From Girls to Women: (Re)Writing, Recuperating, and Resuscitating Biracialism in the Works of Nella Larsen, Toni Morrison, Robin Coste Lewis, and Natasha Tretheway

In general, my feminist analysis focuses on women writers: Nella Larsen’s _Passing_, Toni Morrison’s _The Bluest Eye_, Robin Coste Lewis’ _Voyage of the Sable Venus_, and Natasha Tretheway’s _Bellocq’s Ophelia_. Within these texts, I explore narratives of blackandwhite biracialism but I more specifically focus on the ways in which these women writers subvert ideologies of white supremacy. On one hand, both Larsen and Morrison deal with a narrative of biracialism that specifically subverts the tragic mulatto trope. In Larsen’s work, the passing narrative of the tragic mulatto not only subverts establishments of white supremacy but also subverts psychological spaces of white supremacy. Morrison, on the other hand, gives readers an unconventional narrative of biracialism that completely upends the tragic mulatto trope, which ultimately subverts what we have come to know about the tragic mulatto. With Morrison’s subversive narrative, the tragic mulatto breaches the confines of trope and becomes a symptom of a white supremacist system. In other words, Morrison’s work serves as a cautionary tale: if you are black and living within a system of white supremacy, you may exhibit or be susceptible to symptoms that are reminiscent of the tragic mulatto. For Lewis and Tretheway, their writing technique essentially becomes an act of subversion. Both poet authors, Lewis and Tretheway, engage ekphrastic writing as a means of recuperating erased histories and subverting the ways in which the erasure of black history, including narratives of blackandwhite biracialism, has been normalized in the white Western imagination. Altogether, these women writers—Larsen, Morrison, Lewis, Tretheway— not only (re)write narratives of biracialism, but in their refusal to be complicit in the erasure of blackness, their works also recuperate and resuscitate a variety of unrecognized narratives.