Mixed Race Studies

“Never Was Born”: The Mulatto, an American Tragedy?

The Massachusetts Review
Volume 27, Number 2 (Summer, 1986)
page 293-316

Werner Sollors, Henry B. and Anne M. Cabot Professor of English Literature and Afro American Studies; Director of the History of American Civilization Program
Harvard University

In my first marriage I paid my compliments to my mother’s race; in my second marriage I paid my compliments to the race of my father.

Frederick Douglass

Nationality demands solidarity. And you can never get solidarity in a nation of equal rights out of two hostile races that do not intermarry. In a Democracy you can not build a nation inside of a nation of two antagonistic races, and therefore the future American must be either an Anglo Saxon or a Mulatto. And if a Mulatto, will the future be worth discussing?

Thomas Dixon, Jr.

In the first Afro American novel, William Wells Brown’s Clotel; or, The Presidents Daughter (1853), Thomas Jefferson’s granddaughter (on the slave side) is described as light complexioned and no darker “than other white children.” Brown’s account continues:

As the child grew older, it more and more resembled its mother. The iris of her large dark eye had the melting mezzotinto, which remains the last vestige of African ancestry, and gives that plaintive expression, so often observed, and so appropriate to that docile and injured race.

This account of a woman who is an Octoroon is one of several of Brown’s Mulatto descriptions and representative of many other nineteenth-century sketches of characters whose hair is “‘straight, soft, fine, and light” and whose eyes usually receive much special attention. Descriptions such as the one of Mary’s melting “mezzotinto” (originally, a method of engraving) generate nervousness and laughter when…

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Jean Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark as a Trans-Atlantic Tragic Mulatta Narrative

Sargasso: Journal of Caribbean Literature, Language, and Culture
Volume I (2009-2010)
pages 79-92

Ania Spyra, Assistant Professor of English
Butler University

“pretty useful mask that white one.”
—Jean Rhys, Voyage In the Dark

Images of masks and masking surface repeatedly in Jean Rhys’s 1934 novel Voyage in the Dark; they describe the faces and artificial smiles of English people that Anna Morgan, the narrator and main character, meets when she immigrates to London from the West Indies after her father dies, and they act as an image of a loss of identity. Most importantly, however, they refer to the white or “crude pink” masks worn by Blacks during the Caribbean carnival in Anna’s native Dominica, which resurface in her memory at the end of the novel when she hallucinates in a delirium after a mishandled abortion. The carnival masks always include a slit through which the tongue can emerge and taunt the outraged white onlookers. But Anna does not feel taunted; she asserts she “knew why the masks were laughing” (186). Such an assertion of an intimate knowledge in the usually timid Anna suggests that she holds a particular insight into this “Black skin, White masks” situation: that her pale face might only be a mask covering her own racial mixture, or, in the least, it suggests Anna’s own uncertainty about her genealogy.

My reading is complicated and aided by the original ending of the novel found and published six years after Rhys’ death by Nancy Hemond Brown. The entirety of part IV of the novel originally counted almost two and an half thousand words more than the ending readers of Rhys s published works know (Hemond 41). Since all interpretation of the novel depends on the specific contexts of Annas jumbled reminiscences and thoughts—what Mikhail Bakhtin would call framing—the original, longer text sometimes complicates and sometimes helps to disambiguate statements made in the novel, framing them to suggest different meanings. For example, it is Anna’s father, rather than herself, who pronounces the words about the usefulness of white masks I opened with. Being closer to the family history, the father can speak even more authoritatively about the issue of racial relations in the family. On the other hand, it is still Anna who asserts the knowledge of why the masks are laughing. This time, additional context refigures her statement, “I knew why were laughing they were laughing at the idea that anybody black would want to be white” (52), pointing once again to Annas racial confusion and the centrality of racial masquerade as a theme in the novel.

But what interests me most here is that when Rhys was asked to re-write the original ending because of how grim and potentially unpopular with readers it was, she consented but continued to affirm that the original version was rendered “meaningless” because it provided “the only possible ending” (Letters 25). While in the revised ending, Anna, after some hallucinations, is supposed to be “ready to start all over again in no time” (187), in the original version, she bleeds to death after an abortion. Additionally, it was Rhys’s initial intention to depict Annas death as replicating both her father’s and her mother’s premature deaths, since Anna remembers her mother’s servant, Meta, saying “she was too young to die” (Hemond 44). Why would Rhys see this vicious circle of tragic deaths as the most meaningful, or indeed the only possible, ending for Voyage in the Dark. My argument here is that the early and tragic death ot the protagonist, especially when following that of her mother and father, places the novel firmly in the tradition of the “tragic mulatta” narrative, which—transplanted to the British context—calls for a more complex understanding of transatlantic reverberations of the plantation economy and the racial hierarchies and categories it left in its wake. While I do not mean to replicate an assumption of Annas racial difference, I see the comparative context of the “tragic mulatto” narratives as productive in teasing out the critique ot racial ideologies ot the plantation system that Voyage in the Dark presents.

Although interracial characters inhabited literature since antiquity, the “tragic mulatto” trope derives more specifically from the context of sentimental antislavery narratives in the U.S. In Neither Black Nor White Yet Both: Thematic Explorations of Interracial Literature, Werner Sollors traces the representational matrices of mixed race figures across several languages and genres starting with Greek myths and Biblical parables. He notes an increase in interracial themes since the late eighteenth century, but carefully distinguishes between the cliche representation of a mulatto’s tragic end—which he notices already in the various adaptations and rewritings of Joanna from John Gabriel Stedman’s Narrative of Five Years Expedition in Swiname (1796)—and the actual “tragic mulatto” trope. The essential difference lies for him in that the early interracial characters’ tragic plotlines follow from their status as slaves and thus property, while the tragic mulatto’s drama derives from their indeterminate race and being indentificd as non-white even though they lead lives of free white people (Sollors 207). Sollors’sdefinition of the “tragic mulatto” trope emphasizes that even if far away in time and space from the plantation, the characters who—like Rhys’s Anna—may also seem entirely white still have to deal with echoes of the racial ideologies of the plantation system. Many scholars of the Caribbean—Edouard Glissant, C.L.R. James, Sidney Mintz, Philip Curtin, and David Scott to mention a few—have postulated the plantation system as an essential template for understanding modernity. I turn to Glissant in particular here, because as his postulation of the concept of Relation that connects Africa, Europe and the Caribbean (that for him includes southern US as well) into a web ot filiations, he helps me theorize Rhys’ trans-Atlantic “tragic mulatta.” Because the Relation itself is difficult to define, Michael Dash translates it in a variety of idiomatic ways: creolization, cultural contact, cross-cultural relationships. Glissant writes, “Rhizomatic thought is the principle behind what I call the Poetics of Relation, in which each and every identity is extended through a relationship with the Other” (11). Opposed to a totalitarian rootcdncss, with its connotation ot unique origins, Glissant seeks for an alternative in Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s rhizome with its “enmeshed root system, a network spreading either in the ground or in the air” (11) to assert an existence of connections and influences that grow out of the plantation system. The imagery of rhizomatic connections and tangled webs of influence help me theorize both the distant geographical contexts that Voyage in the Dark engages and its fragmented form. Relation, with its confluence of time and space, helps elucidate also what Rhys saw as her main intention in the novel—described in a letter to Evelyn Scott—to explore the idea that “the past exists side by side with the present, not behind it; that what was—is” (Letters 24)…

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Red and White: Miss E. Pauline Johnson Tekahionwake and the Other Woman

Women’s Writing
Volume 8, Issue 3 (2001)
pages 359-374
DOI: 10.1080/09699080100200140

Anne Collett, Associate Professor of English Literature
University of Wollongong, Australia

This essay examines the dramatised conflictual relationship between “Red” and “White” selves in the performed and literary body of “half-blood” poet, Pauline Johnson Tekahionwake. “Half-blood”, as opposed to the more common but derogatory “half-breed”, was the term used by Pauline to indicate the divisive, yet ultimately creative, potential of the marriage between settler and indigenous cultures in the new Canadian nation of the 1890s and early twentieth century of which she herself was representative. Pauline Johnson’s understanding and representation of that dynamic relationship is charted through an analysis of selected short stories drawn from this period, including “A Red Girl’s Reasoning”, “As It Was in the Beginning” and “My Mother”.

“Forget that I was Pauline Johnson, but remember always that I was Tekahionwake, the Mohawk that humbly aspired to be the saga singer of her people.” [I] Ernest Thompson Scion, admirer and friend, recalls these words in introduction to a collection of Tekahionwake’s stories. Miss E. Pauline Johnson Tekahionwake was perhaps most famous in England and the USA as “The Iroquois Princess” and “poet advocate” for the “Red” people of America’s First Nations, but to Canadians she was also a beloved representative and cultured lady of their new confederacy. The daughter of an English gentlewoman and a Mohawk chief was not allowed to forget that she was Tekahionwake, even had she wanted to, but (contrary to her final request recalled by Seton) neither did she forget, nor allow others to forget, that she was Pauline Johnson. Her “half-blood” inheritance was the signature of her stage and literary career. Although better known during the last decade of the nineteenth century and first decade of the twentieth as a performance poet, she was also the author of many stories, published primarily, but not exclusively, for an audience of women and children. A number of these stories not only served to educate the settler population in the ancient civilisation and living culture of the indigenous…

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Editorial: The Illusion of Inclusion

Wasafiri
Volume 25, Issue 4 (2010)
pages 1-6
DOI: 10.1080/02690055.2010.510357

This special issue of Wasafiri – ‘Black Britain: Beyond Definition’ – focuses on writers who are of black and mixed heritage. Labelling us in this way can, of course, be problematic. The badge ‘black writer’ or ‘Black British writer’ or ‘postcolonial writer’ isn’t one many of us deliberately choose to wear. It has a homogenising, ghettoising effect. Why should the profession to which we belong always be qualified in this way? Martin Amis and Ian McKewan only ever get labelled ‘white male writers’ to draw attention to their role in the status quo. Most of the time they are simply ‘writers’ or ‘British writers’.

The label may be frustrating, but in this context it provides us with a convenient shorthand for assessing a literature sector to which we have always had limited access. Grouping everyone together in this way allows us to explore some important questions: What is Britain like for black people today, both in terms of the wider society and the literature sector? Who is writing what? Who is getting published? Who isn’t?

The answers we get reveal that the society we inhabit in 2010 is still far from egalitarian although, compared with some of our European neighbours, we do now enjoy a degree of integration that is positive and progressive. That said, at an organisational level, there is a subtle, often unconscious or unthinking discrimination that is deeply pernicious and alienating for those who are excluded by it. And this needs once again to become the focus of national debate.

…The Obama Effect

Ever since Barack Obama became US President, a noticeable shift has been taking place in the British media’s conversations about race. The ceiling, some decided, really is made of glass and not the reinforced concrete they’d previously assumed. The term ‘post-racial’ has started to be bandied around as if his singular success meant the sudden emergence of a meritocratic society here in the UK.

There is now a sense that those who still dare to mention the R-word are just pesky killjoys. Fingers point towards Obama or any number of black figureheads in this country. In the same way that feminism became a dirty word in the nineties with women declaring ‘I’m not a feminist but … ’, likewise with racism. It’s just not that cool any more to point it out…

…In today’s UK, 48% of Black Caribbean men and 34% of Black Caribbean women have white partners, and one in ten children lives in a mixed-race family (Platt 6). This suggests the triumph of love over loathing, integration over separation, connection over tribalism. Inter-racial couples are not pelted with pebbles by Outraged of Suburbia when they go for their Sunday passeggiata through the local park. Cute black babies are very on trend; so fashionable, in fact, that famous people travel many thousands of miles to adopt them. And we all know that, for a long time now, the pampered princes of our national sport, once a bastion of racism, are as black as they are white.

While there are many such pointers to a more inclusive society, the racial hierarchies and infrastructure still exist. We may have detected some subsidence in that creepy Victorian house, built on the proceeds of empire and overlooking the graveyard of slavery, but the wrecking ball ain’t smashed it down to the ground yet…

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Obama and the Politics of blackness: Antiracism in the “post-black” Conjuncture

Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics Culture and Society
Volume 12, Issue 4 (2010)
pages 313-322
DOI: 10.1080/10999949.2010.526046

Ben Pitcher, Lecturer in Sociology
University of Westminster, London

This article sets out think about some of the challenges to U.S. antiracism heralded by Barack Obama’s presidency. It begins by examining the relationship Obama negotiates with notions of blackness in his autobiographical writings, and it considers how this exemplifies what has been described as a “post-black” politics. It proceeds to discuss the insufficiency of critiques of “post-black” as having sold out a black political tradition, but it notes that these critiques reveal something of the changing significance of blackness as a form of antiracist practice. Considering how Obama represents a move in black politics from the margins to the mainstream, I argue that the President’s symbolic centrality undermines a conception of critical oppositionality hitherto implicit to the antiracist imaginary. Exploring how this challenges longstanding ideas about who “owns” or controls the antiracist struggle, I suggest that antiracism will need to move beyond accusations of betrayal if it is to account for and understand the profound ways in which Obama has transformed the entire field of U.S. race discourse.

To think about what Barack Obama’s presidency means for U.S. racial politics invariably involves considering his relationship to a politics of blackness. For some, Obama’s mixed-race transnational heritage means that he is grounded in ‘‘the multicultural and global reality of today’s world.’’ For others, Obama’s claim on blackness is delimited by his not having been born to the descendents of slaves. The complex and subtle criteria of identity claims made of Obama reveal something of the complexity of race in twenty-first-century America and exemplify Gary Younge’s observation that however marginal race might be to Obama’s message, it is nevertheless central to his meaning.

While of course Obama’s autobiographical writings cannot exhaust or provide a definitive answer to this meaning, it is notable that they reveal a distantiated relationship to the politics of blackness. The first paragraph to the 2004 preface of Dreams from My Father describes its author’s intention to communicate ‘‘the fluid state of identity’’ that characterizes the politics of race in contemporary America. Obama’s passage into a performative black male adolescence is archly self-conscious, the result of a ‘‘decision’’ rather than a question of necessity. Though he rightly acknowledges the inescapably determining power of race, Obama retains an ironic distance that resists an understanding of this determination as absolute. Even the final section of Dreams, which stages a trip to Kenya as a key biographical moment in Obama’s self-understanding, is undercut by an epilogue on cultural hybridity that refuses as a romantic illusion the search for an African authenticity…

…So what does Obama’s skillful negotiation of the politics of blackness mean for antiracism? Does Obama’s status as ‘‘a black man who doesn’t conform to the normal scripts for African-American identity’’ jeopardize his progressive potential, or is it a precondition of his success? Does Obama’s victory signal ‘‘the end of black politics,’’ or its radical reinvention?…

…For one thing, the immediate symbolic potency of the black president simply invalidates claims predicated on the explicit and straightforward marginalization of black people in America. Obama stands for the move of blackness from the margins to the mainstream. Obama was by no means the first black person to obtain access to a position of power, but his presidency represents a qualitatively new dimension; most important, it records a moment in U.S. racial politics when a critical mass of whites were prepared to cast their vote for a black person…

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The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory [Review: Zack]

American Nineteenth Century History
Volume 11, Issue 2 (2010)
pages 269-270
DOI: 10.1080/14664658.2010.481885

Naomi Zack, Professor of Philosophy
University of Oregon

The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory
Tavia Nyong’o
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009
Pp. 230. ISBNs 978 0 8166 5612 7 and 978 0 8166 5613 4

If The Amalgamation Waltz were not a 230-page book, published by a university press, complete with scholarly apparatus, readers might think that Alan Sokal was at it again, this time with the bad taste to caricature postmodern treatments of mixed race—as though mixed race did not already have a history of tragedy in fiction and biography. But alas, Tavia Nyong’o’s jargon-ridden exercise in “mixed-race theory” probably is the sincere but feverish reworking of a doctoral dissertation written under great stress, which it purports to be. Most readers, after reviving from the stupor induced by grappling with the first half of the introduction, would probably simply recycle the book unread and have done with it. But, I am heartened by the fact that mixed race has become a sufficiently respectable intellectual topic to support publication of even such a failed effort.

Nyong’o’s major theme appears to be that the idea of racial miscegenation enables certain errors in the mass political memory (which is something like a Jungian collective unconscious, only structured by anxiety). The idea of racial miscegenation leads to a “miscegenation of time.” When time is miscegenated, temporal order gets disorganized, so that what people imagine as A preceding B is in reality a case of B preceding A. Thus, the idea of mixed race is imagined to come after the idea of pure race. But in reality, the idea of mixed race comes first and the idea of pure race is constructed as a defense against the nightmarish chaos and danger evoked by the idea of mixed race. However, to put it this way might be too literal, because Nyongo writes, “My method employs the archive as a practice of ‘countermemory’ but without the pretense of using it to build a complete or coherent historical narrative” (p. 7). Indeed, such a narrative is not possible insofar as the “spurious issue” of mixed race/hybridity/amalgamation is not a thing but a performance that defers solution of racial problems into some future in which it (m-r/h/a) will transcend race.

Although Nyongo begins The Amalgamation Waltz by castigating Americans for the assumption that that the history of race in the U.S. offers the final meanings of race words, the four chapters of the book are largely restricted to American history. Chapter one, “The Mirror of Liberty,” is about representations of Crispus Attucks, a mixed-race patriot or insurgent who was killed by British troops in the Boston Massacre on 5 March 1770. Nyong’o weaves Attucks’s role as a symbol of unresolved racial injustice in colonial times with reflection on a book in the Wellcome Library in London that is falsely described as bound in the “Tanned Skin of the Negro whose Execution caused the War of Independence.” Nyong’o notes that some books were in fact bound in human skin, a practice called “anthropodermic bibliopegy” (p. 37). Chapter two, “In Night’s Eye,” begins with a nineteenth-century story about a traveler in a coach at night, who informs his companions that the idea of amalgamation is used by anti-abolitionists to frighten and shock abolitionists. This notion of moral panic, based on imagery of sexual disorder, is further developed throughout the chapter, and Nyong’o makes a lucid case that such imagery was used by both sides of the slavery…

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