Não Identificado: Racial Ambiguity and the Sonic Blackness of Gal Costa

A key concern in postwar America was “who's passing for whom?” Analyzing representations of passing in Hollywood films reveals changing cultural ideas about authenticity and identity in a country reeling from a hot war and moving towards a cold one. After World War II, passing became an important theme in Hollywood movies, one that lasted throughout the long 1950s, as it became a metaphor to express postwar anxiety. In the imaginative fears of postwar America, identity was under siege on all fronts. Not only were there blacks passing as whites, but women were passing as men, gays passing as straight, communists passing as good Americans, Jews passing as gentiles, and even aliens passing as humans (and vice versa). Fears about communist infiltration, invasion by aliens, collapsing gender and sexual categories, racial ambiguity, and miscegenation made their way into films that featured narratives about passing. This book shows that these films transcend genre. Representations of passing enabled Americans to express anxieties about who they were and who they imagined their neighbors to be. By showing how pervasive the anxiety about passing was, and how it extended to virtually every facet of identity. This book broadens the literature on passing in a fundamental way. It also opens up important counter-narratives about postwar America and how the language of identity developed in this critical period of American history.

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Refusing Historical Amnesia

English Language Notes ◽

10.1215/00138282-7716184 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 57 (2) ◽

pp. 99-113

Author(s):

Nicole Stamant

Keyword(s):

Social Justice ◽

African Americans ◽

American South ◽

Central Place ◽

Personal Significance ◽

Danzy Senna ◽

Racial Ambiguity ◽

The American South ◽

Lauren Berlant

Abstract Performing what Michele Elam calls “a refusal of historical amnesia,” Danzy Senna and Emily Raboteau expose how social justice and hospitality are constructed in and around what Pierre Nora calls lieux de mémoire. Engaging particular sites of memory in the American South—places with national and personal significance—Raboteau and Senna negotiate and interrogate the interstitial spaces of racial ambiguity, liminality, and invisibility as they uncover different modes of commemoration and fend off historical forgetting. Writing about their experiences as biracial African Americans, Raboteau and Senna show readers how memorialization of black southern experience connects with communal or inherited familial memories. Their considerations of memory, and the attendant concerns about subjectivity and forgetting, demonstrate the central place of testimony to mnemonic restitution. In so doing, they also expose new ways to engage trauma: through the affect of what Lauren Berlant describes as “crisis ordinariness.”

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Framing racial position and political standing: Hmong Americans in the Wisconsin State Journal and the Chico Enterprise-Record

Ethnicities ◽

10.1177/1468796820949263 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 146879682094926

Author(s):

Yang Sao Xiong ◽

Michael C Thornton

Keyword(s):

Past Research ◽

Public Institutions ◽

Media Representations ◽

Political Incorporation ◽

Political Capacity ◽

Racial Ambiguity ◽

Local Contexts ◽

The Media ◽

Hmong Americans ◽

Immigrant Political Incorporation

Although membership is regarded as an important condition of immigrants’ capacities to influence the political system, the literature on immigrant political incorporation has tended to focus on formal citizenship status, giving the impression that other forms of membership matter less for immigrants’ political capacity. Arguing for the need to account for ethnic groups’ perceived racial position within local contexts, this paper explores how media outlets, as public institutions, construct the identity of Hmong Americans in ways that affect their political standing. Using a textual analysis approach, we examine how two newspapers within two US communities frame Hmong’s group identity. Our findings show that the papers situate Hmong within a field of racial positions, albeit, not in the same ways that past research predicts would apply to Asian Americans. While differing in the particulars, the two newspapers are quite similar in the frames they use to depict Hmong Americans: civic ostracism, racial ambiguity, and threat. The media neither refer to Hmong as Asians nor valorize them vis-a-vis another racial category. Nevertheless, media representations frequently sully Hmong as a threat to the community. We discuss the implications of our findings for immigrant political incorporation.

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