Scripts of Blackness: Race, Cultural Nationalism, and U.S. Colonialism in Puerto Rico

Posted in Anthropology, Books, Caribbean/Latin America, Economics, History, Media Archive, Monographs, Politics/Public Policy, United States on 2015-02-08 20:07Z by Steven

Scripts of Blackness: Race, Cultural Nationalism, and U.S. Colonialism in Puerto Rico

University of Illinois Press
February 2015
320 pages
6.125 x 9.25 in.
38 black & white photographs, 3 maps, 1 chart, 3 tables
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-252-03890-7
Paper ISBN: 978-0-252-08045-6

Isar P. Godreau, Researcher and Former Director
Institute for Interdisciplinary Research
University of Puerto Rico, Cayey

Ideas of blackness, whiteness, and racial mixture in a Puerto Rican barrio

The geopolitical influence of the United States informs the processes of racialization in Puerto Rico, including the construction of black places. In Scripts of Blackness, Isar P. Godreau explores how Puerto Rican national discourses about race—created to overcome U.S. colonial power—simultaneously privilege whiteness, typecast blackness, and silence charges of racism.

Based on an ethnographic study of the barrio of San Antón in the city of Ponce, Scripts of Blackness examines institutional and local representations of blackness as developing from a power-laden process that is inherently selective and political, not neutral or natural. Godreau traces the presumed benevolence or triviality of slavery in Puerto Rico, the favoring of a Spanish colonial whiteness (under a hispanophile discourse), and the insistence on a harmonious race mixture as discourses that thrive on a presumed contrast with the United States that also characterize Puerto Rico as morally superior. In so doing, she outlines the debates, social hierarchies, and colonial discourses that inform the racialization of San Antón and its residents as black.

Mining ethnographic materials and anthropological and historical research, Scripts of Blackness provides powerful insights into the critical political, economic, and historical context behind the strategic deployment of blackness, whiteness, and racial mixture.

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The mixed-race girl’s guide to the art of passing: racial simulations in Danzy Senna’s Caucasia and Nella Larsen’s Quicksand

Posted in Dissertations, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Passing, Women on 2015-02-08 19:49Z by Steven

The mixed-race girl’s guide to the art of passing: racial simulations in Danzy Senna’s Caucasia and Nella Larsen’s Quicksand

Florida Atlantic University
May 2014
65 pages

Gyasi S. Byng

A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of the Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts, Florida Atlantic University

Racial identifications are continually influenced by and constructed through one’s environment. Building on Jean Baudrillard’sThe Precession of Simulacra” and Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, this thesis argues that houses and clothing are the material objects that allow characters Birdie Lee from Danzy Senna’s Caucasia and Helga Crane from Nella Larsen’s Quicksand to construct their mixed race identities. Birdie Lee’s childhood home is the place where she develops a mixed race identity. When she leaves that home, she is forced to take on simulacra in order to pass for white. Without a stable childhood or adult home, Helga Crane’s wardrobe becomes the space where she unconsciously develops a mixed race identity. Her clothing choices allow her to simulate an entirely black identity that masks her mixed race heritage. Ultimately, the fates of Birdie and Helga are determined by whether or not they can occupy a space that is accepting of their mixed race identities.

Read the entire thesis here.

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Rewriting the Passing Novel: Danzy Senna’s Caucasia

Posted in Articles, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Passing on 2015-02-08 19:35Z by Steven

Rewriting the Passing Novel: Danzy Senna’s Caucasia

The Griot
Volume 26, Issue 2, Fall (October 2007)
14 pages

Kathryn Rummell, Professor of English
California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo

Passing (here, signifying African Americans passing for whites) has long been a fixture of the American social landscape. Passers have masqueraded for a variety of reasons, the most common being to flee from slavery, to Improve their economic situation, and of course to escape racism. The practice of passing, according to Werner Sollors in Neither Black Nor White, Yet Both, reached the height of its popularity from the nineteenth through the middle of the twentieth century (Sollors 247), and the majority of narratives of passing were written during this era. These narratives were especially popular during the Harlem Renaissance, when writers such as Jessie Fauset, Nella Larsen, and James Weldon Johnson employed the motif of passing to explore the psychological, emotional, and intellectual dilemmas involved In passing for white. Novels of passing typically share several characteristics: interracial sex, fear of discovery, feelings of guilt and betrayal, and the struggle to find and claim an identity. Perhaps because of the Renaissance’s emphasis on racial pride and solidarity, these novels of passing often indict the passers, portraying them as so-called tragic mulattoes or racial sell-outs. For Instance, Clare Kendry falls (or is pushed) to her death at the end of Larsen’s Passing, and Johnson’s unnamed narrator In Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man wonders If by passing he “sold [his] birthright for a mess of pottage” (211). These portrayals highlight the raclalized social structure of the early twentieth century: mixed-race Individuals often felt trapped in a society that recognized only two racial identities: white and black…

Read the entire article here.

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“A Plea for Color”: Nella Larsen’s Iconography of the Mulatta

Posted in Articles, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Passing, United States on 2015-02-08 19:13Z by Steven

“A Plea for Color”: Nella Larsen’s Iconography of the Mulatta

American Literature
Volume 76, Number 4, December 2004
pages 833-869

Cherene Sherrard-Johnson, Professor of English
University of Wisconsin, Madison

The Negro poet portrays our group in poems, the Negro musician portrays our group in jazz, the Negro actor portrays our group generally with a touch of hilarity. . . . So why should the Negro painter, the Negro sculptor mimic that which the white man is doing, when he has such an enormous colossal field practically all his own; portraying his people, historically, dramatically, hilariously, but honestly.

Archibald J. Motley Jr., “The Negro in Art”

While the name Archibald Motley brings instant recognition only to specialized scholars, two of Motley’s paintings are so well known that they have become, for many, visual embodiments of the Harlem Renaissance. Motley’s The Octoroon Girl (1925) and Blues (1929) have served as cover art for several editions of Harlem Renaissance literature, anthologies, and literary criticism. Blues, with its colorful, energetic composition incorporating the era’s insignia—jazz, the speakeasy, and interracialism—bespeaks musical innovation and artistic intellectualism. And the recurrent appearance of The Octoroon Girl, especially on the cover of women’s fiction, continues to reproduce its subject—the mulatta—as a predominant referent in the visual culture, art, and literature of the Harlem Renaissance era.

The Octoroon Girl, which Motley considered the best of his paintings, is the second of a series in which he uses color and composition to explore miscegenation. Motley claimed to be “sincerely interested in pigmentation of the skin in regard to the lightest type of colored person . . . consisting of one-eighth Negro blood and seven-eighths caucasian blood.” In this painting, he depicts a light-skinned, dark-haired, dark-eyed woman with high cheekbones, an aquiline nose, and rose-colored, pursed lips (see fig. 1). Sitting comfortably on a tapestry-like couch, one arm resting on a small table with two books and a moustached figurine, she is not perfectly centered in the portrait but situated slightly to the right, her head counterbalanced by a gold-framed landscape hanging on the wall. The dramatic contrast of dark and light forms a rich backdrop for the portrait of this clearly modern woman and her penetrating gaze. Her stylish clothing, gloves, and finely drawn, tapered hands indicate her middle-class status, while her frontal position and serious expression lend a dignity that Motley consistently conveys in his portraits. The only fracture in this otherwise graceful composition is the laughing figurine at her elbow. This mocking figure, resembling a clown, undermines the sitter’s poise and subtly disturbs the dignity of the design. The figurine reminds the viewer that the portrait is an image projected by the artist and draws attention to the artificiality in modern realist painting. Placed precisely to illuminate some otherwise hidden aspect of the sitter’s character, the laughing figure suggests there is something more to the sitter than Motley’s title, which directs the viewer’s reading of the painting as an “octoroon girl.” In serving as cover art for novels that thematize racial indeterminacy, this portrait gestures at a collective, visually inflected understanding of the aestheticized markers that created the mulatta, or passing, subject in African American literary and visual culture: physiognomy, exoticism, and the mysterious gaze.

Along with Motley’s haunting octoroon series, a preponderance of photography, visual art, and narrative texts produced during the Harlem Renaissance featured the mulatta as either heroine or primary subject, reinforcing her role as the representative New Negro woman. While the New Negro man was called upon to be an inventor, innovator, and artist, the New Negro woman appeared in roles that emphasized service and self-sacrifice, such as teachers, nurses, and librarians. These popular images of the New Negro woman enforced a genteel standard of behavior, appearance, and vocation that restricted real women’s agency and artistic expression—and ran counter to the modernizing impulse of the era. On the other hand, the image of the mulatta was frequently collapsed into the stereotype of the Jezebel. Motley’s painting A Mulatress

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My Biracial Life: A Memoir

Posted in Articles, Autobiography, Media Archive, United States on 2015-02-08 16:53Z by Steven

My Biracial Life: A Memoir

Philadelphia [Magazine]
2015-02-08

Originally published as “My Wild, Chaotic, Complex, Crazy, Ambiguous (Biracial) Hair” in the February 2015 issue of Philadelphia magazine.

Malcolm Burnley

What 25 years with wild, chaotic, complex, crazy, ambiguous hair has taught me.

It’s 1:30 a.m. on a Saturday night at the barren 24-hour Melrose Diner in South Philly. I’m there alone. The hostess is hawkeyed at the cash register, as if I’m going to steal her silverware. She eventually moseys up to my booth. “Do you have a tan, or is that your natural skin color?” she asks. Natural, I tell her. “What are you?” I give her three guesses. “Hawaiian?” Nope. “Samoan?” Getting colder. At this point, a nearby server who’s been eavesdropping on the conversation decides to join in. “Puerto Rican,” he says. Wrong. “Dominican.” Wrong again. Then, five minutes after I’ve told them my ethnicity, a third member of the waitstaff comes up to me. “Hey, I like your skin color — what are you?”

Welcome to my world…

Read the entire article here.

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Arturo O’Farrill: Afro-Latino Heritage Is ‘One Big Culture That We All Share’

Posted in Articles, Arts, Latino Studies, Media Archive, United States on 2015-02-08 16:29Z by Steven

Arturo O’Farrill: Afro-Latino Heritage Is ‘One Big Culture That We All Share’

The Huffington Post
Latino Voices
2015-02-06

Roque Planas, Editor

Arturo O’Farrill wants Africa to get the credit it deserves.

The New York-based pianist, composer and educator traveled Friday to Los Angeles to attend the Grammys, where his Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra’s “The Offense of the Drum” is nominated for best Latin jazz album.

“We talk a lot about Afro-Cuban jazz, but we don’t really talk about Africa and its impact on the Dominican Republic, on Venezuela, Colombia — bro, in Peru!” O’Farrill told The Huffington Post. “There’s whole parts of Colombia where they play a music called pacífico, and the instruments that they use are direct descendants of marímbulas and instruments that you can find throughout the west coast of Africa. How do you think it got there? Cuba’s a small — maybe a very vibrant and important part of that picture — but Cuba’s just one aspect.”…

…Like the United States, most Latin American societies are a multiracial mix of largely indigenous, European and African peoples — though people of virtually all backgrounds and parts of the globe have settled in the region. In places like Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic or Brazil, where many if not most people are either black or mixed-race, African influences can be found in virtually every aspect of the culture, whether it’s the language, food or religion.

But O’Farrill says too many musicians shortchange their African heritage…

Read the entire article here.

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