Who's Your Mama?: "White" Mulatta Genealogies, Early Photography, and Anti-Passing Narratives of Slavery and Freedom

Partus sequitur ventrem.
The child follows the condition of the mother.

US slave law and custom

If we shift from a politics of substance to a politics of optics, identity itself no longer possesses the reassuring signs of ontological distinction that we are accustomed to reading.

Amy Robinson

The right to see and be seen, in one's own way and under one's own terms, has been the point of contention.

Laura Wexler

1. Passing For or Passing Through?

"Passing" for white, and the representational strategies some phenotypically indeterminate African-American women used to claim privileges granted to whites, name phenomena as different as night and day. Examination of the assumptions about racial aspirations that occupy the space between the two illuminates how paradigms that trump expressed and expressive black female will and agency circulate both in the nineteenth century and in current literary criticism. Mulatto/a-ness as a representational trope often designates a discursive mobility and simultaneity that can raise questions of racial epistemology, while it also functions as a juridical term that constrains citizenship by ante- and postbellum law and force. The women I examine in this essay use their own bodies to challenge such constraints by expressing a desire, not for whiteness, but for familial and juridical relations in which partus sequitur ventrem produces freedom rather than enslavement for African Americans, light and dark.

Many contemporary scholars, however, deploy "white mulatto/a genealogies," a term I use not to describe the lighter shades of a politically determined African-American racial classification but to highlight an overemphasis on patrilineal descent and an identification with and projection of white desire that continually revisits the paternal and the patriarchal, the phallic and juridical Law of the (white) Father. Russ Castronovo exemplifies such configurations in Fathering the Nation: American Genealogies of Slavery and Freedom (1995) when he asserts "texts by ex-slaves prohibit the restoration of any genealogical line, suggesting that only in the discontinuity and disorder of bastard histories does remembering properly construct freedom" (193); he goes on to assert that "the slave's genealogy-both as personal history and as national critique— . . . recontextualizes freedom from plenitude and promise to a narrative of lack and deferral" (200). Others, like Lauren Berlant, offer considerations of undifferentiated "mulatta genealogies" that examine racial mixtures in unspecified and unsituated ways. Eric Sundquist's important To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature (1993) enacts a more explicit erasure of black female agency by offering a (masculinist) nationalist paradigm that enacts and encourages readings of race in the nineteenth century as if women did not have a voice. ¹

One might class these critical interventions with the misnamings Hortense Spillers has outlined in "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe" both as historical reflections and contemporary evocations of "the provisions of patriarchy, here exacerbated by the preponderant powers of an enslaving class [which] declare[s] Mother Right, by definition, a negating feature of human community" (80). ² Most readers of African-American literary traditions, and certainly those familiar with the historically contextualized work of scholars like Barbara Christian, Ann duCille, Frances Smith Foster, and Carla Peterson, recognize that while light-skinned protagonists dominate the literary work of African-American women until well into the twentieth century, white mulatta genealogies nonetheless ignore the recognizable contours of a significant African-American familial politics in slavery and its representation. ³ Moreover, any cursory glance at black female texts penned in the nineteenth century reveals that despite their differences, Harriet Jacobs, Ellen Craft, Harriet Wilson, Lucy Delaney, and Louisa Picquet, as well as Frances E. W. Harper's and Pauline Hopkins's most famous protagonists, all work to steal away African-American agency by recovering black female motive will and active desire as well as by recuperating an economically, legally viable...