Mixed Race Studies

Family Money: Property, Race, and Literature in the Nineteenth Century

Oxford University Press
November 2012
224 Pages
6-1/8 x 9-1/4 inches
Hardcover ISBN: 9780199897704

Jeffory A. Clymer, Professor of English
University of Kentucky

• Sophisticated interdisciplinary treatment of literature’s interaction with the law
• Dramatically revises scholarship on racial identity by emphasizing race’s connection to family and property rights
• Demonstrates that race was entwined with economics well beyond direct issue of slavery in the nineteenth century
• Nuanced, flexible, non-doctrinaire interpretations of both well-known and less familiar literary works

Family Money explores the histories of formerly enslaved women who tried to claim inheritances left to them by deceased owners, the household traumas of mixed-race slaves, post-Emancipation calls for reparations, and the economic fallout from anti-miscegenation marriage laws. Authors ranging from Nathaniel Hawthorne, Frank Webb, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Charles Chesnutt, to Lydia Maria Child recognized that intimate interracial relationships took myriad forms, often simultaneously-sexual, marital, coercive, familial, pleasurable, and painful. Their fiction confirms that the consequences of these relationships for nineteenth-century Americans meant thinking about more than the legal structure of racial identity. Who could count as family (and when), who could own property (and when), and how racial difference was imagined (and why) were emphatically bound together. Demonstrating that notions of race were entwined with economics well beyond the direct issue of slavery, Family Money reveals interracial sexuality to be a volatile mixture of emotion, economics, and law that had dramatic, long-term financial consequences.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. “This Most Illegal Family”: Sex, Slavery, and the Politics of Inheritance
• 2. Blood, Truth, and Consequences: Partus Sequitur Ventrem and the Problem of Legal Title
• 3. Plantation Heiress Fiction, Slavery, and the Properties of White Marriage
• 4. Reparations for Slavery and Lydia Maria Child’s Reconstruction of the Family
• 5. The Properties of Marriage in Chesnutt and Hopkins
• Coda “Race Feeling”
• Notes
• Index

Seeing Beauty, Sensing Race in Transnational Indonesia

University of Hawai‘i Press
March 2013
192 pages
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8248-3664-1
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8248-3736-5

L. Ayu Saraswati, Assistant Professor of Women’s Studies
University of Hawai‘i

In Indonesia, light skin color has been desirable throughout recorded history. Seeing Beauty, Sensing Race explores Indonesia’s changing beauty ideals and traces them to a number of influences: first to ninth-century India and some of the oldest surviving Indonesian literary works; then, a thousand years later, to the impact of Dutch colonialism and the wartime occupation of Japan; and finally, in the post-colonial period, to the popularity of American culture. The book shows how the transnational circulation of people, images, and ideas have shaped and shifted discourses and hierarchies of race, gender, skin color, and beauty in Indonesia. The author employs “affect” theories and feminist cultural studies as a lens through which to analyze a vast range of materials, including the Old Javanese epic poem Ramayana, archival materials, magazine advertisements, commercial products, and numerous interviews with Indonesian women.

The book offers a rich repertoire of analytical and theoretical tools that allow readers to rethink issues of race and gender in a global context and understand how feelings and emotions—Western constructs as well as Indian, Javanese, and Indonesian notions such as rasa and malu—contribute to and are constitutive of transnational and gendered processes of racialization. Saraswati argues that it is how emotions come to be attached to certain objects and how they circulate that shape the “emotionscape” of white beauty in Indonesia. Her ground-breaking work is a nuanced theoretical exploration of the ways in which representations of beauty and the emotions they embody travel geographically and help shape attitudes and beliefs toward race and gender in a transnational world.

Aisha Sabatini Sloan

Trop
2013-05-14

Zoe Ruiz, Saturday Editor for The Rumpus and staff member of FOUND

In The Fluency of Light, Aisha Sabatini Sloan’s essays read like meditations on themes of identity, race, and family. Her writing is sharp—one might say spare—and her descriptions, clear and beautiful. Her essays are a guide that help me navigate my way through my own writing. I study her essays in terms of their structure, I study her craft. Her essays sparked memories of my father, of my mother, and of growing up biracial in Los Angeles, memories that were once buried. Her work is a map to my memory.

I felt grateful and delighted to have the opportunity to talk to Aisha about her writing. I found her to be sensitive, smart, and sincere, and I appreciated that after I asked a question, she would take a long pause and then respond in a way that seemed thoughtful. We met at LACMA on a weekday afternoon; the day was dry and sunny, a typical LA day. We sat in the middle of the courtyard surrounded by people and art.

ZOE RUIZ: Why did you decide to write a book of essays and how did you decide to organize the essays by location?

AISHA SABATINI SLOAN: In college I started interviewing people. I did interviews in Los Angeles, Paris, London, New York, Northfield, Detroit, and eventually South Africa. The project had different manifestations of “doneness” over the years. I wrote a lot to make that project coalesce, including these essays that attempted to capture the cultural/emotional/historical backdrop in each city. But one day, I sat down at my desk, and the interview portion of the project just slumped out of my arms and onto the floor. I took a deep breath, and I weeded out the portraits of my interviewees just to see what was left, and it was the essays about place. I felt like I was seeing the framework of a coherent project for the first time. Maybe ever…

Read the entire interview here.

Afrofuturism’s Others

Tate Modern
Starr Auditorium
Bankside
London SE1 9TG
Saturday, 2013-06-15, 14:00-16:00 BST (Local Time)

Ellen Gallagher, Deluxe 2004–5 (detail) Mixed media, 60 frames, 38.9 x 32 cm each
Tate Photography © Tate

Ellen Gallagher’s work deconstructs received truths and weaves together propositional narratives, inhabiting spaces where the future collapses into the past, obsolescence into technology and image into text. These are spaces carved out by the cultural aesthetic of Afrofuturism.

In the context of Gallagher’s work, speakers will explore and complicate readings of Afrofuturism and its influence on contemporary artists’ practices, creating an intricate understanding of the genre and its evolutions. Speakers include Zoe Whitley (Independent Curator and panel co-organiser), Hazel V. Carby (Professor of African American Studies and Director of the Initiative on Race Gender and Globalisation at Yale University), Amna Malik (Lecturer in Art History and Theory at the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL), and Lili Reynaud-Dewar…

This event is related to the exhibition Ellen Gallagher: AxME

For more information, click here.

Casta Painting: Art, Race and Identity in Colonial Mexico (HI972)

University of Warwick
Coventry, England
Spring 2013

Rebecca Earle, Professor of History

This module explores the distinctive vision of colonial Mexico purveyed via the artistic genre known as the casta painting. Casta paintings depict the outcomes of different types of inter-ethnic mixing, and often come in series of 16, showing many different family groups. They are quite remarkable. Consider, for example, José de Alcíbar’s painting showing a family group consisting, we are told in the helpful label, of a Black father, and Indian mother and their ‘Wolf’ son:

Casta paintings can be seen as attempts at cataloguing the varied inhabitants of Spain’s colonial universe. They thus offer a visual taxonomy of colonial space. At the same time, they have been read as statements of local pride, and usually include a wealth of details about local customs and habits. In addition, they are rich and complex documents relating to the material culture of colonial Spanish America. In Alcíbar’s painting reproduced above we notice not only the domestic strife but also the beautiful china (which is endangered by the parental row) and food items such as the headless chicken. How are we to interpret and understand such images?

The module will introduce students to this artistic genre, and will explore different ways of interpreting these multi-valent images. Its educational aims, therefore, are to help students consider how to read artistic works produced in a colonial setting, how to use casta paintings as a body of source material, and how to explore the relationship between visual and textual depictions of colonial space…

For more information, click here.

The Art of Conversation: Eighteenth-Century Mexican Casta Painting

SHIFT: Graduate Journal of Visual and Material Culture
Issue 5, 2012
25 pages

Mey-Yen Moriuchi
Bryn Mawr College, Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania

Traditionally, casta paintings have been interpreted as an isolated colonial Mexican art form and examined within the social historical moment in which they emerged. Casta paintings visually represented the miscegenation of the Spanish, Indian and Black African populations that constituted the new world and embraced a diverse terminology to demarcate the land’s mixed races. Racial mixing challenged established social and racial categories, and casta paintings sought to stabilize issues of race, gender and social status that were present in colonial Mexico.

Concurrently, halfway across the world, another country’s artists were striving to find the visual vocabulary to represent its families, socio-economic class and genealogical lineage. I am referring to England and its eighteenth-century conversation pictures. Like casta paintings, English conversation pieces articulate beliefs about social and familial propriety. It is through the family unit and the presence of a child that a genealogical statement is made and an effigy is preserved for subsequent generations. Utilizing both invention and mimesis, artists of both genres emphasize costume and accessories in order to cater to particular stereotypes.

I read casta paintings as conversations like their European counterparts—both internal conversations among the figures within the frame, and external ones between the figures, the artist and the beholder. It is my position that both casta paintings and conversation pieces demonstrate a similar concern with the construction of a particular self-image in the midst of societies that were apprehensive about the varying conflicting notions of socio-familial and socio-racial categories.

Read the entire article here.

The Limits of Literary Realism: Of One Blood’s Post-Racial Fantasy by Pauline Hopkins

Callaloo
Volume 36, Number 1, Winter 2013
pages 158-177
DOI: 10.1353/cal.2013.0049

Melissa Asher Daniels, Assistant Professor of English
University of Alabama, Birmingham

Fiction is of great value to any people as a preserver of manners and customs—€”religious, political and social. It is a record of growth and development from generation to generation. No one will do this for us; we must ourselves develop the men and women who will faithfully portray the inmost thoughts and feelings of the Negro with all the fire and romance which lie dormant in our history, and, as yet, unrecognized by writers of the Anglo-Saxon race.

—Pauline Hopkins, Contending Forces

In the preface to her first novel, an excerpt of which appears above, Pauline Hopkins offers a critical assessment of the cultural stakes of fiction. According to the prolific writer and editor, fiction and history should serve mutual ends: the uplifting of the race. Pointing to the artistic and archival merits of both disciplines, Hopkins implores her fellow African Americans to take up the pen. As Hopkins seems to suggest, fiction’s primary power lies in its pedagogical potential. Fiction has the ability to educate literate African Americans about their rich and painful past, and this past can in turn enrich literary production, as it is replete with material that might easily be adapted for the sake of artistic development and political agitation. Addressing African Americans specifically, Hopkins indicates that it is the responsibility of the race to produce the writers who will narrate this past “with all the fire and romance” that it deserves. Calling for a fiction of mimetic detail and romantic affect, Hopkins echoes white writer Albion Tourgée’s claim, made some several years before, that realism alone cannot convey “the grand truth which makes up the continued story of every life” (411).

In Of One Blood; or, the Hidden Self (1902-1903), Hopkins advances her views on the limitations of literary realism and puts her ideas about the aesthetic virtues of romantic fiction into practice. Published serially in the Colored American Magazine, the episodic novel blends realism with romance to explore issues of ancestry, miscegenation, and tangled kinship. In this respect, the novel is generically and thematically akin to much of nineteenth-century African American writing. But in some fundamental ways, Of One Blood is one of the most intricate, if not bewildering texts. Indeed, critics often describe it as “unruly”—taking their cue from the title of an anthology edited by John Cullen Gruesser. To be sure, the novel draws from several romantic traditions—the gothic, adventure, utopian genres—€”and adopts a bifurcated plot line—one American, one African—€”that splits the novel into two separate narratives. The text begins in America, focusing on Reuel’s racial passing, and culminates in Africa with his discovery of a hidden city that doubles as a metaphor for his hidden identity. Together, both the American and African sequences form a “realistic” and “romantic” meditation on blood, genealogy, and fantasies of racial difference circulating in the United States imaginary during the nadir.

Critics, however, have a tendency to overlook the novel’s realism or to under assess its romantic value. Some, following Eric Sundquist’s cue, read the book as “patently escapist” (569); while others, such as Adenike Marie Davidson and Yogita Goyal, more recently, situate it within a constellation of black nationalist and Pan-Africanist discourses advocating emigrationism. My trouble with these readings is twofold: first, critical assessments that describe the novel as “escapist” come off sounding slightly condemnatory; such readings carry a pejorative connotation that seem to suggest that the novel evades pressing political concerns confronting black Americans at the turn of the century or that it disavows literary realism (which it does not); second, analyses that take the novel’s “back to Africa” plot at face value are too literal, neglecting the novel’s fantastic and allegorical qualities in the service of advancing emigrationist readings. And while the novel is clearly in conversation with such discourses, it is more interested in promoting black consciousness and cultural distinctiveness than in advocating actual repatriation. An imaginative take on the problem of American racism,…

A Conversation with Lawrence Hill

Callaloo
Volume 36, Number 1, Winter 2013
pages 5-26
DOI: 10.1353/cal.2013.0072

Winfried Siemerling, Professor of English
University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

When Paul Gilroy in The Black Atlantic offered an alternative account of modernity that placed transnational, black transatlantic lives and cultures at the center, Canada was not on his map. Slavery, however, did not stop at the borders first of New France and then the Canada’s until it was abolished in the British Empire in 1834, and the Underground Railroad made Canada an important site of black writing especially after the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. To be fair, the current surge of impressively strong African Canadian writing, heralded by some authors and anthologies since the 1960s and 1970s, was still gathering steam in the early 1990s.

Lawrence Hill, a novelist and nonfiction writer whose parents immigrated to Canada from the United States after WWII, has become one of the most important contributors to black culture here. His first novel, Some Great Thing (1992), was followed by Any Known Blood (1997), a multi-generational border-crossing novel in which the allusively named Langston Cane V explores his own mixed race and family. In the process, he uncovers a forebear’s slave narrative that recounts his involvement in John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry. Hill’s third novel, The Book of Negroes (2007), is a neo-slave narrative in its entirety that redraws the map of Gilroy’s black Atlantic. The protagonist Aminata, abducted in West Africa, flees first from slavery in South Carolina, then from Americans taking control of New York in 1783, and finally from Nova Scotia to return to Africa. She travels to Sierra Leone in 1792, and from there sails to London to support the abolition of the slave trade. In Hill’s transfiguration of these historical events, Aminata herself becomes a scribe of Guy Carleton’s “Book of Negroes,” recording the 1783 black exodus from New York. The use of the word “Negroes” in Hill’s title, although taken from that historical document, has proven controversial, and the novel appeared in the United States, New Zealand, and Australia as Someone Knows My Name. A breakthrough for Hill internationally, the novel won among other awards the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize.

Hill’s work offers United States readers an especially inviting entrance into contemporary black Canadian literature, not only because of his fiction’s frequent transborder thematic but also since his nonfiction—€”for example Black Berry, Sweet Juice: On Being Black and White in Canada—often speaks to issues of race from a United States-Canadian comparative perspective. The following interview conversation, though concentrating on the novels, seeks to provide an introduction to his entire career, including his formative travels in Africa. It is divided by short subtitles for orientation and ease of reading.

Early Writing and Travels in Africa

Siemerling:

In your last novel, The Book of Negroes (named after a historical document but published in the United States as Someone Knows My Name), you thematize the back-to-Africa journey of 1,200 people from Nova Scotia to Sierra Leone in 1792, and you talk about the fact that it is the first one historically. We also know that for many people still today it is a very emotional and important event, to “go back” to Africa.

Hill:

Yes, and many people of African American or African Canadian origin are seeking some sort of validation from or connection with the motherland. It’s a connection with one’s extended family, metaphorically. Of course, why should a typical African who is selling coffee in his street stand in Niamey, Niger, look at some kid from Toronto and say “hey, here’s my brother.” Sorry, that’s just not going to happen, especially with the way I look, which to many of them was white. Many African Americans and African Canadians have observed this kind of rocky reception that they received. When I went there, I wanted to be welcomed as one of the race and have my blackness celebrated. I wanted to be brought into the arms of my people, in a way. And it’s a natural thing for a twenty-two-year-old to…

The Place in Between: An Interview with Esi Edugyan

Callaloo
Volume 36, Number 1, Winter 2013
pages 46-51
DOI: 10.1353/cal.2013.0070

Maaza Mengiste

Esi Edugyan’s 2011 Man Booker Prize finalist, Half-Blood Blues, opens with the lines, “Chip told us not to go out. Said, don’t you boys tempt the devil.” It is 1940 in Nazi-occupied Paris and the “boys” include Afro-German, Jewish, and African-American members of a jazz band who have recently fled an increasingly dangerous Berlin. They are living under a terrifying regime, trapped as much by the color of their skin as the curfews and constant presence of the Gestapo. Told from the perspective of Sid, an African-American bassist who left pre-civil rights era Baltimore to escape racial segregation, it is Hiero, the incomparably gifted trumpeter player, who holds the band together. But Half-Blood Blues is more than a book about music. Edugyan illuminates one of the forgotten victims of Nazi Germany’s ruthless quest for a racially “pure” state: the “Rhineland Bastards,” mixed-race Germans whose stories were lost when they went into hiding, fled, or disappeared into concentration camps. Hiero is one of those “mischlings,” and through him, we begin to understand how encompassing a denied history can be. But perhaps more than anything, this is a story about friendship, betrayal, loyalty, and the possibility of redemption through music. To read Half-Blood Blues is to hear jazz and the ache of regret through prose. Garnering nominations and awards internationally, the book has kept Edugyan on a busy, hectic schedule. It was my honor to have the chance to catch her in a quiet moment to talk about her book.

Mengiste:

I want to just jump right in and talk a little bit about the book’s setting and its characters. Part of the story takes place in 1940 Paris and Nazi Germany. What was your motivation for writing about this moment in history? What got you really interested in it, and these characters?

Edugyan:

I think I’ve always had a fascination with that period of history. It was such an extreme time in terms of what was happening everywhere, but especially in Europe, in those initial months when the Third Reich came to power. It was very fascinating for me. I had been living in Germany for about a year and a half, over two separate periods. The first time I was there for about thirteen months, learning German and really trying to immerse myself in the culture. And being a black woman living in Southern Germany, I started to wonder about the history of black people in Europe in general, but specifically in Germany. And so I did some research and discovered the story about the Rhineland Bastards—or the so-called “Rhineland Bastards.” That’s how I came to focus on this period that I had done quite a bit of reading on over my lifetime. It was interesting to me.

Mengiste:

When you were researching these Rhineland Bastards, these children born to black soldiers and German mothers in the period following WWI, what guided your decision to make your characters musicians?

Edugyan:

I have a very strong interest in music and grew up with a very strong interest in music even though I was never able to play the instruments very well. So, I’d been working on a project about a different kind of musician, a classical musician. And when I was in Germany, I started putting that aside and turning my sights to jazz musicians. And this was, in large part, because I quite love jazz. I’m not a huge expert on it, I’ll admit that, but what I’ve heard I really like. But also because I knew that Germany had gone through a big jazz age in the twenties, you know, there was a big avant-garde time after the First World War. So then you start to think about “well, what would happen to all of those musicians once the Third Reich took power?” And, you know, it was something that I certainly didn’t know anything about, so I just had to do…

Ellen Gallagher at Tate Modern

The Telegraph
2013-05-02

Alastair Smart, Arts Editor of the Sunday Telegraph

In this solid retrospective, America’s Ellen Gallagher subtly mixes pretty abstraction with reference to her black heritage, says Alastair Smart.

I sometimes feel sorry for artists today. Not in the sense that I’d make a £2 monthly donation for their welfare or anything.

Rather that today’s artist is expected to produce work that’s not just visually striking but conceptually clever. Brains must match looks, and woe betide anyone whose art isn’t deemed “deep” enough to inspire reams of post-structuralist theory.

America’s Ellen Gallagher, now the subject of a Tate retrospective, negotiates this tightrope better than most. Drawing on her mixed-race heritage (with a father from the Cape Verde Islands), she infuses works of minimalist abstraction with subtle references to black history.

Watery Ecstatic, her ongoing series of watercolours and incised paper collages, features all manner of delicately-rendered marine life: from eels, jellyfish and seaweed to fantastical sea monsters. Their intricacy recalls that of old whalers’ scrimshaw – with an unexpected twist…

Read the entire review here.