Multiracial Genealogies in American Life Writing, Past and Present

Workshop I: seminar room P104 (2nd floor, Philosophicum)

Heike Paul, Cedric Essi (Erlangen-Nürnberg)

 

1. Hannah Spahn (FU Berlin), "Beyond the Tragic Mulatta: Cross-Racialism and Social Passing in Mid-Nineteenth-Century American Life Writing"

2. Julia Sattler (TU Dortmund), "Family Secrets: A Relational Reading of Contemporary Mixed Race Memoirs"

3. Cedric Essi (Erlangen-Nürnberg), "Transnational Affiliations in the Mixed Race Memoir: Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father"

4. Frank Mehring (FU Berlin), "Remediating Multi-Racial Memories: Audre Lorde's Berlin Years and the Genealogy of Afro-German Life Writing"

5. Amy Doherty Mohr (LMU München), "The Tangled Web of Story and Identity: Louise Erdrich’s The Plague of Doves"

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Contact:

Hannah Spahn
hspahn@zedat.fu-berlin.de

Julia Sattler
julia.sattler@udo.edu

Cedric Essi
cedric.essi@amer.phil.uni-erlangen.de

Frank Mehring
Frank.mehring@fu-berlin.de

Amy Doherty Mohr
Amy.Mohr@lmu.de

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Much of what is conventionally labeled African American autobiographical writing has recently been reconsidered as part of a 'mixed-race' tradition in American letters. Slave narratives, for instance those by Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, and autobiographical texts, e.g. by Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Malcolm X, address the intricacies of racial mixing and an interracial family heritage in different ways. Especially "the boom" (Paul Spickard) in contemporary multiracial memoirs has seen the publication of texts such as James McBride's The Color of Water, Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father, June Cross’s Secret Daughter, and Rebecca Walker’s Black, White and Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self, which are (re)imagining what it means to be mixed-race in a time which some have dubbed 'post-racial.' Authors of 'white' descent have also engaged in (auto)biographical representations of mixed-race that are problematizing established notions of whiteness, family, and nationhood in America, such as The Hairstons: An American Family in Black and White by Henry Wiencek or Edward Ball’s Slaves in the Family. In fact, the interracial family in many of the narratives since the 1990s has not only been acknowledged as a positive social context for individual identity formation but has also been, time and again, thematized, even celebrated – often by way of a new melting pot rhetoric – as the prototypical American family that is in many ways foundational for and representative of the 'American experience.'

This workshop seeks to shed light on the representation of inter- and multiraciality in American life writing, past and present, and to discuss its role in literary studies and race, mixed race, and post-race cultural politics. Our sense of multiracial life-writing is informed by the African-American/Euro-American paradigm but it is not exhausted by this particular constellation; quite the contrary, we would like to move beyond the black-white dichotomy as a prominent pattern in American racial discourse in order to gain a more complicated picture and a comparative perspective. Our workshop will discuss multiracial life writing in the context of discourses around/about the multiracial subject such as the "one drop-rule", passing and/or "racial faking" (Fred Wah), the tragic mulatto/'half-breed,' narratives of "cross-bloods" (Gerald Vizenor), experiences of slavery & racism, DNA testing, and transracial adoption as well as the representations of experiences of mixed-race people from Latin America in the US vis-à-vis Latin American notions of “la raza cosmica” (José Vasconcelos), to name some of the most pertinent issues.

The following questions could be addressed in contributions to this workshop: how has the ideology of 'miscegenation' affected the production and reception of texts dealing with mixed-race genealogies? What kind of autobiographical traditions are employed in self-representations of the mixed-race subject? What kind of images and stereotypes do we find in historical and contemporary biographies about mixed-race individuals? How do gender and sexuality figure in inter- and multiracial life writing? How can we address multiracial life writing by way of theories/concepts of hybridity? In what way are American mixed-race life writings informed by a transnational and/or postcolonial perspective?

We welcome papers covering multiracial American life writing from different historical contexts and in different media (literature, film, television).