Barriers Between Us: Interracial Sex in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (review)

Abstract

Studies in American Fiction253 context for the work they do, and she has done it in an intelligent, clearly written, and entertaining fashion. Steven TracyUniversity of Massachusetts, Amherst Jackson, Cassandra. Barriers Between Us: Interracial Sex in Nineteenth -Century American Literature. Bloomington and Indianapolis : Indiana Univ. Press. 2004. 146pp. Cloth: $49.95. Paper: $19.95. The current celebration ofcultural hybridity runs the risk offetishizing hybridity and naturalizing the imagined connections between cultural hybridity and mixed-race bodies. In order to gain a fuller understanding of this insidious fetishism of the "mix," we need to historicize the fetishism tied to interracialness even as we uncover the subversive layers of images of interracialness in nineteenth century American literature. Cassandra Jackson's Barriers Between Us: Interracial Sex in Nineteenth Century American Literature complicates the longstanding tendency to assess the progressiveness of nineteenth century images of interracialness. She refuses to simply see "almost white" characters as a courting of white audiences; she wonders about many different audiences and many different depictions of these "almost white" characters. She insists that the focus on interracialness becomes immensely productive as writers find new ways of thinking about boundaries of the nation itself. This very focus on the productive nature of this interracial "play" leads to a fresh analysis that defamiliarizes the tragic mulatto script. Why did this paradigm gain the ability to define images of the interracial in nineteenth century American literature? Jackson's study reveals that we need less critique ofthe melodrama and a greater consideration of the complex issues ofdesire and contradictions underneath this melodrama. Her exploration of the different uses of mixed-race characters gains real momentum when she argues that Chesnutt and Hopkins use mixed-race characters to think specifically about the intraracial negotiations in African American communities as opposed to the more typical investment in black and white relations. In Iola Leroy and Mandy Oxendine, she argues that interracialness becomes a productive space for the representation ofa certain type of black activism. This argument leads to questions reminiscent of Toni Morrison's inquiry in Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the LiteraryImagination. As we think more about the role ofinterracialness in African American literature, Morrison's title transposes into "Playing in the Light: Interracialness and the Black Literary Imagination." Even as Jackson analyzes the work ofboth white and black authors, she provides a very helpful foundation for work addressing the ways in which mixed- 254Reviews race bodies continue to be useful stumbling blocks in African American literary traditions (both objects of fetishism and a means of interrogating the sheer hysteria ofrace). Taking Jackson's lead, we know that we cannot rush to the critique of representations of mixed-race bodies as necessarily a privileging of"lightened" blackness over darker-skinned blackness. Jackson fully confronts the critique ofthe near absence ofany tragedy or melodrama tied to dark-skinned blackness in nineteenth century American literature. She refuses, however, to make the critique the final interpretation of the significance of this interracial play. She wonders, for example, about the subversive possibilities that may have emerged when mixedrace characters were placed in conversation with each other. The larger discourse of racial categorization was shook, so she insists, by the larger conversation between these texts. A greater focus on the larger reception history of these texts and the marketing apparatus may illuminate both these acts ofsubversion and the containment ofsubversion. Jackson's readings demonstrate that the mixedrace body, at this historical moment, remained both a threat to the dominant racial order as well as the containment of subversion, a reproduction of hegemonic whiteness. Her final move to a comparison of the racial categories in an 1850, 1890, 1920, 1930, and 2000 census is a poignant meditation on the constant production and reproduction of race. Even as she thinks about the historical continuity ofthis racial classification, she warns against the conflation of nineteenth century, 1920s and 1930s, and contemporary images ofmixed-race bodies. This conflation often occurs when we allow the "tragic mulatto" paradigm to remain the troublesome starting point as opposed to the much more nuanced argument in Barriers Between Us. The complex shifts in these census reports are Jackson's grand ending point. As Ralph Ellison wrote...