Racial Signifiers Research Articles

James Baldwin's Narrative of Black-White Kinship

In my larger project, I study James Baldwin’s interventions into black freedom movements and I examine his critical dialogue with white people in his time. At the heart of his interventions is a concept that I call boundness — a concept that posits white and black people in America as bound together in what is “literally and morally a blood relationship.” Baldwin describes America as a deeply troubled house in which white people commit violence against and deny their fundamental relatedness to black people. My claim is that the political power of Baldwin’s rhetorical deployment of boundness lies in the disruptive capacity of centering intimacy and impurity in theorizing about race. In the black and white framework, race making has been grounded in myths of and desire for white purity and separation. Impurity and intimacy are Baldwin’s correctives. In this conference paper, using two different texts, I will present Baldwin’s concept of boundness and I will examine some of the rhetorical techniques of Baldwin’s interventions. In particular, I will study the larger kinship narrative, his destabilization of racial categories and his selective use of racial signifiers. I will pay particular attention to Baldwin’s interventions into black nationalist movements and integrationist movements in his time, and I will consider what political space his ideas can open for us today.

Finding the Silver Lining: Hair, (Mixed) Race, and Identity Politics in Toni and Slade Morrison’s Little Cloud and Lady Wind

Finding the Silver Lining:Hair, (Mixed) Race, and Identity Politics in Toni and Slade Morrison’s Little Cloud and Lady Wind Sika A. Dagbovie-Mullins (bio) raincloudswe arenaturenaturenaturenatural!!!black people, we raincloudscloser to the sun and full of life. —Marvin Wyche Jr., “We Rainclouds” (1974) As a little girl I dreamed freely, often on the top step of the back porch—morning, noon, sunset, deep twilight. I loved clouds, I loved red streaks in the sky. I loved the gold worlds I saw in the sky. Gods and little girls, angels and heroes and future lovers labored there, in misty glory or sharp grandeur. —Gwendolyn Brooks, Report from Part One (1972) In Happy to Be Nappy (1999), bell hooks describes black girls’ unprocessed hair as “soft like cotton, flower petal billowy soft, full of frizz and fuzz.” In addition to being described as puffy, spongy, kinky, crinkly, wooly or cotton-like, “natural” unprocessed hair is often associated with clouds. “Flower petal billowy soft” immediately evokes the image of lightness but also brings to mind billow clouds, layers of water vapor that create fluffy wave-like patterns in the sky. The trope of black-hair-as-clouds is especially noticeable in descriptions of black hair in twentieth-century [End Page 173] African American literature. In Jessie Redmon Fauset’s “Double Trouble” (1923), Angelique shakes her “short, black, rather wiry hair til it misted like a cloud” (32); Fran Ross’s mixed race protagonist in Oreo (1974) is told: “Kinky hair—like that beautiful fuzzy cloud you have—is not really kinky” (49); in Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow (1983), Avey Johnson’s daughter’s hair “had stood massed like a raincloud about to make good its threat” (13); in Dorothy West’s The Wedding (1995), Clark Cole thinks of his mistress: “There is no beauty like that of a brown skinned woman when she is beautiful: the velvet skin, the dark hair like a cloud” (97); and in John Edgar Wideman’s Hiding Place (1998), Tommy’s hair is described as, “[c]ombed so high it’s a cloud over his head, a bushy cloud making him taller than his brothers” (77). Toni and Slade Morrison’s children’s book Little Cloud and Lady Wind (2010), illustrated by Sean Qualls, focuses on a young female cloud whose image appears as a black or biracial girl; she sports a giant blue Afro (cloud), striking feature and a continuation of the hair/cloud analogy. In fact, some of Morrison’s novels also equate African American hair with clouds. In Tar Baby after Jadine complains about the effect of the island’s foggy weather on her hair, “[s]he pressed her hair down with both palms, but as soon as she removed them her hair sprang back into a rain cloud” (Morrison, Tar Baby 64) and in Love, the narrator, L, describes the transition black hair goes through when wet as she recounts the actions of a woman on the beach: “Her hair, flat when she went in [the water] rose up slowly and took on the shape of the clouds dragging the moon” (Morrison, Love 106). Little Cloud’s hair and her lavender tan skin act as racial signifiers in this children’s book about independence, belonging, and community. In the beginning of the story, Little Cloud separates from the other clouds, “not wanting to blend into a group and lose her freedom, [but] not wanting to frighten the earth” (Toni and Slade Morrison). A visit from Lady Wind shows Little Cloud that her cloud duties of providing mist and dew are important, teaching her to respect both her individuality and restoring her place in the sky community. The story is reminiscent of Eric Carle’s Little Cloud (1996), which also features a “Little Cloud” that chooses independence: “The clouds pushed upward and away. Little Cloud pushed downward and touched the tops of horses and trees” (Carle). Toni and Slade Morrison’s book seems to signify on this Little Cloud predecessor who does not take a human form (and thus remains a white cloud). On one level, Little Cloud and Lady Wind encourages children to...

The elasticity of the Color Line

In light of the ongoing massive social protest that began in Israel in summer 2011, and considering the new interest in the Israeli Black Panthers protest movement marking its 40th anniversary, I wish to reexamine the press photographs of the Black Panther demonstrations taken in 1971. Studying these photographs, I argue that the visual coverage of the protest in the Israeli popular press strictly excluded the demonstrators from the Israeli public using racial signifiers. This occurred precisely during a period in which the use of racial signifiers was diminishing due to the Six Day War. I draw parallels between photographs from the 1967 War and from the Black Panther demonstrations and maintain that viewing the photographs exposes the state dialectic in handling its citizens. This dialectic moves along the axis between acceptance and rejection, identity and difference, and containment and alienation—relying on the racial visual signifier both to presence and to justify identity and difference.

The Space that Race Creates: An Interstitial Analysis of Toni Morrison's "Recitatif"

The Space that Race Creates:An Interstitial Analysis of Toni Morrison's "Recitatif" Shanna Greene Benjamin (bio) Nostalgia. History. Punctuation? Yes. Punctuation—ubiquitous, understudied, unconscious, undone, present, presentational, peripatetic, imported, important. —Jennifer DeVere Brody1 In texts where racial categories are elusive or ambiguous, the space between the binary becomes open terrain for unpacking race as a trope in American literature. "Recitatif," Toni Morrison's first and only short story, is one such text. "Recitatif," so named for a recitative style of vocal performance that advances the action of, say, an opera in much the same way that dialogue advances the action of a play,2 Morrison charts the adult lives of Twyla Benson and Roberta Fisk—two women brought together as eight-year-old girls at the St. Bonaventure orphanage—and dramatizes their periodic and serendipitous interactions during some twenty years after they first meet. By selectively identifying one woman as white and the other as black, Morrison paints race as a salient feature of the narrative. By resisting the impulse to reveal which woman identifies with which race, however, Morrison challenges the ways writers rely on stereotypical racial codes to describe their characters, compelling readers to interrogate their own suppositions about racial signifiers.3 Race has been, and quite possibly always will be, as central to American literature as narratives of contact and conquest, self-reliance and self-fashioning, modernism and multiculturalism. The conflict that was at one time among the Spanish, French, and Native [End Page 87] Americans was quickly supplanted by tensions between white colonists and black Africans. As inadequate as the "black-white nexus" is to capturing the complexities of America's multiracial past,4 the United States government has traditionally drawn lines of full citizenship along this binary, regulating educational access, marriage rights, and political enfranchisement based upon skin color.5 What resulted was the practice of categorizing persons according to race. The racial signs and symbols permeating much of early American writing morphed, later, into tropes of blackness where dark skin (or simply a dark presence) represents the racial anxieties of white America. In Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, Toni Morrison probes how a dark or "Africanist" presence "ignite[s] critical moments of discovery or change in literature" written by those who are not black.6 If, as Morrison suggests, the presence of a black body signals a moment of psychological or spiritual awakening for nonblack characters in texts crafted by nonblack writers, what sort of awakening takes place when Morrison maintains racial codes but refuses to identify to whom blackness is ascribed? "Recitatif" helps to answer this query. First published in Amiri Baraka's (LeRoi Jones) co-edited anthology Confirmation, and subsequently reprinted in Skin Deep: Black Women and White Women Write about Race, "Recitatif" stands as Morrison's sole foray into the short story and boldly takes aim at the ways in which writers rely on stereotypical racial codes to describe their characters.7 The tale charts the adult lives of protagonists Twyla Benson and Roberta Fisk as they argue about their memories of the past and debate shifting politics in the present; they reckon with how race has influenced their perspectives and prompt readers to consider the same. Race, to be sure, is central to the story—but not in the way readers might expect. Morrison states, from the outset, that one woman is black and the other is white, but she never reveals which is which. The impulse to "solve" the racial conundrum permeating "Recitatif" reveals an underlying theme central to Morrison's short story. Readers want to be able to categorize characters one way or another, to "know" race, and they will go to great lengths to assign racial categories if the writer fails to do it for them. When readers focus on the opposing ends of the racial spectrum, the either / or, the black-and-white of the story, they lose a crucial layer of meaning imbedded within liminal figures and interstitial narratives that defy classification along oppositional discursive paradigms. In "Recitatif," the interstitial narrative between Twyla and Roberta is the story of Maggie: the "kitchen woman"8 who functions as an imperfect...

Picturing the Mix: Visual and Linguistic Representations in Kip Fulbeck's Part Asian•100% Hapa

In response to perceived invisibility within a black/white racial paradigm governed by hypodescent, various multiracial people have begun to speak out against a lack of recognition of their multiplicitous identities. Along with state recognition (i.e., the 2000 census), many of these multiracial identity activists desire a sense of community built around racial multiplicity. In an attempt to develop a community, various methods have been employed, and this article focuses on one such implementation of community building. Using a semiotic approach combined with the literary method of close reading, this article will explore and analyze the photographic book project, Part Asian• 100% Hapa, by Kip Fulbeck. The article will examine how an “imagined community” of Hapas is created through the project and photographs themselves, but also how the photos work to homogenize the very multiplicity they seek to represent. I will look at the use of photographs as a means of subverting the common usage of the body as a racial signifier and thereby show the limitations of racial language. Finally, I will explore the linguistic elements of representation: how do the Hapa subjects’ self-descriptions work against or with the photograph and the project as a whole? Thinking about how those photographed in the book respond to the book's central focus of a stabilized Hapa identity is a critical approach that has the benefit of disrupting the limitations of our racial language, our need for stabilized racial identities, and any homogenization that occurs through the aesthetic project itself. I hope to question the photographic project so that multiracial people can avoid becoming complicit in a new form of racial domination and/or racialization, while also respecting the work that this project has done for Hapas’ visibility.

“When I Die, I Won’t Stay Dead”: The Future of the Human in Suzan-Lori Parks’s The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World

“‘When I Die, I Won’t Stay Dead’: The Future of the Human in Suzan-Lori Parks’s The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World” puts thing theory in conversation with theorizations of temporality, claiming that things rupture the subject/object binary by dislocating subjects and objects in time. The essay shows how the things in Suzan-Lori Parks’s play The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World and Kara Walker’s cutout Middle Passages reorient subjects in time. Demonstrating a relationship between history, as a temporal category, and notions of the human that perpetuate the devaluing of blackness, this essay examines, through an analysis of Parks’s play and Walker’s cutout, what I call an aesthetic of “disalienation,” which loosens the hold of ever-present racial signifiers ready to reinscribe racist formulations of blackness. Through their acts of artistic innovation, Parks and Walker recalibrate time and permanently relegate the subject/object binary, and therefore black inhumanity, to a thing of the past.

William Wells Brown's Economy of Entertainment

William Wells wrote his final book, My Southern Home: or, South and Its People, following his 1879 tour of American South. Published in 1880, book makes an odd coda to a prolific literary career during which authored numerous versions of his autobiography, four books of black history, one published drama, and three editions of his groundbreaking novel, Clotel. Though much of this work has been subjected to intense scholarly scrutiny, My Southern Home has been all but ignored. (1) One reason for this is that since it was written several years after Emancipation, My Southern Home was motivated by different political and aesthetic goals than those that spurred Brown's antebellum writings, and therefore doesn't fit into typical critical paradigms. My Southern Home also perplexes readers with its form, for though it announces itself as an autobiography in which earlier incidents were written out from author's recollections, text does not deliver on that promise (113). In fact, when readers visit Brown's old home, they find a racially indeterminate narrator, a parade of stereotypical illustrations, and promised recollections of slavery copied verbatim (or slightly altered) from Brown's antebellum writings such as Narrative of William Wells (1847), Clotel (1853), or The Escape (1855). This recycling and retooling of old material in antebellum chapters of book precedes a postwar section featuring loosely connected sketches set in various Southern locales. None of characters in first section of My Southern Home appear in second section, and narrator himself appears and disappears without accounting for his own movements or actions. Scholars who have reckoned with Southern highlight many confusions and dead-ends endemic to text. William L. Andrews admires work, but rightly notes that it is nearly impossible to read into My Southern Home a consistent and verifiable sociopolitical message and that the narrator's identity and purposes are ... hard to pin down (Introduction 11). John Ernest accepts Andrews's arguments and posits that Brown's book is less memoir than sociology (Maps 91). According to Ernest, Brown's method led him to present all flaws, contradictions, and pleasures that defined author's Southern home. Ultimately, Ernest argues, Southern make[s] object of observations observing subject himself, William Wells Brown (Maps 103). Ernest is correct to note that positions himself at center of Southern, though I argue that he does so by revealing many of methods that made him a successful author. Throughout his final work, reveals his ability and dynamism as he both revises old material and creates new scenes, many of which feature songs, antics, and performances that illuminate workings of an economy of entertainment. (2) Within Brown's economy of entertainment, black characters use performance to rebalance economic scales, and to highlight uncertainty of racial signifiers. The characters in Brown's My Southern Home show that performing rather than working is what defines white power under slave system and is, concomitantly, one way to reverse economic inequalities of slavery and Jim Crow. Because it was obvious to that work did not correspond to wealth for white slaveholders who lived off fruits of chattel labor, he crafted representations of slavery in which blacks mastered art of not working. Moreover, as only autobiography authored after Emancipation, Southern illuminates economic benefits of entertainment for former slaves within postwar America. (3) Though features free men and women who use performance to realize economic gain in postwar economy, he also inserts himself into a book that is itself an important postwar performance in order to prove that new economic arrangements necessitate revision--but not abandonment--of economy of entertainment. …

Ongoing contestations: the use of racial signifiers in post-apartheid South Africa

Despite hopes for the development of a non-racial citizenry in South Africa, race remains a salient factor in identity claims. Much of the recent literature has focused on issues of black and white identities or on discussions of the reification or erasure of racial identities. This paper addresses questions of coloured identity in South Africa to explore the ways in which these identities are formed through iterative processes and continually in flux. Through a series of vignettes I argue that identity claims are frequently incomplete, uncertain and reworked in different and changing contexts. I highlight the shortcomings of ideas of erasure and reification when analysing identity claims and argue for a more nuanced approach that provides for consideration of post-apartheid racial identities as complex, dynamic and contested.

WHAT ARE YOU LAUGHING AT? ASSESSING THE “RACIAL” IN U.S. PUBLIC DISCOURSE

This paper analyzes some of the cultural dynamics that shape the significance of race in the United States. The focus is on the role of social conventions governing speech and the operation of categorical identities, such as “individual” and “group.” These cultural dynamics are examined via moments of humor—some that are received poorly and others that are successful—because jokes both condense and engage deep reservoirs of implicit cultural knowledge. The goal of this discussion is to highlight how these conventions and categories shape Americans' assessments of what counts as “racial.” In juxtaposing a series of “racial remarks” (by Don Imus and Michael Richards) with a series of television ads that deploy many racial signifiers but drew little critical commentary, my aim is to analyze how Americans can keep laughing about race even as they draw emphatic lines about not being amused by racist remarks.

Sound unbound: sampling digital music and culture

If Rhythm Science was about the flow of things, Sound Unbound is about the remix -- how music, art, literature have blurred the lines between what an artist can do what a composer can create. In Sound Unbound, Rhythm Science author Paul Miller aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid asks artists to describe their work compositional strategies in their own words. These are reports from the front lines on the role of sound digital media in an information-based society. The topics are as diverse as the contributors: composer Steve Reich offers a memoir of his life with technology, from tape loops to video opera; Miller himself considers sampling civilization; novelist Jonathan Lethem writes about appropriation plagiarism; science fiction writer Bruce Sterling looks at dead media; Ron Eglash examines racial signifiers in electrical engineering; media activist Naeem Mohaiemen explores the influence of Islam on hip hop; rapper Chuck D contributes Three Pieces; musician Brian Eno explores the sound history of bells; Hans Ulrich Obrist Philippe Parreno interview composer-conductor Pierre Boulez; much more. Press 'play,' Miller writes, and this anthology says 'here goes.' The groundbreaking music that accompanies the book features Nam Jun Paik, the Dada Movement, John Cage, Sonic Youth, many other examples of avant-garde music. Most of this content comes from the archives of Sub Rosa, a legendary record label that has been the benchmark for archival sounds since the beginnings of electronic music. To receive these free music files, readers may send an email to the address listed in the book. ContributorsDavid Allenby, Pierre Boulez, Catherine Corman, Chuck D, Erik Davis, Scott De Lahunta, Manuel DeLanda, Cory Doctorow, Eveline Domnitch, Frances Dyson, Ron Eglash, Brian Eno, Dmitry Gelfand, Dick Hebdige, Lee Hirsch, Vijay Iyer, Ken Jordan, Douglas Kahn, Daphne Keller, Beryl Korot, Jaron Lanier, Joseph Lanza, Jonathan Lethem, Carlo McCormick, Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid, Moby, Naeem Mohaiemen, Alondra Nelson, Keith Mendi Obadike, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Pauline Oliveros, Philippe Parreno, Ibrahim Quaraishi, Steve Reich, Simon Reynolds, Scanner aka Robin Rimbaud, Nadine Robinson, Daniel Bernard Roumain (DBR), Alex Steinweiss, Bruce Sterling, Lucy Walker, Saul Williams, Jeff E. Winner.

Professor as Embodied Racial Signifier: A Case Study of the Significance of Race in a University Classroom

Professor as Embodied Racial Signifier: A Case Study of the Significance of Race in a University Classroom

Embodying and Transgressing Race in the Novels of John Gregory Brown

This essay will discuss corporeal and racial representation in the work of John Gregory Brown, a little-known, yet immensely rewarding, New Orleans novelist. Placing the discussion within the rich literary tradition of the American South, I will focus on the male protagonists of his first two novels – Decorations in a Ruined Cemetery (1994) and The Wrecked, Blessed Body of Shelton Lafleur (1996) – and examine why Brown's characters constantly shift between different racial positions, and how notions such as racial purity or fixed subjectivity are exposed and interrogated. My analysis will also address physical defect, and explore how Brown destabilizes the ideal of the body as a privileged locus of authoritative wholeness. I will be arguing that, as a cultural and racial signifier, the body in Brown's work is linked with fluidity and fragmentation, and that the boundaries between whiteness and blackness are continuously reshaped by the characters' ambiguous perceptions of themselves as subversive, multi-racial subjects. The conclusion will maintain that both novels offer new insights into the interaction between corporeal representation and racial identity, which make an important contribution to the tradition of American and, particularly, southern literature.

A Breed Between: Racial Mediation in the Fiction of Ernest Ga

By addressing Cajun-African American conflict in Of Love and Dust (1967) and A Gathering of Old Men (1983), Ernest Gaines emphasizes interdependence of and African American people in Louisiana while simultaneously acknowledging social structures that maintain concept of superiority. His fiction depicts complex racial hierarchy; Cajuns' white identity remains complicated to some degree because of popular notions of Cajuns as lower-class and, implicitly, less in minds of wealthy landowners and their African American workers. As such, Gaines places Cajun between Creole landowners and African American laborers. Situated socially between wealthy and working-class African Americans, Gaines portrays Cajuns as possible racial intermediaries who can be manipulated by whites to control blacks but who present some hope of racial mediation between whites and blacks. Simultaneously, Gaines's African American protagonists only realize their own individual worth in midst of Louisiana's racial conflict, but also realize individual humanity of their Cajun neighbors. This mutual understanding remains central to Gaines's ultimate message of racial mediation as key to achieving human equality and true manhood. In Louisiana, cultural and social categories are often complicated by interdependence and overlapping of various racial communities that deny simple boundaries. Although geographically part of Deep South, Louisiana includes its own unique racial and ethnic categories. As Barbara Ladd explains, Prior to Louisiana Purchase in 1803, racial classification in creole Deep South was much more complex than in Anglo Upper South, where status of mixed-blood child followed that of mother (21). This difference extended from fact that children of European colonists and African women constituted separate caste, as demonstrated by New Orleans's free persons of color population (21). Miscegenation complicated racial divisions and testified to their arbitrary nature all over South, but Louisiana society included legal and economic space for these intermediary figures, which further tested boundaries of difference. In this complex categorization, Cajuns also arose as racial intermediaries who fell between categories because of their history of difference and ridicule and because of their culturally-determined identity. One can better understand Louisiana's unique social stratification by defining certain terms, such as Creole and Cajun. Historically, Creole has shifted from referring to person born in colonial Louisiana, regardless of race, to racial signifier (Dormon, Creoles x). (1) While Creole has been used to refer to Louisiana colonists and to demarcate racial communities, Gaines uses term as class marker, referring to landowners. He explains how the big house of plantation was owned by Creoles, which in this context refers to white population of Creole descendants who are in positions of social and economic power (Gaudet and Wooton 228). (2) Cajuns present another example of social and cultural interdependence and complexity in Louisiana. Gaines explains that during his childhood people of quarters thought of Cajun as a who would give them hell on False River.... And anytime there was problem on river, and because so many of whites there were Cajun, it would always be 'that Cajun,' whether one them was involved or not (Gaudet and Wooton 83). Although definition of Cajun in Gaines's past generally included white, French-speaking people, history of how Cajuns came to form an ethnic community in Louisiana is much more complicated. Following 1755 expulsion from Acadia (current day Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island) by British governor Charles Lawrence, many Acadians searched for new homeland. …

White Disavowal, Black Enfranchisement, and the Homoerotic in William Faulkner’s Light in August

Aliyyah I. Abdur-Rahman White Disavowal, Black Enfranchisement, and the Homoerotic in William Faulkner’s Light in August L ight in August was originally about white people: Lena Grove, Gail High­ tower, and Byron Bunch were at the center ofWilliam Faulkner’s initial conception of the novel. The murder and near decapitation of Joanna Burden was to be the event that tied these three characters together. Joe Christmas became the central character of the novel when it became evident Faulkner that another element, an embodied racial signifier, was necessary to get at the heart of Southern history. In Faulkner’s text, the brutal murder of a white woman, followed by the quick capture and lynching of a (reputed) black man, exemplifies and encapsulates the ideological and cultural crisis of blackwhite relations in the post-Reconstruction era, as inflected by gender, class, and the then recent history of slavery in the South. In her article, “Persons in Pieces,” Nell Sullivan asserts, “Christmas became so compelling that Faulkner kept adding episodes to his early life in the flashback[s]. The shift of dramatic emphasis from Lena, Byron, and Hightower to Joe Christmas reveals Faulkner’s recognition of the Negrophobe myth at the heart of the (white) Southern con­ sciousness” (498). In writing Joe Christmas, Faulkner introduced a preoccupa­ tion he would continue to work out in such novels as Absalom, Absalom! and Go Down, Moses: miscegenation and its relation to history, to slavery, and to American genealogies. For Faulkner, miscegenation serves, as Krister Friday remarks, as a “metonym for the tragic aftermath of slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction” (41). The fact of miscegenation—of mixed-race bodies that could evade or straddle the color line and in their very embodiment recall the intimate and violent history of institutional slavery—provided Faulkner with a viable, living metaphor for the gruesome history, tumultuous present, and uncertain future of black-white relations in the post-Emancipation South. Many critics have analyzed miscegenation in Light in August in terms of Faulkner’s rendering of slavery and Southern history. This paper diverges from such standard readings to argue that miscegenation is not simply a metaphor for the messy, entangled racial history of the South; miscegenation is also the principal means by which Faulkner contemplates and represents the imperiled state of white masculinity in the post-Reconstruction era and the homoerotic desire and dread underpinning the white male obsession with black manhood. Generally sexualized, degraded, and debased, the black figures in Light in Au­ gust are placed in close proximity to white characters and spaces in order to demonstrate that, in the postslavery South, black and white communities are 176 The Faulkner Journal Fall 2006/Spring 2007 177 dependent on and, in some ways, mutually constitutive ofeach other. Joe Christ­ mas, however, is not simply someone whose racially inscrutable body reveals un­ certain but possibly mixed-race origins; he is Faulkner’s definitive (albeit white) “nigger.” Like many of the black characters in Light in August, Joe Christmas has little interiority and even less discernable motivation for doing what he does. Like the flat surface of a painting, he is a drawn figure. However, unlike the caricatured, illiterate black men who appear for mere seconds in the novel and abruptly leave, or the sexualized black females who are connected to Joe, or the mammy figures who raise other characters in the novel, Joe Christmas represents Faulkner’s meditation on the civic equality ofblack men in the post-Reconstruction era and its effect on the psyche of whites. Christmas acts out his historical moment and anticipates, if not precipitates, crises in the established economic, gender, and racial systems ofthat historical moment. This paper principally aims to understand the way in which Faulkner’s mixed-race figure in Light in August emblematizes the crisis of the post-Reconstruction racial order. I attend specifi­ cally to Faulkner’s linking of racial ambiguity and homoeroticism in the figure of Joe Christmas, arguing that Faulkner uses the historical fact of miscegenation and the perceived failure of white masculinity to critique Southern culture and history and to offer ways of revamping and reconstituting whiteness in the mod­ ern—meaning postslavery—moment. I. A...

“Nuclear Apartheid” as Political Position: Race as a Postcolonial Resource?

Shampa Biswas (*) Reflecting on colonial traces that remain in current conduct and study of global politics, Roxanne Doty expresses her frustrations with the very definition of field of international relations, whose central problems and categories have been framed in such a way as to preclude investigation into categories such as 'race.' (1) While scholars of international political economy have brought considerable attention to questions of global material inequalities and culturalist/constructivist approaches have highlighted issues of discursive and representational power, category of race still continues to be conspicuous by its absence from field. However, this absence is less curious in subfield of security studies, which remains perhaps one of most enduring bastions of neorealism. When questions of (couched as peace) continue to be privileged over questions of justice, as is case in much of mainstream security studies, there is little epistemic space to raise question of ra ce. But even new critical turn in security studies, which has done much to unsettle epistemological and ontological presuppositions in dominant security thinking, has failed to raise question of race as an explicit category of analysis. India's decision to nuclearize in May 1998 propelled it into international limelight, and along with reprimands, resolutions, and statements that were rapidly issued by international bodies like U.N. General Assembly and Conference on Disarmament, regional bodies like Non-Aligned Movement and European Union, governments from both North and South, and many nongovernmental groups and organizations, all kinds of issues began to be raised with respect to India's motivations, intelligibility of such a decision, consequences of this act for regional and global security, and so on. Little attention, however, journalistic or scholarly, was paid to use by government of a significant racial signifier--nuclear apartheid--to justify and defend its actions. Simply put, nuclear-apartheid position quite starkly and compellingly points to material inequities in distribution of global nuclear resources--inequities that are written into, institutionalized, an d legitimized through some of major arms-control treaties, creating an elite club of nuclear haves with exclusive rights to maintain nuclear arsenals that are to be denied to vast majority of nuclear have-nots. What insights might we gain, as scholars of international relations, from interrogating invocation of race through deployment of nuclear-apartheid position? My attempt in this article is to draw out dynamics of two processes of racialization through a critical scrutiny of nuclear-apartheid position--both processes participating simultaneously in co-constructing racialized domestic and international hierarchic orders. In other words, I will argue that nuclear-apartheid position, articulated in voice of government, simultaneously performs a dual role: At same time that it points to a series of racial exclusions in contemporary global order, it also masks, and hence constitutes an Indian nation through another series of racialized exclusions. I argue that both these dynamics need to be understood simultaneously in order to grasp force and effect of deploying this position. I will briefly explain. It is clear that concept of apartheid draws its enunciative force from category of race, and I will argue that deployment of nuclear-apartheid position by government points to a racially institutionalized global hierarchy. In other words, scrutinizing nuclear-apartheid position means at very least taking seriously manner in which deployment of such a racial signifier by government is able to unsettle a certain taken-for-granted terrain in conduct of international relations and in writing of discipline. …

The Common Continent of Men": Visualizing Race in Moby-Dick

“THE COMMON CONTINENT OF MEN”: VISUALIZING RACE IN MOBY-DICK Cuvated by Elizabeth Schultz omprised of men from “all the isles of the sea, and all the ends of the earth,”’ Melville’s Pequod reflects not Conly the demographic reality of the composition of 19th-century whaling ships but also our author’s passionate vision of a democratic society of diverse and equal individuals. Concluding his introduction of the ship’smulticultural crew in Chapter 27, Melville pronounces them democratically “the common continent of men ... federated along one keel” (121), interdependent in performing the business of whaling and in protecting one another from its perils. And, in case any “mortal critic” might dare to fault his vision of equalizing men from every region, race and class, in a proclamation tinged with defiance and a rapturous desperation, Melville allies himself with divinity, with “thou just Spirit of Equality, which hast spread one royal mantle of humanity over all my kind!,”for he is certain that “thou great democratic God!” will “bear him out in” his great democratic vision (117). Writing Moby-Dick 150 years ago, in the decade prior to the Civil War, when the brutal realities of slavery were threatening the very existence of America, Melville had every reason to be disturbed about the success of democracy, as we, his heirs, conscious of racism’s ongoing ubiquity and inequities, continue to be disturbed. Out of Melville’s profound concern for democracy’s survival, it can be argued ’Herman Melville,Moby-Dick, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hei-she1Parker, G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern UP and the Newberry Library, 1988) 121. Subsequent references will be noted In parentheses in the text. ’Only a veiy few abstract repi-esentations attempt to address the complex issues of race as treated by Melville. Norman Ives’lithograph of Queequeg G Ramadan, which appears in his Illustrationsfor Moby Dick (19501, delineates a facial portrait of Queequeg behind a scrim of abstract symbols. Old Fleece Preaching to the Sharks (1985-86) by Walter Martin and the several versions of The Whiteness of the Whale (1986-87) by Tim Rollins + K.O.S. connect Moby-Dick to a range of questions related to race Particular works in Frank Stella’s that Moby-Dick may be understood as an examination not only of the dangers of democracy’s transformation into despotism, but also of its potential for creating a society where diverse individuals respect and care for one another. It is apparent that Melville’s opening strategy in Moby-Dick is to convince his readers of the possibilities of fulfilling such a vision through his representation of the developing friendship between Ishmael, his naive Yankee narrator, and Queequeg, the mature Polynesian harpooner. Moby-Dick’s readers are encouraged to grow with Ishmael, who, through ignorance and fear, at first perceives the tattooed Queequeg as “the devil himself” (22), but who soon comes to “see how elastic our stiff prejudices grow when love once comes to bend them” (54). However, in his depiction of Fedallah, the Persian harpooner, and of the crew of Fedallah’s whaleboat, Melville himself lapses, associating them with 19th-century literary conventions of ghostly Gothic demonism and assigning them racial signifiers corresponding to 19th-century American fears of Asia and the Near East. Since the first illustrated editions of Moby-Dick at the end of the 19th century, the Pequod’s multicultural crew and the relationship between Queequeg and Ishmael have been prominently featured. With few exceptions, these characters have been realistically represented.2 However, realism itself, as a mode of Moby-Dick series (1985-19971, which includes a monumental and provocative abstract piece for each of the novel’schapters, often appear to focus on the racial discourse in the narrative. For detailed discussion of Stella’sworks, see Robert K. Wallace’sFrank Sietta’s Moby-Dlck Senas:Words md Shapes (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2001); for detailed discussion of Ives, Martin, and Rollins + K 0 S., see Elizabeth Schultz, Unpainted to the Last: Moby-Dick and Twentieth-CenturyAmencan Art (Lawrence. UP of Kansas, 1995).For further discussion of the importance of these few abstract works, also see my essay, “VisualizingRace in lmages of Moby-Dick...

What is this ‘black’ in Irish popular culture?

This article is an analysis of the racial signifiers in two contemporary popular shows, Riverdance and Lord of the Dance. It argues that we need to understand the history of transatlantic Irish and African American exchange in order to comprehend the popular appeal of Celtic revivalism.

Reworking the Conversion Narrative: Race and Christianity in Our Nig

An early example of an African American novel, and earliest known novel by an African American woman writer, Harrie E. Wilson's Our Nig (1859) has prompted ongoing excitement among modern scholars. Since Henry Louis Gates, Jr. discovered text more than a decade ago, contemporary criticism of Our Nig has for most part linked autobiographical novel to nineteenth-century tradition of slave narrative and sentimental novel. Wilson's adaptation of conversion narrative warrants further discussion,(1) however, because it represents a literary experiment more complex than mere imitation or synthesis of popular literary genres. Frado's failed conversion affords Wilson literary space to undermine prevailing social constructions of Christianity, race, and womanhood. Through Frado's narrative, Wilson demonstrates how Christian doctrine anchors popular notions of womanhood and domesticity, and how these concepts are limited by race and racial signifiers. Though Wilson manipulates well-known trappings of conversion narrative that date back to American Puritan tradition, Our Nig tells story of heroine's failed initiation into community of earthly saints. Moreover, Frado's rejection of Christianity's promised eternity demonstrates how race might interrupt Christian rite of passage for those black candidates who could not resolve ambiguities of popular racial myths. In both her worldly and spiritual quests, Frado faces limitations imposed by race. From moment Wilson introduces story of Jim and Mag's union, we begin to see an unsettling vision of Christianity and racial blackness as diametric opposites. black outside, I know,' Jim tells Mag, `but I's a heart inside' (12). For Jim, blackness stands in contradistinction to Christian images of goodness; moreover, with unfolding of Frado's narrative, we become increasingly aware that race stands as an obstacle to her religious conversion as well. Frado's inability to envision black souls as candidates for heaven thwarts her full submission to conversion process, and her failed religious conversion impels story's deviation from popular conventions of domestic fiction. A text that uses conversion narrative pattern, Our Nig ends as an anti-conversion experience. Unable to dispel inherited social images that equate whiteness with Godliness, heroine cannot envision blackness in divine hereafter. In a novel by a black woman writer more than a century after publication of Our Nig, we witness kind of narrative that can result a fictionalized black female heroine successfully resolves question of race and religious experience. In Alice Walker's The Color Purple, Celie finds God only after she expels whiteness that threatens her conversion. Celie shares with Shug her image of God as big and old and tall and graybearded and white (176). However, Celie confesses that vision of God leaves her uncomfortable: when I think about it, it don't seem quite right. But it all I got (176). As a confidant and mentor to Celie, Shug explains that this old man is same God she used to see she prayed (177). She then shares with Celie her vision of a God who is found in everything and everyone, and informs Celie that first step to finding God is to remove the old man, in order to see God who exists everywhere. This transformation is not an easy one. Celie reveals difficulty in trying to rid oneself of old man: Well, us talk and talk bout God, but I'm still adrift. Trying to that old man out of my head (179). Again, she reveals seeming omnipresence of whiteness that makes it so difficult to chase away images of whiteness as inherently powerful: on your box of grits, in your head, and all over radio. He try to make you think he everywhere. Soon as you think he everywhere, you think he God. …

Black Liverpool, Black America, and the Gendering of Diasporic Space

The terms Liverpool and America, no less than African refer to racialized geographies of imagination. The mapping of racial signifiers onto geographical ones lends such terms illusion of referring to physical rather than social locations. That there is no actual space that one could call the African diaspora, despite how commonly it is mapped onto particular locales, points attention to ways that social spaces are constructed in tandem with processes of racial formation. Inspired by Paul Gilroy's first book, There Ain't No Black in Union Jack: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation (1987), I set out in 1991 to study meanings and practices surrounding race and nation in Liverpool, England. Set in a city with one of longest-settled populations in United Kingdom, my research investigated why and how identity is constituted as mutual opposite of English and British identities. Yet in pursuing these themes, I became increasingly amazed at how frequently my informants would make discursive forays into black America. Nested at key moments in their narratives were references to formative influence that America-in many forms-has had on racial identity and politics in their city. The experiences they narrated were varied, and narratives themselves were rich, poignant, and deeply gendered. Black Liverpudlians told of their relations with American servicemen (or GIs) who were stationed outside their city for some 25 years following World War II.1 Men and women also spoke about travels of their own African, Afro-Caribbean, and native Liverpudlian fathers who were employed as seamen by Liverpool shipping companies. The global wanderings of city's men often brought them to Atlantic ports of