Pinder- Biraciality

The increasingly blurry lines of multicultural and racial relations presents an interesting and unsure future for American standards of race, but also the world.

Despite a perceived improvement in the racial relations in America, there are complications on how this should be achieved. The idea that all races will eventually mix and blend together remains controversial. Mainly because despite there being significant ace-blending, the social issues of the country remain the same. Historical examples of miscenegation provide a glimpse of the future; however, each of the stories has their own significant complications and political implications.

Waegner-

The complex relationhip between African-American and Asians has led to a hybridity of cultures blending to be reproduced in film, music, and art. 

Pinder: In “Biraciality and Nationhood in Contemporary American Art” Kymberly Pinder examines how contemporary artists question the notions of biraciality through reflecting their own multicultural realities, whereas mainstream and national media does not seek to complicate and understand biraciality in this manner.

Pinder introduces the work Jamaican-American artist, Lorraine O’Grady, who is in fact a Wellesley alumna, Class of 1955. Pinder specifically references the piece The Clearing: or Cortez and La Malinche, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, N. and Me, which is a dynamic and troubling diptych, which in my mind serves to contextualize the entirety of Pinder’s article. On the left of this photo collage of sorts, there is a naked couple, a black woman and white man, who are intimate and floating in the sky above the trees. There are two children running in the meadow below them are two children, who are most likely their offspring and a pile of clothes with a handgun on top of them. The right side is drastically different than the themes of love and family on the right. On this side of the image there is a similar couple as on the right side, a black woman and a white man, however this interaction is not mutual. The man’s head has become a skeleton and is touching the woman’s breast. She however is not enjoying it, as her face is looking towards the side, turned away. Thus, O’Grady reinforces the contemporary vision of two extremes that define the notion of interracial relationships including pleasure and exploitation as Pinder explains

Lorraine O’Grady,  The Clearing: or Cortez and La Malinche, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, N. and Me (1991)

The concept of biraciality in art, has in fact been a topic of lectures thus for in this course. For instance the title of O’Grady’s The Clearing, recalls the work of Santa Barraza, a Chicana artist whose work was show in Professor Irene Mata’s lecture. Specifically, the oil painting La Malinche (1991), which depicts the “mistress” of Hernan Cortes, who is responsible for the Spanish conquest of Mexico. She is often depicted and memorialized as traitor who was Cortes’ translator and also the mother of his son, who would become the first mixed race person in Mexico. Pinder also describes how other exploitative relationships mentioned in O’Grady’s title such as Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, one of his slaves who was indeed mixed race, who Jefferson was in love with by “still owned her until his death. Finally, O’Grady references her own relationship with N. who is unknown to us which engages her personal experience possibly marrying someone of a different race and as a Jamaican of mixed heritage.

Santa C. Barraza, La Malinche (1991)

Similar to her discussion of multi-racial relationships and women of color, Pinder engages in understanding what it means to be biracial, specifically in the United States. Closely connected to the mothers who may or may not be biracial, the children involved are significant to consider when thinking about the importance or not of biraciality. This concept is at the fore, in Afro-Cuban artist Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons’, La Sagrada Familia or The Holy Family (2000), a triptych, featuring three photographs of her husband who is white and son. This piece serves to highlight a more harmonious vision of biracial identities through the love of father and son that Campos-Pons’ captures. Though, the artists’ son does look bewildered the subject draw upon the connection between father and son, though we cannot see the father’s face.

Pinder’s article truly helps in gaining a further understanding of biraciality through art. That is because in art, we are able to see the complexities and inner turmoil from these obstacles as we see them in real life. The pieces discussed specifically, Lorraine O’Grady’s The Clearing, as well as Adrian Piper’s Vanilla Nightmares Series (1986) and the work of New Negro Movement artist, Archibald Motley, serve to achieve these ends.  In the conclusion of the article, Pinder wonders whether multiethnic people will create national ethnic harmony. I have trouble understanding this. Perhaps she is implying that people of color will likely be in the majority in 2050? I also question why Pinder chose not to discuss the social constructions of race, which lead to issues for biracial peoples such as the one-drop rule in the United States, which said that people with any “drop” of black blood in them was indeed black.

Sentences:

Pinder: Pinder focuses on the duality of representations of multiraciality and their sociopoltical currency in popular culture.

Waegner: Waegner calls the trend of yellowface/blackface impersonation a performative playful passing instead of cultural appropriation.

Response:

In Pinder’s article, Lorraine O’Grady addressed biraciality by stating the ‘mixed product’ will not only negate the idea of purity but also the idea of superiority, commentating on the perceived dualism and hierarchy in multiracial people. However, this amount of responsibility and consumer status given to multiracial people is problematic. For example, the article states there is a growing trend of multiraciality as superior and a ‘perfect hybrid’, blending together the so called Melting Pot. This status as the ‘Universal Child’, given to Tiger Woods due to his African, European and Asian descent negates the individualist cultural and heritage that the multiracial people have, by ‘melting’ them together into a elite hybrid resembling all the parts of the globe. Thus, how is “mixing to be a great strength of multiethnic people”? (394) By assimilating a multitude of cultures and backgrounds so that no racial and cultural tensions become absorbed in this union and birth of a multiracial child? By generating the power given to white privilege and the complexity of cross racial unions so that the “color of the skin makes you think I [can] be lucky”? (395). I have a problem with authors stating multiraciality is now superior because it’s still another form of eugenics and designing human biology for a desired outcome and product. I think O’Grady highlights this problem of assigning values to people based on race in her The Clearing series, juxtaposing unions of multiracial people and historical names, broadening the viewer’s sense of the consequences and appropriation that has come out of these unions.

Lorraine O’Grady Photo credit David Velasco Lorraine O’Grady The Clearing: or Cortez and La Malinche, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, N. and Me, 1991;