The Elusive Everyday in the Fiction of Marilynne Robinson

Framing Robinson’s fiction within the dynamics of everyday life, this study highlights the tensions of form and content that haunt moments of transcendence in her work. Robinson’s novels, it argues, construct a world that is mimetic as well as symbolic and revelatory. Although the heightened apprehension of the quotidian in Robinson’s novels often registers powerfully and beautifully in representational terms, its aesthetic intensity is enacted at the expense of characters who patrol the margins of the ordinary with unceasing vigilance. Inhabiting the everyday self-consciously, her protagonists perform a forced relationship to the ordinary that seldom relaxes into the natural or the familiar; scarred by grief, illness, aging, and trauma, they inhabit a world of transcendent beauty suffused with the terrifying threat of loss. The signature acts of transfiguration that punctuate Robinson’s narratives originate from and anticipate the inevitability of absence: the death of loved ones (Housekeeping), the impending death of the self (Gilead), the fracture of family (Home), the repetition of trauma and abandonment (Lila), and the prohibition of everyday intimacy in interracial romance (Jack). Highlighting the tensions of the uncomfortable ordinary that disrupt a trajectory of transcendence in her fiction, this book situates Robinson’s novels within sociological, psychological, and phenomenological studies of trauma, grief, aging, race, and gender, as well as narrative theory and everyday life studies. Focusing on the experiential dynamics of the lived worlds her novels invoke, The Elusive Everyday argues for the complexity, relevance, and contemporaneity of Robinson’s fiction.

It Is Your Decision to Date Interracially: The Influence of Family Approval on the Likelihood of Interracial/Interethnic Dating

Although attitudes toward interracial romantic relationships (IRRs) have generally improved over the years, many Americans still disapprove of their family members being in IRRs. Prior studies have examined correlates of individual-level attitudes about interracial romance, but less is known about whether family members’ attitudes are directly associated with young people’s decisions to date interracially. Using data collected from 790 romantically involved college students at two large public four-year universities, we find that young adults who believe their siblings, parents, and grandparents approve of IRRs have greater odds of dating interracially. Compared to Whites, Blacks and Hispanics are more likely to be interracially involved but their decision to do so is much less dependent on the approval of their parents and grandparents. We also find young adults are more likely to date interracially if they have five or more relatives with IRR experience themselves. The findings and their implications are discussed.

Afterlives of colonialism: Nostalgia, reader’s response and the case of Noel Barber’s Tanamera

Noel Barber’s Tanamera plots the story of Singapore during World War II as an adventure and interracial romance. Published in 1981, Tanamera enjoyed immense popularity along with other colonial romances that circulated at the time. This article explores readers’ continuing fascination with the genre of colonial romance. Read in light of the postcolonial theory, the study turns to the way the reading public outside academia responds to the colonial imaginary and the extent to which it shapes the collective memory of the empire. The article focuses on Tanamera as a case study for its representations of history and memory of colonialism.

Postcolonial Cacophonies

This chapter argues that Malaysian f ilmmaker Yasmin Ahmad, a prominent cultural voice on racial politics, presents a fresh model of postcolonial poetics. Through interracial romance melodramas set in globalized milieus, she stages interethnic squabbles between speakers of different languages. Ahmad deemphasizes linguistic meaning in favor of purely acoustic pleasures. The soundscape harbors a local aesthetic that transcends the hybridity paradigm associated with postcolonial culture. Ahmad’s predilection for highlighting characters who speak ethnically incongruent languages, furthers a cinematic experience that is aural, spatially marginalized, yet seductively immersive. Jean-Luc Nancy’s concepts of “ecouter” and “resonance” inform these readings, while his eponymous writing vis-à-vis globalization circumscribe a phenomenology that speaks to Malaysia’s postcolonial-global duality and geopolitical “sense of the world.”

Disgust Toward Interracial Couples: Mixed Feelings About Black–White Race Mixing

Three studies further explored Skinner and Hudac's (2017) hypothesis that interracial couples elicit disgust. Using verbal and face emotion measures (Study 1), some participants reported more disgust toward interracial couples than same-race White and Black couples. In Study 2, only people higher in disgust sensitivity tended to “guess” that rapidly presented images of interracial (vs. White) couples were disgusting. Study 3 used a novel image classification paradigm that presented couples side-by-side with neutral or disgusting images. Participants took longer to decide whether target images were disgusting only when interracial (vs. White) couples appeared next to neutral images. Greater sexual disgust heightened this difference. Mixed evidence suggesting an association of disgust with Black couples also emerged in Studies 2 and 3. Thus, the disgust–interracial romance association may only emerge under certain conditions, and the current research offers limited support for the hypothesis that disgust response is exclusively linked to interracial unions.

Marrying Black

This chapter offers a close reading of black/white interracial romance in Sandra Kitt's The Color of Love (1995) and Eric Jerome Dickey's Milk in My Coffee (1998) alongside Michael Jackson's 1991 song "Black or White" and Me'Shell NdegeOcello's 1993 ballad "Soul on Ice." This chapter uncovers how black/white interracial romance is proffered as a postracial antidote to white supremacy and antiblack racism.

Screenings

FQ Columnist Paul Julian Smith reports from Mexico on Netflix's redo of the traditional telenovela with its new series, La casa de las flores (House of Flowers). Smith argues that the series is not as innovative or trangressive as it claims to be and in fact, was preceded in many aspects by the cult Mexican independent series Mirada de mujer (A Woman's Look) in the late 1990s. Both series feature a grumpy patriarch, a dissatisfied mother and wife who embarks on an affair (with a much younger man, in the case of Mirada de mujer), and three confused grown children, and both explore taboo topics such as AIDS, abortion, and interracial romance. Smith questions whether the U.S. newcomer, with its glossy production values, will prove to be as enduring as its homegrown predecessor.

A Robust Bias Against Interracial Couples Among White and Black Respondents, Relative to Multiracial Respondents

Interracial couples are an understudied but increasingly common social group in the U.S. We used direct and indirect measures to examine implicit and explicit biases (respectively) against interracial couples among samples of: (a) predominantly White (non-Black; n=1,217), (b) Black (n=293), and (c) Multiracial (n=284) respondents recruited from the U.S. Results provide evidence of implicit and explicit bias against Black-White interracial couples among respondents in the predominantly White Sample and the Black Sample. There was no evidence of such biases among self-identified Multiracial respondents, in fact, they self-reported favoritism for interracial couples. Consistent with psychological theory and our preregistered hypotheses, we found that personal experience with interracial romance and self-reported contact with interracial couples tended to predict lower levels of bias against interracial couples. This research exposes a robust bias against a growing social group (interracial couples) among predominantly White respondents and Black respondents relative to respondents who identify as Multiracial.