American Mixed-Race Literature: Cultural History, Precursors, Identities, and Forms of Expression |
American Mixed-Race Literature: Cultural History, Precursors, Identities, and Forms of Expression
Purdue University
2004
116 pages
Publication Number: AAT 3166693
ISBN: 9780542022999
Gino Michael Pellegrini, Adjust Assistant Professor of English
Pierce College, Woodland Hills, California
This dissertation focuses on recent instances of mixed race literature in American culture such as Danzy Senna’s novel Caucasia, Rebecca Walker’s Black, White, and Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self, and Kip Fulbeck’s Paper Bullets: A Fictional Autobiography. This dissertation suggests that these mixed race literary texts, as well as the multiracial experiences, sensibilities, themes, and expressions communicated therein, differ from traditional conceptions and descriptions of race and mixed race in American society, history, and literature that are based on the logic of the binary racial system. Mixed race literature attempts to phrase and communicate suppressed, distorted, and/or neglected multiracial experiences, sensibilities, and possibilities. Mixed race literature is also coextensive with the emergence of the multiracial social formation and movement in the post-civil rights era. “Precursors” to mixed race literature fall short in their attempt to phrase and to communicate complexities and experiences of mixed race lived existence. I read Jean Toomer’s Cane as one of the most significant precursors to mixed race literature in American literature. Mixed race literature also differs from “mixed race in American literature” insofar as the later, in the presentation of mixed race characters and themes, both relies on and validates the categorical, hierarchical, and dichotomous logic of the binary racial system. Notable examples in the canon of American and American Ethnic literature are William Faulkner and Toni Morrison who, from a mixed race perspective, extend and promote in their texts the suppression and distortion of multiracial complexities, possibilities, and lived realities in the service of the binary racial system.
Table of Contents
- Abstract
- Chapter One: Multiracial Identity in the Post-Civil Rights Era: A Personal Narrative Essay
- The Summer of 1999
- Growing up Racially Mixed in the 1970s and 1980s
- Negotiating Raciated University in the 1990s
- Conclusion
- Chapter Two: Cane and Jean Toomer: Percursors, American Mixed Race Literature
- Chapter Three: Danzy Senna’s Caucasia: A Novel About Growing Up Racially Mixed and Becoming Multiracial in the Post-Civil Rights Era
- Chapter Four: American Mixed Race Ficiational Autobiographies: Rebecca Walker’s Black, White and Jewish and Kip Fulbeck’s Paper Bullets
- List of References
- Vita
Purchase the dissertation here.
Tags: Danzy Senna, Gino M. Pellegrini, Gino Michael Pellegrini, Gino Pellegrini, Jean Toomer, Kip Fulbeck, Purdue University, Rebecca Walker