Mixed Race Studies

AIS 350 : Black-Indians in the Americas

San Francisco State University
Fall 2011

In this course students will be introduced to some of the major sociological and historical factors that have given rise to multiracial cultural identities in American Indian communities throughout the Americas and the Caribbean with a specific focus on Black-Indians within American Indian and African American Studies. Students will explore the ways that mainstream society comes to understand American Indians and their location within the social, legal, political, and economic sphere of race relations in the West. Students will engage key concepts and theories regarding blood quantum, sovereignty, and land rights as they apply to Natives of mixed ancestry. We will begin with a comprehensive analysis of the notion of a fixed or essential monolithic American Indian identity and how this construction has influenced social, legal, and political understanding of mixed-race Native Americans today and their role within the greater American Indian community. Issues of authenticity, group and community membership, as well as cultural vs. racial formation will be addressed in our weekly readings, lectures, discussions, films, guest lectures, and projects.

AMST 294-03  Mixed Race America: Identity, Culture, and Politics

Macalester College
Saint Paul, Minnesota
Spring 2012

SooJin Pate

This course is an introduction to the animating debates, themes, and issues in Critical Mixed Race Studies. Utilizing critical race theory and postcolonial analysis, we will examine the identities and experiences of multiracial or mixed race people, as well as the ways in which they have played a fundamental role in constructing race and shaping race relations, politics, and culture in the U.S. Topics in this course address the following: conquest and slavery, miscegenation laws, debates about the U.S. Census categories, U.S. militarism, representations of “mixed” people in the media, cultural expressions of “mixed” Americans, transracial adoption, queering mixed race studies, and the Mixed Race/Multiracial Movement.

ENGL 3270.03: Contemporary Canadian Literature: Crossing the Line

Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada
Summer 2007

Dr. C. Dawson

Our study of contemporary Canadian literature will be loosely divided into three sections, each organized around the idea of “crossing the line.” In the first section the line under consideration will be the border that defines this country. By way of example, our discussion of Tom King’s wonderfully funny story “Borders” might draw on his argument that the 49th parallel is a “figment of somebody else’s imagination.” Likewise, our readings of Fred Wah’s Diamond Grill and Wade Compton’s 49th Parallel Psalm might involve a consideration of the ways they each use the metaphor of border crossing to understand their mixed-race identities.

In the second part of the course we will study a number of stories and poems about characters who are seen to have “crossed a line” in the sense that they have acted in a way that is widely perceived to be transgressive or taboo. Here, for example, we might compare the representation of sexuality in texts as different as Miriam Toews’s A Complicated Kindness, a rock-infused Mennonite coming-of-age story, and Timothy Findley’s Not Wanted on the Voyage, a post-apocalyptic allegory set on Noah’s Ark.

In the final section, the line that is “crossed” has to do with genre. While building on our earlier discussions of race, nationality, and sexuality in contemporary Canadian literature, we will focus on works by Dionne Brand and Anne Carson, both of whom ostentatiously mix genres—poetry, fiction, autobiography, travelogue, opera!—with great effect.

Impostors: EUST-235

Amherst College
Spring 2012

Ilan Stavans, Lewis-Sebring Professor in Latin American and Latino Culture

Deborah R. Dizard, Visiting Lecturer in European Studies

An interdisciplinary exploration of the causes behind the social, racial, artistic, and political act—and art—of posing, passing, or pretending to be someone else. Blacks passing for whites, Jews passing for gentiles, and women passing for men, and vice versa, are a central motif. Attention is given to biological and scientific patterns such as memory loss, mental illness, and plastic surgery, and to literary strategies like irony. As a supernatural occurrence, the discussion includes mystical experiences, ghost stories, and séance sessions. The course also covers instances pertaining to institutional religion, from prophesy from the Hebrew and Christian Bibles to the Koran and Mormonism. In technology and communications, analysis concentrates on the invention of the telegraph, the telephone, and the Internet. Entertainment, ventriloquism, puppet shows, voice-overs, children’s cartoon shows, subtitles, and dubbing in movies and TV are topics of analysis. Posers in Greek mythology, the Arabian Nights, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Lewis Carroll, Mark Twain, Sigmund Freud, Jorge Luis Borges, Philip Roth, Oliver Sacks, and Nella Larsen are examined. Conducted in English.

“Race” & Ethnicity in Society in Social-Historical Context (AAS-SOC 338)

Lehman College, City University of New York
Spring 2012

Mark Christian, Professor & Chair of African & African American Studies

The idea of “race” since the 18th Century, and up to the present, has brought forth tremendous social inequality and, not to be over-dramatic, “social death” in a global sense. The ironic thing about “race” is that, from a scientific-biological sense, most authoritative commentators note that it is a problematic concept with little validity if one is arguing for “distinct races” among humankind. In other words, there are no distinct racial types of humans that can be separated from one another. Yes, there is some minor genetic difference among humans, such as skin color, hair texture, eye shape, lip-size; but when measured by what it is to be a human being these add up to only minor genetic differences. However there are still those who will try to put difference between humankind via pseudo-scientific racial theories. Some biologists use modern genetic science to distort the truth that we are all basically the same in humanity. A recent book by Dorothy Roberts called Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-Create Race in the Twenty-First Century (The New Press, 2011) gives a powerful insight into the abuse of modern genetics.

What is significant about “race” and ethnicity (ethnicity is largely related to shared cultural experiences of a specific racialized social group) is the reality of its social significance over time and place. Indeed, “race” has changed from one place to another. For example, what it is to be Black in South Africa is not the same in a social-historical context to what it is to be Black in the United States over time. We can make this point even more complex by stating what it was to be Black in the United States could once change from one state to another. The point here is to comprehend that “race” has been a socially constructed concept over time that has wielded a great amount of human misery and pain for certain social groups, and a great amount of power and privilege for other social groups. Our task is to come to an understanding of this complex topic and for this to be worthwhile intellectually we shall have to comprehend the idea of “race” from a social-historical context.

Given the social significance of White privilege in terms of “race” grouping and hierarchy, this course will focus on the how “whiteness” creates both a conscious and sub-conscious reality that is born out of the historical exploitation of people of color from the period enslavement and the plantation economy (17th – 19th Centuries) experience right through to the present. Even though we now live in a world whereby racism is largely outcast and a forbidden entity in social discourse and interaction, it still lurks beneath the surface in all things social. The current US statistical data on health, wealth, and other societal disparities between so-called “races” makes the comprehension of “whiteness” an important, indeed essential, part of our studies.

Although the course is taught primarily from a social-historical perspective, it is at bottom an interdisciplinary course involving aspects of knowledge from the humanities and social sciences. Having a positive and open mind that has a willingness to learn and work hard will be the key to your success in this class. We shall combine sociology, history, film & documentary to give a dynamic learning experience. The course will be taught via an interactive perspective whereby students will engage with the material and present in individual and group formats. Moreover, it is essentially a reading and writing class with interactive discussion. RESPECT for all in the classroom environment is imperative; regardless of one’s philosophical views or social background, gender, racialized self, or other human attribute.

Learning outcomes:
By the end of this course students should be able to demonstrate an understanding of:

• “Race” as a social construct and therefore “racialized” issues that produce social inequality in the US.
• “Race” as a problematic concept if put to biological scientific inquiry.
• The fallacy of “racial typology” classification.
• Whiteness in the social imagination.
• White privilege and white ethnic groups.
• Sociological theories of “race” & ethnicity.
• How to think critically about “race” & ethnicity.
• The “cultural minority” problematic in regard to peoples of color.
• Multicultural issues in a hierarchical “race” and social-cultural framework.
• Social inequality in terms of “race,” class and gender.
• How to talk about “racial issues” effectively, and get beyond racialized stereotyping.

Key Reading:

• Mark Christian. (Ed.) Integrated but Unequal: Black Faculty in Predominately White Space. (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2012)
• Nell I. Painter. The History of White People. (New York: Norton, 2010)
• Paula S. Rothenberg. (Ed.) White Privilege: Essential Readings on the Other Side of Racism. (New York: Worth, 2011)
• Barbara Trepagnier. Silent Racism: How Well-Meaning White People Perpetuate the Racial Divide, 2nd Edition. (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2010)

ENLT 252 Mestizas, Halfies, and Others

University of Virginia
Fall 2008

How does your family background affect the way that the way that you see yourself?  How others in the United States see you?  In this class we will investigate novels, short stories, and poems that foreground the multicultural and intercultural make-up of the United States.  Our texts are an alternate form of cultural history: they depict a range of interactions between various immigrant communities and the larger “American” culture, which as it turns out, has no single definition.  Our texts are written by women who are often assigned hyphenated labels to indicate their family origins—Sandra Cisneros is Mexican-American, Diana Abu-Jaber is Jordanian-American, and so on—and many of our works feature protagonists who are of mixed racial and ethnic heritage and who negotiate among several different cultural modes.  Some recurring themes of the course will be the experience of living in between two or more languages (many of the texts incorporate untranslated pieces of languages other than English) and the language act of naming and renaming (for instance in Marilyn Chin’s “How I Got That Name: An Essay on Assimilation.”)  We will see that it is not only the ethically “other” citizens who are influenced by the American experience but indeed that their languages and voices penetrate into and profoundly shape American experience as a whole, both in terms of literary content and in terms of formal accomplishment.

 In the course we will analyze literary moments of cross-cultural contact, stereotyping, and exchange, and our goal during the semester will likewise be to create a small exemplary community in which open exchanges can occur.  We will discuss and critique the terms “mestiza” and “halfie,” among other labels for people of mixed race and mixed cultural experience, and we will compare the use and implications of these colloquial terms to the purposes and political intentions of scholarly definitions by cultural critics such as Gloria Anzaldúa and Lila Abu-Lughod. We will also be strongly interested in questions of literary form.  For instance, what is significant about a novel or poem following a linear narrative characteristic of realism, in other words producing a “straight” take on identity and history?  What is at stake in the poem or novel that takes a more postmodern approach and emphasizes a fractured, heterogeneous, hybrid experience?  Course requirements include regular and well-prepared participation, three papers, email responses to two of the readings, one class presentation, one or two periods leading discussion, and an essay-based final exam.

Possible texts include:

Sandra Cisneros, Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories (Vintage)
Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/ La Frontera: The New Mestiza (Aunt Lute Books)
Richard Rodriguez, Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (Bantam)
Nella Larson, Passing (Penguin)
Danzy Senna, Caucasia (Riverhead)
Gish Jen, Mona in the Promised Land (Vintage)
Diana Abu-Jaber, Crescent (Norton)

AMST 349: Race Across the Americas

Emory University

Seminar exploring the social construction of race comparatively and transnationally, especially the status of the descendants of enslaved Africans and mixed-race individuals in the Caribbean and Latin America.

335. Comparative Studies in Racial and cultural Identities

St. Lawrence University, Canton, New York
Cultural Encounters Courses

 This is a senior seminar designed to fulfill the goals of the Cultural Encounters program: to prompt students to synthesize and re-evaluate their academic study of cultures, their experiential learning off campus and their own social locations and identities. The course content will be a comparative analysis of racial, ethnic and cultural identities; readings will be drawn from literature, contemporary cultural studies theory and philosophy of race, gender and identity, supplemented by films shown outside of class. A significant portion of the readings will be drawn from “critical white studies,” looking at the ways white supremacy has been constructed and maintained in both historically specific and transnational ways. The course will pay particular attention to the interrelations between gender and race in different regions, especially as this is revealed through attitudes toward miscegenation and mixed-race identities. Students will be required to complete and present a major research project and to write a self-reflective analysis of their own identities and locations.

28. Hapa Issues: Asian Americans of Mixed Racial Descent

Amherst College, Amherst, Massachusetts
Spring 2010

Growing numbers of inter-racial marriages and the products of these marriages—children of mixed racial descent—have contributed to the increasing diversity of America in the 21st century. Reflecting this heterogeneity, the 2000 Census allowed people to claim more than one background for the first time. In this course, we will evaluate the experiences of hapas—Asians of mixed racial descent—through a historical and comparative framework. This class will explore inter-racial and inter-ethnic marriage trends in various Asian communities in the U.S. in order to highlight the complexity of the Asian American experience. Additionally, we will compare the experiences of hapas representing a range of backgrounds, including those of Asian/White ancestry as well as Asian/Black heritage. Some of the specific topics that will be covered in this course include the following: racial and ethnic community membership and belonging; the dynamics of inter-racial relationships; identity, authenticity, and choice; and the gender identities of mixed race individuals. This course highlights the simultaneous fluidity and social construction of race while marking its real impact on everyday and structural aspects of American life.

44. Afro-Latin America

Amherst College, Amherst, Massachusetts
Spring 2010

(Offered as History 56 [LA] and Black Studies 44 [D, CLA].) This course explores the historical experiences of Afro-Latin populations since Independence within and outside the nation-state. The course asks how and why one might study those whose governments define them not as peoples of African descent but as part of a mixed-race majority of Hispanic cultural heritage, who themselves may often have supported this policy, and who may have had compelling reasons to avoid official scrutiny. Materials include early 20th-century racialist theorizing in Latin America; historical works using census, economic, criminal, and marriage records; analysis of race in the textual and musical representations of peoples, regions and nations; as well as autobiographical works. Two class meetings per week.