Mixed Race Studies

President Obama & Marilynne Robinson: A Conversation in Iowa

The New York Review of Books
2015-11-05

President Barack Obama

Marilynne Robinson

President Obama and Marilynne Robinson at the Iowa State Library, Des Moines, September 2015 (Pete Souza/White House)

The following conversation between President Obama and Marilynne Robinson was conducted in Des Moines, Iowa, on September 14. An audio recording of it can be heard at itunes.com/nybooks. —The Editors

The President: Marilynne, it’s wonderful to see you. And as I said as we were driving over here, this is an experiment, because typically when I come to a place like Des Moines, I immediately am rushed over to some political event and I make a speech, or I have a town hall, or I go see some factory and have wonderful conversations with people. But it’s very planned out and scripted. And typically, we’re trying to drive a very particular message that day about education or about manufacturing.

But one of the things that I don’t get a chance to do as often as I’d like is just to have a conversation with somebody who I enjoy and I’m interested in; to hear from them and have a conversation with them about some of the broader cultural forces that shape our democracy and shape our ideas, and shape how we feel about citizenship and the direction that the country should be going in.

And so we had this idea that why don’t I just have a conversation with somebody I really like and see how it turns out. And you were first in the queue, because—

Marilynne Robinson: Thank you very much.

The President: Well, as you know—I’ve told you this—I love your books. Some listeners may not have read your work before, which is good, because hopefully they’ll go out and buy your books after this conversation.

I first picked up Gilead, one of your most wonderful books, here in Iowa. Because I was campaigning at the time, and there’s a lot of downtime when you’re driving between towns and when you get home late from campaigning. And you and I, therefore, have an Iowa connection, because Gilead is actually set here in Iowa…

…Robinson: And also, one of the things that doesn’t take into account is that local governments can be great systems of oppression. And it’s a wonderful thing to have a national government that can intervene in the name of national values.

Our systems for maintaining the peace and our criminal justice systems generally work, except for this huge swath of the population that is incarcerated at rates that are unprecedented in world history.

And when you are thinking about American democracy or, for that matter, Christianity in your writings, how much does that issue of “the other” come up and how do you think about that? I know at least in Gilead that factors into one major character, trying to figure out how he can love somebody in the Fifties that doesn’t look like him.

Robinson: Iowa never had laws against interracial marriage. Only Iowa and Maine never had [them]—

The President: Those were the only two.

Robinson: Yes. And [Ulysses S.] Grant really did call [Iowa] the shining star of radicalism, and so on. We never had segregated schools; they were illegal from before, while it was still a territory, and so on. And these laws never changed and they became the basis for the marriage equality ruling that the Supreme Court here [in Iowa] did.

So that whole stream of the culture never changed. And at the same time, the felt experience of the culture was not aligned with the liberal tradition [of the] culture. And so in that book, Jack has every right to think he can come to Iowa, and yet what he finds makes him frightened even to raise the question…

Read the entire conversation here. Read part 2 of the conversation here.

Violent Disruptions: Richard Wright and William Faulkner’s Racial Imaginations

Harvard University
September 2013
177 pages

Linda Doris Mariah Chavers

A dissertation presented to The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the subject of African and African American Studies

Violent Disruptions contends that the works of Richard Wright and William Faulkner are mirror images of each other and that each illustrates American race relations in distinctly powerful and prescient ways. While Faulkner portrays race and American identity through sex and its relationship to the imagination, Wright reveals a violent undercurrent beneath interracial encounters that the shared imagination triggers. Violent Disruptions argues that the spectacle of the interracial body anchors the cultural imaginations of our collective society and, as it embodies and symbolizes American slavery, drives the violent acts of individuals. Interracial productions motivate the narratives of Richard Wright and William Faulkner through a system of displacement of signs. Though these tropes maintain their currency today, they are borne out of cultural imaginings over two hundred years old. Working within the framework of the imaginary, Violent Disruptions places these now historical texts into the twenty-first century’s discourse of race and American identity.

In the first part of the dissertation, I show in detail the various narratives at work in William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! (1936) in order to portray the imaginations shared by the white characters and disrupted by the interracial body as spectacle. Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) depicts a similar racial imaginary but with more focus on its violent, corporeal effects. By contrast, in the second half of the dissertation, I demonstrate the writers’ central and racially charged characters from their earlier works, Light in August (1932) and Uncle Tom’s Cabin [Children] (1938; 1940) and look at how the figures of Joe Christmas and Big Boy, respectively, work as literary prototypes for their version in later works.

Read the entire dissertation here.

African American Exceptionalism and the Truth Behind the Rage over Zoe Saldaña Playing Nina Simone

Upliftt: Latinos in Film, TV and Theater
2015-11-09

William Garcia

In a recent article from the Huffington Post, Zoe Saldaña talks about the Nina Simone biopic that has been controversial all over the Black blogospheres. Saldaña said: “the people behind the project weren’t my cup of tea.” She also said, “the director was fine but there was a lot of mismanagement.”

On June 11th 2015, during an InStyle magazine interview, Zoe Saldaña said: “I think I was right for the part, and I know a lot of people will agree, but then again I don’t think Elizabeth Taylor was right for Cleopatra either.” Those comments may seem, in a sense, post-racial, especially after defending African-American actor, Michael B. Jordan, for playing the Human Torch in the Fantastic Four Film.

The Black Movement in the United States has only paid a particular attention to blackness—leaving out Afro-Latinos as “not being really black.” Being Black in the U.S is equated with being African-American in a time where there is a continuous migration from Africa, the Caribbean and Afro-Latin America. The Black Movement in the U.S invisibilizes Afro-Latinos amongst other Afro-descendants in a time when all Black Lives Should Matter. Many African-Americans in the U.S created a controversy over Zoe Saldaña playing Nina Simone. There were several articles published infuriated with her allegedly “playing a blackface” and being a self-loathing Dominican–although most of these articles also forget she is half Puerto Rican. During a Hip-Hollywood.com interview, Zoe Saldaña clearly states she identifies as a Black woman, but that comment was omitted from many conversations…

Read the entire article here.

Postracial Mestizaje: Richard Rodriguez’s Racial Imagination in an America Where Everyone Is Beginning to Melt

American Studies
Volume 54, Number 1, 2015
pages 89-113
DOI: 10.1353/ams.2015.0007

Lee Bebout, Associate Professor of English
Arizona State University

And it seemed to me that the larger questions about America that the color raised is the fact that we are, all of us, in our various colors, our various hues, melting into each other and creating a brown nation. I tried to write a brown book, that is, brownly, by engaging contradiction and paradox, and rhetorical devices that suggest the way that I experience my own life. That is, for example, as the descendent of a conquistador and the Indian—as a Hispanic.

Richard Rodriguez

In recent years, racial formation in the United States has thrived in precipitous tension. Since the social and political tumult of the various freedom struggles from the 1950s to the 1970s and the rise of multiculturalism, explicitly racist discourses and practices have fallen from favor. Yet as many have noted, the material saliency of race is felt as much as ever. Thus, we are left with a wide array of seeming contradictions that maintain white supremacy and other forms of inequality in the guise of fairness and the protection of rights: ever-rising incarceration rates in communities of color through mandatory sentencing and policies of disparate impact, delegitimization campaigns against the first African American President of the United States through questions of his birthright citizenship, anti-(Latino) immigration policies that respond to the Hispanicization of America that mark people under “reasonable suspicion” of foreignness, and the targeting and banning of Mexican American Studies curricula by calling for students to be treated as individuals. These are but a few examples of the dynamic tension of racial formation in contemporary U.S. culture. It is within this context that I seek to situate Richard Rodriguez’s exploration of race in America in his 2002 book Brown: The Last Discovery of America.

Responding in part to Huntingtonian fears of a “clash of civilizations” and a “browning of America,” Rodriguez exalts the impurity of brown as a great American tradition. For Rodriguez, it is not “Brown, … in the sense of pigment, necessarily, but brown because mixed, confused, lumped impure, unpasteurized, as motives are mixed, and the fluids of generations are mixed and emotions are unclear, and the tally of human progress and failure in every generation is mixed, and unaccounted for, missing in plain sight.”

Here one may find common ground between Rodriguez’s “brown” and theorizations of complex personhood by Gloria Anzaldúa and Avery Gordon. Each maps the interactions of multiple, contradictory elements that constitute any individual. For Anzaldúa, this means embracing rejected aspects of the self: the working class, the indigenous, and the queer. In complementary fashion, Gordon suggests that people are not so easily compartmentalized as either victims or agents of their own destiny. Together, they articulate the impurity that Rodriguez terms brown. As this article will demonstrate, however, even as Rodriguez seeks to contest notions of purity, racial and otherwise, Brown serves the interests of the dominant racial order vis-à-vis its relationship to neoliberal thought and discursive strategies. Through Brown, Rodriguez advances a post-racial mestizaje, an embrace of mixture and contradiction that seeks to subvert the social construct of race and yet simultaneously acquiesces to the logics that undergird current inequalities.

In a Brown Context

The political thrust of Rodriguez’s brown project takes on greater significance when placed in context with his earlier work and its critical response. A child of Mexican immigrants who came of age during the Chicano movement—although certainly not a part of it—Rodriguez is one of the most recognized Latina/o public intellectuals today. Yet his vocal arguments against bilingual education, ethnic studies, and affirmative action have long made him a target of criticism. With the publication of his first memoir, Hunger of Memory, and his speaking engagements in conservative circles, Rodriguez advanced a problematic argument of a split between private and public selves. For Rodriguez, his Mexican heritage and the Spanish language were relegated to the private, familial sphere. Because of this argument, Rodriguez became a veritable Hispanic, anti-Chicano boogieman. Tomás Rivera, Ramón Saldívar, William Nericcio, and others critiqued Rodriguez’s thinking, and sometimes Rodriguez himself, as the result of a colonized mind, blind to history and structural…

Transformable Race: Surprising Metamorphoses in the Literature of Early America

Oxford University Press
2014-01-27
336 Pages | 9 halftones
6-1/8 x 9-1/4 inches
Hardcover ISBN: 9780199313501

Katy L. Chiles, Associate Professor of English
University of Tennessee, Knoxville

• First detailed study of “literary race” in eighteenth-century America
• Brings together the scholarly discourses on American Indian identity, the racial regime of African slavery, and the developing discourse of race in eighteenth-century natural history with convincing literary analysis
• Covers canonical texts by Ben Franklin, Samson Occum, Phillis Wheatley, and J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur

As surprising as it might seem now, during the late eighteenth century many early Americans asked themselves, “How could a person of one race come to be another?” Racial thought at the close of the eighteenth century differed radically from that of the nineteenth century, when the concept of race as a fixed biological category would emerge. Instead, many early Americans thought that race was an exterior bodily trait, incrementally produced by environmental factors and continuously subject to change. While historians have documented aspects of eighteenth-century racial thought, Transformable Race is the first scholarly book that identifies how this thinking informs the figurative language in the literature of this crucial period. It argues that the notion of “transformable race” structured how early American texts portrayed the formation of racial identities. Examining figures such as Phillis Wheatley, Benjamin Franklin, Samson Occom, and Charles Brockden Brown, Transformable Race demonstrates how these authors used language emphasizing or questioning the potential malleability of physical features to explore the construction of racial categories.

THINK TANK; Uncovering an Interracial Literature of Love . . . and Racism

The New York Times
2004-04-17

Emily Eakin

The word miscegenation entered America’s bitter racial politics and the national lexicon by way of an ambitious hoax. On Christmas Day in 1863, an anonymous 72-page pamphlet appeared on newsstands around New York City. Titled “Miscegenation: The Theory of the Blending of the Races, Applied to the American White Man and Negro,” it had all the earmarks of a tract by radical abolitionists.

Arguing that “science has demonstrated that the intermarriage of diverse races is indispensable to a progressive humanity,” it triumphantly unveiled a new vocabulary to accompany America’s noble, interracial future. In addition to “miscegenation” (derived, the text explained, from the Latin words miscere, to mix, and genus, race), the neologisms included: “miscegen” (“an offspring of persons of different races”), “miscegenate” (“to mingle persons of different races”) and “melaleukation” (from the Greek words melas and leukos, for black and white, and used to mean the mingling of those races).

“We must become a yellow-skinned, black-haired people — in fine, we must become miscegens if we would attain the fullest results of civilization,” the pamphlet exhorted, pointing to the number of European nations composed “of many diverse bloods” that could claim extraordinary cultural achievements. Just consider the French, it suggested by way of example: “The two most brilliant writers it can boast of are the melaleukon, Dumas, and his son, a quadroon.”

Applauded by prominent abolitionists and denounced in Congress, the pamphlet made miscegenation a household word. But the work turned out to be a fraud, an ultimately unsuccessful scheme by two journalists at a pro-Democratic newspaper to turn voters against Abraham Lincoln, the Republican president who freed the slaves and was up for re-election in 1864.

”You have to imagine that an 1863 audience would take this as the worst possible thing,” said Werner Sollors, a professor of English and African-American studies at Harvard. ”If you read it from a 21st-century point of view, a lot of it seems common sensical.”

The pamphlet is just one of many startling textual artifacts Mr. Sollors included in a new book he edited, ”An Anthology of Interracial Literature: Black-White Contacts in the Old World and the New.” Published in February by New York University Press, the $28 anthology is the first in English devoted to work that Mr. Sollors says has typically been overlooked, an orphan literature belonging to no clear ethnic or national tradition…

Read the entire review here.

From Legend to History to Film: “The Free State of Jones”

Renegade South: Histories of Unconventional Southerners
2015-11-17

Vikki Bynum, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of History
Texas State University, San Marcos

The Free State of Jones, the movie

Between November 19–22, 2015, the Smithsonian Institute and National Endowment of the Humanities will host a history film forum at the National Museum of American History in Washington DC. The forum will include a panel discussion of the forthcoming movie, The Free State of Jones.

According to Executive Director and forum curator Christopher Wilson, “by looking at several brand new films that illuminate the Secrets of American History, we will consider the issues that arise when true stories of the past become the subject of our on-screen entertainment.” To this end, on November 21, distinguished historians David Blight and Steven Hahn will join Gary Ross, the movie’s director and screenplay author, to discuss the challenges of bringing The Free State of Jones to the Big Screen.

The forum will also address the ways in which “films reflect the social, political, and cultural concerns of the times in which they were made,” which speaks to the question posed on Twitter by Kevin Levin of Civil War Memory: “What has changed in our Civil War memory to make room for just such a movie?”

Good question. Given that tales about the Free State of Jones have been around since before the Civil War ended, why wasn’t a movie about these plain white farmers of Civil War Mississippi who armed themselves and fought against the Confederacy made before now?…

Read the entire article here.

European Others: Queering Ethnicity in Postnational Europe

University of Minnesota Press
2011
304 pages
6 b&w photos
5 1/2 x 8 1/2
Paper ISBN 978-0-8166-7016-1
Cloth ISBN 978-0-8166-7015-4

Fatima El-Tayeb, Professor of African-American Literature and Culture
University of California, San Diego

European Others offers an interrogation into the position of racialized communities in the European Union, arguing that the tension between a growing nonwhite, non-Christian population and insistent essentialist definitions of Europeanness produces new forms of identity and activism. Moving beyond disciplinary and national limits, Fatima El-Tayeb explores structures of resistance, tracing a Europeanization from below in which migrant and minority communities challenge the ideology of racelessness that places them firmly outside the community of citizens.

Using a notable variety of sources, from drag performances to feminist Muslim activism and Euro hip-hop, El-Tayeb draws on the largely ignored archive of vernacular culture central to resistance by minority youths to the exclusionary nationalism that casts them as threatening outcasts. At the same time, she reveals the continued effect of Europe’s suppressed colonial history on the representation of Muslim minorities as the illiberal Other of progressive Europe.

Presenting a sharp analysis of the challenges facing a united Europe seen by many as a model for twenty-first-century postnational societies, El-Tayeb combines theoretical influences from both sides of the Atlantic to lay bare how Europeans of color are integral to the continent’s past, present, and, inevitably, its future.

Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Theorizing Urban Minority Communities in Postnational Europe
• 1. “Stranger in My Own Country”: European Identities, Migration, and Diasporic Soundscapes
• 2. Dimensions of Diaspora: Women of Color Feminism, Black Europe, and Queer Memory Discourses
• 3. Secular Submissions: Muslim Europeans, Female Bodies, and Performative Politics
• 4. “Because It Is Our Stepfatherland”: Queering European Public Spaces
• Conclusion: “An Infinite and Undefinable Movement”
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

More Than Just Party Music: New Book ‘Remixing Reggaetón’ Mines the Complicated Racial Politics of the Genre

Remezcla
2015-10-21

Walter Thompson-Hernández
Los Angeles, California

For centuries, the complexities of racism in Latin America have been overshadowed by the false perception that high rates of racial mixture have created a racially democratic Latin American society. In her new book, Remixing Reggaetón: The Cultural Politics of Race in Puerto Rico, scholar Petra Rivera-Rideau challenges this idea through the prism of a genre of urban music that gained momentum in impoverished neighborhoods on the island and ultimately became a global pop phenomenon.Read the entire article here.

Positing that reggaetón challenges the racial democracy myth, Remixing Reggaetón focuses on leading Puerto Rican artists like Tego Calderon and Ivy Queen, who are shifting traditional views on gender, sexuality, and race through provocative, unapologetic performances. Using a historical and contemporary analysis, Rivera-Rideau situates the music against the backdrop of Puerto Rico’s legacy of anti-black racism, looking at how reggaetón both jump-starts the party and raises critical awareness.

We caught up with Rivera-Rideau to learn more about the motivations for her project, and how a sound popping off in the club is providing us with a language to talk about Afro-Latinidad…

Read the entire interview here.

W. E. B. Du Bois and The Souls of Black Folk

University of North Carolina Press
August 2015
288 pages
6.125 x 9.25, notes, index
Paper ISBN: 978-1-4696-2643-7

Stephanie J. Shaw, Professor of History
Ohio State University

In this book, Stephanie J. Shaw brings a new understanding to one of the great documents of American and black history. While most scholarly discussions of The Souls of Black Folk focus on the veils, the color line, double consciousness, or Booker T. Washington, Shaw reads Du Bois’ book as a profoundly nuanced interpretation of the souls of black Americans at the turn of the twentieth century.

Demonstrating the importance of the work as a sociohistorical study of black life in America through the turn of the twentieth century and offering new ways of thinking about many of the topics introduced in Souls, Shaw charts Du Bois’ successful appropriation of Hegelian idealism in order to add America, the nineteenth century, and black people to the historical narrative in Hegel’s philosophy of history. Shaw adopts Du Bois’ point of view to delve into the social, cultural, political, and intellectual milieus that helped to create The Souls of Black Folk.