Mixed Race Studies

Return to the rainforest: A son’s search for his Amazonian mother

BBC News Magazine
2013-08-28

William Kremer
BBC World Service

David Good’s parents come from different countries – hardly unusual in the US where he was raised. But the 25-year-old’s family is far from ordinary – while his father is American, his mother is a tribeswoman living in a remote part of the Amazon. Two decades after she left, David realised he had to find her.

After three days on the Orinoco River, David Good felt sick.

He had been eaten alive by the relentless biting gnats, he was tired and thirsty. The air was dank and humid. Fierce rays of sunlight bounced off the surface of the piranha-filled river as the 40-horsepower motor puttered and the launch pushed further upriver, deeper into the Amazon.

His stomach was a knot of apprehension – he had not slept the previous night at all.

He was not a natural traveller or explorer. The lawns and parks of eastern Pennsylvania were his habitat and this trip to the Venezuelan Amazon – in July 2011 – was his first outside the US since early childhood…

…In 1968, the US anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon published his bestseller Yanomamo: The Fierce People. He described the tribe as being prone to petty disputes – usually over women – which escalate into wars between villages. He painted a picture of a world where chronic warfare, gang rape and murder were all facts of life.

It was as a graduate student of Chagnon’s that David Good’s father, Kenneth Good, first travelled to the Amazon in 1975. He travelled up the Orinoco past the Guajaribo Rapids, just as his son did 36 years later. He made his home in a little hut a short distance from the Hasupuweteri.

The plan was to stay for 15 months of fieldwork, measuring the animal protein intake of all the village members. This was to give Chagnon the data he needed to show his many critics that inter-village warfare was not related to the scarcity of food but stemmed from the drive to maximise reproductive success…

Read the entire article here.

Jahaji Bhai: The emergence of a Dougla poetics in Trinidad and Tobago

Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power
Volume 5, Issue 4, 1999
Special Issue: Fight the Power: Changing forms of Consciousness and Protest
pages 569-601
DOI: 10.1080/1070289X.1999.9962630

Rhoda Reddock, Professor of Gender and Development Studies
University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago

This paper explores the issues of ethnicity and identity in the post‐colonial Caribbean with special reference to Trinidad and Tobago. As with other multi‐ethnic post‐colonial societies, the collapse of post‐World‐War II promises of unified national projects based on the nation‐state or class politics has seen the re‐emergence of racial/ethnic based trajectories. In the context of the contestations of ethnicity, class, and gender in Trinidad and Tobago, the voice of the “Dougla,” or those projecting “dougla identities” of mixed African and Indian ancestry, has been largely missing. Unlike in the North, conceptions of “mixed” identity have existed in the region for many decades. A concept of multiracial identity, however, is relatively new and underdeveloped. This paper explores tentative attempts through the popular culture to express such multiracial identities, especially through the medium of Calypso and Soca and the contestations that greet such an emergence. The dynamics of the changing social, political, and cultural context are also taken into consideration. It does so through the contrasting 1996 “hits” of two singer/songwriters in the Calypso/Soca genre, Brother Marvin and Chris Garcia.

Calypso fictions and narratives, fantasies and commentaries, venture into vitally important areas of social intercourse which, because of unspoken protocols of civil discourse, remain sensitive areas of darkness. Within the freedom of performance, a space hallowed by tradition,…

Read or purchase the article here.

Multiracial Identities in Trinidad and Guyana: Exaltation and Ambiguity

Latin American Issues
Volume 13 (1997) (The Caribbean(s) Redefined)
Article IV

Camille Hernandez-Ramdwar, Associate Professor of Sociology
Ryerson University, Toronto, Ontario

For people of formerly colonized countries, race mixing among the populace has always been a reality. This is particularly true for Caribbean peoples. This paper addresses the ambivalent existence of multiracial identities for Caribbean people in the regions of Trinidad and Guyana, two areas with particularly diverse populations including significant numbers of people who are of (East) Indian background, as well as (in Guyana) an indigenous Amerindian population. The current relevancy of this issue is highlighted by tensions between African and Indian populations in each area, following the elections of predominantly Indian-based governments in Guyana in 1992 (PPP) and Trinidad & Tobago in 1995 (UNC/NAR coalition). As racial terrains shift in the realms of power, people often resort to constructions of “pure” identities to support an “us” versus “them” agenda. An exploration into multiracial identity challenges this re-ordering of racial monoliths and homogeneous social organization; it provides an opening for discussion of similarities rather than differences, of interlinkages and a shared history of colonization.

For the purposes of this article, the term “multiracial” is intended to signify an identity which has arisen out of a colonial history. Prior to Columbus, any notion of “race” among the Amerindians would have differed considerably from that which was developed over time by the Europeans for very specific imperialist reasons. Multiracial Caribbean people are those who are descended from more than one racial group found in the Caribbean. The very notion of multiracial identity is only significant if importance, privilege, difference, or debasement has been accorded to particular racial groups over others during the course of Caribbean history.

My analysis of Caribbean multiracial identity is based on the works cited as well as a series of interviews I conducted with multiracial Caribbean and Caribbean-Canadian people during 1994-1995. It is a preliminary investigation of a subject area which requires much deeper study, a study which I hope to flesh out from this skeletal framework of initial inquiry. Caribbean scholarship has largely ignored and overlooked multiracial/mixed race identity with the exception of a few articles and papers (Khan, Puri, Reddock, and Shibata), and a rather significant body of work dealing with the Coloured/Mulatto/gens de couleur class and its historical/political significance (Braithwaite, Brathwaite, Brereton, Cohen & Green, Heuman, and Sio). In comparison, within the body of Caribbean literature there is an attempt to examine, however superficially, multiracial identity and its problematic/complex meaning beyond African/European bipolarity. This is mostly evident in the works of Edgar Mittelholzer, V.S. Naipaul, Jan Shinebourne, Lawrence Scott, and Merle Hodge. However, large gaps remain in the areas of theory and primary research examining how racially complex Caribbean people negotiate and navigate their identities in a social and political atmosphere which both exalts them (“All o’ we is one”, “One people, one nation, one destiny”, “Out of many, one people”) and denies them full recognition as a legitimate racial “group” in an arena where one’s racial allegiance purportedly informs community and political alliance, personal and business networks, state power and consequently, access to resources.

Contents

• I. “Raceing” in Trinidad and Guyana: Historical Developments
• II. “Douglas“
• III. The “Cocoa Panyols“
• IV. “Bovianders”
• V. Representations of the Multiracial Person
• VI. “Brotherhood of the Boat”? The Common Origin Debate in Trinidad
• VII. Erasure of Multiracial Identity in Trinidad, Erasure of Multiracial Identity in Trinidad and Guyana
• VII. Conclusion
• Notes

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Extended Families: Mixed-Race Children and Scottish Experience, 1770-1820

international journal of scottish literature
ISSN: 1751-2808
ISSUE FOUR, SPRING/SUMMER 2008

Daniel A. Livesay, Assistant Professor of History
Drury University, Springfield, Missouri

Daniel Livesay was winner of the 2007 North American Conference on British Studies Prize, Dissertation Year Fellowship for “Imagining Difference: Mixed-Race Britons and Racial Ideology in the Eighteenth Century Atlantic.”

Three years prior to the ending of the slave trade, Jamaica’s richest and most influential merchant mused on the possible consequences of abolition. Writing to his friend George Hibbert in January of 1804, Simon Taylor offered a stark vision of the British imperial economy without slave importation, echoing scores of other pro-slavery writers who preached the financial doom and gloom of a post-abolitionist society.  Economics, however, were not the only thing on either man’s mind. Hibbert, in a previous letter, had asked Taylor for his thoughts on the future of Jamaica’s white population if fresh supplies of slaves came to a halt.  He wondered if the colony’s whites could farm sugar themselves and if such back-breaking labour would further stifle the increase of the island’s already meager European population. Throwing off his earlier pessimism, Taylor replied with high hopes for the growth of Jamaica’s white residents.  His optimism sprung from a phenomenon he had watched develop over the last two generations: ‘When I returned from England in the year 1760 there were only three Quadroon Women in the Town of Kingston. There are now three hundred, and more of the decent Class of them never will have any commerce with their own Colour, but only with White People. Their progeny is growing whiter and whiter every remove […] from thence a White Generation will come’.  Taylor had seen all other attempts to increase the white population fail and he believed that this process of ‘washing the Blackamoor White’ to be the only way to build an effective racial hedge against an overwhelming black majority on the island.

If miscegenation was the answer to Jamaica’s problems, Simon Taylor could claim to be doing his part for the movement. Indeed, he had earned a reputation on both sides of the Atlantic for his multiracial family. Not long after arriving in Jamaica with her husband, the new Lieutenant-Governor of the island, Lady Maria Nugent visited Simon Taylor in his Golden Grove estate. She commented in her diary that Taylor was ‘an old bachelor’ who ‘detests the society of women’, but she seemed determined to win him over.  However, she could not help but register surprise after an evening at Taylor’s estate when ‘[a] little mulatto girl was sent into the drawing-room to amuse [her]’. Recording the event in her diary, she noted, ‘Mr. T[aylor] appeared very anxious for me to dismiss her, and in the evening, the housekeeper told me she was his own daughter, and that he had a numerous family, some almost on every one of his estates’.  Taylor’s sexual activities with slaves and women of colour were not unusual, nor was his attempt to hide them from European eyes.  Like many white West Indians at the time, Taylor may have given some favours to his children of colour, but he did not treat them as full members of his family.

In contrast to Simon Taylor’s inattention to his mixed-race children, John Tailyour, Simon’s cousin, made a significant attempt to provide for his offspring of colour.  Tailyour originated from Montrose, near Simon’s ancestral home in Borrowfield, and made several unsuccessful attempts at business in the colonies. Forced to abandon his tobacco trade in Virginia at the outbreak of the American Revolution, he returned to North America in 1781, but failed to establish himself in New York’s dry-goods market. Rather than return home to Scotland once again, Tailyour ventured to Jamaica at his cousin Simon’s invitation, where he operated as a merchant from 1783 to 1792. With very few white women on the island from which to choose, Tailyour took up residence with an enslaved woman from his cousin’s plantation. The couple eventually had four children together before Tailyour finally decided to return to Scotland in 1792. Rather than leave his children in Jamaica, however, John Tailyour sent at least three of them to Britain for their education and to be brought up in a trade. His conduct toward his mixed-race offspring stands in sharp relief with that of his cousin’s and reveals the complicated attitudes that whites had toward these children…

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A Blunt Chief Justice Unafraid to Upset Brazil’s Status

The New York Times
2013-08-23

Simon Romero, Brazil Bureau Chief

BRASÍLIA — Brazil’s highest court has long viewed itself as a bastion of manners and formality. Justices call one another “Your Excellency,” dress in billowing robes and wrap each utterance in grandiloquence, as if little had changed from the era when marquises and dukes held sway from their vast plantations.

But when the chief justice, Joaquim Barbosa, strides into the court, the other 10 excellencies brace themselves for whatever may come next.

In one televised feud, Mr. Barbosa questioned another justice about whether he would even be on the court had he not been appointed by his cousin, a former president impeached in 1992. With another justice, Mr. Barbosa rebuked him over what the chief justice considered his condescending tone, telling him he was not his “capanga,” a term describing a hired thug.

In one of his most scathing comments, Mr. Barbosa, the high court’s first and only black justice, took on the entire legal system of Brazil — where it is still remarkably rare for politicians to ever spend time in prison, even after being convicted of crimes — contending that the mentality of judges was “conservative, pro-status-quo and pro-impunity.”

“I have a temperament that doesn’t adapt well to politics,” Mr. Barbosa, 58, said in a recent interview in his quarters here in the Supreme Federal Tribunal, a modernist landmark designed by the architect Oscar Niemeyer. “It’s because I speak my mind so much.”

His acknowledged lack of tact notwithstanding, he is the driving force behind a series of socially liberal and establishment-shaking rulings, turning Brazil’s highest court — and him in particular — into a newfound political power and the subject of popular fascination.

The court’s recent rulings include a unanimous decision upholding the University of Brasília’s admissions policies aimed at increasing the number of black and indigenous students, opening the way for one of the Western Hemisphere’s most sweeping affirmative action laws for higher education…

…In a country where a majority of people now define themselves as black or of mixed race — but where blacks remain remarkably rare in the highest echelons of political institutions and corporations — Mr. Barbosa’s trajectory and abrupt manner have elicited both widespread admiration and a fair amount of resistance.

As a teenager, Mr. Barbosa moved to the capital, Brasília, finding work as a janitor in a courtroom. Against the odds, he got into the University of Brasília, the only black student in its law program at the time. Wanting to see the world, he later won admission into Brazil’s diplomatic service, which promptly sent him to Helsinki, the Finnish capital on the shore of the Baltic Sea.

Sensing that he would not advance much in the diplomatic service, which he has called “one of the most discriminatory institutions of Brazil,” Mr. Barbosa opted for a career as a prosecutor. He alternated between legal investigations in Brazil and studies abroad, gaining fluency in English, French and German, and earning a doctorate in law at Pantheon-Assas University in Paris…

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Who is an Indian?: Race, Place, and the Politics of Indigeneity in the Americas

University of Toronto Press
August 2013
272 pages
Paper ISBN: 9780802095527
Cloth ISBN: 9780802098184

Edited by:

Maximilian C. Forte, Associate Professor of Sociology and Anthropology
Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada

Who is an Indian? This is possibly the oldest question facing Indigenous peoples across the Americas, and one with significant implications for decisions relating to resource distribution, conflicts over who gets to live where and for how long, and clashing principles of governance and law. For centuries, the dominant views on this issue have been strongly shaped by ideas of both race and place. But just as important, who is permitted to ask, and answer this question?

This collection examines the changing roles of race and place in the politics of defining Indigenous identities in the Americas. Drawing on case studies of Indigenous communities across North America, the Caribbean, Central America, and South America, it is a rare volume to compare Indigenous experience throughout the western hemisphere. The contributors question the vocabulary, legal mechanisms, and applications of science in constructing the identities of Indigenous populations, and consider ideas of nation, land, and tradition in moving indigeneity beyond race.

Contents

• Preface
• Introduction: “Who Is an Indian?” The Cultural Politics of a Bad Question / Maximilian C. Forte (Concordia University, Sociology and Anthropology)
• Chapter One: Inuitness and Territoriality in Canada / Donna Patrick (Carleton University, Sociology and Anthropology and the School of Canadian Studies)
• Chapter Two: Federally-Unrecognized Indigenous Communities in Canadian Contexts / Bonita Lawrence (York University, Equity Studies)
• Chapter Three: The Canary in the Coalmine: What Sociology Can Learn from Ethnic Identity Debates among American Indians / Eva Marie Garroutte (Boston College, Sociology) and C. Matthew Snipp (Stanford University, Sociology)
• Chapter Four : “This Sovereignty Thing”: Nationality, Blood, and the Cherokee Resurgence / Julia Coates (University of California Davis, Native American Studies)
• Chapter Five: Locating Identity: The Role of Place in Costa Rican Chorotega Identity / Karen Stocker (California State University, Anthropology)
• Chapter Six: Carib Identity, Racial Politics, and the Problem of Indigenous Recognition in Trinidad and Tobago / Maximilian C. Forte (Concordia University, Anthropology)
• Chapter Seven: Encountering Indigeneity: The International Funding of Indigeneity in Peru / José Antonio Lucero (University of Washington, The Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies)
• Chapter Eight: The Color of Race: Indians and Progress in a Center-Left Brazil / Jonathan Warren (University of Washington, International Studies, Chair of Latin American Studies)
• Conclusion: Seeing Beyond the State and Thinking beyond the State of Sight / Maximilian C. Forte (Concordia University, Sociology and Anthropology)
• Contributors
• Index

Rethinking Race in Brazil

Journal of Latin American Studies
Volume 24, Number 1 (February, 1992)
pages 173-192

Howard Winant, Professor of Sociology
University of California, Santa Barbara

Introduction: the Repudiation of the Centenário

13 May 1988 was the 100th anniversary of the abolition of slavery in Brazil. In honour of that date, various official celebrations and commemorations of the centenário, organised by the Brazilian government, church groups and cultural organisations, took place throughout the country, even including a speech by President José Sarney.

This celebration of the emancipation was not, however, universal. Many Afro-Brazilian groups staged actions and marches, issued denunciations and organised cultural events repudiating the ‘farce of abolition’. These were unprecedented efforts to draw national and international attention to the extensive racial inequality and discrimination which Brazilian blacks – by far the largest concentration of people of African descent in any country in the western hemisphere – continue to confront. Particular interventions had such titles as ‘100 Years of Lies’, ‘One Hundred Years Without Abolition’, ‘March for the Real Liberation of the Race’, ‘Symbolic Burial of the 13th of May’, ‘March in Protest of the Farce of Abolition’, and ‘Discommemoration (Descomemoração) of the Centenary of Abolition’. The repudiation of the centenário suggests that Brazilian racial dynamics, traditionally quiescent, are emerging with the rest of society from the extended twilight of military dictatorship. Racial conflict and mobilisation, long almost entirely absent from the Brazilian scene, are reappearing. New racial patterns and processes – political, cultural, economic, social and psychological — are emerging, while racial inequalities of course continue as well. How much do we know about race in contemporary Brazil? How effectively does the extensive literature explain the present situation?

In this article the main theories of race in Brazil are critically reviewed in the light of contemporary racial politics. I focus largely on postwar Brazilian racial theory, beginning with the pioneering UNESCO studies. This body of theory has exhibited considerable strengths in the past: it has been particularly effective in dismantling the myth of a non-racist national culture, in which ‘racial democracy’ flourished, and in challenging the role of various elites in maintaining these myths. These achievements, appreciable in the context of the analytical horizon imposed on critical social science by an anti-democratic (and indeed often dictatorial and brutal) regime, now exhibit some serious inadequacies when employed to explain current developments.

This article accepts many of the insights of the existing literature but rejects its limitations. Such a reinterpretation, I argue, sets the stage for a new approach, based on racial formation theory. This theory is outlined below, and it is suggested that it offers a more accurate view of the changing racial order in contemporary Brazil. Racial formation theory can respond both to ongoing racial inequalities and to the persistence of racial difference, as well as the new possibilities opened up by the transition to democracy; it can do this in ways in which the established approaches, despite their considerable merits, cannot…

Read or purchase the article here.

A Family Tree That Includes Slaves — And Slave Owners

Tell Me More
National Public Radio
2013-08-15

Celeste Headlee, Host

Part of our summer reading series Island Reads, highlighting authors from the Caribbean

Andrea Stuart was curious about her family’s history in Barbados. And through years of careful research, she found that her bloodline includes both slave owners and slaves. She has written about her own family, as well as a detailed history of slavery in the Caribbean, in her book Sugar in the Blood. Guest host Celeste Headlee talks with Stuart about her family history, the moral complexity of slavery and finding roots in the past.

Interview Highlights

On the founder of a mixed-race dynasty:

“When I read about George Ashby, or rather, wrote about him, I remember thinking, ‘My goodness. What bravery it must have taken to take this huge step to leave England, in his case, to go to the New World.’ I mean, in those days the journey itself was so traumatic and long, the chances of being killed by raiders or pirates — everything was so difficult about this journey, and then to kind of confront this untrampled land, where at least half of the early settlers died just because things were so difficult. It seemed to me that he was extraordinarily brave. But then his generation and the subsequent generations make this terrible mistake. They become slave owners, and therefore become part of the whole institution of slavery. So I am deeply ambivalent about him. I admire him on one hand, and I lament him on the other.”…

Listen to the story here. Download the audio here. Read the transcript here.

Representing Mixed Race in Jamaica and England from the Abolition Era to the Present by Sara Salih (review)

Eighteenth-Century Fiction
Volume 25, Number 4, Summer 2013
pages 777-780
DOI: 10.1353/ecf.2013.0025

Nicole N. Aljoe, Assistant Professor of English
Northeastern University

Sarah Salih, Representing Mixed Race in Jamaica and England from the Abolition Era to the Present (London, New York: Routledge, 2010)

Sara Salih offers a welcome and rigorous analysis of the relationships among the development of the law, notions of subjectivity, and discourses of race and sexuality in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in England and Jamaica. This book makes a productive contribution to ongoing critical conversations about the complexity and nuance of race in the British past by responding explicitly to David Scott’s suggestion that we consider more carefully the stories we assume we know, particularly about slavery. One such story concerns the mulatto and his/her tragic outsiderness as exemplified in the trope of “tragic mulatto.” Numerous scholars, including Werner Sollors and Eve Raimon, have explored this trope within the context of the United States, and Salih’s study builds on this work and extends it by considering representations of mixed-race individuals in the British-Jamaican context. In addition, by making clear the different ways in which the mulatto was treated and represented outside of the US context—for example, noting that neither interracial sex nor marriage were ever outlawed in Jamaica or England, unlike in the United States—Salih’s study offers a corrective to uncritical conflation of the distinct cultures of enslavement. Most specifically, her study reveals the ways in which, in the British-West Indian context, although mulattos were frequently figured as being inside particular aspects of national and subject-constituting discourses—mulattos could “pass” for white, and in the eighteenth century they could legally petition to be designated as white—they were simultaneously and persistently represented as isolated and “firmly outside the heterorepronormative narrative paradigm” (125).

This book is invested in illustrating the “processes of normalization and the consolidation of norms” about the legal status, nature, and character of mixed race individuals in Jamaica and England from the eighteenth century through the twentieth century by considering cultural representations alongside juridical and colonial documents. Salih argues that all of these texts—the fiction, nonfiction, legal writings, and judicial statutes—contribute dialogically to creating and sustaining societal norms and subjects. The study traces the ways in which these texts inform the legal identity “mulatto” that eventually comes to be defined and understood as a cultural/political identity. In tracing this movement, she is “less interested in ‘race’ as interiority and affect than in the specific ways in which it is produced and enacted legally and performatively” (123–24). And although the study scrupulously sets itself against those studies of race in the eighteenth century that deal with questions and issues of identity, it is best seen as a complement to these other studies. In particular, by attending to the ways in which discussions of the mulatto were also discussions of interracial sex, Salih illuminates the impact of sexuality on notions of race.

Salih begins her close readings with Marly, an 1828 novel about a Jamaican slave plantation. After providing an intriguing reading of the relationship between fiction, the law, and power grounded in the novel’s initial image of a slave driver exchanging his whip for a pen (56), Salih outlines how the novel, by offering fiction as well as history in its description of life on the plantation, contributes to the creation of societal norms. In so doing, according to Salih, novels can reveal “narrative investment in the disciplining of subjects” (57). For example, society wants mixedrace women to disappear, and hence they are novelistically relegated to the background. However, the novel Marly also reveals the complicated positioning of mixed-race individuals. Although women are relegated to the background, a mixed-race man is foregrounded in a chapter in which he offers a long harangue on how similar brown or mixed-race people are to whites and therefore should be allowed more freedoms in Jamaica (68–70). Although the brown man gets to proclaim his proximity to whiteness, at the end of the novel he too is isolated like the brown women, Salih argues, and is placed in a non-reproductive category.

The study then moves to a reading of The Woman of Colour (1808), edited by Lyndon Dominique for Broadview Press (2007). Salih addresses how in the novel, despite a positive representation of Olivia (its interracial character), she too is isolated and unmarried…

Study analyzes ambiguities in the works of Aluísio Azevedo

Agência FAPESP: News Agency of the Sao Paulo Research Foundation
2011-06-08

Karina Toledo

Agência FAPESP —The Mulatto, by Aluísio Azevedo, is a title that refers to the collective human state. It does not mention a character or a specific situation, but rather a human category that is very important for understanding the process of Brazil’s formation.

This analysis is presented by sociologist Rodrigo Estramanho de Almeida in the book A realidade da ficção. Ambiguidades literárias e sociais em ‘O Mulato’ de Aluísio Azevedo (The reality of fiction. Literary and social ambiguities in “The Mulatto” by Aluísio Azevedo), released by Alameda Casa Editorial on March 15. 

The starting point for this analysis is the second book published by Aluísio Azevedo, The Mulatto. The researcher analyzes the contradictions found in this book, as these contradictions marked the entire literary trajectory of the Maranhão author. Critics normally divide Azevedo’s work into two categories: engaged (or activist) romance, filled with social criticism, and feuilletonesque novels. 

“This ambiguity remains throughout the career of Aluísio. The writer himself made it clear in correspondence and newspaper texts that he was conscious of it and struggled with it. But I try to show that there is continuity in his works,” commented Estramanho de Almeida in an interview with Agência FAPESP…

Read the entire article here.