Eve
Raimon, Ph.D., associate professor of arts and humanities
at the University of Southern Maine’s Lewiston Auburn
College, has written a book on the subject of interracialism.
In The "Tragic Mulatta" Revisited: Race
and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Antislavery Fiction, published by Rutgers
University Press, Raimon focuses on the mixed-race female
slave in literature, arguing that this figure became a symbolic
vehicle for explorations of race and nation-both of which
were in crisis in the mid-nineteenth century. At this time,
judicial, statutory, social, and scientific debates about
the meaning of racial difference (and intermixture) coincided
with disputes over frontier expansion, which were not only
about land acquisition but also about the "complexion" of
that frontier. Embodying both northern and southern ideologies,
the "amalgamated" mulatta, the author argues, can
be viewed as quintessentially American, a precursor to contemporary
motifs of "hybrid" and "mestizo" identities.
"For years I've been fascinated by the controversy
surrounding this important and recurring character in stories
and novels advocating the abolition of slavery,” notes
Raimon. “In this book, I look at the mixed-race female
slave as perhaps not so tragic, but rather as a figure that
both black and white writers used to work through the realities
of racial intermixture in a nation still shaping its own
racial and national identity."
Where others have focused on the gendered and racially abject
position of the "tragic mulatta," Raimon reconsiders
texts by such central antislavery writers as Lydia Maria
Child, William Wells Brown, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Harriet
Wilson to suggest that the figure is more usefully examined
as a way of understanding the volatile and shifting interface
of race and national identity in the antebellum period.
Eve
Raimon, Ph.D., associate professor of arts and humanities
at the University of Southern Maine’s Lewiston Auburn
College, has written a book on the subject of interracialism.
