Mixed Race Studies

Nharas and Morenas Horras: A Luso-African Model for the Social History of the Spanish Caribbean, c. 1570-1640

Journal of Early Modern History
Volume 14, Issue 1 (2010)
pages 119-150
DOI: 10.1163/138537810X12632734397061

David Wheat, Assistant Professor of History
Michigan State University

Drawing on little-used archival materials held in Seville’s Archive of the Indies and ecclesiastical records from the Cathedral of Havana, this article argues that free African and African-descended women participated in Spain’s colonization of the Caribbean to a degree that has not been fully recognized. Regularly described as vecinas (heads of household) and as spouses to Iberian men in key port cities, free women of color played active roles in the formation and maintenance of Spanish Caribbean society during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, not as peripheral or marginalized figures, but as non-elite insiders who pursued their own best interests and those of their families and associates.

City’s black founding father

Decator Daily
Decatur, Alabama
2010-04-19

Deangelo McDaniel, Staff Writer

Minister, historian reconstructing life of ex-slave who became successful farmer

First in a two-part series

The Rev. Wylheme Ragland would like to spend one day with Robert Murphy.

So would local historian Peggy Allen Towns.

“Just one day,” Ragland said emphatically. “Just one day.”

Murphy, who died June 8, 1918, is one of Decatur’s black founding fathers, Towns and Ragland proclaim.

The former slave is buried in the Cowan section of Decatur City Cemetery and so are many of the secrets that would reveal the River City’s pre-Civil War and Reconstruction history.

Ragland, a United Methodist pastor at the church where Murphy was a trustee, and Towns are determined to reconstruct his life.

Doing so, they say, would fill significant gaps in Decatur’s history and dispel myths about the role of blacks and what happened here in 1864…

…But to understand and appreciate Murphy’s journey you have to go back to Virginia in 1795 when Mary, a slave, was born to the Kimble family.

Mary was his mother.

Traveling from Virginia through North Carolina, she arrived in the Tennessee Valley with the Kimble clan before 1820.

The slave-owning family purchased land in Trinity that extended to the Tennessee River.

In 1831, Murphy was born to Mary and his mother’s owner.

The Kimble family intermarried with the Murphys, who also owned a plantation on the Tennessee River. At some point before the Civil War, Mary and her son became the property of James Murphy

“Where was your home before and during the Civil War?” a government lawyer asked Murphy in 1906.

“About six miles from Decatur,” Murphy answered. “I belonged to James Murphy.”

As was the case for some mulatto (mixed-race) slaves, Murphy had extraordinary privileges for a slave, especially in 1864 when the Union Army fortified Decatur. He told the government he was able to travel between Decatur and Athens where his wife, Harriett, lived.

“My master did not care where I went so long as I did not go to be a soldier,” Murphy said in 1906…

Read the entire article here.

“Our Ancestors came from many Bloods”. Gendered Narrations of a Hybrid Nation

Lusotopie
Volume 12, Issue 1 (2005)
pages 217-232
DOI: 10.1163/176830805774719728

Isabel P.B. Fêo Rodrigues, Professor of Anthropology
University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth

Narratives of mixed ancestry in Cape Verde use gender as common denominator in the weaving of a Creole nation. These narratives may hide tensions, conflicts, and adversities, but they also contain elements of fusion and national cohesion. They are and have been gendered narratives, partial and selective of the elements of fusion substantiating and sustaining a Cape Verdean identity vis-à-vis the multiple symbolic and material challenges faced by this young post-colonial nation-state. In them, Cape Verde is portrayed as an exceptional African case with boundaries carved by the ocean, free from ethnic conflict, and without a pre-colonial past through which to filter present realities.

Black Czech writer Zmeškal won EU Prize for Literature in 2011

Afro-Europe
2012-04-08

Czech writer Tomáš Zmeškal, who was born as the son of a Congolese father and a Czech mother in Prague, won the European Union Prize for Literature in 2011 for his debut novel “Love Letter in Cuneiform Script” (Milostný Dopis Klínovým Písmem) set in post-war Czechoslovakia through the collapse of communism.

He was one of 12 winners of the prize, which recognizes the best new or emerging authors in the European Union.

Zmeškal’s novel “Životopis černobílého jehněte”  (“The Biography of the Black and White Lamb”) of 2009, written long before his debut was published, is the first novel in Czech language dealing with the experience of Africans in the communist countries in Eastern Europe. It is the childhood and youth story of twins, who do not know their ethnically mixed parents and grow in their grandmother’s house. In spite of her attempts to protect them, they suffer from the racism and hostility that surrounds them. Which is all the more absurd since the society, in which they live, officially encourages internationalist attitudes and an understanding among nations…

Read the entire article here.

Eurasian Women as Tawa’if Singers and Recording Artists: Entertainment and Identity-making in Colonial India

African and Asian Studies
Volume 8, Issue 3 (2009)
pages 268-287
DOI: 10.1163/156921009X458118

Shweta Sachdeva Jha, Assistant Professor of English
Miranda House, University College for Women, University of Delhi

Scholarship on Eurasians has often addressed issues of migration, collective identity and debates around home. Women performers however do not find themselves discussed in these histories of Eurasian peoples in India. This paper aims to account for individual agency in shaping one’s identity within the meta-narratives of collective identity of migrant peoples. I focus on two Eurasian women entertainers in the colonial cities of Benares and Calcutta who chose to forget their mixed-race past to fashion successful careers using new identities as tawa’if singers and actors in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This, I shall argue, was possible within the wider context of emergent colonial modernities in colonial India. By choosing micro-level case histories of these celebrity entertainers, I want to argue for including popular culture as an arena of identity-making within histories of migration and gender. To engage with popular culture, I shall extend our perception of historical ‘archive’ to include a varied set of materials such as biographical anecdotes, discographies, songbooks, and address the fields of poetry, music and history. Through this project I hope to rethink ideas of gender, culture and agency within wider debates of migration and identity-making.

Racial Classification in Assisted Reproduction

Yale Law Journal
Volume 118, Issue 8 (June 2009)
pages 1844-1898

Dov Fox, Academic Law Research Fellow
Georgetown University Law Center

This Note considers the moral status of practices that facilitate parental selection of sperm donors according to race. Arguments about intentions and consequences cannot convincingly explain the race-conscious design of donor catalogs. This prompts us to examine the expressive dimension of wrongful discrimination. Even practices marked by innocent motives and benign effects can give reason for pause when they needlessly entrench divisive assumptions about how people of a particular race think or act. Race-based differentiation in voting ballots, dating websites, and donor catalogs helps us to tease out the subtle normative tensions that racial preferences occasion in the contexts of citizenship, romance, and reproduction. These reflections suggest that racially salient forms of donor disclosure are pernicious social practices, which, while operating beyond the reach of the law, ought to be condemned as bad policy. The Note concludes by developing reproductive choice-structuring mechanisms that aim to balance respect for intimacy, autonomy, and expressions of racial identity with responsibility to work against conditions that divide us.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• I. Race and reproduction
  • A. Free Market Sperm Donation
  • B. Race-Conscious Donor Catalogs
• II. the expressive dimension of racial discrimination
  • A. Discriminatory Intent and Discriminatory Effects
  • B. Discriminatory Expression
• III. the moral logic of donor classification
  • A. The Social Meaning of Reproducing Race
  • B. The Architecture of Reproductive Choice
• Conclusion

Introduction

Few choices matter more to us than those we make about the person with whom we will share a life or start a family. When having children involves assisted reproduction, selecting an egg or sperm donor occasions similar gravity. Such decisions typically bring to bear a patchwork of preferences about the particular physique, disposition, or values we find desirable in a romantic or procreative partner. To many, race matters. Just as some people in the search for companionship are looking for a significant other who shares their racial background, many of those who wish to become parents would prefer a child whose racial features resemble their own.

To help those who use donor insemination have a child of a particular race, sperm banks routinely catalog sperm donors on racial grounds. Twenty-three of the twenty-eight sperm banks operating in the United States provide aspiring parents with information about donor skin color, and the largest banks organize sperm donor directories into discrete sections on the basis of race. This practice of race-conscious donor classification invites us to rethink those racial preferences we commonly take for granted within intimate spheres of association. Insofar as race tends to reproduce itself within the family unit, race-conscious donor decisionmaking serves as a promising point of departure from which to ask whether and how our multiracial democracy should seek to preserve or diminish our collective self-identification with racial solidarities.

This Note proceeds in three parts. Part I describes the practice of racial classification by the world’s largest sperm bank. Part II argues that antidiscrimination arguments about bad intentions and bad consequences struggle to make sense of the race-conscious way that sperm banks design donor catalogs and online search functions. This suggests that certain classes of discriminatory behavior require a richer moral vocabulary than traditional frameworks allow. In these cases, we do well to examine what might be called the expressive dimension of wrongful discrimination, which turns on whether a rule or action instantiates public values that characteristically erode worthy forms of social recognition.

Part III works out the social meaning of racial classification in assisted reproduction by reference to similar classifications in the more familiar settings of voting and dating. These analogies help us to tease out the subtle normative tensions that racial preferences occasion in the contexts of citizenship, romance, and reproduction. This Part argues that racial classifications marked by innocent motives and benign effects give reason for pause when they needlessly entrench divisive assumptions about how people of a particular race think or act. These reflections suggest that racially salient forms of donor disclosure are pernicious social practices, which, while operating beyond the reach of the law, ought to be condemned as bad policy. The Note concludes by developing reproductive-choice-structuring mechanisms that aim to balance respect for intimacy, autonomy, and expressions of racial identity with responsibility to work against conditions that divide us.

Read the entire article here.

Traveling with Her Mother’s Tastes: The Negotiation of Gender, Race, and Location in “Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands”

Signs
Volume 26, Number 4, Globalization and Gender (Summer, 2001)
pages 949-981

Sandra Gunning, Professor of English, Afroamerican and African Studies and Women’s Studies
University of Michigan

The autobiography Wonderful Adventuers of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands ([1857] 1984) by) Jamaican mixed-race “Creole” Mary Jane Grant Seacole (1805-81) reveals a great deal about the complex interplay in the nineteenth century between gendered mobility, black diaspora identity, colonial power, and transnational circularity. As a black entrepreneur and “doctress” who ran combination lodging houses and taverns in the Caribbean and Central America, Seacole relocated midcareer to Turkey during the Crimean War (1854-56) to service the needs of English soldiers on the battlefield. After losing her business when the war ended sooner than expected, she settled in England and attempted to recover from bankruptcy…

Creole Performance in Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands

Gender & History
Volume 15, Issue 3, November 2003
pages 487–506
DOI: 10.1111/j.0953-5233.2003.00317.x

Rhonda Frederick, Associate Professor of African & African Diaspora Studies Program
Boston College

Mary Seacole’s autobiography has been read as a feminist performance as well as a paradigmatic Victorian travel narrative. While these assessments address important aspects of the memoir, neither affords the author’s Jamaicanness significant space in its analysis. This essay addresses the silences left when Wonderful Adventures is removed from its Jamaican context, then offers a reading of it from this perspective. Grounded in histories that document nineteenth-century Jamaican social categories, the article analyses Seacole’s book using Caribbean literary perspectives that explore raced, ‘coloured’ and geographically-located identities. The result is an interpretation of the memoir that offers insight into Jamaica’s Creole population, its status and colour politics, and identity concerns. All have been expertly shaped by Seacole’s rhetorical manoeuvres.

Read or purchase the article here.

Mahtani wins prestigious geography award

Inside UTSC
University of Toronto, Scarborough
2012-03-29

Minelle Mahtani won the Glenda Laws Award for geography, which is given to early and mid-career scholars for outstanding contributions to geographical research on social issues.
 
It is administered by the Association of American Geographers, and endorsed by the Institute of Australian Geographers, the Canadian Association of Geographers, and the Institute of British Geographers.
 
“Her contributions to geographic research on social issues build bridges between the academy and other centers of knowledge, like the policy, media and not-for-profit worlds. Her experience as a former national television news producer provides unique insights into critiques about media and minority representation as well as geographies of news consumption. She has also paid scholarly attention to geography’s expertise in an era of specialized knowledge economies, challenging the ivory tower to produce anti-racist geographies in the academy and challenging geographers to teach for inclusion,” the award presentation reads in part…

…Mahtani has also written about issues of race within the academy. She has written about the discrimination faced by women of colour geographers, and suggested that geography’s historical engagement with colonialism and imperialism works to ensure the domination of whiteness among faculty and students of geography.
 
Mahtani is especially interested in documenting the experiences of mixed-race Canadians, and has published a number of papers on mixed-race identities. She is an editor of the forthcoming book entitled Global Mixed Race to be published by New York University Press.
 
Mahtani brought her expertise on multiraciality to aid in the editing of Lawrence Hill’s memoir, Black Berry, Sweet Juice: On Being Black and White in Canada. In a recent visit to UTSC, Hill, author of the bestseller, Book of Negroes singled out Mahtani for encouraging him to consider the relationship between geography and identity.
 
Mahtani also designed the first course to be offered in geography and mixed race in Canada, entitled “Spaces of Multiraciality: Critical Mixed Race Theory”, taught in the department of Social Sciences here at UTSC.

Read the entire article here.

The idea of nature in “Benito Cereno.”

Studies in Short Fiction
Spring, 1993

Terry J. Martin

Although many critics have analyzed specific natural images in Melville’s Benito Cereno, no one has yet focused exclusively on the role of nature in the novella, nor looked fully at its problematic relation to Delano. Such an examination can both reveal much about Melville’s artistry and enhance our understanding of the protagonist’s special kind of self-delusion. Midway through the novella, Delano performs an act that is at once typical and revelatory of his ideology: overwhelmed by fears for his life and doubts about providence, he turns to nature for reassurance:

As [Delano] saw the benign aspect of nature, taking her innocent repose in the evening, the screened sun in the quiet camp of the west shining out like the mild light from Abraham’s tent–as charmed eye and ear took in all these, with the chained figure of the black, clenched jaw and hand relaxed. (96-97).

The personal qualities that Delano attributes to nature (i.e., its “benign[ity]” and “innocen[ce]”), together with the religious associations that the sight evokes, reveal a kind of Emersonian belief in the transcendent goodness and moral providence of nature. It is, in other words, God’s benignity that Delano sees suffused throughout the scene. Delano is not a thoroughgoing pantheist; he retains the idea of a personal God, noticeable especially when he later declares, “There is someone above” (77). Nevertheless, for Delano, just as for Emerson, this transcendent spirit is shadowed forth in phenomenal nature, and Delano would no doubt agree with Emerson that “particular natural facts are symbols of particular spiritual facts” (13). This belief in effect turns nature into a vast allegory of the divine spirit. For Delano, the mere appearance of benignity in nature warrants belief in the transcendent reality of benignity…

…Delano’s belief that nature possesses a transcendent moral order legitimates for him the interpretation of natural signs. To be sure, Delano’s behavior is no different from that of most of his contemporaries when he interprets, for example, the color of skin according to this ideal order. If all things signify. then surely white, being the opposite of black, must entail different spiritual characteristics as well. Indeed, Delano has only to look to nature” to find objective corroboration for his belief that whites are “by nature . . . the shrewder race” (75) and therefore naturally superior to blacks: the (apparent) dominance of the whites and servitude of the blacks on the San Dominick offers sufficient proof of Delano’s premise. But Delano has also observed what he takes to be the evident inferiority even of free blacks at home. Blacks have presented themselves as “good-humor[ed],” “easy,” “cheerful,” and “harmonious in every glance and gesture; as though God had set the whole negro to some pleasant tune” (83). They are, he thinks, fit “for avocations about one’s person,” like “natural valets and hair-dressers; taking to the comb and brush congenially as to the castanets, and flourishing them apparently with almost equal satisfaction” (83). Furthermore, blacks are, in Delano’s view, exempt “from the inflicted sourness of the morbid or cynical mind” (84). However, he also deems them essentially “stupid” (75), displaying the “docility arising from the unaspiring contentment of a limited mind, and that susceptibility of blind attachment sometimes inhering in indisputable inferiors” (84). For Delano, skin color is simply the seal that providence uses to stamp inferior goods.

Of course, who knows what happens when the races are “unnaturally” mixed? Delano conjectures about the effect: “It were strange, indeed, and not very creditable to us white-skins, if a little of our blood mixed with the African’s, should, far from improving the latter’s quality, have the sad effect of pouring vitriolic acid into black broth; improving the hue, perhaps, but not the wholesomeness’ (89). It will be seen from this that the racially crossed offspring are at a distinct disadvantage in Delano’s world, in which natural signs correlate with spiritual identity, because their identities are as uncertain as the effect of mingled magic potions. In fact, the mulatto represents a special semiotic problem for Delano precisely because the mulatto is neither black nor white and is hence unable to be interpreted with any degree of certainty. Delano is therefore even willing to consider the possibility that a mulatto with a regular European face is a devil (89). After all, a belief in the inherent allegorical qualities of matter requires that the mulatto be something less than white but greater than black, and devilishness at least presupposes intelligence gone astray…

Read the entire article here.