians in dominant popular culture from the Reconstruction period to the early twentieth century, all of the book’s chapters call attention to the formal strategies of literary texts by wide-ranging authors of color such as Charles Chesnutt, Wu Tingfang, Nella Larsen, Edith Eaton, Winnifred Eaton, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Younghill Kang. Lee’s focus on these texts and authors decenters whiteness as ostensibly the a priori authentic embodiment of citizenship into which minority groups were trying to assimilate. In turn, the texts decenter the nation as a privileged site of identification as they underscore the “multilateral nature of racial encounters” (43).

Certain parts of the book illustrate just how complex and ambitious Lee…

Race and Justice in Transnational Perspective: “From the Conservation of Races to the Cosmic Race”

Seminar Series: Race and Justice in Transnational Perspective
University of California, Merced
California Room
5200 North Lake Rd.
Merced, California 95343
2013-10-23, 10:30 PDT (Local Time)

Juliet Hooker, Associate Professor of Government
University of Texas, Austin

The Mexican philosopher José Vasconcelos [1882-1959] and the African American political thinker W.E.B. DuBois [1868-1963] are viewed as having developed conceptions of race and racial identity that are quintessentially Latin American and U.S. American respectively.  Vasconcelos is one of Latin America’s foremost advocates of mestizaje; his notion of the Cosmic Race is generally viewed as articulating a more complex approach to race that sought to dismantle specific racial group identities and reformulate hybrid subjectivities. This approach is often contrasted to the binary, static conceptions of race developed in the U.S., including by African-American thinkers. This paper analyzes this characterization of Latin American and African American political thought by comparing Vasconcelos and DuBois’ arguments about race, especially racial identity. In particular, I will analyze DuBois’ discussion of racial mixing in the U.S. and the motivations behind Vasconcelos’ account of mestizaje in order to complicate the comparison between supposedly static, biologically grounded accounts of race and flexible notions of race that are able to acknowledge processes of racial mixing.  The aim of this juxtaposition is to stage a hemispheric dialogue about race between these two towering American pensadores, in order to show the surprising points of convergence and divergence between U.S. and Latin American ideas about race.

The seminar series “Race and Justice in Transnational Perspective” is organized by Tanya Golash-Boza, Nigel Hatton, and David Torres-Rouff. The event is co-sponsored by the UC Center for New Racial Studies, Sociology, and SSHA.

For more information, click here.

Racial Passing in James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man and Philip Roth’s The Human Stain

A Vertentes
Universidade Federal de São João del Rei
Volume 19, Number 2
13 pages

Maria Luiza Cardoso de Aguiar
Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais

The so-called racial passing is defined, mainly, as a phenomenon through which black people who are light-skinned pass for whites, in order to achieve social and economic advantages which are usually more easily available to white people. Based on problematizations around the concepts of passing, the present article intends to analyze, comparatively, two important works from the 20th century: The Autobiography of an Ex-colored Man (1912/1989), written by James Weldon Johnson, and The Human Stain (2000), written by Philip Roth. The analysis of these works aims at investigating how the issue of passing is portrayed in each of the novels, in order to highlight the fact that, although the protagonists at stake share many similarities, such as the desire to free themselves from the decisiveness of pre-established categories like race, the experience of passing is heterogeneous and it is differently constructed and operated in each of the novels.

O chamado passing racial trata, principalmente, do fenômeno no qual negros de pele mais clara e de traços mestiços se passam por pessoas brancas, a fim de, mais comumente, conseguirem vantagens sociais e econômicas, frequentemente mais acessíveis aos brancos do que aos negros. A partir de problematizações em torno dos conceitos de passing, o presente trabalho visa a analisar comparativamente duas importantes obras da literatura norte-americana do século XX: The autobiography of an ex-colored man (1912/1989), de James Weldon Johnson, e The human stain (2000), de Philip Roth. Pretende-se investigar como a questão do passing é retratada em cada uma das obras, a fim de se destacar que, apesar de os protagonistas em questão apresentarem muitas similaridades e desejarem que categorias pré-estabelecidas não sejam decisivas em suas trajetórias, a experiência do passing é heterogênea, sendo construída e operada diferentemente em cada um dos romances.

Read the entire article here.

When Ethnic Ambiguity Becomes a Privilege

SunDryed Affairs
2011-06-08

Wendell Hassan Marsh

Taking a look at recent box office results, it is the ethnically ambiguous star and ambiguously ethnic films that appear to be making bank.

Ambiguity reaches around and hugs the color line while supporting the weight of overlapping identities. It’s not a question of black or white, but black and white, and Asian, and Latino, and Muslim, and gay ad infinitum.

Take Fast Five for example. The entire Fast and Furious franchise has been celebrated as a celebration of today’s multicultural pluralism. This iteration in particular with its romps in Brazilian favelas practically makes ethnic ambiguity a theme.

The two leading forces at odds in the film are Vin Diesel and Dwayne Johnson, two of the most ethnically ambiguous figures in Hollywood most can think of. Even though the ethnically ambiguous man on the run (Diesel) dukes it out with the ethnically ambiguous G-man (Johnson) in some incredible fight scenes, they eventually put their differences aside long enough to stick it to the unambiguously corrupt (kind of) white power structure in Brazil.

But to make it happen, they have to assemble, you guessed it, an ethnically ambigious team who “can fit in everywhere” as one sequence says showing a tanned Asian guy (Sung Kang) with long, California boy hair. There’s also the sexy former Mossad (Israeli intelligence) agent who he falls in love with while flying down the German Autobahn on the way to Tokyo. Then of course you have the two brothers (of both the blood and the black variety), but they are speaking Spanish! Throw in a few more race-bending Latinos and a couple of old-school American Negro types and you have quite the ethnically ambiguous party!…

Read the entire article here.

Deconstructing the Mixed-Race Experience of Passing

California State University, San Marcos
May 2006
172 pages

Victoria Baldo Segall

A Thesis Submitted for Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in Literature and Writing Studies

In “Beauty and the Beast: On Racial Ambiguity” Carla Bradshaw describes passing as an attempt to achieve acceptability by claiming membership in some desired group while denying other racial elements in oneself thought to be undesirable (79). In literature on passing, the mixed-race individual may, as Bradshaw suggests, become a “chameleon” if s/he desires; s/he may choose to pass as one race over another and blend with one race for reasons such as self-preservation. Bradshaw’s description of passing as gaining “false access” to a particular group or identity aides in setting thetone for passing as a harmful experience for the mixed-race individual. Specifically, this thesis will show that, as we’ll see with Nella Larsen’s “Passing,” Danzy Senna’s Caucasia, and Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia, not only does passing present the instability of race, but it emotionally and physically destroys the mixed-race individual; the characters have the power and ability to perform and live within different racial worlds, but through their passing they ultimately disempower the non-dominant race of which they are a part and empower the dominant race.

To support this argument, Chapters One through Three will explore how, imbedded within all three texts, there are four themes in particular that play influential roles in the discussion of mixed-race identity and its relation to passing:

• fixed identity vs. unfixed identity
• performance of identity
• displacement
• racial consciousness

Table of Contents

• I. Introduction
• II. Chapter One: The Fall of Nella Larsen’s “Passing”
• III. Chapter Two: The Supposed Super Hybrid Birdie of Danzy Senna’s Caucasia
• IV. Chapter Three: The Problem with Hybrid Vigor in Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia
• V. Conclusion

Read the entire thesis here.

Complicating Constructions: Race, Ethnicity, Hybridity in American Texts

University of Washington Press
2007-06-15
352 pages
notes, bibliog., index
6 x 9 in.
Paperback ISBN: 9780295988351
Hardcover ISBN-10: 0295986816; ISBN-13: 978-0295986814
eBook ISBN: 9780295800745

Edited by

David S. Goldstein, Senior Lecturer, School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences
University of Washington, Bothell

Audrey B. Thacker, Lecturer in English
California State University, Northridge

This volume of collected essays offers truly multiethnic, historically comparative, and meta-theoretical readings of the literature and culture of the United States. Covering works by a diverse set of American authors—from Toni Morrison to Bret Harte—these essays provide a vital supplement to the critical literary canon, mapping a newly variegated terrain that refuses the distinction between “ethnic” and “nonethnic” literatures.

Other contributors include Jesse Alemán, Ariel Balter, Olivia Castellano, AnnaMarie Christiansen, Georgina Dodge, Tracy Floreani, Joe Lockard, Edwin J. McAllister, Sheree Meyer, William Over, Jeffrey F. L. Partridge, Chauncey Ridley, Derek Parker Royal, Alexander W. Schultheis, Andrea Tinnenmeyer, and Jose L. Torres-Padilla.

Contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• I. Re-Constructing Race and Ethnicity: Identity Imposed or Adopted
  • 1. Citizenship Rights and Colonial Whites: The Cultural Work of Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s Novels
  • 2. Testifying Bodies: Citizenship Debates in Bret Harte’s Gabriel Conroy
  • 3. The Color of Money in The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man
  • 4. Passing as the “Tragic” Mulatto: Constructions of Hybridity in Toni Morrison’s Novels
  • 5. Re-Viewing the Literary Chinatown: Multicultural Hybridity in Gish Jen’s Mona in the Promised Land
  • 6. Reading The Turner Diaries: Jewish Blackness, Judaized Blacks, and Head-Body Race Paradigms
• II. Re-Contextualizing Race and Ethnicity: Texts in Historical and Political Perspective
  • 7. Smallpox, Opium, and Invasion: Chines Invasion, White Guilt, and Native American Displacement in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century American Fiction
  • 8. Visualizing Race in American Immigrant Autobiography
  • 9. Maud Martha vs. I Love Lucy: Taking on the Postwar Consumer Fantasy
• III. Re-Considering Race and Ethnicity: Meta-Issues in Theory and Criticism
  • 10. Some Do, Some Don’t: Whiteness Theory and the Treatment of Race in African American Drama
  • 11. Traumatic Legacy in Darryl Pinckney’s High Cotton
  • 12. Portnoy’s Neglected Siblings: A Case for Postmodern Jewish American Literary Studies
  • 13. Tension, Conversation, and Collectivity: Examining the Space of Double-Consciousness in the Search for Shared Knowledge
  • 14. When Hybridity Doesn’t Resist: Giannina Braschi’s Yo-Yo Boing!
• Contributors
• Index

Never-Ending Story

The New York Times
2013-09-27

A. O. Scott, Chief Film Critic

‘Conversation About Race’ Has Not Brought Cultural Consensus

The “conversation about race” that public figures periodically claim to desire, the one that is always either about to happen or is being prevented from happening, has been going on, at full volume, at least since the day in 1619 when the first African slaves arrived in Jamestown. It has proceeded through every known form of discourse — passionate speeches, awkward silences, angry rants, sheepish whispers, jokes, insults, stories and songs — and just as often through double-talk, indirection and not-so-secret codes.

What are we really talking about, though? The habit of referring to it as “race” reflects a tendency toward euphemism and abstraction. Race is a biologically dubious concept and a notoriously slippery social reality, a matter of group identity and personal feelings, mutual misunderstandings and the dialectic of giving and taking offense. If that is what we are talking about, then we are not talking about the historical facts that continue to weigh heavily on present circumstances, which is to say about slavery, segregation and white supremacy.

But of course we are still talking about all that, with what seems like renewed concentration and vigor. Nor, in a year that is the sesquicentennial of the Gettysburg Address and the semicentennial of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, are we simply looking back at bygone tragedies from the standpoint of a tranquil present. The two big racially themed movies of the year, “Lee Daniels’ The Butler” and Steve McQueen’s “12 Years a Slave,” are notable for the urgency and intensity with which they unpack stories of the past, as if delivering their news of brutal bondage and stubborn discrimination for the first time…

Read the entire article here.

Eating the Black Body: Miscegenation as Sexual Consumption in African American Literature and Culture

Peter Lang
2006
231 pages
0.340 kg, 0.750 lbs
Softcover ISBN: 978-0-8204-7931-6

Carlyle Van Thompson, Dean, School of Liberal Arts and Education
Medgar Evers College, the City University of New York

In this provocative and original exploration of racial subjugation and its aftermath, Carlyle Van Thompson illumines the racialized sexual desire that reduces Black people to commodities for consumption. Eating the Black Body examines the often-sadistic forms of sexual violence during the period of slavery and its aftermath. By looking at one poem and three novels—Richard Wright’s Between the World and Me, John Oliver Killens’ Youngblood, Gayl Jones’ Corregidora, and Octavia Butler’s Kindred—that examine slavery and the Jim Crow period, Thompson investigates a wide variety of Black bodies as sites of miscegenation and sexual desire. Thompson also examines a horrific case of White male police brutality in New York City in which a Black man was sodomized. Bold and persuasively argued, Eating the Black Body will engage readers in a broad range of literary, historical, and cultural studies.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Consuming Hot Black Bodies: Miscegenation as Sexual Violence in African American Literature and Culture
• Chapter 2: Speaking Desire and Consumption of the Black Body in Richard Wright’s “Between the World and Me”
• Chapter 3: Miscegenation as Sexual Consumption: The Enduring Legacy of America’s White-Supremacist Culture of Violence in John Oliver Killens’ Youngblood
• Chapter 4: Miscegenation, Monstrous Memories, and Misogyny as Sexual Consumption in Gayl Jones’ Corregidora
• Chapter 5: Moving Past the Present: Racialized Sexual Violence and Miscegenous Consumption in Octavia Butler’s Kindred
• Chapter 6: White Police Penetrating. Probing, and Playing in the Black Man’s Ass: The Sadistic Sodomizing of Abner Louima
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography

“Makin a way Outta no way:” The dangerous business of racial masquerade in Nella Larsen’s Passing

Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory
Volume 15, Issue 1 (2005)
pages 79-104
DOI: 10.1080/07407700508571489

Carlyle Van Thompson, Acting Dean, School of Liberal Arts and Education
Medgar Evers College, the City University of New York

Early in Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929), Clare Kendry Bellew and Irene Westover Redfield (the light-skinned and middle-class black female protagonists) are both passing for white in Chicago at an elite and segregated restaurant atop the Drayton Hotel during the horrid heat of August. Here, in this coincidental meeting of two childhood friends, Irene and Clare have a conversation about the possibility of permanently assuming a white identity. Irene, who only passes sometime, superciliously relates her reason for not permanently passing herself off as white: “‘You see Clare, I’ve everything I want. Except, perhaps a little more money'” (1929, 190). in contrast, Clare responds: “‘Of course…that’s what everybody wants just a little more money, even the people who have it. And I must say I don’t blame them. Money’s awful nice to have. In fact, all things considered, I think, ‘Rene, that it’s even worth the price'” (1929, 190). Larsen reveals that economic security is a critical concern in the lives of these middle-class black women. Despite the vulnerabilities of revelation, Clare adamantly believes that the monetary and social advantages of passing for white surpass the disadvantages. Class, as inflected by gender within the nexus of race, con-…

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