MAPPING THE LIMINAL IDENTITIES OF MULATTAS IN AFRICAN, AFRICAN AMERICAN, AND ...

285 Pages·2006·0.63 MB·English

The Pennsylvania State University
The Graduate School
Department of Comparative Literature

MAPPING THE LIMINAL IDENTITIES OF MULATTAS IN AFRICAN,

AFRICAN AMERICAN, AND CARIBBEAN LITERATURES

A Thesis in
Comparative Literature
By
Khadidiatou Guèye

Submitted in Partial Fulfillment
of the Requirements
for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

December 2006
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The thesis of Khadidiatou Guèye was reviewed and approved* by the following:

Thomas A. Hale
Liberal Arts Professor of African, French,
and Comparative Literature
Thesis Advisor
Chair of Committee

Professor Bernard W. Bell
Professor of English

Professor Christiane J. Makward
Professor of French and Women Studies

Iyunolu Osagie
Associate Professor of English

Pius Adesanmi
Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature

Caroline D. Eckhardt
Professor of English and Comparative Literature
In Charge of Graduate Programs in
Comparative Literature

*Signatures are on file in the Graduate School.
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Abstract

In twentieth-century African, African American, and Caribbean literatures,
mixed-blood women are often misread as figures frozen in tragic postures. Such
unrealistic portraitures replicate the traditional white-authored pathologizations of racial
hybridity. Drawing on the theoretical framework of liminality, this study investigates
how mulattas negotiate their identities in specific socio-cultural environments, times, and
places. Four writers of African descent and dissimilar socio-historical backgrounds are
studied: Abdoulaye Sadji from Senegal, Bessie Head from South Africa, Mayotte
Capécia from Martinique, and Nella Larsen from the United States.
The study is divided into five chapters that deal with the experiences of mulattas
in autobiographical writing, sexuality, madness, racial passing, and expatriation.
Thematic and stylistic discrepancies in the works examined are ancillary to the common
liminal strategies of de-marginalization and self-reconstruction of female heroines. Their
attempts at self-assertion appear in the ways in which they resist the constrictions of
patriarchal and racist regimes. Their construction of spaces of agency is interwoven with
ambiguity, ambivalence, and contradictions, which are emblematic of the discontinuities
of their lives and paradigmatic of their intricate search for identity. In the works, the
liminal experiences of mulattas are framed within the quests for social visibility, the
affirmation of humanity, the renegotiation of space, and the anomic straddling between
oppositional boundaries and statuses. Through their striving to rise above the limitations
imposed on their gender and race, mulattas commit acts of transgression and
dissemblance, and disrupt racial taxonomy. I demonstrate that liminality is a major
unifying thread that runs through all the narratives and argue that it creates alternative
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existential paradigms for mixed-blood women. Liminality is an appropriate tool that
challenges monolithic views of identities through the re-articulation of cultural meanings.
My main contribution is twofold. First, I extend the traditional cartography of
liminality, which is usually based on small-scale societies where individuals have loyalty
to their primary communities. Second, I suggest new vistas for race criticism in diasporic
studies.
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Table of Contents

Acknowledgements vii

Chapter One Monoracial, Biracial, and the Entre-Deux 1
Introduction 1

Black/White Polarization 17
Racial Hybridity 38
Betwixt and Between: The Ambiguity of Liminality 50
Chapter Two Liminal Psychoautobiographies: Rites and Routes 59
Autobiography as Autrebiographie: Je-Jeu in Mayotte 60
Capécia’s Je suis martiniquaise

Internal Drama: Spectralized Presences in Bessie Head’s 86
A Question of Power

Chapter Three The Liminal Experience of Sexuality and the 108
Problematic of Respectability

Sexuality at Point Zero in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand 109
and Mayotte Capécia’s La négresse blanche

Sexuality and Normative Illegitimacy in Mayotte 125
Capécia’s La négresse blanche

Nini, mulâtresse du Sénégal: Between Sexual 141
Empowerment and Disempowerment

Chapter Four Herspace: Liminal Madness and Racial Passing of the 157
Mulatta

I am Mad But I am Not Mad: Shuttling Between Seamless 158
Identities in Bessie Head’s A Question of Power

Telling a New Story: Racial Performance and Ambiguity 180
in Nella Larsen’s Passing

Chapter Five The Limen of Journeys: Mulattas and Colonial Paris 206
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The French Métropole: Interior Landscapes in Nini, 207
mulâtresse du Sénégal

Migration and Trans-Caribbean Identity in Je suis 228
martiniquaise and La négresse blanche

Conclusion 245

Works Cited 251
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Acknowledgements

This project is brought to fruition thanks to the moral support and encouragement
of many people. I dedicate it to my unrivalled parents Aïssatou and Malick, my beloved
professors, and friends. I am particularly grateful to my thesis advisor and mentor
Professor Thomas A. Hale, who has always boosted my morale and believed in my
abilities. Without his guidance and advice, this project would not have been possible. I
would also like to express my wholehearted gratitude to Professor Bernard William Bell
for his mentorship, kindness, availability, and acute intellectual insights. I am indebted to
Professors Adesanmi, Makward, and Osagie, whose support and valuable critical
suggestions have been instrumental in the completion of the thesis. I cannot be thankful
enough and grateful to Professor Caroline Eckhardt for her steady professional guidance
and support throughout my career and careful reading of my dissertation. I am indebted
to Professor Thomas O. Beebee, whose generosity, availability, help, and incredible sense
of humor, spurred my professional steps.
This project has benefited from several grants. Fulbright and Delta Kappa Gamma
fellowships and a Penn State Africana Research Center Dissertation Award have
provided valuable financial support that I am glad to acknowledge.
Chapter One

Monoracial, Biracial, and the Entre-Deux

Introduction

Colonialism and slavery have been instrumental in the creation of a web of racial
complexities in Africa, the Americas, and the Caribbean. The blending of whites and
blacks led to the emergence of biracial people known as mulattos. Since the eighteenth
century, these people of mixed heritage have straddled racial borders and grappled with
searing and unresolved tensions rooted in the desire for self-definition and self-
identification. Race mixing produces biologically and culturally hybrid people whose
inheritance of an unclearly and unstably defined identity makes them ambiguous. The
figures of mulattos have long been and are still associated with the tragic by virtue of
their liminal position. Their ambiguous situation generates inner clashes rooted in their
contradictory and warring identities.
Nineteenth-century French thinkers such as Arthur de Gobineau and Gustave Le
Bon associate miscegenation with degeneration, danger, decadence, and sterility. In
Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (1995), Robert Young shows
how “racial difference became identified with other forms of sexual and social perversity
as degeneracy, deformation or arrested embryological development” (180). Western
theorists often demonized mixed-bloods because they threatened the teleological
paradigms of their civilization or the supposed progression of evolution, which was
sometimes believed to rest on the inheritance of acquired characteristics. However, it is
worth specifying that the monolithically and stereotypically negative representation of
mulattos is the product of Western conceptualizations of racial difference. The
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pathologization of racial difference produces the situation that defines racially mixed
people as excluded from the Western epistemological order. In The Biological and Social
Meaning of Race (1971), Richard Osborne argues that “persons are likely to be treated
not according to what they are as individuals, but according to the stereotypes of the
group to which they belong” (15). These stereotypes appear in many media, especially
literature, which has served as a disseminator of Western attitudes toward miscegenation.
William Cohen’s The French Encounter With Africans: White Responses to
Blacks (1980) and Pierre Loti’s Le roman d’un spahi (1974) exemplify the undesirability
of racial intermixture. Cohen describes “interracial sex […] as the violation of the
distance between two species” (235) and Loti’s spahi, Jean, a French soldier in the
Senegalese colonial cavalry, wishes he did not have his “dignité d’homme blanc, souillée
par le contact de cette chair noire” (208) [“white man’s dignity soiled by contact with
[Fatou Gaye’s] black flesh”].1 However, such colonial discourse on miscegenation was
rejected by anticolonialist writers from the colonies. For example, the Senegalese author
Ousmane Socé, in his novel Mirages de Paris (1937), considers métissage as a challenge
to European mono-ethnicism (147). Others like Léopold Sédar Senghor ascribe to
métissage the political function of erasing differences (“Le problème culturel” 1-3). The
meaning of hybridity changes with locality. In North America, it is often glossed as
multiculturalism, in Latin America, as mestizaje, and in the Caribbean, as creolization.
Édouard Glissant and Antonio Benitez-Rojo are prominent creolization theorists who
view hybridity as a contestation of dominant cultural inscriptions and a ceaseless process
of possibilities.

1 All translations are mine unless otherwise specified.
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Anthropologists, historians, psychologists, and cultural geographers have
addressed the identity issue for mulattos in a variety of ways that rely quite often on
demographic data, surveys, or interviews. Although such approaches to learning about
the situation of the mulatto are useful, literature offers a particularly privileged window
on the subject because it enables the reader to understand the motivations, the nuances,
and the textures of the lives of these people as recreated from the experiences,
observations, and imaginations of the authors. Literature also links together various
disciplines such as history, sociology, cultural studies, and psychoanalysis. In her plenary
address at the American Comparative Literature Association Conference at Princeton on
Friday, March 24, 2006, Toni Morrison rightly contended that “art summons what other
disciplines describe.” Depending on the specialty and interest of scholars, works of
literature can be examined from different perspectives. While specialists in other fields
can document certain aspects of the lives of mulattos, literary authors convey unique and
insightful portrayals of their condition. The contribution of writers of fiction is especially
valuable because they are often best situated to provide answers to questions about
mulattos: What is blackness? What is whiteness? Who is black? Who is white? How do
mulattas live their ‘twoness’? How do mulattas react to blackness and whiteness? How
do mulattas negotiate their identities through the liminal experiences of autobiographical
writing, sexuality, madness, racial passing, and exile? Are they frozen in tragic postures?
The purpose of this thesis is to propose answers to these questions by analyzing
the works of four writers from different cultural, historical, linguistic, and social
backgrounds who offer captivating portraitures of mulattas. These writers are Abdoulaye
Sadji (Sénégal), Bessie Head (South Africa), Mayotte Capécia (Martinique), and Nella