Optical Illusions: Images of Miscegenation in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century American Art |
Optical Illusions: Images of Miscegenation in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century American Art
American Art
Volume 5, Number 3 (Summer, 1991)
pages 88-107
Judith Wilson, Former Assistant Professor of African American Studies, Assistant Professor of Art History and Assistant Professor of Visual Studies
University of California, Irvine
miscegenationn. [Latin miscere to mix + genus race…]: a mixture of races; esp: marriage or cohabitation between a white person an a member of another race.
—Webster’s Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary
Today, most physical anthropologist do not believe that pure races ever existed.
—Bruce G. Trigger
What the matter came down to, of course, was visibility. Anyone whose appearance discernibly connected him with the Negro was held to be such.
—Winthrop Jordon
“Race” is a peculiarly optical system of classification as Hugh Honour and Albert Boimehave observed. In the English-speaking world, it is a concept that characteristically stresses a single feature or color—value—and is structured by polarities “white” and “black,” “white” and “non-white,” “the white race” and “the darker races,” 0r “white people” and “people of color.” Miscegenation, the sexual union of individuals assigned to different racial categories, blurs such distinctions, thereby threatening race-based systems of social order and privilege. Indeed, as both anthropologist Bruce Trigger and philosopher Anthony Appiah have suggested, the age-old historical fact of miscegenation undermines the validity of race as either a scientific or a philosophical construct.
North American attitudes toward race are notoriously rigid and denial oriented in their insistence upon what anthropologist Virginia R. Dominguez has labeled “the binary system”:
Whereas descendants of Africans and Europeans in the United States, regardless of miscegenation, are typically allowed membership in only two racial categories—white and black—the Afro-Latin world… has long used miscegenation as a mechanism for the construction of a new category of people epistemologically separate from both whites and blacks.
North American practice is unique, not only in its tendency to view miscegenation primarily in African- versus European-American terms—a tendency that both excludes additional levels of genealogical complexity (e.g., the possibility of African, European, and Native American ancestry) and erases other histories (e.g., the record of anti-Asian sentiment and legislation, with its accompanying prohibitions of interracial sex). Thus reduced to a black-white issue, the sex-race conjunction has given rise to forms of literary and cinematic representation that are well known: American authors ranging from James Fenimore Cooper to William Faulkner have shared a preoccupation with the supposed tragedy of mixed ancestry, and filmmakers ranging from D. W. Griffith to Spike Lee have lamented the alleged horrors of interracial sex…
Read or purchase the article here.
Tags: American Art, Judith Wilson