Mixed Race Studies

Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Nella Larsen’s Passing: An Exploration of Performed Identity

President’s Writing Awards (2019)
Boise State University, Boise, Idaho
2019

Aly Sebright

Aly Sebright

Currently in its 37th year, the President’s Writing Awards contest honors undergraduate writing at Boise State.

My name is Alyson Sebright. I was born in Boise and grew up in Nampa, where I still reside. I’m currently a Junior majoring in English with an emphasis in Literature here at Boise State, with plans to study abroad in Stirling, Scotland this coming Fall of 2019. I chose to study literature because of my deep passion for storytelling, not only in telling my own stories but better understanding those of others. I believe wholeheartedly that sharing stories can change the world and for that reason I study literature with the intention of one day working in the publishing field as a developmental fiction editor. After graduation I am planning to pursue a graduate degree, either through a Fulbright program or a graduate school here in the States. When I’m not studying, I can usually be found loitering around the Writing Center with my coworkers, doing photography around town, or working on my latest creative writing project.

Nella Larsen’s novel, Passing, centers around the experience of two biracial women whose identities are primarily performative as they navigate life with the privilege of “passing” as White. Through this narrative, Larsen suggests that both racial and gender/sexual identities are as largely performative as they are inherent. Passing explores the ideas of both these identities as they exist in a world where passing is possible. Larsen calls into question the very nature of such concepts and their intersections: how identity shapes the experiences of individuals, and how those individuals shape those identities in turn.

The novel evaluates racial identity in several ways, but centers upon the socially-enforced performative nature of biracialism. In one of the opening scenes, Irene is waited upon in a rooftop cafe where she is passing as White in order to exist within the space and receive the service she desires. Larsen explains of Irene: “Never, when she was alone, had they [White people] even remotely seemed to suspect that she was a Negro” (Larsen 8). This is one of the first moments in which the reader sees Irene engage in the activity of “passing”, and it emphasizes the nature of race as a performative identity in the case of “mulatto” or lighter skinned Black individuals, whose biracial identity is largely ignored, forcing such individuals to “choose” to perform one race or another. As one scholar explains: “the act of passing both subverts racial categories and reinforces them, employing the logic that people of mixed ancestry are ‘really’ black but pretend to be white” (Nisetich 350). In this moment, Irene’s choice to pass, while it does afford her the desired effect of being treated as a White citizen, necessitates her to temporarily deny her racial identity. This choice is inherently ironic, as Irene becomes obsessed with the idea of racial “loyalty” as the novel continues, in relation to her perceptions of Clare’s decision to pass as White…

Read the entire essay here.

He passed as a white student at U-M — but was actually college’s first black enrollee

Detroit Free Press
2019-10-19

Micah Walker

Tylonn J. Sawyer, 42 of Detroit, works on the mural he’s been painting inside the University of Michigan, Modern Languages Building on campus in Ann Arbor on Saturday, October 19, 2019. The mural titled “First Man: Samuel Codes Watson (Acrylic)” is dedicated to the first African-American to attend the University of Michigan, Samuel Codes Watson. In 1853, Samuel Codes Watson was the first African American student admitted to the [University of] Michigan. (Photo: Eric Seals, Eric Seals/Detroit Free Press)

In 1853, Samuel Codes Watson became the first black student admitted to the University of Michigan at a time where higher education for African Americans was nearly impossible.

Studying to become a doctor, Watson would go on to receive his M.D. from Cleveland Medical College in 1857, being one of the first black people to do so. He later became Detroit’s first elected African-American city official and the city’s richest property owner by 1867.

Now, Tylonn Sawyer is bringing more awareness to Watson’s story through a work of art.

The Detroit artist is working with two U-M students on a mural to honor Watson. He’s spent the last two weekends painting inside U-M’s Modern Language Building. The mural was to be completed Saturday.

The project is part of Sawyer’s residency at the Institute for the Humanities, which will include his exhibition, “White History Month Vol. 1,” and a series of student engagement opportunities…

…”I was trying to find something not too heavy-handed, but something that could fit the theme (of the exhibit) and then it dawned on me, I wanted to know who was the first black person to attend the school,” he said.

However, since Watson was of mixed race, he passed as white during his two years at U-M. Fortunately for Sawyer, that fact made the doctor more compelling to paint for “White History.”

“That fascinates me that there was a black person who had white privilege and was cognizant of his ethnicity,” he said. “When you really think about it, he kinda wasn’t a black person when he was there. That’s such a juxtaposition for me.”…

Read the entire article here.

There Will Be No More Daughters, Poems

Northwestern University Press
2019-10-15
120 pages
Trim size 6 x 9
Trade Paper ISBN: 978-1-941423-03-5

Christine Larusso

At once sharp and tender, this debut collection from Christine Larusso (winner of the Madeleine P. Plonsker Emerging Writers Residency Prize) overflows with all the sorrows and ecstasies, the violations and acts of revenge, of girlhood and women’s coming-of-age. Set against the landscape of Southern California, where wide, wild expanses mingle with segregated sprawl, written from the viewpoint of a woman in a multiracial family, There Will Be No More Daughters has one foot planted in the firm realities of patriarchal domination, racial unbelonging, sex, death, and intergenerational alcoholism—and another in vivid flights of dream and dissociation.

Refusing Historical Amnesia: Emily Raboteau, Danzy Senna, and the American South

English Language Notes
Volume 57, Issue 2 (2019-10-01)
pages 99-113
DOI: 10.1215/00138282-7716184

Nicole Stamant, Associate Professor of English
Agnes Scott College, Decatur, Georgia

Performing what Michele Elam calls “a refusal of historical amnesia,” Danzy Senna and Emily Raboteau expose how social justice and hospitality are constructed in and around what Pierre Nora calls lieux de mémoire. Engaging particular sites of memory in the American South—places with national and personal significance—Raboteau and Senna negotiate and interrogate the interstitial spaces of racial ambiguity, liminality, and invisibility as they uncover different modes of commemoration and fend off historical forgetting. Writing about their experiences as biracial African Americans, Raboteau and Senna show readers how memorialization of black southern experience connects with communal or inherited familial memories. Their considerations of memory, and the attendant concerns about subjectivity and forgetting, demonstrate the central place of testimony to mnemonic restitution. In so doing, they also expose new ways to engage trauma: through the affect of what Lauren Berlant describes as “crisis ordinariness.”

Read or purchase the article here.

Two new stamps mark 50 years of Thin Lizzy

The Journal.ie
2019-10-07

Sean Murray

Queues formed at the GPO earlier for fans to get their hands on the new stamps.

AN POST HAS today launched two new stamps to mark fifty years of legendary Irish rock band Thin Lizzy.

Phil Lynott’s daughters Sarah and Cathleen, his grandchildren and ex-wife Caroline were on hand to unveil the new stamps earlier today.

An Post said that queues formed at the GPO in Dublin today with fans snapping up the collector’s items.

One of them features a portrait of Lynott himself by artist Jim Fitzpatrick while the other features the album artwork from Black Rose…

Read the entire article here.

Crossing the racial line: The fluidity vs. fixedness of racial identity

Self and Identity
Published online: 2019-09-04
DOI: 10.1080/15298868.2019.1662839

Payton A. Small, Graduate Student
Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences
University of California, Santa Barbara

Brenda Major, Distinguished Professor
Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences
University of California, Santa Barbara

Five studies investigated perceptions of individuals whose identity claims violate societal ascriptions of group membership. Studies 1–3 showed that perceivers dislike targets whose claimed race/ethnicity does not match either of their parent’s racial/ethnic ancestry, delegitimize their identity claims, and deny their claimed identity relative to targets whose claimed race/ethnicity matches at least one of their parents’ race/ethnicity backgrounds. Study 4 showed that mismatched religious identities are not similarly devalued, suggesting that perceived misrepresentation of racial/ethnic identity holds special significance as a violation of social norms. Study 5 found that racial essentialism was associated with increased disparagement of targets with two White parents who claim a Black identity, but not of targets with two Black parents who claim a White identity.

Read or purchase the article here.

I am Multiracial: Predictors of Multiracial identification strength among mixed ancestry individuals

Self and Identity
Published online: 2019-06-29
DOI: 10.1080/15298868.2019.1635522

Jasmine B. Norman, Graduate Assistant
Department of Psychology
University of Utah

Jacqueline M. Chen, Assistant Professor of Social Psychology
University of Utah

Research has yet to examine variability in how strongly individuals claim the unconventional Multiracial identity and why. In two studies, we examined mixed-race individuals’ strength of Multiracial identification. Across both studies (N_S1 = 139; N_S2 = 215), mixed-race people who regularly received feedback that their appearance was incongruent with their background had stronger Multiracial identification. In Study 2, perceived discrimination was associated with Multiracial identification, but the link depended on the racial group of the perpetrator. Specifically, perceiving discrimination from ingroup members was associated with stronger Multiracial identification, and this was strongest when White ingroup members were the source of discrimination. These findings demonstrate the interpersonal nature of racial identity and illuminate the complex dynamics of negotiating multiple racial backgrounds.

Read or purchase the article here.

Column: Lightskin privilege and its place in activism

The Daily Tar Heel
Chapel Hill, North Carolina
2019-04-14

Devon Johnson, Chief Opinion Editor

After reading a letter to the editor this week questioning the place of biracial students in campus activism, I thought it was an important question that deserved to be expanded upon and hopefully answered to some degree. So I’ve reflected on my race, specifically how my race is perceived by others and how, if at all, it impacts the ways in which I form my racial identity.

The first time I distinctly remember my biracial identity being affirmed was, perhaps unsurprisingly, in Drake’s “You & The 6.” “I used to get teased for being Black, and now I’m here and I’m not Black enough.” This line summed up the in-betweenness I had felt for most of my life; the tugging from either side of the aisle by those trying to have me racialize and categorize myself…

Read the entire article here.

Hazel Carby: Where Are You From?

Duke Franklin Humanities Institute
2018-11-05

An account of how a young black girl, growing up in South London, had to learn to negotiate the racial fictions of post World War Two Britain, drawn from Dr. Carby’s forthcoming book, “Imperial Intimacies” (Verso 2019).

Hazel Carby is Charles C. & Dorothea S. Dilley Professor of African American Studies & American Studies and the Director of the Initiative on Race, Gender, and Globalization at Yale University. Born in postwar UK, trained at the University of Birmingham under Stuart Hall’s mentorship, she is a foundational scholar of US black feminist intellectual history. Her books include Reconstructing Womanhood (1987), Race Men (1998), and Cultures in Babylon (1999). She was named the 2014 recipient of the Jay B. Hubbell Medal for Lifetime Achievement in American Literary Studies.

Co-directed by Richard Powell, Jasmine Nichole Cobb, and Lamonte Aidoo, the From Slavery to Freedom Lab examines the life and afterlives of slavery and emancipation, linking Duke University to the Global South.

Watch the address here.

I’m black. My siblings aren’t. What people need to know about Latinos and diversity.

The Boston Globe Magazine
2019-10-27

Karina E. Cueavas, Producer
Telemundo Boston, NBC Universal

Adobe Stock

What Big Papi, Gwen Ifill, and Celia Cruz have in common.

“Is she adopted?” That was the first question my brother’s math teacher asked my mom as we awaited seating at his ninth-grade graduation ceremony. I was only in fifth grade and I didn’t know what adopted meant. But I did see my mom’s frown. Her mouth twitched and I knew what was about to come wouldn’t be nice.

Minutes later my dad walked up to my mom, who was fuming. Asked what happened and she let him know. My dad only wished he were present to give the math teacher a piece of his mind.

My mom had already cursed Mr. Tonato out. And she had every right to do so. Now, let me make it very clear: Being adopted is wonderful, but I was the biological product of two very different looking people. And to many that was an alien concept. Little did I know that wasn’t the first time my parents ever got asked that question. It was just the first time I ever heard it. It certainly wouldn’t be the last.

I’m Afro-Latina. My mom is a white Latina and my siblings have her skin tone. Our dad is Afro-Latino. Both my parents are originally from the Dominican Republic. And this has been our story throughout my entire life. My mom having to explain to people that I’m her daughter. Me trying to teach people that Latinos come in different shades, sometimes all within one family. To add to some people’s confusion, my siblings and I are bilingual — we speak Spanish, our parents’ native language.

The kicker here — I grew up in New York City. The melting pot of the United States. Sometimes it felt suffocating to navigate the streets feeling as if even in such a diverse city, I didn’t belong. I wasn’t alone in that train of thought. I was part of what the book The Afro-Latin@ Reader describes in detail: “a large and vibrant, yet oddly invisible community in the United States: people of African descent from Latin America and the Caribbean.”…

Read the entire article here.