Abstract
Abstract One of the propositions implicit in Chapter 4 is that racial identity—in the foregoing instance, “authentic” African-American identity in particular—can be, or effectively is, gendered-coded specifically as masculine in the case of popular music. However jarring the suggestion may be, the fact itself is nothing new in African-American literary culture, a whole subtradition of which centers on the figuration of a specific racial type in decidedly feminine terms. I am referring to the “tragic mulatto;’ a stock figure in U.S. fiction by blacks and whites alike from the nineteenth through the early twentieth centuries. In asserting that the tragic mulatto has been conceived as a specifically feminine character, I in no way mean to imply that U.S. literature contains no male characters of mixed European and African “blood:’ for it certainly does—Tom Driscoll in Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson immediately comes to mind-and I examine one important instance of such a depiction at some length in this chapter.
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