Narratives of Blood

In recent years, American studies scholarship has increasingly come to conceptualize racial, gendered, and national identities as a dynamic process of negotiation rather than as an immutable essence. Theorists such as Homi Bhabha and Gloria Anzaldúa have demonstrated the permeability of linguistic, racial, gendered, class, and, indeed, territorial boundaries and borders, and have shown conclusively how we all juggle multiple identities in our everyday lives. Outside the academy, however, attitudes toward racial and gendered identities in the United States have labored until very recently under the (often surreal) classificatory constraints of nineteenth-century positivist science. This fact was brought home to me two years ago when I attended a high school reunion in the tiny village of Roanoke, Louisiana. During my childhood years, in the days of racial segregation, the town was divided racially by the railroad tracks, with African Americans living on one side (called The Quarters) and whites (mostly Anglo-American and Cajun) on the other. The two races were viewed as living in hermetically sealed compartments, and the idea of social or intellectual exchange between them was viewed as unthinkable. This notion of hermetic separation between the races is, of course, a fiction; the South (and indeed the country as a whole) has until very recently invested considerable emotional energy in denying the very obvious reality of interracial relationships. When, after several decades in Europe, I encountered my high school classmates again for the first time in years, scales fell from my own eyes. For the very first time I saw clearly in their features (and in my own) the blending of the diverse races and histories that had brought us all to this village in the heart of the Louisiana rice fields.

For many reasons, recent scholarship on interracial writing and on re-definitions of identity linked to gender and sexual orientation is one of the most exciting areas in American literary and cultural studies today. Several groundbreaking studies have been published, such as Werner Sollors's Neither Black nor White yet Both: Thematic Explorations of Interracial Literature, which focuses on heterosexual African/American white relationships, Elise Lemire's "Miscegenation": Making Race in America, and Joshua David Bellin's The Demon of the Continent: Indians and the Shaping of American Literature. For the most part, these studies have the very great virtue of viewing racial and/or gendered identities in fluid terms rather than in antiquated either-or binary classifications. These are joined by two recent monographs that are eloquent and provocative contributions to this burgeoning area of study.

Betsy Erkkila's elegantly written and tightly argued Mixed Bloods and Other Crosses: Rethinking American Literature from the Revolution to the Culture Wars begins by citing the Oxford English Dictionary's definition of "cross," both as noun and as verb. To wit:

Cross, n. 1. The instrument of crucifixion: the particular wooden structure on which Jesus Christ suffered death; a market-place, market; the Christian religion, especially when opposed to other religions. 2. A trial or affliction. 3. A trouble, annoyance; misfortune, adversity; sometimes anything that thwarts or crosses. 4. The point where two lines or paths cross each other; a crossing, cross-way. 5. An intermixture of breeds or races in the production of an animal; an instance of cross-fertilization in plants; an animal or plant, or a breed or race, due to crossing. 6. An instance of the mixture of the characteristics of two different individuals; something intermediate in character between two things. 7. A contest or match lost by collusory arrangement between the principals.

Cross, v. 1. To crucify. 2. To lay (a thing) across or athwart another; to set (things) across each other; to place crosswise. 3. To lie or pass across; to intersect. 4. To pass over a line, boundary, river, channel, etc.; to pass from one side to the other...