Mixed Race Studies

Transcending Blackness: From the New Millennium Mulatta to the Exceptional Multiracial. Ralina L. Joseph. [Cannon]

MELUS: Multi-Ethnic LIterature of the United States
Volume 39, Issue 3 (Fall 2014)
pages 207-209
DOI: 10.1093/melus/mlu028

Sarita Cannon, Associate Professor of English Language and Literature
San Francisco State University

Transcending Blackness: From the New Millennium Mulatta to the Exceptional Multiracial. Ralina L. Joseph. Durham: Duke University Press, 2012. 248 pages. $84.95 cloth; $23.95 paper.

Ralina L. Joseph’s timely book about representations of multiracial black women in popular culture makes a significant contribution to the growing field of critical mixed-race studies. Drawing on research in various fields, Joseph closely reads four texts produced between 1998 and 2008: Showtime’s television series The L Word (2004-09), Danzy Senna’s coming-of-age novel Caucasia (1998), Alison Swan’s independent film Mixing Nia (1998), and the reality competition show America’s Next Top Model (2003-present). Joseph examines representations of black mixed-race subjectivity in these texts through two tropes: the new millennium mulatta and the exceptional multiracial. These two very different archetypes of multiracial identity are nonetheless linked by a common desire to transcend blackness, a proposition that Joseph argues is deeply troubling in twenty-first-century America, where, although many proclaim that affirmative action is no longer necessary, structural inequalities between blacks and whites remain entrenched.

One of Joseph’s central claims in Transcending Blackness is that popular representations of black mixed-race women fall into one of two categories. The new millennium mulatta is, in many ways, a revision of the tragic mulatta figure, made popular in films such as The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Imitation of Life (1959). According to Joseph, the new…

Read or purchase the review here.

Black Indian With a Camera: The Work of Valena Broussard Dismukes

Southeastern Oklahoma University
Native American Symposium
2005-Proceedings of the Sixth Native American Symposium
pages 40-46

Sarita Cannon
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

In this paper, I examine the liberatory photography of a living African-Choctaw-French American artist, Valena Broussard Dismukes. I am especially fascinated by the way in which Dismukes takes the camera, an object that had previously been used as a weapon of oppression against Native Americans and people of African descent, and uses it to capture the spirit of twenty-first-century Black Indians on their own terms. In her series of portrait photographs entitled “Red-Black Connection: The Cultural Heritage of Black Native Americans,” Dismukes highlights the varied experience of Black Indians in the United States and forces her viewers to reevaluate their notions of what a “real” Indian and what a “real” Black person look like….

…The verbal narratives that accompany many of the portraits highlight many issues that contemporary Black Indians face, including the difficulty of tracing their lineage and the responses they receive from others about their authenticity or lack thereof. However, generally the narratives celebrate Black Indian Identity. A few of Dismukes’ subjects discuss how their own family members obscured their “true” ancestry. For instance, Elnora Tena Webb Mitchell (of Cherokee/Blackfeet descent) writes, “My grandparents and other members of my family were identified as Native American. However, there is much information about our ancestry that is kept secret. Being Native American is not revered nor honored by many family members.” It is interesting to note here that it is not the Black blood that is repressed, but rat her it is the Indian ancestry. It was not always advantageous to be identified as Black rather than Native. This choice depended upon historical and geographical context. Still others note how they are viewed as “wannabes” who are trying to distance themselves from Blackness. Gene “Quietwalker” Holmes of Comanche descent says, “There have been people from both communities who react to my heritage on a negative basis and ask, ‘Who or what are you trying to be?’” But Carol Munday Lawrence of Cherokee descent responds to these attacks simply by saying that she is merely discovering her multiple selves: “I fully understand why some fear that to claim Native American, or any other heritage, is to reject one’s Blackness, but this is not about ‘going Native.’ Knowing who your people are, and embracing them all unconditionally, can only enrich your life.” And Stella Vaugh playfully embraces this historical moment in which she can identify as a multiracial person: “In fact, I’m having fun boasting about my mixed-race. I jokingly say I’m 57 Heinz Variety. My mother’s mother is Cherokee and Irish. My father’s mother is Bohemian and his father is Choctaw. I am told that one of my ancestors is black and I’m still searching for that beautiful person.” Vaugh proudly embraces her multiple heritage and openly acknowledges the mystery that still surrounds her ancestry. She symbolizes the twenty-first century Black Indian who is coming out” after living much of her life in a space where she felt the need to repress parts of her identity. If Dismukes’ project can give at least one person the opportunity to feel a sense of dignity about who she is and introduce her to a community of people who also live at the crossroads of Native and African American cultures, then it is, without a doubt, a meaningful political and artistic endeavor…

Read the entire paper here.

Searching for the authentic Red-Black self: Depictions of African-Native subjectivity in literature, visual art, and film

University of California, Berkeley
2005
235 pages
AAT 3186996
ISBN: 9780542292071

Sarita Nyasha Cannon, Associate Professor of English
San Francisco State University

In this dissertation, I explore representations of a largely invisible multiracial group: people of Native American and African-American descent. Relying upon the two theoretical frameworks of cultural studies and multiculturalism outlined in Chapter 1, I analyze texts from various genres in order to understand the construction of Black-Red subjectivity. In Chapter 2, I examine the 1848 slave narrative/native autobiography The Life of Dr. Okah Tubbee. Written by a mulatto who passed as the son of a Choctaw chief in order to escape the slavery, this text exemplifies the performative possibilities of autobiography as well as Tubbee’s simultaneous rejection of Blackness and embrace of stereotypical ideas of Indian-ness. In Chapter 3, I look at another figure that straddles African American and Native American cultures, the fictional character of Rayona in Michael Dorris’ 1988 novel A Yellow Raft in Blue Water. Like Tubbee, Rayona negotiates various identities. However, rather than being a somewhat tragic trickster figure who rejects Blackness as Tubbee does, Rayona is able to embrace her multiple subject positions in a variety of contexts. In Chapter 4, I focus on visual representations of African-Native Americans in the sculpture of African-Chippewa artist Edmonia Lewis and in the portraits of African-Choctaw photographer Valena Broussard Dismukes. I argue that despite Lewis’ familiarity with Native culture, she deploys stereotypes about American Indians in an attempt to gain a mainstream audience. Dismukes, on the other hand, creates portraits of contemporary Black Indians who can express their mixed heritage on their own terms. Finally, in Chapter 5, I explore two contemporary documentary films that reflect two opposite narratives of the history of Black-Native subjectivity. Steven Rich Heape’s film Black Indians celebrates people with African-Native heritage and elevates them to a special status. On the other hand, Long Lance, a documentary about a mixed-race man’s rejection of the one-drop rule and his fabrication of various Native American identities, emphasizes the tragic nature of “passing.” Implicit within my exploration of these cultural representations of Black Indians is the elusive quest for racial or cultural “authenticity,” a problematic goal that often unconsciously panders to an essentialized notion of identity. In their attempts to render authentic images of Blacks, Native Americans, and Black-Native Americans, these authors and artists often reinscribe stereotypes about these groups and thus reinforce the very racial and social hierarchies they intend to question.

Purchase the dissertation here.

The Politics of Biracialism [Issue]

The Black Scholar
Journal of Black Studies and Research
Fall 2009 (2009-09-22)
Volume 39, No. 3/4

Guest Editors:

Laura Chrisman, Professor of English
University of Washington

Habiba Ibrahim, Assistant Professor of English
University of Washington

Ralina Joseph, Assistant Professor of Communications
University of Washington

Why a biracial issue, and why now? As black Americans we have mixed ancestry; one might ask what is gained by giving this obvious fact the attention of a special issue. Rather than focus on this broad history, however, we instead highlight here the situations of first-generation biracial black people. Perhaps this does not simplify matters. Foregrounding their specific experiences, identities, and concerns may stir up the anger of those who feel judged “not black enough” and the anger of those who feel betrayed and devalued by self-identifying biracial individuals. The politics of biracialism, seen this way, are individualistic, diminishing our community’s cohesion. Yet we feel that the time is right for an exploration of the topic. Biracial or multiracial studies is fast-growing and itself extremely varied in its methods, disciplines, and orientation. Acknowledging the important and interesting work that has been produced in the last two decades, we provide a forum for such work. Another factor in our choice of topic is the emergence, in 2008, of Obama as a presidential candidate. Both his blackness and his first generation biracialism have prompted new consideration, within black communities and within the U.S. population as a whole, of the operations and meanings of race, nation, family and community within the U.S.A. This gives us additional incentive to explore biracialism in the present moment. Our moment differs from the fraught late 1990s when the multiracial social movement campaigned for recognition in the 2000 Census, and was opposed by influential black voices. The present adds some confidence and optimism: to profile biracialism now, we suggest, is not to jeopardize black collectivity so much as it is to recognize and join the healthy debates that are flourishing within and beyond black studies…

Table of Contents

• Introduction to “The Politics of Biracialism” / Laura Chrisman
• Interracial Intimacies, Barack Obama, and the Politics of Multiracialism / Kimberly McClain DaCosta
• Review Essay: Performing the Twenty-first Century Tragic Mulatto: Black, White, and Jewish: Autobioraphy of Shifting Self by Rebecca Walker / Ralina Joseph
• Toward Black and Multiracial “Kinship” After 1997, or How a Race Man Became “Cablinasian” / Habiba Ibrahim
• Poetry: “The Art of Loving” / Madeleine Clifford
• Baby janay and Naomi Pabst: Negotiating Race Mixing, Adoption, and Transnationality / Naomi Pabst
• Reframing the National Family: Race Mixing and Re-telling American History / Catherine Squires
• Race, Multiraciality, and Barack Obama: Toward a More Perfect Union? / G. Reginald Daniel
• Books Reviews
  • Amalgamation Schemes: Anti-blackness and the Critique of Multiracialism by Jared Sexton / LeiLani Nishime
  • Dispatches from the Color Line: The Press and Multiracial America  by Catherine R. Squires / Manoucheka Celeste
  • Framing the Black Panthers: The Spectacular Rise of a Black Power Icon by Jane Rhodes / Madhavi Murty
  • Mixed Race Hollywood Edited by Mary C. Beltrán and Camilla Fojas / Sarita Cannon