Mixed Race Studies

Trans-American Modernisms: Racial Passing, Travel Writing, and Cultural Fantasies of Latin America

University of Southern California
August 2009
311 pages

Ruth Blandón

Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (ENGLISH)

In my historical examination of the literary works of Nella Larsen, William Carlos Williams, Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson, Jessie Redmon Fauset, and Carl Van Vechten, I investigate U.S. modernists’ interest in Latin America and their attempts to establish trans-American connections. As they engage with and write about countries such as Brazil, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Costa Rica, and Venezuela as utopian spaces, these writers often tend to relegate Latin America to the status of a useful trope, one that allows them to negotiate a variety of identitarian and sexual anxieties.

The domestic political landscape that informs the desire for migration to the Latin Americas—whether real or fantastical—in the early twentieth century leads to Johnson’s depiction of the savvy and ambitious titular character in his first and only novel, Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, to Van Vechten’s, Larsen’s, and Fauset’s fantastical Brazil in their respective Nigger Heaven, Passing, and Plum Bun. Hughes’s translation of Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén’s poetry illustrates his straddling of national and color lines through the translation of language. These writers react to Jim Crow laws, one-drop rules, and color lines in their connections to and fantasies of the Latin Americas. What then of writers who make similar trans-American connections and constructions, but who write from a space of relative privilege, however resistant they are to that privilege? Consider William Carlos Williams, who negotiates the pressures of assimilation in the United States as he attempts to assert his Afro Puerto Rican and Anglo Dominican heritages. Although Williams is commonly recalled as an “all-American” poet, his works betray his constant attempts to harness three perpetually shifting and overlapping identities: that of a son of immigrants, of a first generation “American,” and of a son of the Americas.

The trans-American connections I reveal span the fantastical to the truly cross-cultural. In placing United States modernism and the Harlem Renaissance within a larger hemispheric context, I shift our sense of U.S. modernism in general, but also of the Harlem Renaissance’s place within U.S. modernism in particular.

Table of Contents

• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• List of Figures
• Abstract
• Introduction
• Chapter One:
  • Reading, Misreading, and Language Passing in James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man and Along This Way
  • Blackness under the law
  • James Weldon Johnson’s Along This Way
  • The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man
  • Conclusion
• Chapter Two:
  • Brazilian Schemes and Utopian Dreams in Nella Larsen’s Passing, Jessie Redmon Fauset’s Plum Bun, and Carl Van Vechten’s Nigger Heaven
  • Historical Context
  • From Liberia to Brazil—A Change of Venue
  • Carl Van Vechten’s Nigger Heaven
  • Jessie Fauset’s Plum Bun, “Home,” and Brazil
  • Larsen’s Passing and Brazil as Utopia/Dystopia
  • Conclusion: Utopia vs. Brazilian Reality
• Chapter Three:
  • All-American Me: William Carlos Williams’s Construction and Deconstruction of the Self
  • Cultural Context—Casta and Passing
  • Blurring Cultural Boundaries: “Only the whites of my eyes were affected.”
  • The Specter of Blackness: “I had visions of being lynched…”
  • In The American Grain: “I am—the brutal thing itself.”
  • Translation: “El que no a vista Sevilla, […] no a vista maravilla!”
  • Conclusion: “I’ll keep my way in spite of all.”
• Chapter Four:
  • “Look Homeward Angel Now”: Travel, Translation, and Langston Hughes’s Quest for Home
  • Langston Hughes in Mexico and Cuba—1907-1948: Mexico
  • Cuba
  • Langston Hughes and Nicolás Guillén in Spain
  • Translation, Analogy, and the “I”
  • Of Poetry, Jazz, Son, and Rumba
  • The Translations
  • Conclusion: Translating, Travel, and “Home”
• Bibliography

List of Figures

• Figure 1: James Weldon Johnson, photographed by Carl Van Vechten in 1932.
• Figure 2: “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.” Pablo Picasso, 1907.
• Figure 3: “Noire et Blanche.” Man Ray, 1926.
• Figure 4: “Blues.” Archibald Motley, 1929.
• Figure 5: “An Idyll of the Deep South.” Aaron Douglas, 1934.
• Figure 6: Bessie Smith, photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1936.
• Figure 7: Billie Holiday, photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1949.
• Figure 8: The Williams Family
• Figure 9: “De Español y Mulata; Morisca.” [“From Spaniard and Mulatto, Morisca.”] Miguel Cabrera, 1763.
• Figure 10: “De Mestizo y d India; Coyote.”[“From Mestizo and Indian, Coyote.”] Miguel Cabrera, 1763.
• Figure 11: William Carlos Williams, circa 1903.
• Figure 12: Elena Hoheb Williams
• Figure 13: Langston Hughes
• Figure 14: Diego Rivera with Frida Kahlo, photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1932.
• Figure 15: Nicolás Guillén

Read the entire dissertation here.

Visually white, legally black: Miscegenation, the mulatto, and passing in American literature and culture, 1865–1933

Illinois State University
2004
193 pages
Publication Number: AAT 3128271

Karen A. Chachere

Many historians and literary scholars characterize the period between 1865-1933 as America’s preoccupation with the “Negro Question.” Admittedly, America was intrigued by the idea of the former slave as “citizen.” Seemingly, the more resounding question obscured behind the “Negro Question” was how whites would maintain their privilege. The answer to this question plagued America’s consciousness and manifested itself most obviously in American literature written from 1865-1933. Indeed, the novels, which emerged during this turbulent period, with their focus on miscegenation, the mulatto, and passing, accurately reflect the fear that whites felt at the thought of losing their legal, social, and economic advantages. White and black writers of the era capitalized on the nation’s fear of miscegenation and racial passing and voraciously used these themes to protest the venomous social, legal, and political conflicts that ensued over America’s desire to maintain its whiteness.

Diverse writers such as Mark Twain, Charles Waddell Chesnutt, and Jessie Redmon Fauset debated the color line in their works. “Visually White, Legally Black: Miscegenation and the Mulatto in American Literature and Culture, 1865-1933” examines the dialectical relationship that emerged between these diverse writers through American literature’s theme of miscegenation and passing narratives and exposes the underlying issue that was not blackness, but whiteness. And yet, the mulatto’s attempt at racial passing has often been misconstrued as an indictment against the black community rather than for what it really is–an indictment against claims of racial purity and white superiority. The first four chapters of this dissertation are grounded in biographical, historical, and legal evidence in order to expose the ways in which writers negotiated the nexus of race, class, and gender. Finally, chapter five illustrates how the passing genre may be used in the literature classroom to challenge and encourage dialogue concerning race, class, and gender superiority/inferiority.

Table of Contents

• DEDICATION
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• CONTENTS
• I. HISTORICAL, LEGAL, AND LITERARY OVERIVIEW OF RACE MIXING
  • Brief Historical Overview of Miscegenation
  • A Divided Sisterhood: The Beginning
  • Building a Case Against Race Mixing
  • Constructing Whiteness Through the Legal System
• II. PROTECTING THE UNMARKED CATEGORY: WHITENESS RECOVERED IN MARK TWAIN’S PUDD’NHEAD WILSON
• III. WHITE ACCOUNTABILITY IN CHARLES W. CHESNUTT’S “THE SHERIFF’S CHILDREN”
• IV. REPRESENTATIONS OF WHITENESS IN JESSIE REDMON FAUSET’S COMEDY: AMERICAN STYLE
• V. MISCEGENATION, THE MULATTO, AND PASSING: A TEACHING NARRATIVE
• WORKS CITED

Purchase the dissertation here.

Race Passing and American Individualism

University of Massachusetts Press
February 2003
176 pages
Cloth ISBN: 1-55849-377-8 (Print on Demand)

Kathleen Pfeiffer, Professor of English
Oakland University, Rochester, Michigan

A literary study of the ambiguities of racial identity in American culture

In the literature of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America, black characters who pass for white embody a paradox. By virtue of the “one drop” rule that long governed the nation’s race relations, they are legally black. Yet the color of their skin makes them visibly-and therefore socially-white.

In this book, Kathleen Pfeiffer explores the implications of this dilemma by analyzing its treatment in the fiction of six writers: William Dean Howells, Frances E. W. Harper, Jean Toomer, James Weldon Johnson, Jessie Fauset, and Nella Larsen. Although passing for white has sometimes been viewed as an expression of racial self-hatred or disloyalty, Pfeiffer argues that the literary evidence is much more ambiguous than that. Rather than indicating a denial of “blackness” or co-optation by the dominant white culture, passing can be viewed as a form of self-determination consistent with American individualism. In their desire to manipulate personal identity in order to achieve social acceptance and upward mobility, light-skinned blacks who pass for white are no different than those Americans who reinvent themselves in terms of class, religion, or family history.

In Pfeiffer’s view, to see race passing as a problematic but potentially legitimate expression of individualism is to invite richer and more complex readings of a broad range of literary texts. More than that, it represents a challenge to the segregationist logic of the “one drop” rule and, as such, subverts the ideology of racial essentialism.

Plum Bun: A Novel without a Moral

Beacon Press
Published in 1929
408 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-080700919-2
Size: 5-3/8″ X 8″ Inches

Jessie Redmon Fauset

Written in 1929 at the height of the Harlem Renaissance by one of the movement’s most important and prolific authors, Plum Bun is the story of Angela Murray, a young black girl who discovers she can pass for white. After the death of her parents, Angela moves to New York to escape the racism she believes is her only obstacle to opportunity. What she soon discovers is that being a woman has its own burdens that don’t fade with the color of one’s skin, and that love and marriage might not offer her salvation.