... with the figure of the tragic mulatto as instances of queer pleasure, both self-shattering and subject forming. In so doing, the essay pays tribute to that tragic mulatto as a spectacular mulata and diva. The spectacular mulata diva summons queer subjectivities; furthermore, she betrays larger national...

... . . . that is the ineffaceable curse of Cain . . . Dion Boucicault, The Octoroon, or Life in Louisiana The 1949 film Pinky presents a central mulatto character as a method for focusing attention on issues of race and racism.1 As one of a series of liberal films...

... capacity that allowed her to play a multiplicity of roles in the American film industry’s updated miscegenation scenario. Thus Temple’s characters could range from innocent white child to lascivious female, white phallic savior, racial mulatto, and black min- strel — all within the same film. Indeed...

... beauty for me. I bring misfortune to all who love me!16 Bersi is Maddalena’s mulatto maid who is also a prostitute. Bersi disappears in Andy Beckett’s translation of Maddalena’s aria. Amazingly, at the very moment Bersi’s name is mentioned in the aria, Andy stops translating. For Bersi’s name...

... mulatto’ persona that has always characterized sexually desirable mixed-Black female characters in Hollywood films.”11Jordan portrays aborted, interracial, polymorphic sexual love stories in which “straight” white, male characters befriend and fall for “queer” black, female characters. Breaching...

... career, see Donald Bogle,Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films (New York: Viking, 1973), 176 – 86; and Donald Bogle, Brown Sugar: Eighty Years of Black Female Superstars (New York: Da Capo, 1980), 92 – 97. 16...

... conventional tropes of the tragic mulatto to become mulata divas, especially for queer of color viewers who see them as the keepers of “an eroticized racial secret” that leads them to pursue taboo passions in an attempt to emancipate themselves from dominant culture’s racial and sexual restrictions...

... inclinations of modernism inso- Figure 4. Richard Bruce far as he models his rendering of physiog- Nugent, Drawing for nomic traits not after the scientifc para- Mulattoes — Number 2. digm but rather after African masks (fg. From Ebony and Topaz, 4). More importantly, he effects...

... populations, if they exist, are never simply natural but rather result from a complex negotiation between culture, society, and biology. Importantly, segregation was a response to failures of biological theories of the innate physical degeneracy of mulattos and Africans. It was also a response...

... to the signifier of skin color—which Homi Bhabha calls “the most visible of fetishes”43 and which therefore cannot operate as a “secret”—circumcision, like gay sexuality or the race of the mulatto/a, can. Passing gives to such ambiguous identity cate- gories “a certain narratability insofar as it raises...

... in Research in African Literatures, American Drama, English Academy Review, Frontiers, and Safundi. She has a new piece in the anthology African Women Writing Resistance, and she is currently revising her dissertation on the “tragic mulatto” in contemporary African literatures. A “savage” Solomon...

... without fear of becoming one because he or she does not change his or her complexion but simply blackens it (in the case of blackface) or reshapes the facial features by taping and stretching them (in the case of yellowface).41 Conversely, a so-called mulatto can pass as white only when his...

... Resistance . Her book Mixed Race Stereotypes in South African and American Literature: Coloring Outside the (Black and White) Lines (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) examines the trope of the “tragic mulatto” from a transnational perspective. © 2015 by Camera Obscura 2015 BioShock Infinite first...

... to be or are already produced as part of the mainstream. This inside track is the result of conscious cross-over marketing, the conglomeration of the music industry, and post-Civil Rights integration. 139 As a symbolic mulatto icon where race and class codes are mixed, Whitney Houston represents...

..., features dancer Linda Martina Young s choreogra- phy of four enduring Black female archetypes the strong Aunt Sarah, the tragic mulatto Saffronia, the seductive Sweet Thing, and the angry Peaches. Larkin s The Kitchen, by contrast, is shot in grainy black- and- white 8mm (in the extant version...

... Novels of Child, Howells, and Harper,” American Literature 75 (2003): 813 – 41. For an interesting discussion of racial passing and cinematic cyborgs, see LeiLani Nishime, “The Mulatto Cyborg: Imagining a Multiracial Future,” Cinema Journal 44 (2005): 34 – 49. 6. Judith...

... were poisoned at the Camp by Old Betsey. Martha, Age 22 Yrs. A fine Mulatto Woman given me by my Father, to act as Nurse and Cook for our child. Ran away in Charleston May 1861, Caught four months after. No longer with me.13 According to Louis Manigault’s journal entries, problems...

..., Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretative History of Blacks in American Films, new 3rd ed. (New York: Continuum, 1994), 9. 49. Bogle, Primetime Blues, 22. 50. “The New Housekeeper,” season 1, episode 1 of The Andy Griffith Show, writ. Jack Elinson and Charles...

... to their parents. Ricardo’s situation as a Luso-African is shown to be more difficult and is thus radical- ized through the complete absence of a home. He is a mulatto, neither black nor white, without parents, and therefore he has an even more fragile identity. His specific situation becomes also...

..., “The Dark Spot in the Kaleidoscope: Black Images in American Film,” The Kaleidoscope Lens: How Hollywood Views Ethnic Groups, ed. Randall M. Miller (New York: Jerome S. Ozer, 1980) 15-35. Also see Donald Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies and Bucks...