Mixed Race Studies

305. The Social Construction of Race in the U.S.

Vassar College
Poughkeepsie, New York

Diane Harriford, Professor of Sociology

This course examines the social construction of race in the United States from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the present. The focus is on the changing racial meanings and identities of specific socio-historical groups and the ways in which social institutions interpret and reinterpret race over time. Contemporary issues addressed include: the construction of “whiteness”, the making of model minorities, color-blindness and the post-racial society, and the emergence of the “mixed race” category. Readings may include Cooper, DuBois, hooks, Collins, Frye, Omni and Winant, and Roediger.

AAS 550: Asian Americans of Mixed Heritages

San Francisco State University
Spring 2012

Wei Ming Dariotis, Associate Professor of Asian American Studies

This is an interactive, dynamic course taught in a seminar style with an expectation of active student participation. Group work and interaction are emphasized in order to provide students with real life problem solving opportunities. Creative and analytical approaches are both emphasized through Reading Response Essays, a Midterm Group Play, Research Portfolio and related Presentation, and Final Class Project (creating a Hapa Children’s Book). Topics covered in this course may include a selection of the following:

• The history of anti-miscegenation in the US, particularly as such laws relate to the Asian Pacific American experience; stereotypes of APIs [Asian-Pacific Islanders] of mixed heritage
• the history of US and European war and colonialism in relation to APIs of mixed heritage
• the “war bride” phenomenon
• TransRacial/transnational adoption; Hapas in Hawai’i
• Double Minority Hapas
• Queer Hapas
• Hapa Bodies (body image and health issues)
• Hapa Creative/Cultural expression
• Mixed Heritage activism and social and political organizations

This course explores the Historical, Cross-Cultural and Global Contexts relevant to Asian Pacific Americans of mixed heritage. AAS 550 is designed to present students with cross cultural and historical perspectives which will permit students to empathize with Asians Pacifics of mixed heritage, across a wide variety of historical circumstances and personal experiences. The inherently multiethnic nature of the subject matter allows students to develop an appreciation of an emerging sub-dominant group (APIs of mixed heritage or Hapas) and recognition of the fundamental unity of humankind…

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Mixed Race Across the Pacific

University of Southern California
Freshman Seminars
Spring 2013

Duncan Williams, Associate Professor of Religion

In an era when a mixed-race President of the United States proudly proclaims himself as the first Pacific President of America, how might we rethink the study of race in a global, rather than merely a regional, perspective? With the recent changes to the U.S. Census that allows for multiple racial identifications, how might race and race relations be recast when multiplicity, hybridity, and creolization marks everyone from Obama’s half-American/half-Indonesian half-sister to the so-called black golfer Tiger Woods, who is actually primarily Asian?

This course investigates how shifting the paradigm of race studies to the Asia Pacific Americas (Transpacific) experience of race disrupts and reorients the traditionally binary, black/white or white/colored Transatlantic model of race studies in the United States that emerged from a focus on the Transatlantic slave trade. By examining the legacies of Western and Japanese empires in Korea, Taiwan, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific Islands and the legacies of disaporic communities in North and South Americas we will reframe the lens through which we approach race studies. Our second focus is to look at miscegenation, creolization, and how mixed race disrupts simplistic racial category formations. We will study comparative anti-miscegenation laws across transnational boundaries and the role of the offspring of mixed race unions that emerged through migrations, trade flows, and the impact of wars.

Duncan Williams is the chair of the School of Religion and director of the USC Center for Japanese Religions and Culture and the founder of the Hapa Japan Project (a database of mixed-race Japanese people from 1500s to the present) and the Mugen Project (the world’s first online bibliographical database on Buddhism).

History 101.020: Betwixt and Between in the United States: Boundaries and the People who Defy Them

University of California, Berkeley
Spring 2013

MacKenzie Moore, Visiting Lecturer

This 101 seminar is geared toward any student who wants to study the boundaries among and between people, nations, or states, broadly defined. It is also perfect for those wishing to explore what happens when such barriers are (inevitably) ruptured, questioned, or otherwise revealed to be unstable. Some, but by no means all, possible topics include: immigrant history, Native American/colonial contact, the history of American sexuality, frontier environments, mixed-race communities or individuals, the US/Mexico Borderlands, religious synthesis, or urban communities.  We will begin the semester by exploring theoretical approaches to the question of boundaries and categories and the power that sustains them. We will also discuss what such categories mean to people as they construct communities, nations, and identities. We will then consider specific examples of people who, out of choice or circumstance, defy those boundaries. The rest of the semester will be run as a writing and reading seminar. We will support and encourage each other through peer editing, research partners, and other boundary-crossing activities.

346-Comparative Ethnic Literatures (Reg. No. 22253)

University of Buffalo, The State University of New York
Spring 2013

Susan Muchshima Moynihan, Assistant Professor of English

This course brings together Asian American and African American texts to destabilize our understandings of race; to situate racial formations in political and historical moments marked by the intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, and national and transnational affiliations; and to consider how literary strategies facilitate political engagement with these issues. The course will proceed in four parts.

Part I “Racial Ambiguity and the Dynamics of Passing” will engage Charles Chesnutt’s The House Behind the Cedars and short stories and essays by Edith Eaton (Sui Sin Far) and Winnifred Eaton (Onoto Watanna) to address how literary representations of the late-19th and early 20th centuries deployed mixed-race identities and attempts to pass within strict racial hierarchies marked by national and international politics…

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Barack Obama and the Contest for Identity through Self-Representation: HIST-UA 413

New York University
Spring 2013

Jeffrey Sammons, Professor of History

This course will explore the life and career path of the nation’s first “black” president through a focus on his two autobiographies, which will be studied for their content, style, and grounding in the genre and relationship to select canonical texts of the more distant as well as recent past. The course also will pay close attention to representations by others of Obama by critics, supporters, and neutral commentators through a variety of media from books to film to television and radio to social media. As important as Obama is for his unprecendented political achievements, his multi-racial, multi-cultural, multi-national and multi-religious background and experience make him an ideal subject for exploring personal and group identity in a time of apparently increasing concern with Otherness.

AAS 490: Special Topics in Black World Studies: Section 008: Race and “Black Indians”

University of Michigan
Winter 2013
Theme Semester Courses

Tiya Miles, Professor of American Culture, Afroamerican and African Studies, and Native American Studies

This seven week mini course is a special winter 2013 offering for the LSA Theme Semester on Race. The course will introduce students to a range of issues and experiences related to the topic and identity category of “Black Indians.” Popularized in the 1980s by a book of the same title, the term “Black Indians” is often used to identify and describe people of mixed-race African American and Native American ancestry. It is also applied to people with strong bi-cultural connections across these groups who may or may not have Black and native “blood” ties. This class will explore and analyze three major aspects of our subject matter:

1. historical contexts for the interactions of Africans, African Americans and Native Americans;
2. personal experiences stemming from mixed race and bi-cultural Afro-Native identities;
3. meanings and effects of “racial stories” that have been crafted and told about “Black Indians” over time.

Major themes and ideas that will emerge in our discussions include: indigeneity, European and U.S. colonialism, slavery, racial formation and racial hierarchy, mixed-race coupling and family making, tribal sovereignty, personal and community identities, and racial and cultural authenticity.

Textbooks/Other Materials

• Confounding the Color Line, Author: Brooks, James F.
• Black Indians: A Hidden Heritage, Author: written by William Loren Katz.
• Crossing Waters, Crossing Worlds: the African diaspora in Indian country, Author: edited by Tiya Miles and Sharon P. Holland.
• IndiVisible: African-Native American Lives in the Americas, Author: general editor, Gabrielle Tayac.

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SOCI 329-Multiracial America

Rice University
2013-2014

Multiracial America examines the phenomenon of race mixing (e.g. interracial interaction, multiracial identity) from a sociological perspective. The course covers the legal, political, and cultural contexts of interracial interaction and how these impact current understanding of what it means to be “mixed race.” Recommended Prerequisite(s): SOCI 101.

RRS 625: Mixed Race Studies: A Comparative Focus

San Francisco State University
Spring 2013

Introduction to the field of mixed race studies from a comparative and ethnic studies perspective. Exploration of various multiracial issues for ethnic studies from the viewpoint of scholars and cultural expressionists who are themselves of mixed-racial heritage. [Formerly ETHS 625]

Philosophy of Race (3050)

Appalachian State University, Boone, North Carolina
Fall 2013

Kim Hall, Professor of Philosophy

What is race?  What is the relationship between the category of race and racism?  What is the relationship between race and personal identity?  How do multiracial identities raise questions about the meaning of race and its relationship to identity?  What is the relationship between racialization and society?  What can philosophy help us to understand about race?  What are the relationships between race, gender, class, and sexuality?  How has the idea of race influenced the discipline and practice of philosophy?  This course will examine the metaphysical, epistemological, social, political, and ethical dimensions of race.  Class readings will include both historical and contemporary philosophical approaches to race and racism.