THIS CHAPTER CONSIDERS how two early multiracial authors in North America, Alice Dunbar-Nelson (1875–1935) and Sui Sin Far (1865–1914), transform the archetype (or stereotype) of the “tragic mulatta.” First formulated in 1933 by African American poet and literary critic Sterling A. Brown, the term “tragic mulatta” refers to a limiting set of representations for mixed-race characters that was pervasive throughout nineteenth-century American literature and sentimental romance, typically taking the form of a multiracial woman who lives as white (deliberately or ambiguously) and garners sympathy from the audience before her story comes to a tragic end. The issue of racial passing was a fraught and complex one in real life for multiracial individuals in the late nineteenth century through the turn of the twentieth, as Allyson Hobbs reveals in African American communities and Emma Jinhua Teng in a transnational “Eurasian” Asia-Pacific diaspora context, and literary scholars have developed richly nuanced approaches for understanding stories of passing in sentimental romance traditions.

In a contemporary Asian American literary context, Jennifer Ann Ho observes how “mixed race bodies … create mobile subjectivities for their narrators” as a story passes “through genre, through identities, through countries—crossing multiple borders of form and content to create a passing story.” Ho's idea of the “theme of passing as a continually evolving strategy for dislocating one's racial and ethnic identity” is evident in early passing stories as well. My discussion of “local color” sketches composed in the early careers of Dunbar-Nelson and Sui Sin Far traces how imagery of the Virgin Mary and Joan of Arc are associated with racial and gendered ambiguity and complex acts of passing and transformation. These feminine figures, deeply ingrained in the medievalism of the era, foreground nuanced traversals of language, race, gender, and sexuality.

Alice Dunbar-Nelson: Creolization and Francophone Medievalisms

Alice Dunbar-Nelson (1875–1935), author, journalist, and political activist, was the first woman of color to publish short stories, first in her collection of poems and short stories, Violets and Other Tales (1895), and then in The Goodness of Saint Rocque, and Other Stories (1899). Dunbar-Nelson's “local color” sketches (this term “local color” also devised by Sterling A. Brown) explore nuances of life in and around New Orleans, and her narratives that ambiguously mark characters’ racial identities and use careful representations of speech (including varieties of English and French) offer subtle indications of a person's class, race, and ethnicity.