Mixed Race Studies

Crossing Over: Racial Passing and Racial Uplift in Nella Larsen’s Fiction

University of the South, Sewanee, Tennessee
2009
34 pages

Karly D. Beavers

Senior Honors Thesis in American Studies

Fundamental to the American myth is a juxtaposition of the “civilized” or “superior” majority with the “inferior” other. By classifying African Americans as inherently different from and inferior to whites, the white majority justified the enslavement and, later, the political and social oppression of black Americans. Our concept of race relies heavily on the visible differences between whites and African Americans. Interracial couples posed a threat to the socially constructed color line almost immediately, producing offspring who did not fit under the simple label of black or white. Although legally considered African American because of their “Negro blood,” some individuals found it possible to pass for white. Passing began long before emancipation, but it became a prevalent topic in African American fiction during the early twentieth century. Nella Larsen in particular explores the idea of passing in her two novels Quicksand and Passing. As her main female protagonists search for their true identity within a racist and patriarchal society, they struggle with DuBois’s idea of “double consciousness.” Within the African American community during the early twentieth century, middle class blacks sought to uplift the race through upholding and exemplifying white middle class values. Larsen’s characters are thus trapped in a complicated system that rails against social inequality while it espouses the oppressive structures of the dominant white culture. From various newspaper articles and book reviews, one sees a varied reaction to passing within the African American community. For men, racial passing rendered them more effeminate in the eyes of black Americans. Larsen focuses more on the experiences of black women, who found themselves forced into an oppressive domestic role in an effort to uplift the race and reaffirm the masculinity of black men.

An attractive young woman sits on a train destined for New York. Leaving behind the remnants of her oppressive past, she begins to make plans for the future—a bright future bursting with opportunity and adventure. Pain, isolation, shame—all fade into the distance. Surely New York will be the answer. Surely the happiness that has eluded her for so long awaits her there. She. Helga Crane, will no longer be the illegitimate daughter of a Danish runaway and an African American gambler. She will simply become another young woman trying to make a life for herself in the city. A remark from her new employer interrupts Helga’s pleasant thoughts. “How is it that a nice girl like you can rush off on a wild goose chase like this at a moment’s notice. I should think your people’d object, or’d make inquiries, or something.’ In an instant. Helga’s excitement gives way to embarrassment. After the young woman admits to a less than ideal parentage, her employer replies coldly. “I wouldn’t mention that my people are white, if I were you. Colored people won’t understand it. and after all it’s your own business.”

So begins Helga Crane’s journey to New York in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand. Published in 1928. Larsen’s debut novel tells the story of a mixed race woman searching for a stable identity within a racist and unstable society. The daughter of a white woman and a black man. Helga constantly reminds herself and others of the threat lurking beneath America’s strict racial code. When her employer discovers Helga’s heritage, Larsen writes. “The woman felt that the story, dealing as it did with race intermingling and possibly adultery, was beyond definite discussion. For among black people, as among white people, it is tacitly understood that these things are not mentioned—and therefore they do not exist.” Helga is thus robbed of her true identity. Because she threatens the strict “color line” that guides all of American life, the mixed race Helga—the real Helga—cannot exist. According to Martha J. Cutter. “Helga Crane attempts to use ‘passing’ as a way of finding a unitary sense of identity—a sense of identity structured around one role, a role that somehow corresponds to her ‘essential self.'” Although Helga’s dark skin prevents her from passing for white, she in a sense passes for black by denying, or at least omitting, her white ancestry. Instead, she finds solace in a number of different identities. In Cutter’s words, she passes as “an exotic Other, a committed teacher, an art object, a devout Christian, a proponent of racial uplift, [and] a dutiful mother.”…

Read the entire thesis here.

Race and Making America in Brazil: How Brazilian Return Migrants Negotiate Race in the US and Brazil

University of Michigan
2011
314 pages

Tiffany Denise Joseph

Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Sociology) in The University of Michigan

This dissertation explores how US immigration influenced the racial conceptions of Brazilian returnees, individuals who immigrated to the US and subsequently returned to Brazil. Since Brazil was once regarded as a multi-racial utopia and represents a very distinct social environment when compared to the US, the dissertation objective was to learn how returnees adapted to the US racial system and if they “brought back” US racial ideals to Brazil upon returning. I conducted semi-structured retrospective interviews with 49 Brazilian returnees in Governador Valadares, Brazil, the country‘s largest immigrant-sending city to the US to explore how these individuals perceived and navigated racial classification and relations in Brazil and the US before, during, and after the US migration. To more effectively isolate the influence of immigration for returnees, I also interviewed a comparison group of 24 non-migrants.

Findings suggest that returnees relied on a transnational racial optic to navigate the US racial system as immigrants and to readapt to the Brazilian racial system after returning to Brazil. I use the term “transnational racial optic” to demonstrate how migration transformed returnees‘ observations, interpretations, and understandings of race in Brazil and the US. Returnees felt the US racial system was characterized by more rigid racial classification, overt forms of racism, and pervasive interracial social and residential segregation compared to Brazil. The US migration also influenced returnees‘ perceptions of racial stratification in both societies, particularly with regard to the socio-economic positions and behaviors of US and Brazilian blacks.

After the US migration, most returnees were not conscious of how their racial classifications or perceptions changed, although the results indicate shifts in their racial and skin tone classifications over the course of the migration. Furthermore, returnees felt that they did not remit US racial ideals to Brazil after returning. While both returnees and non-migrants thought racism existed in Brazil, returnees, after having lived in the US, were more cognizant of the structural manifestations of racism than non-migrants. This suggests that returnees‘ observations of race in the US influenced their perceptions of race in Brazil post-migration, which is indicative of the transnational racial optic.

Table of Contents

• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Appendices
• Abstract
• Chapter 1 Introduction
• Chapter 2 Background and Theoretical Framework
• Chapter 3 Methodology
• Chapter 4 Examining Brazilian Return Migrants‘ Personal Conceptions about Race in the United States
• Chapter 5 Examining Brazilian Return Migrants‘ Societal Conceptions about Race in the US
• Chapter 6 The Return: Brazilian Return Migrants‘ Post-Migration Conceptions of Racial Classification in Brazil
• Chapter 7 Contemporary Life in GV: Conceptions of Race among Return Migrants and Non-Migrants
• Chapter 8 Conclusion
• Appendices
• Bibliography

List of Figures

• Figure 1: Returnees‘ Race in Brazil Pre-Migration (Brazil Census)
• Figure 2: Returnees‘ Race in US (US Census)
• Figure 3: Returnees‘ Average Skin Tone Classifications during Migration Process
• Figure 4: Non-Migrants‘ Racial Classifications (Brazil Census)
• Figure 5: Returnees’ Racial Classifications at Time of Interview
• Figure 6: Coding Schema for Returnees’ and Non-Migrants’ Brazilian Racial Conceptions
• Figure 7: Coding Schema of Returnees‘ US Racial Conceptions

List of Tables

• Table 1: Demographics of Return and Non-Migrants
• Table 2: Immigration Demographics for Return Migrants
• Table 3: Topics in Interview Protocols
• Table 4: How Participants Racially Classified Interviewer
• Table 5: Importance of Race before Immigrating
• Table 6: Importance of Race in US
• Table 7: Importance of Race before Immigrating vs US
• Table 8: Brazilian Racial Classifications
• Table 9: Open-Ended Racial Classifications in US
• Table 10: Self-Ascribed vs. External Racial Classification in US
• Table 11: Factors Influencing Open-Ended Racial Classification
• Table 12: Experiences of Discrimination by Racial Classification
• Table 13: Defining Race- Return Migrants vs Non-Migrants
• Table 14: Factors Influencing Return Migrants and Non-Migrants
• Table 15: Returnees’ Skin Tone Classifications at Each Retrospective Migration Stage
• Table 16: Racial Classification in the US vs Racial Classification
• Table 17: Pre-Migration Racial Classification vs Racial Classification
• Table 18: Self-Ascribed Racial Classification-Return Migrants vs. Non-Migrants
• Table 19: Importance of Classifications
• Table 20: Return Migrants‘ Skin Tone Classifications across Racial Categories
• Table 21: Returnees’ Perceptions of Racial Democracy
• Table 22: Manifestations of Racism
• Table 23: Return Migrants’ Demographic Info (Returnees 1-24)
• Table 24: Return Migrants’ Demographic Info (Returnees 25-49)
• Table 25: Non-Migrants‘ Demographic Info

List of Appendices

• Appendix 1 Demographic Information
• Appendix 2 Coding Schema
• Appendix 3 Interview Protocol for Return Migrants-English Version
• Appendix 4 Interview Protocol for Non-Migrants-English Version
• Appendix 5 Interview Protocol for Return Migrants-Portuguese Version
• Appendix 6 Interview Protocol for Non-Migrants- Portuguese Version

Chapter 1: Introduction

I filled it out [Census form]. Yes, they asked [for my racial classification] and I put white because I wasn‘t Hispanic or Latino. [The form] had Hispanic, white, black, there wasn‘t an option for me specifically. Even though in Brazil, I considered myself white, there [in the US] for them [the Americans] I am not white because white there is blue eyes and blonde hair.

–Renata, white woman, 46 years, New York

Because when they [Americans] look at you, they know, they know that you‘re not American. (quirks) I don‘t know how they know, but…if you speak English [with a foreign-sounding accent] like in America, they know you are not American. I don‘t know why.

-Amanda, white woman, 33 years, Massachusetts

Increasing immigration to the United States in the last fifty years has had a significant impact on the population’s racial and ethnic diversity. Although the US historically has been predominantly white and black, the 2000 US Census revealed a population that has become increasingly racially nonwhite since the majority of recent immigrants have come from Latin America, Asia, and the Caribbean.2 While these immigrants bring with them hopes for a brighter future, they also come with conceptions of race from their countries of origin, which are not easily shed and may influence their perceptions of and incorporation into US society. In the US, race is a primary mode of social organization and the social construction of race has created widespread social inequality between whites and people of color since the nation’s inception (Feagin 2000; Omi and Winant 1994). Feagin (2000) argues that the black-white racial binary is the foundation of US race relations and is the ruler by which other racial and immigrant groups are measured. Therefore, immigrants who come to the US enter a racially polarized social context.

The quotes at the beginning of this chapter provide recollections of how Brazilian return migrants, or Brazilians who immigrated to the US and subsequently returned to Brazil, negotiated race while living in the US as immigrants.3 The ideas captured in Renata and Amanda’s quotes suggest a reconfiguration in the US of self-ascribed racial classification that differed from their racial self-classifications in Brazil, as well as recognition of how “Americans” identify foreign others.

While race is a strong structuring factor for US residents, race and racial classification in immigrants’ countries of origin may be very different from those in the US, which means immigrants must learn how to negotiate race in their new context. According to Landale and Oropesa (2002):

“Not only must migrants adapt to change in their status from majority group member to minority group member; they also face pressure to redefine themselves in terms of the black-white dichotomy that delineates race relations in the U.S.” (pg. 234).

Such a process of redefinition may be challenging for immigrants who never before have classified themselves using rigid racial terms, particularly for those who come from Latin America, which has a history of more socially-accepted racial mixing that has resulted in populations with a diverse range of physical racial markers, such as skin tone and hair texture (Landale and Oropesa 2002; Roth 2006; Duany 2002; Itzigsohn et. al 2005). Brazil, once considered a racial utopia compared to the US because of its perceived harmonic interracial relations, is such a country. Whereas one’s ancestry and physical features are generally the basis for classification into a single specific racial group in the US, such characteristics may signify different racial classifications in Brazil and other Latin American countries. Renata’s quote clearly demonstrates how her physical features are considered white in Brazil although she is considered nonwhite in the US. Thus, Renata and other Latin American immigrants come to the US with a different understanding of race and must adjust to existing racial classifications and race relations upon arrival. As Latinos are currently the largest ethno-racial minority in the US and do not easily fit into the historical black-white racial binary, it is important to explore how immigrants from Latin American countries, more specifically Brazil, adapt to race in the US.

Brazil is the Latin American country of interest in this study for three reasons. First, there have been various comparative studies of race in the United States and Brazil that have explored the unique racial characteristics of these countries (Degler 1986; Marx 1998; Telles 2004; Bailey 2009). Brazil and the US are two of the largest countries in the Americas and share a history of European colonization, Indigenous conquest, and African enslavement. Yet, the social construction of race has unfolded very differently in each context, motivating studies that explored how the racist US differed from Brazil’s multi-racial paradise.4 Second, as the largest slave-holding societies in the Americas, Brazil and the US have large African-descended populations. The majority of African slaves imported to the Americas were sent to Brazil. Even after the abolition of the Atlantic Slave Trade, African slaves were still illegally imported to Brazil, which was last country in the Americas to abolish slavery in 1888. Thus, Brazil’s African-descended population is significantly larger than its US counterpart (Telles 2004). In fact, it has been argued that Brazil has the world’s second largest-African descended population after Africa (Telles 2004; Martes 2007). Finally, this research is also motivated by the increase in Brazilian immigration to the US in the last thirty years. Brazil’s economic recession in the 1980s with its high unemployment and inflation rates encouraged significant emigration for employment purposes to the US, Canada, and Japan (Goza 1999; Margolis 1994; Takenaka 2000). Since that time, Brazilians have migrated to the US in large numbers, yet there had been very little research examining their experiences until the mid-1990s.

Given the plethora of comparative race research on Brazil and the US and the growth of Brazilian immigrant communities in the US, a study exploring how Brazilian immigrants come to understand race in the US is warranted. The primary goal of this dissertation is to comparatively explore the social constructions of race in Brazil and the US through the observations, perceptions, and experiences of individuals who have lived in each country for an extended period of time. While other comparative studies have relied on survey and historical data to understand how race and racism “work” on a macro-level in each society, I examine how individuals make sense of and negotiate race in both countries at the personal level. Because Brazilian immigrants are one of the most recent immigrant groups to the US and extensive return migration has been documented among this group, Brazilian return migrants are the ideal group for such a study. As individuals who were racially socialized in Brazil, they entered the US with a different perception of race and encountered a racial system that relied on more rigidly defined racial categories and groups and appeared to be more overtly racist than Brazil.

Furthermore, upon leaving the US, Brazilian return migrants go home with a different mindset that has been shaped by their experiences abroad. Migration between both countries facilitates comparisons between migrants’ quality of life in Brazil and the US that make it difficult to readapt to life in post-migration Brazil (Margolis 2001). Margolis (2001) argues that “some returnees become people in-between [who] are not entirely satisfied with life in either country” (pg. 243). Thus, if their mindsets are “changed” by living in the US, it is possible that US migration also facilitates a change in these individuals’ racial conceptions in Brazil after the US migration. I define racial conceptions as a set of ideas that help individuals understand how social actors, in this study Brazilian returnees, negotiate race in a particular context. In this study, I operationalize these conceptions in three ways using data from respondents’ experiences of: (1) racial classification, (2) observations, perceptions, and experiences of racism or racial discrimination, and (3) an understanding of how race functions on a societal level. For example, Brazilian return migrants in this study negotiated racial conceptions in the US through: (1) their personal, professional, and miscellaneous interactions with other Brazilians, other immigrants, and native born US citizens, and (2) their “consumption” of US culture through television, music, and newspapers.

This dissertation examines how exposure to racial systems in the United States and Brazil influences the racial conceptions of Brazilian return migrants in three contexts: (1) in Brazil before the US migration; (2) in the US as immigrants; and (3) in Brazil after the US migration. To comparatively explore race in the US and Brazil via Brazilian return migrants’ racial conceptions, I address two major questions in this study:

(1) How does immigration to the US change racial conceptions for Brazilian return migrants while they are living in the US and after returning to Brazil?

(2) Do return migrants “bring back” racial ideals from the US and if so, what impact does extensive US migration have on racial relations in returnees’communities?

To address these research questions, I rely on data obtained from semi-structured interviews with 49 Brazilian return migrants and 24 non-migrants (Brazilians who never migrated) in Governador Valadares, Brazil, a city of 250,000 residents in the South Central state of Minas Gerais. Governador Valadares (GV) has historically been Brazil’s largest immigrant-sending city to the US. Emigration to the US has so heavily influenced the local economy that the city has been famously nicknamed by Brazilians as “Governador Valadolares,” as in US dollars. About 15 percent of GV residents, also known as Valadarenses, are estimated to be living in the US and nearly 80 percent of Valadarenses have at least one relative residing in the US (CIAAT 2007; Margolis 1998). Additionally, return migration to GV after the US migration has been heavily documented (Marcus 2009; Assis and de Campos 2009; Martes 2008; Siqueira 2008; CIAAT 2007; Siqueira 2006). The prevalence of US migration has created a constant flow of people, money, and culture between GV and the US, so much so that GV and particular US cities with large numbers of migrants from GV are considered transnational social fields or:

“… set[s] of multiple interlocking networks of social relationships through which ideas, practices, and resources are unequally exchanged, organized, and transformed… [that] connect actors through direct and indirect relations across borders” (Levitt and Glick Schiller 2004, 1009).

Because the majority of migrants from GV intend to return to their native city after the US migration, they maintain social and economic ties while living in the US. Valadarenses generally immigrate to the US to work for two to five years to earn and save as much money as possible for the purpose of purchasing a home and car or starting a business upon returning from the US. This process has been referred to as “Fazer à América,” which translates in English to “making America” (Martes 2008; CIAAT 2007; Siqueira 2006). These migrants hope the US migration will facilitate upward social mobility and access to what they perceive to be a better or more “American” quality of life in GV after migration…

…Additionally, the exploration of racial conceptions for this subset of individuals who are on the move between the US and Brazil also helps me develop a more nuanced argument about race as a social construction that varies from place to place. This is particularly true for the comparison of the US and Brazil, two countries with very distinct racial histories that are now experiencing shifts in racial discourses due to changing ethnic demographics (US) and the introduction of affirmative action policies (Brazil). The increase in rates of interracial marriage, introduction of an option to classify in more than one racial category on the US census, the dismantling of race-based affirmative action policies in the US and the recent election of Barack Obama as the first black (biracial) president of the United States have spurred debates about whether the US has now become a postracial society. Furthermore, the growth of the Latino population into the country’s largest ethno-racial minority and increased immigration from Latin America have had a significant impact on US demographics.

At the same time, to address racial inequality in Brazil, some universities and companies have begun to implement racial quotas to increase the representation of Afro-Brazilians in Brazil’s higher education system, which has been very controversial. Although nonwhites constitute nearly half of the Brazilian population, whites constitute about 73 percent of university students (Telles 2004; Stubrin 2005; Bailey 2009). Due to the prevalence of racial mixing in Brazil and many white Brazilians’ acknowledgment of having black racial ancestry, the implementation of affirmative action has made it necessary to racially classify individuals (blacks) in a socially meaningful way to determine who can benefit from race-specific policies. This policy has facilitated discussions about an importation of US racial classification standards (Telles 2004; Araujo 2001; Fry and Maggie 2004; Maio and Santos 2005; Bailey 2009). Because both Brazil and the US are experiencing shifts in racial discourse as they relate to discussions of racial demographics, racial classification, and inequality, some researchers have argued that the US will undergo either a (1) “Latin-Americanization” of race in which existing racial boundaries will become more ambiguous or (2) shift from the traditional black-white racial binary to a black-nonblack binary in which existing racial boundaries will be realigned (Bonilla-Silva 2004; Skidmore 2003; Lee and Bean 2004; Yancey 2003). Other researchers suggest that the US and Brazilian racial classification systems are on “converging paths,” as each country’s racial dynamics seem to be resembling its counterpart (Daniel 2006; Bailey 2009):

It appears to be the case that racial dynamics in the United States and in Brazil are like two ships passing in the night, one showing signs of movement toward mixed-race framings and the other toward single-race identification (Bailey 2009, 8).

Thus, it is possible that just as Brazilians are moving back and forth across US and Brazilian borders, that racial ideals in each country are also being exchanged, which highlights the significance of this study in another way. If race in the US is becoming “Latin-Americanized,” it is important to understand how Latin Americans (in this study Brazilians) conceive of race in their countries of origin and in the US if researchers are to understand how the social construction of race in the US may evolve in the future…

Read the entire dissertation here.

White Skin, White Masks: The Creole Woman and the Narrative of Racial Passing in Martinique and Louisiana

University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
2006
83 pages

Michael James Rulon

A thesis submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in the Curriculum of Comparative Literature

Through an examination of two Creole passing subjects from literary passing narratives of the twentieth century, this thesis simultaneously treats two problems that have been largely overlooked by contemporary scholarship: the role of the Creole racial identity in the genre of the passing narrative, as well as the possibility of racial passing within the context of a Creole society. In Walter White’s 1926 novel, Flight, and Mayotte Capécia’s 1950 novel, La négresse blanche, the protagonists’ difficulties in negotiating a stable racial identity reveal the inherent weakness of the racial binary that is essential to the very notion of racial passing, and they also show that Creoleness has failed to establish itself as a stable racial identity in the societies represented in both novels.

Table of Contents

• 1. Pawòl Douvan/Some Opening Words
• 2. Nwè, Blan èk Kréyòl/Black, White, and Creole
• 3. Mimi èk Isaure/Mimi and Isaur
• 4. Pasé pou Blan, Pasé pou Nwè/Passing for White, Passing for Black
• 5. Ovwè tè kréyòl/Goodbye, Creole Land
• 6. Conclusion: Èk alòs… /And so
• WORKS CITED

Read the entire dissertation here.

Living Out Loud: (De)Constructing the Multiracial Individual

Stanford University
2011-05-19
55 pages

Stephanie Otani-Sunamoto

Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for Department Honors in Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity at Stanford University

Although mixed race people have existed throughout American history, being mixed race was either stigmatized or an unrecognized identity option until the Multiracial Movement began in the late 1980’s. The past twenty years have brought an unparalleled rise in Mixed Race consciousness. On a political level, advocates successfully campaigned for Census reclassification in the form of a “Mark one or more” option on the Census 2000. Mixed Race scholars, activists, writers and artists were active in creating a new, cosmopolitan “Mixed Race Person.” All the while they proclaimed that they fighting against racism and representing a largely marginalized community.

This thesis takes a critical approach to the messages about what it means to be “Mixed Race” that proliferate in the media and in academia: Mixed Race people have “the best of both worlds” and the act of choosing one racial and/or cultural identity forces the multiracial person to deny part of who her or she is. I argue that the academic and popular conceptualizations of Mixed Race actually reinforce the racial/racist ideologies Multiracial activists claimed to be so oppressive. These problematic ideas are a direct result of one of the driving forces for Mixed Race activism and scholarship: the desire to legitimize multiracial families. In doing so, one particular narrative of mixed race identity and authenticity has prevailed. I call for a more nuanced vision of Mixed Race personhood that allows for non-traditional family structures and does not impose any ideals of authenticity upon the mixed race individual. I will then present a literary nonfiction piece, Outside/Inside, based on my own life as a counter-example to the common narratives seen in Mixed Race literature and representations.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Theoretical Framework
• Building a Mixed Race History
• Mixed Race Literature and Constructions of Multiracial Personhood
• Towards a Productive Mixed Race Consciousness
• Conclusion
• Works Cited

Introduction

I’m mixed. I’m not one or the other.
Interracial mixing is the future. Pretty soon, everyone will be mixed.
Mixed race people are so beautiful.
I don’t have to choose between my parents.
You are so exotic.
What is your ethnicity?
I love being mixed because people can’t place me into any categories.
Do you have anything else “in” you?
I am the best of both worlds.
Mixed race people aren’t as racist because they are a sign that old racial barriers are breaking down.

These statements, whether in the form of words or images, have been the soundtrack playing in my ears for all of my adult life. Three years ago, I started paying attention to the messages that surrounded me about Mixed Race and race in general. Everyone seemed to have opinions about where ambiguous bodies, including mine, belonged.

Academic literature on Mixed Race identity formation told me that mixed race people were in a position that is largely defined by the struggle to find legitimation from “both their cultures.” Cultures. The mixed race people I saw in videos and read in books talked about cultures as though they were tangible objects given to them the day they came home from the hospital and were told, Take these and make use of all of them. I knew that was not how race worked. Race was a physical categorization; it does not fully explain how the individual identity is internalized and made meaning.

But there were some divergent voices. Michele Elam argues that Multiracial advocates have framed their arguments as “ahead of the times” and in doing so have painted those who choose to criticize their efforts as conservative, even backwards. Michele Elam, Kimberly McClain DaCosta and Kim Williams are among the few who have taken a critical approach to studying the Mixed Race Movement through analyzing literature and entertainment, Multiracial organizations and marketing, and political strategies, respectively. While their works make important contributions, I believe that there is still much more room for nuance in the discussion about Mixed Race, particularly subjectivities.

The disconnect between what I knew about race and what I have read about Multiraciality led me on a roundabout journey to the research questions that drive this piece. The term Mixed Race implies that there are two (or more) essences being mixed, but how can that be if race isn’t real? If a new group has been created, new boundaries for group membership have also been created. Who stands inside and outside the boundaries of the new Mixed Race group? Are there other narratives in this movement that have been overlooked? Where is my place in all of this discourse?

I have created a framework that critiques popular ideas about Mixed Race and offers suggestions for the future of Mixed Race scholarship. I will discuss how the simultaneous denial and exploitation of multiracial people historically and the example of empowerment provided by the Civil Rights Movement spurred a group of people to give positive meaning to the word Multiracial. I will analyze the ways in which current representations and theorizations of Mixed Race identity conflate racial and ethnic identity formation. I argue that this has happened because Multiracial organization was motivated by the desire to validate the concept of a Multiracial Family. I will conclude by suggesting ways to for Mixed Race scholarship to move beyond advocacy and focus on the experiences of multiracial bodies, not multiethnic people.

Perhaps by presenting a voice that diverges from the monolithic entity that is Mixed Race Studies in 2011, it can provide a pathway for other types of stories we have yet to hear…

Read the entire thesis here.

From exile to transcendence: racial mixture and the journey of revision in the works of Lydia Maria Child, Hannah Crafts, Kate Chopin, James Weldon Johnson, and Jean Toomer

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
May 2010

Suzanne M. Lynch

My study, entitled From Exiles to Transcendences focuses on five authors: Lydia Maria Child, Hannah Crafts, Kate Chopin, James Weldon Johnson, and Jean Toomer. It examines each author’s effort to represent the mixed-race character as a constant “process of becoming” (Hall, Questions of Identity 4). This study aims to convey the distinctiveness of the American mixed-race character in American literature and to provide a thorough reading of how this distinctiveness is portrayed and sustained throughout the scope of the selected texts. My dissertation identifies the mixed-race voice as experientially distinct from other American raced voices while acknowledging the mixed-race character as one who demonstrates a connectedness to a plurality of racial cultures. The following chapters span a period of approximately 100 years and illustrate a common concern among them, albeit from differing perspectives and influences, regarding how home and family function as fluid spaces of racial subjectivity. My study maintains a position that the above authors questioned the presumed irreversibility of an entrenched understanding of family ties; that they challenged and rescripted the historically defined self with a self that privileges experience and discovery over pre-given identities; and that they depicted their characters as evolving subjects who created themselves with name and identity as they moved toward their “process of becoming.”

Read the dissertation here (may require log-in).

Racial mixture and civil war: The histories of the U.S. South and Mexico in the novels of William Faulkner and Carlos Fuentes

Michigan State University
2008
266 pages
Publication Number: AAT 3331903
ISBN: 9780549837800

Emron Lee Esplin, Assistant Professor of English and American Studies
Kennesaw State University, Kennesaw, Georgia

A Dissertation Submitted to Michigan State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, Department of English

This dissertation is an endeavor in inter-American literary criticism with three primary arguments. First, I argue that the affinities and differences between the histories of the U.S. South and Mexico require us to redefine the terms “America” and “American” according to their original hemispheric context and to adopt a transnational approach when studying American literature. Second, I claim that the ways in which race and racial mixture are viewed in the Americas—specifically, the discourse of miscegenation in the United States and the discourse of mestizaje in Mexico–are national not natural. These discourses are connected to lengthy colonial and national histories and to specific moments of crisis in the formation of U.S. and Mexican national identities that took place during the U.S. Civil War and the Mexican Revolution. Third, I argue that William Faulkner and Carlos Fuentes participate in these discourses of racial mixture when their novels both replicate and challenge the essentialisms of miscegenation and mestizaje, respectively.

In my introduction, I develop a historiographic approach to inter-American literary studies that I follow in chapter one by laying the historical groundwork for comparing the U.S. Civil War to the Mexican Revolution and in chapter two by examining how the discourses of miscegenation and mestizaje which grew out of these conflicts disparately favor(ed) whiteness–miscegenation through overt segregation and mestizaje through public praise for racial mixture and private desires for assimilation. Chapter three explores how Faulkner’s Light in August, Absalom, Absalom! , and Go Down, Moses and Fuentes’ La muerte de Artemio Cruz and Gringo viejo repeat the essentialist underpinnings of miscegenation and mestizaje by describing so-called racially mixed characters as fragments. Chapter four examines how Light in August and Gringo viejo challenge the discourses by assigning violence to whiteness. Chapter five analyzes how Light in August and La muerte de Artemio Cruz offer fictional portrayals of both miscegenation’s and mestizaje’s erasure of Mexico’s African past. I conclude the project by offering a critique of current hybridity theory and by arguing that Go Down, Moses and La muerte de Artemio Cruz demonstrate the impossibility of positive hybridity.

Table of Contents

• INTRODUCTION: METHODS FOR INTER-AMERICAN LITERARY STUDIES
• CHAPTER 1: WAR IN THE TWO SOUTHS: PRESENT PASTS AND CIVIL WAR IN THE U.S. SOUTH AND MEXICO
• CHAPTER 2: DISCOURSES OF RACIAL MIXTURE BORN IN CIVIL WAR: CREATING THE NATION IN THE UNITED STATES AND MEXICO
• CHAPTER 3: RACIAL MIXTURE AS FRAGMENTATION
• CHAPTER 4: ANCESTRY, BLOOD, AND THE VIOLENCE OF THE WHITE FATHERS
• CHAPTER 5: BLACK, MEXICAN, AND BLACK MEXICAN
• CONCLUSION: POSITIVE HYBRIDITY?
• WORKS CITED

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Other Communions: Maya, Mulatto, Woman and God in Miguel Ángel Asturias 1923-1974

University of Michigan
2010
218 pages

Andrea Leigh Dewees

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Romance Languages and Literatures: Spanish) in the University of Michigan

“Other Communions: Maya, Mulatto, Woman and God in Miguel Ángel Asturias 1923-1974” engages the Guatemalan Nobel Laureate’s literary production over five decades, beginning with his portrayals of the Maya and expanding to include his representations of the mulatto, female and God. I am primarily concerned with close readings of Los ojos de los enterrados (1960), Mulata de Tal (1963) and El árbol de la cruz (1997) but I draw also from others of Asturias’s novels, as well as historiography, postcolonial and feminist theory, to show how Asturias narrates the nation through literary figures of the Other.

Chapter 2 begins with an intellectual history of Asturias as a “Maya” author, tracing the roots and permutations of this myth through biography, autobiography, and literary criticism. I then show how his appropriative creation of a Maya indigenismo is central to his political and aesthetic conception of Latin American literature. However, Asturias’s novels extend beyond this fictive Maya center. Chapter 3 analyzes a non-Maya, untranslated phrase associated with a mulatto character in Asturias’s Banana Trilogy. I analyze an emerging negrista aesthetic and argue that the interruptive repetition of the phrase structures the novel’s account of the recent history of revolution, land reform and democratic rupture in Guatemala, as well as the more distant legacies of the conquest, colonialism and slavery.

Mulata de tal also features a mulatta character and in Chapter 4 I explain how Asturias connects land to the female body through a complex series of fragmentations, profanations and redemptions. In contrast to the more historical concerns of the Banana Trilogy, this novel is encased within an apocalyptic framework, marking a shift in Asturias’s attention from a Maya origin to the end of days.

Finally, I examine a sketch published after Asturias’s death, El árbol de la cruz, calling attention to Asturias’s connection between the female Other and the cross in what amounts to a brief treatise on communion. I show how this text, read accumulatively through popular religiosity in others of Asturias’s novels, balances between definitive origin and conclusive end.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Abstract
• Chapter 1 Introduction Mimesis and Guatemalan National Literature
• Chapter 2 Asturias and lo maya
• Appendices
• Chapter 3 Irrupted History: 1944, 1954 and Los ojos de los enterrados
• Chapter 4 Fragments between hell and heaven: land, the female body and the text in Mulata de tal
• Chapter 5 Crosses, Origins, Communions
• Bibliography

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Turning Dreams to Chaos: Multiplicity and the Construction of Identity

Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, California
2003
249 pages
ISBN (eBook): 978-3-638-68960-1
Archive No.: V7499
DOI: 10.3239/9783638689601

Tamara Hollins

A Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Claremont Graduate University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate Field of English

This work will reflect on the mutability of meaning in the female mulatto body as well as on the mutability of perception by acknowledging the erroneous nature of race and its concrete results, by examining the valorization and undermining of racial essentialism and heterogeneity, and by revealing passing as bound by the social and legal restraints related to the physical body even as it interrogates racial classifications. Specifically, this study will explore how some nineteenth century, modern, and postmodern American narratives containing mulattoes and passing personas produce a resolution reiterating the structure of race or new subjectivities within or possibly without the color line. Through this exploration, the war between the homogenous Self and the different Other will play out. In an effort to unite a divided personality, the Other will counter attempts by the Self to maintain essentialism. The success lies not in the final outcome but in recognizing the subversive acts of the Other and the irrational tactics of the Self as continuously revealing the subjects as always already married and as surpassing mere essentialism into the multitudinous, heterogeneous One. Still, this work realizes that essentialism has a place in heterogeneity, even if essentialism is a logical error. Duality and conflict are inherent in heterogeneity, or the multitudinous One. The key is not to eradicate, in an essentialist manner, one and not the other, but to live in a state of awareness, respecting and accepting those who knowingly choose to construct identities within or without the color line.

Table of Contents

• Introduction: Reading Meaning in the Mixed Body
• Chapter One: Assimilating into What?: Stereotypes, Appearances, and Behavior
• Chapter Two: Eliminating the Tragic: Intersections of Christianity, Racial Uplift, and True Womanhood
• Chapter Three: Passing as Subversion and Reification
• Chapter Four: The Journey Home: Replacing Tragedy with Authority
• Chapter Five: Looking Within and Beyond Race with Irene, Clare, and Angela
• Chapter Six: From the Passing Mulatto to the Biracial Character: Race, Class, Gender, and Family
• Conclusion: The Community of Multiplicity

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(In) between identities: Representations of the island and the mulatto in nineteenth-century French fiction

University of Wisconsin, Madison
2005
205 pages
Publication Number: AAT 3186126
ISBN: 9780542274718

Molly Krueger Enz, Assistant Professor of French
South Dakota State University

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (French)

This dissertation explores how five nineteenth-century authors depict the tension surrounding racial (in)equality in France’s island colonies through the creation of mulatto characters who are portrayed as “in-between” characters in exile. The thesis is divided into two sections, each based on a common a theme. The first part treats two novels containing mixed-race characters who criticize racial prejudice and the hypocrisy of metropolitan and colonial societies. In my first chapter, I examine how the protagonist of Dumas’s Georges devotes his life to ending racial discrimination against mulattoes on the Île de France and show that the figures of the island and mulatto are structured around similar tensions of isolation and self-sufficiency. My second chapter explores how mixed-race characters in Hugo’s Bug-Jargal refuse to be classified racially. I argue that race is changeable and reflects the unstable history of the island of Saint-Domingue. The second section of this study considers the themes of female heroism and oppression through the figures of the revolutionary, the “tragic mulatta,” and the épave. In the third chapter, I contend that the central mulatta character in Lamartine’s Toussaint Louverture, the product of her black mother’s rape by a white colonist, is depicted as a revolutionary heroine who symbolizes the political power struggle between France and Saint-Domingue. My fourth chapter claims that the “tragic mulatto” stereotype, previously studied in relation to American literature, can be applied to Sand’s eponymous white heroine in Indiana. In my fifth chapter on Madame Charles Reybaud’s “Les Éépaves” and Madame de Rieux, I argue that white female characters usurp traditional white male roles when they enter relationships with men of color. Furthermore, I analyze the figure of the “épave,” neither free nor slave, which I feel best represents the “in-between” nature of the mulatto. This dissertation analyzes geographic, racial, and gendered “in-between” spaces in French Romantic literature on colonialism to further develop an understanding of how marginalized identities were formed in the first half of the nineteenth century and how these identities in turn shaped Romanticism.

Table of Contents

• Abstract
• Introduction: Margins and Mixings
• I. Prejudice and Hypocrisy: Criticisms of Metropolitan and Colonial Societies
  • CHAPTER ONE: The Mulatto as Island and the Island as Mulatto in Alexandre Dumas’s Georges
  • CHAPTER TWO: Mirroring, Monstrosity, and Métissage: Victor Hugo’s Bug-Jargal
• II. Heroism and Oppression: The Revolutionary, the Tragic Mulatta, and the Épave
  • CHAPTER THREE: Female Revolutionary Heroism in Alphonse de Lamartine’s Toussaint Louverture
  • CHAPTER FOUR: Slavery and the Tragic Mulatto Stereotype in George Sand’s Indiana
  • CHAPTER FIVE: Who “Belongs” to Whom?: Sexual Politics in Two Works by Madame Charles Reybaud
• Conclusion
• Appendix
• Works Cited
• Works Consulted

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The Military Camptown in Retrospect: Multiracial Korean American Subject Formation Along the Black-White Binary

Bowling Green State University
December 2007
116 pages

Perry Dal-nim Miller

Submitted to the Graduate College of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts

This thesis applies theoretical approaches from the sociology of literature and Asian Americanist critique to a study of two novels by multiracial Korean American authors. I investigate themes of multiracial identity and consumption in Heinz Insu Fenkl’s Memories of My Ghost Brother and Nora Okja Keller’s Fox Girl, both set in the 1960’s and 1970’s gijichon or military camptown geography, recreational institutions established around U.S. military installations in the Republic of Korea. I trace the literary production of Korean American subjectivity along a socially constructed dichotomy of blackness and whiteness, examining the novels’ representations of cross-racial interactions in a camptown economy based on the militarized sexual labor of working-class Korean women. I conclude that Black-White binarisms are reproduced in the gijichon through the consumption practices of both American military personnel and Korean gijichon workers, and that retrospective fictional accounts of gijichon multiraciality signal a shift in artistic, scholarly, and popular conceptualizations of Korean American and Asian American group identities.

Table of Contents

• CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION
• CHAPTER II. SOCIOLOGY OF ASIAN AMERICAN LITERATURE
• CHAPTER III. WRITING THE MULTIRACIAL SELF: FENKL’S MEMORIES OF MY GHOST BROTHER
• CHAPTER IV. HISTORICAL FICTIONALIZATIONS OF THE GIJICHON: KELLER’S FOX GIRL
• CHAPTER V. CONCLUSION
• WORKS CITED
• APPENDIX A. CHAPTER SYNOPSES OF MEMORIES
• APPENDIX B. CHAPTER SYNOPSES OF FOX GIRL

W.E.B. Du Bois’ oft-quoted problem for the twentieth-century was that of the color line: of racial classification and stratification policed and reproduced by the nation-state, cultural institutions, and hegemonized subjects within these institutions.1 The 2000 U.S. Census form revised racial demarcations to accommodate multiracial self-identification. By offering respondents the option of multiple selections from the categories “White, Black, Asian, some other race, American Indian, and Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander,” the form allowed 6.8 million of 281.4 million respondents to identify themselves as multiracial. Though multiraciality is now institutionally recognized, the individual must still choose from finite combinations of racial categories determined by the state. Given the centuries-old problem of the color line in the United States, what are the implications of the increased public presence of multiracial subjectivity? In contemporaneous fictional works by and about multiracial subjects, what correspondences exist to the state’s regulation of race and multi-race?

In the twenty-first century, the racialization of subjects in and beyond the United States continues to form the basis for structures of social and economic inequality. Omi and Winant define race as “a concept which signifies and symbolizes social conflicts and interests by referring to different types of human bodies” and racial formation as “the sociohistorical process by which racial categories are created, inhabited, transformed, and destroyed.” The significant body of scholarship on the social fallout of racial hierarchy continues to focus primarily on the socio-political binary constructions of blackness and whiteness. This binary is key to understanding the existing historical context for racialized cross-group interaction in the U.S. However, the centrality of the Black-White binary in academic discourses also has the unfortunate consequence of marginalizing other racial groups and actors in the present racial state. Paradigms of race that fail to consider interstices beyond this primary binary thereby compromise the underlying anti-racist project of race scholarship itself. The anti-racist project is rendered incapable of addressing the fault lines and politics of division formed among non-white ethnic groups in the United States. In addition, multiculturalist discourses tend toward triumphalist celebrations of cultural diversity in a Post Civil-Rights Era and ignore the structural and institutional-level consequences of racial difference. The elision of inter- and intra-group relations beyond Black-White functions to conserve discourses, cultural practices, and social and economic processes that maintain the centrality and dominance of whiteness. As Omi and  Winant point out,

As much as the politicians or mainstream media, academic analyses reproduce this distorted model of race [racial dichotomizing] as a largely black-white dichotomy… Too often, today as in the past, when scholars and journalists talk about race relations, they mean relations between African Americans and whites.

The 1990s witnessed increased media and academic attention to the positioning of other ethnic groups in the American racial construct. Omi and Winant suggest a new scenario of racial actors coming into prominence nationally in the 1992 Los Angeles uprising, where “Koreans, African Americans, and Chicanos [were both] victims and victimizers.” In discourses on race in the United States, the model minority is that group poised (or posed) at the threshold separating racial otherness from whiteness. Touted as the apex of economic and assimilationist success to which other minoritized groups could and should aspire, the model minority figure is ostensible evidence of an egalitarian, equal-opportunity society. At the same time, it diverts awareness from the actuality of race-class articulated stratifications that restrict opportunity to those already privileged by class and whiteness. Today Asians in the United States are positioned in that discursive liminality, i.e. the model minority position.

Complex negotiations occur among racialization, systemic, overt, and covert racial discrimination, sedimented prejudice, and conflicting tides of assimilation and the perpetuation of Asian ethnic identities. This thesis analyzes the fiction of two multiracial Korean American writers who explore cross-racial dynamics while departing from model minoritization mythologies. My primary question is how this particular construction of Asian American ethnic subjectivity, that is, the multiracial Korean American, perpetuates Black-White binarisms. In this section, I review pertinent literatures—the historical and social contexts of Asian American literature and of multiracial identity. In both Heinz Insu Fenkl’s Memories of My Ghost Brother and Nora Okja Keller’s Fox Girl, the Black-White binary is manifest in multiracial spaces and bodies and consumption practices. Drawing on the established significance of biography in delineating Asian American social margins, I present one understanding of the Black-White binary as a factor in multiracial Asian American subjectivity. Fenkl and Keller’s novels are fictionalized retrospective accounts of life in recreational districts or gijichon (military camptowns) around U.S. military installations in Korea during the 1960’s and 1970’s. As such, these novels demonstrate the significance of Yellow-Black-White transracial interaction and consumption in national hegemonies.

I will first explain some of the discourse around Asian American as a signifier and panethnic rubric. Espiritu characterizes Asian American panethnicity as an entity coalescing in terms of social movements and political initiatives during and after the 1960’s in an “organizational dimension;” that is, the political and social structures through which Asian American-ness itself is manifested. Historically, the panethnic Asian American movement has fallen far short of encompassing all ethnicities and class backgrounds within the Asian rubric; in addition, the movement has tended to replicate patriarchal structures extant in the larger American culture. According to Yen Le Espiritu, the rubric of “Asian American” not only encompasses a multiplicity of ethnicities, but describes “a highly contested terrain on which Asian American of different racial, cultural, and class backgrounds merge and clash over terms of inclusion.” My thesis locates the works of Fenkl and Keller, and the racially hybridized subjectivities they depict, along this terrain of contestation. Through the implication of the Black-White binary in constructions of multiracial Korean American identity, it is possible to understand the significance of existing race hierarchies on the politics of inclusion and exclusion in Asian American collective and group identities…

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