Imagining a Mestiza-Self Through the Double-Consciousness Trope

This paper is a comparative study between two African-American novels: Caucasia by Danzy Senna (1998) and Quicksand by Lenna Larsen(1928). It specifically discusses how their respective mixed-race protagonist re-appropriates the double-consciousness trope –a term originally coined by African-American scholar W. E. Du Bois to describe the existence of blacks in the United States. More specifically, I argue that Danzy Senna’s novel Caucasia transcends traditional notions of mixed-race identity found in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand. First, I establish that Helga, the mulatta protagonist of Quicksand is constructed to play the version of the double-consciousness which assumes that mixed people (black and white) in United States live with internalized racism. Next, I demonstrate that Caucasia challenges Quicksand by providing us with a mulatta protagonist who re-appropriates the notions of double-consciousness by making it instrumental to her own survival and birth-right to be mixed.

Mapping Black mixed-race Birmingham: Place, locality and identity

Utilizing narrations of urban space derived from interviews with 37 Mixed White and Black Caribbean people in the UK’s second-largest city, Birmingham, this article argues that place should be central to the theorization of mixed-race. Whilst Critical Mixed-Race Studies tends to privilege racial identity as the defining feature of the mixed-race experience, this article argues that mixed-race subjects identify with and through their respective localities to cultivate and perform their racialized identities. Drawing on personalized mental maps and routes through the city, the discussion sheds light on how conceptualizations of neighbourhood and territory are entangled with expressions of racial identity and belonging. By showing how the local histories, identities and characters of places come to be written on the bodies of mixed-race subjects, I demonstrate the power that place has in organizing social life and shaping identities. In doing so the article warns against the critical absence of place, and particularly the local, in empirical analyses of mixed-race identity. It suggests that for the development of de-essentialist understandings of mixedness which exist outside the realm of personal identifications, it is necessary to engage critically with place as an analytical framework.

Recognition

Being multiracial can be a contradictory experience characterized by misperception and a lack of agency; however, embracing multiple identities can constitute an internal revolution of consciousness. This internal revolution of consciousness cannot occur without a societal recognition of multiracial identity. There needs to be a substantive social understanding of multiracial identity in order for true recognition to occur. Frida Kahlo’s The Two Fridas serves as an opening anecdote to this chapter as it illustrates multiplicity, which can characterize multiracial consciousness. Racial identity and multiracial identity are explored through Linda Alcoff’s Visible Identities, which also establishes the need for a substantive social understanding of mixed-race identity. An internal revolution of consciousness can be developed through Sarah Ahmed’s notion of queerness in Queer Phenomenology and Gloria Anzaldúa’s notion of mestiza consciousness in Borderlands: La Frontera. The parallels between queerness and a mixed-race consciousness are further explored in this chapter to embody new ways of being and seeing the world.

“Unlike Men, The Diamonds Linger:” Bassey and Bond Beyond the Theme Song

This chapter directs attention to Shirley Bassey’s voice as both constituting and contesting the white male gaze of the James Bond franchise. I consider Bassey in relation to the politics of race and gender as she sonically invokes a long tradition of racial mimicry by both black and white women singers. Bassey furthers this tradition in that her influence can be traced beyond her various theme songs for the Bond films in the more recent performances by white artists. As Bassey’s Welsh and mixed-race identity gives a different contour to our understanding of what and who constitutes “Britishness,” her synecdochal relationship to the James Bond film series also allows us to reconsider the possibilities for black women’s voices in cinema.

Nippo-Kanaks in Post-War New Caledonia: Race, Law, Politics and Identity

This article interrogates both the legal and social identities of Japanese-Melanesians (or ‘Nippo-Kanaks’) residing in the Free French territory of New Caledonia at the beginning of the twentieth century to the years following the Second World War. The first part of the article details how, fearing an imminent Japanese attack on New Caledonia after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the French Empire began the process of deporting nearly all Japanese emigrants residing throughout New Caledonia to Australian internment camps on 8 December 1941. French officials in New Caledonia sequestered all property belonging to the Japanese émigré community, and later sold it to the French public. Nippo-Kanaks, who were children at the time of the incarceration and deportation of their Japanese fathers, maintained a problematized legal identity as Japanese nationals residing in Pacific French territory. Although the French Empire granted French citizenship to mixed race Kanaks in 1946, French authorities in New Caledonia specifically denied French citizenship to Nippo-Kanaks, who then had to petition for French naturalization. The second part of this article interrogates the social identity of Nippo-Kanaks viewed from the perspective of Jeannette Yokoyama, a second-generation Nippo-Kanak whose Japanese father was deported to Australia. Yokoyama’s father was forcibly repatriated to Japan after the Second World War, but by writing letters he maintained communication with his family in New Caledonia. The letters that Jeannette received from her father allowed her to forge personal memories of her absent father that shaped her social, mixed race identity as a Nippo-Kanak. For Yokoyama’s father, the letters served as a means to enculturate Jeannette as a Japanese daughter from afar. Jeannette’s memories of her beloved father, coupled with the embrace of her Japanese heritage, represent a symbolic resistance to French administrators’ efforts to erase the presence of the Japanese community in New Caledonia.