Mixed Race Studies

First Annual Black German Cultural Society Inc. Convention

German Historical Institute
1607 New Hampshire Avenue, NW
Washington, D.C.
2011-08-19 through 2011-08-21

The Black German Cultural Society, Inc. is excited to announce its First Annual Convention to be held from August 19 to 21, 2011, at the German Historical Institute (GHI) in Washington, DC. With the theme of “Strengthening Transatlantic Connections,” the convention will host guests and presenters from our international community in Germany and the United States.
 
Our keynote speaker will be Noah Sow, the acclaimed journalist, musician, producer and author of “Deutschland Schwarz Weiß” (C. Bertelsmann, 2008), who will speak about “Geteilte Geschichte: The Black Experience in Germany and the US.”
 
In cooperation with the Humanities Council of Washington, DC, the convention will also feature an award ceremony for Hans J. Massaquoi, who will be given the “Champion of the Humanities Award” in honor of his lifetime achievements as an author, journalist, and cultural ambassador. Accepting the award at the convention on behalf of Mr. Massaquoi will be his son, Hans J. Massaquoi, Jr.

Additionally, the convention will feature a photo exhibit on “The Civil Rights Struggle, African American GIs, and Germany,” and “Homestory Deutschland: Gelebt – Erlebte Schwarze Deutsche Geschichte(n).”…

For more information, click here.

“Germany’s ‘Brown Babies’ Must Be Helped! Will You?”: U.S. Adoption Plans for Afro-German Children, 1950-1955

Callaloo
Volume 26, Number 2 (Spring 2003)
pages 342-362
DOI: 10.1353/cal.2003.0052
E-ISSN: 1080-6512 Print ISSN: 0161-2492

Yara-Colette Lemke Muniz de Faria

This essay explores the debate that arose around the adoption of Black German children by African American parents and the subsequent immigration of these children to the United States. Using a comparative approach, the article probes the underlying internal social and political controversies in postwar Germany and the United States that led to and accompanied these events, concluding that both the plans for and practical implementation of the adoption of these Black German children abroad was an complex and contradictory attempt to solve the “problem” a German-born Black population was seen to pose.

Scattered throughout Europe today there are thousands of “war orphans”—children of European girls and American soldiers who loved and left. Hundreds of these homeless children are the offspring of Negro soldiers and their mulatto status makes adoption by European families extremely unlikely. But in America there are hundreds of childless Negro couples who wish to adopt these “war babies” and bring them to the U.S. Up to now government red tape has prevented all but a trickle from being adopted. (“German War Babies”)

In January 1951, an article was published in the African-American magazine Ebony with the above-cited headline. The article chronicled the story of an African-American teacher, Margaret Ethel Butler, who since 1947 had been attempting to adopt two Afro-German children and arrange their immigration to the United States. On 4 October 1951, nine months after the article appeared, Margaret E. Butler fas finally able to welcome her much longed-for adopted children at the Chicago airport. These two German children, born of African-American occupation soldiers and German women, are considered the first such children to be adopted and arrive in the U.S. after the war.

The adoption of these two Afro-German children (a boy and a girl of five and six years of age) who, until their departure for the U.S., had lived in a Rheingau orphanage was the result of a bureaucratic battle waged by Margaret E. Butler over a period of many years. It was in 1947 that she first learned of the discrimination facing many Afro-German children in Germany through an article in the Chicago Tribune, at which point she decided to adopt two of these children. Her initial inquiries, including a journey to the children’s orphanage in Germany, were followed by countless requests and petitions, as well as further visits to Germany. Soon Margaret E. Butler became known as the Butler Case, a phenomenon widely documented in both the West German and the African-American press.

In the following pages, will explore several aspects of the public response to this group of German occupation children in Germany and the U.S. I begin with an examination of the motives which led German and American organizations and individuals in both countries to perceive Afro-German children as potential adoptees for the U.S. The first section looks at the crucial role of the Black press and the NAACP…

Read or purchase the article here.
Also read, “Reflections on the ‘Brown Babies’ in Germany: the Black Press and the NAACP,” in The Civil Rights Struggle, African-American GIs, and Germany.

Race and Sociological Reason in the Republic: Inquiries on the Métis in the French Empire (1908-37)

International Sociology
Volume 17, Number 3 (September 2002)
361-391
DOI: 10.1177/0268580902017003002

Emmanuelle Saada, Associate Professor and Director of the Center for French and Francophone Studies
Columbia University

This article compares two collective surveys on the métis conducted in 1908 and 1937 in the French colonies. Métis was a category used mostly to describe children born out of wedlock to indigenous mothers and European fathers. The first inquiry was sponsored by anthropologists of the Société d’anthropologie de Paris; the second was an administrative survey that brought together social scientists, administrators and a variety of other experts. The comparison sheds light on the specific trajectory of the ‘métis problem’ in the French Empire, and on the process of construction of a social category. More broadly, it invites a reappraisal of the signification and role of race in both the construction of French citizenship and the history of French social thought in the first half of the 20th century.

Read or purchase the article here.

Creating the Creole Island: Slavery in Eighteenth-Century Mauritius

Duke University Press
2004
360 pages
5 illustrations
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8223-3402-6
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-3399-9

Megan Vaughan, Smuts Professor of Commonwealth History
Cambridge University

The island of Mauritius lies in the middle of the Indian Ocean, about 550 miles east of Madagascar. Uninhabited until the arrival of colonists in the late sixteenth century, Mauritius was subsequently populated by many different peoples as successive waves of colonizers and slaves arrived at its shores. The French ruled the island from the early eighteenth century until the early nineteenth. Throughout the 1700s, ships brought men and women from France to build the colonial population and from Africa and India as slaves. In Creating the Creole Island, the distinguished historian Megan Vaughan traces the complex and contradictory social relations that developed on Mauritius under French colonial rule, paying particular attention to questions of subjectivity and agency.

Combining archival research with an engaging literary style, Vaughan juxtaposes extensive analysis of court records with examinations of the logs of slave ships and of colonial correspondence and travel accounts. The result is a close reading of life on the island, power relations, colonialism, and the process of cultural creolization. Vaughan brings to light complexities of language, sexuality, and reproduction as well as the impact of the French Revolution. Illuminating a crucial period in the history of Mauritius, Creating the Creole Island is a major contribution to the historiography of slavery, colonialism, and creolization across the Indian Ocean.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• One – In the Beginning
• Two – Engineering a Colony, 1735-1767
• Three – Enlightenment Colonialism and Its Limits, 1767-1789
• Four – Roots and Routes: Ethnicity without Origins
• Five – A Baby in the Salt Pans: Mothering Slavery
• Six – Love in the Torrid Zone
• Seven – Reputation, Recognition, and Race
• Eight – Speaking Slavery: Language and Loss
• Nine – Metissage and Revolution
• Ten – Sugar and Abolition
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index

Converging Spectres of an Other Within: Race and Gender in Prewar Afro-German History

Callaloo
Volume 26, Number 2 (Spring 2003)
pages 322-341
DOI: 10.1353/cal.2003.0036

Tina Campt, Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies and Director of the Africana Studies Program
Barnard College

This article examines two of the earliest historical contexts in which Germans articulated a public discourse on its black population. The essay explores the discourse of racial endangerment enunciated in the German colonies in the debates on the status of racially-mixed marriages and the Afro-German progeny of these relationships and links this discourse to a second recurrence of the spectre of racial mixture in the interwar years, the figure of the “Rhineland Bastard.” Setting these discourses in relation to one another, the article maps the trajectory of an imagined spectre of racial danger that served as a powerful and resilient construct for the expression of German national anxieties on blackness in the first half of the twentieth century.

Read or purchase the articles here.

D’Eichthal and Urbain’s Lettres sur la race noire et la race blanche: Race, Gender, and Reconciliation after Slave Emancipation

Nineteenth-Century French Studies
Volume 39, Numbers 3 & 4 (Spring-Summer 2011)
pages 240-258
E-ISSN: 1536-0172 Print ISSN: 0146-7891

Naomi J. Andrews, Assistant Professor of History
Santa Clara University

This article is a close reading of Gustave d’Eichthal and Ishmayl Urbain’s Lettres sur la race noire et la race blanche (1839), written during the decade prior to the “second” French emancipation in 1848. The article argues that the hierarchical gendering of race described in the letters is reflective of metropolitan concerns about potential for social disorder accompanying slave emancipation in the French colonies. In arguing for social reconciliation through interracial marriage and its offspring, the symbolically charged figure of the mulatto, the authors deployed gendered and familial language to describe a stable post-emancipation society.

Read or purchase the article here.

Is the Discourse of Hybridity a Celebration of Mixing, or a Reformulation of Racial Division? A Multimodal Analysis of the Portuguese Magazine Afro

Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Reasearch
Volume 11, Number 2, Article 24 (May 2010)
29 pages
ISSN: 1438-5627

José Ricardo Carvalheiro, Assistant Professor in the Communication and Arts Department
University of Beira Interior, Portugal

For many years the study of “race” relations was dominated by paradigms—of assimilationism and multiculturalism—which highlighted difference and division (as a problem, or a virtue). In more recent years the idea of racial and cultural mixing—creolization or hybridization—has become an important concept in ethnic and racial studies. The starting point of this article is the observation that the idea of racial and cultural mixture—hybridity or mestiçagem—was a key ideological feature of Portuguese colonialism in its last decades. If hybridity is not therefore a new discourse in Portugal, what is the place for it today and what kind of hybridity is being referred to? What might the Portuguese case tell us about discourses of hybridity more generally? The article explores these questions through a combined visual and linguistic analysis of the lifestyle magazine Afro as a site where contemporary discourses about “race” intertwine.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
3. The “African” Minority in Portugal
4. Afro, a Magazine in the Market
4.1 What does the existence of a lifestyle magazine such as Afro mean?
5. Racial Actors in Visual and Verbal Texts
6. Transnational Representations, “Race” Questions and Hybridity
7. Stories About Mixing: Layers of Discourse
8. Conclusion
Acknowledgments
References
Author
Citation

Read the entire article here.

Phil Lynott: Famous For Many Reasons

Irish Migration Studies in Latin America
Volume 4, Number 3 (July 2006)
Published by The Society for Irish Latin American Studies

John Horan

Bronze statue of Phil Lynott on Harry Street, Dublin (by Paul Daly, cast by Leo Higgins, plinth hand-carved by Tom Glendon)

In view of the unique and colourful history of the ties between Ireland and Brazil that date back centuries, it is perhaps surprising that the most famous Irish-Brazilian was a mixed-race rock star from Dublin. Phil Lynott was one of Ireland’s first world-famous rock stars, and definitely the most famous black Irishman in the island’s history, long before the advent of a new era in the Republic that facilitated the immigration of people from various African nations from the 1990s. Lynott’s band, Thin Lizzy, was the first internationally successful Irish rock band, and Lynott himself was considered the biggest black rock star since Jimmy Hendrix.

Phil Lynott: THE ROCKER, a 2002 biography by Mark Putterford, begins with the sentence, “Phil Lynott was one of the most colorful and charismatic characters in the history of rock ‘n’ roll.” This sentence would be considered an understatement by those who knew him through all stages of his life. His family history was typical in some ways, but his mother’s personal history was anything but typical for Ireland in 1949, the year he was born.

Philomena Lynott was born in Dublin in 1930 to Frank and Sarah Lynott. She was the fourth of nine children, all of whom grew up in the working-class Crumlin district on the south side of Dublin. Economic hardships in the Republic prompted her to choose to move across the Irish Sea to Manchester to find work, while many of her friends went to Liverpool. Shortly after her arrival in Manchester, she was courted by a black Brazilian immigrant whose surname was Parris. To this very day, Philomena Lynott has never spoken publicly about her son’s father, so as to protect his privacy. She once said, “He was a fine, fine man, who did the decent thing and proposed marriage to me when I told him I was pregnant.” Philomena and her former boyfriend stayed in contact for five years after their son was born. However, when it became clear that marriage was no longer a possibility between the two, they drifted apart. It is said that Philip Lynott’s father returned to live in Brazil and started another family, which has always been the reason given for Philomena’s refusal to provide any information about the “tall, dark stranger” who was her son’s father, as she never wanted to disrupt his life with his new family. Several sources cite that the Brazilian made some level of financial contribution towards supporting his Irish son in the early years…

Read the entire article here.

In visit to Ireland, O’Bama seeks to reverse U.S. notions of race

The Philadelphia Inquirer
2011-05-25

John Timpane, Inquirer Staff Writer

President Obama’s one-day visit to Ireland was a masterly orchestration of three visuals – one imaginary, two very real.

Imaginary visual: the apostrophe in O’Bama. “My name is Barack Obama,” he said in Dublin, “of the Moneygall Obamas, and I’ve come home to find the apostrophe we lost somewhere along the way.” Anglo-Irish apostrophe, Kenyan last name, American tale…

…Obama was doing much more than playing to the folks at home, with a wink to Moneygall. He was doing no less than seeking to reverse American notions of race, origin, and ethnicity.

“Clearly, a political bet is being made here that this will make beautiful political theater for 2012,” says Matt Wray, assistant professor of sociology at Temple University. “But that isn’t where the conversation ends. There’s a performance here of race and ethnicity that does suggest the terms are changing in the U.S. These images of Obama quaffing Guinness as a son of Ireland really do strike even casual observers as historically new.”

Consider the irony of a man so long under fire for his origins, comes to Ireland to celebrate one strand of those origins. He is called black because in the United States, we are messed up about origins. Why not call him “Barack Obama, America’s 44th white president?” Or “America’s third Irish American president” (after Ronald Reagan and John Kennedy)? He is as much those things as its first black president. No? Never happen? Why not?

Charles Gallagher, chairman of the Sociology, Social Work and Criminal Justice Department at La Salle University, sees the notorious “one-drop rule” of U.S. social attitudes at work: “A single ‘drop of black blood’ negates your ability to reconnect back to Europe. Race trumps all other questions of ethnic origin. Yet we know that 80 percent of all African Americans have European ancestors. Their history, which includes slavery, has cut them off both from Africa and from Europe, from being able to reclaim that great-grandfather in Sicily or Eastern Europe.”…

…Obama’s speech in Dublin told of Fulmouth Kearney, his grandfather’s grandfather, who got out of tiny Moneygall in 1850, ended up in Ohio, bought land, and started a line of middling, obscure, working Americans. How was Kearney to know his line would braid with a Kenyan line, to run within an American (yes) president? An American tale.

Gallagher says, “What Obama did is fantastic. He’s telling the truth: that ethnicity is absolutely fluid, and you can reclaim the full spectrum of your identity. It’s further blurring of the color line, and it gives permission to Americans, many of whom have incredibly diverse origins, to explore them all.”

As Wray puts it: “It speaks to the fastest-growing segment of Americans—those of mixed race—starting to rewrite the script. Obama, in his blackness, is free to explore his whiteness.”

The circle won’t be closed, of course, until millions of white Americans embrace the Africa in their pasts. Forty million claim Irish roots. How many will claim African?…

Read the entire article here.

Drôle de Félix : A Search for Cultural Identity on the Road

Wide Screen
Volume 3, Number 1 (2011)
ISSN: 1757-3920

Zélie Asava

With the emergence of la culture beur in the 1980s—and the birth of a new type of filmmaking influenced by postcolonial politics, world cinema, the new hood films of the African-American community and its hip hop culture—questions of identity, multiculturalism and being mixed-race came to the fore.  Since then, many films have tackled the representation of France’s ethnic minorities onscreen and attempted to  move towards representing the dream 2007 presidential candidate Ségolène Royal expressed of a ‘Mixed-Race France’. This article will explore representations of ethnicity, gender and sexuality in Drôle de Félix/The Adventures of Felix (1999), through the figure of Félix, a homosexual, mixed-race (French-North African) man searching for his absent father and his ‘true’ identity.  The film focuses on the demystification of imperialist absolutes and divisions to reveal what lies between, in the interstices. Through its focus on transgressive identity it transforms traditional representations to explore what lies beyond.  This article interrogates the representational schema of Drôle de Félix, by exploring the cinematic stereotypes and taboos challenged and maintained in the film in comparison to traditional beur cinema and established ideas of Maghrebi-French characters in French cinema.

Read the entire article here.