Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Trey Ellis, in his “The New Black Aesthetic” essay (along with Greg Tate’s Flyboy in the Buttermilk, Nelson George’s Buppies, B-Boys, Baps and Bohos: Notes on Post-Soul Black Culture and several other essayists of the mid-to-late 1980s and early 1990s), identified an emerging “school” of post-civil rights movement black artists and writers. “These are artists for whom,” as Tate puts it, “black consciousness and artistic freedom are not mutually exclusive but complementary, for whom ‘black culture’ signifies a multicultural tradition of expressive practices. . . .” While Ellis ultimately described this school by his essay’s title, he argued that the artists and writers who comprised it were … “cultural mulattos.”
Of all the names and concepts and terms scholars of African-American literature and culture throw around as they attempt to understand this post-civil rights movement era, “cultural mulatto” is perhaps the most misunderstood. Here, from the essay, is Ellis’s oft-quoted definition: “Just as a genetic mulatto is a black person of mixed parents who can often get along fine with his white grandparents, a cultural mulatto, educated by a multi-racial mix of cultures, can also navigate easily in the white world.” Perhaps most peculiar is Ellis’s argument that these “cultural mulattos” are also somehow “wholly black.” He goes on to briefly discuss two types of “tragic” cultural mulattos: those “self-deluding” blacks who falsely aspire to whiteness, and, conversely, those who affect a “’superblackness’ and try to dream themselves back to the ghetto.”
In this paper, I will critique Ellis’s definition—and, in the process critique various scholars’ critiques of Ellis’s definition—eventually offering my own interpretation of what a cultural mulatto looks like—and does. I will restrict my discussion to black artists who were born or came of age in the post-civil rights movement era, and I plan, contrary to Ellis’s strategy, to focus far more on what these artists do—the “mix of cultures” reflected in their art—than where they come from. Can one be a “New Black Aesthetic” artist (or a “Post-Soul aesthetic” artist, the term I prefer) and produce art that reflects a cultural mulatto sensibility and not be a cultural mulatto oneself? Where’s the line between “wholly black” and “cultural[ly] mulatto,” and how does it show up in one’s art? Indeed, as I move toward a viable, working definition of the term, I’ll conceptualize it as an artistic term that will allow readers (or, in the panel’s case, attendees) a sense of how to formally recognize the culturally mulatto black artist—or, at the very least, how to frame an argument for who is and who is not a cultural mulatto.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: If we consider David Wark Griffith’s film "The Birth of a Nation" (1915) as what Vincent Rocchio called “The Birth of a (Racist) Nation(al) Cinema”, the first great theme at the origin of North American cinema is the notion of “race” with an alarming warning against the danger represented by miscegenation and its offspring for the future of the North American society. Hollywood never parts with this fear and attempts to exorcize it with a series of passing films, the most outstanding of which were released between 1930 and 1960.
In societies built upon the idea of “the purity of the white race”, the “mixed race” person is inevitably bound to be an object of curiosity and the passing films transfer to the silver screen that character on the margin of the North American society as the figure of the desired, repressed, forbidden and dramatic fantasy to cross the colorline; the invisible but truly real and deep-rooted barrier which separates Blacks from Whites. In those movies, a “mixed-race” person is typically a tragic character who desperately wants but one thing: to be considered as a white person. The plots always deal with the character’s ability to live that challenge which blurs the society‘s inflexible racial classifications. Indeed, the “mixed race” figure, holder of a so called marginal position between two worlds, proves the instability of the “race” notion. S/he creates a space for multiple identities and constantly looks for the possibility to step across the economic and social boundaries refusing his/her place as a second class citizen and the undeniable socio-economic oppression that victimizes black people. An idiosyncrasy of the North American segregationist cinema, the mixed figure can’t be but a tragic character, torn apart because s/he belongs to two radically separate worlds. Contrary to the self-made character, the métisse figure is neither allowed to define him/herself as s/he would like to nor to live according to his/her own choices without regretting it bitterly. For if his/her skin color is visually white, it is socially black.
Because s/he personifies the colorline itself, when wanting to pass for white so as to free him/herself from the burden of being black in a segregated society, s/he must, through every gesture, thought or word, endlessly recreate it. It further complicates his/her quest for a stable identity and makes him/her the unwitting accomplice of the preservation of racist ideological constructions.
Yet, beyond this dominant discourse which reinforces the status quo of the “race” idea and of racism, the passing films are unwillingly subversive because of the very nature of the subject that they put on screen.
Therefore it is not the dominant cinema through the “mixed-race” question which is the topic of this abstract but the reality of miscegenation and the métis people through the filter of fiction, which means the cinematic construction of difference, otherness when the métisse figure eventually stares at us blatantly from the screen and questions the black and white communities while attempting to put the pieces of his/her identity back together.

Publication Type: Individual Presentation
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Medical professionals and historians have lauded James Marion Sims, the “Father of American Gynecology,” for his pioneering work in early American modern gynecology. Until recently, most historians of medicine have written little more than glowing hagiographies about the gynecological surgeon. During the past two decades, social historians of medicine and slavery have raised criticisms about whether these accolades are deserved. The most commonly cited denunciation of Sims is concentrated on the extensive and prolonged experimental surgery work he performed on enslaved women to cure their obstetrical fistulae.

My research findings allow me to posit that Sims was no more unique than other antebellum-era gynecological surgeons who simultaneously exploited and aided vulnerable populations to advance professional women’s health care. I do contend that the ethical concerns that surround Sims’ medical work must be re-examined and continuously connected to the landscape of slavery, and immigration later in his career. Essentially, the sphere of nineteenth century gynecology allowed black women to hold an unusual position. Race, status, and gender marked black female bodies as “super-” ones that were able to transcend pain, surgery, and harsh treatment.

My paper seeks to unpack the layers of meaning around antebellum physicians’ use of enslaved female patients. Additionally, attempts by historians to rescue enslaved women and refashion them into heroic historical agents must also be contested because it perpetuates the archaic thinking of black women as having had “superbodies.” Yet, I am also arguing that medicine was an arena in which the archetype of the helpless black female slave was reified into the physically strong black woman icon. Ultimately, the study of Dr. Sims and his slave patients provide the framework for which we can extend our historical query into how slavery and racism impacted medical ethics in nineteenth century women’s healthcare.

Publication Type: Invited Paper
Abstract: Drawing on a trope that has traditionally been a vehicle for literary moralizing
and tragedy, Colson Whitehead and Charles Johnson construct novels about passing that
embrace the humorous potential of the liminality of mulatto characters. Building on
theories about the social function of humor, this essay examines the ways in which
Whitehead and Johnson’s humor enables them to destabilize reified racial constructs in
order to create new processes of racial identification. Crafting his novel around a joke
borne out of the experience of passing, Whitehead’s The Intuitionist examines the
relationship between social structures of racial identification and black humor, intimating
that while its jokes may not prompt laughter, its effects remain far-reaching. Similarly,
Johnson’s irreverent take on the slave narrative in Oxherding Tale emphasizes the
artificiality of the fictional tropes that have come to define African American literature
and identity. This paper uses Whitehead’s and Johnson’s texts to discuss the role played
by humor in creating new understandings of African American identity. Drawing on the
African American literary tradition even as they undermine some of its most sacred
tropes, both authors use humor to point towards new directions both in the construction
of racial identity and its representation.