Chapter 17 - Mixed-Race Autobiographical Narratives

Summary

Streeter’s chapter examines mixed-race life narratives that emerged in significant numbers in the mid-nineteen nineties and continues in the present time. Streeter contends these mixed-race narratives are a publishing trend begun after a distinct cultural turn in the nineteen-nineties, when the first generation of what she names post-Loving children, born just before and after interracial marriage became legal in 1967. The chapter focuses on black and white race mixture because, among the book-length life narratives investigating racially mixed ancestries and articulating mixed identities, most are authored from that perspective. Blackness and mixed-ness are, at the most fundamental level, overlapping discourses of identity in the United States. The fear of and fascination with race mixture between white people and Black people is a distinctly US American cultural trope. The color line – a tool of separation - and the one-drop rule – a deeply ambiguous barometer of Blackness – are contradictory imperatives. Under these circumstances, Streeter contends, dichotomy becomes the repetitive mode appending attempts to pin down intrinsic Blackness as articulated in mixed-race life writing.