Souls of Mixed Folk, by Michelle Elam
review by Brian Bantum
Brian Bantum is an Associate Professor of Theology at Seattle Pacific University. He writes and teaches on the intersections of Christology, anthropology and race as well as art, literature and theological method. His first book, Redeeming Mulatto: A Theology of Race and Christian Hybridity was published in 2010 (Baylor University Press).
Contemporary fascination with mixed-race bodies/identity has dovetailed with conversations about “post-racial” America. Perhaps most well-known was the 1993 Timemagazine cover heralding the “New Face of America” with a composite image of America’s varied races into a somewhat racially ambiguous, light-skinned woman. Twenty years later, National Geographic would also image the “Changing Face of America,” but through a compilation of many images of mixed-race faces. Page after page of brown faces with blue eyes, or Asian faces with afros all served to image the variety of mixed-race identity becoming increasingly prevalent in the United States.
The images of mixed-race men and women, and imaged projections of what a society could look like are not ancillary to the question of race. Race is a visual phenomenon. But if this is the case, how do we begin to account for the growing numbers of self-defining “mixed-race” individuals and the very real racialized inequalities that mark American society so profoundly? Is mixed-race the future? And more importantly, how do mixed-race bodies help us to interpret our current racialized moment?
In her brilliant analysis, Michelle Elam’s The Souls of Mixed Folk: Race, Politics, and Aesthetics offers an important critique of the emerging field of critical mixed-race studies and the consumer niche regarding Black mixed-race identity. But most critically, Elam highlights the critical illusion at the heart of so many mixed-race rhetorics: a post-racial fallacy of de-historicity that is grounded in a “peculiarly late-capitalist consumerist response to the political murkiness of racial difference” (1).
While Elam’s text critiques several contemporary instantiations of mixed-race politics, literature, and consumerism, she deals most with critical interventions that “can take us beyond ‘ordinary seeing’ not only as an invitation to reconsider racial and visual clichés of mixed-race, but as a chance to re-imagine social relations through art,” so that the book “analyzes mixed-race experiments in sightfulness that join aesthetic invention with new forms of social engagement” (26). Elam develops this “sightfulness” through five chapters. The first of which provides an overview of recent emerging fields and trends in mixed-race scholarship and literature, while the remaining chapters focus on constructive interventions.
Elam’s critique of contemporary mixed-race literature and rhetoric is twofold. First, she highlights the inherent “covering” (32) necessary to construct a coherent narrative of mixed-race identity. In so doing, a heteronormative and economically-advantaged ideal markets an image of an ideal mixed-race identity, which renders invisible many stories of mixed-race identity even as it seeks to make mixed-race identity more visible. Secondly, Elam points to the way mixed-race rhetoric often encourages the “tendency to see themselves as representing the breaking wave—rather than in the times” (39). Consequently, mixed-race identity becomes subject to consumerist tendencies (targeted hair-care products, self-esteem products, specialized children’s books), while simultaneously exhibiting what Mireille Rosello calls an “amnesiac creolity” (42). For example, while seeking to reclaim historical literary figures such as Langston Hughes or Nella Larsen as “mixed-race writers,” the amnesia obfuscates the historical space within which those writers created and navigated their voice. Attention to historical contextuality and resistance to the consumerist individualization of personhood form the fundamental terms of evaluation as Elam moves towards constructive evaluations of mixed-race aesthetics and politics.
Two examples of aesthetic interventions are found in the comic strips, Boondocks and Maintaining, which are read as monitoring the current state of race. But more importantly, these “comic strips can help us understand that mixed-race is not a palliative to the ‘race question’ but, instead, a palimpsest of national anxieties and ambitions involving race” (94). This expansion rather than construction of the race question is exemplified in MacGruder’s Boondocks’ mixed-race character, Jazmine, who shifts throughout the strip to ultimately abandon her claim to “racelessness,” while they must still account for her within a spectrum of Black experience. The comic’s immediate nature sees this process unfold our time for the reader, shifting their identifications with them over time.
While comic strips point to an “in-time” intervention of racial codifications, Elam also engages the retrieval and reinterpretation of historical tropes, such as the “passing novel.” Danny Senna’s Caucasia, Philip Roth’s The Human Stain, and Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist, “fit mixed-race literature back into an African American canon” (123). In doing so, “these novels also reinvent racial passing as a literary intervention and cultural commentary precisely because of the way they engage new millennial discourses of mixed-race as historically distinctive” (123). The question of history and contextual connection is a critical aspect of Elam’s critique as well as an essential character to her constructive proposal. Any articulation of a racial identity that attempts to understand itself as disconnected from the historical formations of racial identity only serves to strengthen the hegemony of a racialized American society.
Elam points to aesthetic interventions that refuse such de-historicity and thus thrust the individual, again and again, back to the way their bodies are part of a long history of sight and interpretation. These interpretations are not only about the individual, but become incorporated into society’s self-understandings where modernity is inherently tied to progress and progress becomes understood as a “post-racial” vision. In the face of this conflation of progress, modernity, and post-raciality that so much contemporary mixed-race literature contributes to, Elam suggests that novels, such as Danzy Senna’s Symptomatic and Elizabeth Raboteau’s The Professor’s Daughter, disrupt these narratives as they critique “a social order that would ‘deploy the figure of the racial hybrid as an alibi for a nationalism that reinvents the racial logic it claims to have broken’” (127). Such a disruption becomes a “call to arms” and expresses the “need to move from watching (which leads only to crossed eyes) to action, from spectatorship to participation, from staring to social recognition, especially if it enables the stare to look back” (156-157).
Ultimately, Elam points to the way in which race distorts sight. Insofar as mixed-race politics and aesthetics are centered upon a perceived discomfort in the question “What are you?,” it belies the racialized modes of apprehension that continue to work broader society, even as mixed-race identities so often seek to extricate themselves from such politics. But for Elam, mixed-race bodies still offer a crucial intervention into the mechanics of racialized sight and the instantiations of inequality that these politics of visuality engender. These aesthetic deployments of mixed-race identity push towards a mutual recognition as the political hope of aesthetics. The hope is grounded in an effort to re-orient sight so that determining race is not so much a matter of appearance but one of apprehension, not of visibility but of vision” (161).
The Souls of Mixed Folk concludes with an explication of David Chapelle’s “Racial Draft” and how art ultimately serves to create new ways of seeing.“What perhaps makes this political aesthetics most distinctive is its embrace, even exaltation, of the mutual, processual nature of race and its imbrication in a web of social relations. Importantly, this recognition that racial identity is not of one’s own making does not lead these artists to concede the ‘What are you?’ interaction as the only or the representative example of participatory creation of mixed-races’ meaning” (202). For Elam, the mixed-race body is one that is inextricably caught between processes of assertion and interpretation, where they are simultaneously being located and negotiating this location within broader historical and social patterns of belonging.
The significance of these aesthetic politics lies not in unearthing the deeper historical connections, but by making visible the underlying modulations of race, the invisible calculations, and the rhetoric of belonging or non-belonging that are perpetually manufactured in a society’s daily life. For Elam, the art does not simply reveal these patterns, but makes them known through a disruptive performance of these alternative forms. In this regard, Elam suggests that the power of these aesthetic politics lies not in their effectiveness or aims. “The art is the political change, not the ornamental gloss to it” (202).
The question of race can never be considered apart from the visuality of the body and that visuality as an aesthetic politic. The interventions that are required are not only policies, but artful interventions that unveil the ambiguities and the connections that are so often hidden by rhetoric of post-race that attempt to render what we see benign, while maintaining structural realities that undergird social and economic inequity.
Elam’s analysis is brilliant and a pointed counter to the ways contemporary mixed-race scholarship and media have sought to move towards an individualistic, post-racial, consumerist politics. And in this regard, her work is important not only for students of race and mixed-race, but is a vital resource for scholars of religion, and particularly Christian theologians who are so often inattentive to the visuality of bodies while also invoking art as a propagandizing tool to further particular theological aims. This is especially true in a contemporary moment where the realities of racialized bodies are not a merely academic exercise, but become apparent on a seemingly daily basis. Whether in reports of Black men and women shot by police without hesitation, or furor over dark immigrants “invading” our land, or Muslims being reduced to a violent band of terrorists—Elam helps us to see that these questions are not simply about policies or even education, but about processes of visualization that describe and deploy bodies as signifiers.
As a theologian, I am challenged by Elam’s text to consider how theology can begin to narrate the church historically in ways that resist a “post-racial” illusion of neither “Jew” nor “Gentile,” and rather narrate the complicated intersections that the church, as a living body, has to inevitably navigate. And this process is not simply an intellectual process, but a process of intervening with an aesthetic Word, words made flesh whose appearance distorts and disrupts theology and the church’s temptation to forget that it is a visual people.
This visuality is also a call to consider art as not simply an illustrative endeavor that helps create slick graphics or a more compelling communication. Elam’s analysis displays how artists engage in an aesthetic politics in order to disruptively display and speak what they see. In doing so, the artist’s work is not an act of utility, but an iconic imaging of a moment’s truthfulness. As such, Elam’s text calls theologians to consider their work not simply as explications of dogma or a more accurate re-telling of history. Elam is calling us to, perhaps, a more dangerous methodology, an aesthetic display of truth that must be seen through the form of one’s body and that creates communities who help make the invisible to be seen, ultimately enabling us to apprehend our collective humanity more truthfully.
Brian Bantum is an Associate Professor of Theology at Seattle Pacific University. He writes and teaches on the intersections of Christology, anthropology and race as well as art, literature and theological method. His first book, Redeeming Mulatto: A Theology of Race and Christian Hybridity was published in 2010 (Baylor University Press).
Contemporary fascination with mixed-race bodies/identity has dovetailed with conversations about “post-racial” America. Perhaps most well-known was the 1993 Timemagazine cover heralding the “New Face of America” with a composite image of America’s varied races into a somewhat racially ambiguous, light-skinned woman. Twenty years later, National Geographic would also image the “Changing Face of America,” but through a compilation of many images of mixed-race faces. Page after page of brown faces with blue eyes, or Asian faces with afros all served to image the variety of mixed-race identity becoming increasingly prevalent in the United States.
The images of mixed-race men and women, and imaged projections of what a society could look like are not ancillary to the question of race. Race is a visual phenomenon. But if this is the case, how do we begin to account for the growing numbers of self-defining “mixed-race” individuals and the very real racialized inequalities that mark American society so profoundly? Is mixed-race the future? And more importantly, how do mixed-race bodies help us to interpret our current racialized moment?
In her brilliant analysis, Michelle Elam’s The Souls of Mixed Folk: Race, Politics, and Aesthetics offers an important critique of the emerging field of critical mixed-race studies and the consumer niche regarding Black mixed-race identity. But most critically, Elam highlights the critical illusion at the heart of so many mixed-race rhetorics: a post-racial fallacy of de-historicity that is grounded in a “peculiarly late-capitalist consumerist response to the political murkiness of racial difference” (1).
While Elam’s text critiques several contemporary instantiations of mixed-race politics, literature, and consumerism, she deals most with critical interventions that “can take us beyond ‘ordinary seeing’ not only as an invitation to reconsider racial and visual clichés of mixed-race, but as a chance to re-imagine social relations through art,” so that the book “analyzes mixed-race experiments in sightfulness that join aesthetic invention with new forms of social engagement” (26). Elam develops this “sightfulness” through five chapters. The first of which provides an overview of recent emerging fields and trends in mixed-race scholarship and literature, while the remaining chapters focus on constructive interventions.
Elam’s critique of contemporary mixed-race literature and rhetoric is twofold. First, she highlights the inherent “covering” (32) necessary to construct a coherent narrative of mixed-race identity. In so doing, a heteronormative and economically-advantaged ideal markets an image of an ideal mixed-race identity, which renders invisible many stories of mixed-race identity even as it seeks to make mixed-race identity more visible. Secondly, Elam points to the way mixed-race rhetoric often encourages the “tendency to see themselves as representing the breaking wave—rather than in the times” (39). Consequently, mixed-race identity becomes subject to consumerist tendencies (targeted hair-care products, self-esteem products, specialized children’s books), while simultaneously exhibiting what Mireille Rosello calls an “amnesiac creolity” (42). For example, while seeking to reclaim historical literary figures such as Langston Hughes or Nella Larsen as “mixed-race writers,” the amnesia obfuscates the historical space within which those writers created and navigated their voice. Attention to historical contextuality and resistance to the consumerist individualization of personhood form the fundamental terms of evaluation as Elam moves towards constructive evaluations of mixed-race aesthetics and politics.
Two examples of aesthetic interventions are found in the comic strips, Boondocks and Maintaining, which are read as monitoring the current state of race. But more importantly, these “comic strips can help us understand that mixed-race is not a palliative to the ‘race question’ but, instead, a palimpsest of national anxieties and ambitions involving race” (94). This expansion rather than construction of the race question is exemplified in MacGruder’s Boondocks’ mixed-race character, Jazmine, who shifts throughout the strip to ultimately abandon her claim to “racelessness,” while they must still account for her within a spectrum of Black experience. The comic’s immediate nature sees this process unfold our time for the reader, shifting their identifications with them over time.
While comic strips point to an “in-time” intervention of racial codifications, Elam also engages the retrieval and reinterpretation of historical tropes, such as the “passing novel.” Danny Senna’s Caucasia, Philip Roth’s The Human Stain, and Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist, “fit mixed-race literature back into an African American canon” (123). In doing so, “these novels also reinvent racial passing as a literary intervention and cultural commentary precisely because of the way they engage new millennial discourses of mixed-race as historically distinctive” (123). The question of history and contextual connection is a critical aspect of Elam’s critique as well as an essential character to her constructive proposal. Any articulation of a racial identity that attempts to understand itself as disconnected from the historical formations of racial identity only serves to strengthen the hegemony of a racialized American society.
Elam points to aesthetic interventions that refuse such de-historicity and thus thrust the individual, again and again, back to the way their bodies are part of a long history of sight and interpretation. These interpretations are not only about the individual, but become incorporated into society’s self-understandings where modernity is inherently tied to progress and progress becomes understood as a “post-racial” vision. In the face of this conflation of progress, modernity, and post-raciality that so much contemporary mixed-race literature contributes to, Elam suggests that novels, such as Danzy Senna’s Symptomatic and Elizabeth Raboteau’s The Professor’s Daughter, disrupt these narratives as they critique “a social order that would ‘deploy the figure of the racial hybrid as an alibi for a nationalism that reinvents the racial logic it claims to have broken’” (127). Such a disruption becomes a “call to arms” and expresses the “need to move from watching (which leads only to crossed eyes) to action, from spectatorship to participation, from staring to social recognition, especially if it enables the stare to look back” (156-157).
Ultimately, Elam points to the way in which race distorts sight. Insofar as mixed-race politics and aesthetics are centered upon a perceived discomfort in the question “What are you?,” it belies the racialized modes of apprehension that continue to work broader society, even as mixed-race identities so often seek to extricate themselves from such politics. But for Elam, mixed-race bodies still offer a crucial intervention into the mechanics of racialized sight and the instantiations of inequality that these politics of visuality engender. These aesthetic deployments of mixed-race identity push towards a mutual recognition as the political hope of aesthetics. The hope is grounded in an effort to re-orient sight so that determining race is not so much a matter of appearance but one of apprehension, not of visibility but of vision” (161).
The Souls of Mixed Folk concludes with an explication of David Chapelle’s “Racial Draft” and how art ultimately serves to create new ways of seeing.“What perhaps makes this political aesthetics most distinctive is its embrace, even exaltation, of the mutual, processual nature of race and its imbrication in a web of social relations. Importantly, this recognition that racial identity is not of one’s own making does not lead these artists to concede the ‘What are you?’ interaction as the only or the representative example of participatory creation of mixed-races’ meaning” (202). For Elam, the mixed-race body is one that is inextricably caught between processes of assertion and interpretation, where they are simultaneously being located and negotiating this location within broader historical and social patterns of belonging.
The significance of these aesthetic politics lies not in unearthing the deeper historical connections, but by making visible the underlying modulations of race, the invisible calculations, and the rhetoric of belonging or non-belonging that are perpetually manufactured in a society’s daily life. For Elam, the art does not simply reveal these patterns, but makes them known through a disruptive performance of these alternative forms. In this regard, Elam suggests that the power of these aesthetic politics lies not in their effectiveness or aims. “The art is the political change, not the ornamental gloss to it” (202).
The question of race can never be considered apart from the visuality of the body and that visuality as an aesthetic politic. The interventions that are required are not only policies, but artful interventions that unveil the ambiguities and the connections that are so often hidden by rhetoric of post-race that attempt to render what we see benign, while maintaining structural realities that undergird social and economic inequity.
Elam’s analysis is brilliant and a pointed counter to the ways contemporary mixed-race scholarship and media have sought to move towards an individualistic, post-racial, consumerist politics. And in this regard, her work is important not only for students of race and mixed-race, but is a vital resource for scholars of religion, and particularly Christian theologians who are so often inattentive to the visuality of bodies while also invoking art as a propagandizing tool to further particular theological aims. This is especially true in a contemporary moment where the realities of racialized bodies are not a merely academic exercise, but become apparent on a seemingly daily basis. Whether in reports of Black men and women shot by police without hesitation, or furor over dark immigrants “invading” our land, or Muslims being reduced to a violent band of terrorists—Elam helps us to see that these questions are not simply about policies or even education, but about processes of visualization that describe and deploy bodies as signifiers.
As a theologian, I am challenged by Elam’s text to consider how theology can begin to narrate the church historically in ways that resist a “post-racial” illusion of neither “Jew” nor “Gentile,” and rather narrate the complicated intersections that the church, as a living body, has to inevitably navigate. And this process is not simply an intellectual process, but a process of intervening with an aesthetic Word, words made flesh whose appearance distorts and disrupts theology and the church’s temptation to forget that it is a visual people.
This visuality is also a call to consider art as not simply an illustrative endeavor that helps create slick graphics or a more compelling communication. Elam’s analysis displays how artists engage in an aesthetic politics in order to disruptively display and speak what they see. In doing so, the artist’s work is not an act of utility, but an iconic imaging of a moment’s truthfulness. As such, Elam’s text calls theologians to consider their work not simply as explications of dogma or a more accurate re-telling of history. Elam is calling us to, perhaps, a more dangerous methodology, an aesthetic display of truth that must be seen through the form of one’s body and that creates communities who help make the invisible to be seen, ultimately enabling us to apprehend our collective humanity more truthfully.
