Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

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  • Where Is the Carnivalesque in Rio’s Carnaval? Samba, Mulatas and Modernity

    Where Is the Carnivalesque in Rio’s Carnaval? Samba, Mulatas and Modernity

    Visual Anthropology
    Volume 21, Issue 2 (2008)
    pages 95-111
    DOI: 10.1080/08949460701688775

    Natasha Pravaz, Associate Professor of Anthropology
    Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

    This article chronicles the historical normalization of carnaval parades and samba performances in Rio de Janeiro, by looking at the progressive standardization of audiovisual imagery fueled by a nationalistic project based on cultural appropriation. Afro-Brazilian performance traditions have come to stand for Brazilian national identity since at least the 1930s, and practices of visual consumption such as shows de mulata (spectacles where Afro-Brazilian women dance the samba) have elevated “mixed-race” women to be icons of Brazilianness. While these practices have de-emphasized grotesque excess in order to fit scopophilic drives, they have failed to secure a firm grip over performers’ experiences.

    Read or purchase the article here.

  • Hybridity Brazilian Style: Samba, Carnaval, and the Myth of “Racial Democracy” in Rio de Janeiro

    Hybridity Brazilian Style: Samba, Carnaval, and the Myth of “Racial Democracy” in Rio de Janeiro

    Identities
    Volume 15, Issue 1 (2008)
    pages 80-102
    DOI: 10.1080/10702890701801841

    Natasha Pravaz, Associate Professor of Anthropology
    Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

    Through ethnographic and historical inquiry, this article inspects the usefulness of the concept of hybridity for an analysis of Rio’s samba and carnaval. If differentiated from mestiçagem, the concept of hybridity can productively be put to use. The discourse on mestiçagem is the basis for dominant narratives of national identity and celebrates samba and other Afro-Brazilian cultural forms as symbols of Brazilianness and racial democracy. Such political use of culture was initiated by President Vargas’s appropriation of subaltern performance genres in his populist project of modernity. At the same time, as expressions of Afro-Brazilian culture, samba and carnaval are contested performances; many celebrate the “racially democratic” character of samba spaces as a core domain of Afro-Brazilian sociability. This article traces the roots of samba and carnaval in Rio de Janeiro and examines their current import for a politics of identity by drawing from interviews and fieldwork at escola de samba Unidos da Cereja. The article stresses the methodological importance of addressing multiple practices and voices emerging in the context of samba performances. The concept of hybridity can thus describe Afro-Brazilians’ use of culture in the negotiation of power imbalances and alternative values.

    Read or purchase the article here.

  • Is the Discourse of Hybridity a Celebration of Mixing, or a Reformulation of Racial Division? A Multimodal Analysis of the Portuguese Magazine Afro

    Is the Discourse of Hybridity a Celebration of Mixing, or a Reformulation of Racial Division? A Multimodal Analysis of the Portuguese Magazine Afro

    Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Reasearch
    Volume 11, Number 2, Article 24 (May 2010)
    29 pages
    ISSN: 1438-5627

    José Ricardo Carvalheiro, Assistant Professor in the Communication and Arts Department
    University of Beira Interior, Portugal

    For many years the study of “race” relations was dominated by paradigms—of assimilationism and multiculturalism—which highlighted difference and division (as a problem, or a virtue). In more recent years the idea of racial and cultural mixing—creolization or hybridization—has become an important concept in ethnic and racial studies. The starting point of this article is the observation that the idea of racial and cultural mixture—hybridity or mestiçagem—was a key ideological feature of Portuguese colonialism in its last decades. If hybridity is not therefore a new discourse in Portugal, what is the place for it today and what kind of hybridity is being referred to? What might the Portuguese case tell us about discourses of hybridity more generally? The article explores these questions through a combined visual and linguistic analysis of the lifestyle magazine Afro as a site where contemporary discourses about “race” intertwine.

    Table of Contents

    1. Introduction
    3. The “African” Minority in Portugal
    4. Afro, a Magazine in the Market
    4.1 What does the existence of a lifestyle magazine such as Afro mean?
    5. Racial Actors in Visual and Verbal Texts
    6. Transnational Representations, “Race” Questions and Hybridity
    7. Stories About Mixing: Layers of Discourse
    8. Conclusion
    Acknowledgments
    References
    Author
    Citation

    Read the entire article here.

  • Closing the Circle

    As [Matt] Wray puts it: “It speaks to the fastest-growing segment of Americans—those of mixed race—starting to rewrite the script. Obama, in his blackness, is free to explore his whiteness.”

    The circle won’t be closed, of course, until millions of white Americans embrace the Africa in their pasts. Forty million claim Irish roots. How many will claim African?…

    John Timpane, “In visit to Ireland, O’Bama seeks to reverse U.S. notions of race,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, May 25, 2011. http://articles.philly.com/2011-05-25/news/29582090_1_ollie-hayes-barack-obama-president-obama.

  • (Re)Claiming Rights?

    …Consider the irony of a man so long under fire for his origins, comes to Ireland to celebrate one strand of those origins. He is called black because in the United States, we are messed up about origins. Why not call him “Barack Obama, America’s 44th white president?” Or “America’s third Irish American president” (after Ronald Reagan and John Kennedy)? He is as much those things as its first black president. No? Never happen? Why not?

    Charles Gallagher, chairman of the Sociology, Social Work and Criminal Justice Department at La Salle University, sees the notorious “one-drop rule” of U.S. social attitudes at work: “A single ‘drop of black blood’ negates your ability to reconnect back to Europe. Race trumps all other questions of ethnic origin. Yet we know that 80 percent of all African Americans have European ancestors. Their history, which includes slavery, has cut them off both from Africa and from Europe, from being able to reclaim that great-grandfather in Sicily or Eastern Europe.”…

    John Timpane, “In visit to Ireland, O’Bama seeks to reverse U.S. notions of race,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, May 25, 2011. http://articles.philly.com/2011-05-25/news/29582090_1_ollie-hayes-barack-obama-president-obama.

  • Henry Ossawa Tanner’s Negotiation of Race and Art: Challenging “The Unknown Tanner”

    Henry Ossawa Tanner’s Negotiation of Race and Art: Challenging “The Unknown Tanner”

    Journal of Black Studies
    Published online before print 2011-03-17
    DOI: 10.1177/0021934710395588

    Naurice Frank Woods, Visiting Assistant Professor of African American Studies
    University of North Carolina, Greensboro

    This essay is a response to an article recently published by Will South titled “A Missing Question Mark: The Unknown Henry Ossawa Tanner” in the journal Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide. Tanner was the foremost African American artist of the late 19th century. He has emerged as an exemplar of Black achievement in the arts and is now included in the canon of American art of that period. While Tanner labored to remove the equation of race as the defining factor for his artistic output, he never lost sight of his racial identity. South’s article suggests otherwise and he reconstructs Tanner as a “tragic mulatto” who, on several occasions, passed as White to advance his career and social standing. South’s conclusion seriously jeopardizes Tanner’s hard-fought reputation and greatly diminishes his celebrated cultural significance. I weigh South’s evidence against documented sources and conclude that Tanner unabashedly affirmed his “Blackness” throughout his life and art.

    Read or purchase the article here.

  • Painting the World’s Christ: Tanner, Hybridity, and the Blood of the Holy Land

    Painting the World’s Christ: Tanner, Hybridity, and the Blood of the Holy Land

    Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide: a journal of ninetheenth-century visual culture
    Volume 3, Issue 2 (Autumn 2004)

    Alan C. Braddock, Assistant Professor of Art History
    Tyler School of Art, Temple University

    Henry Ossawa Tanner’s global vision of Christ circa 1900 projected an ideal of hybridity that embodied the artist’s personal resistance not only to racial stereotypes but also to racial thinking as such.

    In 1899, Henry Ossawa Tanner painted Nicodemus Visiting Jesus (fig. 1), based on a story from the Gospel of John in which Christ tells a Jewish Pharisee of miraculous visionary powers available to those who are born again. By signing the painting “H. O. Tanner, Jerusalem, 1899,” the artist touted his firsthand knowledge of Palestine, where he spent eleven months on two separate trips between 1897 and 1899. The Nicodemus is one of several paintings with biblical subjects that Tanner produced around 1900 after expatriating himself from the United States. Frustrated by pervasive racial discrimination on account of his African ancestry, Tanner left Jim Crow America in 1894 to live in France for the rest of his life, except for occasional family visits to Philadelphia and artistic expeditions to Palestine and North Africa.

    By 1900, Tanner had become an international success—exhibiting regularly at the Paris Salon, winning awards, and attracting more critical praise than many American artists, including his former teacher at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Thomas Eakins. In 1897, Tanner’s The Resurrection of Lazarus (fig. 2) was exhibited to great acclaim at the Salon, awarded a medal, and purchased by the French government for its Luxembourg Gallery of contemporary art. Expatriation in Europe actually enhanced Tanner’s artistic reputation in America during these years, for he exhibited often in New York, Chicago, Pittsburgh, and Philadelphia. In 1900 the Nicodemus was purchased by the Pennsylvania Academy and awarded the prestigious Lippincott Prize. Yet it was only in the European art world and in biblical subject matter that Tanner found what he called “a perfect race democracy.”…

    …The present article focuses precisely upon Tanner’s ambiguous racial construction of Christ circa 1900, a topic overlooked in previous scholarship on the artist but one having significant consequences for our historical understanding of his work and more broadly for how we interpret American art and identity from an international postcolonial perspective. Put simply, I argue that Tanner and his biblical paintings at the turn of the twentieth century—especially the Nicodemus and others depicting Christ as a figure of universality—offered a critique not simply of racism, but of “race” itself as an epistemological category. In that respect, Tanner’s work offers an important international model for de-colonizing art by interrogating race at a moment when the dominant culture in the United States was deeply invested in segregation and difference. Those investments, of course, were articulated most famously in the Supreme Court’s Plessy v. Ferguson ruling of 1896, allowing individual states to establish “separate but equal” public facilities based on racial difference. Such institutionalized segregation prompted W. E. B. Du Bois to identify the “color-line” as the “problem of the twentieth century.”

    For Tanner, however, the problem was not simply one of crossing or negotiating the “color-line” in painting but rather how to put that line, and the very idea of race, under erasure by highlighting the elusiveness—and therefore the universality—of Christ’s identity. What makes Tanner’s case especially interesting is the relationship that obtained between his pictures and his person, seen here in a photograph of around 1900, when he was about 40 years old (fig. 4). Tanner was a relatively light-skinned man whose complexion and physiognomy did not conform to stereotypical conceptions of blackness, but rather prompted a variety of (often overlapping) racial identifications, including “mulatto,” “Latin,” and even “Aryan.” In the eyes of many contemporaries, Tanner and his work were complex hybrids that resisted clear racial definition, in a manner akin to the universality of Christ and the demography of the Holy Land. My purpose here is to examine the visual and historical evidence of that resistance by closely reading a selection of Tanner’s paintings in relation to various writings by contemporary critics and by the artist himself…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Affirming Blackness: A Rebuttal to Will South’s “A Missing Question Mark: The Unknown Henry Ossawa Tanner”

    Affirming Blackness: A Rebuttal to Will South’s “A Missing Question Mark: The Unknown Henry Ossawa Tanner”

    Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide: a journal of ninetheenth-century visual culture
    Volume 9, Issue 2 (Autumn 2010)

    Naurice Frank Woods, Visiting Assistant Professor of African American Studies
    University of North Carolina, Greensboro

    George Dimock, Associate Professor of Art History
    University of North Carolina, Greensboro

    Will South’s recent article proposing a heretofore “unknown” Henry Ossawa Tanner who was conflicted about his African American identity and who, while in France, sought to pass as white demonstrates an impressive mastery of archival sources and a flair for persuasive re-interpretation. It is all the more problematic therefore that he misinterprets the available evidence and thereby diminishes the cultural significance of Tanner’s work. Most ingeniously, South builds an elaborate yet spurious argument by restoring a question mark to Tanner’s declaration “Now am I a Negro?” in a famous epistolary exchange with art critic Eunice Tietjens in 1914. In so doing he refashions the foremost African American artist of the nineteenth century as a tragic mulatto—a man who saw himself “as mostly white,” who worked while in France to “systematically…remove race from the equation of his life,” and was willing “to conceal the African American component of his extraction.” South concludes with a critical appraisal that undermines the integrity of Tanner’s art by claiming that “his achievements, ultimately, were grounded in a life of complex compromise lived in between his blackness and his whiteness.”

    With or without the missing punctuation, Tanner’s response to Tietjens resounds as his most important statement on race. It reflects his utter frustration with America’s practice of applying a rule of hypodescent (the “one-drop rule“) that defined him as an innately inferior being and constricted his opportunities as artist and citizen. What Tanner was rejecting in his response to Tietjens was not his race but the American art establishment’s continual labeling of him as “Negro” whenever his talent was evaluated. By way of contrast, the Paris art world showed “steadily increasing interest” in his work, linking him with his fellow countrymen, James McNeill Whistler and John Singer Sargent, without “slight[ing] his art in the exploitation of his race” as was the custom in the U.S. press. Tanner considered himself principally an American artist and he affirmed his right to join the ranks of the cultural elite based on artistic merit and racial equality. Tanner’s life and art challenged his nation’s disingenuous notions of race. When taken in context, his question to Tietjens, “Now am I a Negro?” is far from being a renunciation of his black ancestry and heritage as South would have it. Rather it functions rhetorically as sardonic irony in response to the cruelties and stupidities of white racism…

    Read the entire article here.

  • The Blackfoot Tribe of the Midsouth

    The Blackfoot Tribe of the Midsouth

    American Society of Ethnohistory Conference
    “Blackfoot, Redbones, Brass Ankles and Pied Noir: Colorful Identities, Creative Strategies American Society of Ethnohistory conference”
    Santa Fe, New Mexico
    2005-11-18 through 2005-11-20
    2005-11-19

    Carol A. Morrow, Professor of Anthropology
    Southeast Missouri State University

    Over the years, I have had a number of African-American students identify themselves as having Native American heritage.  Occasionally they claim descent from the ‘Blackfoot tribe’, but they always have a southern heritage.  Most students don’t know much more than just the term, Blackfoot, but one student explained that Blackfoot meant a blend of African and Cherokee heritage.  Given our location on the Trail of Tears, Cherokee heritage is common; the Blackfoot tribe is something else entirely.  This paper reviews the use of the Blackfoot term throughout the Midsouth.

    Over the years, I have had a number of students in my North American Indians classes who have self-identified as Blackfoot, or Cherokee and Blackfoot, or in one case, Choctaw and Blackfoot.  I would always ask them if they had ties or relatives in Montana, and with one exception, they all said NO. The one exception is the blond blue-eyed young man, who in fact, did have relatives in Montana.

    I teach at Southeast Missouri State, which is in Cape Girardeau and the Cherokee Trail of tears passed through our community in 1838-1839.  Additionally, there was a large community of Cherokee Indians that lived to the sound of our area in Arkansas territory, and many pushed north into Missouri when they were moved in 1828 West into Indian territory (these were the Old Settlers).  So we have always had a number of people in the area of Cherokee ancestry.  But Blackfoot Indian is another story entirely.  Finally, I realized that the Blackfoot students were African-American.  My African-American students almost always had Indian blood, but it took me a while to figure out that they were the only ones that claimed Blackfoot blood…

    Read the entire paper here.

  • The First Black Prairie Novel: Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance’s Autobiography and the Repression of Prairie Blackness

    The First Black Prairie Novel: Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance’s Autobiography and the Repression of Prairie Blackness

    Journal of Canadian Studies/Revue d’études canadiennes
    Volume 45, Number 2 (Spring 2011)
    pages 31-57
    E-ISSN: 1911-0251; Print ISSN: 0021-9495
    DOI: 10.1353/jcs.2011.0022

    Karina Vernon, Assistant Professor of English
    University of Toronto

    This essay situates Chief Buffalo Child’s Long Lance: The Autobiography of a Blackfoot Indian Chief (1928) within the cultural context of its production, the anti-Black racial climate of the Canadian Prairies in the early part of the twentieth century, in order to analyze the textual repression of its author’s Blackness. Although the Autobiography has been discredited as a fraud because, as Donald B. Smith discovered, Long Lance was not in fact Blackfoot as the Autobiography claims, but “mixed blood” from North Carolina, this essay reclaims it as the first novel penned on the Prairies by a Black author, for it tells a true—more metaphorical and allegorical than factual—story about the desire on the part of displaced “new” world Blacks for Indigenous status and belonging. This essay examines the implications of claiming the Autobiography as the first Black prairie novel and explores how reading it as fiction rather than autobiography extends our understandings of “passing,” racial identification and transformation.

    Cet article situe l’autobiographie Long Lance: The Autobiography of a Blackfoot Indian Chief (1928) du Chef Buffalo Child dans le contexte culturel de sa production—le climat racial anti-Noirs des Prairies canadiennes au début du XXe siècle—afin d’analyser la répression textuelle de son auteur noir. Donald B. Smith a par la suite considéré cette autobiographie comme une imposture, ayant découvert que Long Lance ne faisait pas partie de la confédération des Pieds-Noirs, mais était plutôt un « sang-mêlé » de la Caroline du Nord. Cependant, l’auteur du présent article considère cette autobiographie comme le premier roman écrit dans les Prairies par un Noir puisqu’il raconte une histoire vraie—quoique plus métaphorique et allégorique que factuelle—du désir des Noirs déplacés du « Nouveau » Monde d’acquérir le statut d’indigène et d’appartenir à leur monde. L’article examine les conséquences de la classification de cette pseudo-autobiographie comme le premier roman des Prairies écrit par un Noir et explore les manières dont sa lecture en tant qu’œuvre de fiction plutôt qu’autobiographie nous aide à mieux comprendre le concept de « passage », d’identification et de transformation raciales.

    Read or purchase the article here.