Form-crossers: Mixed-race characters at the intersection of fiction and non-fiction

Scholars have shown crossings between truth and fiction to have unique relevance to mixed-race life and literature, tracing how early 1900s mixed-race writers Sui Sin Far, Onoto Watanna and Long Lance used autofiction to pass under invented identities (Heidenreich 3-6). Those writers drove a movement imagining mixed-race characters as tricksters who manipulated their identities to overcome oppression (Brennan 42-45).

Autofiction (a genre 'blur[ring] the boundaries between fact and fiction' (Sheppard 88)) has since developed considerably (Dix1,7), with formal experimentation a key characteristic (Menn 165); however, no study has explored how innovative formal strategies of contemporary autofiction may facilitate representations of mixed-race characters in roles beyond passing and trickery.

My project, an auto fictional novel and critical essay, addresses this gap. The essay expands an emerging body of autofiction studies and brings a new formal dimension to mixed-race literature studies, arguing that contemporary autofiction provides new, necessary representational constructs for mixed-race characters. The novel enacts this argument creatively, engaging autofiction as an expansive genre to express complex identities.

This responds to Adekoya's call for stories outside academia exploring the feeling of mixed identities to counteract Britain's polarised racial discourse. Questions

- What are the prevailing representations and narrative roles assigned to mixed-race characters, and through which formal strategies are these expressed? - What innovative formal strategies does contemporary autofiction offer for exploring mixed-race identities? - How can those strategies be put into practice to develop new representations and roles for mixed-race characters?

Critical Methods

After reviewing scholarship on prevailing representations of mixedness, I will study four contemporary auto fictional texts by mixed-race authors - Alexander Chee's Edinburgh and How to Write an Autobiographical Novel; Jamaica Kincaid's The Autobiography of My Mother; and Nina Bouraoui's Tomboy - identifying how each employs formal strategies including hybridity, fragmentation and ambiguity to express mixed identity. I will build on Ferber's work which applies Butler's theory of intelligibility to show how mixed subjects, as threats to racial binaries, are perceived as unintelligible (Ferber 138-139).

Applying this concept together with Moretti's notion of literary forms as abstracts of social relations (Moretti 66), I will interrogate how the interaction of form and content in contemporary autofiction may disrupt the matrix determining the intelligibility of mixed-race characters, allowing them to fully assert their identities and perspectives. This extends Wimbush's research on autofiction as a productive zone for expressing postcolonial identity.

Novel

Set in London and Taipei in 2018, Making Alice engages my critical research and life experiences, crossing fiction and non-fiction to interrogate the promises and pitfalls of passing. It follows the subterfuges of two mixed-race women living on the peripheries of urban life, exploring precarity of employment and citizenship resulting from societal treatments of mixedness and the mixed subject's response.

One woman is the fantasy of the other, who dreams that by passing as a version of herself that is less mixed, more intelligible, she can be seen as a fully realised person. In fact, what finally allows this is the novel, which accommodates her identity in all its complexity.