The Souls of Mixed Folk examines representations of mixed race in
literature and the arts that redefine new millennial aesthetics and
politics. Focusing on black-white mixes, Elam analyzes expressive
works--novels, drama, graphic narrative, late-night television, art
installations--as artistic rejoinders to the perception that post-Civil
Rights politics are bereft and post-Black art is apolitical. Reorienting
attention to the cultural invention of mixed race from the social
sciences to the humanities, Elam considers the creative work of Lezley
Saar, Aaron McGruder, Nate Creekmore, Danzy Senna, Colson Whitehead,
Emily Raboteau, Carl Hancock Rux, and Dave Chappelle. All these writers
and artists address mixed race as both an aesthetic challenge and a
social concern, and together, they gesture toward a poetics of social
justice for the "mulatto millennium."
The Souls of Mixed Folk seeks a middle way between competing
hagiographic and apocalyptic impulses in mixed race scholarship, between
those who proselytize mixed race as the great hallelujah to the "race
problem" and those who can only hear the alarmist bells of civil rights
destruction. Both approaches can obscure some of the more critically
astute engagements with new millennial iterations of mixed race by the
multi-generic cohort of contemporary writers, artists, and performers
discussed in this book. The Souls of Mixed Folk offers case studies of
their creative work in an effort to expand the contemporary idiom about
mixed race in the so-called post-race moment, asking how might new
millennial expressive forms suggest an aesthetics of mixed race? And how
might such an aesthetics productively reimagine the relations between
race, art, and social equity in the twenty-first century?
