Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

What [Robert] Fish overlooks is Japan’s policymaking process of embedding racism through “typifying race.” That is to say, how the acceptance and normalization of differentiation (i.e., the assumption that “mixed-blood children” are different because they look different) in fact legitimizes and systematizes racism (this is why scholars of racism generally do not use generic racialized categorizations such as “Black”, “White”, “Asian” etc. without proper problematization and contextualization). In fact, as argued earlier, the racialization process need not involve biological “race” at all: the act of differentiating, “othering,” and subordinating can be due to any physical marker that has a social stigma attached to it (e.g., hair textures, narrower eyes, cleft palates, skin blemishes). Notwithstanding the Japanese government’s (constructive) postwar attempts to enforce equality for “mixed-blood children” at the Japanese elementary school level, the fact that “mixed-blood children” were officially categorized, “othered,” and singled out for differential treatment on an official level in fact invited more attention to the issue of blood in Japanese society. In effect, especially in an atmosphere of impressionable youths like a schoolyard, this typification could in fact have created and reinforced mixed-bloodedness as a stigma, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy that encouraged the very racialization that government policies were trying to avoid. Thus the sociology of racism itself should have been more fully problematized and discussed in Fish’s research.

Debito Arudou, “Japan’s Under-Researched Visible Minorities: Applying Critical Race Theory to Racialization Dynamics in a Non-White Society,” Washington University Global Studies Law Review, Volume 14, Issue 4: Global Perspectives on Colorism (Symposium Edition), 2015. 706. http://openscholarship.wustl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1552&context=law_globalstudies.

Stonequist’s Concept of “The Marginal Man” in Langston Hughes’ Play Mulatto

Posted in Articles, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, United States on 2012-09-29 23:30Z by Steven

Stonequist’s Concept of “The Marginal Man” in Langston Hughes’ Play Mulatto

International Journal of Applied Linguistics & English Literature
ISSN 2200-3592 (Print), ISSN 2200-3452 (Online)
Volume 1, Number 4 (September 2012)
pages 125-130

Farshid Nowrouzi Roshnavand
University of Tehran, Iran

Rajabali Askarzadeh Torghabeh, Assistant Professor of Letters and Humanities
Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, Iran

Born with the inception of the slave trade, interracial mixing has always been a moot point throughout the history of the United States. In America’s racist climate, the mulatto offspring of every interracial relationship was deemed by the dominant white society to be born of transgression and thus was marginalized and disenfranchised as an alleged tainter of white “pure blood” and a threat to the societal system of structural positions. Facing discrimination and injustice like black Americans, white-black mulattoes also suffered from not belonging to a definite racial group. This duality of a mixed-blood’s life has grabbed the attention of many scholars including Everett Verner Stonequist who discussed the fragile subalternized status of the “marginal man” in an antagonistic environment while he rejects and craves for both of his racial ancestries at the same time. Envisioning a three-phase life-cycle for a mulatto, Stonequist maintained that the mulatto has either to conform to the status quo and survive or defy the power structures and embrace, mostly unfavorable, consequences. This paper aims to apply Stonequist’s concept of “marginal man” to Langston Hughes’ play Mulatto (1935) and tries to show how the alienated and rootless protagonist is inevitably precipitated into death and destruction.

Read the entire article here.

Tags: Everett Stonequist, Everett V. Stonequist, Everett Verner Stonequist, Farshid N. Roshnavand, Farshid Nowrouzi Roshnavand, Farshid Roshnavand, International Journal of Applied Linguistics & English Literature, Langston Hughes, Rajabali A. Torghabeh, Rajabali Askarzadeh Torghabeh, Rajabali Torghabeh

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Mixed Race Studies

Stonequist’s Concept of “The Marginal Man” in Langston Hughes’ Play Mulatto

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