Contribution to Book
From America, With Hate: Bond and the 'Black Shirley Temple'
Scattered and Gathered: Catholics in Diaspora
(2017)
Abstract
This paper follows Philippa Schuyler’s journey away from the ‘mulatto-minded milieu’ of her parents in New York – a journey in which she declared that ‘Americans display no culture ... I hate my country,’ and invented a new identity for herself as Felipa Monterro, a woman of Iberian origin who could serve as a Catholic writer or a ‘sexy novelist’ insouthern Europe and southern Africa. It documents the cultural materials available for an ambitious, talented and lonely individual who sought success in a Cold War context by attacking blackness as an alien Other (that was tied to Communism, anti-colonialism and Negritude) and defending the authority of strong white rule in multiracial environments (as a means to limit racial violence and economic underdevelopment). In doing so, it argues that Schuyler’s self-fashioning illustrates the shame associated with blackness in America, and a deep concern that her loved ones might reveal or expose aspects of her life as an African American child prodigy that she would prefer to remain hidden. It also contends that her adoption of a Felipa Monterro moniker reveals a feeling of shame linked to the exposure of a failed self before the ideal of racial equality (Ahmed 2004: 106, Gordon and Gordon 2009: 81). Such feelings of shame meant that Schuyler did not respond to the humiliation of black bodies in the 1950s and 60s by joining the chorus of voices proclaiming ‘Black is beautiful,’ or talking about the need for a pan-African movement that confronted colonization, slavery, lynching and segregation with a ‘force vitale’. In contrast, she distanced herself from these revolutionary movements by renouncing African American culture and recycling anti-African stereotypes.
Keywords
- Race,
- mixed-race,
- Philippa Schuyler,
- James Bond,
- Ian Fleming,
- Frantz Fanon
Disciplines
Publication Date
2017
Editor
M L. Budde
Publisher
Wipf and Stock
Citation Information
Daniel McNeil. "From America, With Hate: Bond and the 'Black Shirley Temple'" Scattered and Gathered: Catholics in Diaspora (2017) Available at: http://works.bepress.com/danielmcneil/29/