The Souls of Mixed Folk: Race, Politics, and Aesthetics in the New Millennium by Michele Elam (review)

With the establishment of critical mixed-race studies as a recognized academic field (with a new journal and biennial national conference to boot), Michele Elam’s The Souls of Mixed Folk: Race, Politics, and Aesthetics in the New Millennium is a well-timed and essential contribution to literary and mixed-race studies. Elam skillfully examines how mixed race is imagined and invoked in a number of literary, artistic, and popular cultural expressions and media, including academia, fiction, comic strips, comedy, and drama. As television viewers’ reactions demonstrated after the airing of the Cheerios ad featuring an interracial couple and mixed-race child, topics related to “mixed race” (and, pejoratively, “race mixing”) continue to incite discussion, debate, and dispute. Elam’s text astutely outlines, describes, and tackles these issues, leaving no stones unturned.

In her introduction, she seeks to demythologize mixed race as a new or recent phenomenon. Elam stresses that there is nothing new about mixed race; rather what is new is how mixed race gets problematically framed, marketed, and celebrated, post-civil rights. She notes that the mixed-race movement in campaigning for “mixed race rights” has coincided with our national tenet of individualism. In her words, “mixed race people appear to reconcile that American contradiction of e pluribus unum [one out of many]” (9). Elam critiques the mixed-race movement’s championing a separate classification for mixed race (most notably on the census) as a so-called exercise of free choice. She argues that the “post-soul” writers and artists whose work she examines counter such efforts and directly or indirectly pay homage to earlier twentieth-century discussions of mixed race by W E. B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, and Fran Ross. Although “post-soul” is a contested term, Elam finds it fitting for many of texts she studies that, in Bertram Ashe’s words, “trouble blackness.”

Elam’s goal in chapter one, “The Mis-education of Mixed Race,” is to think more critically about mixed race and its institutionalization, particularly in academia. Some of these efforts emphasizing biraciality, such as toys, dolls, and books are innocent; others are dangerous—for example, “the revisioning of literary history, and in turn, the surveys and period courses usually based on it” (42). African American literature has been especially threatened by and co-opted, wherein African American mixed-race authors, taken out of historical context, are called biracial or multiracial, labels which Elam views as “at risk at times of overstating these works’ distinctiveness and the post-race promises they might hold” (44). She begins by discussing the covers of anthologies that she asserts offer a narrow visual image of mixed race, despite the variety of people featured on the covers. As she explains, the covers presume heterosexuality and “normative models of mixed race” (33). Elam’s own book cover, which features a photograph of Lezley Saar’s “Baby Halfie Brown Head,” an androgynous plastic doll with a black head and white body, does the opposite by presenting a confusing and aberrant artistic rendering of mixed race. The cover of The Souls of Mixed Folk thus engenders more questions than answers, and “provides a vivid example of the alternative progressive directions for mixed-race art and activism in the post-civil rights era that are at the center of this book” (3).

Chapter two, “The ‘Ethni-Ambiguo Hostility Syndrome’ of the ‘Halfrican American’: Mixed Race in Aaron McGruder’s The Boondocks and Nate Creekmore’s Maintaining” joins an ever-growing body of criticism that importantly focuses on black comics and graphic novels. Her juxtaposition of the two comic strips counters assumptions that these comics offer opposing portrayals of the mixed-race experience and blackness. The Boondocks has received extensive criticism for its depiction of Jazmine Dubois, a mixed-race friend of main character Huey, while Maintaining has been celebrated for its “authentic” representation of mixed-race teenagers and the issues they face. Emphasizing...