Black Biracial Crossings: Mixed-Race Identity in Modern American Literature and Culture

165 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2004.My project seeks to broaden and reassess how "black" and "white" are defined by investigating how literature, history, and culture inform changing identity politics. My dissertation argues that America's obsession with mixed race, traced through representations, imaginings and theorization of mulattos or black/white mixed race people, intimates a secret longing for less confining racial scripts. Nella Larsen's Quicksand, Michelle Cliff's Abeng, Danzy Senna's Caucasia, James McBride's The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother, and Rebecca Walker's Black, White and Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self along with popular culture figures including Halle Berry, Vin Diesel, Mariah Carey, and Derek Jeter demonstrate how biracial representations redefine both "blackness" and "whiteness" by claiming multiple race identities. I submit that these representations offer an alternative to asserting a biracial subjectivity disengaged from blackness, what I am calling a "b(l)iracial" identity that underscores how racial politics pervade but do not completely dictate racial identification.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD