Mixed Race Studies

You Have Given Me a Country

Sarabande Books
2010-08-15
208 pages
9 x 6
Paperback ISBN: 13: 978-1-932511-82-6

Neela Vaswani, Teacher in the Master of Fine Arts in Writing Program
Spalding University

You Have Given Me a Country is a mixed-genre exploration of blurred borders, identity, and what it means to be bicultural. Combining memoir, history, and fiction, the book follows the paths of the author’s Irish-Catholic mother and Sindhi-Indian father on their journey towards each other and the biracial child they create. Vaswani’s second full-length work thematically echoes such books as The Color of Water, Running in the Family, or Motiba’s Tatoos, but is entirely unique in approach, voice, and story. The book reveals the self as a culmination of all that went before it, a new weave of two varied, yet ultimately universal backgrounds, that spans continents, generations, languages, wars, and, at the center of it all, family.

Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects

Duke University Press
August 2010
264 pages
21 illustrations
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8223-4591-6
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-4609-8

Christina Sharpe, Associate Professor of English and Director of American Studies
Tufts University

Arguing that the fundamental, familiar, sexual violence of slavery and racialized subjugation have continued to shape black and white subjectivities into the present, Christina Sharpe interprets African Diasporic and Black Atlantic visual and literary texts that address those “monstrous intimacies” and their repetition as constitutive of post-slavery subjectivity. Her illuminating readings juxtapose Frederick Douglass’s narrative of witnessing the brutal beating of his Aunt Hester and Essie Mae Washington-Williams’s declaration of freedom in Dear Senator: A Memoir by the Daughter of Strom Thurmond, as well as the “generational genital fantasies” depicted in Gayl Jones’s novel Corregidora and a firsthand account of such “monstrous intimacies” in the journals of an antebellum South Carolina senator, slave-holder, and vocal critic of miscegenation. Sharpe explores the South African-born writer Bessie Head’s novel Maru—about race, power, and liberation in Botswana—in light of the history of the Khoi San woman Saartje Baartman, who was displayed in Europe as the “Hottentot Venus” in the nineteenth century. Reading Isaac Julien’s film The Attendant, Sharpe takes up issues of representations of slavery, display, and the sadomasochism of everyday black life. Her powerful meditation on intimacy, subjection, and subjectivity culminates in an analysis of the black and white silhouettes created by Kara Walker and the subtexts of the critiques leveled against the silhouettes and the artist.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction. Making Monstrous Intimacies: Surviving Slavery, Bearing Freedom
• 1. Gayl Jones’s Corregidora and Reading the “Days That Were Pages of Hysteria”
• 2. Bessie Head, Saartje Baartman, and Maru Redemption, Subjectification, and the Problem of Liberation
• 3. Isaac Julien’s The Attendant and the Sadomasochism of Everyday Black Life
• 4. Kara Walker’s Monstrous Intimacies
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

Plum Bun: A Novel without a Moral

Beacon Press
Published in 1929
408 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-080700919-2
Size: 5-3/8″ X 8″ Inches

Jessie Redmon Fauset

Written in 1929 at the height of the Harlem Renaissance by one of the movement’s most important and prolific authors, Plum Bun is the story of Angela Murray, a young black girl who discovers she can pass for white. After the death of her parents, Angela moves to New York to escape the racism she believes is her only obstacle to opportunity. What she soon discovers is that being a woman has its own burdens that don’t fade with the color of one’s skin, and that love and marriage might not offer her salvation.

The Tapestry of Walter White’s Contradictions [Book Review]

Sewanee Review
Volume 118, Number 3, Summer 2010
pages lxxxii-lxxxiv
E-ISSN: 1934-421X
Print ISSN: 0037-3052

Sanford Pinsker, Emeritus Professor of English
Franklin and Marshall College, Lancaster, Pennsylvania

Tom Dyja. “Walter White: The Dilemma of Black identity in America”.  The Library of African American Biography.  Lanham, Maryland: Ivan R. Dee Publishsers, 2008.  224 pp.. (hardcover).  ISBN1-56663-766-X / 978-1-56663-766-4.

In the early stages of his campaign for the presidency, many blacks regarded Barack Obama as too “white”; later many whites regarded him as too “black.” To his credit the biracial Obama presented himself as a mainstream American—and, more than that, as an exemplar of the postracial age. He did not play the race card although others, alas, did. No doubt there are still many folks, most of them over sixty, who are as ignorant, as mean-spirited, and as prejudiced as were their forefathers. Racial identity, always complicated, always contentious, is a current that alternates between how people are defined by others and how they define themselves.

The now nearly forgotten Walter White (1893–1955) belongs to an earlier time when lynching was commonplace in the Jim Crow South, and when the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People spent much of its time trying to get federal antilynching laws passed. Because White was fair-skinned—and had blond hair and blue eyes to boot—he could not only “pass” for white, but also play the trickster in the bargain: White would amble into a small southern town, posing as an insurance salesman (which he had, in fact, been for the black-owned Standard Life Insurance Company) and engage the locals in conversation about a recent local lynching. For their part the rednecks were happy to oblige, often bragging about what had occurred in bloodcurdling…

Read or purchase the review here.

1111 ENG 126: Racial Passing, Black and White

The College of Saint Rose
Albany, New York
Fall 2009

Eurie Dahn, Assistant Professor of English

In this course, we will analyze depictions of racial passing in American literature. In particular, we will examine narratives where African Americans “pass” for white and vice versa. While the popularity of passing as a historical phenomenon is debatable, it is incontestably a source of literary richness. This course is also about interraciality and the meaning of race itself, as the possibility of passing exposes hidden ambiguities and anxieties about race in the United States. Texts we will read may include those by Jessie Fauset, Nella Larsen, James Weldon Johnson, Mark Twain, and Walter Mosley. This is a discussion-based course, so come prepared to participate. Fulfills diversity requirement.

Walter White: The Dilemma of Black Identity in America

Ivan R. Dee
October 2008
224 pages
Electronic ISBN: 1-56663-815-1 / 978-1-56663-815-9
Cloth ISBN: 1-56663-766-X / 978-1-56663-766-4
Paper ISBN: 1-56663-865-8 / 978-1-56663-865-4

Thomas Dyja

The day Walter White was buried in 1955 the New York Times called him “the nearest approach to a national leader of American Negroes since Booker T. Washington.” For more than two decades, White, as secretary of the NAACP, was perhaps the nation’s most visible and most powerful African-American leader. He won passage of a federal anti-lynching law, hosted one of the premier salons of the Harlem Renaissance, created the legal strategy that led to Brown v. Board of Education, and initiated the campaign demanding that Hollywood give better roles to black actors. Driven by ambitions for himself and his people, he offered his entire life to the advancement of civil rights in America.

Table of Contents

• A World of His Own
• The Life Insurance Temperament
• Undercover Against Lynching
• At the Center of the Harlem Renaissance
• Conflict, Control, and the Making of Mr. NAACP
• Fighting on All Fronts
• “I am white and I am black”