Mixed Race Studies

Creole Renegades: Rhetoric of Betrayal and Guilt in the Caribbean Diaspora by Bénédicte Boisseron (review)

The Americas
Volume 72, Number 4, October 2015
pages 661-664

John Patrick Walsh, Assistant Professor of French
University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

In this outstanding book, Bénédicte Boisseron challenges received ideas on Caribbean literature and critical paradigms that have sedimented around them. Organized around individual trajectories and texts of “second-generation” Caribbean diasporic writers, the book argues that these authors resist the cultural obligation to Caribbeanness that enjoined an earlier generation to “write back” to the metropolitan center from the peripheral spaces of empire. Boisseron eschews this historical binarism in order to call attention to writers who have pulled up stakes from a “home” that has become a “new center” (p. 7). The oppositional stance they adopt is marked by less by political engagement, Boisseron contends, than by the desire to explore personal stories. The rejection of prescribed identities makes them “renegades.”

Boisseron anchors her use of “renegade” in C. L. R. James’s Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways, the study of Melville that calls attention to Ahab’s crew of isolatoes, or those “living on a separate continent of [their] own” (p. 8). Throughout, Boisseron moves between textual analysis and biography to frame the renegade as one who questions allegiance to the Caribbean. As the book unfolds, “renegade” shifts meaning according to the writer’s particular form of defection. Therefore, it becomes an umbrella term that encompasses the itineraries in question.

By arguing that local spaces of the Caribbean have developed their own centripetal power, Boisseron suggests that the so-called global turn of literary studies still has a way to go to break free of the colonial legacy of center and periphery. Boisseron draws on numerous schools of thought, from diaspora studies and postcolonial theory, to psychoanalysis and deconstruction, and her ability to distill a range of ideas is evidence that European theoretical models take on new life in the location of their translation. The book thus performs the very “decentering” of authority that it underscores as the hallmark of second-generation Caribbean writers.

The five chapters make for an engaging read. The clarity and consistency of Boisseron’s prose, and the balance it achieves between historical overview and close reading, make it suitable for both experts in the field and students new to these texts. The first chapter, “Anatole Broyard: Racial Betrayal and the Art of Being Creole,” explores the phenomenon of racial passing as an exemplary act of being Creole. In contrast to the book’s generally extensive use of primary written sources, this chapter is largely a study of the life of the long-time literary critic, including the biography penned by his daughter, Bliss Broyard, and the posthumous “outing” of Broyard by Henry Louis Gates Jr. For Boisseron, “the incompleteness of kinship is what makes the Creole, just like the passing subject, a born renegade” (p. 51).

Chapter 2, “Maryse Condé’s Histoire de la femme cannibale: Coming Out in the French Caribbean,” foregrounds Condé’s refusal to adhere to the critical norms of Postcolonial Studies. “Because she resists, while seemingly adopting, the postcolonial trend,” Boisseron writes, “Condé is strictly speaking a postcolonial renegade, or a ‘postcolonial antipostcolonial’” (p. 58). Condé’s most significant betrayal of Caribbean sensibilities is her portrayal of the macoumé, or the Creole term that refers to an unsayable homosexuality through its association with “the source of gossip (commère)” (p. 68). The trope of “coming out,” Boisseron concludes, “revealing the covert presence of Creole homosexuality, allows Condé to break open the walls of sedentariness in the French Antilles” (p. 85). Given the enormous critical attention to Condé, the originality of Boisseron’s reading is a rare feat.

Chapter 3, “Parasitic and Remittance Diaspora’” turns to two writers of the Haitian dyaspora, Edwidge Danticat and Dany Laferrière. The conflict between the perception of resident writers and those on the outside is a complicated issue that owes to a rigid idea of geographic and affective borders. In an arguably cynical approach, Boisseron describes the texts of Danticat and Laferrière as “an uncertain mixture of opportunism . . . and remittance,” or a kind of cultural repayment that the expatriate makes to the native country (p. 128). Yet her close readings betray a more nuanced way of thinking about the texts of these immigrant artists.

Chapter 4, “V. S. Naipaul and Jamaica Kincaid: Rhetoric…

Raising Mixed Race: Seattle author shows realities facing multiracial children

The Seattle Globalist
2015-12-09

Sharon H. Chang

The day my mixed race son was born in 2009 was a turning point for the way I thought about race.

Despite living for decades as a multiracial person myself, suddenly I started asking deeper questions about race, racism, and mixedness. I realized I needed to move beyond reflecting just on self-identity, and start placing our family in critical conversation with a national global politic. What was our relationship as mixed race Asian peoples to a planet devastated by European colonialism and to our home, a colonized nation, devastated by four centuries of violent white racism?

How would my son experience this world? What would he learn about himself? And how would he grow to contribute to its transformation, or perpetuate its ongoing devastation?…

Read the entire article here.

A Romance of the Republic

University Press of Kentucky
2014-07-11 (Originally published in 1867)
464 pages
6 x 9
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8131-0928-2
Web PDF ISBN: 978-0-8131-4910-3

Lydia Maria Child (1802-1880)

Edited by:

Dana D. Nelson, Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English
Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee

A Romance of the Republic, published in 1867, was Lydia Maria Child’s fourth novel and the capstone of her remarkable literary career. Written shortly after the Civil War, it offered a progressive alternative to Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Writer, magazine publisher and outspoken abolitionist, Child defied the norms of gender and class decorum in this novel by promoting interracial marriage as a way blacks and whites could come to view each other with sympathy and understanding. In constructing the tale of fair-skinned Rosa and Flora Royal—daughters of a slaveowner whose mother was also the daughter of a slaveowner—Child consciously attempted to counter two popular claims: that racial intermarriage was “unnatural” and that slavery was a benevolent institution. But Child’s target was not merely racism. Her characters are forced both to reconsider their attitudes toward “white” and “black” and to question the very foundation of the patriarchal society in which they live.

Mixed race identity and counselling

Therapy Today
Volume 26, Issue 10 (December 2015)
pages 16-20

Nicola Codner
Leeds, Yorkshire, United Kingdom

Nicola Codner describes her own identity as a mixed race woman and calls on counsellors to learn more about the psychosocial needs of our third largest ethnic minority group

I felt compelled to submit an article to Therapy Today because I’m aware that, as a mixed race woman (of black Jamaican, Nigerian and white British heritage), every time I pick up a copy of the journal I’m scanning for articles on mixed race identity and counselling/mental health. I rarely find anything on the topic and when I do it tends to be a mere few lines or paragraphs that only acknowledge the lack of attention paid to this group. This is disappointing and frustrating. Mixed race identity and issues are so invisible in the counselling world, despite the fact that this section of the population is the fastest growing and the third largest ethnic minority in the UK.

Dialogue around issues affecting mixed race children, adults and families, is increasing slightly in the UK but it is still insubstantial. I notice in the US (where the mixed race population is also quickly increasing) this is a different story. Research on the mixed race population is more abundant and counsellors are being made aware that they need to be able to consider the needs of this part of the population and be able to show specific competence in working with this group. Research in the UK is minimal and counselling books that focus exclusively on mixed race people are absent. As noted by Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, social policy makers are taking a slow-paced approach to including mixed race Britons, despite the fact we are the country with the most mixed relationships in the developed world.

It was only in 2001 that the racial category of mixed race was added to the National Census of Population. The term is most commonly understood as applying to people who have one white parent and one parent from an ethnic minority. However, this traditional understanding of the term excludes those who have parents of different races where neither parent is white. Again, there is more dialogue around this in the US where it is more commonly acknowledged that our general understanding of who is included in the mixed race category needs to broaden. It’s also important to acknowledge that not all people who have parents of different races will identify as mixed race, which means the mixed race population could be larger in the UK than is currently observed (as an example, some people of black and white parentage may choose to identify solely as black). In addition some mixed race people are of more than two races which is often ignored…

Read the entire article here.

Reflections on Multiracial Identity on Another Thanksgiving Passed

Black Agenda Report: News, information and analysis from the black left.
2015-12-01

Danny Haiphong

The U.S. imperial domain floats on raw force and fairy tales. One myth “paints the U.S. as a safe haven for people of different backgrounds instead of the genocidal settler state that it is.” Another tale holds that multi-racial identity “carries with it new experiences with racism not yet easily understood or dealt with.” The truth is, the U.S.is racist to the core, and “proponents of multiracial identity possess little interest in solidarity.”

Over the last few years, much discussion has occurred in the US corporate media around the demographic shift in the US. Reports have verified that white Americans will be minorities in the general population after 2042. This impending change has struck fear in the eyes of the racist, rightwing sector of society and romanticism in the minds of the racist, white liberal sector of society. The right has responded with racist terror while self-identified white liberals have found new ways to boast of the so-called “progress” of US capitalist society. Multiracial identity has been a key concept recently devised to sanitize the racial political order of the US.

The politics of multiracial identity are a product of the same liberal mythology so embedded in the Thanksgiving holiday. This ideology, promoted by the liberal sector of the ruling class, celebrates Thanksgiving as proof that the US is a “nation of immigrants.” Thanksgiving positions the US as a cooperative society. The fairy tale paints the US as a safe haven for people of different backgrounds instead of the genocidal settler state that it is.

Similarly, multiracial identity has been featured in corporate media such as the New York Times as a product of an increasingly tolerant, diverse US Empire. The US corporate media is quick to cite how more self-identified “Americans” are marrying between racial groups and how migrations of peoples from Africa, Asia, and Latin America have increased as well. These developments are indeed fact. However, the past and present exploitation that underlies their meaning is left out of the discussion in the same manner that the continued plight and resistance of indigenous peoples is left out of the Thanksgiving narrative…

Read the entire article here.

Writing Reconstruction: Racial Fluidity and National Reunion in A Romance of the Republic

ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance
Volume 61, Number 4, 2015 (No. 241 O.S.)
pages 631-666
DOI: 10.1353/esq.2015.0017

Lori Robison, Associate Professor of English
University of North Dakota

Speaking to a nation traumatized by the divisive war and anxious to find reunification, Lydia Maria Child, with her 1867 novel A Romance of the Republic, presents a portrait of a new national family that transcends the narrow racial and regional identifications of the antebellum past. Carolyn Karcher, Child’s biographer, notes that the novel was very consciously written to address the contemporary challenges of Reconstruction: “Written against the backdrop of the betrayal Johnson was engineering of all the promises the war had seemingly endorsed—genuine emancipation for African Americans; recognition of the indispensable role they had played as soldiers, spies, and auxiliaries; and their incorporation as equal citizens into a truly reconstructed Union—A Romance of the Republic insistently rehearses the history that its white audience was so rapidly forgetting.” This characterization of Child’s motivations for writing the novel hints at its complex rhetorical situation: the novel delves back into the recent, pre-war past to revisit the arguments against slavery, as a means of making the case for more progressive Reconstruction policies in the present and future. Worried, rightfully, that Reconstruction would undo the potential that emancipation had brought for a more egalitarian society, Child faced a contradictory writing task: she needed to represent a future in which the national “house divided” has been re-united while, simultaneously, not letting her readers forget the national divisiveness created by slavery in the recent past.

It is these contradictory tasks, I believe, that led Child to choose the sentimental romance as the genre through which to write this early novel of Reconstruction. To address the threat of cultural amnesia, the novel, which is set almost entirely in the antebellum period, uses appeals to sympathy to undermine slavery—just as do Child’s earlier abolitionist texts. Yet to also avoid entrenching resistant readers in the past, the novel, at the same time, uses the romance’s insistence on union to represent a more promising future. Conflating domestic union with national (re)union (a conflation signaled by the novel’s title), Child gives her readers a means of imagining a new post-war nation. The novel’s final scenes take place in the days following the end of the Civil War and it is in these final pages that the “republic” of the title is imagined in the new domestic space that heroines Rosa and Flora have achieved for themselves. Though it does not end with a wedding, the novel nonetheless does end like the traditional romance plot, with the promise of a new, united family and continuing, utopian domesticity.

Rhetorically, then, Child’s choice of genre makes a great deal of sense. My interest, however, in exploring A Romance of the Republic is to better understand how the literature of Reconstruction—even those texts with very progressive politics—would ultimately pave the way for the pro-Confederate romances that became so popular by the turn of the century. Post-Reconstruction literary representations of the regional and racial politics of national reunification came increasingly to be lodged in the genre of the sentimental romance. Published early in Reconstruction, A Romance of the Republic initiates this trend, largely because of its transitional status as an abolitionist text addressing post-abolition issues. As June Howard reminds us, “empathy and sympathy have different politics at different moments, and at any given moment are likely to have mixed and complicated politics,” and A Romance uses many of the rhetorical strategies that Child and other abolitionists had used so effectively in the fight against slavery, although the post-war fight for racial equality had very different political stakes. The hallmarks of the sentimental romance, sympathetic connection built through an appeal to union and family, effectively undermined slavery by asserting the humanity of those who had been enslaved. However, this sympathetic appeal also, I believe, worked to fix identities at a time in which our understanding of racial and national identities could have been more fluid and thus could have developed quite differently than they did. In…

The link between “tourism” and “settler colonialism” in Hawai’i

Matador Network
2015-07-29

Bani Amor

Maile Arvin is a Native Hawaiian feminist scholar who writes about Native feminist theories, settler colonialism, decolonization, and race and science in Hawai‘i and the broader Pacific. She is currently a University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in Ethnic Studies at UCR and will be officially joining the department as an assistant professor in July. She is part of the Critical Ethnic Studies Association working group and a member of Hinemoana of Turtle Island, a Pacific Islander feminist group of activists, poets, and scholars located in California and Oregon. You can find some of her academic writing here.

Bani Amor: Tell us about yourself, the work that you do, and how your identities play into that work.

Maile Arvin: So I’m Native Hawaiian, and my family is from Waimanalo, a small town on the windward side of O’ahu. I’m an academic – I research and teach about race and indigeneity in Hawai’i, the larger Pacific and elsewhere. Being Native Hawaiian grounds my work, motivates me to write about Native Hawaiian lives and histories in complicated, respectful ways.

One of my current projects is working with Hinemoana of Turtle Island, a group of Native Hawaiian and other Pacific Islander feminist women, many of whom are also academics but also poets, activists, artists. We support each other in the academic world and are accountable to each other. We talk to each other a lot about current issues that affect Pacific Islanders, usually in news that erases the existence of Indigenous Pacific Islanders altogether, and sometimes write up responses on our blog, muliwai. We’re currently working on a response to the movie Aloha. Or maybe more about the criticism of the movie that is entirely focused on Emma Stone’s casting.

Bani Amor: Word. That leads me to my next question: I often find that travel media and tourism are complicit in settler colonialism, in that it still purports an archaic, false image of indigenous peoples as smiling caricatures who are ready, willing and able to serve at the beck and call of the (white) tourist. Any idea why this is especially the case for Hawai’i?

Maile Arvin: For Hawai’i, because it is actually a U.S. state, there is this incredible sense of entitlement that white Americans in particular feel to being at home in Hawai’i. Since World War II in particular, and the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, there was this narrative of Hawai’i as being the place that militarily makes the rest of the U.S. safe. And along with that, there is also a need to justify and naturalize U.S. military occupation of these islands that are over 2000 miles away from the U.S. continent. So Hawai’i becomes this feminine place in need of the masculine U.S. military to safeguard both Hawai’i and the rest of the U.S. And Native Hawaiian women in particular become these symbols of a happy, paradisical place, a place where white military men will have fun, will get their own Native Hawaiian girl…

Read the entire interview here.