Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (Pluto Press, 1986), 180.
Hortense J. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (Summer 1987): 80.
For a more complete overview of the stereotype, see David Pilgrim, “The Tragic Mulatto Myth,” Jim Crow Museum, Ferris State University, November 2000 →.
W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches (1903; Johnson Reprint Corp., 1968).
This is also the name of an eponymous series by Adrian Piper, perhaps the most visible contemporary artist who has directly engaged with the epistemological and social effects of racial ambiguity as part of her practice.
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 40.
See Kara Keeling, “‘In the Interval’: Frantz Fanon and the Problem of Visual Representation,” Qui Parle 13, no. 2 (Spring–Summer 2003); and Keeling, The Witch’s Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense (Duke University Press, 2007).
Keeling, “‘In the Interval,’” 103.
Kara Keeling discusses “common sense” in a number of texts. In her 2003 “‘In the Interval’” she notes that certain racist assumptions “have sedimented into various forms of common sense and now also inform counter-hegemonic projects, including those aimed at dismantling racism” (92).
Darby English, How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness (MIT Press, 2010), 43.
Emmanuel Sampath Nelson, The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Multiethnic American Literature: A–C (Greenwood Publishing Group, 2005), 482. Emphasis in the original.
This is a reference to standpoint epistemology, or “standpoint theory,” which I discuss in more detail below.
The text that comes closest is Geetha Ramanathan’s Kathleen Collins: The Black Essai Film (Edinburgh University, 2020), which discusses a reference one of the characters makes to Dorothy Dandridge, a Black actress who was often cast in the role of tragic mulatto. However, Ramanathan’s text does not read the reference through the form of the film, looking only at the literal influence of Dandridge’s work on Collins herself.
In a crucial article on the film, L. H. Stallings notes the “Frankie and Johnny” myth that inspires the student film in which Losing Ground’s main character will be cast, but doesn’t address how the film explicitly codes this story with a tragic mulatto motif in two different scenes of Losing Ground. See Stallings, “‘Redemptive Softness’: Interiority, Intellect, and Black Women’s Ecstasy in Kathleen Collins’s Losing Ground,” in “Beyond Normative: Sexuality and Eroticism in Black Film, Cinema, and Video,” special issue, Black Camera 2, no. 2 (Spring 2011).
Terri Francis, “Whose ‘Black Film’ Is This? The Pragmatics and Pathos of Black Film Scholarship,” Cinema Journal 53, No. 4 (Summer 2014): 147.
David Nicholson quoted in Stallings, “‘Redemptive Softness,’” 52. Original source: David Nicholson, “A Commitment to Writing: A Conversation with Kathleen Collins Prettyman,” Black Film Review 5, no. 1 (Winter 1988–89): 14.
Ramanathan, Kathleen Collins.
Richard Brody, “Lost and Found,” The New Yorker, January 30, 2015 →.
See, for instance, Jourdain Searles, “Kathleen Collins’s Groundbreaking Portrait of Black Womanhood,” Hyperallergic, June 28, 2022 →.
“For sociologist Orlando Patterson, social death describes the experience of slavery as it has appeared across time and space—a slave is not merely an exploited person but someone robbed of his or her personhood. For Wilderson, the state of slavery, for Black people, is permanent: every Black person is always a slave and, therefore, a perpetual corpse, buried beneath the world and stinking it up.” Vinson Cunningham, “The Argument of ‘Afropessimism,’” July 20, 2020, The New Yorker →.
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 110, as quoted in Keeling, “‘In the Interval,’” 95. Whereas both Fanon and Afropessimist thinkers share a sense of the ontological negativity of Blackness, they tell drastically different accounts of it—in one, social death is more or less insuperable, in the other, it is surpassed through anti-colonial resistance.
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 180, 151.
Keeling, Witch’s Flight, 96.
See Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 179–80: “Those who grant our conclusions on the psychosexuality of the white woman may ask what we have to say about the woman of color. I know nothing about her. What I can offer, at the very least, is that for any women in the Antilles—the type that I shall call the all-but-whites—the aggressor is symbolized by the Senegalese type, or in any event by an inferior (who is so considered). The Negro is the genital.”
Despite its absence from Fanon’s account of Black representations in cinema, the imaging of Black women in film was clearly already a live issue at the time of Fanon’s text. Director Ousmane Sembene’s Black Girl came out in 1966, one year before Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks. (In Black Girl, a young Senegalese woman goes to work for a white family in France, only to commit suicide by the end of the film.) As I have suggested above, even if the ultimate, metaphysically crushing defeat in the Hegelian encounter that Fanon traces deranges Black men’s possibility of self-reflexive “ontology,” it does not mean that the social ontology it institutes for whites leaves the Black woman out of the latter’s racist framework. As Black Girl explores, the colonized Black woman is exposed to the racism of colonialism—or, in America, slavery’s legacy—just like her male counterpart, if in different ways. Even if Fanon’s Black man may very well know nothing (or choose to know nothing) about the “woman of color,” the white colonial imaginary nevertheless knows her well.
Also discussed throughout Keeling, Witch’s Flight.
See, for example, Keeling, “‘We’ll Just Have to Get Guns and Be Men,’ The Cinematic Appearance of Revolutionary Black Women,” chap. 4 in Witch’s Flight.
Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” 80. Emphasis in original. Here Spillers also notes: “1) motherhood as a female bloodrite is outraged, is denied, at the very same time that it becomes the founding term of a human and social enactment; 2) a dual fatherhood is set in motion, comprised of the African father’s banished name and body and the captor’s mocking presence. In this play of paradox, only the female stands in the flesh, both mother and mother-dispossessed.”
For an array of positions, see The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader: Intellectual and Political Controversies, ed. Sandra Harding (Routledge, 2004).
Nancy C. M. Hartsock, “The Feminist Standpoint: Developing the Ground for a Specifically Feminist Historical Materialism,” in Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader; Patricia Hill Collins, “Learning from the Outside Within: The Sociological Significance of Black Feminist Thought,” Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader.
Hartsock, “Feminist Standpoint.”
Collins, “Learning from the Outside Within.”
Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, “Fantasy in the Hold,” chap. 6 in The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (Minor Compositions, 2013) →.
Moten and Harney, Undercommons, 52.
Moten and Harney, Undercommons, 47.
Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” 67.
Moten and Harney, Undercommons, 92–93. Emphasis added. They also write: “In those mutations that are always also a regendering or transgendering … lies blackness, lies the black thing that cuts the regulative, governant force of (the) understanding (and even of those understandings of blackness to which black people are given since fugitvityy escapes even the fugitive)” (50). Emphasis added.
Roberto Esposito, Categories of the Impolitical, trans. Connal Parsley (Fordham University Press, 2015).