Mixed Race Studies

Brazil’s New Racial Politics

Lynne Rienner Publishers
2009
251 pages
ISBN: 978-1-58826-666-8

Edited by:

Bernd Reiter, Associate Professor of Political Science
University of South Florida

Gladys L. Mitchell (Gladys Mitchell-Walthour), Assistant Professor of Political Science
Denison University, Granville, Ohio

As the popular myth of racial equality in Brazil crumbles beneath the weight of current grassroots politics, how will the country redefine itself as a multiethnic nation? Brazil’s New Racial Politics captures the myriad questions and problems unleashed by a growing awareness of the ways racism structures Brazilian society.

 The authors bridge the gap between scholarship and activism as they tackle issues ranging from white privilege to black power, from government policy to popular advocacy, and from historical injustices to recent victories. The result is a rich exploration of the conflicting social realities characterizing Brazil today, as well as their far-reaching political implications.

Contents

• Foreword—Michael Mitchell.
• 1. The New Politics of Race in Brazil—Bernd Reiter and Gladys L. Mitchell.
• BLACK EMPOWERMENT AND WHITE PRIVILEGE.
  • 2. Whiteness as Capital: Constructing Inclusion and Defending Privilege—Bernd  Reiter.
  • 3. Politicizing Blackness: Afro-Brazilian Color Identification and Candidate Preference—Gladys L. Mitchell
  • 4. Out of Place: The Experience of the Black Middle Class—Angela Figueiredo.
  • 5. The Political Shock of the Year: The Press and the Election of a Black Mayor in São Paulo—Cloves Luiz Pereira Oliveira.
• AFFIRMATIVE ACTION CONTESTED.
  • 6. Affirmative Action and Identity—Seth Racusen.
  • 7. Opportunities and Challenges for the Afro-Brazilian Movement—Mónica Treviño González.
• THE NEW POLITICS OF BLACK POWER.
  • 8. Racialized History and Urban Politics: Black Women’s Wisdom in Grassroots Struggles—Keisha-Khan Y. Perry.
  • 9. Black NGOs and “Conscious” Rap: New Agents of the Antiracism Struggle in Brazil—Sales Augusto dos Santos.
  • 10. Power and Black Organizing in Brazil—Fernando Conceição.
  • 11. New Social Activism: University Entry Courses for Black and Poor Students—Renato Emerson dos Santos.
• CONCLUSION.
  • After the Racial Democracy—Bernd Reiter and Gladys L. Mitchell.

Race and Identity in Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father: A Collection of Critical Essays

Edwin Mellen Press
June 2012
308 pages
ISBN10:  0-7734-1601-3; ISBN13: 978-0-7734-1601-7

Edited by:

Michael A. Zeitler, Associate Professor of English
Texas Southern University, Houston

Charlene T. Evans, Professor of English
Texas Southern University, Houston

This book examines significant aspects of President Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father both in relation to the African American literary tradition and to the context of the relevant historical and cultural productions that inform it. The authors view the book a work of literature and compare it to other works by black authors such as Toni Morrison, Frederick Douglass, and Ralph Ellison among others. Some authors contest the idea that the book was written during a pre-political stage in President Obama’s life because it was released to coincide with his first political campaign in Chicago, Illinois in the mid-1990’s. For autobiographical reasons the book is important because it shows various aspects of President Obama’s upbringing, and put in his own words his experience of being black in America. There is also a discussion of why he chose the less Americanized Barack when he went into college, rather than the homogeneous, whitened name Barry, which was the name he preferred in grammar school (out of being teased by other children)—and how he chose this name precisely because it constructed his identity as antithetical to the dominant paradigms of whiteness that he had been confined to while growing up in Hawaii. One article even describes President Obama’s father being ostracized from Kenyan politics after a coup d’etat forced a leader out of power who he had publically supported, which lead the family to America. It also tells the story of a turgid paternal influence on the young Barack Obama, where caught in a vicious cycle of perpetually working for his father’s approval, he spiraled into low self-esteem, which may have fueled his political ambitions later in life (as overcompensation for a lack of fatherly approval).

Table of Contents

• Foreword / Molefi Kete Asantei
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction / Michael A. Zeitler
• A Knot to Bind Our Experiences Together: Storytelling in Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father and Critical Race Theory / Erin Ponton Fiero
• No Apology for the Show: Performance and Oratorical Self-Creation in Obama, Douglass, and Ellison / Granville Ganter
• Slumming and Self-Making in Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father / David Mastey
• In Search of My Father’s Garden: Kenya as the Focal Point for the Study of a New Kind of Narrative in African American Autobiography / Claire Joly
• An Image of Africa: Race and Identity in Barack Obama’s Rewriting of Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’ / Michael Zeitler
• Obama, Ellison, and the Search for Identity / Rita Saylors
• Voices of His Mothers: Feminist Interventions and Identity in Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father / Letizia Guglielmo
• Queer Coherence: Loss and Hybridity in Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father / Patricia Harris Gillies
• The Search for Race and Masculine Identity in Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father / Dolores Sisco
• Beyond Race: Racial Transcendence in Jean Toomer’s Cane and Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father / Charlene T. Evans
• Glorious Burdens: A Lacanian Reading of Racial Passing, Inheritance, and Paternal Desire in Obama’s Dreams from My Father / Nicholas Powers

Pictures and Progress: Early Photography and the Making of African American Identity

Duke University Press
2012
400 pages
71 photographs
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-5085-9
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8223-5067-5

Edited by:

Maurice O. Wallace, Associate Professor of English and African & African American Studies
Duke University

Shawn Michelle Smith, Associate Professor of Visual and Critical Studies
School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Pictures and Progress explores how, during the nineteenth century and the early twentieth, prominent African American intellectuals and activists understood photography’s power to shape perceptions about race and employed the new medium in their quest for social and political justice. They sought both to counter widely circulating racist imagery and to use self-representation as a means of empowerment. In this collection of essays, scholars from various disciplines consider figures including Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Ida B. Wells, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and W. E. B. Du Bois as important and innovative theorists and practitioners of photography. In addition, brief interpretive essays, or “snapshots,” highlight and analyze the work of four early African American photographers. Featuring more than seventy images, Pictures and Progress brings to light the wide-ranging practices of early African American photography, as well as the effects of photography on racialized thinking.

Contributors. Michael A. Chaney, Cheryl Finley, P. Gabrielle Foreman, Ginger Hill, Leigh Raiford, Augusta Rohrbach, Ray Sapirstein, Suzanne N. Schneider, Shawn Michelle Smith, Laura Wexler, Maurice O. Wallace

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Pictures and Progress / Maurice O. Wallace and Shawn Michelle Smith
• 1. “A More Perfect Likeness”: Frederick Douglass and the Image of the Nation / Laura Wexler
• 2. “Rightly Viewed”: Theorizations of the Self in Frederick Douglass’s Lecture on Pictures / Ginger Hill
• 3. Shadow and Substance: Sojourner Truth in Black and White / Augusta Rohrbach
  • Snapshot 1. Unredeemed Realities: Augustus Washington / Shawn Michelle Smith
• 4. Mulatta Obscura: Camera Tactics and Linda Brent / Michael Chaney
• 5. Who’s Your Mama?: “White” Mulatta Genealogies, Early Photography, and Anti-Passing Narratives of Slavery and Freedom / P. Gabrielle Foreman
• 6. Out from Behind the Mask: Paul Laurence Dunbar, the Hampton Institute Camera Club, and Photographic Performance of Identity / Ray Sapirstein
  • Snapshot 2. Reproducing Black Masculinity: Thomas Askew / Shawn Michelle Smith
• 7. Louis Agassiz and the American School of Ethnoeroticism: Polygenesis, Pornography, and Other “Perfidious Influences” / Suzanne Schneider
• 8. Framing the Black Soldier: Image, Uplift, and the Duplicity of Pictures / Maurice O. Wallace
  • Snapshot 3. Unfixing the Frame(-up): A. P. Bedou / Shawn Michelle Smith
• 9. “Looking at One’s Self through the Eyes of Others”: W. E. B. Du Bois’s Photographs for the Paris Exposition of 1900 / Shawn Michelle Smith
• 10. Ida B. Wells and the Shadow Archive / Leigh Raiford
  • Snapshot 4. The Photographer’s Touch: J. P. Ball / Shawn Michelle Smith
• 11. No More Auction Block for Me! / Cheryl Finley
• Bibliography
• Contributors
• Index

Obama and Race: History, Culture, Politics

Routledge
2011-11-10
200 pages
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-415-68678-5

Edited by

Richard H. King, Professor Emeritus of American and Canadian Studies
University of Nottingham

In this collection, academics from both sides of the Atlantic analyze the confluence of a politician, a process, and a problem—Barack Obama, the 2008 US presidential election, and the ‘problem’ of race in contemporary America. The special focus falls upon Barack Obama himself, who appears in many guises: as an individual from biracial and transnational backgrounds; a skilled, urban African-American organizer and then politician; and as intellectual and author of a bestselling autobiographical exploration.

There is a certain representative quality about Obama that makes him a convenient way into the labyrinth of American race relations, national and regional politics (including the South and Hawaii), and past history (particularly from the 1960s to the present). Contributors also explore the role Michelle Obama has played in this process, both separately from and together with her husband, while one theme running through many chapters concerns the myriad ways that the American left, right and centre differ on the nature and future of race in a country that daily becomes more mixed in ethnic and racial terms. Race is everywhere; race is nowhere. The essays are grouped by their approach to the topic of Obama and race: via historical analysis, cultural studies, political science and sociology, as well as pedagogy. The result is an exciting mix of perspectives on one of the most fascinating phenomena of our time.
 
This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal Patterns of Prejudice.

Contents

1. Obama and race: culture, history, politics Richard H. King, University of Nottingham, UK
2. The riddle of race Emily Bernard, University of Vermont, USA
3. ‘A curious relationship’: Barack Obama, the 1960s and the election of 2008 Brian Ward, University of Manchester, UK
4. Barack Hussein Obama: the use of history in the creation of an ‘American’ president George Lewis, University of Leicester, UK
5. Becoming black, becoming president Richard H. King, University of Nottingham, UK
6. Two great days in Harlem Carmel King, freelance photographer, UK
7. How to read Michelle Obama Maria Lauret, Sussex University, UK
8. Barack Obama and the American island of the colour blind Peter Kuryla, Belmont University, USA
9. Barack Obama as the post-racial candidate for a post-racial America: perspectives from Asian America and Hawaii Jonathan Y. Okamura, University of Hawaii, USA
10. Barack Obama and the South: demography as electoral opportunity Donald W. Beachler, Ithaca College, USA
11. Teaching Obama: history, critical race theory and social work education Damon Freeman, University of Pennsylvania, USA

American Creoles: The Francophone Caribbean and the American South

Liverpool University Press
May 2012
256 pages
234 x 156 mm
Hardback ISBN: 9781846317538

Edited by:

Celia Britton, Professor of French and Francophone Studies
University College London

Martin Munro, Professor of French and Francophone Studies
Florida State University

The Francophone Caribbean and the American South are sites born of the plantation, the common matrix for the diverse nations and territories of the circum-Caribbean. This book takes as its premise that the basic configuration of the plantation, in terms of its physical layout and the social relations it created, was largely the same in the Caribbean and the American South. Essays written by leading authorities in the field examine the cultural, social, and historical affinities between the Francophone Caribbean and the American South, including Louisiana, which among the Southern states has had a quite particular attachment to France and the Francophone world. The essays focus on issues of history, language, politics and culture in various forms, notably literature, music and theatre. Considering figures as diverse as Barack Obama, Frantz Fanon, Miles Davis, James Brown, Édouard Glissant, William Faulkner, Maryse Condé and Lafcadio Hearn, the essays explore in innovative ways the notions of creole culture and creolization, terms rooted in and indicative of contact between European and African people and cultures in the Americas, and which are promoted here as some of the most productive ways for conceiving of the circum-Caribbean as a cultural and historical entity.

Contents

• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction – Martin Munro and Celia Britton
• Creolizations
  • Lafcadio Hearn’s American Writings and the Creole Continuum – Mary Gallagher
  • Auguste Lussan’s La Famille creole: How Saint-Domingue Emigres Bcame Louisiana Creoles – Typhaine Leservot
  • Caribbean and Creole in New Orleans – Angle Adams Parham
  • Creolizing Barack Obama – Valerie Loichot
  • Richard Price or the Canadian from Petite-Anse: The Potential and the Limitations of a Hybrid Anthropology – Christina Kullberg
• Music
  • ‘Fightin’ the Future’: Rhythm and Creolization in the Circum-Caribbean – Martin Munro
  • Leaving the South: Frantz Fanon, Modern Jazz, and the Rejection of Negritude – Jeremy F. Lane
  • The Sorcerer and the Quimboiseur: Poetic Intention in the Works of Miles Davis and Edourard Glissant – Jean-Luc Tamby
  • Creolizing Jazz, Jazzing the Tout-monde: Jazz, Gwoka and the Poetics of Relation – Jerome Camal
• Intertextualities: Faulkner, Glissant, Conde
  • Go Slow Now: Saying the Unsayable in Edouard Glissant’s Reading of Faulkner – Michael Wiedorn
  • Edouard Glissant and the Test of Faulkner’s Modernism – Hugh Azerad
  • The Theme of the Ancestral Crime in the Novels of Faulkner, Glissant, and Conde – Celia Britton
  • An American Story – Yanick Lahen
• Notes on Contributors
• Index

Race, Ethnicity, and Nation: Perspectives from Kinship and Genetics

Berghahn Books
Winter 2007
210 pages
Hardback ISBN: 978-1-84545-355-8
Paperback ISBN:978-1-84545-681-8

Edited by

Peter Wade, Professor of Social Anthropology
University of Manchester

Race, ethnicity and nation are all intimately linked to family and kinship, yet these links deserve closer attention than they usually get in social science, above all when family and kinship are changing rapidly in the context of genomic and biotechnological revolutions. Drawing on data from assisted reproduction, transnational adoption, mixed race families, Basque identity politics and post-Soviet nation-building, this volume provides new and challenging ways to understand race, ethnicity and nation.

Contents

• Preface and Acknowledgements
• 1. Race, Ethnicity and Nation: Perspectives from Kinship and Genetics / Peter Wade
• 2. Race, Genetics and Inheritance: Reflections upon the Birth of ‘Black’ Twins to a ‘White’ IVF Mother / Katharine Tyler
• 3. Race, Biology and Culture in Contemporary Norway: Identity and Belonging in Adoption, Donor Gametes and Immigration / Signe Howell and Marit Melhuus
• 4. ‘I want her to learn her language and maintain her culture’: Transnational Adoptive Families’ Views of ‘Cultural Origins’ / Diana Marre
• 5. Racialization, Genes and the Reinventions of Nation in Europe / Ben Campbell
• 6. Kinship Language and the Dynamics of Race: The Basque Case / Enric Porqueres i Gené
• 7. The Transmission of Ethnicity: Family and State – A Lithuanian Perspective / Darius Daukšas
• 8. Media Storylines of Culturally Hybrid Persons and Nation / Ben Campbell
• Notes on Contributors
• Glossary
• Index

Race and the Genetic Revolution: Science, Myth, and Culture

Columbia University Press
September 2011
304 pages
1 illus; 4 tables
Paper ISBN: 978-0-231-15697-4
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-231-15696-7

Edited by:

Sheldon Krimsky, Professor of Urban & Environmental Policy & Planning; Adjunct Professor of Public Health and Family Medicine
Tufts School of Medicine
Tufts University, Medford, Massachusetts

Kathleen Sloan

Do advances in genomic biology create a scientific rationale for long-discredited racial categories? Leading scholars in law, medicine, biology, sociology, history, anthropology, and psychology examine the impact of modern genetics on the concept of race. Contributors trace the interplay between genetics and race in forensic DNA databanks, the biology of intelligence, DNA ancestry markers, and racialized medicine. Each essay explores commonly held and unexamined assumptions and misperceptions about race in science and popular culture.

This collection begins with the historical origins and current uses of the concept of “race” in science. It follows with an analysis of the role of race in DNA databanks and racial disparities in the criminal justice system. Essays then consider the rise of recreational genetics in the form of for-profit testing of genetic ancestry and the introduction of racialized medicine, specifically through an FDA-approved heart drug called BiDil, marketed to African American men. Concluding sections discuss the contradictions between our scientific and cultural understandings of race and the continuing significance of race in educational and criminal justice policy.

Table of Contents

• A short history of the race concept / Michael Yudell
• Natural selection, the human genome, and the idea of race / Robert Pollack
• Racial disparities in databanking of DNA profiles / Michael T. Risher
• Prejudice, stigma, and DNA databases / Helen Wallace
• Ancestry testing and DNA : uses, limits, and caveat emptor / Troy Duster
• Can DNA witness race? Forensic uses of an imperfect ancestry testing technology / Duana Fullwiley
• BiDil and racialized medicine / Jonathan Kahn
• Evolutionary versus racial medicine : why it matters? / Joseph L. Graves Jr.
• Myth and mystification : the science of race and IQ / Pilar N. Ossorio
• Intelligence, race, and genetics / Robert J. Sternberg … [et al.]
• The elusive variability of race / Patricia J. Williams
• Race, genetics, and the regulatory need for race impact assessments / Osagie K. Obasogie.

Loving vs. Virginia in a Post-Racial World: Rethinking Race, Sex, and Marriage

Cambridge University Press
June 2012
300 pages
Hardback ISBN-13: 9780521198585
Paperback ISBN-13: 9780521147989

Edited by

Kevin Noble Maillard, Professor of Law
Syracuse University

Rose Cuison Villazor, Professor of Law
University of California, Davis

In 1967, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that laws prohibiting interracial marriage were unconstitutional in Loving vs. Virginia. Although this case promotes marital freedom and racial equality, there are still significant legal and social barriers to the free formation of intimate relationships. Marriage continues to be the sole measure of commitment, mixed relationships continue to be rare, and same-sex marriage is only legal in 6 out of 50 states. Most discussion of Loving celebrates the symbolic dismantling of marital discrimination. This book, however, takes a more critical approach to ask how Loving has influenced the “loving” of America. How far have we come since then, and what effect did the case have on individual lives?

Table of Contents

• Introduction Kevin Noble Maillard and Rose Cuison Villazor
• Part I: Explaining Loving v. Virginia
  • 1. The legacy of Loving John DeWitt Gregory and Joanna L. Grossman
• Part II: Historical Antecedents to Loving
  • 2. The ‘love’ of Loving Jason A. Gillmer
  • 3. Loving in Indian territory: tribal miscegenation law in historical perspective Carla Pratt
  • 4. American mestizo: Filipinos and antimiscegenation laws in California Leti Volpp
  • 5. Perez v. Sharp and the limits of Loving: race, marriage, and citizenship reconsidered R. A. Lenhardt
• Part III: Loving and Interracial Relationships: Contemporary Challenges
  • 6. The road to Loving: the legacy of antimiscegenation law Kevin Noble Maillard
  • 7. Love at the margins: the racialization of sex and the sexualization of race Camille A. Nelson
  • 8. The crime of Loving: Loving, Lawrence, and beyond I. Bennett Capers
  • 9. What’s Loving got to do with it? Law shaping experience and experience shaping law Renée M. Landers
  • 10. Fear of a ‘Brown’ planet or a new hybrid culture? Jacquelyn Bridgeman
• Part IV: Considering the Limits of Loving
  • 11. Black pluralism in post-Loving America Taunya Lovell Banks
  • 12. Multiracialism and reparations: accounting for political blackness Angelique Davis
  • 13. Finding a Loving home Angela Onwuachi-Willig and Jacob Willig-Onwuachi
• Part V: Loving outside the United States Borders
  • 14. Racially inadmissible wives Rose Cuison Villazor
  • 15. Flying buttresses Nancy K. Ota
  • 16. Crossing borders: Loving v. Virginia as a story of migration Victor Romero
• Part VI: Loving and Beyond: Marriage, Intimacy and Diverse Relationships
  • 17. Black vs. gay: centering LBGT people of color in civil marriage debates Adele Morrison
  • 18. Forty years after Loving: a legacy of unintended consequences Rachel F. Moran
  • 19. The end of marriage Tucker Culbertson
  • 20. Afterword Peter Wallenstein

Creolization: History, Ethnography, Theory

Left Coast Press
March 2007
276 pages
6 x 9
Hardback ISBN: 978-1-59874-278-7
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-59874-279-4
eBook ISBN: 978-1-61132-467-9
eBook Rental (180 Days) ISBN: 978-1-61132-467-9

Edited by

Charles Stewart
Department of Anthropology
University College London

Social scientists have used the term “Creolization” to evoke cultural fusion and the emergence of new cultures across the globe. However, the term has been under-theorized and tends to be used as a simple synonym for “mixture” or “hybridity.” In this volume, by contrast, renowned scholars give the term historical and theoretical specificity by examining the very different domains and circumstances in which the process takes place. Elucidating the concept in this way not only uncovers a remarkable history, it also re-opens the term for new theoretical use. It illuminates an ill-understood idea, explores how the term has operated and signified in different disciplines, times, and places, and indicates new areas of study for a dynamic and fascinating process.

Table of Contents

• Introduction: Creolization: History, Ethnography, Theory, Charles Stewart
• 1. Creole Discourse in Colonial Spanish America, Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra
• 2. Creoles in British America: From Denial to Acceptance, Joyce Chaplin
• 3. The ‘C-Word’, Again: From Colonial to Postcolonial Semantics, Stephan Palmié
• 4.Creole Linguistics from its Beginnings, Through Schuchardt, To the Present Day, Philip Baker and Peter Mühlhäusler
• 5. From Miscegenation to Creole Identity: Portuguese Colonialism, Brazil, Cape Verde, Miguel Vale de Almeida
• 6. Indian-Oceanic Creolizations:Processes and Practices of Creolization on Réunion Island, Françoise Vergès
• 7. Creolization in Anthropological Theory and in Mauritius, Thomas Hylland Eriksen
• 8. Is There a Model in the Muddle? ‘Creolization’ in African Americanist History and Anthropology, Stephan Palmié
• 9. Adapting to Inequality: Negotiating Japanese Identity in Contexts of Return, Joshua Roth
• 10. The Créolité Movement: Paradoxes of a French Caribbean Orthodoxy, Mary Gallagher
• 11. Creolization Moments, Aisha Khan

Black Indian Slave Narratives

John F. Blair, Publisher
2004
200 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-89587-298-2

Patrick Minges

Few people realize that Native Americans were enslaved right alongside the African Americans in this country. Fewer still realize that many Native Americans owned African Americans and Native Americans from other tribes. Recently, historians have determined that of the 2,193 interviews with former slaves that were collected by the Federal Writers’ Project, 12 percent contain some reference to the interviewees’ being related to or descended from Native Americans. In addition, many of the interviewees make references to their Native American owners. In Black Indian Slave Narratives, Patrick Minges offers the most absorbing of these firsthand testimonies about African American and Native American relationships in the 19th century.

The selections include an interview with Felix Lindsey, who was born in Kentucky of Mvskoke/African heritage and who served as one of the buffalo soldiers who rounded up Geronimo. Chaney Mack, whose father was a “full-blood African” from Liberia and whose mother was a “pure-blood Indian,” gives an in-depth look at both sides of her cultural heritage, including her mother’s visions based on the “night the stars fell” over Alabama. There are stories of Native Americans taken by “nigger stealers,” who found themselves placed on slave-auction blocks alongside their African counterparts.

The narratives in this collection provide insight into the lives of people who lived in complex and dynamically interconnected cultures. The interviews also offer historical details of capture and enslavement, life in the Old South and the Old West, Indian removal, and slavery in the Indian territory.

I wasn’t as dark as I am now, but kind of red-like, and when Geronimo saw me he said, “You ain’t no nigger, you’re an Indian.”

“My father may have been an Indian, but I’m a nigger because that’s the race of my mother, and the race I chose,” I said.

—From Felix Lindsey’s narrative