Mixed Race Studies

Boundaries Transgressed: Modernism and miscegenation in Langston Hughes’s “Red-Headed Baby”

Atlantic Studies
Volume 3, Issue 1 (April 2006)
pages 97 – 110
DOI: 10.1080/14788810500525499

Isabel Soto

This essay is an expanded and revised version of a paper read at the 8th International Conference On the Short Story in English, organized by the Instituto Universitario de Investigación en Enstudios Norteamericanos, Alcalá de Henares (Spain), 28–31 October 2004.

This essay argues that while Langston Hughes‘s short story “Red-Headed Baby” (from The Ways of White Folks) may initially seem to depart from the Hughes repertoire (through its dizzying modernist style, for one), it ultimately endorses the author’s signature concerns of race, genre transgression and imaginative appropriation of alterity. I also seek to historicize Hughes’s text, inscribing it within a modernist practice, studies of which have traditionally promoted the Euro-American paradigm of a dehistoricized “modernist construction of authorship through displacement” (Cora Kaplan). Few writers of the first third of the twentieth century have undertaken travel—figurative and literal—as intensely as Hughes has. His work is anchored in representations of displacement and “Red-Headed Baby” is no exception, with its miscegenation motif and sailor protagonist. Hence my reading of Hughes’s short story will also draw on modes of inquiry that promote displacement as central to an understanding of cultural practice. I draw substantially on Paul Gilroy‘s black Atlantic model and formulations of diaspora—not least because his influential work barely mentions Hughes, that most diasporic of modernist writers. I will argue that travel was aesthetically enabling for Hughes, enhancing what elsewhere I have termed his poetics of reciprocity or mutuality. Finally, Duboisian double consciousness also contributes to my discussion, which proposes a dialogic relationship between The Souls of Black Folks and The Ways of White Folks.

Read or purchase the article here.

Passing

W. W. Norton & Company
September 2007
584 pages
5.2 × 8.4 in
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-393-97916-9

Nella Larsen

Edited by

Carla Kaplan, Davis Distinguished Professor of American Literature
Northeastern University

Nella Larsen is a central figure in African American, Modernist, and women’s literature.

Larsen’s status as a Harlem Renaissance woman writer was rivaled by only Zora Neale Hurston’s. This Norton Critical Edition of her electrifying 1929 novel includes Carla Kaplan’s detailed and thought-provoking introduction, thorough explanatory annotations, and a Note on the Text. An unusually rich “Background and Contexts” section connects the novel to the historical events of the day, most notably the sensational Rhinelander/Jones case of 1925. Fourteen contemporary reviews are reprinted, including those by Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Mary Griffin, and W. E. B. Du Bois. Published accounts from 1911 to 1935—by Langston Hughes, Juanita Ellsworth, and Caleb Johnson, among others—provide a nuanced view of the contemporary cultural dimensions of race and passing, both in America and abroad. Also included are Larsen’s statements on the novel and on passing, as well as a generous selection of her letters and her central writings on “The Tragic Mulatto(a)” in American literature. Additional perspective is provided by related Harlem Renaissance works. “Criticism” provides fifteen diverse critical interpretations, including those by Mary Helen Washington, Cheryl A. Wall, Deborah E. McDowell, David L. Blackmore, Kate Baldwin, and Catherine Rottenberg. A Chronology and Selected Bibliography are also included.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction
A Note on the Text
The Text of Passing
Backgrounds and Contexts
REVIEWS

1. Mary Rennels – “Passing” Is Novel of Longings (April 27, 1929)
2. Beyond the Color Line (April 28, 1929)
3. Margaret Cheney Dawson – The Color Line (April 28, 1929)
4. The Dilemma of Mixed Race: Another Study of Color-line in New York (May 1, 1929)
5. Alice Dunbar-Nelson – As In a Looking Glass (May 3, 1929)
6. W. B. Seabrook – Touch of the Tar-brush (May 18, 1929)
7. Esther Hyman – Passing by Nella Larsen (June 1929)
8. Aubrey Bowser – The Cat Came Back (June 5, 1929)
9. Mary Griffin – Novel of Race Consciousness (June 23, 1929)
10. W. E. B. Du Bois – Passing (July 1929)
11. Mary Fleming Larabee – Passing (August 1929)
12. Do They Always Return? (September 28, 1929)
13. “M. L. H.” – Passing (December 1929)
14. Passing (December 12, 1929)

CONTEMPORARY COVERAGE OF PASSING AND RACE

1. When Is a Caucasian Not a Caucasian? (March 2, 1911)
2. [Publisher’s Preface to the 1912 Edition of Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man]
3. Writer Says Brazil Has No Color Line (October 1925)
4. Blood Will Tell (July 24, 1926)
5. Don Pierson – Does It Pay to “Pass?” (August 20, 1927)
6. Juanita Ellsworth – White Negroes (May-June 1928)
7. Lewis Fremont Baldwin – From From Negro to Caucasian, Or How the Ethiopian Is Changing His Skin (1929)
8. Emilie Hahn – Crossing the Color Line (July 28, 1929)
9. Caleb Johnson – Crossing the Color Line (August 26, 1931)
10. Langston Hughes – Passing for White, Passing for Colored, Passing for Negroes Plus (1931)
11. 75,000 Pass in Philadelphia Every Day (December 19, 1931)
12. Careful Lyncher! He May Be Your Brother (January 21, 1932)
13. Blonde Girl Was ‘Passing‘ (January 23, 1932)
14. Swedish Negro Baby! (April 28, 1932)
15. Virginia Is Still Hounding ‘White’ Negroes Who ‘Pass’ (June 29, 1935)

THE RHINELANDER/JONES CASE

1. Mark J. Madigan – Miscegenation and “the Dicta of Race and Class”: The Rhinelander Case and Nella Larsen’s Passing (1990)
2. Selected newspaper articles on the case (list pending)

AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND BIOGRAPHY

1. About Nella Larsen
2. Miss Nella Larsen Bids for Literary Laurels (May 12, 1928)
3. Thelma E. Berlack – New Author Unearthed Right Here in Harlem (May 23, 1928)
4. Mary Rennels – Behind the Backs of Books and Authors (April 13, 1929)
5. [Letter about Nella Larsen] Jean Blackwell Hutson to Louise Fox (August 1, 1969)
6. Thadious M. Davis – Nella Larsen’s Harlem Aesthetic (1989)
7. George Hutchinson – Nella Larsen and the Veil of Race (1997)
8. Larson on birth, Passing, and death
9. Davis on birth, Passing, and death
10. Hutchinson on birth, Passing, and death

Author’s Statements

1. Nella Larsen Imes, “Author Statement,” 1926
2. Nella Larsen Imes, Guggenheim Application
3. [In Defense of Sanctuary]

Letters

1. To Carl Van Vechten [1925]
2. To Charles S. Johnson [August 1926]
3. To Eddie Wasserman
4. To Eddie Wasserman
5. To Dorothy Peterson
6. To Dorothy Peterson
7. To Dorothy Peterson
8. To Dorothy Peterson
9. To Langston Hughes
10. To Gertrude Stein
11. To Carl Van Vechten
12. To Carl Van Vechten

THE TRAGIC MULATTO(A)

1. Lydia Maria Child – The Quadroons (1842)
2. Williams Wells Brown– From Clotel (1853)
3. Frances Harper – From Iola Leroy (1892)
4. William Dean Howells – From An Imperative Duty (1892 or 83?)
5. Kate Chopin – The Father of Désirée’s Baby (1893)
6. Mark Twain – From Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894)
7. Charles Chesnutt – From The House behind the Cedars (1900)
8. Georgia Douglass Johnson – The Octoroon (1922)
9. Countee Cullen – Near White (1925)
10. Langston Hughes – Mulatto (1927)
11. Fannie Hurst – From Imitation of Life (1933)

SELECTED WRITINGS ABOUT PASSING

1. Frank Webb – From The Gairies and Their Friends (1852)
2. Frances Harper – From Iola Leroy (1892)
3. Charles Chesnutt – From House behind the Cedars (1900)
4. James Weldon Johnson – From Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912)
5. Jessie Redmon Fauset – The Sleeper Wakes (1920)
6. Countee Cullen – Two Who Crossed a Line (1925)
7. Walter White – From Flight (1926)
8. Jessie Redmon Fauset – From Plum Bun (1928)
9. Rudolph Fisher – From The Walls of Jericho (1928)
10. George S. Schuyler – From Black No More (1931)
11. Langston Hughes – Passing (1934)

SELECTED WRITINGS FROM THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE

1. Joseph Seamon Cotter, Jr. – The Mulatto to His Critics (1918)
2. Countee Cullen – Heritage (1925)
3. W. E. B. Du Bois – Criteria of Negro Art (1926)
4. Nella Larsen [Pseud. Allen Semi] – Freedom (1926)
5. George S. Schuyler – The Negro-Art Hokum (1926)
6. Carl Van Vechten – From Nigger Heaven (1926)
7. From Negro Womanhood’s Greatest Needs: A Symposium (1927)

Criticism

1. Nathan Irvin Huggins – [Schizophrenia from Racial Dualism]
2. Mary Mabel Youman – Nella Larsen’s Passing: A Study in Irony
3. Claudia Tate – Nella Larsen’s Passing: A Problem of Interpretation
4. Mary Helen Washington – Nella Larsen: Mystery Woman of the Harlem Renaissance
5. Cheryl A. Wall – Passing for What? Aspects of Identity in Nella Larsen’s Novels
6. Deborah E. McDowell – [Black Female Sexuality in Passing]
7. David L. Blackmore – “That Unreasonable Restless Feeling”: The Homosexual Subtexts of Nella Larsen’s Passing
8. Jennifer DeVere Brody – Clare Kendry’s “True” Colors: Race and Class Conflict in Nella Larsen’s Passing
9. Helena Michie – [Differences among Black Women]
10. Judith Butler – Passing, Queering: Nella Larsen’s Psychoanalytic Challenge
11. Ann duCille – Passing Fancies
12. Kate Baldwin – The Recurring Conditions of Nella Larsen’s Passing
13. Gayle Wald – Passing and Domestic Tragedy
14. Catherine Rottenberg – Passing: Race, Identification, and Desire
15. Miriam Thaggert – Racial Etiquette: Nella Larsen’s Passing and the Rhinelander Case

Nella Larsen: A Chronology
Selected Bibliography

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