Mixed Race Studies

Racial Passing and Its Transatlantic Contexts

5 University Gardens
Room 101
University of Glasgow
Glasgow, United Kingdom
Tuesday, 2018-11-20, 17:15Z

Janine Bradbury, Senior Lecturer in Literature
York St John University York, United Kingdom

The Transatlantic Literary Women are excited to be welcoming Dr. Janine Bradbury to Glasgow to give a paper titled: “Racial Passing and Its Transatlantic Contexts”. The talk takes place in room 101, 5 University Gardens at 5.15pm on Tuesday 20th November with drinks and refreshments available from 5. This is a social, friendly gathering. As always, everyone is welcome. Hope to see you there!

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, an entire literary genre emerged in the United States that revolved around light skinned, mixed race African Americans who ‘fraudulently’ pretended to be or passed for white in order to ‘evade’ racism, prejudice, and segregation. Films like Imitation of Life brought the topic to a national audience and writers as diverse as William Faulkner, Mark Twain, and Langston Hughes featured passing in their works.

Given that the United States has a distinct history of race relations, how do stories about passing ‘work’ beyond these regional and national contexts? And do American stories about passing inspire and hold relevance for writers across the black Atlantic? How is gender and nationhood represented in these works? And what role do women writers play in the history of the passing genre?

This talk explores the phenomenon of ‘passing-for-white’ as represented in the work of transatlantic literary women ranging from Harlem Renaissance writer Nella Larsen to contemporary British writer Helen Oyeyemi and asks why passing continues to inspire women writers across the West.

For more information, click here.

Pudd’nhead Wilson and Those Extraordinary Twins

Broadview Press
2016-05-04 (Originally Published in 1894)
304 pages
5½” x 8½”
Paperback ISBN: 9781554812660

Mark Twain

Edited by:

Hsuan L. Hsu, Associate Professor of English
University of California, Davis

The two narratives published together in The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson and the Comedy of Those Extraordinary Twins are overflowing with spectacular events. Twain shows us conjoined twins, babies exchanged in the cradle, acts of cross-dressing and racial masquerade, duels, a lynching, and a murder mystery. Pudd’head Wilson tells the story of babies, one of mixed race and the other white, exchanged in their cradles, while Those Extraordinary Twins is a farcical tale of conjoined twins. Although the stories were long viewed as flawed narratives, their very incongruities offer a fascinating portrait of key issues—race, disability, and immigration—facing the United States in the final decades of the nineteenth century.

Hsuan Hsu’s introduction traces the history of literary critics’ response to these works, from the confusion of Twain’s contemporaries to the keen interest of current scholars. Extensive historical appendices provide contemporary materials on race discourse, legal contexts, and the composition and initial reception of the texts.

Blood Work: Imagining Race in American Literature, 1890-1940

Louisiana State University Press
January 2015
240 pages
5.50 x 8.50 inches
Hardcover ISBN: 9780807157848

Shawn Salvant, Assistant Professor of English and African American
University of Connecticut

The invocation of blood—as both an image and a concept—has long been critical in the formation of American racism. In Blood Work, Shawn Salvant mines works from the American literary canon to explore the multitude of associations that race and blood held in the consciousness of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Americans.

Drawing upon race and metaphor theory, Salvant provides readings of four classic novels featuring themes of racial identity: Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894); Pauline Hopkins’s Of One Blood (1902); Frances Harper’s Iola Leroy (1892); and William Faulkner’s Light in August (1932). His expansive analysis of blood imagery uncovers far more than the merely biological connotations that dominate many studies of blood rhetoric: the racial discourses of blood in these novels encompass the anthropological and the legal, the violent and the religious. Penetrating and insightful, Blood Work illuminates the broad-ranging power of the blood metaphor to script distinctly American plots—real and literary—of racial identity.

The Tragic Immigrant: Duality, Hybridity and the Discovery of Blackness in Mark Twain and James Weldon Johnson

ELH
Volume 82, Number 1, Spring 2015
pages 211-249
DOI: 10.1353/elh.2015.0001

Richard Hardack

Around the turn of the twentieth-century, a number of American writers imagined that European culture could help them develop an external perspective with which to reinterpret racial double-consciousness in the United States. In Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson, European culture winds affirmed the binaries of race in the American South; but in James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, published eighteen years later, European culture helps foster ideas of cultural and racial hybridity, though they cannot be transferred entirely to America. I explore the “discovery” of blackness and final rejection of European identity common to Twain’s and Johnson’s novels. In Twain’s novel, the familiar figure of “the tragic mulatto” is juxtaposed with, and temporarily supplanted by, the more unexpected figure of the tragic immigrant, an outsider who can never become an assimilated American. Johnson then recalibrates Twain’s configuration of racial duality by turning the external conflict between African American mulatto and European immigrant twins into an internal struggle of double consciousness.

Pudd’nhead Wilson

Harvard University Press
February 2015 (Originally Published in 1894)
190 pages
5-1/2 x 8-1/4 inches
7 line illustrations
Paperback ISBN: 9780674059832

Mark Twain (1835-1910)

Introduction by:

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

When a murder takes place in Dawson’s Landing, Missouri, the lives of twin Italian noblemen, the courageous slave Roxy, her 1/32nd “black” son who has been raised “white,” and a failing lawyer with an intense interest in the science of fingerprinting become tangled. The unsolved riddle at the heart of Pudd’nhead Wilson is less the identity of the murderer than it is the question of whether nature or nurture makes the man. In his introduction, Werner Sollors illuminates the complex web of uncertainty that is the switched-and-doubled-identity world of Mark Twain’s novel. This edition follows the text of the 1899 De Luxe edition and for the first time reprints all the E. W. Kemble illustrations that accompanied it.

English 4640G: Construction of Racial Identity in Post Civil War America

Huron University College at Western University
London, Ontario, Canada
Winter 2013

Neil Brooks, Associate Professor, English

Course Description: Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination argues that the canonical American literary tradition can only be understood after recognizing the presence of an often silenced, but almost ubiquitous Africanist persona. This persona served as a negative stereotype against which the dominant American identity could define itself. However, even Morrison’s groundbreaking work re-inscribes the binary between Black and White in America and fails to theorize adequately the ways in which bi-racial and multi-racial identity have complicated the ideologies she discusses. This course will begin with Morrison’s analysis and then look at several novels and stories which the explore the instability of any color line between Black and White in America.

Course Objectives: This course addresses the examination of how racial identity, particularly mixed race identity, is constructed in America through close engagement with selected literary works written by Americans since the end of the Civil War. By the end of the course students should have improved their critical reading and writing in ways which will enable their success in a wide variety of University courses. Further, students will have learned American historical background, feminist literary theory, patterns of racial construction, theories of performativity, and skills in analyzing artistic achievement within the works. Finally, the course aims to provide the framework for applying these skills and knowledge in engaging with the narratives students will encounter and create outside the classroom.

Course Material:

• Playing in the Dark, Toni Morrison
• Pudd’nhead Wilson, Mark Twain
• The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, James Weldon Johnson
• Quicksand, Nella Larsen
• Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
• Tar Baby, Toni Morrison
• Caucasia, Danzy Senna

For more information, click here.

Crimes of passing: The criminalization of blackness and miscegenation in United States passing narratives

University of California, Los Angeles
2005
158 pages
Publication Number: AAT 3175169
ISBN: 9780542133046

Susan Elaine Bausch

A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature

Between approximately 1880 and 1925, large numbers of legally black Americans crossed the color line and identified as white; in common parlance, they “passed.” After Reconstruction, the South attempted to legislate the separation of the races by enacting “Jim Crow” laws that mandated segregation and prohibited miscegenation (at least within marriage). This meant that many passers were not just violating a social taboo by crossing the color line, they were also breaking the law. Even in the North, there were some anti-miscegenation laws on the books, although convention and prejudice probably played a bigger role in limiting mixed-race marriages. In effect, these laws made it a crime for a black person to do what a white person did, which means that blackness itself was criminalized.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter One: Imitation White and Secret Murderers: The Criminalization of Blackness in Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson
• Chapter Two: Feminine Transgressions: Crossing Racial and Sexual Boundaries in Nella Larsen’s Passing and the Rhinelander Case
• Chapter Three: Passing for What?: Joe Christmas’s Racial Uncertainty and Criminal Fate in William Faulkner’s Light in August
• Chapter Four: A Passing Success: The Cost of Mobility in James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man
• Conclusion
• Works Cited

Purchase the dissertation here.

English R1A: Keeping it Real?: Racial & Queer Passing in American Literature

University of California, Berkeley
Fall 2010

Rosa Marti­nez

“I had a literature rather than a personality, a set of fictions about myself.”
—Kafka Was the Rage by Anatole Broyard

This course intends to explore the “art” of racial passing and masquerade in American literature and culture through a diverse sample of American novels and short stories, such as traditional narratives of black-to-white passing, which is historically prevalent particularly in African-American literature, and other modes of passing, for instance gender and ethnic ambiguity as well as posing and the “closeting” of one’s sexuality. What are the connections or disjunctions between “closeting,” posing, and crossing the gender or color line? By focusing on the trope of the passing figure, we will ask how people and imagined characters negotiate their identity in various and varying social spaces and also, how authors disclose the frailty of social order regarding sexuality, race and the body to make alliances in unimagined ways. Venturing out of the closet as another and as they please, these passing figures are, indeed, queer. Yet what are the personal costs in relinquishing a disfavored identity for a favored one?

This course intends to hone your reading and writing skills, and will focus on helping you make thoughtful questioning and “interesting use of the texts you read in the essays you write.” Through a gradual process of outlining, rewriting and revising, you will produce 32 pages of written work (including brief response papers and three 3-4 page argumentative essays).

Book List

Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, Naufragios (1542); William and Ellen Craft, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom (1860); Joseph Harris, Rewriting (2006); Nella Larsen, Passing (1929); Mark Twain, Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894); a course reader containing critical readings.

Exploring Prejudice, Miscegenation, and Slavery’s Consequences in Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson

The Kennesaw Journal of Undergraduate Research
Volume 1, Issue 1, Article 3 (2011)
5 pages

Steven Watson
Kennesaw State University, Kennesaw, Georgia

This research paper analyzes Mark Twain’s use of racist speech and racial stereotypes in his novel Pudd’nhead Wilson. Twain has often been criticized for his seemingly inflammatory language. However, a close reading of the text, supplemented by research in several anthologies of critical essays, reveals that Twain was actually interested in social justice. This is evident in his portrayal of Roxana as a sympathetic character who is victimized by white racist society in Dawson’s Landing, Mississippi during the time of slavery. In the final analysis, Twain’s writing was a product of the time period during which he wrote. This knowledge helps students understand the reasons behind Twain’s word choices, characterization, and portrayal of race.

In his novel Puddn’head Wilson, Mark Twain uses racist speech and ideology to examine slavery’s consequences and make a plea for the elevation of the black race. Roxana, the true protagonist and an obviously sympathetic character, appears to be a white supremacist. This is a logical contradiction. It is one of many contradictions that lend the book its complexity and make it challenging to interpret. Roxana has a dual nature in more ways than one. She is smart yet always loses. She is committed to her own survival while being filled with self-loathing. She is free and relishes her freedom, yet can be bought and sold at any time.

The basic plot of Pudd’nhead Wilson involves Roxana, a house slave of Percy Driscoll living in Dawson’s Landing, Missouri. She gives birth to a child on the same day that Driscoll’s wife does. Fearing her child will be sold down the river, Roxana switches the two babies in their cribs so that her son will be raised as Driscoll’s son and heir. She is able to do this because both she and her son are of mixed race and can pass for white (Twain 15). When the children become adults, one is accused of murder. Only the title character, a disgraced young lawyer, is able to sort out the identities and identify the murderer…

Read the entire article here.

Mark Twain and Homer Plessy

Representations
Number 24, Special Issue: America Reconstructed, 1840-1940 (Autumn, 1988)
pages 102-128

Eric J. Sundquist, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities
Johns Hopkins University

The carnivalesque drama of doubling, twinship, and masquerade that constitutes Pudd’nhead Wilson and its freakishly extracted yet intimately conjoined story, “Those Extraordinary Twins,” is likely to remain misread and controversial in estimations of Mark Twain’s literary achievement as long as the work’s virtual mimicry of America’s late-nineteenth-century race crisis is left out of account. Readers have, of course, often found a key to the novel’s interpretation in the notorious “fiction of law and custom” that makes the “white” slave Roxy legally “black” by allowing one-sixteenth of her blood to “outvote” the rest (8-9). Like so many parodic moments in the book, however. Twain’s joke about voting speaks not simply to general anxieties about miscegenation but more particularly to the deliberate campaign to disfranchise blacks and strip them of legal protections that was underway by the early 1890s. Built of the brutal artifice of racial distinctions, both American law and American custom conspired to punish black men and women in the post-Reconstruction years, and Twain’s bitter failed fiction, verging on allegory but trapped in unfinished burlesque, has been thought to participate in the black nadir without artistically transcending it or, conversely, without reaching its broader historical implications.

As Hershel Parker and others have demonstrated in detail, Twain’s chaotic process of composition and his unconcerned interchange of various manuscript versions make it impossible to place much weight on authorial intention narrowly defined. Yet this hardly leads to the conclusion that Twain’s vision had no coherent meaning or that his own comic rationale, contained in the opening of “Those Extraordinary Twins,” reveals nothing of significance about the texts critique of contemporary race theory or Twain’s authorial involvement in that critique. Indeed, one might rather argue that the confusion and seeming flaws in the manuscript and the published text, while largely attributable to his haste to produce a book that would ameliorate his financial problems, are also a measure of the social and psychic turmoil that Twain, not least as a liberal Southerner living and working in the North, felt in the post-Reconstruction years. The key phenomena in late-nineteenth-century race relations have just as much place in determining the text’s range of implication, its meaning, as do such mechanical factors as compositional sequence and manuscript emendations. Preoccupied with relevant but improperly construed issues of aesthetic unity and verisimilitude, critics have typically missed the primary ways in which Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894) and its attached tale of the Italian Siamese twins involves itself in the…

Read the entire article here.