Scenes From the Cutting Room Floor: Black Womanhood and the Visual Politics of Mixed Race Family Albums 1918-2020

Abstract

This dissertation asks two interrelated questions. First, how do visually iconic representations of Black-white families shift in relation to Black cultural politics and aesthetics throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries? Looking at widely circulating photographs and representations of iconic mixed-race families over the last century, I argue that these images have been shaped by a common set of visual themes and symbols that attempt to convey interracialism as perpetuating racial progress, integration, and social normativity. The continued use and evolution of these visual codes over time has coalesced into an iconography of interracial Black-white families, reproduced in American culture through the uplift of iconic mixed-race families in narratives of racial progress.

Second, this dissertation asks what it would mean if Black women (their visions, their feelings, their memories, their presence) guided our understanding of the visual politics of racially mixed families in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries? What images and stories of interracial kinship are centered when collected and curated through a Black feminist intellectual and historical lens? This study traces the shifting reception of Black and racially mixed women’s curatorial visions of interracial kinship over the past century, marking how Black women’s uses and narration of the public and private family archive situates interracial kinship within (rather than apart from) Black gender, sexual, and class politics and aesthetics. I argue that Black women have used private family archives throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries to shape, reshape, and disrupt the visual icon of the mixed-race family over time, instead creating icons of Black racial affirmation for multiracial families. While sometimes operating in concert with the dominant, public visual iconography of mixed families, Black women’s curatorial approaches toward images of interracial kinship overwhelmingly reveal the emotional and psychological effects of these iconic representations on Black women, mothers, and racially mixed Black women and daughters.

Using visual cultural analysis and archival research, each chapter offers a different take into how one or a number of iconic racially mixed families use images to negotiate notions of social and racial identity in public and in private, and how these negotiations impacted their politics in turn. Spanning from roughly 1918-2021, I situate these families within the very particular cultural, historical, and intellectual contexts in which they lived. Attending to Black women’s curatorial labor as it functions within domestic spaces and contexts, this study rethinks the political discourse regarding racial intimacy within interracial families in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In doing so, it reconstitutes this affective work back within histories of Black communal care, kinship, and survival rather than histories of uplift, progress, assimilation, and postracial futurities.