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"We Are Joined Together Temporarily" The Tragic Mulatto, Fusion Monster In Lee Frost's The Thing With Two Heads, Justin Ponder
"We Are Joined Together Temporarily" The Tragic Mulatto, Fusion Monster In Lee Frost's The Thing With Two Heads, Justin Ponder
Ethnic Studies Review
In Lee Frost's 1972 film The Thing with Two Heads, a white bigot unknowingly has his head surgically grafted onto the body of a black man. From that moment on, these two personalities compete for control of their shared body with ridiculous results. Somewhere between horror and comedy, this Blaxploitation film occupies a strange place in interracial discourse. Throughout American literature, the subgenre of tragic mulatto fiction has critiqued segregation by focusing on the melodramatic lives of those divided by the color line. Most tragic mulatto scholarship has analyzed overtly political novels written by African American writers from the Reconstruction …