The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory

by Tavia Nyong’o

At a time when the idea of a postracial society has entered public discourse, The Amalgamation Waltz investigates the practices that conjoined blackness and whiteness in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Scrutinizing widely diverse texts--archival, musical, visual, and theatrical--Tavia Nyong'o traces the genealogy of racial hybridity, analyzing how key events in the nineteenth century spawned a debate about interracialism that lives on today. Deeply interested in how discussions of racial hybridity have portrayed the hybrid as the recurring hope for a distant raceless future, Nyong'o is concerned with the ways this discourse deploys the figure of the racial hybrid as an alibi for a nationalism that reinvents the racist logics it claims to have broken with. As Nyong'o demonstrates, the rise of a pervasive image of racially anomalous bodies responded to the appearance of an independent black public sphere and organized politics of black uplift. This newfound mobility was apprehended in the political imaginary as a bodily and sexual scandal, and the resultant amalgamation discourse, he argues, must be recognized as one of the earliest and most enduring national dialogues on sex and sexuality. Nyong'o tracks the emergence of the concept of the racial hybrid as an ideological modernization of the older concept of the mongrel and shows how this revision brought race-thinking in line with new understandings of sex and gender, providing a racial context for the shift toward modern heterosexuality, the discourse on which postracial metaphors so frequently rely. A timely rebuttal to our contemporary fascination with racial hybridity, The Amalgamation Waltz questions the vision of a national future without racial difference or conflict.

Genres: Theory, Academic, History, Nonfiction, Race

248 pages, Paperback

First published May 14, 2009

About the author

Tavia Nyong’o is Professor of African American Studies, American Studies, and Theater & Performance Studies at Yale University and the author of Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life (2018).

Reviews

[eli]

i had a crazy journey with this book. saw online that nyong'o's coining of homosexual miscegenation in out of the coffin into the closet are ideas he formulated in here + therefore needed to read it. couldnt find anywhere to pirate it online. begged my uni to buy it then had to wait months. finally got it. its one of the densest things i have read on par with spillers and i desperately need to reread the first chapter (got far more into the flow of his writing after that) but i definitely can see the brushstrokes in this. it argues against the idea of racial amalgamation (to borrow his term over the racist use of miscegenation) as liberal signifier of progress + posits it as "part of [the] genealogy" of "the long history of 'race' and racism". conclusion specifically is amazing (+ is where im quoting from). every day i pray louis will be included in nyong'o's next work of longform scholarship. today i pray my uni never actually asks for this back

'That heterosexuality, marriage, and human reproduction should be recruited to the task of getting us beyond "race" is a primary historical irony to which the themes I address throughout The Amalgamation Waltz bring us. The temptation to see the private sphere as a respite from the public is an enduring one in American life and clearly captured both the real and the dramatized Strom Thurmond. Renee Romano, in her 2003 study of legal marriages across the color line since World War II, takes note of the claim that "love is the answer, not legislation." Comparably, Rachel Moran argues that in the wake of Loving v. Virginia (the 1967 Supreme Court decision overturning antimiscegenation laws), "race has become submerged in romantic complexity." Hollywood films as different as Bulworth (1998), Monster's Ball (2001), and Something New (2006) ultimately extol sex and intimacy as sites where racial divisions may be suspended or dissolved. And, in the wake of several decades of marriage freedom, the public visibility of children of mixed marriages -- Tiger Woods, Mariah Carey, Halle Berry, Derek Jeter, and so on -- is a source of frequent commentary.
If love, romance, and reproduction are the answer, however, what exactly is the question? Although seemingly benign and innocent, the recourse to romantic complexity as an answer to racism belies the manner in which heterosexuality, marriage, and human reproduction have all historically been recruited, with stunning effectiveness, to construct racial hierarchy and difference. And what is more, they are hardly unproblematic institutions in themselves, even considered apart from questions of racial justice. [...] Rather than solutions, love, romance and sexuality are problems, or at leart part of a much more general problematic than is commonly supposed.'

[Irma Mayorga]

I enjoyed collecting the following words from this insightful and elegantly written work: obdurate, superadded, arriviste, instate, recursive, infrahuman, finitude, augurs, jeremiad, inchoate, execrating, abreaction, predigitation, fort-da game, dandizette, renascent, rhetors, ur-narratives, internecine, hagiography, riposte, ideologemes, history of assemblage, interregnum, absconding, refraction, scion, polymath, raciology, remonstrance, ineluctably, malapropisms, traducing, strategic essentialism, invective, herrenvolk democracy, thralldom, parallex, aporetic, cipher, petard, concatenate. I enjoy when works startle me with words that have fallen out of my own circulation of use or introduce me to new dimensions of ideas with rich vocabulary full of depth.

[Harvey Young]

Important book. Smart, theoretically sophisticated. Well-researched.