During the 1960s, while the focus of many activists for social change was on equality and racial justice, some of us asked a very important two-word question: “Equally what?” Equally materialistic and consumptive? Equally ruthless, dishonest and unethical in business? Equally corrupt in government and disregardful of the people whom we are elected to serve? Equally destructive to the environment (the word we used then—now I say the planet, the biosphere, or life itself)? For many Americans of color, both then and now, the major victories and small social reforms brought by the Civil Rights and anti-racism movement of the 1960s meant greater chances for economic and social “upward” mobility. For some of the more traditional Native Americans living on reservations, equality was not as important of a goal as maintaining sovereignty, treaty rights, and cultural preservation, but, for the increasing number of urban Native Americans at that time, and for many reservation people as well, being free from racial discrimination and being allowed equal rights and opportunities for “success” in the larger American society was also a major concern.
This presentation will look at the connection between the notion of betrayal and the concept of Creoleness. It proposes a theory of racial passing as a quintessential expression of Creoleness in which discrepancies, shifts, slippages, and alterations, which are often misconceived as calculated expressions of betrayal and duplicity, are in fact defining components of both racial passing and the history of Creoleness. The work is based on the life of Anatole Broyard (1920-1990), an American writer and literary critic (New York Times) of Creole descent from New Orleans who controversially hid his black origin in hope of making it as an American—as opposed to “African-American”—writer. Based on the semantic history of the word “Creole” in the Caribbean and New Orleans, this presentation seeks to challenge scholarly readings that fix racial identity, arguing instead that race, as racial passing and Creoleness attest, is by nature equivocal and mostly determined by the variable context of reception.
Vietnamese American Subjectivity, Masculinity, and Domestic Violence in Lac Su’s I Love Yous Are for White People
Quan Ha
University of Montana
