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  • From Quarantine to Mainstream:The Literary and Historical Journey of American Mixed-Race Heroines
  • Beverly Tomek (bio)
THE STRANGE HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN QUADROON: Free Women of Color in the Revolutionary Atlantic World. By Emily Clark. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2013.
THE ROMANCE OF RACE: Incest, Miscegenation, and Multiculturalism in the United States, 1880–1930. By Jolie A. Sheffer. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. 2013.

Racial “color lines” in the United States and the plight of those who have dared to cross them have long fascinated historians, sociologists, psychologists, novelists, and playwrights alike. In the nation’s early years, especially from the period of the Haitian Revolution to the American Civil War, the specter of “racial mixing” threatened the social and political structures in a nation built upon race-based slavery. As abolitionists cried out against slavery, they were met with a fierce resistance. They were accused of supporting “amalgamation,” a term that was used as a rallying cry against emancipation. For anti-abolitionists, black freedom would too [End Page 43] likely lead to a nation of racial hybrids. Abolitionists responded by pointing out that most of the racial mixing in the nation resulted from the power white men held over enslaved black women on southern plantations, but even many white opponents of slavery admitted to discomfort with the notion of too much intimate contact with African Americans.

During the Civil War, those who opposed black freedom coined the term “miscegenation” and used it to play on existing fears and stir others, in both the North and the South, to resist any new social order based on social equality, claiming that in such conditions blacks and whites would mix freely. This message was loud and clear, and so was the response. The post–Civil War years saw the emergence of Jim Crow segregation and the use of brutal tactics such as lynching to ensure the maintenance of white racial purity. Legal and extra-legal means sought to prevent people from crossing the carefully constructed and rigidly maintained racial divide in the U.S. well into the twentieth century. Whether “amalgamation” or “miscegenation,” mixing would not be tolerated in mainstream culture. At the same time, however, Americans remained in many ways fascinated with this taboo subject. What of those who dared to cross the lines, or of those born of such unions? 1

In recent years, scholars of American Studies have begun to examine in depth the history of, and reaction to, love across racial and ethnic lines in the U.S. 2 Two new works in this field, Emily Clark’s The Strange History of the American Quadroon: Free Women of Color in the Revolutionary Atlantic World and Jolie A. Sheffer’s The Romance of Race: Incest, Miscegenation, and Multiculturalism in the United States, 1880–1930, collectively illustrate the unique and challenging position of those born of such unions. Focused primarily on history but also incorporating literature, Clark creates a case study to explain the historical origins of New Orleans’ reputation as the exotic home of the almost mythical American “quadroon,” often portrayed as the “tragic mulatto.” Clark’s work highlights the “otherness” of the legendary quadroon and the process that left her “colonized” in that city to show how the tragic mulatto became a prominent but very much misunderstood figure in the cultural imagination. Sheffer employs history but relies primarily on literary technique to examine works in the literary genre of “racial romance” as she brings the topic into a later period and shows how mixed-race writers at the turn of the twentieth century built on tales such as that of the tragic mulatto to call for a more inclusive multicultural American society. She explains how writers with firsthand familiarity of that special space between races appropriated the image for their own ends as they tried to open the door for acceptance and equality. While Clark argues that the writers of popular fiction and travel stories helped cordon off the mulatto, Sheffer shows how some tried to set this figure free.

During the course of the nineteenth century, the quadroon became a stock image of New Orleans’ culture, with travel narratives describing the women...

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