Biracialism and trauma in Kaine Agary’s Yellow-Yellow

Abstract

The connection between the discourse of racial purity and its traumatic effects on the biracial woman takes center stage in Kaine Agary’s Yellow-Yellow, which manifests in valorization and vilification of biracial subjects. Contrary to received and discriminatory knowledge that equated biraciality with degeneracy and hyper-sexuality, this article argues that master narratives of social marginality, and stigmatization of biracial women are undermined through the counter-narrative of subjects that deconstructs the dialectic of visibility and invisibility of the biracial body. Appropriating the stereotypes against them, victims recover their subjectivity by articulating their stories, which transgress an ossified binary perception of race. Though these stories do not provide narrative closure, they embrace the contradictions and ambivalence that characterize existential realities of biracial bodies, and therefore, rupture the singular and normative narrative that names biracial women as ‘other’.

Keywords: biracialism, trauma, visibility, invisibility, testimony