Mixed Race Studies

Africa’s Legacy in Mexico: The Photographs of Tony Gleaton

Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles
Laband Art Gallery
2007-09-09 through 2007-11-18

Africa’s Legacy in Mexico features forty-five black and white photographs from a series of portraits of African Mexicans by Tony Gleaton. Taken in the late 1980s and early 1990s, primarily in three villages along the southwestern coast of Mexico, Gleaton’s photographs offer insight into a little-known aspect of Mexican culture. These poignant images focus on the present-day descendants of African slaves who were brought to Mexico by the Spanish colonialists beginning in the 1500s. Though Africans have been part of the cultural fabric of Mexico for five centuries, the official policy of the Mexican government has been to only highlight the country’s mestizo [mixed race] heritage that has resulted from the mixing of indigenous and European peoples. Miriam Jimenez Roman writes that Gleaton’s photographs “force us to rethink many of our preconceptions not only about our southern neighbor but more generally about issues such as race, ethnicity, culture, and national identity.”

View some of the photographs here.

Francophone Women: Between Visibility and Invisibility

Peter Lang Publishing Group
2010
146 pages
Hardback ISBN 978-1-4331-0803-7

Edited by

Cybelle H. McFadden, Assistant Professor of French
University of North Carolina, Greensboro

Sandrine F. Teixidor, Assistant Professor of French Studies
Randolph-Macon College, Ashland, Virginia

Francophone Women: Between Visibility and Invisibility underscores the writing of authors who foreground the female body and who write across geographical borders, as part of a global literary movement that has the French language as its common denominator. This edited collection exposes how female authors portray the tensions that exist between visibility and invisibility, public and private, presence and absence, and excess and restraint when it is linked to femininity and the female body.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Preface

1. Corporeal Performance and Visible Gender Position in Colette’s The Pure and the Impure. Marion Krauthaker
2. After-Images of Muslim Women: Vision, Voice, and Resistance in the Work of Assia Djebar. Mary Ellen Wolf
3. The Gaze beneath the Veil: Portrait of Women in Algeria and Morocco. Sandrine F. Teixidor
4. Vision, Voice, and the Female Body: Nina Bouraoui’s Sites/Sights of Resistance. Adrienne Angelo
5. The Métis Body: Double Mirror. Caroline Beschea-Fache
6. The Body, Sexuality, and the Photo in L’Usage de la photo. Cybelle H. McFadden

Contributors
Index

From: The Métis Body: Double Mirror

DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM? I AM THE ONE YOU CAN’T LEAVE ALONE.  The one who puzzles you, intrigues you.  I am the original definition of “exotic.” Acceptable in many ways, the cafe au lait of life, more palatable because I am diluted…  They call me white, they call me black… they’ve called me everything in between.
Camille Hernandez-Ramdwar

In their novels Garçon manqué (2000) and 53cm (1999), Nina Bouraoui and Sandrine Bessora, respectively, portray characters born of parents belonging to different racialized groups and raise the issues defining métissage.  As they form corporeal representation of the concept, they describe the métis experience in the Francophone context.  The complexity of defining the concept of métissage involves examining both races, since they shape the perception of the métis by the Other and by the subject itself; it also entails discussing the racial tensions that play out in corporeal ways.  Using the work of Bouraoui and Bessora, I will analyze how the conception of a world based on dichotomies and binary oppositions, reinforced by racial categorization, affects and disturbs the construction of métis identities in the texts…

Mixed bodies, separate races: The trope of the “(tragic) mulatto” in twentieth-century African literature

McMaster University (Canada)
2007
251 pages
AAT NR57539

Diana Adesola Mafe, Assistant Professor of English
Denison University

This dissertation proposes that the American literary trope of the “tragic mulatto” has both roots and resonances in sub-Saharan Africa. The concept of the mulatto, a person of mixed black and white heritage, as a tragic, ambiguous Other evolved primarily from nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American fiction. I argue, however, that the mulatto occupies a similarly vexed discursive space in the historiography of sub-Saharan Africa and contemporary African literature. After contextualizing the American trope through such postbellum novels as James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912) and Nella Larsen’s Quicksand (1928), I track the emergence of specific racially mixed populations in sub-Saharan Africa as a result of trade, migration, and colonialism. My historical survey of such mixed race communities as the Afro-Portuguese lançados of Senegambia and the Coloured people of South Africa brings to light the remarkable currency of (tragic) mulatto stereotypes across time and space. Having established the circulation of mulatto stereotypes in (pre-)colonial sub-Saharan Africa, I consider how two contemporary mixed race South African writers engage with such stereotypes in their work. This study argues that twentieth-century Coloured writers Bessie Head and Arthur Nortje realize the trope of tragic mixedness in their respective lives and writing. Head and Nortje reflect the rigid apartheid ideology of their native South Africa and assign universality to the “plight” of being mixed race in a segregationist society. But both writers also use their (gendered) identities as “tragically mixed” to challenge the policed racial categories of apartheid, subverting fixity through, paradoxical performances of Self. I conclude my study in the post-civil rights and post-apartheid arena of the twenty-first century, using my own experiences as an African “mulatta” and the current field of mixed race studies to illustrate how paradox itself is indispensable to progressive readings and imaginings of mixed race identity.

Table of Contents

• CHAPTER ONE: The Evolution of the “Tragic Mulatto” Trope in American Literature: An Introduction
• CHAPTER TWO: The White Man’s “Other” Burden: (Pre-)Colonial Race Mixing in the “Dark Continent”
• CHAPTER THREE: A Mulatta in Motabeng: Bessie Head’s A Question of Power as African Tragic Mulatta Fiction
• CHAPTER FOUR: A Portrait of the (Tortured) Artist as a Young (Coloured) Man:Reading Arthur Nortje
• CHAPTER FIVE: The Premise/Promise of Paradox: Concluding Theories and Reflections from a New Millennium “Mulatta”
• BIBLIOGRAPHY

Purchase the dissertation here.

Interracial families in South Africa: an exploratory study

Rand Afrikaans University
June 1994
310 pages
(In English and Afrikaans)

Lesley Morrall

A dissertation presented in partial fulfillment of the requirement of the degree Doctor of Literature and Philosophy in Psychology in the Faculty of Arts at Rand Afrikaans University.

Interracial marriage can be viewed as a barometer of social change. South Africa has historically been a country of racial tension with legislation seeking to keep the races apart. However, during April 1994 the country’s first democratic elections took place, thus ending the reign of white minority rule. It is against this backdrop that the present study took place. The aim of the study is to seek a deeper understanding of the experiences of mixed: race families living in South Africa. Certain questions are raised, inter alia; the causes for interracial relationships and marriage, the reactions of the families of origin, the patterns of adjustment, the raising of the children with specific reference to identity development and, the reactions of the community. Theories on prejudice, discrimination and interpersonal attraction were studied as a basis for a possible understanding of the phenomenon of mixed marriage. A brief exposition of the history of South Africa detailing relevant legislation places the study in context. Statistics on the incidence of interracial marriage and divorce were tabulated. Research pertaining to mixed marriage and interracial children was reviewed emphasizing the issues as outlined in the questions posed. However, very few studies could be found which related to South Africa. As such, media coverage of interracial relationships as reported in South Africa between 1993 to 1994 was also covered.

Table of Contents

• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• SUMMARY (ENGLISH)
• SUMMARY (AFRIKAANS)

1. OVERVIEW
   1. Introduction
   2. Marriage
   3. Family
   4. The Concept of Race
   5. The Concept of Mixed-Race
   6. The Present Study
      • Aims of the study
2. THEORIES : PREJUDICE, DISCRIMINATION AND INTERPERSONAL ATTRACTION
   1. Introduction
   2. Prejudice and Discrimination Defined
   3. The Origin of Prejudice
   4. Theories of Prejudice
   5. Combatting Prejudice
   6. Interpersonal Attraction Defined
   7. Proximity
   8. Emotional State
   9. Need for Affiliation
   10. Physical Attractiveness
   11. Similarity
   12. Conclusion
3. HISTORICAL OVERVIEW OF SOUTH AFRICA AND THE LAW
   1. Introduction
   2. Historical Overview
   3. Legislation
      • The Population Registration Act, Act 30 of 1950
      • The Group Areas Act, Act 41 of 1950
      • History of the Immorality Act and the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act
        • Media coverage
        • Repeal of the Acts
   4. Conclusion
4. LITERATURE REVIEW: MIXED-RACE MARRIAGE
   1. Introduction
   2. Trends and Pattems of Mixed-Race Marriage
   3. Spouse Selection
   4. Adjustment
   5. Divorce
   6. Public Attitudes towards Mixed Marriage
   7. Attitude of Family towards Mixed-Race Couples
   8. Research Critique
   9. Conclusions from the literature Review
5. LITERATURE REVIEW: MIXED-RACE CHILDREN
   1. Introduction
   2. Theories: Biracial Children and their Identity
   3. Studies of Biracial Children
      • Intellectual development: Birth to four years
      • Racial awareness: Early childhood
      • Self-concept: Scholars
      • Racial identity: Adolescents
      • Mixed-race heritage: Adults
   4. Raising Biracial Children
   5. Conclusions from the Literature Review
6. INCIDENCE OF MIXED-RACE MARRIAGE AND DIVORCE
   1. Introduction
   2. Incidence in the United States of America
   3. Incidence of Mixed-Race Marriage in South Africa
   4. Incidence of Mixed-Race Divorce in South Africa
7. RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
   1. Introduction
   2. Questions
   3. Qualitative Research
   4. The Study
   5. Sample
   6. Data Analysis
8. CASE NUMBER 1 – MOHAMMED AND RONELLE: AN ASIAN/WHITE FAMILY
9. CASE NUMBER 2 – JACK AND TINA: A WHITE/BLACK RELATIONSHIP
10. CASE NUMBER 3 – CLIVE AND MINNIE: THREE GENERATIONS OF MIXED MARRIAGES
11. CASE NUMBER 4 – LEON AND ESTHER: A WHITE/BLACK INTERRACIAL MARRIAGE
12. CASE NUMBER 5 – ED AND ELLEN: FOUR GENERATIONS OF MIXED MARRIAGES
13. CASE NUMBER 6 – JOHAN AND BELINDA: WHITE/COLOURED MIXED MARRIAGE
14. CASE NUMBER 7 – THOMAS AND BELLA: A WHITE/BLACK INTERRACIAL MARRIAGE
15. RESULTS OF THE RESEARCH
    1. Introduction
    2. General Results
    3. Specific Results
    4. Conclusion
16. DISCUSSION OF RESULTS AND CONCLUSION
    1. Introduction
    2. Theories: Prejudice and Discrimination
    3. Theories: Interpersonal Attraction
    4. Previous Research: Mixed-Race Marriage
       • Who marries out?
       • Spouse selection
       • Adjustment
       • Societal attitude towards mixed marriage
       • Attitude of extended family
    5. Identity Development: Mixed-Race Children
    6. Divorce
    7. Conclusions
       • Causes of interracial relationships
       • Adjustment patterns
       • Child raising practices
       • Racial identity
       • The extended family
       • Legislation and the political environment
    8. Limitations of the Study
    9. Directions for Future Research

• REFERENCES
• APPENDIX A: MEDIA COVERAGE OF INTERRACIAL RELATIONSHIPS: 1993-1994
  1. Introduction
  2. Articles
  3. Conclusion
• APPENDIX B: NEWSPAPER CARTOONS
• APPENDIX C: QUESTIONNAIRE
• APPENDIX D: LETTER TO THANDI MAGAZINE
• APPENDIX E: ADVERTISEMENT IN THANDI MAGAZINE

Read the entire dissertation here.

Empire’s progeny: The representation of mixed race characters in twentieth century South African and Caribbean literature

2006-01-01
355 pages
Publication Number: AAT 3249543

Kathleen A. Koljian
University of Connecticut

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut, 2006.

This dissertation is an examination of the portrayal of mixed race characters in South African and Caribbean literature. Through a close reading of the works of representative Caribbean [Derek Walcott, Michelle Cliff, and Jamaica Kincaid] and South African authors, [Bessie Head, Zoe Wicomb, and Zakes Mda] my dissertation will construct a more valid paradigm for the understanding of mixed-race characters and the ways in which authors from the Caribbean and South Africa typically deploy racially mixed characters to challenge the social order imposed during colonial domination. These authors emphasize the nuanced and hierarchical conceptualizations of racialized identity in South Africa and the Caribbean. Their narratives stand in marked contrast to contemporary models of ‘hybridity’ promulgated by prominent post-colonial critics such as Homi Bhabha and his adherents. In this dissertation, I hope to provide a more historically and culturally situated paradigm for understanding narrative portrayals of mixed race characters as an alternative to contemporary theories of ‘hybridity’. Current paradigms within post-colonial theory are compromised by their lack of historical and cultural specificity. In failing to take into account specific and long-standing attitudes toward racial identity prevalent in particular colonized cultures, these critics founder in attempts to define the significance of the racially mixed character in postcolonial literature. Bhabha, for example, fails to recognize that the formation of racialized identity within the Caribbean and South Africa is not imagined in simple binary terms but within a distinctly articulated racial hierarchy. Furthermore, Bhabha does not acknowledge the evolution of attitudes and ideas that have shaped the construction and understanding of mixed-race identity. After a brief survey of the scientific discourse of race in the colonial era, and a representative sampling of key thematic elements and tropes in early colonial literature to demonstrate the intersection of race theory and literature, close readings of individual narratives will demonstrate the limitations of current models of ‘hybridity’ and illuminate the ways in which individual authors and texts are constructed within (and sometimes constrained by) long-standing and pervasive discourses of racialized identity.

Table of Contents

• Introduction: Empire’s Progeny
• “A Small Corner of the Earth”: Bessie Head
• “Colouring the Truth”: Zoe Wicomb
• Birthing the Rainbow Nation: Zakes Mda’s Madonna of Excelsior
• The “Mulatto of Style”: Derek Walcott’s Carribean Aesthetics
• “Only Sadness Comes from Mixture”: Clare Savage’s Matrilineal Quest
• Xeula and Oya: Jamaica Kincaid’s Autobiography of My Mother
• Conclusion
• Works Cited

Read a preview here.
Purchase the full dissertation here.

Ancestry Testing and DNA: Uses, Limits – and Caveat Emptor

GeneWatch
Council for Responsible Genetics
Volume 22, Issue 3-4 (July-August 2009)
2009-07-30
Pages 16-18

Troy Duster, Professor of Sociology
New York University

Direct consumer use of DNA  tests for ancestry tracing has taken off in the last five years, and we are not just talking about probes for first-generation genetic lineage as in the “Who’s your daddy?” tests popularized on daytime television.  Since 2002, nearly a half-million people have purchased tests from at least two dozen companies marketing direct-to-consumer kits.  The motives for testing range from the desire for ancestral links to those who lived on other continents five-hundred plus years ago to a more modest interest in reconstructing family histories.  For many African-Americans, the quest to find a link to regions and peoples of sub-Saharan Africa can take on a spiritual or even messianic quest, at least partially explained by the fact that the Middle Passage across the Atlantic during the slave trade explicitly and purposefully obliterated linguistic, cultural, religious, political and kinship ties.  The 2006 PBS television series, African American Lives, brought this quest into sharp relief.  First celebrity and later ordinary Blacks were mesmerized by stories of DNA matches that claimed to reveal or refute specific ancestral links to Africa, to Native American heritage, and surprising to some, East Asian or European populations.

In sharp contrast, CBS’ 60 minutes aired a dramatic segment in the fall of 2007 (October 7) that portrayed a direct and sharp challenge to the claims-making about such ancestry testing.  The segment began with Vy Higgensen, an African-American woman from New York’s Harlem triumphantly affirming her connection to “new kin” (one of whom was a white male cattle rancher from Missouri).  But as the program unfolds, we see a disturbing cloud of doubt drift over the last part of the segment that ends with a less than subtle hint at specious claims.  A first test from the company African Ancestry, claims that Higgensen is linked to ancestors in the Sierra Leone, the Mende people.  She rejoices. “I am thrilled!  It puts a name, a place, a location, a people!”  But then she is shown the results of a second test, from another company, Relative Genetics, which claims that she instead has a genetic match to the Wobe tribe of the Ivory Coast.  She seems unruffled.  Yet a third test, from Trace Genetics, claims that her ancestors are from Senegal, the Mendenka.  Now she seems agitated, visibly concerned, confused – and most certainly disappointed that what began as a definitive match to a particular group or region of Africa has now turned into a “you pick which one you want to believe” game.

What can DNA tell us about our genetic lineage, and where does it fall short? What explains Vy Higgensen’s multiple results from different testing sites? Flawed methodology? Partial truths hyped as definitive findings? Did the testing companies use different methods or deploy different reference populations – or both?…

…There is a yet more ominous and troubling element of the reliance upon DNA analysis to determine who we are in terms of lineage, identity, and identification. The very technology that tells us what proportion of our ancestry can be linked, proportionately, to sub-Saharan Africa (ancestry-informative markers) is the same being offered to police stations around the country to “predict” or “estimate” whether the DNA left at a crime scene belongs to a white or black person. This “ethnic estimation” using DNA relies on a social definition of the phenotype (the observable physical or biochemical characteristics of an organism, determined by both genetic makeup and environmental influences). That is, in order to say that someone is 85 percent African, we must know who is 100 percent African. Any molecular, population, or behavioral geneticist who uses the term “percent European” or “percent Native American” is obliged to disclose that the measuring point of this “purity” (100 percent) is a statistical artifact that begins not with the DNA, but with a researcher adopting the folk categories of race and ethnicity…

Read the entire article here.

ENGLISH 261E: Mixed Race Literature in the U.S. and South Africa (seminar)

Stanford University
Department of English
Winter Quarter, 2010-2011

Michele Elam, Martin Luther King, Jr. Centennial Professor of English and Olivier Nomellini Family University Fellow in Undergraduate Education

Grant Parker, Associate Professor of Classics
Stanford Univeristy

As scholar Werner Sollors recently suggested, novels, poems, stories about interracial contacts and mixed race constitute “an orphan literature belonging to no clear ethnic or national tradition.” Yet the theme of mixed race is at the center of many national self-definitions, even in our U.S. post-Civil Rights and South Africa’s post-Apartheid era. This course examines aesthetic engagements with mixed race politics in these trans- and post-national dialogues, beginning in the 1700s and focusing on the 20th and 21st centuries.

Not White Enough, Not Black Enough: Racial Identity in the South African Coloured Community

Ohio University Press/Swallow Press
2005
264 pages
5 1/2 x 8 1/2 in.
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-89680-244-5

Mohamed Adhikari, Lecturer of Historical Studies
University of Cape Town, South Africa

The concept of Colouredness—being neither white nor black—has been pivotal to the brand of racial thinking particular to South African society. The nature of Coloured identity and its heritage of oppression has always been a matter of intense political and ideological contestation.

Not White Enough, Not Black Enough: Racial Identity in the South African Coloured Community is the first systematic study of Coloured identity, its history, and its relevance to South African national life. Mohamed Adhikari engages with the debates and controversies thrown up by the identity’s troubled existence and challenges much of the conventional wisdom associated with it. A combination of wide-ranging thematic analyses and detailed case studies illustrates how Colouredness functioned as a social identity from the time of its emergence in the late nineteenth century through its adaptation to the postapartheid environment.

Adhikari demonstrates how the interplay of marginality, racial hierarchy, assimilationist aspirations, negative racial stereotyping, class divisions, and ideological conflicts helped mold people’s sense of Colouredness over the past century. Knowledge of this history, and of the social and political dynamic that informed the articulation of a separate Coloured identity, is vital to an understanding of present-day complexities in South Africa.

“A Black Girl Should Not be With a White Man”: Sex, Race, and African Women’s Social and Legal Status in Colonial Gabon, c. 1900–1946

Journal of Women’s History
Volume 22, Number 2, Summer 2010
E-ISSN: 1527-2036
Print ISSN: 1042-7961
DOI: 10.1353/jowh.0.0140

Rachel Jean-Baptiste, Associate Professor of African History
University of California, Davis

This article reviews representations and lived experiences of interracial sex and métissage in twentieth-century colonial Gabon to argue that African communities and colonial societies debated over “the métis problem” as question of how to demarcate African women’s sexuality, and socioeconomic and political power in the urban locale. These discourses and social realities reflected ambiguous and contradictory colonial discourses and polyvalent struggles among Gabonese populations to recast gender and respectability in the colonial capital city. Mpongwé women’s participation in interracial relationships, frequently brokered by male kin, had unintended consequences that threatened colonial order and reordered gender hierarchies within Mpongwé communities. Following World War I through the 1950s, shifting coalitions of elite African men, colonial officials, and private French citizens—anxious of the social mobility black and mixed race women achieved and sought to maintain—frowned upon and sought to restrict interracial liasons. Mpongwé women, both black and métis, involved in interracial relationships struggled to maintain control over their property, their labor, and insist upon their respectability in the precarious urban milieu. Using oral and written sources, this article addresses a gap in the scholarship on gender, sexuality, and colonialism by foregrounding how African women and men engaged in and reflected on miscegenation at the center of analysis. Furthermore, this article emphasizes the colonial encounter as a dialectic in which the actions of African women shaped colonial perceptions and policies.

Read or purchase the article here.

Children of the French Empire: Miscegenation and Colonial Society in French West Africa 1895-1960

Oxford University Press
1999
216 pages
Hardback ISBN13: 9780198208198; ISBN10: 0198208197

Owen White, Associate Professor of History
University of Delaware

This book recreates the lives of the children born of relationships between French men and African women from the time France colonized much of West Africa towards the end of the 19th century, until independence in 1960. Set within the context of the history of miscegenation in colonial French West Africa, the study focuses upon the lives and identities of the resulting mixed-race or métis population, and their struggle to overcome the handicaps they faced in a racially divided society. This author has drawn an evaluation of the impact and importance of French racial theories, and offers a critical discussion of colonial policies in such areas as citizenship and education, providing insights into problems of identity in colonial society.

Table of Contents

Abbreviations
Map of French West Africa and Togo
Introduction
1. Miscegenation in French West Africa
2. Abandonment and Intervention
3. Education and Employment
4. Race and Heredity
5. Paternity and the Mother Country
6. Métis and the Search for Social Identity
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index