Abstract
The Age of Obama has reignited the young interdisciplinary field of mixed race studies and proven the ongoing significance of the question, “What does it mean to be mixed race in America?” The two decades leading up to the momentous inauguration of a mixed race president were marked by a flurry of activity as academics, authors, and activists lobbied for new and better representation of mixed race people on a national scale. Obama’s very rise to power has symbolic echoes of mulatto characterizations in literature, where mulattos were often called upon to embody historic national moments. As Werner Sollors points out, the mulatto—the archaic term for a person of mixed black and white parentage—is sometimes cast as a radical young man who refuses to accept inferiority as his birthright.1 The displacement of John McCain and the replacement of George W. Bush by Obama, whose 2008 election campaign hinged on “change,” is the utopian alternate ending to numerous tragic mulatto fictions in which a young “upstart” mulatto man challenges an established white patriarchy.
Yet, ultimately, it is the aura of “smelling strangeness” and “the futility of coloured life” which lingers on in all these books.
—Vernon February, Mind Your Colour
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Notes
Werner Sollors, Neither Black Nor White Yet Both: Thematic Explorations of Interracial Literature (New York: Oxford UP, 1997), 239–40.
Kimberley McClain DaCosta, Making Multiracials: State, Family, and Market in the Redrawing of the Color Line (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2007), 163.
Chris Morris-Lent, “Barack the Magic What?” Columbia Spectator, January 21, 2009, http://www.columbiaspectator.com/2009/01/21/barack-magic-what/.
Grant Farred, Midfielder’s Moment: Coloured Literature and Culture in Contemporary South Africa (Boulder: Westview P, 2000), 7.
Mohamed Adhikari, “From Narratives of Miscegenation to Post-Modernist Re-Imagining: Towards a Historiography of Coloured Identity in South Africa,” in Burdened by Race: Coloured Identities in Southern Africa, ed. Mohamed Adhikari (Cape Town: U of Cape Town P, 2009), 13.
Zimitri Erasmus, “Introduction: Re-Imagining Coloured Identities in Post-Apartheid South Africa,” in Coloured by History, Shaped by Place: New Perspectives on Coloured Identities in Cape Town, ed. Zimitri Erasmus (Cape Town: Kwela Books, 2001), 22–3.
Mohamed Adhikari, Not White Enough, Not Black Enough: Racial Identity in the South African Coloured Community (Athens, OH: Ohio UP, 2005), xii.
Mohamed Adhikari, “Introduction: Predicaments of Marginality: Cultural Creativity and Political Adaptation in Southern Africa’s Coloured Communities,” in Burdened by Race: Coloured Identities in Southern Africa, ed. Mohamed Adhikari (Cape Town: U of Cape Town P, 2009), viii.
Elleke Boehmer and Bart Moore-Gilbert, “Introduction to Special Issue: Postcolonial Studies and Transnational Resistance,” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 4, no. 1 (2002): 15.
Vernon February, Mind Your Colour: The ‘Coloured’ Stereotype in South African Literature (London: Kegan Paul International Ltd., 1981), 70.
Michele Elam, The Souls of Mixed Folk: Race, Politics, and Aesthetics in the New Millennium (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2011), 9–10.
Jennifer DeVere Brody, Impossible Purities: Blackness, Femininity, and Victorian Culture (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1998), 16; Sollors, Neither Black Nor White Yet Both, 243.
Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 66.
Edward Long, The History of Jamaica; or, General Survey of the Antient and Modern State of That Island: With Reflections on Its Situations, Settlements, Inhabitants, Climate, Products, Commerce, Laws, and Government, vol. 2 (1774; repr., London: F. Cass, 1970), 335; Matthew Lewis, Journal of a West India Proprietor (1834; repr., Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999), 68.
Sterling A. Brown, “Negro Character as Seen by White Authors,” Journal of Negro Education 2 (April 1933): 195.
Eve Allegra Raimon, The “Tragic Mulatta” Revisited: Race and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Antislavery Fiction (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2004), 7.
Stuart Hall, “The Spectacle of the ‘Other,’” in Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, ed. Stuart Hall (London: Sage, 1997), 257.
Stuart Hall, “Introduction: Who Needs ‘Identity’?” in Questions of Cultural Identity, eds. Stuart Hall and Paul Du Gay (London: Sage, 1996), 4.
Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), 63.
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© 2013 Diana Adesola Mafe
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Mafe, D.A. (2013). Tainted Blood: The “Tragic Mulatto” Tradition. In: Mixed Race Stereotypes in South African and American Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137364937_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137364937_1
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