Mixed Race Studies

Tragic No More: Mixed Race Women and the Nexus of Sex and Celebrity

University of Massachusetts Press
December 2012
176 pages
6 x9; 6 illustrations
ISBN (paper): 978-1-55849-985-0
ISBN (cloth): 978-1-55849-984-3

Caroline A. Streeter, Associate Professor of English
University of California, Los Angeles

A timely exploration of gender and mixed race in American culture

This book examines popular representations of biracial women of black and white descent in the United States, focusing on novels, television, music, and film. Although the emphasis is on the 1990s, the historical arc of the study begins in the 1930s. Caroline A. Streeter explores the encounter between what she sees as two dominant narratives that frame the perception of mixed race in America. The first is based on the long-standing historical experience of white supremacy and black subjugation. The second is more recent and involves the post–Civil Rights expansion of interracial marriage and mixed race identities. Streeter analyzes the collision of these two narratives, the cultural anxieties they have triggered, and the role of black/white women in the simultaneous creation and undoing of racial categories—a charged, ambiguous cycle in American culture.

Streeter’s subjects include concert pianist Philippa Schuyler, Dorothy West’s novel The Wedding (in print and on screen), Danzy Senna’s novels Caucasia and Symptomatic, and celebrity performing artists Mariah Carey, Alicia Keys, and Halle Berry. She opens with a chapter that examines the layered media response to Essie Mae Washington-Williams, Senator Strom Thurmond’s biracial daughter. Throughout the book, Streeter engages the work of feminist critics and others who have written on interracial sexuality and marriage, biracial identity, the multiracial movement, and mixed race in cultural studies.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Essie Mae Washington-Williams’s Secrets and Strom Thurmond’s Lies
• 2. The Wedding’s Black/White Women in Prime Time
• 3. Sex and Femininity in Danzy Senna’s Novels
• 4. Faking the Funk? Mariah Carey, Alicia Keys, and the Politics of Passing
• 5. From Tragedy to Triumph: Dorothy Dandridge, Halle Berry, and the Search for a Black Screen Goddess
• 6. High (Mulatto) Hopes: The Rise and Fall of Philippa Schuyler
• Afterword
• Notes
• Index

I continue to identify myself as black. I don’t see it in contradiction with my white and Mexican ancestry. Nor does it negate these other parts of myself. I have come to understand that my multiplicity is inherent in my blackness, not opposed to it. To be black, for me, is to contain all colors. The choice stems from my childhood decision not to define myself differently from my sister or my father. But it also grows out of my increasing understanding that race is not real, but rather is a social, political, and historical construct. Race has never been about blood, and it has never been about reason. Rather, it has to do with power and economics and history. One of my concerns about the multiracial movement is that it buys into the idea of race as a real, biological category. It seems to see race almost as chemistry: Mix black and Japanese, you get Blackanese, mix Caucasian, black, Indian, and Asian and you get Cablinasian. I wonder if it will work toward a deconstruction of race, or a further construction of it. When we look at societies that acknowledge racial mixture, such as Haiti, Brazil, and South Africa, it becomes clear that multiracial pride does not necessarily mean the end of racism. Even when we look at the history of our own country—blue vein societies, brown paper bag tests, and light-skinned privilege—it becomes clear that a multiracial identity can live happily with racism and white supremacy intact.

Source: DanzySenna.com

Danzy Senna, “Passing and the Problematic of Multiracial Pride (or, Why One Mixed Girl Still Answers to Black),” in Black Cultural Traffic: Crossroads in Global Performance and Popular Culture, edited by Harry J. Elam, Jr. and Kennell Jackson, (Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press: 2005), 85.

Literature and Racial Ambiguity

Rodopi
2002
320 pages
8.7 x 5.9 x 0.9 inches
Hardback ISBN: 978-90-420-1428-2 / 90-420-1428-8
Paperback ISBN: 978-90-420-1418-3 / 90-420-1418-0

Edited by:

Teresa Hubel, Associate Professor of English
Huron University College in London, Ontario

Neil Brooks, Associate Professor of English
Huron University College at Western University, London, Ontario

Contents

• Neil Brooks and Teresa Hubel: Introduction
• 1. Peter Clandfield: “What Is In My Blood?”: Contemporary Black Scottishness and the work of Jackie Kay
• 2. Neluka Silva: “Everyone was Vaguely Related”: Hybridity and the Politics of Race in Sri Lankan Literary Discourses in English
• 3. Teresa Zackodnik: Passing Transgressions and Authentic Identity in Jessie Fauset’s Plum Bun and Nella Larsen’s Passing
• 4. Myriam Perregaux: Whiteness as Unstable Construction: Kate Pullinger’s The Last Time I Saw Jane
• 5. Bella Adams: Becoming Chinese: Racial Ambiguity in Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club
• 6. Jennifer Sparrow: Strategic Créolité. Caliban and Miranda after Empire
• 7. Jennifer Gibbs: White Identity and the New Ethic in Faulkner’s Light In August
• 8. Elizabeth DeLoughrey: White Fathers, Brown Daughters: the Frisbie Family Romance and the American Pacific
• 9. Rita Keresztesi Treat: Writing Culture and Performing Race in Mourning Dove’s Cogewea, The Half-Blood ‘(1927)
• 10. Kathryn Nicol: Visible Differences: Viewing Racial Identity in Toni Morrison’s Paradise and “Recitatif”
• 11. Yvette Tan: Looking Different/Rethinking Difference: Global Constants and/or Contradictory Characteristics in Yasmine Gooneratne’s A Change of Skies and Adib Kalim’s Seasonal Adjustments
• 12. Margaret D. Stetz: Jessie Fauset’s Fiction: Reconsidering Race and Revising Aestheticism
• 13. Paul Allatson: “I May Create A Monster”: Cherríe Moraga’s Transcultural Conundrum
• 14. Michele Hunter: Revisiting the Third Space: Reading Danzy Senna’s Caucasia
• Notes on the Authors

The Dialogue About “Racial Democracy” Among African-American and Afro-Brazilian Literatures

University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
2008
262 pages

Isabel Cristina Rodrigues Ferreira

A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures (Portuguese).

This dissertation focuses on the myth of racial democracy in the works of African-American and Afro-Brazilian writers in the early and late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Their novels, short stories, and a play dialogue among each other. The African-American novels Passing (1929) of Nella Larsen and Caucasia (1998) of Danzy Senna reflect on their perception of Brazilian reality of racial democracy, which was related to their own racial realities. Both authors use Brazilian racial harmony as an option to their characters to experience a different racial relation that did not involve segregation in the 1920s or violent acts in the 1960s and 1970s. The Afro-Brazilian selection of stories reflects on the Brazilian reality for Afrodescendants, which presents no sign of racial harmony. The novels Vida e morte de M. J. Gonzaga de Sá (1919) and Clara dos Anjos (1923-24) of Lima Barreto, Malungos e milongas (1988) of Esmeralda Ribeiro and Ponciá Vicêncio (2003) of Conceição Evaristo; the unpublished play Uma boneca no lixo of Cristiane Sobral; and short stories of Cuti, Márcio Barbosa, Éle Semog, Esmeralda Ribeiro, Oubi Inaê Kibuko, Conceição Evaristo, Lia Vieira and Cristiane Sobral show that Afro-Brazilian reality in the 1920s and in the late twentieth and early twentieth-first centuries is of discrimination, and prejudice, but they reflect on non-violent solutions to fight against their fate.

In Chapter One, I introduce the subject of racial democracy, which will be discussed in two African-American novels and some Afro-Brazilian literary works. Chapters Two and Three are overviews of Brazilian history, examining the role and perception of Afro-descendants by society, and Afro-Brazilian literature throughout the centuries, respectively. The former helps readers understand how important the myth of racial democracy was to maintain the order and power to those controlling the country’s economy and politics. Chapter Four examines African-American novels, relating them not only to their perception of Brazil, but also to their own history and racial relations. Chapter Five shows different racial issues discussed in some of the works. These interpretations of Brazilian racial reality can dismantle the discourse of the myth of racial democracy. The last Chapter is the conclusion of what I presented and discussed in the previous chapters and some thoughts about future research topics.

Read the entire dissertation here.

Identity Formation in Biracial Female Authors’ Narratives of Passing: Transgressing Racial and Sexual Boundaries in Nella Larsen’s Passing and Danzy Senna’s Caucasia

Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
September 2008
150 pages

Stamatia Koutsimani

A Dissertation submitted to the Department of American Literature and Culture, School of English, Faculty of Philosophy of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts.

The complex presence of the mulatta figure in American cultural history is mostly reflected in twentieth-century narratives of passing where the light-skinned enough to pass Negress becomes a vehicle for challenging both the color line and the very notions of blackness and whiteness. Contrary to nineteenth-century whites’ stereotypical representations of the “tragic mulatta” as a victim of her divided racial heritage, the use of the passing mulatta by twentieth-century biracial female authors has served to criticize racial as well as gender essentialisms. In this respect, this thesis will focus on Nella Larsen’s Passing, published in 1929 and Danzy Senna’s Caucasia, published in 1998, trying to show how the changing representation of the passing mulatta characters reflects the gradual reversal of the tragic mulatta myth and reveals the interconnections among race, gender, class and sexuality in different sociopolitical contexts. By examining the authors’ use of the passing mulatta as a trope through which to question the dominant political and racial ideology of their time, the thesis will attempt to explain how the biracial female characters’ transgression of racial and gender boundaries contributes to the understanding of identity as constructed and performed. More specifically, the reading of Passing and Caucasia will be based on Judith Butler’s concept of gender performativity and Catherine Rottenberg’s theoretical discussion of race performativity. In addition, Kimberlé Crenshaw’s theory of intersectionality, which is central to Valerie Smith’s notion of black feminism, will play a major role in the analysis of the two works.

Based on a comparative analysis of the novels, the thesis will draw attention to the central mulatta characters’ search for racial and gender identities, with a view to tracing potential changes in the authors’ employment of the passing theme in the increasingly multicultural US racial context. Moreover, by highlighting the passing novels’ difference from stereotypical depictions of mulatta figures, the thesis aims at responding to questions regarding racial dualism and ongoing debates over mixed race identity. On the whole, it will reveal that the biracial female authors’ representations of the permeable borders between identity categories serve to challenge dominant cultural understandings of racial and gender differences which have long contributed to the mulatta figure’s liminal status in American society.

Read the entire thesis here.

Passing, Performance, and Perversity: Rewriting Bodies in the Works of Lawrence Hill, Shani Mootoo, and Danzy Senna

49th Parallel: An interdisciplinary journal of North American studies
Issue 26: Autumn 2011
ISSN: 1753-5794
19 pages

Natalie Wall
University of Calgary

This paper examines the function of passing in the works of Lawrence Hill, Shani Mootoo, and Danzy Senna. It traces the historical use of the term passing, following its development from a static conception of the black person passing for white to a theoretical practice of acting out any/every race, in order to open the term up and explore why passing is considered perverse by so many and enlightened by a few. Passing, the essay suggests, exposes the dual nature of race – a construct that is arbitrary and fictional but which also possesses immense social and material power. Finally, by juxtaposing the works of these three authors, the essay argues for a conception of passing as an intersectional phenomenon, defined not only by race but also by its interactions with class, gender, and sexuality.

Read the entire article here.

English 108: Crossing Racial Boundaries in Post-Civil Rights Fiction and Film: Interracial Encounters

University of California, Los Angeles
Winter 2012

Caroline Streeter, Associate Professor of English

This course looks at literature and film depicting interracial sexuality and mixed race identities in the post-Civil Rights era. Course materials depict individuals and communities that trouble and challenge conventional ideas about racial categorization and the boundaries between groups. Texts represent a wide variety of ethnic and cultural perspectives. Books include Caucasia (Danzy Senna), A Feather on the Breath of God (Sigrid Nunez), Drown (Junot Diaz) and My Year of Meats (Ruth L. Ozeki). Movies include Diva (Jean-Jacques Beineix), Jungle Fever (Spike Lee) and The Wedding Banquet (Winston Chao).

Passing, segregation, and assimilation: How Nella Larsen changed the “Passing” novel

University of Texas, El Paso
December 2010
105 pages
Publication Number: AAT 1483825
ISBN: 9781124390468

Vivian Maguire

A Thesis Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at El Paso in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS Department of English

In 1929, Nella Larsen wrote Passing, a novel that delves into the lives of two African-American women living in segregated society. Passing portrays the reunion of two childhood friends, Clare Kendry and Irene Westover. The relationship between Irene and Clare is at first one of fascination, as the two have lifestyles that intrigue one another. Things quickly start to change however, when Irene concludes that Clare and her husband Brian are having an affair. Irene’s suspicious attitudes toward Clare become hostile and she is more determined than ever to prevent Clare from joining her social circle and perhaps, from taking her place in black society. The novel takes an unexpected turn with a confrontation between John Bellew and Clare. She mysteriously falls to her death through an open window with Irene standing nearby. Clare’s demise is further muddled with a plethora of thoughts that run through Irene’s mind at the time, making her the lead suspect in Clare’s sudden death. Clare’s death is never resolved, leaving that event, like many others in the novel, open for interpretation. Irene, who prides herself on her honesty, has the most befuddled interpretation of how Clare died at the end of the story.

What makes Passing such an extraordinary novel is not only that it avoids the traditional conventions of the passing novel, which are typically concerned with the dire effects of leaving one’s race behind, but it calls those conventions into question. Clare does not redeem herself by returning to the black community; she dies, and possibly at the hands of a woman who was supposed to support her according to racial laws. The reader is compelled to sympathize with Clare while wondering what is wrong with Irene. The answer to that question is of course that Irene subscribes to the very ideas about race and ethics that the majority of Americans were invested in at that time. These racial edicts became far more pressing than the lives of individuals themselves, which Larsen recognized and set out to challenge.

Larsen’s Passing is important because it captures the subtlety and nuance of race relations and identity at this point in American history in a way that other novels of the time failed to do. Larsen did this by using the established genre of the passing novel to create a depiction that draws the reader’s focus to a point deeper than the act of passing itself, and directs it toward the more difficult underlying questions about race relations and racial identity. In the next chapter I will look at the social environment that surrounded the passing phenomenon. I will discuss what social analysts and early authors of passing texts identified as motivations behind passing and examine what Nella Larsen felt actually led individuals to do so. Ultimately I will address what Nella Larsen argues all along: individuals cannot fit into social roles designated by racial categories, and the resulting tension leads to unwarranted racial violence.

In my second chapter, I will address two authors who influenced Nella Larsen to change the traditional passing novel. I will describe how one author, Charles Chesnutt, inspired Larsen to change the traditional passing figure in order to demonstrate that the race problem was not in passing, but adhering to racial constructs. The second author, James Weldon Johnson, inspired Larsen with his satirical take on passing, and motivated her to further challenge the racial restrictions on American society.

In chapter three, I will explore how Larsen uses mirrors, an unreliable narrator, and ambiguous situations to comment on the futile and dangerous affect segregation and assimilation had on American culture. Her use of an untrustworthy, but racially loyal heroine helped to reveal the pitfalls in allowing an entire civilization to be divided by racial and social roles. Finally, I will look at two authors who succeeded Larsen, adopting her position on Americans’ dependency on racial and social roles, and what is lost in succumbing to assimilation. The first author I will discuss, Ralph Ellison, writes a novel that seemingly is not about passing at all, yet his exploration of assimilation illustrates that there is little difference between passing and assimilation to meet social expectations when both require performance and the severing of one’s identity. The second author, Danzy Senna, directly addresses both assimilation and passing as the same with a heroine that passes and assimilates at different intervals in order to avoid discrimination. Neither author offers a solution to the passing problem. Their message resembles Larsen’s in that though race is imagined, society’s dependence on racial divisions is not. To live separately from race is difficult, but possible, and worthwhile in the search for identity.

Table of Contents

• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Crossing the Line: Nella Larsen’s Take on Transcending Racial Boundaries
• Shroud of Ethics: Nella Larsen and the Traditional Passing Novel
• Mirror on the Wall: What Nella Larsen’s Ambiguous Novel Reveals About Passing
• Passing in Time: Nella Larsen’s Impact on the Passing Novel
• Epilogue
• Endnotes
• Works Cited
• Curriculum Vita

Introduction

In 1892, Homer Plessy, a man who was seven-eighths white and one-eighth black, was forcibly removed and then jailed for sitting in the whites-only section of a railroad car in Louisiana. Plessy disputed these events in the Supreme Court in 1896, where he argued that his black ancestry was imperceptible, and that he was by all definitions a white person. The Supreme Court ruled that Plessy’s exclusion from the white railroad car was not a violation of the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment because while the amendment was created to ensure that all men are treated equally, it was never intended to eliminate social distinctions based on color.

However little a percentage of his ancestry was black, it was that percentage that mattered. Despite Plessy’s white appearance, the state of Louisiana viewed him as black and treated him accordingly, illustrating the illogicality of racial lines and the laws created to guard them. This left individuals who, like Plessy, were visibly white, but by definition still black, to either accept their position in society as inferior or to escape such oppressive markers by passing for white.

In 1929, Nella Larsen wrote Passing, a novel that delves into the lives of two African-American women living in segregated society. Passing portrays the reunion of two childhood friends, Clare Kendry and Irene Westover. The two had lost touch when Clare’s father died and Clare was forced to move in with her two white and racist aunts. When they meet again, Irene is living in Harlem with her two children and her husband, who practices medicine. Clare has married a successful businessman, John Bellew. Clare’s husband however, is a white racist who is unaware that Clare is in fact black. At first glance, the title Passing appears to refer to the lifestyle that Clare has chosen. However, she decides early in the novel that she would like to rejoin black society and no longer cares for racial pretenses. Irene, who Clare has adopted as her guide into the black community, treats Clare with civility. Yet all the while, she is resentful of Clare’s cavalier attitude and wishes to prevent her reentry into the black community. In the novel, Irene’s identity will come into question, as she wears a particular visage for society while masking her true thoughts and feelings…

Purchase the thesis here.

In the Middle, In Between: Cultural Hybridity, Community Rejection, and the Destabilization of Race in Percival Everett’s “Erasure”, Adam Mansbach’s “Angry Black White Boy”, and Danzy Senna’s “Caucasia”

Howard University
2011
84 pages
Publication Number: AAT 1495397
ISBN: 9781124728568

Laura R. Perez

A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Howard University In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in the Department of English

Cultural hybridity, a term first introduced by post-colonial theorist Homi Bhabha, has been a shifting and difficult to define concept within academic discourse. My thesis will focus on cultural hybridity as the embodiment of a pluralistic identity that encompasses the characteristics or attributes of more than one culture or race. I will examine three contemporary literary works of racial satire—Percival Everett’s Erasure, Adam Mansbach’s Angry Black White Boy, and Danzy Senna’s Caucasia—that present culturally hybrid protagonists and explore the ways in which these protagonists are utilized to destabilize race. Furthermore, I will demonstrate the tensions that this destabilization creates through community rejections of each protagonists’ hybridity – tensions that become inherent to hybridity itself.

My exploration will include an analysis of the protagonists’ hybridity—the ways in which they do not fit into the existing notions of what blackness or whiteness is—and how this hybridity is marginalized by their communities. Following this, I will explicate the protagonists’ responses to their marginalization—their creation of dual identities or alter egos and the racial/psychoanalytic significance of this process. I will draw upon post-colonial and critical race theory writings, as well as Freudian and Lacanian theory, to frame my analysis. But most importantly, I will draw upon the work of scholars—including Marwan Kraidy, Jopi Nyman, Sabrine Broeck, Pnina Werbner, Peter Burke, and Robert Young—to theorize hybridity within my analysis.

Finally, I will examine the novels’ conclusions, during which the protagonists’ dual identities are forcefully merged, and demonstrate the lack of resolution that this merging creates. This examination will reveal that the community rejections of hybridity in each novel are, in themselves, impossible to mediate. Thus, I will prove that each protagonist’s hybrid positioning not only destabilizes race by challenging the concreteness of racial categorizations, but that this positioning, and the community’s response to it, also demonstrates the tensions inherent to hybridity itself. In this way, each text undermines the black-white binary, while also affirming the tensions that result from not willfully engaging in it.

Table of Contents

• Thesis Committee
• ABSTRACT
• CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION
  • Background to the Problem
  • Statement of the Problem
  • Review of Literature
  • Theoretical Framework and Methodology
  • Plan of Research
  • Definition of Terms
• CHAPTER 2: PERCIVAL EVERETT’S ERASURE
• CHAPTER 3: ADAM MANSBACH’S ANGRY BLACK WHITE BOY
• CHAPTER 4: DANZY SENNA’S CAUCASIA
• REFERENCES

Purchase the dissertation here.

Where Did You Sleep Last Night? A Personal History

Picador (an imprint of Macmillan)
May 2009
208 pages
5 1/2 x 8 1/4 inches
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-312-42939-3, ISBN10: 0-312-42939-8
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-374-28915-7, ISBN10: 0-374-28915-8

Danzy Senna

When Danzy Senna’s parents married in 1968, they seemed poised to defy history: two beautiful young American writers from wildly divergent backgrounds—a white woman with a blue-blood Bostonian lineage and a black man, the son of a struggling single mother and an unknown father. When their marriage disintegrated eight years later, the violent, traumatic split felt all the more tragic for the hopeful symbolism it had once borne.

Decades later, Senna looks back not only at her parents’ divorce but at the histories that they had tried so hard to overcome. In the tradition of James McBride’s The Color of Water, Where Did You Sleep Last Night? is “a stunningly rendered personal heritage that mirrors the complexities of race, class, and ethnicity in the United States” (Booklist).