Mixed Race Studies

Segregated Miscegenation: On the Treatment of Racial Hybridity in the North American and Latin American Literary Traditions

Routledge
2003-02-28
Pages: 144
Trim Size: 6 x 9
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-415-94349-9

Carlos Hiraldo, Professor of English
LaGuardia Community College, City University of New York

Through the comparative study of literatures from the United States and Latin America, Segregated Miscegenation questions received notions of race and nation. Carlos Hiraldo examines the current understanding of race in the United States alongside alternative models of racial self-definition in Latin America. His provocative analysis traces the conceptualization of blackness in fiction and theories of the novel, and troubles the racial and ethnic categories particular to each region’s literary tradition.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Coloring Latinos, Coloring the United States
  • The Novel as Popular Culture
  • Race in Latin America
  • Latinos as a U.S. Race
  • The Novel in the Dissemination and Reconfiguration of Notions about Race
• Chapter One: Novel Concepts: The Role of the Novel in Developing Ideas of Nation and Race in the Americas
  • Mikhail Bakhtin, Georg Lukacs, and the “New World” of the Novel
  • Benedict Anderson and the Novel as a Tool of National Imagination
  • Fredric Jameson and the Many Worlds in the Americas
  • Novels and the Fictionalization of Racial Attitudes
• Chapter Two: Enslaved Characters: Nineteenth-Century Abolitionist Novels and the Absence of Bi-racial Consciousness
  • Differences between Bi-racial and Mulatto Characters
  • The Myth of Racial Purity versus the Dreams of a Miscegenated Paradise
  • The Limitations of Nineteenth-Century Racial Representations
  • Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Bi-racial Characters in Nineteenth-Century U.S. and Latin American Literatures
  • Sab as a Nineteenth-Century Cuban Romantic Tale about Race
  • The Complicit Ignorance of Cecilia Valdes
  • A Thin Line between Black and White in Martin Morua Delgado’s Sofia and Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson
  • Race without Romance in Antonio Zambrana’s El negro Francisco
• Chapter Three: Mulatto Fictions: Representations of Identity-Consciousness in U.S. and Latin American Bi-racial Characters
  • Mulatto Characters as Racial and Cultural Nexus
  • Passing the Tragic Mulatta in Twentieth-Century U.S. Literature
  • Gabriela and the Sexualized Mulatia in Twentieth-Century Latin American Literature
  • Pobre negro, The Violent Land, and the Limits of Mulatto Characters in Twentieth-Century Latin American Literature
  • Joe Christmas and the Unmerry Existence of Mulatto Characters in Twentieth-Century U.S. Literature
  • Go Down, Moses and the Mumbled Recognition of Racial Confluence in the United States
  • The Bluest Eye and the Persistence of Anti-mulatto Fiction in the United States
• Chapter Four: Identity Against the Grain: Latino Authors of African European
  • Heritage and Their Encounters with the Racial Ideology of the United States
  • Latino Authors and the “One Drop” Rule
  • Piri Thomas, Julia Alvarez, and the Limitations of Choosing Sides in the U.S. Racial Divide
  • Esmeralda Santiago and Negi’s Persistent Puertoricanness in the Face of the “One Drop” Rule
• Chapter Five: Choosing Your Own Face: Future Trends of Racial
  • Discourses in the United States
  • Latino Influence in Other Cultural Products
  • The Latin American Racial Paradigm behind the “Wigga”
  • The Rock, Tiger Woods, and a Universal Race
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

As We Are Now: Mixblood Essays on Race and Identity

University of California Press
January 1998
282 pages
Paperback ISBN: 9780520210738

edited by

William S. Penn, Professor of Creative Writing
Michigan State University

The thirteen contributors to As We Are Now invite readers to explore with them the untamed territory of race and mixblood identity in North America. A “mixblood,” according to editor W.S. Penn, recognizes that his or her identity comes not from distinct and separable strains of ancestry but from the sum of the tension and interplay of all his or her ancestral relationships. These first-person narratives cross racial, national, and disciplinary boundaries in a refreshingly experimental approach to writing culture. Their authors call on similar but varied cultural and aesthetic traditions—mostly oral—in order to address some aspect of race and identity about which they feel passionate, and all resist the essentialist point of view. Mixblood Native American, Mestizo/a, and African-American writers focus their discussion on the questions indigenous and minority people ask and the way in which they ask them, clearly merging the singular “I” with the communal “we.” These are new voices in the dialogue of ethnic writers, and they offer a highly original treatment of an important subject.

Table of Contents

Introduction
William S. Penn

Cutting and Pinning Patterns
Erika Aigner-Varoz

Howling at the Moon: The Queer but True Story of My Life as a Hank Williams Song
Craig Womack

Crossing Borders from the Beginning
Alfonso Rodriguez

Knots
Carol Kalafatic

What Part Moon
Inez Petersen

Tradition and the Individual Imitation
William S. Penn

On Mapping and Urban Shamans
Kimberly Blaeser

Race and Mixed-Race: A Personal Tour
Rainier Spencer

Visions in the Four Directions: Five Hundred Years of Resistance and Beyond
Arturo Aldama

Between the Masques
Diane DuBose Brunner

From the Turn of the Century to the New Age: Playing Indian, Past and Present
Shari Huhndorf

Troublemakers
Rolando Romero

Ritchie Valens Is Dead: E Pluribus Unum
Patricia Penn Hilden

Notes on Contributors

Gender, Race and Religion in the Colonization of the Americas

Ashgate Publishing
July 2007
218 pages
219 x 153 mm
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-7546-5189-5

Edited by

Nora E. Jaffary, Associate Professor of History
Concordia University, Montreal, Canada

When Europe introduced mechanisms to control New World territories, resources and populations, women-whether African, indigenous, mixed race, or European-responded and participated in multiple ways. By adopting a comprehensive view of female agency, the essays in this collection reveal the varied implications of women’s experiences in colonialism in North and South America.

Although the Spanish American context receives particular attention here, the volume contrasts the context of both colonial Mexico and Peru to every other major geographic region that became a focus of European imperialism in the early modern period: the Caribbean, Brazil, English America, and New France. The chapters provide a coherent perspective on the comparative history of European colonialism in the Americas through their united treatment of four central themes: the gendered implications of life on colonial frontiers; non-European women’s relationships to Christian institutions; the implications of race-mixing; and social networks established by women of various ethnicities in the colonial context.

This volume adds a new dimension to current scholarship in Atlantic history through its emphasis on culture, gender and race, and through its explicit effort to link religion to the broader imperial framework of economic extraction and political domination.

Table of Contents

• Introduction: Contextualizing race, gender, and religion in the New World Nora E. Jaffary
• Part 1: Frontiers
  • 2. Women as go-betweens? Patterns in 16th-century Brazil Alida C. Metcalf
  • 3. Gender and violence: conquest, conversion, and culture on new Spain’s imperial frontier Bruce A. Erickson
  • 4. The very sinews of a new Colony: demographic determinism and the history of early Georgia women, 1732–52 Ben Marsh
• Part 2: Female Religious
  • 5. The convent as missionary in 17th-century France Susan Broomhall
  • 6. ‘Although I am black, I am beautiful’: Juana Esperanza de San Alberto, Black Carmelite of Puebla Joan C. Bristol
  • 7. Andean women in religion: Beatas, ‘decency’, and the defense of honour in colonial Cuzco Kathryn Burns
• Part 3: Race Mixing
  • 8. Incest, sexual virtue, and social mobility in late colonial Mexico Nora E. Jaffary
  • 9. ‘An empire founded on libertinage’: The mulâtresse and colonial anxiety in Saint Domingue
    Yvonne Fabella
  • 10. Mediating Mackinac: métis women’s cultural persistence in the Upper Great Lakes Bethany Fleming
• Part 4: Networks
  • 11. Circuits of knowledge among women in early-17th-century Lima Nancy E. van Deusen
  • 12. Waters of faith, currents of freedom: gender, religion, and ethnicity in inter-imperial trade between Curaçao and Tierra Firme Linda M. Rupert
• Afterword
  • Women in the Atlantic world
  • Patricia Seed
• Bibliography
• Index

Read the introduction here.

Seven Hours To Burn

Women Make Movies
USA/Canada, 1999
9 minutes
Color/BW, VHS/16mm
Order No. W01699

Shanti Thakur

“A visually expressive personal documentary that explores a family’s history. Filmmaker Thakur mixes richly abstract filmmaking with disturbing archival war footage to narrate the story of her Danish mother’s and Indian father’s experiences. Her mother survives Nazi-occupied Denmark while her father experiences the devastating civil war in India between Hindus and Muslims. Both émigrés to Canada, they meet and marry, linking two parallel wars. Their daughter lyrically turns these two separate histories into a visually rich poem linking past and present in a new singular identity.” Doubletake Documentary Film Festival Catalogue

View the trailer here.

Issues for Racially Diverse Families

A Research Project for the Capital Region Race Relations Association, Victoria [Canada]
2003
41 pages

Elias Cheboud (1959-2010), Adjunct Professor of Social Work
University of Victoria, Canada

Christine Downing, Project Coordinator
Multiracial Family Project

This report explores the experience of members of racially mixed families in Victoria, BC. Six themes were identified:(1. Identifying Self, 2. Being In Racially Mixed Family In Victoria, 3. The Challenges, 4. Access For Support, 5. Acceptance, 6. Gaps In Service And Resources). Then reference was made to the heuristic method, chosen to verify the process and to understand the meaning of these lived-experiences.

Most participants in this snapshot study have described encountering numerous barriers as part of a racially mixed family or as individuals living in Victoria. This could be due to everyday racism and discrimination that has closed their access to social services and resources. Interestingly, isolation, identity confusion and an impaired sense of belonging were common experiences reported by adults and children. As a result, for participants to seek resources and services, it has been difficult due to their uniqueness and inability to fit to the existing service and resource categories. The significance of this finding means participants are struggling to adapt their identity to fixed notions of identity (ie. “Chinese”, “Black”) in order to access services and/or seek resources.

What was fascinating in this study was that some individuals who chose to marry into different racial/ethnic backgrounds were rejected by their family of origin and as a result they became isolated from their community. Whereas some individual’s experiences regardless of racial/ethnic mix were positive, the family and community relationships remained solid. Based on this study, we conclude that racially mixed families in Victoria are lonely and the isolation experienced by their children is more serious due to the outright rejection of the community they live in.

The findings presented here are comparable to identity patterns explanations (individual, cultural, and social, as well as political issues) found in the literature. Furthermore, the extracted meanings have confirmed sources of identity as being congruent to the adopted theory of this research (explain briefly locational theory). This study is very important to all professionals as well as to human services agencies. Both human service agencies and professionals could refer to these participants’ patterns of experiences of reforming identities which serve as a guideline to help and provide services appropriately. We believe that we have exposed the need to facilitate this awareness and sensitivity to gain further knowledge about racially mixed people in Victoria. This research confirms commonly held assumptions about identity and associated stresses for racially mixed people. This research will serve to identify the various locations held by racially mixed people in the community as well as their unique needs which may ultimately help to bridge the gaps in knowledge about racially mixed families in Victoria.

The following recommendations are suggested to address these concerns:

1. Development of an educational, information and resource center in Victoria.
2. Development of support groups to address concerns brought up in the study
3. Province wide research (both qualitative and quantitative)
4. Extended training for professionals and service providers at all levels in community and government agencies.

Read the entire report here.

Trans/formative identities: narrations of decolonization in mixed-race and transgender lives

University of Victoria
2007
114 pages

Sarah E. Hunt

A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts Interdisciplinary in the Department of Women’s Studies and the Department of Anthropology

This interdisciplinary research paper explores story and metaphor of “trans/formative identities” as a basis for challenging normative racial and gender categories. Autoethnography is used as a method for weaving the author’s own experience as a mixed-race Indigenous person with academic research and theory. The discussion is contextualized by an analysis of institutionalized colonial relationships framing Indigenous knowledge in academia and the role of Indian status in defining Indigenous identity. Six mixed-race and transgender or genderqueer people in Victoria and Vancouver, British Columbia are interviewed and the themes from their shared experiences are used as the basis for further understanding trans/formative identities. These themes are: irony; contradiction and impossibility; stories of home and family; naming and language; embodied negotiations, contextual selves, and; artistic visions.

Table of Contents

• ABSTRACT
• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• DEDICATION
• SECTION One: Introduction
• Section Two: Impacts of colonial deconstruction of indigenous knowledge and emerging indigenous research methods
  • Indigenous knowledge in academia: historical and personal contexts
  • Methodological approaches to thesis research
  • Situating myself as an Indigenous researcher
  • Working in my own community contexts
  • Morality and narrative: collaboration and dialogue
  • Film as a tool of representation
  • Alto ethnography and identity in relation
• Section Three: Representations of indigenous identity and emerging discussions of trans/formative subjectivities
  • Assigned identities and their representations
  • Empowering subjects: emerging discussions of racial and gender identities
  • Trans/formative representations of the symbolic domain
• Section four: themes of trans/formative identities
  • Understanding metaphor: themes and stories
  • Thematic exploration of interview dialogue
• NOTES ABOUT THE VIDEO
• REFLECTING BACK: LESSONS LEARNED AND LINGERING QUESTIONS
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• APPENDIX A: INTERVIEW QUESTIONS
• APPENDIX B: ETHICAL CONSIDERATIONS FOR VIDEO DISTRIBUTION

Read the entire thesis here.

The Catholic Church and the Formation of Metis Identity

Past Imperfect
Volume 9 (2001)
pages 65-87

Jacinthe Duval

This essay explores the relationship between the Roman Catholic Church and the Metis in the Red River colony in the nineteenth century. It demonstrates how missionaries, via their intellectual artifacts, have been responsible for shaping popular contemporary images of Metis culture. In analyzing the writings of missionaries, this paper also notes the ambiguity with which these individuals viewed Metis society. Priests steeped in European ecclesiastical and national values who hoped the Metis might form the basis of a new Francophone prairie society viewed some mixed-blood cultural practices as inimical to this end. From the perspective of the missionaries, the tantalizing familiarity of the French, Catholic aspect of the Metis contrasted jarringly with their ‘alien’ indigenous cultural and economic traits. As such, the Metis represented both a promise and a threat to the nation-building project. Although Metis identity has been stamped with the official seal of the church, the contradictions missionaries saw in this culture offer a promising avenue for the exploration of the complex processes of identity formation.

Read the entire article here.

An Exploration of the Experiences of Inter-racial Couples

Canadian Journal of Family and Youth (Le Journal Canadien de Famille et de la Jeunesse)
Volume 1, Number 2 (2008)
pages 75-111
ISSN: 1718-9748

Temitope Oriola
Department of Sociology
University of Alberta, Alberta, Canada

This study utilizes in-depth interviews of five interracial heterosexual couples to explore how couples live, and re/de/construct their everyday lives within a multiethnic society. I examine how couples experience public spaces, negotiate their identities, raise biracial children and confront cultural differences. The study also investigates the process of acceptance of partners by couples’ respective families and the media representation of interracial relationships. This paper demonstrates that minority families are more likely to raise strong objections or resistance to their children marrying Whites. Another major finding of this study is that subjects experience gradual shifts in their identities and changes in their worldviews as a result of their relationships with their spouses regardless of whether they adopt a ‘colourblind’ or ‘colour-conscious’ approach. Subjects’ narratives are also laced with intermingling discourse of race and culture.

Introduction

More than most concepts, ‘race’ and its concomitant outcomes like racism, racialization and racial profiling have been subjects of intense debate by the academia and laity. Amid widespread issues of marginalization and inequality, it is easy to dismiss the ties that bind some members of the various groups—dominant or dominated—together. One of these is interracial intimacy like common-law heterosexual unions and marriages. Why do some individuals in spite of the ‘one drop of blood’ rule, widespread stereotypes, social (mis)construction of the Other, potential loss of privilege and historically entrenched and societally enforced boundaries cross the colour line when it comes to love and/or marriage? How do interracial couples negotiate their way in public spaces and raise biracial kids? What influence does their relationship have on their worldview and identities? How does society encompassing significant others like family, friends, neighbours, and the sea of unknown faces they encounter daily relate with them? How do interracial couples assess the representation of interracial unions on Canadian television? These are the questions this study attempted to explore through in-depth interviews conducted with five interracial couples in Canada between February and March, 2008.

Integration and Social Construction of Interracial Unions

Most studies done on interracial unions are American or British in origin, even though Canada, compared to the United States, has a higher proportion of interracial couples (Milan and Hamm, 2004). There are, however, some Canadian studies on the unease over mixed race offspring from heterosexual relations between First Nations’ women and White men in British Colombia by Mawani (2002) and the experiences of White women involved with Black men by Deliovsky (2002). From issues such as the media representations of interracial relationships as aberration, events and/or spectacles Perry and Sutton, 2006) to the contestedness of the identity of children of interracial ouples (Barn and Harman, 2006), to why young, upwardly mobile and career-driven lack men ostensibly prefer White women regardless of class (Craig-Henderson, 2006) to short (melo-dramatic) autobiographical accounts of interracially-involved young eople (Alderman, 2007) to the making of ‘multiracials’ and the problematic of the intersticial space of mixedness (DaCosta, 2007), to the ironic and paradoxical contradiction of ‘talking Black, sleeping White’ among some activists in post-bellum United States (Romano, 2003); interracial relationships have come to stay as evidenced in the ‘proliferation’ of those called a myriad of names like ‘coloured’, ‘mulattoes,’ ‘halfcaste’ and ‘mixed race’ (Barn and Harman, 2006: 1314) but are still largely seen as problematic. There is an urgent need to fill the intriguing lacuna in the Canadian literature on the experiences of interracial couples…

…Data Analysis—Interviews

In this section, findings from the interviews with all five couples are presented under thematic issues. These include reaction of subjects’ families to their choice of spouses, experiences in public spaces, shifts in identities and changes in the worldview of subjects, concerns about the identities of their biracial children, experiences in public spaces and media representation. The results show how divergent subjects’ experiences were when they introduced their partners to their families, how they began to learn, adopt and adapt to otherwise ‘alien’ cultures, and what impact these have had on their identities. The results indicate that except in one case, minority families are generally reluctant to accept their children’s White partners. Subjects also opine that the medium of television and movies seldom cast couples that look like them preferring to depict more ‘conventional’ couples…

Read the entire article here.

Moya `Tipimsook (“The People Who Aren’t Their Own Bosses”): Racialization and the Misrecognition of “Métis” in Upper Great Lakes

Ethnohistory
Volume 58, Number 1 (Winter 2011)
pages 37-63
DOI: 10.1215/00141801-2010-063

Chris Andersen, Associate Professor of Native Studies
University of Alberta

Scholars have long noted the central place of racialization in the last five centuries of colonial rule and likewise the crossracial encounters and eventual colonial intimacies regulated in its shadow. In the conceptual terrain posted by these demarcations, this article explores how, in the absence of extensive documentation on historical self-ascriptions, contemporary ethnohistorians examining upper Great Lakes fur trade settlements have attempted to come to terms with the historical social ontologies that long preceded official attempts to regulate them. Specifically, we examine the racialized logics governing the retrofitting of these settlements as “métis” and “Métis” and, secondarily, the recent creep of juridical logics into ethnohistorical conversations. Rather than challenging ethnohistorical conclusions that these settlements were/are Métis, this article challenges how they are ethnohistorically imagined as such, and in doing so it appeals for a Métis “counter-ethnohistory” alternatively anchored in an analytics of peoplehood.

The Rise and Decline of Hybrid (Metis) Societies on the Frontier of Western Canada and Southern Africa

The Canadian Journal of Native Studies
Volume 3, Number 1 (1983) (Special Issue on the Metis)
ISSN  0715-3244

Alvin Kienetz

A comparison of the development of the Metis in Canada and similar peoples in Southern Africa reveals some remarkable similarities between the two groups. The existence of these parallels suggests that a more extensive comparative study of peoples of mixed race throughout the world would be of value.

Une comparaison de l’évolution des Métis au Canada et de celle de certains peuples similaires dans le Sud africain révèle des ressemblances frappantes entre les deux groupes. Ce parallèle suggère qu’une étude comparative plus complete des peuples de race mixte dans le monde entier présenterait une valeur incontestable.

Read the entire article here.