Mixed Race Studies

slippery positions

The State
2013-05-17

Tiana Reid
Columbia University

As a self-defined Black, lesbian, mother, warrior poet, Audre Lorde is the model representative for intersectionality. As such, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches has become a ubiquitous text in undergraduate courses, for the theory and practice of intersectionality; a way to look at what women’s studies scholar Leslie McCall calls “the relationships among multiple dimensions and modalities of social relationships and subject formations.” Put crudely, intersectionality is an idea used to explain the links between positions or configurations of oppression. What’s more, as a Caribbean-American (her parents were born in Barbados and Carriacou), we could say Lorde straddled two worlds—or perhaps none at all.

Lorde’s poetry as poetry and not as purely a feminist rubric, however, has been written about far less. In Warrior Poet: A Biography of Audre Lorde, writer and scholar Alexis De Veaux describes the genesis of the poem “Sahara,” published in Lorde’s 1978 book of poems, The Black Unicorn, in a moment while Lorde was on a plane in 1977 that passed over the Sahara desert after making a stop in Madrid to refuel. The poet, flying from New York City, was on her way to Lagos, Nigeria for FESTAC, the Second World African Festival of Arts and Culture. Lorde’s trip to Nigeria is meaningful not simply because the plane ride—the birds-eye view of the vastness of the Sahara—inspired the homonymous poem. By 1977, Nigeria had emerged as what De Veaux calls the “richest black-ruled nation” in Africa because of oil wealth. Bringing together Black activists, academics, writers, artists and spectators, FESTAC acted as a transnational spectacle establishing new political, literary and racial grounds.

What’s most significant here is that despite the literal and symbolic coming together of a black diasporic vision in the name of arts and culture, Lorde stayed on the fringes and felt separate from some sense of a monolithic group identity, an identity based seemingly solely on race—and not gender or sexuality. Lorde’s participation and view on FESTAC is mostly shrouded in mystery but what we do have is the poem “Sahara.” I read “Sahara” through Lorde’s trip to FESTAC and thus, envision landscapes of diaspora as heterogeneous and transformative. Her hesitation toward FESTAC parallels the poem’s fluctuating hesitation toward the Sahara desert. I say hesitation rather than outright fear despite the all-encompassing terror that can be gleaned from Lorde’s approach to the masculine desert: “grief of sand… male sand / terrifying sand.” The hesitation emerges from the heterogeneous incarnations sand is allowed to take. Rocks, what sand is made of, take millions and millions of years to become sand, meaning the image of a desert can’t be separated from its process, from its formation through finely divided particles, a prolonged breaking down…

Read the entire article here.

Self-Writing, Literary Traditions, and Post-Emancipation Identity: The Case of Mary Seacole

Biography
Volume 23, Number 2, Spring 2000
pages 309-331
DOI: 10.1353/bio.2000.0009

Evelyn J. Hawthorne, Professor of English
Howard University, Washington, D.C.

“ . . . unless I am allowed to tell the story of my life in my own way, I cannot tell it at all.”

Written at the height of the Victorian period, The Wonderful Adventures of Mary Seacole in Many Lands (1857) is a paradigmatic black woman’s text of self-authoring that has been lauded as “one of the most readable and rewarding black women’s autobiographies in the nineteenth century” (Andrews, Introduction xxviii). Representing a locus classicus of culturally sanctioned feminine self-reliance, it was written and published in England by Mary Jane Grant Seacole (1805-1881), a free-born Jamaican who achieved fame for her work as a nurse during the Crimean War, meriting several medals. Transgressing gender, race, and class roles as an adventuring businesswoman in Jamaica, London, Haiti, New Granada, and Cuba, and as a female who, undaunted by the horrors of the battlefield, deployed herself to the Crimean War, this heroine is extraordinary by any standard. But in addition to its biographical importance, this work is an invaluable means of espying how the free(d) female subject fashioned her identity, from a socially, racially, and economically disempowered position in the post-Emancipation historical environment. Wonderful Adventures is a cultural text that reveals how Seacole, a woman of color, exploited critical historical moments to construct a new social identity. At the same time, though, Seacole’s independence raises questions about the role of the dominant power in the free(d) subject’s search for equality and social rights, for Seacole seems to have advanced through her own machinations, rather than through the inconsistent British script of freedom offered to the colonial, racial subject.

I will argue that Seacole’s textual and rhetorical strategies encode contestatory practices that enable her to author herself and to critique and unsettle Victorian ideology. By manipulating genre and linguistic conventions, Seacole promotes a double-voicedness that allows her to challenge “disciplining” systems (in Foucault’s sense of non-coercion)—practices which mark her as a resisting subject. By foregrounding cultural issues of race and gender, thus forcing them into higher public visibility, Seacole also contends against the contradictory and conflictual text of freedom. Though seemingly ideologically compliant, then, the work’s signifying strategies produce a text that contests authority while textualizing the authenticity of difference and hybrid subjectivity.

When the location of the center shifts from Jamaica to England, Seacole finds this new site of difference less predictable than the colonial one. The rejection Seacole encountered when she applied to serve as a nurse under Florence Nightingale in the Crimean War suggests how confusing the faces of freedom were for the post-Emancipation subject in nineteenth-century Britain. In Jamaica, Seacole had learned medicine from British surgeons. Her work there and in Panama, especially during cholera and yellow fever epidemics, had earned her a reputation as a nurse, and the title of “yellow doctress.” When she became aware of the desperate conditions at the Crimean warfront — the newspapers were full of stories about untended soldiers dying more from diseases and lack of care and sanitation than from war wounds — a self-assured Seacole traveled to England to volunteer, carrying letters of recommendation from well-ranking surgeons. But despite her training and her letters of support, both the Secretary of War and the Office of Quatermaster-General ignored her. Seacole responded by getting to the Crimea on her own. Forming a corporation with an old family friend, she financed her own expedition to set up there as a “sutler.” Sailing first from England to Constantinople with her warehouse of provisions, she then made her way to Balaclava. At a place near the battlefield, she spent the considerable sum of eight hundred pounds to erect her store, the “British Hotel.” Since she had also…

The United States of the United Races: A Utopian History of Racial Mixing

New York University Press
April 2013
288 pages
22 halftones
Cloth ISBN: 9780814772492
Paper ISBN: 9780814772508

Greg Carter, Associate Professor of History
University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee

Barack Obama’s historic presidency has re-inserted mixed race into the national conversation. While the troubled and pejorative history of racial amalgamation throughout U.S. history is a familiar story, The United States of the United Races reconsiders an understudied optimist tradition, one which has praised mixture as a means to create a new people, bring equality to all, and fulfill an American destiny. In this genealogy, Greg Carter re-envisions racial mixture as a vehicle for pride and a way for citizens to examine mixed America as a better America.

Tracing the centuries-long conversation that began with Hector St. John de Crevecoeur’s Letters of an American Farmer in the 1780s through to the Mulitracial Movement of the 1990s and the debates surrounding racial categories on the U.S. Census in the twenty-first century, Greg Carter explores a broad range of documents and moments, unearthing a new narrative that locates hope in racial mixture. Carter traces the reception of the concept as it has evolved over the years, from and decade to decade and century to century, wherein even minor changes in individual attitudes have paved the way for major changes in public response. The United States of the United Races sweeps away an ugly element of U.S. history, replacing it with a new understanding of race in America.

Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Thomas Jefferson’s Challengers
• 2. Wendell Phillips, Unapologetic Abolitionist, Unreformed Amalgamationist
• 3. Plessy v. Racism
• 4. The Color Line, the Melting Pot, and the Stomach
• 5. Say It Loud, I’m One Drop and I’m Proud
• 6. The End of Race as We Know It
• 7. Praising Ambiguity, Preferring Certainty
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author

Introduction

In April 2010, the White House publicized Barack Obama’s self-identification on his U.S. census form. He marked one box “Black, African Am., or Negro,” settling one of the most prevalent issues during his 2008 presidential campaign: his racial identity. This choice resounded with the monoracial ways of thinking so prevalent throughout U.S. history. People who believed he was only black because he looked like a black person or because many others (society) believed so or because of the historical prevalence of the one-drop rule received confirmation of that belief. The mainstream media had been calling him the black president for over a year, so they received confirmation of this moniker.

Many people who had followed the adoption of multiple checking on the census found his choice surprising. Surely, as president, he would be aware of the ability to choose more than one race. To pick one alone went against everything activists wanting to reform the government’s system of racial categorization had worked for in the 1990s. Many found it surprising that the man who had called himself “the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas” would choose one race. After all, he had used this construction far more times than he had called himself black, giving the impression that he embraced his mixture along with identifying as black. That snippet, along with images of his diverse family, had been part of what endeared him to mixed-race supporters. Similarly, his campaign’s deployment of his white relatives built sympathy with white voters. Some people argued that he had failed to indicate what he “was” by choosing one race. He made the diverse backgrounds in his immediate family a footnote. But, recalling Maria P. P. Root’s “A Bill of Rights for Racially Mixed People,” a pillar of contemporary thought on mixed race, they had to respect his prerogative. He had the right to identify himself differently than the way strangers expected him to identify.

Three lessons emerged from this episode: How one talks about oneself can be different from how one identifies from day to day. How one identifies from day to day can be different from how one fills out forms. And on a form with political repercussions, such as the census, one may choose a political statement different from both how one talks and how one identifies. Obama had always been a political creature; he never did anything for simple reasons. By the regulations, the administration could have withheld the information for seventy-two years. Instead, it became a small yet notable news piece in real time. Publicizing his participation in the census could motivate other minorities (beyond those who knew the history of multiple checking) to do so as well. More likely, he was thinking about the 2012 election. His response to the 2010 census could influence voters later on. If the number of those who would have hurt feelings over a singular answer was less than those who would find offense in a multiple answer, then a singular answer was the best to give. Even though mixed-race Americans took great pride in Obama’s ascendance, they were a small faction to satisfy.

Then why did Obama take so much care to cast himself as a young, mixed-race hope for the future? Because even though the number of people who identify as mixed race is small, they hold immense figural power for the nation as symbols of progress, equality, and utopia, themes he wanted to associate with his campaign. In other words, he piggybacked onto positive notions about racially mixed people to improve his symbolic power. At the same time, he nurtured the stable, concrete, and accessible identity that people so used to monoracial thought could embrace, not the ambiguous one that challenged everyone.

Interpretation of current events such as this can disentangle the complexities we encounter here and now. However, while historical analysis always enriches the understanding of current events, writing history about current events presents a pitfall: they are moving targets resisting our attempts to focus on them. Similarly, following figures such as Obama lures us into announcing sea changes in racial conditions. Americans of all walks like indicators of progress. But addressing racial inequality calls for more than well-wishing. As a guiding principle, we should remember to appreciate that these are stories that have no resolution, much like the story of racialization in general. The meanings of mixture, the language we use to describe it, and its cast of characters have always been in flux.

Even before colonial Virginia established the first anti-intermarriage laws in 1691, efforts to stabilize racial identity had been instrumental in securing property, defending slavery, and maintaining segregation. The study of interracial intimacy has labeled racially mixed people either pollutants to society or the last hope for their inferior parent groups. To this day, many Americans label each other monoracially, interracial marriage remains a rarity, and group identities work best when easy to comprehend. However, at the same time that many worked to make racial categorization rigid, a few have defended racial mixing as a boon for the nation. Ever since English explorer John Smith told the story of the Indian princess Pocahontas saving his life in 1608 (a founding myth of the United States), some have considered racial mixing a positive. These voices were often privileged with access to outlets. Many were men, and many were white. This study reconsiders the understudied optimist tradition that has disavowed mixing as a means to uplift a particular racial group or a means to do away with race altogether. Instead, this group of vanguards has praised mixture as a means to create a new people, to bring equality to all, and to fulfill an American destiny. Historians of race have passed over this position, but my narrative shows that contemporary fascination with racially mixed figures has historical roots in how past Americans have imagined what radical abolitionist Wendell Phillips first called “The United States of the United Races.”…

Read the entire Introduction here.

Alien Citizen: Review

www.ReviewPlays.com
ALIEN CITIZEN
Asylum Lab
2013-05-13

Jose Ruiz

Elizabeth Liang steps on the solo stage to tell the world what it’s like to be a TCK (Third Culture Kid).  These are people who, as children, traveled the globe intermittently because their parents were sent to diplomatic, business or military assignments and the family had to constantly adjust to new schools, new friends, new customs and new languages.  Her father worked for a multi-national company and was sent to several different countries during her formative years.

That in itself is fodder for a fascinating story of growing up with indeterminate roots.  When the story comes from Elizabeth Liang, whose ethnic heritage spans three continents, from her paternal roots in China, to her birth roots in Central America, to her mother’s varied European background, it becomes more than just a story…

Read the entire review here.

‘War Baby’ is something to see, if you can let go

The Chicago Tribune
2013-05-08

Lori Waxman, Instructor of Art History, Theory and Criticism
School of the Art Institute of Chicago

It was the Hello Kitty tepee that did it for me.

Some exhibitions can be so challenging that it takes a particularly unexpected artwork for the viewer to finally let go and get into the swing of things. “War Baby/Love Child: Mixed Race Asian American Art,” currently up at the DePaul Art Museum and featuring work by a dozen-and-a-half artists, is one such show. A riotously colored digital print by Debra Yepa-Pappan featuring a purple-haired Native American woman, lifted from an iconic Edward S. Curtis photograph and set against a background of space-age tepees, one of them marked with the equally iconic and silent face of everybody’s favorite Japanese cat, is one such artwork.

Hilarious and weird and crazily of its time — i.e., now — Yepa-Pappan’s collage lifted my thoughts up and over the various stumbling blocks that “War Baby/Love Child” presents. Curated by Laura Kina, an artist and DePaul professor, and Wei Ming Dariotis, a professor of Asian-American Studies at San Francisco State University, the cogitative but overdetermined exhibition sets up a Catch-22. It wants to recognize the complex realities of a fast-growing segment of the American population — the 2.6 million who identify as Asian plus one or more other races — and to prove how far beyond stereotype those people go. And yet, two gargantuan cliches give their name to the exhibition itself.

The term “war babies” generally refers to the children of Asian or Pacific Islander women and the U.S. soldiers who were stationed in their home countries during World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War. “Love children” were born of the free love of a post-civil rights and flower-child era, and, as listed in the extensive exhibition catalog, their makeup includes Eurasians and Hapas (Mixed White Asians), Mixed Bloods (Mixed Asian Native Americans), Blasians (Mixed Black Asians) and Mestizaje (Mixed Latino Asians).

“War Baby/Love Child” thus finds itself in the counterintuitive position of wanting to replace its own title with a dozen less-loaded ones. Wall labels are one tool, and the ones here list an astonishing array of mixed identities as well as direct quotes from most of the artists, many of whom speak about personal experiences growing up amid racial presumption…

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HIST 574–Modern U.S. History: Miscegenation, Mixed Race, and Interracial Relationships

Simmons College, Boston, Massachusetts
Summer 2013

Ulli Ryder, Lecturer of History and Africana Studies

This class will explore the conditions for and consequences of crossing racial boundaries in the United States. It will take a multidisciplinary approach, utilizing historical scholarship, literature, legal scholarship, and communication studies, along with several feature and documentary film treatments of the subject. Students will gain a deeper understanding of the ways race has been socially constructed; the connections between race and power in the U.S.; and the possibilities of a non-racist future.

FILM: Mixed-Race People Tell Their Stories in ‘Hafu’

The Rafu Shimpo: Los Angeles Japanese Daily News
2013-05-03

J.K. Yamamoto, Rafu Staff Writer

“Hafu,” a new documentary about mixed-race people in Japan, will be screened Wednesday, May 8, at 7:30 p.m. at the Japanese American National Museum, First and Central in Little Tokyo, as part of the 29th L.A. Asian Pacific Film Fest.

Directed by Lara Perez Takagi and Megumi Nishikura, the film had its Los Angeles premiere on April 5 at JANM during the Hapa Japan Conference. The Bay Area premiere was on April 7 at UC Berkeley.

The title, the Japanese pronunciation of “half,” is the most common term in Japan for people who are half Japanese. It is similar to the Hawaiian word “hapa,” which originally meant someone half Native Hawaiian and half Caucasian.

The film focuses on five stories that reflect the diversity of the Hafu experience:…

…At the L.A. premiere, Koji Sakai of JANM noted the connections between “Hafu” and the museum’s ongoing exhibition “Visible & Invisible: A Hapa Japanese American History”: “In a lot of ways the community, or people in general, think of Hapa as a new phenomenon, but in reality Hapas have been there from the very beginning in our community, and it’s time we acknowledge and support that.”

Duncan Ryuken Williams, co-director of the USC Center for Japanese Religions and Cultures, convener of Hapa Japan 2013, and co-curator of “Visible & Invisible,” had high praise for “Hafu”: “It’s a really thoughtful and inspirational film … The film directors did a great job of picking these five individuals. I think you’ll agree they represent the spectrum, the range of possible people in this Hafu experience … I’ve followed the making of this film and I know it’s a major labor of love for the two film directors. They put a lot into making this happen with the help of dozens of people who volunteered their time, most of whom were Hafu individuals.”…

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“Black No More”?: Walter White, Hydroquinone, and the “Negro Problem”

American Studies
Volume 47, Number 1 (Spring 2006)
pages 5-30

Eric Porter, Professor of American Studies
University of California, Santa Cruz

In an August 1949 Look magazine article—”Has Science Conquered the Color Line?”—NAACP Executive Secretary Walter White pondered the social implications of monobenzyl ether of hydroquinone, an antioxidant used in rubber and plastics manufacturing that had recently been found to remove melanin from human skin. Government investigators had publicly identified this effect in 1940, after investigating complaints by black and Mexican workers at a Texas tannery who developed pale patches of skin on their hands, arms and torsos because of the presence of hydroquinone in their protective gloves. Hydroquinone would eventually be used medicinally to treat severe forms of vitiligo (a disease involving the progressive loss of melanin which makes one’s skin appear mottled) by removing the remaining melanin from patients’ skin, thus evening out their skin tone. It has also been used as a fading compound to treat different kinds of localized hyper-pigmentations and is still found in often-dangerous skin lightening cosmetic products sold to people with dark complexions across the globe.

In 1949, however, the ultimate medical, cosmetic, and social impacts of hydroquinone were still unknown. White wrote his article after traveling to Chicago to meet with scientists engaged in research on the substance. Afterwards, he took it upon himself to speculate on its future in ways that echoed George Schuyler’s 1931 prototypical black science fiction novel Black No More, in which Dr. Junius Crookman, a fictional Harlem physician, devises a way to induce vitiligo “at will” and “solve the American race problem” by turning dark skins pale. Unfortunately for White, his speculations, which might be described as a bad piece of journalism that degenerated into an involuntary piece of science fiction, rendered him a lightning rod for criticism. For the civil rights leader seemed to suggest that hydroquinone provided a solution to the problems of segregation, racism, and colonialism in the post-World War II world by enabling non-white peoples to bleach their skins.

White’s article baffled his contemporaries. Not only did he seem to be advocating an absurd, demeaning, and physically damaging political strategy; some were also struck by the irony that the comments about hydroquinone came from the blond-haired, blue-eyed Executive Secretary of the NAACP. Early in his tenure with the organization, White had been sent to the South to gather information for the organization’s anti-lynching crusade and did so, risking his life in the process, by passing as a white traveling salesman. His career as a “race man” and his leadership of the NAACP since 1931 both affirmed as well as called into question definitions of racial identity, which in turn prompted questions about his role at the organization’s helm…

…What I will argue, however, is that, whatever White’s professional motivations, the ideas embedded in “Has Science Conquered the Color Line?” and especially in a somewhat longer, unpublished version of the piece, the resonances of these ideas with other bits of White’s public commentary, and responses to the Look article by black leaders and lay people alike—all give insight into some of the political and moral dilemmas revolving around race, science, and civil and human rights during the immediate postwar period. Moreover, they illustrate how a scientific, political, and moral imperative to abandon racial thinking had entered African American political and popular discourse by the end of the 1940s. This imperative emanated from decades of research seeking to debunk race as a biological category, and it was given new immediacy by both the horrors of Nazi racial science put into practice and a post-Hiroshima and Nagasaki faith in science, technology, and rational thought as vehicles by which to overcome the problems of the world (the racist and genocidal applications of the bombing notwithstanding). The notion that race was irrational and irrelevant was increasingly prominent, albeit in complicated ways, through the 1940s within a broader, transnational context of academic writing, journalistic reportage, and the rhetoric of statecraft. But it had a particular and no less complicated resonance among African Americans during the immediate post-World War II era.

White’s article and the controversies it elicited demonstrate how dilemmas around race and rights, conditioned by scientific research on race, were, in fact, significant components of black racial formations at mid-century. The imperative to move beyond race affected other political and personal choices—for example, national versus international affiliation, the primacy of race or class in social analysis, integrationist versus nationalist civil rights agendas, race consciousness versus color blindness in personal deportment and interpersonal relations—facing African Americans. And it caused people to ponder the usefulness of the sense of black virtue that constituted their own understanding of what it meant to be human.

This essay moves next to an assessment of “Has Science Conquered the Color Line?” and issues that arose as White, a middle-class “race man” capable of passing as white, tried to debunk the idea that race had a biological basis while maintaining a link to his racial community. The investigation continues by examining the controversy surrounding White’s piece, which demonstrates how political leaders and lay people alike addressed the limitations and value in racial affiliation and racial transcendence. In the process, it explores some of the conceptual and political questions about race, science, and rights that emerged as black leaders like White contemplated the Faustian bargain of linking domestic civil rights struggles to U.S. foreign policy goals and a concomitant ethos of color blindness. The conclusion revisits the idea that engagements with scientific accounts of race were significant to African American racial formations at mid-century, and it ponders the implications of these engagements in light of scholarly claims about the importance of black political cultures and racial discourses during this period…

Read the entire article here.

Violent Liaisons: Historical Crossings and the Negotiation of Sex, Sexuality, and Race in The Book of Night Women and The True History of Paradise

small axe: a caribbean journal of criticism
Volume 16,Number 2, 38 (2012)
pages 43-59
DOI: 10.1215/07990537-1665668

Sam Vásquez, Associate Professor of English
Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire

Increased criticism and representations of violence in contemporary Jamaica often account for these tensions by citing poverty or gang and political rivalries in the post-independence era. However, both Marlon James’s The Book of Night Women (2009) and Margaret Cezair-Thompson’s The True History of Paradise (1999) take these explorations a step further, specifically examining women’s responses to violence and reminding readers that present-day sexual violence creates conditions of entrapment, hostility, and lawlessness reminiscent of the barbarities of slavery and colonialism. In so doing, the authors highlight the ways historical gender and racial stereotypes inform contemporary understandings of Caribbean gender and sexuality. Anchoring this discussion in recent theories about sex and sexuality and specifically examining mixed-race and white Caribbean women, Sam Vásquez argues that both authors use neo–slave narrative tropes to simultaneously problematize acts of violence against these individuals and demonstrate how women engaged and even utilized limiting colonial paradigms.

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BeDevil: Colonialism and the children of miscegenation

Journal of International Communication
Volume 19,  Issue 1, 2013
Special Issue: South-North conversations
pages 43-58
DOI: 10.1080/13216597.2012.754363

Wajiha Raza Rizvi
Hashmi Media Institute, Karachi, Pakistan

BeDevil (1993) addresses the marginalization of Aboriginal Australians in the events, symbolism, and media hype surrounding the bicentenary of European settlement in Australia in 1988. Tracey Moffatt challenges the racial stereotypes by gearing a political process of reform and self-recognition though her postmodernist ‘identity search’-driven work aiming at appropriation of hegemonic spectacle. BeDevil disrupts the hegemony of the pure original canon that excluded Aboriginal Australians from the mainstream. This sort of exclusion practice is a known phenomenon worldwide, more so happens in the postcolonial Third World countries like Pakistan and India as both exclude their ethnic minorities from the mainstream media. The paper echos back to Moffatt’s stories of bedeviling experiences with tales of similar issues around race, gender, and normality from Islamic Republic of Pakistan, wherein post-Independence immigrants are constantly struggling for appropriation and redefinition of their identities. The Pakistan born children of miscegenation are considered immigrants by descent despite the facts concerning Islamic origins, two nations’ theory, migration, and over 60 years residency. The paper compares the mutually bedeviling experiences of ‘othering’ and a struggle with the notions of shared social conscience and histories between children of miscegenation in Australia and Pakistan in the context of the Australian trilogy.

Read or purchase the article here.