In its provocative fall 1993 special issue, “The New Face of America,” Time magazine sensationally represents hybridity as a dramatic development that is forcing a “new” look on America. The issue highlights how racial mixture is redefining American identity, heralding the future, when whites will be “just another minority” (Henry, “Politics” 73). Many of the issue’s articles investigate how mixture literally changes the face of America and discuss the visual implications of this change. The magazine’s cover, the new face of America, is a light-skinned woman who is supposed to represent the fusion of the different races in the United...

Paule Marshall’s novel Praisesong for the Widow describes the origins of Thomasina Moore’s uncertain racial identity: “He forced my mother / late / one night. / What do they call me?” (19). Her light skin enables her to pass and to perform in the chorus line at the Cotton Club. “She had the color that qualified” (19). She moves fluidly from the white cultural realm of nightclubs and cruise ships to the African-American cultural realm of “snakehips” and Harlem dance halls (26). Yet her color does more than give her access to these performances of privilege. Marshall inserts this question...

Caribbean identity is built on both mestizo and mulatto mixture. While Mexican usage of mestizaje often elides the Africanist presence, this presence is more visible in the racial makeup of the Caribbean. In defining her Puerto Rican–American identity, Rosario Morales includes “the ebony sheen to my life,” “the sound of african in english” (Levins Morales and Morales 56–57). She affirms “The Other Heritage” within her mestizaje: “I was just right just me just brown and pink and full of drums inside beating rhythm for my feet” (58). As she says in another poem, “Africa,” “Though my roots reach...

In its constructions of race, sex, gender, and nationality, the television show Designing Women provides more than a popular feminist message. The main characters of the show are four white southern women and an African-American man (predictably enough, an ex-convict) who works for them. The four women run the gamut of traditionally feminine stereotypes: conceited snob, ditzy blonde, feisty single mom, and seductive southern lady. Yet Anthony, originally the designing women’s van driver and odd-job man, complicates traditional assumptions about black masculinity as he learns to participate in “feminine” activities (including decorating, leg waxing, and Girl Scout camp) and “female”...

African-American feminist science fiction writer Octavia Butler explores the limits of fluid identities. In Wild Seed (1980), her African heroine Anyanwu is a “shape-shifter”: she can change the shape, color, or species of her body at will. We see her as an old woman, a young woman, a black man, a white man, a dolphin, a dog, and an eagle. She transforms her malleable identity to escape from dangerous situations: “I took animal shapes to frighten my people when they wanted to kill me. . . . I became a leopard and spat at them. . . . I became...

The mulatta/mestiza has held the attention of American media for more than a century. Her influence is significant enough to unleash a tremendous body of representations on the popular, the literary, the governmental, and the academic fronts, as all try to claim her with their rhetoric and their ideals. Perhaps this loud (and often racist or misogynist) rhetoric is designed to eclipse her own voice, to protect the myths of U.S. racial history. Even if she is not directly listened to—as the dominant culture mediates her voice and her image—she has exerted symbolic agency over the terms of...