The mulatta as cultural and political text, or "It can't be too easy to be one of a kind"
Item
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Title
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The mulatta as cultural and political text, or "It can't be too easy to be one of a kind"
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:f7235f1e49c8:12053
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identifier
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12725
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Creator
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Williams, Tracyann F.,
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Contributor
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Jane Marcus
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Date
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2013
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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American literature | African American studies | Womens studies
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Abstract
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Mixed race figures appear in many late 19th and early 20th century texts, particularly in the United States. The use of these characters, often female, is deliberate, allowing the authors to actively explore and mediate the anxieties raised in the ante- and post-bellum periods around race, class, nation, and sexuality. By employing two novels (Jessie Fauset's Plum Bun and Nella Larsen's Passing, published in 1928 and 1929, respectively), as well as the 1949 film Pinky, the first chapter illustrates the ways mixed race female or mulatta characters are necessary in understanding the formation of the collective American cultural imagination.;It is, then, important to consider silences that occur in texts by iconic literary figures like Willa Cather. Her last novel Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940) has proven discomfiting to critics who cannot place it within her larger body of work. Yet, the author's use of the mixed race female character in her ante-bellum Virginia-based novel invites the need for renewed discussion. In a similar vein, Martha Gellhorn is commonly known as a journalist and Mrs. Ernest Hemingway. However, her 1944 novel Liana set on a fictional French island, furthered demonstrated her desire to be known primarily as a novelist. Both Cather and Gellhorn are each engaged in their own white female imperialist projects, working out their preoccupations with a shifting political landscape through their mixed race female characters in violent ways. The second and third chapters also examine how these two authors are shaped by dominant ideologies as anyone else. From their writings, I interrogate the unconscious effect these ideologies have on what they put into their work.;It is essential for literary critics to revisit and interpret these foundational texts as artifacts of the cultural past to make history more legible. Mixed race female characters are critical to the discussion. Neither black, white, and certainly not male, they dredge up a troublesome racial past that is actually closer to the present day than most would think. The final chapter unveils these themes reinvigorated and reimagined in contemporary narratives like Patricia Powell's The Pagoda (1998), Emily Raboteau's The Professor's Daughter (2005), Heidi Durrow's The Girl Who Fell from the Sky (2011), and Danzy Senna's Caucasia (1998), ultimately underscoring that a mixed race canon does exist.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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English
