Mixed Race Studies

Adding up preoccupations about color, race in literature

Emory Report
Emory University
1999-02-22
Volume 51, Number 21

The class listed in Emory’s spring course atlas as “The Calculus of Color” might at first sound like an art class on color theory, but instructor Cassandra Jackson intends for her class to explore mulatto figures and miscegenation in 19th and 20th century American literature.

The course takes its title from a chapter in Werner Sollors‘ book, Neither Black Nor White, a thematic exploration of biracial characters in European and American literature.

Jackson said students were drawn to the course for specific reasons. “A number of my students felt as though biracial people are very much a part of American culture and history, yet they hold an invisible space. Personal history also had an influence. A few are biracial or have a biracial parent. The students work hard and are really committed. Many of them feel a personal investment in the class because they see race issues as relevant to their lives.”…

Read the entire article here.

Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson: History, Memory, and Civic Culture

University of Virginia Press
1999
325 pages
6 x 9
ISBN: 0-8139-1919-3

Edited by

Jan Ellen Lewis
Rutgers University

Peter S. Onuf
University of Virginia

The publication of DNA test results showing that Thomas Jefferson was probably the father of one of his slave Sally Hemings‘s children has sparked a broad but often superficial debate. The editors of this volume have assembled some of the most distinguished American historians, including three Pulitzer Prize winners, and other experts on Jefferson, his times, race, and slavery. Their essays reflect the deeper questions the relationship between Hemings and Jefferson has raised about American history and national culture.

The DNA tests would not have been conducted had there not already been strong historical evidence for the possibility of a relationship. As historians from Winthrop D. Jordan to Annette Gordon-Reed have argued, much more is at stake in this liaison than the mere question of paternity: historians must ask themselves if they are prepared to accept the full implications of our complicated racial history, a history powerfully shaped by the institution of slavery and by sex across the color line.

How, for example, does it change our understanding of American history to place Thomas Jefferson in his social context as a plantation owner who fathered white and black families both? What happens when we shift our focus from Jefferson and his white family to Sally Hemings and her children? How do we understand interracial sexual relationships in the early republic and in our own time? Can a renewed exploration of the contradiction between Jefferson’s life as a slaveholder and his libertarian views yield a clearer understanding of the great political principles he articulated so eloquently and that Americans cherish? Are there moral or political lessons to be learned from the lives of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings and the way that historians and the public have attempted to explain their liaison?

Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson: History, Memory, and Civic Culture promises an open-ended discussion on the living legacy of slavery and race relations in our national culture.

Contributors:

Annette Gordon-Reed, New York Law School
Rhys Isaac, College of William and Mary
Winthrop D. Jordan, University of Mississippi
Jan Ellen Lewis, Rutgers University, Newark
Philip D. Morgan, Institute of Early American History and Culture
Peter S. Onuf, University of Virginia
Jack N. Rakove, Stanford University
Joshua Rothman, University of Virginia
Werner Sollors, Harvard University
Lucia Stanton, Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation
Dianne Swann-Wright, Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation
Clarence Walker, University of California at Davis
Gordon S. Wood, Brown University

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.

Mixing Race, Mixing Culture: Inter-American Literary Dialogues

University of Texas Press
2002
6 x 9 in.
324 pp., 4 photos, 1 chart
ISBN: 978-0-292-74348-9
Print-on-demand title

Edited by

Monika Kaup, Assistant Professor of English
University of Washington, Seattle

Debra Rosenthal, Assistant Professor of English
John Carroll University

Over the last five centuries, the story of the Americas has been a story of the mixing of races and cultures. Not surprisingly, the issue of miscegenation, with its attendant fears and hopes, has been a pervasive theme in New World literature, as writers from Canada to Argentina confront the legacy of cultural hybridization and fusion.

This book takes up the challenge of transforming American literary and cultural studies into a comparative discipline by examining the dynamics of racial and cultural mixture and its opposite tendency, racial and cultural disjunction, in the literatures of the Americas. Editors Kaup and Rosenthal have brought together a distinguished set of scholars who compare the treatment of racial and cultural mixtures in literature from North America, the Caribbean, and Latin America. From various angles, they remap the Americas as a multicultural and multiracial hemisphere, with a common history of colonialism, slavery, racism, and racial and cultural hybridity.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• I. Mixed-Blood Epistemologies
  1. Werner Sollors, Can Rabbits Have Interracial Sex?
  2. Doris Sommer, Who Can Tell? The Blanks in Villaverde
  3. Zita Nunes, Phantasmatic Brazil: Nella Larsen‘s Passing, American Literary Imagination, and Racial Utopianism
• II. Métissage and Counterdiscourse
  1. Françoise Lionnet, Narrating the Americas: Transcolonial Métissage and Maryse Condé‘s La Migration des coeurs
  2. Michèle Praeger, Créolité or Ambiguity?
• III. Indigenization, Miscegenation, and Nationalism
  1. Priscilla Archibald, Gender and Mestizaje in the Andes
  2. Debra J. Rosenthal, Race Mixture and the Representation of Indians in the U.S. and the Andes: Cumandá, Aves sin nido, The Last of the Mohicans, and Ramona
  3. Susan Gillman, The Squatter, the Don, and the Grandissimes in Our America
• IV. Hybrid Hybridity
  1. Rafael Pérez-Torres, Chicano Ethnicity, Cultural Hybridity, and the Mestizo Voice
  2. Monika Kaup, Constituting Hybridity as Hybrid: Métis Canadian and Mexican American Formations
• V. Sites of Memory in Mixed-Race Autobiography
  1. Rolando Hinojosa-Smith, Living on the River
  2. Louis Owens, The Syllogistic Mixedblood: How Roland Barthes Saved Me from the indians
• Coda: From Exoticism to Mixed-Blood Humanism
  1. Earl E. Fitz, From Blood to Culture: Miscegenation as Metaphor for the Americas
• Contributors
• Works Cited
• Index

Read the entire introduction here.

Neither Black Nor White Yet Both: Thematic Explorations of Interracial Literature

Oxford University Press
March 1997
592 pages
Hardback ISBN13: 9780195052824; ISBN10: 019505282X

Werner Sollors, Henry B. and Anne M. Cabot Professor of English Literature and Afro American Studies; Director of the History of American Civilization Program
Harvard University

Why can a “white” woman give birth to a “black” baby, while a “black” woman can never give birth to a “white” baby in the United States? What makes racial “passing” so different from social mobility? Why are interracial and incestuous relations often confused or conflated in literature, making “miscegenation” appear as if it were incest? When did the myth that one can tell a person’s race by the moon on their fingernails originate? How did blackness get associated with “the curse of Ham” when the Biblical text makes no reference to skin color at all?

Werner Sollors examines these questions and others in Neither Black Nor White Yet Both, a new and exhaustively researched exploration of “interracial literature.” In the past, interracial texts have been read more for a black-white contrast of “either-or” than for an interracial realm of “neither, nor, both, and in-between.” Intermarriage prohibitions have been legislated throughout the modern period and were still in the law books in the 1980s. Stories of black-white sexual and family relations have thus run against powerful social taboos. Yet much interracial literature has been written, and this book suggests its pervasiveness and offers new comparative and historical contexts for understanding it.

Looking at authors from Heliodorus, John Stedman, Buffon, Thomas Jefferson, Heinrich von Kleist, Victor Hugo, Aleksandr Sergeevic Puskin, and Hans Christian Andersen, to Lydia Maria Child, Harriet Beecher Stowe, William Wells Brown, Mark Twain, Charles Chesnutt, Kate Chopin, Cirilo Villaverde, Aluisio Azevedo, and Pauline Hopkins, and on to modern writers such as Langston Hughes, Jessie Fauset, Boris Vian, and William Faulkner, Sollors ranges across time, space, and cultures, analyzing scientific and legal works as well as poetry, fiction, and the visual arts, to explore the many themes and motifs interwoven throughout interracial literature. From the etymological origins of the term “race” to the cultural sources of the “Tragic Mulatto,” Sollors examines the recurrent images and ideas in this literature of love, family, and other relations between blacks, whites, and those of “mixed race.”

Sollors’ interdisciplinary explorations of literary themes yield many insights into the history and politics of “race,” and illuminate a new understanding of the relations between cultures through the focus on interracial exchanges. Neither Black Nor White Yet Both is vital reading for anyone who seeks to understand what has been written and said about “race,” and where interracial relations can go from here.

Table of Contents

• List of Illustrations
• Introduction:
• Black—White—Both—Neither—In-Between xv
• 1. Origins; or, Paradise Dawning 31
• 2. Natus Æthiopus/Natus Albus 48
• 3. The Curse of Ham; or, from “Generation” to “Race” 78
• 4. The Calculus of Color 112
• 5. The Bluish Tinge in the Halfmoon; or, Fingernails as a Racial Sign 142
• 6. Code Noir and Literature 162
• 7. Retellings: Mercenaries and Abolitionists 188
• 8. Excursus on the “Tragic Mulatto”; or, the Fate of a Stereotype 220
• 9. Passing; or, Sacrificing a Parvenu 246
• 10. Incest and Miscegenation 285
• Endings 336
• Appendix A: A Chronology of Interracial Literature 361
• Appendix B: Prohibitions of Interracial Marriage and Cohabitation 395
• Notes 411
• Selected Bibliography 523
• Index 561