Mixed Race Studies

Allyson Hobbs, A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life [Varlack Review]

49th Parallel
Issue 37 (2015-11-19)
pages 66-68
ISSN: 1753-5894

Christopher Allen Varlack, Lecturer
Department of English
University of Maryland

Allyson Hobbs, A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014. 382 pp.

Popularized in part during the Harlem Renaissance of the early to mid-twentieth century, the passing novel, including James Weldon Johnson’s 1912 The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, Walter White’s 1926 Flight, and Jessie Redmon Fauset’s 1928 Plum Bun: A Novel Without a Moral, has received a wide range of scholarship. Elaine K. Ginsberg’s 1996 study, Passing and the Fictions of Identity explores the politics of passing from the early experiences of African slaves through the present day while Gayle Wald’s 2000 Crossing the Line: Racial Passing in Twentieth-Century U.S. Literature and Culture explores cinematic and literary representations of passing produced in the United States. Together, these works reveal the struggle of an African-American community marginalized and disenfranchised within an American society defined by its Jim Crow culture and racial hierarchy. Under these circumstances, racial passing is most often an attempt to obtain what Cheryl L. Harris terms “whiteness as property” as a result of the very limited opportunities and restricted social mobility afforded to blacks. Such scholarship provides insight into the historical function of passing and the ways in which the passing novel brings to the forefront of the American consciousness an increased awareness of its changing socio-racial landscape.

In her critical work, appropriately titled, A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life, Allyson Hobbs seeks to add a new dimension to this existing conversation, her book is “an effort to recover those lives” lost in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as “countless African Americans [knowingly] passed as white, leaving behind families, friends, and communities without any available avenue for return” (4). Hobbs’ work, a welcomed addition to the field, thus uses the lives of the everyday participants of passing to show not only what they gained from assuming their white identities—economic opportunity, social mobility, increased acceptance, etc.—but also what they lost along the way—the all-important connection to family and community that had long sustained the African-American people in the midst of cultural oppression…

Read the entire review here.

PART 1: Dispatches from Dream City: Zadie Smith and Barack Obama

Electric Lit
2010-10-19

The Editor

Reading and re-reading Zadie Smith’s spookily empathetic essay about Dreams of My Father and the natural linguistic flexibility of the biracial, upwardly mobile figure, the inevitable thought occurred to me: Is Zadie Smith the Barack Obama of literature?

Consider the parallels between the two: both are biracial (Zadie Smith had a white English father and a black Jamaican mother). Both are precocious strivers who came from somewhat déclassé origins and rose to become shining examples of their respective countries’ meritocratic aspirations (Zadie Smith grew up in a council flat, the English equivalent of a housing project, and received a scholarship to Oxford). Both give evidence of having been closer to their white parent. Both seem to promise liberation from the bad faith that has existed on both sides of the color line since the start of the post-civil rights era. Both are figures who because they smoothly speak the language of progressivism (in Smith’s case, the language of progressivism is the language of avant-garde literature and abstruse academic theory) appear–or in the case of Obama, appeared–less cautious and conservative than they really are. Changing My Mind is the title of Zadie Smith’s collection of what she calls ‘occasional essays;’ it might as well be titled ‘Only Connect,’ to use the credo of her beloved E.M.Forster’s Howards End–like Forster and like Obama, Zadie Smith is a builder of bridges and a reconciler of the seemingly irreconcilable.

There is a remarkable essay, “Two Directions for the Novel,” which is a kind of Beer Summit for contemporary fiction: on one side of the table is Joseph O’Neill, author of the Gatsbyesque 9/11 novel Netherland, on the other side is Tom McCarthy, writer of manifestos (still, after a century, a prerequisite for avant-garde credentials) and author of the astringently difficult novel Remainder…

Read the part 1 of the article here. Read part 2 here.

The Quadroon; or, A Lover’s Adventures In Louisiana

Robert M. DeWitt
1856
430 pages

Captain Mayne Reid (1818-1883)

Read the entire book here.

“I’ve got a piece coming out for Buzzfeed about the word mulatto. I think that’s a good word to start using more often. People don’t like the word, but they can’t point to why, or they think it’s a reference to a mule. But the word is actually an Arabic word referencing people of mixed heritage. It predates the word for mule. Historically, it’s the word we used for people of mixed race in this country. And the thing about words like mixed and biracial is that they’re completely vague. They don’t make much sense. Most black and white people who consider themselves biracial, their race is listed legally and socially as black. Plus bi- doesn’t work because there are other races mixed in there, too. Part of the thing that worries me about the biracial movement is that it can be ahistoric. And as I said the vast majority of African-Americans are of mixed racial descent. So by the definitions they’re using, every African-American is pretty much biracial. It would be a miracle if they did a test and there weren’t some European poking in. In my view, mulatto acknowledges that there’s a larger history. And for me, the black and white mixed experience is part of my African-American experience. I still consider myself African-American, just mixed African-American. It’s like, if you have a Dad whose Irish, you’d be Irish, and nobody would debate that just because your Mom was Italian. But for African-Americans, we have these rigid ways of looking at the issue. We’ve inherited these preconceived notions.” —Mat Johnson

Dwyer Murphy, “Pitching Chaos, an interview with Mat Johnson, author of Loving Day,” Electric Lit, May 26, 2015. http://electricliterature.com/pitching-chaos-an-interview-with-mat-johnson-author-of-loving-day/.

Pitching Chaos, an interview with Mat Johnson, author of Loving Day

Electric Lit
2015-05-26

Dwyer Murphy

This week marks the release of Loving Day, the new novel from Mat Johnson, author of Pym, Drop, Hunting in Harlem, Incognegro, and others. Johnson and I spoke last week on Skype. I caught him in his car, heading home from a school tour, and we continued our chat as he walked across the campus of the University of Houston, where he’s a faculty member in the creative writing program. Johnson has an energetic, incisive way of speaking. He works historical analysis, social observation, literary critique and wicked one-liners into the span of a sentence or two, always with the kind of conversational ease that makes you feel like he’s been mulling things over for a while and you were just the person he was hoping to see. We talked about race and culture in Philadelphia, prioritizing entertainment in literature, fatherhood, the book community on Twitter, and “the idea of being a straight male interacting with the feminine” (yes – sex – but other stuff, too…).

Dwyer Murphy: Over the course of your career, you’ve shifted between novels, graphic novels, comics, and non-fiction. With Loving Day, you’re back to the novel. How do you decide which medium to work with? Does the story dictate the format?

Mat Johnson: Usually it starts with the idea. I would say I’m a novelist first, but if the idea doesn’t fit into a novel, then I look for other ways to tell it. The graphic novel is kind of my way of doing a short story. I don’t usually write short stories, but I’ve found that pieces that are about the length of a story and have a strong visual aspect tend to work really well as graphic novels, so that’s how I’ll tell those particular stories…

Read the entire interview here.

My white father and Black mother both encouraged me to be Black, to embrace Black, both as a label and as a way of being part of the world. To claim the Black community as my own. To them this was an act of resistance against a society that would devalue Black people and Blackness as a concept. But it was also an act of love for me, a gift to be part of this incredible community that fuels phenomenal intellectual and artistic culture all over the world.

Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, “Hold Fast to Blackness,” Medium, July 29, 2015. https://medium.com/@chanda/hold-fast-to-blackness-3e4fa529917d.

“Many people portray the history of race in the United States as the rise of the “one drop of blood” rule. We have made too much of this. It was not the one-drop rule that kept the edifice of Jim Crow so strong. Racism could work through many different rules about ancestry, and it did. It could work even with a great deal of racial mixture. Just because more people are marrying across color lines today doesn’t mean race or racism are things of the past.”—Ariela J. Gross

Gilien Silsby, “Renowned Legal Historian Discusses Race in America,” Gould School of Law News (University of Southern California), October 29, 2015. http://gould.usc.edu/press/article.cfm?newsid=4236.

The Octoroon, a Tragic Mulatto Tale of the Old South

Jubilo! The Emancipation Century
2011-01-23

Alan Skerrett, Jr, Editor
Washington, D.C.

The Octoroon is a tragic mulatto play by Irish playwright and actor Dion Boucicault. It opened on Broadway in 1859, just a few years before the American Civil War. The play was based on Mayne Reid’s novel, The Quadroon, and the incidents relating to the murder of the slave in Albany Fonblanque’s novel, The Filibuster…

…The play centers around its heroine Zoe, a Louisiana octoroon in the pre-Civil War era. An octoroon is a person who has one biracial grandparent, while the other three grandparents are white. An octoroon is the child of a white parent and a quadroon parent. A quadroon is the child of a white parent and a biracial parent.

Octoroons are very often light enough to appear white. However, under the era’s one-drop rule, they were considered black. Additionally, any child born to a slave was automatically considered a slave. So, an octoroon born to a quadroon mother, where the quadroon mother was born to a biracial slave mother, was herself a slave…

Read the entire review here.

The Old Neighborhood, A Novel

Curbside Splendor Publishing
April 2014
502 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-1940430003

Bill Hillmann

Bill Hillmann’s debut novel, The Old Neighborhood, is the story of teenager Joe Walsh, the youngest in a large, mixed-race family living in Chicago. After Joe witnesses his older brother commit a gangland murder, his friends and family drag him down into a pit of violence that reaches a bloody impasse when his elder sister begins dating a rival gang member. The Old Neighborhood is both a brutal tale of growing up tough in a mean city, and a beautiful harkening to the heartbreak of youth.

We Must Be Alive: Among the Wild Mulattos & Other Tales by Tom Williams

Electric Lit
2015-11-13

Rosie Clarke

In his 1991 hit song, Black or White, Michael Jackson meditates on racial equality, singing, “I’m not going to spend/My life being a color.” However, Jackson’s well-documented, complicated relationship with his African American appearance speaks to the contrary. In a way, Jackson’s transformation from his natural skin tone to an eerie, bleached white speaks not just of his profound personal battle with identity, but a broader problem in America as a whole. The simple fact is, that as a result of systematic white supremacy, many African Americans do spend their lives “being a color.” This troubling issue forms the central motif of Kentucky-born writer and academic Tom Williams’ short story collection, Among the Wild Mulattos & Other Tales.

The burdens of oppression, violence, and inequality shouldered by black Americans weigh heavy. But how are bi or multiracial people affected—the shades of grey, if you will, in the simplified divisions of ‘black’ and ‘white’—and how are they recognized and represented in cultural phenomena like literature? Here, Williams attempts to address these matters in their multifarious forms…

…Author of The Mimic’s Own Voice and Don’t Start Me Talkin’, and currently Chair of English at Kentucky’s Morehead State University, Williams explores in detail the experience of biracial Americans in a contemporary environment that claims, albeit falsely, to be ‘post-racial.’ The eponymous ‘mulatto’ is a term traditionally denoting a person with one black and one white parent, or sometimes referring to someone with mixed black and white ancestry. Not commonly used today, mulatto is regarded as at best archaic and at worst a racial slur, which is reasonable considering the etymology of the word is based in the Latin mūlus, or mule, the infertile offspring of a horse and donkey.

Perhaps unsurprising given his own mixed race heritage, Williams is explicitly concerned with representations of biracial identity, using fiction to consider the ways in which biracial individuals navigate a world that is unsure whether to treat them as black or white. The majority of these stories are located in the Southern and Midwestern states, where racism remains rife, and racial tension is high. One character, in ‘Who Among Us Knows the Route to Heaven?,’ describes his reception as a biracial child in 1970s Ohio as “(o)dder than two-headed calves, stranger than Uri Geller,” and when watching TV at that time, that “(n)ever once did I see a face or family that looked like mine.” It is this alienation that Williams is most curious about, and the steps some biracial people feel forced to take to in order to counteract it…

Read the entire review here.