Settling down to read detective stories can be an enjoyable escape from mundane life. But the fictional world of crime is, unfortunately, not immune to racial prejudices. After all, Sherlock Holmes, the world’s most famous sleuth, claimed to “as easily differentiate between the footprints of a Hindu or Muslim as he could identify the Chinese origins of a tattoo by its color,” as Tarik Abdel-Monem recapitulates. (Even C. Auguste Dupin, the detective hero of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” tries his hand at identifying “the voice of an Asiatic—of an African” from the cry of an orangutan.)
To be sure, Abdel-Monem notes that “[o]ne would be hard pressed to find a modern work that embraces the Victorian racism of Holmes or the racist and sexist overtones of the hard-boiled genre,” as today’s crime authors include writers of color like Walter Mosely and Barbara Neely. Still, he proposes that “the landscape with which interracialism is the focus is still both limited, and contested” in the crime genre today, especially in the continued use of the trope of the “tragic mulatto” or mixed-race individual.
He notes that mixed-race individuals are frequently depicted as unnatural: they may be incredibly physically attractive yet possess uncanny abilities or provoke violence in other characters. One reason behind these “reductive and trivial representations” could be “a desire to apologize for the historical legacy of racism and racial separation by endowing multiracial characters with social advantage,” he suggests. “But such representations are clumsy at best, and beg the question of whether or not such bizarre attempts at apology for racism are truly productive.”
In particular, Abdel-Monem cites Jurassic Park author Michael Crichton’s Rising Sun, which was published in 1992, “when economic tensions between the United States and Japan were high.”
In this notable detective procedural, investigators must work to solve the murder of a young white sex worker found dead at the Los Angeles office of a Japanese corporation. Japanese characters “are presented as alien and hostile bodies in rather standard orientalist protocol,” Abdel-Monem writes, especially since the victim is revealed to have been engaged in paid sadomasochistic acts with Japanese men—who, in typical orientalist fashion, “are as rich as their tastes are perverse.”
“The interracial sexual act in Rising Sun is thus imbued with inferences of sadism and death originating from desires of the alien Japanese,” Abdel-Monem infers.
A key assistant in the investigation is Theresa, a technology genius who is introduced in sexually objectifying terms: “dark, exotic-looking, almost Eurasian… beautiful, drop-dead beautiful.”
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Though she has mixed Japanese and African American heritage, Theresa has a deep antipathy toward Japanese people because of the discrimination she has faced for her mixed-race identity, her descent from an “untouchable” caste, and her physical disability of a missing forearm.
“Given the extent to which racialized, national rivalry underpins the story’s plot, Crichton’s reduction of Theresa into a disfigured body makes sense,” Abdel-Monem explains. “In such a universe, off-spring of a Japanese/Black-American union could only be both uniquely beautiful and talented, but also defective.”
Even Theresa’s resentment is in line with the “heavy handed portrayal of multiracial characters as angry, lonely, embittered persons” that Abdel-Monem observes in popular crime stories. For instance, Lea Wait’s mass-market crime novel Shadows at the Spring Show, published in 2005, goes so far as to make anger over the transracial adoption the motive for a string of grisly murders in a small town. The protagonist of that book finds her visit to New England clouded by “her continuing encounters with the troubled, racially-mixed adoptees” associated with a local adoption center.
“Through her focus on the dysfunctional behaviors and backgrounds of almost all the adopted adolescents, and the negative effects on multi-racial families, Waits [sic] emphasizes and frames transracialism as a destructive and disturbing phenomen[on],” Abdel-Monem writes.
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Instead of interpreting these stories as isolated examples or a recent trend, Abdel-Monem connects these depictions to an established tradition in American literature, including Mark Twain’s novel Pudd’nhead Wilson.
“The depiction of interracialism in contemporary American crime fiction both reflects and exploits our anxieties about race and race relations,” he writes. “The continuing presence of the tragic mulatto in modern works of fiction is clearly problematic, yet not surprising given its long historical legacy.” Its prevalence in the crime genre just “attest[s] to the longevity and persistence with which particular tropes of interracialism resound within the popular culture generally,” he concludes.
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