Ramifications of Racial Identity in Gloria Naylor’s Linden Hills

This paper attempts to bring out the racial identity in Gloria Naylor’s Linden Hills. It presents the struggle for African-American identity; the idea of feminist consciousness is brought forward. There is a fight against racism. Women are found to be dominated, humiliated, and harassed by the male characters. The theme of tragic mulatto is introduced in the novel, reinforcing the importance of racial roots. Linden Hills portrays a sarcastic examination of the uncertain struggle for African-American identity in the nineteenth century and twentieth century. The relationship between personal identity and cultural history is the main theme in this novel. Naylor focuses on a community of heartless people who have become detached from their cultural past in the action of ascending the corporate ladder towards a promising monetary future. In this quest of upward mobility, the occupants of Linden Hills have even turned away from the sense of their racial identity.

Affiliating With George Eliot

This chapter looks at George Eliot's usage of the “unwitting passing and voluntary racial affiliation” scenario in her works and what it means for African American writers. Virtually no other major British writer ever told it at all. By contrast, a number of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American writers—most of them African American—constructed this same scenario, almost invariably in stories about African American identity. Within American literary history, such stories are legible as refutations of what has come to be known as the tragic mulatto/a plot. In stories with this plot, the discovery that a character who has believed himself or herself to be white has some African ancestry is cataclysmic, leading directly to enslavement, sexual violation, madness, and/or death.

Octavia Butler’s Vampiric Vision

Octavia Butler’s Fledgling (2005) chronicles the story of Shori Matthews, a 53-year-old vampire who looks like a 10-year-old black girl. Shori awakens with amnesia and physical scarring as a result of an attack from unknown assailants. While healing, she is hunted by clandestine factions of white-skinned vampires called the Ina. Shori later discovers that she is a product of amalgamated Ina and human blood. This chapter argues that Shori is a tragic mulatto figure in the vein of characters in novels like Iola Leroy, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,Our Nig, and Clotelle but written in the genre of science fiction and fantasy. The novel seems especially concerned with effects of familial and cultural devastation, trauma, miscegenation and xenophobia. While these are primary concerns of the slave narrative, these elements are also reflective of oppressive forces in modern societies that continue to play out master-slave relationships, often in concealed ways.