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Epilogue h The mulatta/mestiza has held the attention of American media for more than a century. Her influence is significant enough to unleash a tremendous body of representations on the popular, the literary, the governmental , and the academic fronts, as all try to claim her with their rhetoric and their ideals. Perhaps this loud (and often racist or misogynist) rhetoric is designed to eclipse her own voice, to protect the myths of U.S. racial history. Even if she is not directly listened to—as the dominant culture mediates her voice and her image—she has exerted symbolic agency over the terms of American race ideology. Indeed, she is more than an object of study, the focus of an anxious American gaze. While there is a contradiction inherent in the simultaneous disempowerment of and obsession with mulattas and mestizas, there is no question that mixed-race women have been central to the formation of American identity. And this centrality decenters whiteness in America and exposes the violations on which American racialization rests. So, in keeping with the tensions and dualities that abound in this book, I end on a note of simultaneous celebration and caution. It is important to keep in mind the ways in which celebrations of mixture sometimes mask reactionary attempts to contain race within the terms of white supremacy. At the same time, the literature I analyze in this book testifies to the ways in which mulattas and mestizas escape these violent containments. Writers such as Danzy Senna and Cristina García, or even William Wells Brown and Pauline Hopkins, imagine characters who continually redefine their race in resistance to external incursions. Their multiple and fluid identifications enable powerful stories of survival. This conclusion is not utopian or dystopian, harmonious or tragic. Either adjective alone would [211] 212 Epilogue be ahistorical, unrealistic, and overly simplistic. I want readers to depart with a sense of the empowering ways that mixture can (and often does) rede fine identity, even though racial fluidity has always occurred in the face of violent resistance. What remains is that which exceeds official containment , that which survives rape and tragedy: the excess writing in the margins of census forms, the personal narratives on the lines marked “other,” and the friction between conflicting perceptions of mixed identities. ...

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