Mixed Race Studies

Liana by Martha Gellhorn (1944)

Literary Ladies Guide: Inspiration for Readers and Writers from Classic Women Authors
2018-11-25

Taylor Jasmine

Martha Gellhorn was married to Ernest Hemingway when Liana, her fifth novel, was published in 1944. She had already made quite a name for herself as a war correspondent by that point and it rankled her to be described as “Mrs. Ernest Hemingway” in reviews of her books.

Though her fiction varied in its quality and critical acclaim, her book of linked stories titled The Trouble I’ve Seen (1936), based on her actual observations as a journalist during the Depression, earned her a great deal of respect.

Her brief marriage to Hemingway was already in jeopardy the year that Liana appeared. In her capacity as a war correspondent, Gellhorn wanted to cover the action, wherever it happened to be…

…The story centers on Liana, who is described as a mulatto, or what we now call mixed-race. She marries Marc Royer, a wealthy white man on a fictional French Caribbean island called Saint Boniface.

For his part, he marries her mainly to spite another woman, and so, Liana is marked by a kind of tragedy in this sense, becoming a prisoner in his home, and a partner to a man who doesn’t fully love her…

Read the entire review here.

Liana

Charles Scribner’s Sons
1944
285 pages

Martha Gellhorn (1908-1998)

Her Color Was No Barrier—To Men

A French-owned island of the Caribbean is the setting for a haunting story of the tragedy of a marriage between a lovely, untutored mulatto and a rich, lonely white man. He has married her to spite the woman he wants and loves—and has failed; he has reaped ridicule where he had had envy. Then comes on the scene a bitter young French refugee, in love with his last century, detached from the pitfulls and vices of a trepical island community. More hires him to teach Liana—he leaves then to their own devices—and then is startled into jealous suspicion when infidelity is whispered. The thought is fertile seed—and emotional complications confuse the issues of young Pierra’s desire to serve his country. A tragic ending sounds the inevitable finals to an impasse. Simply told, with emotional undertones. —Kirkus Reviews

Leitner Human Rights Speaker Series: Chinyere Osuji, Rutgers University – cosponsored with the Center on Race, Law and Justice – Boundaries of Love: Interracial Marriage and the Meaning of Race in Brazil and the United States

Leitner Center for International Law and Justice
Fordham Law School
150 West 62nd Street
Room 3-09
New York, New York 10023
2019-04-09, 12:30-13:30 EDT (Local Time)
Contact: leitnercenter@law.fordham.edu

Chinyere Osuji is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Rutgers University with affiliations in Africana Studies and Latin American and Latino studies. Before coming to Rutgers-Camden, she was a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Center for Africana Studies.

Chinyere conducts research on the meaning that social actors give to racial and ethnic boundaries. Her first book, Boundaries of Love: Interracial Marriage and the Meaning of Race (April 2019, NYU Press) takes a novel approach to comparing race and ethnicity across societies by examining the experiences of interracial couples. Boundaries of Love relies on 103 qualitative interviews that she conducted with 52 black-white couples between 2008 and 2012 in Los Angeles and Rio de Janeiro (in Portuguese). Through using what she calls a critical constructionist approach, Boundaries of Love compares the experiences of couples involving black men and white women with those of black women with white men in these two diverse, multicultural settings. This book reveals how non-elites in these two post-Atlantic slavery societies employ cultural repertoires that push against, bridge over, blur, dismantle or reproduce ethnoracial boundaries.

Chinyere’s next project will employ the critical constructionist approach to nursing and healthcare. In addition, she will be examining the lives of African immigrants, focusing on how they form community without being spatially concentrated.

For more information, click here.

These Photos Celebrate the Beauty of Panama’s Afro-Latinx Community

Vice
2019-03-27

André-Naquian Wheeler

Kayla Reefer

Photographer Kayla Reefer’s new series, “Identidad,” explores her family’s roots in Panama.

Black people are everywhere, my mother once told me. I was sharing my anxieties about studying abroad in Europe, of sticking out like a sore thumb. In my head, blackness was something that began and ended in America. My history classes only ever talked about the slaves stolen and taken to the Deep South. But my mother was right. The African diaspora reaches far and wide: the Afro-Caribbean communities of London, Black Canadians, Afro-Brazilians, and on and on. The problem is how rarely the wide, far-reaching spectrum of blackness is taught, shown, celebrated, and acknowledged.

Photographer Kayla Reefer grapples with the ramifications of this everyday. She is Afro-Latina, the daughter of Panamanian immigrants. Growing up in California, Reefer talks about feeling the need to prove her heritage and identity to her black and Latinx friends. To show them she is not simply one or the other, but an amalgamation of histories. “Eventually, I learned to embrace both worlds,” she says. “Because they’re both me.”

Sadly, not all Panamanians take ownership of their Afro roots, Reefer says. She once saw a Panama census stating only 9 percent of the country was Afro-Latinx. The small statistic does not match up to Reefer’s reality, the people she sees riding the bus during her visits to the Central-American country, of her family and friends. “That statistic is absolutely not true,” she argues, anger in her voice. “It just feeds into the lack of awareness and knowledge of what an Afro-Latinx person is. There’s this erasure happening.”…

Read the entire article here.

Cecilia Valdés or El Angel Hill: A Novel of Nineteenth-Century Cuba

Oxford University Press
2005-09-29 (originally published in 1882)
544 Pages
5-1/2 x 8-1/4 inches
Paperback ISBN: 9780195143959

Cirilo Villaverde (1812-1894)

Edited by:

Sibylle Fischer, Associate Professor of Spanish, Portuguese, and Comparative Literature
New York University

Translated by:

Helen Lane (1921-2004)

Cecilia Valdés is arguably the most important novel of 19th century Cuba. Originally published in New York City in 1882, Cirilo Villaverde’s novel has fascinated readers inside and outside Cuba since the late 19th century. In this new English translation, a vast landscape emerges of the moral, political, and sexual depravity caused by slavery and colonialism. Set in the Havana of the 1830s, the novel introduces us to Cecilia, a beautiful light-skinned mulatta, who is being pursued by the son of a Spanish slave trader, named Leonardo. Unbeknownst to the two, they are the children of the same father. Eventually Cecilia gives in to Leonardo’s advances; she becomes pregnant and gives birth to a baby girl. When Leonardo, who gets bored with Cecilia after a while, agrees to marry a white upper class woman, Cecilia vows revenge. A mulatto friend and suitor of hers kills Leonardo, and Cecilia is thrown into prison as an accessory to the crime.

For the contemporary reader Helen Lane’s masterful translation of Cecilia Valdés opens a new window into the intricate problems of race relations in Cuba and the Caribbean. There are the elite social circles of European and New World Whites, the rich culture of the free people of color, the class to which Cecilia herself belonged, and then the slaves, divided among themselves between those who were born in Africa and those who were born in the New World, and those who worked on the sugar plantation and those who worked in the households of the rich people in Havana. Cecilia Valdés thus presents a vast portrait of sexual, social, and racial oppression, and the lived experience of Spanish colonialism in Cuba.

Taxing Blackness: Free Afromexican Tribute in Bourbon New Spain

University of Alabama Press
February 2019
312 pages
9 B&W figures / 3 maps / 23 tables
Trade Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8173-2007-2
eBook ISBN: 978-0-8173-9220-8

Norah L. A. Gharala, Colonial Latin Americanist and Assistant Professor of World History
Georgian Court University, Lakewood, New Jersey

A definitive analysis of the most successful tribute system in the Americas as applied to Afromexicans

During the eighteenth century, hundreds of thousands of free descendants of Africans in Mexico faced a highly specific obligation to the Spanish crown, a tax based on their genealogy and status. This royal tribute symbolized imperial loyalties and social hierarchies. As the number of free people of color soared, this tax became a reliable source of revenue for the crown as well as a signal that colonial officials and ordinary people referenced to define and debate the nature of blackness.

Taxing Blackness:Free Afromexican Tribute in Bourbon New Spain examines the experiences of Afromexicans and this tribute to explore the meanings of race, political loyalty, and legal privileges within the Spanish colonial regime. Norah L. A. Gharala focuses on both the mechanisms officials used to define the status of free people of African descent and the responses of free Afromexicans to these categories and strategies. This study spans the eighteenth century and focuses on a single institution to offer readers a closer look at the place of Afromexican individuals in Bourbon New Spain, which was the most profitable and populous colony of the Spanish Atlantic.

As taxable subjects, many Afromexicans were deeply connected to the colonial regime and ongoing debates about how taxpayers should be defined, whether in terms of reputation or physical appearance. Gharala shows the profound ambivalence, and often hostility, that free people of African descent faced as they navigated a regime that simultaneously labeled them sources of tax revenue and dangerous vagabonds. Some free Afromexicans paid tribute to affirm their belonging and community ties. Others contested what they saw as a shameful imposition that could harm their families for generations. The microhistory includes numerous anecdotes from specific cases and people, bringing their history alive, resulting in a wealth of rural and urban, gender, and family insight.

Open Auditions for Casta by Adrienne Dawes

Dougherty Arts Center
1110 Barton Springs Road
Austin, Texas 78704
Telephone: (512) 974-4000
Tuesday, 2019-03-19 17:00-22:00 CDT (Local Time)

Salvage Vanguard Theater announces open auditions for the world premiere of Casta by Adrienne Dawes. Casta will be directed by Jenny Larson and feature music by Graham Reynolds.

Casta is inspired by a series of casta paintings by Miguel Cabrera, a mixed-race painter from Oaxaca. Casta paintings were a unique form of portraiture that grew in popularity over the 18th century in Nueva España/colonial Mexico. The paintings depicted different racial mixtures arranged according to a hierarchy defined by Spanish elites. When a lowly apprentice is commissioned to paint a casta series for a wealthy patron, he tries to conform his work to a set hierarchy. The images revolt, illuminating a complex portrait of fluid Latinx identities.

For more information, click here.

A Proposal for Afro-Hispanic Peoples and Culture as General Studies Course in African Universities

Humanities
Volume 8, Issue 1 (2019)
11 pages
DOI: 10.3390/h8010034

Purity Ada Uchechukwu
Department of Modern European Languages
Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka 0000, Nigeria

After centuries of denial, suppression and marginalization, the contributions of Afro-Hispanics/Latinos to the arts, culture, and the Spanish spoken in the Americas is gradually gaining recognition as Afro-descendants pursue their quest for visibility and space in Spanish America. Hand in hand with this development is the young generation of Afro-Latinos who, are proud to identify with the black race. Ironically, the young African student has very little knowledge of the presence and actual situation of Afro-descendants in Spanish-speaking America. This is because many African universities still follow the old colonial system which excludes knowledge of the presence and cultures of the once enslaved Africans in the Spanish speaking world. Thus, while Afro-descendants are fighting for visibility and recognition in Spanish America, they remain almost invisible in the African continent. The aim of this paper is to propose a curriculum, Afro-Hispanic Peoples and Culture, as a general studies course in African universities. Such a curriculum would create in Africa the much-needed visibility and contributions of Afro-descendants in Spanish-speaking America, and also foster collaborative works between young African academics and their counterparts in the Americas.

Read the entire article HTML or PDF format.

France Winddance Twine | Digging Up the Past: Race & Class in Brazil

Duke Franklin Humanities Institute
Duke University, Durham, North Carolina
2019-02-11

The From Slavery to Freedom Lab welcomed France Winddance Twine on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the publication of her book, “Racism in a Racial Democracy: The Maintenance of White Supremacy in Brazil.” Dr. Twine reflected on intersectionality and racial, gender, and class politics in Brazil and the future of Brazilian Studies.

France Winddance Twine is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is an ethnographer, a feminist race theorist, and a documentary filmmaker, whose research focuses on multiple dimensions of inequality. Twine’s research provides case studies for a nuanced analysis of the intersections of race, class, sexuality and gender inequality. Twine has conducted extensive field research on both sides of the Atlantic including: Brazil, Britain, and the United States. She is the author and editor of ten books including: Racism in a Racial Democracy: The Maintenance of White Supremacy in Brazil; A White Side of Black Britain: Interracial Intimacy and Racial Literacy; Geographies of Privilege; Outsourcing the Womb: Race, Class, and Gestational Surrogacy in the Global Market; and Girls with Guns: Firearms, Feminism and Militarism.

Drawing inspiration from John Hope Franklin’s path-breaking 1947 study, the “From Slavery to Freedom” Franklin Humanities Lab seeks to examine the life and afterlives of slavery and emancipation, linking Duke University to the Global South.

Afro-Descendants in Latin America

Rayburn House Office Building
45 Independence Ave SW
Room 2247
Washington, DC 20515
2019-02-26, 11:00-12:30 EST (Local Time)

Hank Johnson, Host
United States House of Representatives (GA-04)

Panelists

• Ofunshi Oba Kosso, Yoruba Cuba Organization
• Carlos Quesada, Race and Equality
• Crystal Yuille, WOLA
• Euclides Rengifo, UNIAFRO
• Alessandra Ramos, TRANS FORMAR, Brazil

Please join Rep. Hank Johnson^* for a discussion on the state of Afro-descendants in Latin America. Our panel of experts will illuminate many of the rights and liberties under threat in Latin America, and how a productive relationship between government and civil society can promote inclusion, justice, and equality for Afrodescendants in the region. Panelists will also speak to the importance of the UN designated International Decade for People of African Descent in globally combatting racism and discrimination.

^*Rep. Johnson is the sponsor of H.Res 133—Supporting the goals and ideals of the designation of January 1, 2015, to December 31, 2024, as the “International Decade for People of African Descent.”

RSVP to Chelsea Grey at Chelsea.Grey@mail.house.gov.