Mixed Race Studies

Crossing the Color Line: Narratives of Passing in American Literature

St. Mary’s College of Maryland
English 400.01
Fall 2008

Christine Wooley, Assistant Professor of English
     
This course will consider representations of passing (and thus also miscegenation) in nineteenth- and twentieth-century U.S. culture. While passing has often been depicted-and dismissed-as an act of racial betrayal, more recent criticism has suggested that we view these depictions of racial transgression and deception in more complicated ways. In this class, we will analyze various narratives centered around passing and miscegenation as sites through which we can better examine-and understand-the construction of racial identities in particular historical and political contexts. We will ask whether or not narratives about passing and miscegenation challenge the stability of racial categories. Likewise, we will pay close attention to how such narratives also engage issues of class, ethnicity, and gender. Syllabus may include works by authors such as Harriet Wilson, William Wells Brown, Lydia Maria Child, Frances Harper, William Dean Howells, Pauline Hopkins, Mark Twain, Charles Chesnutt, Kate Chopin, James Weldon Johnson, Nella Larsen, George Schuyler, Toni Morrison, and Philip Roth. In addition, this class will also draw on a selection of historical and legal documents, current critical works on race, and films such as The Jazz Singer and Imitation of Life.

African-American Reflections on Brazil’s Racial Paradise

Temple University Press
February 1992
276 pages
5.5 x 8.25
Cloth ISBN: 0-87722-892-2
eBook ISBN: 978-1-59213-104-4

Edited by

David J. Hellwig, Professor Emeritus of Interdisciplinary Studies
St. Cloud State University, St. Cloud, Minnesota

Essays that focus on the authors’ observations of race relations in Brazil from the first decade of the century through the 1980s

At the turn of the twentieth century, the popular image of Brazil was that of a tropical utopia for people of color, and it was looked upon as a beacon of hope by African Americans. Reports of this racial paradise were affirmed by notable black observers until the middle of this century, when the myth began to be challenged by North American blacks whose attitudes were influenced by the civil rights movement and burgeoning black militancy. The debate continued and the myth of the racial paradise was eventually rejected as black Americans began to see the contradictions of Brazilian society as well as the dangers for people of color.

David Hellwig has assembled numerous observations of race relations in Brazil from the first decade of the century through the 1980s. Originally published in newspapers and magazines, the selected commentaries are written by a wide range of African-American scholars, journalists, and educators, and are addressed to a general audience.

Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Introcution: The Myth of the Racial Paradise
• Part I: The Myth Affirmed (1900-1940)
  • 1. “Brazilian Visitors in Norfolk”
  • 2. “Brazil vs. United States”
  • 3. “Brazil and the Black Race”
  • 4. “Brazil” – W.E.B. Du Bois
  • 5. “Opportunities in Brazil: South American Country Offers First Hand Knowledge of the Solving of the Race Question”
  • 6. “Brazil” – Cyril V. Briggs
  • 7. “Wonderful Opportunities Offered in Brazil for Thrifty People of All Races” – Associated Negro Press
  • 8. “South America and Its Prospects in 1920” – L. H. Stinson
  • 9. “Brazil as I Found It” – E.R. James
  • 10. “Sidelights on Brazil Racial Conditions” – Frank St. Claire
  • 11. “My Trip Through South America” – Robert S. Abbott
  • 12. “Sightseeing in South America” – William Pickens
• Part II: The Myth Debated (1940-1965)
  • 13. “The Color Line in South America’s Largest Republic” – Ollie Stewart
  • 14. “Stewart in Error – No Color Line in Brazil” – James W. Ivy
  • 15. Letter by W.E.B. Du Bois to Edward Weeks, Atlanta, Georgia, October 2, 1941
  • 16. “Brazil Has No Race Problem” – E. Franklin Frazier
  • 17. “A Comparison of Negro-White Relations in Brazil and the United States” – E. Franklin Frazier
  • 18. Excerpt from Quest for Dignity: An Autobiography of a Negro Doctor – Thomas Roy Peyton
  • 19. “Brazilian Color Bias Growing More Rampant” – George S. Schuyler
  • 20. “The Negro in Brazil” – Lorenzo D. Turner
• Part III: The Myth Rejected (1965-)
  • 21. “From Roxbury to Rio-and Back in a Hurry” – Angela M. Gilliam
  • 22. “Brazil: Study in Black, Brown and Beige” – Leslie B. Rout, Jr.
  • 23. “Equality in Brazil: Confronting Reality” – Cleveland Donald, Jr.
  • 24. “‘Mestizaje’ vs. Black Identity: The Color Crisis in Latin America” – Richard L. Jackson
  • 25. “Black Consciousness vs. Racism in Brazil” – Niani (Dee Brown)
  • 26. “Brazil and the Blacks of South America” – Gloria Calomee
  • 27. “In Harmony with Brazil’s African Pulse” – Rachel Jackson Christmas

To Make a New Race: Gurdjieff, Toomer, and the Harlem Renaissance

University Press of Mississippi
1999
202 pages
Cloth: 157806130X (9781578061303)
Paper: 1578061318 (9781578061310)

Jon Woodson, Professor of English
Howard University, Washington, D.C.

Jean Toomer’s adamant stance against racism and his call for a raceless society were far more complex than the average reader of works from the Harlem Renaissance might believe. In To Make a New Race Jon Woodson explores the intense influence of Greek-born mystic G. I. Gurdjieff on the thinking of Toomer and his coterie—Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen, George Schuyler, Wallace Thurman—and, through them, the mystic’s influence on many of the notables in African American literature.

Gurdjieff, born of poor Greco-Armenian parents on the Russo-Turkish frontier, espoused the theory that man is asleep and in prison unless he strains against the major burdens of life, especially those of identification, like race. Toomer, whose novel Cane became an inspiration to many later Harlem Renaissance writers, traveled to France and labored at Gurdjieff’s Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man. Later, the writer became one of the primary followers approved to teach Gurdjieff’s philosophy in the United States.

Woodson’s is the first study of Gurdjieff, Toomer, and the Harlem Renaissance to look beyond contemporary portrayals of the mystic in order to judge his influence. Scouring correspondence, manuscripts, and published texts, Woodson finds the direct links in which Gurdjieff through Toomer played a major role in the development of “objective literature.” He discovers both coded and explicit ways in which Gurdjieff’s philosophy shaped the world views of writers well into the 1960s. Moreover Woodson reinforces the extensive contribution Toomer and other African-American writers with all their international influences made to the American cultural scene.

Table of Contents

• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Jean Toomer: Beside You Will Stand a Strange Man
• 2 Wallace Thurman: Beyond Race and Color
• 3 Rudolph Fisher: Minds of Another Order
• 4 Nella Larsen: The Anatomy of “Sleep”
• 5 George Schuyler: New Races and New Worlds
• 6 Zora Neale Hurston: The Self and the Nation
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

To Be Suddenly White: Literary Realism and Racial Passing

University of Missouri Press
2006
296 pages
6 1/8 x 9 1/4
ISBN: 978-0-8262-1619-9

Steven J. Belluscio, Associate Professor of English
Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York

To Be Suddenly White explores the troubled relationship between literary passing and literary realism, the dominant aesthetic motivation behind the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century ethnic texts considered in this study. Steven J. Belluscio uses the passing narrative to provide insight into how the representation of ethnic and racial subjectivity served, in part, to counter dominant narratives of difference.

To Be Suddenly White offers new readings of traditional passing narratives from the African American literary tradition, such as James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, Nella Larsen’s Passing, and George Schuyler’s Black No More. It is also the first full-length work to consider a number of Jewish American and Italian American prose texts, such as Mary Antin’s The Promised Land, Anzia Yezierska’s Bread Givers, and Guido d’Agostino’s Olives on the Apple Tree, as racial passing narratives in their own right. Belluscio also demonstrates the contradictions that result from the passing narrative’s exploration of racial subjectivity, racial difference, and race itself.

When they are seen in comparison, ideological differences begin to emerge between African American passing narratives and “white ethnic” (Jewish American and Italian American) passing narratives. According to Belluscio, the former are more likely to engage in a direct critique of ideas of race, while the latter have a tendency to become more simplistic acculturation narratives in which a character moves from a position of ethnic difference to one of full American identity.

The desire “to be suddenly white” serves as a continual point of reference for Belluscio, enabling him to analyze how writers, even when overtly aware of the problematic nature of race (especially African American writers), are also aware of the conditions it creates, the transformations it provokes, and the consequences of both. By examining the content and context of these works, Belluscio elucidates their engagement with discourses of racial and ethnic differences, assimilation, passing, and identity, an approach that has profound implications for the understanding of American literary history.

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…

Read the entire article here.

Passing Novels in the Harlem Renaissance: Identity Politics and Textual Strategies

Lit Verlag Munster
2003
224 pages
ISBN 3-8258-5842-1

Mar Gallego, Associate Professor of American Studies
University of Huelva (Spain)

Passing Novels in the Harlem Renaissance offers an insightful study of the significance of passing novels for the literary and intellectual debate of the Harlem Renaissance. Mar Gallego effectively uncovers the presence of a subversive component in five of these novels (by James Weldon Johnson, George Schuyler, Nella Larsen, and Jessie Fauset), turning them into useful tools to explore the passing phenomenon in all its richness and complexity. Her compelling study intends to contribute to the ongoing revision of the parameters conventionally employed to analyze passing novels by drawing attention to a great variety of textual strategies such as double consciousness, parody, and multiple generic covers. Examining the hybrid nature of these texts, Gallego skillfully highlights their radical critique of the status quo and their celebration of a distinct African American identity.

Miscegenation, assimilation, and consumption: racial passing in George Schuyler’s “Black No More” and Eric Liu’s “The Accidental Asian”

MELUS
Volume 33, Number 3 (Fall 2008) Multicultural and Multilingual Aesthetics of Resistance
pages 169-190

Hee-Jung Serenity Joo, Associate Professor of English
University of Manitoba

“[E]ither get out, get white or get along.”
—Schuyler, Black No More (11)

“Some are born white, others achieve whiteness, still others have whiteness thrust upon them.”
—Liu, The Accidental Asian (34-35)

In her influential essay “Eating the Other,” bell hooks examines the ways in which race is commodified in our intensifying hypercapitalist world. She expects that “cultural, ethnic, and racial differences will be continually commodified and offered up as new dishes to enhance the white palate”. The other is “eaten” and the white self is satiated through consumption of aspects of the other’s culture—food, tattoos, music, language, tourism, or even the other’s body. Over a decade later, a casual stroll down any drug store cosmetics aisle attests to the voraciousness of this white appetite. L’Oreal’s True Match foundation line caters to a wide range of skin tones, with white, Asian, and black models posing for its stylish magazine spreads. True to hooks’s observations, the darker the color of the foundation, the more edible the skin tone becomes: on the lighter side of the pigment spectrum are colors such as “porcelain,” “alabaster,” “ivory,” “nude,” and “natural.” In contrast, the darker end includes “honey,” “caramel,” “crème café,” “cappuccino,” “nut brown,” and “cocoa.” No matter that the latter colors are also advertised as daily specials on any Starbucks menu, the blatant metaphors of consumption and the exotic appeal of dark skin juxtaposed against the purity and neutrality of light skin are hard to ignore.

Two seemingly disparate texts, George Schuyler’s Black No More (1931) and Eric Liu’s The Accidental Asian: Notes of a Native Speaker (1998), pick up the question the cosmetic industry begs us to ask: what impact will consumerism have on the perpetually changing meaning of race in this age of late capitalism? In theory, in this post-Civil Rights world the category of race is less dependent on the state for its demands of equality; legally, at least, for example, the state no longer sanctions Jim Crow segregation or condones lynching. Perhaps in this epoch race has become a marker of personal taste, one that can be consumed by the highest bidder. In contrast to hooks’s emphasis on the white cannibalistic consumption of the other, these two texts complicate this racist schema by positing others as the ones who can consume their way out of their respective races and into the white one. This article compares the literary trope of racial passing in Black No More to the social narrative of assimilation in The Accidental Asian to show the changing nature of race under the pressures of late capitalism. In Black No More, racial passing challenges segregation laws that deny racial minorities entry into the labor market in the interest of protecting capitalist accumulation. In The Accidental Asian, assimilation is the contemporary version of racial passing; assimilation is promoted to incorporate racial minorities into the market as consumers, to make them pass into an appropriate category of consumption and whiteness. Despite their attempts at imagining a nation where race no longer matters, the persisting racial passing narratives of both texts question their proclamations of “post-racism.”

Though written over sixty years apart, both Black No More and The Accidental Asian present eerily similar futures of an anti-racist nation premised on miscegenation. Historically, miscegenation derived from the white slave owner’s exploitation of the black female body in order to protect and increase his property. Under Jim Crow segregation, miscegenation signified a danger to the white racial “purity” of the nation in the form of a supposed black sexual threat against white women. For Asian Americans, miscegenation has served historically as a contested battleground for legal inclusion into the nation in the forms of marriage and immigration laws. At the turn of the twenty-first century, however, miscegenation sometimes is celebrated as a means to achieve a multicultural and racism-less society. Tracing the changing nature of racial passing and miscegenation in these two texts reveals the ongoing political implications of color-blind consumerism and late capitalist consumption.

Published during the Harlem Renaissance while legal segregation flourished, Schuyler’s Black No More concerns a machine that literally turns African Americans into white (Caucasian) individuals. As Dr. Junius Crookman, the African American scientist who invents the machine, states, this will “solve the American race problem” . After all, he argues, “if there were no Negroes, there could be no Negro problem”. He then opens a business christened “Black-No-More, Incorporated” to capitalize on the success of his scientific endeavor. Predictably and often comically, instead of eliminating the race problem in the United States, Black-No-More, Inc. only thrusts the entire nation into chaos and racial paranoia by making it impossible to distinguish “real” whites from former African Americans who have “become” white via the machine. The complexities of the color line that the characters transgress attests to the intimate relationship between the state and early-twentieth-century mass production (Fordist) capitalism, which created a white working class by rejecting black bodies in the pursuit of a coherent national identity. At the same time, the thrust of the capitalist Black-No-More “machine” already foreshadows the rise of global capitalism that marks Liu’s historical moment.

Similar to Schuyler’s novel, The Accidental Asian also attempts to depict an ideal anti-racist society. In Liu’s vision, set in an era of globalization and late capitalism, racial identities are fluid and racial passing has become a consumerist choice. He argues that in this day and age, “you don’t have to have white skin anymore to become white”. The book is Liu’s poignant memoir of assimilation into the elite upper class of the US. Journalist, author, and former speechwriter for Bill Clinton, Liu confesses that because US society conflates class and race by equating power and wealth with whiteness, the illogic of assimilation unfortunately but inevitably makes him white; therefore, as his title suggests, he is Asian only by accident. He lists a variety of specifically consumerist practices that make him white, including “wear[ing] khaki Dockers,” “eat[ing] gourmet greens,” and “furnish[ing] [his] condo a la Crate and Barrel”. The contemporary racial passing proposed by Liu shows a significant shift in the social meaning of race; now race is influenced by consumerism and flexible capital spending, rather than by the state. In Black No More, becoming white mediates the state’s racism, while Liu’s text presents a scenario in which certain assimilated and affluent people of color regard racial and ethnic identities as commodities. This relatively malleable definition of race is compounded by the ever increasing popularity of white subjects who desire to pass for exotic ethnics.

Racial passing narratives have often been used to reveal the constructed and fragile nature of racial categories and to critique the hypocritical and discriminatory system of US democracy that equated white skin with freedom and citizenship? In African American literary history, in particular, the racial passing narrative has been an important genre. Beginning with slave narratives and continuing through the domestic “tragic mulatto” novels of the Civil War and into Harlem Renaissance literature, the trope of the racial passer has been deployed to reveal the unjust treatment of African Americans in US history.  Whether under slavery or during the Jim Crow era, mixed-race subjects with light skin often passed for white in order to gain their freedom or assert their constitutional rights.

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Composition in Black and White: The Life of Philippa Schuyler

Oxford University Press
January 1995
360 pages
47 halftones
6-1/8 x 9-1/4
ISBN13: 978-0-19-511393-8
ISBN10: 0-19-511393-4

Kathryn Talalay

The Tragic Saga of Harlem’s Biracial Prodigy

George Schuyler, a renowned and controversial black journalist of the Harlem Renaissance, and Josephine Cogdell, a blond, blue-eyed Texas heiress and granddaughter of slave owners, believed that intermarriage would “invigorate” the races, thereby producing extraordinary offspring. Their daughter, Philippa Duke Schuyler, became the embodiment of this theory, and they hoped she would prove that interracial children represented the final solution to America’s race problems.

Able to read and write at the age of two and a half, a pianist at four, and a composer by five, Philippa was often compared to Mozart. During the 1930s and 40s she graced the pages of Time and Look magazines, the New York Herald Tribune , and The New Yorker . But as an adult she mysteriously dropped out of sight, leaving America to wonder what had happened to the “little Harlem genius.” Suffering the double sting of racial and gender bias, Philippa was forced to find recognition abroad, where she traveled constantly, performing for kings and queens, and always in search of her self. At the age of thirty-five, Philippa finally began to embark on a racial catharsis: she was just beginning to find herself when on May 9, 1967, while on an unauthorized mission of mercy, her life was cut short in a helicopter crash over the waters of war-torn Vietnam.

The first authorized biography of Philippa Schuyler, Composition in Black and White draws on previously unpublished letters and diaries to reveal an extraordinary and complex personality. Extensive research and personal interviews from around the world make this book not only the definitive chronicle of Schuyler’s restless and haunting life, but also a vivid history of the tumultuous times she lived through. Talalay has created a highly perceptive and provocative portrait of a fascinating woman.

Interracialism: Black-White Intermarriage in American History, Literature, and Law

Oxford University Press
September 2000
560 pages
Paperback ISBN13: 9780195128574
Paperback ISBN10: 0195128575
Hardback ISBN13: 9780195128567
Hardback ISBN10: 0195128567

Edited by:

Werner Sollors, Henry B. and Anne M. Cabot Professor of English and African-American Studies
Harvard University

Interracialism, or marriage between members of different races, has formed, torn apart, defined and divided our nation since its earliest history. This collection explores the primary texts of interracialism as a means of addressing core issues in our racial identity. Ranging from Hannah Arendt to George Schuyler and from Pace v. Alabama to Loving v. Virginia, it provides extraordinary resources for faculty and students in English, American and Ethnic Studies as well as for general readers interested in race relations. By bringing together a selection of historically significant documents and of the best essays and scholarship on the subject of “miscegenation,” interracialism demonstrates that notions of race can be fruitfully approached from the vantage point of the denial of interracialism that typically informs racial ideologies.