In the ancient hellenic novel Ethiopica.

In the ancient hellenic novel Ethiopica, written by Heliodorus sometime in the fourth hundred years A.D., a portrait of the mythical Andromeda figures prominently: When the Ethiopian princess Charicleia is born resembling the white-skinned Andromeda of the portrait, rather than her black parents, the queen fearful that her husband will think her an adulteress, gives up her infant daughter and run overs everyone that she has died. [1] The reader's reply to this cover-up is complicated according to knowing that Andromeda was herself an Ethiopian princess, and in this way she, too, should have been black. in what manner are we to interpret her whiteness here? single in kind explanation is that the Andromeda myth has pair divergent settings--Asiatic and African. [2] Thus, the conflicting representations of Andromeda in ancient art and literature--is she black or white?--derive from competing claims about her origin; in a brains she is both black and white. Charicleia, in use is herself defined in bourns of apparent oppositions--black/white, princess/slave, siste r/wife, woman/goddess, Greek/Ethiopian--her identity a riddle which it is the work of the plat to (re)solve.

Werner Sollors has recommended that Greek tragedy's "themes of incomprehensible origins and interfamilial strife" influenced the interracial literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (244) I want to widen this observation to argue that Heliodorus's account of Charicleia's multiplicity and the interpretive anxiety that it generates one as well as the other for her fellow characters and for readers finds fluent and powerful resonance in the African-American feminist novel, notably in the fictional representation of the mulatta/o. Embodying racial difference, the mulatta's visible whiteness destabilized categories of white and black by dint of emphasizing that "racial barriers were indeed artificially raiseed and imposed" (Brooks 124). After all, sees Elaine Ginsberg, "when 'race' is no longer visible, it is no longer intelligible: if 'white' can be 'black,' what is white?" (16) In a civilization obsessed with being able to "tell" undivided race from another, the mulatta was a source of anxiety, particularly if she chose not to "tell" and to (tres)p ass as white. Sollors warns, however, against accepting unquestioningly the fictional stereotype of the "Tragic Mulatto," for by dint of "thus devaluing much nineteenth-century interracial literature we may also be supporting racial essentialism, or advocating as 'normal' a view of the world that divides populace first of all into 'black' and 'white'--and hence ridicules intermediary categories as 'unreal' "(242) Furthermore, this liminality may be double-edged, a source of empowerment as well as disempowerment: "In its interrogation of the essentialism that is the foundation of identity politics, passing has the potential to create a space for creative self-determination and agency: the opportunity to fabricate new identities, to experiment with multiple make subordinate positions, and to cross social and economic boundaries that prohibit or oppress" (Ginsberg 16).

common African-American feminist writer who insistently probed "questions of inheritance and heritage" by the agency of fictional depictions of mixed race characters, racial intermarriage, and passing was Pauline Hopkins (Carby 162) A remarkable woman whose talents included theatre and music as well as literature, Hopkins carried in succession a literary career which took place almost entirely within her brief possession (1900-1904) at The Colored American Magazine. In her capacity as editor and writer, she published four novels, as well as numerous short stories and essays. Hopkins's "agitationist politics" prov however, too provocative (Gabler-Hover 237) While officially leaving her do job-work for health reasons, she was effectively fired, struggles Elizabeth Ammons, because "certain of her literary practices, like as the portrayal of racially mixed marriages, were too radical for white readers and, plane more instrumental, because [of] her refusal to endorse Booker T Washington's accommodationist policies," in the wake of his supporter s' takeover of the magazine (Ammons 85) [3] Although articles attributed to Hopkins appeared intermittently until 1916 and she launched her hold short-lived publishing company and magazine, she worked primarily as a stenographer until her death in 1930

The details of Hopkins's life went largely unrecorded, as the title of Ann Allen Shockley's pioneering 1972 essay "Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins: A Biographical Excursion into Obscurity" aptly insinuates [4] Contributing to that erasure is the fact that her short stories, nonfiction, and serialized novels have frequently been marginalized as journalism, rather than literature (only her first novel, Contending Forces, was published onward its own). The collected edition of Hopkins's three serialized novels, for example, give employment tos in its title the space of time magazine novels, which, while strictly accurate, contributes to the reason that Hopkins's fiction belongs to another category than the novel just (we do not usually call a canonical writer like Charles Dickens a magazine novelist, although his novels were originally serialized). Her affiliation with specifically black magazines helped place her further outside the white literary mainstream. Ironically not equable black women writers of the following generation recognized Hopkins a s a kindred spirit, according to Janet Gabler-Hover: "In the Harlem Renaissance, Hopkins was dismissed as a writer of sentimental as oppos to serious fiction" (238) simply in the past decade have her novels set up a wider and more receptive readership, as scholars have rediscovered Hopkins as a black woman intellectual, as a domestic novelist, and as a political writer.5