Mixed Race Studies

Feet in two worlds: The American Indian, cowboy hybrid

NonDoc
2015-12-26

Sunny Cooper

(Sunny Cooper)

The Native American is historically pedigreed. Its bloodlines bound through hundreds of years and generations, and lopes straight as I-40. Not so with the American Cowboy. Here, history zigzags, revealing how Spaniards and Native Americans formed the early American Cowboy: the Mestizos, the Criollos, the vaqueros. Russell Freedman says, “It is the cowboy whose fabled reputation we remember, while the vaquero has all but disappeared from history.”

The romantic icon we know today appears relatively new on the scene of humanity. What isn’t new to us is the historic conflicts, and Hollywood cinema, that deeply divided the American West into a split personality: Cowboys vs. Indians.

With respect to the fundamental fact that one set of cultures is rooted in bloodlines and the other in a lifestyle, the two identities share a vital commonality in the American West: the hybrid culture, the amalgamation of Indian and cowboy. We’re horses of a different color with feet in both worlds…

Read the entire article here.

Silencing Race: Disentangling Blackness, Colonialism, and National Identities in Puerto Rico by Ileana Rodríguez-Silva (review)

The Americas
Volume 72, Number 4, October 2015
pages 655-657

Isar Godreau, Researcher
Interdisciplinary Research Institute
University of Puerto Rico, Cayey

Rodríguez-Silva, Ileana M., Silencing Race: Disentangling Blackness, Colonialism, and National Identities in Puerto Rico (London, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

In Silencing Race, Ileana Rodríguez offers a much-needed historical exploration of the silences about “race” embedded in political and public discourses about Puerto Rico. The book is divided in two parts that cover the years from 1870 to 1910. The first part is dedicated to the later years of the Spanish colonial regime, the second to the first years under US colonial rule. Rodríguez-Silva demonstrates how different class and political interests during both these periods converged to subordinate the issue of racial inequality to issues of class and national identity. She argues that class, not race, became the key category through which demands for rights and political participation were made and recognizes the varying perspectives of creole elites, former slaves, union organizers, politicians, and US labor unions. The author also explains the historical conditions that supported such silencing of racial issues and demonstrates why voicing a racialized sense of self or denouncing racism had complex and multifaceted political consequences. On the one hand, politicians sought to gain the electoral support of the predominantly black and expanding labor movement. Aware as they were of the close relationship between race and class, they often accused political rivals of being racist for not attending to workers, needs for economic uplift and equity. On the other hand, blackness and associated popular expressions of poor working-class folk were considered backward by the criollo leadership, who also limited participation of black males in party decisions.

Rodríguez-Silva argues further that a politicized black identity was associated with unrest and the anticolonial movements that had taken place in Haiti and the rest of the Caribbean, including Cuba with its 1912 race war and massacre against the black members of the Partido Independiente de Color. Explicit debates about racism were also inconvenient for political elites who wanted to project themselves to metropolitan authorities as illustrious men in charge of a multiracial society free of racial conflict. During the years of Spanish colonialism, evading the issue of racism and making claims to racial harmony proved Puerto Ricans’ capacity to renegotiate the relationship with Spain as equals (not as separatists).

Undermining racial conflict was also important for maintaining key political alliances between white criollos, artisans, and the working class. As a US colony, making claims to racial harmony proved the local elite’s capacity to negotiate the colonial relationship with the racially segregated United States. An explicit racialized discourse also stood at odds with US colonial representatives with whom annexationists, socialists, and labor union leaders were trying to negotiate better wages, employment opportunities, legal protection, and US citizenship. Hence, Rodríguez-Silva shows how, despite major ideological and class differences, politicians, intellectuals, and labor organizers sought to deracialize their politics. The book explores the silence around issues of race and racial inequality across various geographical areas, but offers the most substantive material on Ponce, its political parties, artisans’ associations, regional publications, and other aspects of public life.

The book’s introduction provides a sophisticated analysis of the role of silence in these processes. The author theorizes silence as the attempt to shape or prevent racial talk as a strategy and tool of oppression, but also as a strategy of the oppressed for survival. She persuasively argues that silence also communicates. However, defining what exactly is being silenced in the historical sources analyzed or defining her expectations for “noise” could have improved the analysis. For Rodríguez-Silva, “noise” (or the opposite of silence) seems to mean the explicit discourses that condemn racism, draw attention to Puerto Rican blackness, or call for organizing around a racialized subjectivity. Yet “race” can also encompass whiteness, whitening, racial harmony, racial mixture, or euphemisms such as “de color.”

These terms do not necessarily represent a silencing of race, but they do imply a silencing of some specific formulations of race, for example, black identity. As such, they can be understood as a deployment of race to silence other specific formulations of race. This unspoken notion of “race talk” or “racial noise” makes the overall theoretical argument about silencing less focused than one would like. It also presents what is being suppressed as an inherently “natural” thing that exists out…

Read the entire review here.

Theories of Race and Ethnicity: Contemporary Debates and Perspectives

Cambridge University Press
January 2015
Paperback ISBN: 9780521154260

Edited by:

Karim Murji, Senior Lecturer in Sociology
The Open University, United Kingdom

John Solomos, Professor of Sociology
University of Warwick, United Kingdom

How have research agendas on race and ethnic relations changed over the past two decades and what new developments have emerged? Theories of Race and Ethnicity provides a comprehensive and cutting-edge collection of theoretically grounded and empirically informed essays. It covers a range of key issues in race and ethnicity studies, such as genetics and race, post-race debates, racial eliminativism and the legacy of Barack Obama, and mixed race identities. The contributions are by leading writers on a range of perspectives employed in studying ethnicity and race, including critical race feminism, critical rationalism, psychoanalysis, performativity, whiteness studies and sexuality. Written in an authoritative yet accessible style, this volume is suitable for researchers and advanced students, offering scholars a survey of the state of the art in the literature, and students an overview of the field.

• A unique set of views on race and ethnicity by writers committed to advancing scholarship
• Covers some of the latest issues and debates in the field, including genetics, post-race eliminativism and mixed race identities from a range of perspectives
• Opening and closing editorial chapters provide a route map of shifts in the field of race and ethnicity studies, and return to some recurring debates to demonstrate how the field changes and has continuing and persisting questions in theorising race and ethnicity

Table of Contents

• 1. Introduction: situating the present Karim Murji and John Solomos
• Part I. Debates: Introduction to Part I
  • 2. Race and the science of difference in the age of genomics Sandra Soo-Jin Lee
  • 3. Colour-blind egalitarianism as the new racial norm Charles A. Gallagher
  • 4. Getting over the Obama hope hangover: the new racism in ‘post-racial’ America Eduardo Bonilla-Silva (with Victor E. Ray)
  • 5. Does a recognition of mixed race move us toward post-race? Miri Song
  • 6. Acting ‘as’ and acting ‘as if’: two approaches to the politics of race and migration Leah Bassel
  • 7. Can race be eradicated? The post-racial problematic Brett St Louis
• Part II. Perspectives: Introduction to Part II
  • 8. Superseding race in sociology: the perspective of critical rationalism Michael Banton
  • 9. Critical race feminism Adrien K. Wing
  • 10. Performativity and ‘raced’ bodies Shirley Tate
  • 11. Racism: psychoanalytic and psycho-social approaches Simon Clarke
  • 12. The sociology of whiteness: beyond good and evil white people Matthew W. Hughey
  • 13. (Sexual) whiteness and national identity: race, class and sexuality in colour-blind France Éric Fassin
  • 14. Racial comparisons, relational racisms: some thoughts on method David Theo Goldberg
• 15. Conclusion: back to the future Karim Murji and John Solomos

Being Japanese American: A JA Sourcebook for Nikkei, Hapa . . . & Their Friends

Stone Bridge Press
2015-06-09
176 pages
7.50 x 9.25 inches
Trade Paper ISBN13: 9781611720228; ISBN10: 1611720222
Ebook ISBN13: 9781611725292; ISBN10: 1611725291

Gil Asakawa

A celebration of JA culture: facts, recipes, songs, words, and memories that every JA will want to share.

This entertaining compendium is a celebration of Japanese American history and heritage. While detailing favorite foods, customs, words, games, and holidays, it explores the painful history of immigration and WWII internment, with suggestions for connecting to your Japanese American community and passing on traditions across generations and into intermarried families. This revised edition has fresh interviews with Japanese Americans about their life experiences and explores contemporary Japanese pop culture like anime and J-pop, with information on traveling to visit your Japanese roots and lists of resources on the Web and social media.

She Is Cuba: A Genealogy of the Mulata Body

Oxford University Press
2015-12-01
240 Pages
53 images
6-1/8 x 9-1/4 inches
Hardcover ISBN: 9780199968169
Paperback ISBN: 9780199968176

Melissa Blanco Borelli, Senior Lecturer in Dance
Royal Holloway University of London

• Weaves together historical method, auto-ethnographic, and performative writing
• Sits at the precipice of scholarly and public interest in Cuban cultural history

She is Cuba: A Genealogy of the Mulata Body traces the history of the Cuban mulata and her association with hips, sensuality and popular dance. It examines how the mulata choreographs her racialised identity through her hips and enacts an embodied theory called hip(g)nosis. By focusing on her living and dancing body in order to flesh out the process of identity formation, this book makes a claim for how subaltern bodies negotiate a cultural identity that continues to mark their bodies on a daily basis. Combining literary and personal narratives with historical and theoretical accounts of Cuban popular dance history, religiosity and culture, this work investigates the power of embodied exchanges: bodies watching, looking, touching and dancing with one another. It sets up a genealogy of how the representations and venerations of the dancing mulata continue to circulate and participate in the volatile political and social economy of contemporary Cuba.

Table of Contents

• Prologue, Entre Familia/Between Family
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Historicizing Hip(g)nosis
• Interlude 1: Echando Cuentos/Telling Stories
• Chapter 2: Hip(g)nosis at Work: Rumors, Social Dance and Cuba’s Academias de Baile
• Interlude 2: A Marriage Proposal
• Chapter 3: Hip(g)nosis as Pleasure: The Mulata in Film
• Interlude 3: Lost Baggage
• Chapter 4: Hip(g)nosis as Brand: Despelote, Tourism and Mulata Citizenship
• Conclusion or Rear Endings
• Index

Houston Bound: Culture and Color in a Jim Crow City

University of California Press
November 2015
320 pages
Hardback ISBN: 9780520282575
Paperback ISBN: 9780520282582

Tyina Steptoe, Assistant Professor of History
University of Arizona

Beginning after World War I and continuing throughout the twentieth century, Houston was transformed from a black-and-white frontier town into one of the most ethnically and racially diverse urban areas in the United States. Houston Bound draws on social and cultural history to show how, despite Anglo attempts to fix racial categories through Jim Crow laws, converging migrations—particularly those of Mexicans and Creoles—complicated ideas of blackness and whiteness and introduced different understandings about race. This migration history is also a story about music and sound, tracing the emergence of Houston’s blues and jazz scenes in the 1920s as well as the hybrid forms of these genres—like zydeco and Tejano soul—that arose when migrants forged shared social space and carved out new communities and politics. Houston’s location on the Gulf Coast, poised between the American South and the West, yields a particularly rich examination of how the histories of colonization, slavery, and segregation produced divergent ways of thinking about race.

This interdisciplinary book provides both an innovative historiography about migration and immigration in the twentieth century and a critical examination of a city located in the former Confederacy.

Under the Sky of My Africa: Alexander Pushkin and Blackness

Northwestern University Press
May 2006
488 pages
6 1/8 x 9 1/4
Paper ISBN: ISBN 978-0-8101-1971-0

Edited by:

Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy (1951-2015), Ann Whitney Olin Professor of Russian Literature and Culture
Barnard College
Columbia University, New York, New York

Nicole Svobodny, Assistant Dean, College of Arts & Sciences; Senior Lecturer, International & Area Studies
Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, Missouri

Ludmilla A. Trigo

Foreword by:

Henry Louis Gates Jr., Alphonse Fletcher University Professor; Director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research
Harvard University

Roughly in the year 1705, a young African boy, acquired from the seraglio of the Turkish sultan, was transported to Russia as a gift to Peter the Great. This child, later known as Abram Petrovich Gannibal, was to become Peter’s godson and to live to a ripe old age, having attained the rank of general and the status of Russian nobility. More important, he was to become the great-grandfather of Russia’s greatest national poet, Alexander Pushkin. It is the contention of the editors of this book, borne out by the essays in the collection, that Pushkin’s African ancestry has played the role of a “wild card” of sorts as a formative element in Russian cultural mythology; and that the ways in which Gannibal’s legacy has been included in or excluded from Pushkin’s biography over the last two hundred years can serve as a shifting marker of Russia’s self-definition.

The first single volume in English on this rich topic, Under the Sky of My Africa addresses the wide variety of interests implicated in the question of Pushkin’s blackness-race studies, politics, American studies, music, mythopoetic criticism, mainstream Pushkin studies. In essays that are by turns biographical, iconographical, cultural, and sociological in focus, the authors-representing a broad range of disciplines and perspectives-take us from the complex attitudes toward race in Russia during Pushkin’s era to the surge of racism in late Soviet and post-Soviet contemporary Russia. In sum, Under the Sky of My Africa provides a wealth of basic material on the subject as well as a series of provocative readings and interpretations that will influence future considerations of Pushkin and race in Russian culture.

1.38 Million Afro-Descendants Are Identified on the Mexican Census for the First Time

Remezcla
2015-12-10

Yara Simón

Since the 1910 Mexican Revolution, Mexico’s national identity has been defined by mestizaje – a term that recognizes mixed racial ancestry of the New World after colonization. But although Mexico’s African presence was considerable from the start of colonization, this “third root” is often excluded from classic views of mestizaje, which focus on indigenous and European ancestries.

For over 15 years, Afro-Mexicans have been been trying to remedy this by pushing for formal recognition in Mexico’s national constitution. Currently, Mexico and Chile are the only countries in Latin America that don’t legally recognize their Afro-descendants as distinct ethnic groups, which activists believe contributes to fight anti-Black racism.

And this year, a group of activists claimed a victory on the path to this recognition. Afro-Mexican advocacy organization Mexico Negro successfully fought for Afro-Mexicans to be included on the national census. According to Quartz, this year was the first time that people of African descent were able to accurately identify themselves on the census, revealing that 1.2 percent of Mexicans – 1.38 million people – are of African descent…

Read or purchase the article here.

The link between “tourism” and “settler colonialism” in Hawai’i

Matador Network
2015-07-29

Bani Amor

Maile Arvin is a Native Hawaiian feminist scholar who writes about Native feminist theories, settler colonialism, decolonization, and race and science in Hawai‘i and the broader Pacific. She is currently a University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in Ethnic Studies at UCR and will be officially joining the department as an assistant professor in July. She is part of the Critical Ethnic Studies Association working group and a member of Hinemoana of Turtle Island, a Pacific Islander feminist group of activists, poets, and scholars located in California and Oregon. You can find some of her academic writing here.

Bani Amor: Tell us about yourself, the work that you do, and how your identities play into that work.

Maile Arvin: So I’m Native Hawaiian, and my family is from Waimanalo, a small town on the windward side of O’ahu. I’m an academic – I research and teach about race and indigeneity in Hawai’i, the larger Pacific and elsewhere. Being Native Hawaiian grounds my work, motivates me to write about Native Hawaiian lives and histories in complicated, respectful ways.

One of my current projects is working with Hinemoana of Turtle Island, a group of Native Hawaiian and other Pacific Islander feminist women, many of whom are also academics but also poets, activists, artists. We support each other in the academic world and are accountable to each other. We talk to each other a lot about current issues that affect Pacific Islanders, usually in news that erases the existence of Indigenous Pacific Islanders altogether, and sometimes write up responses on our blog, muliwai. We’re currently working on a response to the movie Aloha. Or maybe more about the criticism of the movie that is entirely focused on Emma Stone’s casting.

Bani Amor: Word. That leads me to my next question: I often find that travel media and tourism are complicit in settler colonialism, in that it still purports an archaic, false image of indigenous peoples as smiling caricatures who are ready, willing and able to serve at the beck and call of the (white) tourist. Any idea why this is especially the case for Hawai’i?

Maile Arvin: For Hawai’i, because it is actually a U.S. state, there is this incredible sense of entitlement that white Americans in particular feel to being at home in Hawai’i. Since World War II in particular, and the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, there was this narrative of Hawai’i as being the place that militarily makes the rest of the U.S. safe. And along with that, there is also a need to justify and naturalize U.S. military occupation of these islands that are over 2000 miles away from the U.S. continent. So Hawai’i becomes this feminine place in need of the masculine U.S. military to safeguard both Hawai’i and the rest of the U.S. And Native Hawaiian women in particular become these symbols of a happy, paradisical place, a place where white military men will have fun, will get their own Native Hawaiian girl…

Read the entire interview here.

People Of Color With Albinism Ask: Where Do I Belong?

Code Switch: Frontiers of Race, Culture and Ethnicity
National Public Radio
2015-12-07

Anjuli Sastry

Growing up, Natalie Devora always questioned how she fit into her African-American family.

“Everyone was brown, and then there was me,” Devora says. “I’m a white-skinned black woman. That’s how I navigate through the world. That’s how I identify.”

Devora has albinism, a rare genetic expression that leads to little or no melanin production. No matter what race or ethnicity someone with albinism is, their skin and hair appear white because of a lack of pigment. It is estimated that one out of every 18,000 to 20,000 people born in America each year has some form of albinism, according to the National Organization for Albinism and Hypopigmentation.

Devora grew up in Oakland, Calif., where, every so often, strangers would ask her mother about her “white” child. It made Devora question where she belonged…

…That brings us back to the original question. In a society where race is intrinsic to the fabric of our society — leaving aside the myths of post-racialism and colorblind politics — where do people of color, but without color, fit? Do they need to fit? And how should everyone else change their own perceptions about albinism?…

Read the entire article here.