Building the “Blue” Race: Miscegenation, Mysticism, and the Language of Cognitive Evolution in Jean Toomer’s “The Blue Meridian”

Posted in Articles, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Passing, United States on 2010-08-10 02:32Z by Steven

Building the “Blue” Race: Miscegenation, Mysticism, and the Language of Cognitive Evolution in Jean Toomer’s “The Blue Meridian”

Texas Studies in Literature and Language
Volume 46, Number 2, Summer 2004
pages 149-180
E-ISSN: 1534-7303
Print ISSN: 0040-4691
DOI: 10.1353/tsl.2004.0008

Stephanie L. Hawkins, Assistant Professor of English
University of North Texas

Toomer’s vision of psychological evolution later realized and racialized in “The Blue Meridian” (1936) has its precursor in Cane’s closing chapter, the short drama “Kabnis,” and in the figure of Kabnis as a biracial subject struggling to find speech representative of his psychological experience. Kabnis’s ambivalence toward his black ancestry manifests in blood rhetoric that both highlights and undermines the purity of the plantation aristocracy that has contributed to his making. He declares, “My ancestors were Southern blue-bloods—”; “And black,” retorts Lewis, another educated black Northerner. Recognizing the pervasiveness of the one-drop rule for determining African descent—and the fact that Southerners frequently purged traces of black blood from their genealogical records—Kabnis argues that there “Aint much difference between blue and black” (108). There is a double recognition here: first, that black ancestry is inherent in the bodies of many who pass for white; and second, that as a…

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Stalking the Biracial Hidden Self in Henry James’s The Sense of the Past and “The Jolly Corner”

Posted in Articles, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Passing, United States on 2010-08-10 02:16Z by Steven

Stalking the Biracial Hidden Self in Henry James’s The Sense of the Past and “The Jolly Corner”

The Henry James Review
Volume 25, Number 3, Fall 2004
pages 276-284
E-ISSN: 1080-6555,
Print ISSN: 0273-0340
DOI: 10.1353/hjr.2004.0027

Stephanie L. Hawkins, Assistant Professor of English
University of North Texas

This essay argues that, for James, the visible face and body conceal some genetic “reality” or heritage, which he figures in both The Sense of the Past and “The Jolly Corner” as the specter of unacknowledged racial difference. In both works, James fuses evolutionary biology and the ghostly, thematizing turn-of-the-century anxieties regarding miscegenation. By transforming a narrative of time travel into one of racial passing, James both literalizes the psychological phenomenon of a “hidden self” and exposes the central paradox of double-consciousness: the simultaneous recognition and rejection of one’s “hidden” racial differences and sense of estrangement from the national family.

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