Mixed Race Studies

Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings: A Novel

Viking Books
2016-04-05
624 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 9780525429968
Ebook ISBN: 9780698410336

Stephen O’Connor

A debut novel about Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, in whose story the conflict between the American ideal of equality and the realities of slavery and racism played out in the most tragic of terms.

Novels such as Toni Morrison’s Beloved, The Known World by Edward P. Jones, James McBride’s The Good Lord Bird and Cloudsplitter by Russell Banks are a part of a long tradition of American fiction that plumbs the moral and human costs of history in ways that nonfiction simply can’t. Now Stephen O’Connor joins this company with a profoundly original exploration of the many ways that the institution of slavery warped the human soul, as seen through the story of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. O’Connor’s protagonists are rendered via scrupulously researched scenes of their lives in Paris and at Monticello that alternate with a harrowing memoir written by Hemings after Jefferson’s death, as well as with dreamlike sequences in which Jefferson watches a movie about his life, Hemings fabricates an “invention” that becomes the whole world, and they run into each other “after an unimaginable length of time” on the New York City subway. O’Connor is unsparing in his rendition of the hypocrisy of the Founding Father and slaveholder who wrote “all men are created equal,” while enabling Hemings to tell her story in a way history has not allowed her to. His important and beautifully written novel is a deep moral reckoning, a story about the search for justice, freedom and an ideal world—and about the survival of hope even in the midst of catastrophe.

Blackass: A Novel

Graywolf Press
2016-03-01
272 pages
5.5 x 8.25
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-55597-733-7

A. Igoni Barrett

Furo Wariboko, a young Nigerian, awakes the morning before a job interview to find that he’s been transformed into a white man. In this condition he plunges into the bustle of Lagos to make his fortune. With his red hair, green eyes, and pale skin, it seems he’s been completely changed. Well, almost. There is the matter of his family, his accent, his name. Oh, and his black ass. Furo must quickly learn to navigate a world made unfamiliar, and deal with those who would use him for their own purposes. Taken in by a young woman called Syreeta and pursued by a writer named Igoni, Furo lands his first-ever job, adopts a new name, and soon finds himself evolving in unanticipated ways.

A. Igoni Barrett’s Blackass is a fierce comic satire that touches on everything from race to social media while at the same time questioning the values society places on us, simply by virtue of the way we look. As he did in Love Is Power, or Something Like That, Barrett brilliantly depicts life in contemporary Nigeria, and details the double-dealing and code-switching that is implicit in everyday business. But it’s Furo’s search for an identity—one deeper than skin—that leads to the final unraveling of his own carefully constructed story.

Pao: A Novel

Bloomsbury Publishing
2011-07-12
288 pages
5 1/2″ x 8 1/4″
Paperback ISBN: 9781608195077
EPUB eBook ISBN: 9781608196845

Kerry Young

As a young boy, Pao comes to Jamaica in the wake of the Chinese civil war and rises to become the Godfather of Kingston’s bustling Chinatown. Pao needs to take care of some dirty business, but he is no Don Corleone. The rackets he runs are small time and the protection he provides necessary, given the minority status of the Chinese in Jamaica. Pao, in fact, is a sensitive guy in a wise guy role that doesn’t quite fit. Often mystified by all that he must take care of, Pao invariably turns to Sun Tsu’s Art of War. The juxtaposition of the weighty, aphoristic words of the ancient Chinese sage, and the tricky criminal and romantic predicaments Pao must negotiate goes far toward explaining the novel’s great charm.

A tale of post-colonial Jamaica from a unique and politically potent perspective, Pao moves from the last days of British rule through periods of unrest at social and economic inequality, though tides of change that will bring Rastafarianism and the Back to Africa Movement. Jamaica is transforming: And what is the place of a Chinese man in this new order? Pao is an utterly beguiling, unforgettable novel of race, class and creed, love and ambition, and a country in the throes of tumultuous change.

The Alienist and Other Stories of Nineteenth-Century Brazil

Hackett Publishing Company
March 2013
ca. 152 pages
Cloth ISBN: 1-60384-853-3; 978-1-60384-853-4
Paper ISBN: 1-60384-852-5; 978-1-60384-852-7
Examination ISBN: 1-60384-852-5; 978-1-60384-852-7

Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839-1908)

Edited by:

John Charles Chasteen, Patterson Distinguished Term Professor of History
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Accompanied by a thorough introduction to “Brazil’s Machado, Machado’s Brazil”, these vibrant new translations of eight of Machado de Assis’s best-known short stories bring nineteenth-century Brazilian society and culture to life for modern readers.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• Introduction.
• 1. To Be Twenty Years Old!
• 2. The Education of a Poser.
• 3. The Looking Glass.
• 4. Chapter on Hats.
• 5. A Singular Occurrence.
• 6. Terpsichore.
• 7. Father Against Mother.
• 8. The Alienist.

Loving Day: A Novel

Spiegel & Grau
2015-05-26
304 Pages
6-1/8 x 9-1/4
Hardcover ISBN: 9780812993455
Ebook ISBN: 9780679645528

Mat Johnson

“In the ghetto there is a mansion, and it is my father’s house.”

Warren Duffy has returned to America for all the worst reasons: His marriage to a beautiful Welsh woman has come apart; his comics shop in Cardiff has failed; and his Irish American father has died, bequeathing to Warren his last possession, a roofless, half-renovated mansion in the heart of black Philadelphia. On his first night in his new home, Warren spies two figures outside in the grass. When he screws up the nerve to confront them, they disappear. The next day he encounters ghosts of a different kind: In the face of a teenage girl he meets at a comics convention he sees the mingled features of his white father and his black mother, both now dead. The girl, Tal, is his daughter, and she’s been raised to think she’s white.

Spinning from these revelations, Warren sets off to remake his life with a reluctant daughter he’s never known, in a haunted house with a history he knows too well. In their search for a new life, he and Tal struggle with ghosts, fall in with a utopian mixed-race cult, and ignite a riot on Loving Day, the unsung holiday for interracial lovers.

A frequently hilarious, surprisingly moving story about blacks and whites, fathers and daughters, the living and the dead, Loving Day celebrates the wonders of opposites bound in love.

A Romance of the Republic

University Press of Kentucky
2014-07-11 (Originally published in 1867)
464 pages
6 x 9
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8131-0928-2
Web PDF ISBN: 978-0-8131-4910-3

Lydia Maria Child (1802-1880)

Edited by:

Dana D. Nelson, Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English
Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee

A Romance of the Republic, published in 1867, was Lydia Maria Child’s fourth novel and the capstone of her remarkable literary career. Written shortly after the Civil War, it offered a progressive alternative to Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Writer, magazine publisher and outspoken abolitionist, Child defied the norms of gender and class decorum in this novel by promoting interracial marriage as a way blacks and whites could come to view each other with sympathy and understanding. In constructing the tale of fair-skinned Rosa and Flora Royal—daughters of a slaveowner whose mother was also the daughter of a slaveowner—Child consciously attempted to counter two popular claims: that racial intermarriage was “unnatural” and that slavery was a benevolent institution. But Child’s target was not merely racism. Her characters are forced both to reconsider their attitudes toward “white” and “black” and to question the very foundation of the patriarchal society in which they live.

Incognegro, A Graphic Mystery

Vertigo
2008
136 pages
Hardcover ISBN-13: 978-140121097

Mat Johnson, Author

Warren Pleece, Artist

Mat Johnson, winner of the prestigious Hurston-Wright Legacy Award for fiction, constructs a fearless graphic novel that is both a page-turning mystery and a disturbing exploration of race and self-image in America, masterfully illustrated with rich period detail by Warren Pleece (The Invisibles, Hellblazer). In the early 20th century, when lynchings were commonplace throughout the American South, a few courageous reporters from the North risked their lives to expose these atrocities. They were African-American men who, due to their light skin color, could pass for white. They called this dangerous assignment going “incognegro.” Zane Pinchback, a reporter for the New York-based New Holland Herald, is sent to investigate the arrest of his own brother, charged with the brutal murder of a white woman in Mississippi. With a lynch mob already swarming, Zane must stay “incognegro” long enough to uncover the truth behind the murder in order to save his brother — and himself.

The Quadroon; or, A Lover’s Adventures In Louisiana

Robert M. DeWitt
1856
430 pages

Captain Mayne Reid (1818-1883)

Read the entire book here.

The Old Neighborhood, A Novel

Curbside Splendor Publishing
April 2014
502 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-1940430003

Bill Hillmann

Bill Hillmann’s debut novel, The Old Neighborhood, is the story of teenager Joe Walsh, the youngest in a large, mixed-race family living in Chicago. After Joe witnesses his older brother commit a gangland murder, his friends and family drag him down into a pit of violence that reaches a bloody impasse when his elder sister begins dating a rival gang member. The Old Neighborhood is both a brutal tale of growing up tough in a mean city, and a beautiful harkening to the heartbreak of youth.

Whasian

Harken Media
2015-11-02
340 pages
6 in x 9 in
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-9887757-6-3
Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-0-9887757-5-6
E-Book ISBN: 978-0-9887757-4-9

Joy Huang Stoffers (Joy Huang-Iris)

Young adult literary fiction for teens struggling with racial and cultural identity and racism.

The thing about secrets is they force you to choose—especially the ones that hurt so much you keep them from your best friend. Ava Ling Magee hopes college will free her from the past: high school, parents, everything. Freedom from her Asian mother’s control, her Caucasian father’s neglect, and the world’s confusion, however, requires more than a dorm room. Sure, she makes new friends, separates herself from the parental units, and parties. Yet, Ava’s secrets linger, binding her to the past and cleaving her in two. She must choose between the darkness she knows and unknown perils. Sometimes, when life hurts the most, we discover our freedom lay within all along.