Mixed Race Studies

Racial Choice at Century’s End in Contemporary African American Literature

University of Maryland
2008
161 pages

Kaylen Danielle Tucker

Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2008

This dissertation introduces the term “racial choice” to describe a contemporary idea that racial identity can be chosen or elected, as can the significance and the influence of race on an individual’s identity. Racial choice emerges out of the shifting historical, cultural, and social discussions of race and identity we have witnessed after integration. This dissertation examines the resulting representations of contemporary black identity in African American literature by analyzing texts that were published in the last quarter of the twentieth century and that feature protagonists that come of age during or after integration. Andrea Lee’s Sarah Phillips (1984), Danzy Senna’s Caucasia (1998), and Paul Beatty’s The White Boy Shuffle (1996) are representative texts that engage racial choice to register how the racial hierarchy has changed in the late twentieth century and how that change affects the African American literary tradition of race writing. In their attempts to write outside of the existing racial paradigm—using white flight, passing, and satire as narrative strategies—the authors test the racial boundaries of African American literature, finding that writing outside of race is ultimately unachievable.

The introductory chapter explains the cultural, literary, and scholarly context of my study, arguing that because race matters differently in the late twentieth century contemporary African American literature handles race uniquely. I argue in my first chapter that Lee uses white flight as a narrative form to move Sarah Phillips beyond the influence of racialization and to suggest class as an alibi for racial difference. Continuing this theme amidst the Black Power Movement of the 1970s and the multiracial project of the 1990s, my second chapter analyzes Senna’s Caucasia, which revises the passing narrative form and explores the viability of choosing a biracial identity. In my third chapter, I show how Beatty’s The White Boy Shuffle satirizes the African American protest tradition to point up the performativity necessary in maintaining racial binaries and suggests that culture is a more accurate identifier than race.

My concluding chapter argues that though the three novels under study challenge racial categories—and by extension race writing—to different degrees, they all use similar methods to point up the shifting significance of race, racial categories, and racial identity. By historicizing attitudes about racial categories, challenging the dichotomous understanding of race, representing the tensions of racial authenticity, and showing the performativity necessary to maintain racial categories, the novels illustrate the traditional boundaries of racial choice and attempt to stretch the limits of the African American literary tradition.

Table of Contents

• Introduction: The Future American: The “Color Line” and “Racial Choice” at the Millennium
• Chapter One: Integration and White Flight in Andrea Lee’s Sarah Phillips
• Chapter Two: Racial Choice and the Contemporary Passing Paradigm
• Chapter Three: Satire, Performance, and Race in The White Boy Shuffle
• Conclusion: The Future of Racial Identity and African American Literature
• Works Cited

Read the entire dissertation here.

Rethinking race and politics: Mixed race and the trajectory of minority politics in the United States

University of California, Irvine
2007
232 pages
AAT 3274346
ISBN: 9780549148944

Natalie Masuoka, Assistant Professor of Political Science
Tufts University

This project addresses how minority communities frame collective identities and organize political agendas amidst growing levels of racial and ethnic diversity. Using the rise of a politicized Mixed Race identity as a case study, I examine how Asian American, Black, Latino and White Americans choose to exert their racial group identities as a response to the Mixed Race public policy agenda. Using a multi-method research design consisting of survey data and qualitative interviews with leaders of minority non-profit advocacy organizations, I examine how identity group politics functions at two levels: First, at the elite level, how do Mixed Race and traditional minority group activists frame their right to political representation? Second, at the mass level, how do each of these racial groups utilize these identities in their evaluation of various political issues? I find that Mixed Race Americans, regardless of their political efforts to gain recognition for their distinctive racial identities, have adopted a political agenda and individual political attitudes which corresponds with the civil rights agenda advanced by the traditional minority groups.

Purchase the dissertation here.

Equivocal subjects: The representation of mixed-race identity in Italian film

University of California, Irvine
2007
226 pages
AAT 3296258
ISBN: 9780549410775

Shelleen Maisha Greene, Assistant Professor of Conceptual Studies
University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee

My dissertation seeks to establish a critical framework for the analysis of mixed-race subjects in Italian film. Within the Italian context, mixed-race subjects emerged out of the colonial conditions stemming from the nation’s occupation and settlement of its east African colonies beginning in the nineteenth century. However, racial mixture has also served as a metaphor for the internal division of Italy between North and South, a historical formation that arguably allows for the development of analytics, such as the “Southern Question,” by which to essentialize a racially heterogeneous population. Through an examination of four historically contextualized films, I examine the presentation of mixed-race subjects in Cabiria (1914), Sotto la croce del sud (1938), Il Mulatto (1949/1951), and Il fiore delle mille e una notte (1974). I argue that the mixed-race subject is a constitutive element of the Italian cinema, a figure that serves as a nodal point for the intersection of conceptions of race and the nation.

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