The mulatta and the politics of race / Teresa C. Zackodnik.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Zackodnik, Teresa C.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

American fiction--African American authors--History and criticism.

American fiction.

American fiction--African American authors.

Race in literature.

American fiction--Women authors--History and criticism.

American fiction--Women authors.

Political fiction, American--History and criticism.

Political fiction, American.

African American women--Intellectual life.

African American women.

Politics and literature--United States.

Politics and literature.

Women and literature--United States.

Women and literature.

Multiracial people in literature.

Race relations in literature.

Racism in literature.

Women in literature.

United States.

Physical Description:

xxxii, 235 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Jackson : University Press of Mississippi, [2004]

Summary:

From abolition through the years just before the civil rights struggle began, African American women recognized that a mixed-race woman made for a powerful and, at times, very useful figure in the battle for racial justice. The Mulatta and the Politics of Race traces many key instances in which black women have wielded the image of a racially mixed woman to assault the color line. In the oratory and fiction of black women from the late 1840s through the 1950s, Teresa C. Zackodnik finds the mulatta to be a metaphor of increasing potency.

Before the Civil War white female abolitionists created the image of the "tragic mulatta," caught between races, rejected by all. African American women used the mulatta figure to invoke and manage American and British abolitionist empathy and to contest racial stereotypes of womanhood in the postbellum United States. The mulatta aided writers in critiquing the "New Negro Renaissance" and gave writers leverage to subvert the aims of mid-twentieth-century mainstream American culture.

The Mulatta and the Politics of Race focuses on the anti-slavery lectures and appearances of Ellen Craft and Sarah Parker Remond, the domestic fiction of Pauline Hopkins and Frances Harper, the Harlem Renaissance novels of Jessie Fauset and Nella Larsen, and the little-known 1950s texts of Doroths Lee Dickens and Reba Lee. Throughout, the author discovers the especially valuable and as yet unexplored contributions of these black women and their uses of the mulatta in prose and speech.

Contents:

1 Fixing the Color Line: The Mulatta, American Courts, and the Racial Imaginary 3

2 "White Slaves" and Tragic Mulattas: The Antislavery Appeals of Ellen Craft and Sarah Parker Remond 42

3 Little Romances and Mulatta Heroines: Passing for a "True Woman" in Frances Harper's Iola Leroy and Pauline Hopkins's Contending Forces 75

4 Commodified "Blackness" and Performative Possibilities in Jessie Fauset's The Chinaberry Tree and Nella Larsen's Quicksand 115

5 Passing Transgressions, Excess, and Authentic Identity in Jessie Fauset's Plum Bun and Nella Larsen's Passing 156

Epilogue: The "Passing Out" of Passing and the Mulatta? 186.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 217-227) and index.

ISBN:

157806676X

OCLC:

53953484