Mixed Race Studies

Nella Larsen’s ‘Passing’ and the Fading Subject

African American Review
Volume 32, Issue 3 (Fall 1998)
pages 373-386

Neil Sullivan

. . . Irene Redfield wished, for the first time in her life, that she had not been born a Negro. For the first time she suffered and rebelled because she was unable to disregard the burden of race. It was, she cried silently, enough to suffer as a woman, an individual, on one’s own account, without having to suffer for the race as well. It was a brutality, and undeserved. Surely, no other people were so cursed as Ham’s dark children. (Passing 225)

Although many critics have accused Nella Larsen of using race as a pretext for examining other issues, Passing (1929), her second novel, is profoundly concerned with racial identity. In “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism,” Barbara Smith cautions critics about the danger of ignoring “that the politics of sex as well as the politics of race and class are crucially interlocking factors in the works of Black women writers” (170). For Larsen, too, “race” is inextricable from the collateral issues – including class, gender, sexuality, and rivalry-that bear upon the formation of identity. “Passing,” of course, alludes to the crossing of the color line that was once so familiar in American narratives of “race,” but in Larsen’s novel the word also carries its colloquial meaning – death. Thus Passing’s title, like the title of Larsen’s earlier Quicksand, hints at the subject’s disappearance in the narrative, or the possibility of aphanisis, which Jacques Lacan defines in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis as the disappearance of the subject behind the signifier. For Irene Westover Red field and Clare Kendry Bellew, the “twin” protagonists of Passing, the obliterating signifier is nigger, a word that comes to encapsulate their struggle with the conflicts of American racism and assimilation. The narrative representation of these conflicts also suggests at a symbolic level Larsen’s repetition and working through of her own anxieties about the rejection she experienced as a result of her racial identity.

Her hazy origins and almost traceless “disappearance” differentiate Larsen from the other authors of the Harlem Renaissance, but not from the characters of her own novels. Until the publication of the 1994 biography by Thadious Davis, Nella Larsen’s life was shrouded in silence; not even the year of her birth was certain. Davis’s project was “to remove the aura of mystery” from Larsen’s life (xix), an aura that often resulted in critics’ presentation of Larsen as inscrutable Other. But with the details unearthed in her extensive research, Davis reveals that Nella Larsen was deeply scarred by the reality of racism; her seeking of celebrity as a writer was in fact a symptom of the need for recognition and validation, something which she never received as a child and only tenuously as a young adult (Davis 10). As the daughter of the Danish immigrant Marie Hansen and the African American Peter Walker, Larsen was already doubly marginalized in American society, but when her mother remarried a white man (also a Danish immigrant), Larsen found herself so excluded from the family that her mother did not even report her existence to census takers in 1910 (Davis 27). The Larsens orchestrated their dark daughter’s absence from their Chicago home by sending her to the Fisk Normal School in Nashville when she was only fifteen, and when the money ran out a year later, Marie Larsen apparently asked the sixteen-year-old Nella (then Nellie) to make her own way in the world. Larsen vanished temporarily, resurfacing three years later at the Lincoln Training Hospital in New York City as a student nurse, where, according to Davis, she began her ascent into the black middle class all alone (66, 70-72).

Larsen’s childhood rejection was seemingly reiterated in her 1919 marriage to Elmer S. Imes, which ended in a much-publicized divorce in 1933. As Ann Allen Shockley explains, the deterioration of the marriage was accelerated by the overt antipathy felt by Larsen’s light-skinned mother-in-law and, significantly, by Imes’s indiscreet affair with Ethel Gilbert, a white staff member at Fisk University, where Imes taught physics (438). “He liked white women,” several of Imes’s friends remarked to Thadious Davis in explanation of his betrayal of Nella Larsen (362). It is hardly incidental in Larsen’s construction and subsequent dissolution of identity that the rivals for her husband’s affection were both “white” women, and that she could therefore attribute the second major rejection in her emotional life to her inability to be sufficiently white. Although there were many problems in the Larsen-Imes union, the divorce contains the hint of another command to “turn white or disappear,” the imperative that Frantz Fanon suggests is implicit in all interracial dialogue (100). In effect, the rejections by her family and by her husband, exacerbated by the “problem of authorship” stemming from charges of plagiarism in the “Sanctuary” affair (Dearborn 56), destroyed the identity Larsen consciously cultivated during the 1920s, and provoked her disappearance from public life.

Perhaps because Larsen discovered Imes’s affair with Ethel Gilbert during the composition of Passing (Davis 324), her desire for recognition and fear of rejection surface in the characters Clare Kendry and Irene Red field. In Passing, Irene and Clare are tyrannized by the Other’s desire, and though their relationship is complicated by issues of gender and sexuality, the dynamics of white racism and the demands of assimilation dictate the lives of the two women. White racism ultimately defines their lives in the word nigger, and that definition determines the limits of their lives; in other words, it over-determines their ends—narratively and otherwise…

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Passed Over: The Tragic Mulatta and (Dis)Integration of Identity in Adrienne Kennedy’s Plays

African American Review
Volume 35, Number 2 (Summer, 2001)
pages 281-295
DOI: 10.2307/2903258

E. Barnsley Brown

Much recent interest in the drama of Adrienne Kennedy has been spawned by the publication of her innovative autobiography People Who Led to My Plays (1987), the 1992 Great Lakes festival devoted to her work, and the recent productions of her plays by the Signature Theatre Company, which devoted an entire season to her work. Yet Kennedy has yet to receive the widespread critical attention she deserves as one of the most unique and innovative twentieth-century American playwrights. [1] Compared to August Wilson, who has garnered many accolades and is fast replacing Lorraine Hansberry as the African American playwright whose work is anthologized, taught, and critiqued, Kennedy’s work is still relatively unknown by the average theatergoer, and even by some academics. And while critics praise August Wilson’s use of African beliefs in the supernatural and the presence of the ancestors, these very elements are present in Kennedy’s earliest plays from the 1960s. Wilson’s characteristic themes—the inexorable legacy of history, the tenuous line between dream and reality, memory as a (re)constructive process, and the conflicting forces in identity formation—were addressed by Kennedy over a decade earlier. It bears asking, then, why Kennedy’s work has been largely ignored until recently, and her message, a message grounded in the politics of oppression, often overlooked.

Kennedy ascribes her limited critical success to the fact that her plays are “abstract poems” (Diamond, “Interview” 157) and thus do not easily fit into an American theatrical tradition dominated by realistic plays such as those of Alice Childress and Hansberry. I contend, however, that Kennedy’s lack of widespread popularity can be more accurately attributed to her uncanny ability to make audiences feel ill at ease through her dramatization of the politics of identity and, in particular, of miscegenation. As she admits at the end of her interview with Elin Diamond, “My plays make people uncomfortable so I’ve never had a play done in Cleveland [her hometown], never” (157). The volatile content of Kennedy’s plays-her (not so) standard theme of a history of racial and sexual abuse leading to fragmentation and even death-does not make her plays either light viewing or reading. In effect, Kennedy’s painful exploration of miscegenation through a fragmented, postmodern form challenges and even assaults her audienc e, revealing both her riveting power as a writer as well as the grounds upon which her work has been passed over by her contemporaries, critics, and scholars alike.

By tackling the taboo topic of miscegenation and representing it in both the form and content of her plays, Kennedy represents the African American struggle against both external and internal oppression. In her plays, which she has described as “states of mind” (qtd. in Cohn 108), Kennedy shows the self in dialogue not only with society but also with the fragmentary vestiges of otherness within the self, those internalized markers of oppression. Kennedy thus creates psychic landscapes in which the ongoing battle between conflicting discourses and mythologies is made manifest through symbols, composite characters, and a plurality of voices, all of which reveal the violent struggle between whiteness and blackness within as well as outside the self…

…If the reading or viewing audience cannot locate Sarah, then who can? Kennedy brings home the impossibility of fixing Sarah’s identity and forces the viewer to confront his or her own displacement within the phantasmagoric world of the play.

As the tragic mulatta, caught between races, caught between “room” that do not offer a home or a place to belong, Sarah represents (t)races of an unattainable, stable, and unified subjectivity and identity. In actuality, Sarah and herselves are at once black and white, male and female, English and African (American), contemporary and historical. These traces of identity pass by the spectator in ephemeral moments, reflected, refracted, and distorted, as in a funnyhouse mirror. Kennedy seems to be suggesting that not only is the lack of a unified self a human condition, but it is also a subaltern condition, aggravated by racial animosity. By conveying Sarah’s internal struggle through traces of multiple selves, Kennedy thus underscores the racial hatred that has long characterized American society and effectively revises the family drama to reveal the tragic effects of racial hatred on an individual as well as collective level.

Kennedy embodies the racial polarization that has long characterized American society in Sarah’s fragmented consciousness by emphasizing colors–white, black, and yellow, the “color” of the mulatto. The colors themselves take on a life of their own as Sarah talks about how her statue of Queen Victoria is “a thing of astonishing whiteness” and “black is evil and has been from the beginning” (5). Sarah’s struggle to integrate her warring heritages is embodied throughout by a relentless repetition of “white” and “black” on every page of the play’s dialogue. Even the stage directions emphasize the colors of costumes, lights, and props—for example, “a white nightgown” (2,4), “white light” (2), “an ebony mask” (7), “a black shirt and black trousers” (9). “a black and white marble floor” (16), “a dark brightness” (20)—all of which point to Sarah’s internal struggle. Yet the images of whiteness in the stage directions far outnumber those of blackness, demonstrating Sarah’s obsession with white culture and her desire to pass for white.

In actuality, Sarah desires to repudiate her black heritage, symbolized by her black father, whose persistent knocking is heard throughout the play, thus suggesting that Sarah’s black heritage cannot be ignored. Kennedy makes Sarah’s desire to pass most evident in the following monologue, in which Sarah speaks of her desire for much more than integration into white society:

As for myself I long to become even a more pallid Negro than I am now; pallid like Negroes on the covers of American Negro magazines; soulless, educated and irreligious. I want to possess no moral value, particularly value as to my being. I want not to be. I ask nothing except anonymity…. It is my dream to live in rooms with European antiques and my Queen Victoria, photographs of Roman ruins, walls of books, a piano, oriental carpets and to eat my meals on a white glass table. I will visit my friends’ apartments which will contain books, photographs of Roman ruins, pianos and oriental carpets. My friends will be white.

I need them as an embankment to keep me from reflecting too much upon the fact that I am a Negro. For like all educated Negroes… I find it necessary to maintain a stark fortress against recognition of myself. (6)

Educated in a Eurocentric tradition and “soulless,” stripped of pride in her blackness or “soul,” Sarah desires complete assimilation, as shown in her reverence for the symbols and trappings of Eurocentric civilization–European antiques, books, oriental carpets, photographs of Roman ruins, and so forth.

Kennedy shows that Sarah has absorbed white racist ideology so fully that she and herselves repeatedly refer to her father as “a wild black beast” (5). Sarah also believes he raped her mother, thus adhering to the mythical idea of the black rapist. [5] As Rosemary Curb argues, “Sarah experiences the racial warfare within herself by consciously identifying with the White oppressor self against the Black oppressed sell” (“Fragmented” 181). In fact, Sarah and herselves identify so completely with the white oppressor that her final disintegration of selfhood, her tragic hanging at the end of the play by either murder or suicide, is best read as the death of her Negro self (yes)….

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Desdemona’s Fire – Review

African American Review
Volume 35, Number 2 (Summer 2001)
pages 342-343

Lesley Wheeler, Henry S. Fox Professor of English
Washington and Lee University, Lexington, Virginia

Ruth Ellen Kocher. Desdemona’s Fire. Detroit: Lotus P, 1999. 62 pp.

This shapely first collection, 1999 winner of the Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award, rises with independent grace from its framework of myth and allusion. The title, Desdemona Fire, certainly signals the book’s chief subject. Desdemona, here a “poor white girl from the edge of town,” bears a child by a traveling African American jazz pianist. The “fire” designates both the mother’s passion and its product, a restless girl who prowls the volume in a red nightgown. In the title poem, the speaker addresses her father, cast as Othello: “I am writing myself into your story/because you murder again/not knowing my birth.” Kocher’s references, in fact, range from Louise Gluck and Wallace Stevens to Greek myth and Buddhism. However, this volume finds a deeper coherence in its autobiographical voice, which appealingly balances vivid poetry with spare forthrightness. While these poems sometimes treat stock situatiions–sessions of braiding and straightening hair, the sounds of violence in the projects—Kocher often u ses allusion to defamiliarize these scenes, and the restraint of her style highlights her scrupulous fairness in writing a complex world. As she remarks in “Odyssea Home,” “Sometimes, words are simply/too accurate for anger and lust.”

The structure of Desdemona’s Fire dramatizes Kocher’s attractive unpredictability. It divides roughiy in half, a binary which suggests the obvious racial and cultural split within the speaker. Part I circles obsessively around the absent black father, but while Part II offers many complementary versions of the speaker’s white mother, the volume doesn’t really work so neatly. Instead, from one half to another this collection changes spirit. While abandonment and murder darken the first half of the book, the second half seeks and finds moments of reconciliation.

Kocher’s best poems explore how agonizing differences and tentative connections can coexist among people, accessibly sketching how race, especially, complicates human feelings. “The Migrant,” a powerful poem several pages in length, provides a memorable example of these concerns. Kocher recounts the “First time I saw another/brown face”: While staying at a farm rented by her white mother’s relatives, she watches black migrant workers pick tomatoes. The little girl strongly feels the paradox of her situation and hides from both groups, the migrants whom she physically resembles and the gathered family to whom she also belongs. While she imagines the workers’ angry children rushing the porch to smash the heaped tomatoes, she also projects forward to real violence, an attack by her white cousin she will experience years in the future. As in the rest of the volume, Kocher expresses estrangement from her white kin in sorrowful or bitter tones; after all, they ought to claim her, while the darker women eyeing her curiously from the fields owe her no such debt, or at least a far frailer one. Elsewhere, Kocher finds generous community with the neighborhood women of color who braid her hair (“Braiding”), in sharp contrast to the alienation she feels from mother and scowling grandmother in “Liturgy of the Light-Skinned.”…

Read the entire review here.

“Suddenly and Shockingly Black”: The Atavistic Child in Turn-into-the-Twentieth-Century American Fiction

African American Review
Volume 41, Number 1 (Spring, 2007)
pages 51-66

J. Michael Duvall, Associate Professor of English
College of Charleston, Charleston, South Carolina

Julie Cary Nerad, Associate Professor of English
Morgan State University, Baltimore, Maryland

From at least the Civil War through the Harlem Renaissance, black and white authors alike regularly imagined interracial babies who grew lighter-skinned with each generation: the greater the proportion of white ancestry, the less obvious are signs of black ancestry. These writers thus follow the common understanding of racial interbreeding as tending toward, in Stephen Jay Gould’s parlance, “a ‘blending’ or smooth mixture and dilution of traits” (24). The “natural grandson of a Southern lady, in whose family his mother had been a slave,” Harper writes, “the blood of a proud aristocratic ancestry was flowing through his veins, and generations of blood admixture had effaced all traces of his negro lineage” (239). The blending, mixing, and dilution of African features of interracial characters occur across a wide swath of late 19th-century American fiction and answer to a wide variety of purposes, from the reconciliationist fiction of Lydia Maria Child, whose Romance of the Republic (1867) offers a model of national reconstruction in two generations of loving, moral, interracial couples who have white-skinned children, to the white supremacist tales of Thomas Dixon, whose The Clansman (1905) reifies the myth of the lascivious and tempting nature of black women via their whitened interracial offspring. And, of course, this blending model also creates the conditions for a staple trope of much white and African American fiction of the late nineteenth century and onward: racial passing.

 Yet if the fiction of the time features this “amalgamation” model of heredity as embodied by Latimer (as well as Iola and her brother Harry), it also sees the emergence of a countervailing discourse of interracial heredity the specific effect of which throws a wrench into the mechanics of passing. In Iola Leroy, the eponymous heroine warns the white Dr. Gresham, her first suitor, that should they marry and procreate, her race could be revealed by an “unmistakeab[ly]” black child (117). An undeniable “throw-back” to a black racial past, such a child would result from the supposed process of “atavism” (in Latin, “a great grandfather’s grandfather”). Submerged racial features were believed to skip generations only to recur farther down the family line, rupturing a smooth hereditary narrative of blending and exposing the parent’s “true” race, always black and never white. In many novels and stories, atavism remains only a threat. However, in texts we examine below, atavistic children are actually born. These children range in appearance from simply showing signs of color to manifesting a monstrous, ape-like form, the fancied evidence of a supposed profound and irremediable racial pollution.

We argue specifically that the actual birth of grotesquely atavistic children in fiction, suddenly appearing at the turn of the twentieth century, is both historically bound and distinctly gendered: such children were usually the product of black male/white female sexual relationships that were seen by many whites as particularly threatening to white hegemonies at the historical moment. Various turn-of-the-20th-century authors use racial atavism, structured through a logic of contamination, to consolidate racial identity, maintain the color line, or bolster white supremacist discourse. The unidirectional logic of racial contamination, common throughout the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, fueled white racist propaganda for maintaining distinct racial categories and white hegemonies: black blood, once introduced into a family line, could be diluted, but never removed. Such mongrelization, white supremacists feared, would eventually lead to the disintegration of the white family and, consequently, the white nation. Framing these atavistic children or the threat of their appearance against their more common cousins, the light or white-skinned mulatto figure, we thus argue that they function as a dire warning both to black men of any shade and to white women whose wombs white men needed “uncontaminated” to (re)produce a white nation.

The idea of an apparently other-raced child, Werner Sollors tells us in an indispensable chapter of Neither White Nor Black Yet Both (1997), goes back to antiquity, during which an other-raced child was thought to prove adultery or, alternatively, to figure as a true wonder. In this ancient cultural setting, atavism could result in either a black or white child: such a child might be Natus AEthiopus, a black child birthed by white-appearing parents, or Natus Albus, a white child birthed by seemingly black parents. With one parodic exception, we find no instances of Natus Albus in the fiction of the late nineteenth or the early twentieth century. (1) Furthermore, according to Sollors, with the advent of a species model of race, the nineteenth century marks a change in attitude toward the idea of Natus AEthiopus, which he summarizes in his chapter’s closing discussion of Robert Lee Durham’s novel, The Call of the South (1900):

In the hands of a racialist radical, the Natus AEthiopus changed into the white horror of horrors. Underneath the Gothic machinery, however, one … recognizes the issues of the past in their transformation: atavism explains a child’s color, but in a cultural context in which it could be asserted that black and white must never be related in a family structure. Wonder is replaced with horror … ; adultery seems to have completely disappeared [as an explanation for atavism]; “essential” racial difference cuts even fully legalized family relations…. (66)

 The present essay builds on Sollors’s work by investigating what, aside from the species-inflected racial science and thinking that he identifies, lies behind this shift from wonder to horror, at the end of the nineteenth century. What, more precisely, governs the appearance in American novels of not just unexpected, dark-skinned babies, but grotesquely atavistic ones, and to what ends?…

…That the myth of atavism emerges in a wide range of novels makes sense, given the period’s fixation on the discourses of blood, the idea of racial purity, and the legally entrenched system of segregation, yet the texts that actually produce atavistic children are in fact striking for their rarity. Indeed, the arguably overwhelming presence of light- or white-skinned mixed-race children in interracial fiction, even in those that include the threat of atavism, prompts us to ask what governs the appearance of those few mixed-race infants who actually show black racial traits. We suggest that these children often materialize within particular narrative constructions. Two turn-of-the-century stories, both again involving racial passing and featuring comparatively mild incidents of atavism, suggest that narrative’s contours. In one, Kate Chopin’s widely-read 1893 short story “Desiree’s Baby,” a presumably white woman commits suicide and infanticide, and in the other, Pauline Hopkins’s “Talma Gordon” (1900), a mixed-race woman survives, but her male child dies. (10) In Chopin’s story, Desiree, herself a woman of “obscure origin,” marries Armand, the son of a respected family, only to produce a baby—a son—who has black racial characteristics. Unclear as to what this appearance could possibly mean, she queries her husband, who replies: “it means that you are not white” (176, 179). Befuddled by this revelation since her complexion is lighter in shade than her husband’s, but accepting his judgment against her, Desiree walks into the swamp with her infant, presumably committing infanticide and suicide. The story ends not here, however, but with Armand’s discovery of a letter written to his father from his long-deceased mother, explaining that Armand has black heritage. This discovery reverses the common narrative construct of the white male/black female coupling. Instead, the story offers us a black male/white female pairing that actually produces in very mild form an atavistic (male) child. (11) Pauline E. Hopkins’s short story “Talma Gordon” (1900) also offers a case of a mildly atavistic child. Although the child issues from the more common white male/black female pairing, the child, who has physical characteristics that identify him as having African heritage, is again male. The child dies from disease while still an infant, while his two older, physically white sisters survive. What we begin to see in these two stories of mild atavism is a gender dynamic that further complicates narrative embodiments of grotesquely atavistic children…

…The manner in which individual authors have engaged the trope of the atavistic child—as evidence of an everlasting barrier between the races, as warning not to transgress or pass over the color line, as strategy for solidifying race categories and white hegemonies–suggests that the trope of the atavistic child functions as the bearer of certain kinds of what Jane Tompkins has called cultural work the functional relation of a piece of literature to its immediate historical conditions and the answer to the question “what kind of work is this novel trying to do?” (38). Throughout the nineteenth century, novels that explored “the race question” did significant cultural work by helping to shape our national politics. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin is perhaps the best-known example of the impact that a novel can have in our cultural imaginary. By the turn of the twentieth century, the novel had perhaps an even greater impact on the public. As Lee Baker explains, “The mass media played an integral role in shoring up the ideological demarcation of the color line. Technological advances and rising literacy rates increased the circulation and decreased the prices of magazines, newspapers, and books. By 1905, stereotypes that had previously been reinforced by folklore or expensive texts were now voraciously consumed by the public in the mass media” (38). The graphic racist novels by whites in the first decade of the twentieth century promulgated negative stereotypes about African Americans, using the atavistic child as a nodal point for articulating the discourses of miscegenation, white supremacy, racial passing, black male/white female sex, the mythic black beast rapist, and lynching. These novels, in essence, reinforced anti-miscegenation sentiment in a particularly unidirectional way to maintain the color line and to deny black civil rights. While white male/black female sex may have been considered immoral–by many people, black and white–it ultimately failed to destabilize cultural hegemonies. Not so with black male/white female sex, which whites considered much more dangerous because it disrupted the reproduction of whiteness. White men, so novels such as Lee’s and Davenport’s conclude, must strenuously guard the white womb against race pollution and perversion, corruptions marked by the birth of a degenerate atavistic child. Punishing black men who dare pollute those wombs works to consolidate whiteness across a North-South regional divide…

….Ironically, women posed one of the greatest dangers to the sanctity of the color line because of their central role in the reproduction of whiteness. White women held the biological key to maintaining and increasing the white race, and thus fortifying white hegemonies because only white women could produce white children. Their race loyalty alone made possible the continuation of white male authority that insured white privilege. If white women’s bodies served as the vessels for reproducing whiteness, they had to remain “pure” from the corrupting taint of blackness. The grotesquely atavistic child that drove its mother to insanity and/or death became a graphic symbol of the punishment of racialized transgression and one that starkly highlights white men’s anxiety over controlling the reproductive powers of white women. Thus, while woman’s importance in cultural production was elevated above other cultural factors, it also remained linked to their racial identity and to their biological role as mother and the age-old attempt to govern female sexuality. The grotesquely atavistic child’s appearance at this moment stems from the same white fear that fueled the industry of lynching in this decade…

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Mar Gallego. Passing Novels in the Harlem Renaissance: Identity, Politics and Textual Strategies [Review]

African American Review
Volume 38 (Winter 2004)
pages 720-723

Mar Gallego. Passing Novels in the Harlem Renaissance: Identity, Politics and Textual Strategies. Hamburg: Lit Verlag Munster, 2003. 214 pp.

Zhou Yupei

Until very recently, novels of passing that appeared during the Harlem Renaissance had been viewed as either assimilationist or collaborative with racist ideology. Mar Gallego’s Passing Novels in the Harlem Renaissance offers an opposing view by providing a detailed account of the subversive and parodying strategies employed in novels by four representative and controversial African American writers: James Weldon Johnson, George Schuyler, Nella Larsen, and Jessie Fauset. Gallego considers these authors’ parodying strategies as responses not only to social realities but to the idea of double consciousness and other literary traditions.

Gallego’s book opens with a rereading of Du Bois’s theory of “double consciousness” that reveals both the positive and the negative perspectives contained in the theory and connects it with the motif of passing. The positive refers to the notion of the “third self,” which results from the union of an African American ethnic identity and an American national identity, a notion that implies the possibility of a society in which African culture and American culture co-exist. The negative refers to the metaphor of the “veil,” which means the distorted and stereotypical image imposed upon African Americans, a metaphor that may produce negative duplicity in African American life. Gallego’s account of these contradictory perspectives achieves a dual purpose. First, it explains Du Bois’s inner conflict between his realistic conception of American society and his idealistic notion of double consciousness. Second, it alludes to the multiple and indeterminate character of double consciousness and links this notion to the Yoruba tradition of Esu-Elegbara, in which Henry Louis Gates, Jr. locates the “Signifying Monkey,” and finally the idea of double-voicedness central to Bakhtin’s theories of “heteroglossia” and “dialogization.” Such connections expose the parodying nature of double consciousness in spite of the inner conflict contained in it. Gallego’s reading of the notion of double consciousness constitutes a reasonable starting point and a convincing rationale for Gallego’s argument that the novels of passing under study respond in a complex way to double consciousness and strategically hide their negative attitudes toward racism under the cover of various means of seemingly cooperative representations. Gallego also lays out a theoretical framework of exploration in his subsequent chapters, each of which locates a writer’s parodying strategies in the historical context of the representation of African Americans and in the literary context of the genres of Western literature employed and subverted by the writer.

To incorporate issues of race and gender, Gallego also identifies in the first chapter double consciousness with the feminist notion of “divided identity,” designating, as Mary Hairston McManus does, the latter as “double double consciousness.” Reviewing earlier African American feminist criticism, Gallego concludes that this discourse involves “the subversion, inversion or variation of other discourses that marginalize African American women.” This summary anticipates his statement that the characterization of Larsen’s and Fauset’s mulatta figures of passing also involves the subversion, inversion, or variation of other racist or sexist discourses in literary tradition.

Each subsequent chapter is devoted to one of the four authors. In chapter two, Gallego argues that James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912) innovates the tradition of slave narratives by endowing it with subversive and ironic overtones, and revises Du Bois’s notion of double consciousness by calling into question the negative perspective of the theory. For Gallego, Johnson’s novel represents a new stage of the narrative tradition that traces its origin to Equiano’s “integrated narrative,” which integrates different voices, and Douglass’s “generic narrative,” which makes the narrator eventually dominate the different voices integrated by the narrative. Johnson uses such techniques as duality of voices, control over the narration, fictionalization of the narrative “I,” and rhetoric as a mask for subversion, techniques often found in either Equiano or Douglass. With these techniques Johnson effectively but trickily conveys his ironic and multivocal vision and makes his narrator successfully write himself into the text. The connection discovered by Gallego between Johnson’s text and Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk leads to the conclusion that Johnson’s novel negates both the positive image of the “Talented Tenth” and the idealistic possibility of a “third self.” Gallego states that Johnson’s representation of the phenomenon of passing questions cultural and racial categories and promotes heterogeneity. With abundant historical and textual evidence, Gallego defines Johnson as an important African American writer who initiates a model for the depiction of the mulatto condition and anticipates other novels of passing in the following decade…

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Black ‘Like Me’: (Mis)Recognition, the Racial Gothic, and the Post-1967 Mixed-Race Movement in Danzy Senna’s Symptomatic

African American Review
Number 42 (Summer 2008)
pages 287-305

Hershini Bhana Young, Associate Professor of English
State University of New York, Buffalo

Symptomatic, Danzy Senna’s second novel, is a dense and disturbing satire of the post-1967 mixed-race movement. Tersely written, “hard-edged and kind of minimalist,” as Senna describes it in an interview with Rebecca Weber, it invokes the thrillers and film noir of Roman Polanski, Alfred Hitchcock, Brian DePalma, and Barbet Schroeder (Single White Female), to name a few. The novel’s style pays overt homage to Ralph Ellison’s brooding Invisible Man, even as it also gestures toward W. E. B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, and Nella Larsen. Symptomatic describes the life of an unnamed woman who has just moved to New York on a writing fellowship. After a short-lived and disastrous relationship with Andrew, who is white, the protagonist sublets an apartment that she learns about from an older colleague named Greta Hicks, who befriends her. Their tense relationship, based on their “shared” mixed-race identity, rapidly disintegrates when the protagonist starts dating a black artist named Ivers. Greta, who eventually reveals herself as the original occupant of the apartment that the protagonist is subletting, stalks the protagonist and eventually attempts to kill her. Both main characters are tragic, confused, and inseparable until one of them dies…

…Symptomatic, in contrast, is dark and troubling, using imagery, metaphor and a strained plot to tackle romantic ideas about community formation and race. I feel that most readers’ discomfort with the novel revolves around what Senna’s experiments in form hope to accomplish: an imminent warning about the danger of racialized communities that counters popular belief about the glamorous, though ordinary and well adjusted mixed-race community member. Senna launches a devastating critique of models of community based on collective political action. She shows how community comes to stand in for a “passive, static, conservative [timeless and naturalized]… network of people who inevitably know your name and your business because you interact with them every day, rather than those you have sought out as allies”; they are not driven by shared political purposes but rather by a simplistic recognition of inherent similarity (Joseph 10). Senna accomplishes her warning about this type of community through several means, most importantly through her 1) deployment of the African American gothic to create a disturbing and implausible plot with stock characters and 2) her historicization of contemporary mixed-race community formations based on phenotypic sameness, specifically those that resulted from the post-1967 mixed-race movement. Symptomatic begins where Caucasia ostensibly ends, with the protagonist Birdie’s poignant recognition of another girl who is “black like her” in the San Francisco Bay area. But it then asks us what implications there are of this moment of racial (mis)recognition on a personal, cultural and national level. What specifically does Senna hope to articulate about sameness, difference and community that demonstrate the promise of a mixed-race utopia gone tragically awry? Symptomatic, through a careful and strategic deployment of African American gothic conventions, critiques overly optimistic cultural understandings of hybridity both as the source of community formation and as racial (non) identity. It articulates the need for new models of community based on noncompulsory politicized identifications and strategies for redressing historical injustice.

The “Bi-Racial Baby Boom”: Which Mixed-Race Movement?

Racial mixing in this country is certainly nothing new, nor are the various esponses by mixed-race people to the violent implementation of the one-drop rule that has historically characterized black-white interrelations. (2) But Senna’s novel does not target the entire history of mixed-race people in the United States. While thoroughly grounded in this history, the novel focuses on the contemporary mixed-race movement enabled by the successes and failures of the civil rights movement. Kim Williams argues that while historically racial designations have been used to distinguish and disenfranchise those who were not deemed white, the political leadership of the civil rights campaign saw the opportunity to use those same racial classifications to end racism and ensure equality. An example of this would be the 1965 Voting Rights Act that required statistics on race to ensure equality of access to voting. In the 1970s, multiracial activists, using the language of civil rights, argued that “the official recognition of multiracialism” was a civil right “By arguing that the recognition of multiracial people was the ‘next logical step in civil rights,’ multiracial activists drew shrewdly on the symbolism of the civil rights movement, yet in the process cast themselves as more progressive than the so-called progressives (i.e., the civil rights lobby)” (K. Williams 87). (3) To the civil rights movement’s linking of rights and identity, the mixed-race movement added an appeal to the state for official endorsement of their particular identity with the understanding that “[n]onrecognition or misrecognition can inflict harm; can be a form of oppression, imprisoning someone in a false, distorted, and reduced mode of being” (Charles Taylor qtd. in K. Williams 89). Thus, not being seen as mixed-race, but as only black or white by others and by the state constitutes a psychological form of injury supposedly equal to centuries of material oppression with psychological effects. This problematic idea of recognition as ensuring equality is at the heart of Symptomatic. Senna relies on the gothic imagery of doubles and mirroring to critique the notion that racial recognition is an adequate basis for community formation, as I develop later…

…Contrary to Time magazine, mixed-race people have not become more common during the last two decades. The misperception stems from the foundational status of legalized interracial marriage as the only legitimate site of the production of hybrid offspring. What gets silenced, in the case of African Americans, is the hybridity of Africans themselves and the long legacy of sexual abuse that reproduced racialized categories of property. The children of white planters, for example, were first and foremost slaves due to the condition of blackness inherited from their mothers. Hypodescent was not a choice but a pseudoscientific term brutally enacted on the bodies of Africans and their New World descendants. (6) The mixed-race movement is fraught with such misunderstandings and contradictions, another of these being that most of the organizations within it are not constituted by people of mixed race. Rather, the mixed-race movement’s membership consists largely of monoracially identified parents, almost always white, who claim to act on their children’s behalf. One could argue, then, that the mixed-race movement attempts to extend the hitherto denied privileges of whiteness to children who historically would be black. Indeed, this “new” multiracial national imaginary “has worked to reconfigure the popular discourse on race and sexuality, forging [instead] … an increasingly sentimentalized white [power] that rewrites its centrality to the nation by embracing new modes of cross-racial feeling” (Wiegman 872). While these senti-mental modes may appear to differ from earlier dominant forms of white supremacy, such as during Reconstruction, wherein interracial sex was violently disavowed and policed in order to preserve the unpreservable purity of race, the effect of maintaining white power is the same. Contemporary liberal whiteness in the age of global capital assimilates interracial desire, and under the guise of recognizing a common humanity, perpetuates the same racialized injustices that have become all too familiar. The recognition of humanity comes at the expense of not recognizing a history…

…Senna states repeatedly in interviews that she is “wary of the way multiraciality has become fetishized in the media and in the popular discussion on race…. I’m suspicious of adding a new category to the Census for a lot of reasons …” (qtd. in Arias 448). (13) She insists that given the complex histories around “mulattos” (the word Senna prefers to use for its historicity), the mixed-race movement has been seen as an unequivocal solution for those people marginalized by racial binary thinking that has them occupying the interstitial spaces of neither/nor. Symptomatic fully articulates what Caucasia hints at during its final pages: that the warm embrace of coercive sameness, while seeming to provide salve for the wounds of racist exclusion repeats the violence of racial binarisms. A community of people who are “biologically” alike results, not in the transcendence of racial hierarchical categories, but rather in their perpetuation. Senna urges us to interrogate the role of prescriptive sameness in the construction of identity by her use of the gothic, no matter how much this sameness is viewed as deconstructing the larger structures of racism in the United States. She does not depict the racially ambiguous character as essentially threatening to dialectical formations of black and white. Part of Symtomatic’s “dark” vision is how the racially ambiguous character can reinforce racial categorizations and misrecognitions, leading to a deepening of the racial chasms that haunt the American landscape and the revocation of civil rights gains. Senna thinks through race, moving away from prescriptive physical sameness (even multiracial sameness) towards an understanding of racial community as constituted via engaged, deliberate historical interactions grounded in material realities. She uses the gothic to defamiliarize the specter of sameness and expose its dangerous logic, no matter in what context that sameness appears. I wish to be clear: the compulsion to seek out those who think and act like you is the essence of community formation. Sameness is essential in the formation of common political agendas, in the organizations of communities with common historical memories. What happens, however, when this compulsion moves from one of voluntarism to another of phenotypic coercion? The novel uses the racial gothic to explore the tensions between compulsory unions (biologically determined via the logic of sameness) and other more deliberate, engaged interactions based on common agendas and concerns. (14)…

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A Mixed Race: Ethnicity in Early America, edited by Frank Shuffelton (Oxford University Press, 1993) [Review]

African American Review
Volume 29, Number 1 (Spring 1995)
pages 149-152

Raymond F. Dolle, Associate Professor of English
Indiana State University

A Mixed Race extends the recent work of ethnographic critics, such as James Clifford (The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art [1988]), and such literary critics as Werner Sollors (Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture [1986]) and William Boelhower (Through a Glass Darkly: Ethnic Semiosis in American Literature [1987]). These critics have argued that ethnicity is not located solely in an essential cultural identity, continuity, or tradition, and that texts should not be understood as mimetic descriptions of an essential, unchanging ethnic difference (even though that is often the pretense of these texts). Rather, the center of ethnicity should be seen as a dynamic relation between cultural groups, and their texts as orchestrations of multivocal exchanges among these groups as they transform themselves (the hegemonic group included) in the process of confronting others. Thus, ethnicity is performance, a group’s continually changing self-understanding in relation to a changing larger world, a struggle for control over narratives, values, and the self. Furthermore, this process of ethnicity is carried on by means of signs and codes that are generated by the groups to negotiate relationships with other hostile or accommodating groups. So, to understand more fully the ethnic foundation of our culture, we must recognize ethnic semiosis in colonial texts. Such clarifying views have enabled the scholars in this volume to consider the circumstances, rhetorical negotiations, and representation of ethnic formation in early America…

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Traveling Identities: Mixed Race Quests and Fran Ross’s “Oreo”

African American Review
Volume 40, Number 1 (Spring 2006)

Tru Leverette
University of North Florida, Jacksonville

The Frontier: Where Two Come Together

Traveling to my grandmother’s funeral during my first marriage, my white husband and I walked down the narrow plane aisle toward our seats. In front of me was a black woman who stopped the line when she reached her row and asked the white man in the aisle to excuse her as she settled herself into the window seat. As she seated herself, the man looked at me and asked, “Are you two together?” I said no and proceeded past him and his bewildered look.

My husband scoffed, loudly enough for the man to hear, “That was an interesting assumption, huh?”

“Yeah,” I replied. “But you know that happens to me all the time.”

And, indeed, it does. People readily assume I “belong” with any other people of color in the vicinity, and rarely, if ever, do they assume that I “belong” with my husband. Reflecting on the incident now, I wonder how effectively I could have articulated my sense of place if I’d answered the man’s question affirmatively, though unexpectedly: “Yes, I am two together.”

Because I see myself as both black and white, I, like many other persons born to parents of different races, sometimes think of myself as moving in the space that unites the two, as traveling from one shore to another given certain contexts, and other times as sailing the river that forms the meridian between two shores. Such metaphors of movement, travel, and cruising are not uncommon in explorations of mixed race identity; in fact, the metaphor of border-crosser has been taken up readily and used to suggest a mobility and  indeterminacy that may not be as easily accessible as the metaphor suggests. Mixed race identity often has been considered a “frontier” in race relations, if I can extend the travel metaphor into the realm of quest. (1) Thus, the anecdote with which I began this essay fittingly exemplifies the role of movement, travel, and quest in explorations and definitions of mixed race identity. Alternatively, the anecdote may invoke Denise Riley’s suggestion that identity “is more accurately conceived as a state which fluctuates for the individual” (6). The notion that various components of identity come into the foreground and recede  in differing situations may be more useful in interrogating the workings of identity than that of the border crosser. We may imagine individuals traveling with identities whose components are variously enacted or shelved without imagining that these individuals are completely liberated from the constraints of identity, as if their ability to cross borders were a ticket into every desirable community and a ticket out of every undesirable situation.

These introductory comments regarding travel and quest are important to the following discussion of Oreo, the recently republished novel by Fran Ross. This novel explores the possibilities within mixed race identity as it attempts to assert a utopian sense of racial harmony and wholeness and to grapple with the theoretical and philosophical questions of mixed race and gender. Its metaphors of traveler and quester concur with discourses of mixed race that  theorize such individuals in terms of the past—as outcasts who seek an acknowledgement and understanding of their origins—and in terms of the future—as pioneers whose existence may foster the racial harmony of utopian visions. In keeping with other discourses of mixed race identity, the novel prioritizes questions of history and origins as well as future possibilities for imagining race. Within Oreo, the personal utopia sought also connects to the longing for a national utopia that would rectify the racial discord of the period in which it was written—during the Black Nationalist Movement of the 1970s. Originally published in 1974, Ross’s novel was not well received since it both literally and figuratively plays with the ideologies of race and gender that were being debated at the time. One January 1975 review describes the novel as “experimental, intelligent, and even funny in places. The dialogue, however, is a strange mixture of Uncle Remus and Lenny Bruce, and quite often unintelligible” (Salassi 146). This initial review offers a striking contrast to one following the novel’s reprinting in 2000, when it is heralded as “a true twenty-first century novel.” According to this review, the novel’s “wit is global, hybrid and uproarious; its meditation on language is simultaneously irreverent, appropriative and serious” (Foreman and Stein-Evers 36). This latter review, however, problematically champions “the goodness of ambiguity which leads everywhere,” asserting that “the triumphant  chameleon [Oreo] goes unnoticed wherever it chooses.” Such claims of liberty and unobstructed movement display precisely the dangerous assumption inherent in notions of the border crosser as they are often articulated. Oreo by no means suggests that the dualities of identity make it possible for one to escape the realities and constraints of racism, sexism, and oppression. Rather, the novel suggests that dualities allow one to play (both literally and figuratively) with the structures of identity, allow one to manipulate boundaries and seek agency in arenas where these structures might seem rigid and inaccessible, respectively…

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Fluidity without Postmodernism: Michelle Cliff and the “Tragic Mulatta” Tradition

African American Review
Vol. 32, No. 4 (Winter, 1998)
pages 673-689

Suzanne Bost, Associate Professor of English
Loyola University

I am writing the story of my life as a statue… I wish they had carved me from the onyx of Elizabeth Catlett.  Or molded me from the dark clay of Augusta Savage.  Or cut me from mahogany or cast me in bronze.  I wish I were dark plaster like Meta Warrick Fuller’s Talking Skull.  But I appear more as Edmonia Lewis’s Hagar—wringing her hands in the wilderness—white marble figure of no homeland—her striations caught within.  (Cliff, Land 85)

In “The Laughing Mulatto (Formerly a Statue) Speaks,” Michelle Cliff invokes past stereotypes of the mulatto and the sculptors who remolded them. From Edmonia Lewis (1844-1909)—the half-black, half-Chippewasculpor who gained international fame with the help of abolitionists William Lloyd Garrison and Lydia Maria Child—to Augusta Savage (1892-1962)—the Harlem Renaissance artists who sculpted busts of W. E. B. Du Bois, Frederick Douglass, and Marcus Garvey—black artists have been reconstructing images of African Americans.  The speaker of “The Laughing Mulatto” identifies with racial “betweeenness,” yet she also subverts racist conventions that privilege the whiteness within biracial African Americans. She wishes that her skin were darker: onyx, mahogany, or bronze, not white marble (Cliff, Land 85).  Her wish implicitly compares race to workable materials, as if racial identity were something that could be chiseled and molded by an artist…

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Fading to white, fading away: biracial bodies in Michelle Cliff’s Abeng and Danzy Senna’s Caucasia

African American Review
2006-03-22

Michelle Goldberg

However dissimilar individual bodies are, the compelling idea of common, racially indicative bodily characteristics offers a welcome short-cut into the favored forms of solidarity and connection, even if they are effectively denied by divergent patterns in life chances and everyday experiences.—Paul Gilroy, Against Race

the invisible in me is counter to the visible.—Michelle Cliff, “The Black Woman As Mulatto”

Michelle Cliff’s Abeng (1986) and Danzy Senna’s Caucasia (1998) typify a recent literary uptrend: a dramatic increase in biracial fiction, memoir, and theory, in biracial discourses of passing, invisibility, and identity. Abeng, which received widespread critical acclaim, and Caucasia, the winner of numerous 1998 “Best Book” awards, introduce characters whose mixed race parentage holds true for a growing number of multiracial Americans. Both novels offer biracial characters who resist racial labels while staying especially connected to “blackness.” In Abeng and Caucasia, respectively, the white bodies of Clare Savage and Birdie Lee misrepresent identities that remain ascribed to, yet not confined by, “blackness.”…

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