Representing Mixed Race in Jamaica and England from the Abolition Era to the Present (review)

In Representing Mixed Race, Sara Salih approaches her topic, as she puts it, by "working against the contemporary academic grain, which has frequently sought to uncover and examine affect, interiority, the psychic operations of racial identity, whether of the oppressor or the oppressed" (3). Instead, she grounds her cultural critique in specific statutory laws and the sort of overt and covert references to them found in British colonial and postcolonial texts, beginning with what she calls "subject-constituting" legal and non-legal (eighteenth-century) discourses from Britain's Caribbean colonies. Salih's approach, which enables her to situate her discussion of mixed-race characters in relation to the jurisprudential (human and civil rights) discourses of their day, handily suggests ways to apply her methods to other artworks from other places and different times. Her discussion of the evolving presentation of the mixed-race subject is greatly enriched by her frequent reference to present-day theorists and cultural critics, among them Giorgio Agamben, Hannah Arendt, E. K. Brathwaite, Pierre Bourdieu, Judith Butler, Jacques Derrida, Lee Edelman, Michel Foucault, Paul Gilroy, Orlando Patterson, and Ann Pellegrini.

In her historico-theoretical introductory chapter (subtitled "The Mulatto in Law and Literature"), Salih presents in considerable detail the background information, legal documents, critical theory, and research questions conditioning her analysis of the study's focal literary and cinematic texts. The chapters that follow engage in nuanced analyses of A Woman of Colour (Anonymous 1808), Marly: Or, a Planter's Life in Jamaica (Anonymous 1828), Dinah Craik's Olive (1850), Richard Hill's The Lights and Shadows of Jamaican History (1859), a range of writings by and about Mary Seacole (1805-1881), Wilkie Collins's Armadale (1866), and two twentieth-century films, Mona Lisa (1985) and The Crying Game (1992). This wide array of legal and literary texts is not so sprawling as at first it may appear, for Salih proposes in this volume to illustrate coherently "the processes of normalization and the consolidation of norms" regarding the legal status, "nature," and "character" of persons of mixed race—and to do so over three centuries' worth of historical and cultural changes.

Accordingly, her project requires that her focal texts align themselves not so much with each other as with the shifting contextual discourses dominant from era to era. Her first chapters, for example, examine the impact of slavery-era laws on colonial fiction about "tragic mulattos." Later, she treats the influence of abolition and Darwin (among others) upon prevailing nineteenth-century discourses on racial evolution and degeneracy as these relate to fictionalized treatments of mixed-race characters. Finally, she shows how—in later fiction and twentieth-century film—same-sex taboos condition popular images of mixed-race figures in sexual relationships with whites.

In the eighteenth century, as Salih makes rigorous efforts to document with crucial but little-known archival evidence, the social standing of mulattos in the Caribbean became legally problematic in ways determined by their visibly mixed bloodlines and by precedent-setting, but often contradictory, legal rulings on the personhood (as opposed to chattel status) and property rights of mixed-race offspring of land-owning white citizens. Salih's sophisticated discussion of Marly and A Woman of Colour is contextualized not only by the historical and legal factors implicit in their specific storylines and jurisprudential systems and times, but also by recent theoretical and scholarly analyses of discursive violence visited upon slaves and their descendants by laws that pressured mixed-race persons "as a collective to redefine themselves according to the existing terms of the law, rather than refusing and rejecting these terms altogether" (21, emphasis in original). Salih argues that "their appeals for legal redress were made on an individual basis: at this time they were not advocating for the legal rights of free people of colour in general, nor were they necessarily campaigning for the abolition of the slave trade" (83).

In the chapter...