N°020_Vol.1_20

Introduction:  Identity is one of the mere rights that each individual deserves for his integrity and social integration. The African-American literary works mainly depict the experience of the black community. A marginalized community deprived of all vertus that contribute to its enjoyment. That insinuates that black people are classified in the inferior class and the whites in the superior one. However, this article explores how people from these two opposed races are identified. In other words, the work deals with the issue of identity of the mulattoes from the perception of the two origins in a society where slavery and racism are at spring. In this perspective, this article answers the following questions: How are mixed race people (mulattoes) identified by the black community? How are they identified by the white community? The new historicist and the Marxist approaches permit to analyze this problem of identity the hybrid people are facing. Therefore, this work is conducted on the basis of the following assumptions: the racial problem of black people is for great part in the identity crisis of mulattoes, and their difficulty to be accepted by the American society. Each race they are originated from rejects their belonging to it. While Blacks consider them as belonging to the superior race, the Whites in turn think that they belong to the inferior class/class either by their colour or their link with the black race; that is to say the flow of “black blood” in their veins. This disorientation renders complicate the question of identity of those people.

0.1 Theoretical framework: Numbers of scholars deal with the question of identity namely of Blacks. Setia Pooman (2018) for example estimates that black people refers to self-actualization for the need of identity face to racism and exclusion they experience. In the same perspective, A. Maslow (2017) sustains that the quest of identity calls for Self-actualization. For Hall Stuart (1997) the issue of identity is constructive and dynamic and not a specific and static entity affiliated to an individual. Thus, the individual (black) can change or modify (his identity) accordingly to his mode of construction. All the above works deal with the issue of black people’s identity problem. But this article depicts the question of people from both the oppressed and oppressor races.   

0.2 Methodological framework: This article consists to study the experience of mulattoes in the American society. Thus it is question to demonstrate how their affiliation to black race constitutes the main source of their difficulty to enjoy their right to identity. The analysis of the notion of “miscegenation” scrutinizes the hybridity or multiraciality. The exploration of the concept of “Hyper-descent” permits to describe the perception of mulattoes by black people, considering them as whites. Moreover, the notion of “Hypo-descent” highlights the classification of mulattoes by the white community as blacks. The word “Hypo” meaning “under or sub” indicates the inferiority of the mixed-race people according to the whites.