Mixed Race Studies

Equivocal subjects: The representation of mixed-race identity in Italian film

University of California, Irvine
2007
226 pages
AAT 3296258
ISBN: 9780549410775

Shelleen Maisha Greene, Assistant Professor of Conceptual Studies
University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee

My dissertation seeks to establish a critical framework for the analysis of mixed-race subjects in Italian film. Within the Italian context, mixed-race subjects emerged out of the colonial conditions stemming from the nation’s occupation and settlement of its east African colonies beginning in the nineteenth century. However, racial mixture has also served as a metaphor for the internal division of Italy between North and South, a historical formation that arguably allows for the development of analytics, such as the “Southern Question,” by which to essentialize a racially heterogeneous population. Through an examination of four historically contextualized films, I examine the presentation of mixed-race subjects in Cabiria (1914), Sotto la croce del sud (1938), Il Mulatto (1949/1951), and Il fiore delle mille e una notte (1974). I argue that the mixed-race subject is a constitutive element of the Italian cinema, a figure that serves as a nodal point for the intersection of conceptions of race and the nation.

Purchase the disseration here.

What’s in a Name? Mixed-Race Families and Resistance to Racial Codification in Eighteenth-Century France

French Historical Studies
Volume 33, Number 3 (2010)
Pages 357-385
DOI: 10.1215/00161071-2010-002

Jennifer L. Palmer, Collegiate Assistant Professor of History
University of Chicago

The Saint-Domingue planter Aimé-Benjamin Fleuriau did not simply leave colonialism behind when he returned to his hometown La Rochelle: he literally brought some of its complications with him. Five of his mixed-race children by his former slave Jeanne arrived with or soon after their white father. The very existence of this family complicated an increasingly easy equation between blackness and slavery, and for both the planter and his children, family ties shaped their experience of race and status. In the midst of growing racial paranoia in France and legislation that regulated all people of color, Fleuriau and his daughter Marie-Jeanne privileged family over race as a means of carving out a position of autonomy for themselves in French society, albeit in very different ways and for very different reasons. In doing so, they shaped what the category “family” meant in France.

Aimé-Benjamin Fleuriau, ex–résident blanc de Saint-Domingue, au lieu d’abandonner le colonialisme après son retour à La Rochelle, a rapporté avec lui certaines des complications coloniales. Cinq des enfants métisses qu’il a eus avec son ancienne esclave Jeanne sont arrivés avec lui, ou peu après. L’existence même de cette famille a compliqué le lien évident entre la négritude et l’esclavage. Pour le planteur et ses enfants les liens familiaux ont informé leur manière d’assumer leur race et leur position sociale. Au milieu de la paranoïa raciale croissante en France au dixhuitième siècle et la législation qui réglementait tous gens de couleur, Fleuriau et sa fille Marie-Jeanne ont privilégié les liens familiaux plutôt que raciaux afin de créer une position d’autonomie dans la société française, bien que par des moyens et pour des raisons très différents. Ils ont ainsi façonné la catégorie « famille » en France.

Read or purchase the article here.

Trading Races: Joseph and Marie Bunel, a Diplomat and a Merchant in Revolutionary Saint-Domingue and Philadelphia

Journal of the Early Republic
Volume 30, Number 3, Fall 2010
pages 351-376
E-ISSN: 1553-0620
Print ISSN: 0275-1275

Philippe R. Girard, Associate Professor of History
McNeese State University, Lake Charles, Louisiana

Based on extensive research in French, British, and U.S. archives, the article focuses on Joseph Bunel, a diplomatic and commercial envoy for Toussaint Louverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines, and his wife Marie Bunel (Fanchette Estève), who spent her adult life as a merchant in Cap Français (Cap Haïtien) and Philadelphia. Joseph and Marie Bunel were a white Frenchman and a free black Creole, but their careers were shaped more by their social and monetary ambitions than by their racial background. After spending a few years in prerevolutionary Saint-Domingue (Haiti) as a merchant and a plantation manager, Joseph Bunel played an important administrative role in Louverture’s regime after 1798, first as a diplomatic envoy charged with drafting treaties of commerce and non-aggression with the United States and England during the Quasi-War, then as Louverture’s paymaster. Because of his closeness to the regime, he was deported to France during the Leclerc expedition. After moving to Philadelphia in 1803, he became a noted exporter of war contraband to Dessalines’ Haiti and in 1807 settled permanently in this country as a merchant. Marie Bunel, a prosperous free-colored merchant from Cap Français before the outbreak of the Haitian Revolution, continued her mercantile activities throughout the revolutionary period. Though personally close to notable figures like Louverture and Henri Christophe, her political involvement in the revolutionary struggle was limited. Persecuted along with her husband during the Leclerc expedition, she moved to Philadelphia, where she lived as an independent merchant long after Haiti had declared its independence. It was not until 1810 that for personal reasons she moved back to Haiti, where little evidence is available to retrace the end of the Bunels’ eventful lives.

Read or purchase the article here.

Understanding the Identity Choices of Multiracial and Multicultural Afro-European and Black Women Living in Germany: Identifying a Model of Strategies and Resources for Empowerment

Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, München
October 2006
179 pages

Dominique Michel-Peres

This grounded theory study investigated the identity choices of highly achieving multiracial and multicultural Afro-European and Black immigrant women living in Germany and the role these choices played in their personal constructs of coping and self-empowerment. 10 openended narrative interviews, field observations formed the data base; whereby the field observations where used to affirm or disaffirm evolving hypothesis. The historical, social, and cultural context in which these women live is reviewed, and key terms such as racism and discrimination are clarified. The individual racial identity choice and coping strategies were analyzed, and a theoretical model was developed describing the a) causal conditions that influence and form racial identity choices, b) phenomena that resulted from these causal conditions, c) the contextual attributes that influenced type of strategy developed, d) intervening condition that have an impact on the type of strategy developed, e) the strategies themselves, and f) the consequences of those strategies. The components of the theoretical model are first described and then illustrated by narrative excerpts.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Table of Contents
List of Tables
List of Figures
Abstract
Introduction

1. Conceptual Point of Departure
1.1. Bi- / Multi-isms and the Precariousness of Recognition
1.2. Racist Construction in Europe
1.2.1. European expansion and exploration:-its role in shaping images of Africans and of “races”
1.2.2. The stage is set: socio-historical and socio-cultural props
1.2.2.1 Social Darwinism and German colonialism
1.2.2.2. Internalized Colonialism
1.3. Representations and Projections
1.3.1 Postwar Germany’s Black children
1.3.2. Non-white minorities and the German educational system
1.4. Summary

2. Racism and Discrimination
2.1. Racism, Discrimination and Subjectivity
2.1.1. Defining racism
2.1.2 What is racism? Identity Choices of Multiracial & Multicultural Afro-European and Black Women in Germany
2.1.2.1. Axiom 1: Racism does not implicate the existence of races
2.1.2.2. Axiom 2: Racism implies the existence of social hierarchies
2.1.2.3. Axiom 3 Racism requires influence in social structuring processes
2.2. Racism and Racial Discrimination’s New Attire
2.2.1. Central Frames in Racism
2.2.1.1. Abstract liberalism
2.2.1.2. Abstract liberalism and its role in cultural racism
2.2.1.3. Cultural racism and self-fulfilling prophecies
2.2.1.4. Symbolic Racism Excurse: Germany’s discourse on immigration
2.3. Racial Discrimination : Subjectivity and Psychological Impact
2.3.1. The Psychological Impact of Perceived Racial Discrimination
2.4. Summary

3. Identity Construction, Patchwork Identities and the Stigmatized Self
3.1. Identity Construction and Patchwork Identities: Who am I?
3.1.1. Patchworks of Racial and Ethnic choices
3.2. Multicultural-Multiracial- Who am I?
3.2.1. Models of ethnic and racial identity development
3.2.1.1. Visible racial and ethnic group models (V-REG)
3.2.1.1.1. Cross’s Theory of Black Identity Development Identity Choices of Multiracial & Multicultural Afro-European and Black Women in Germany
3.2.1.1.2. Helm’s model of White Identity Development
3.2.1.1.3. Multiracial identity development models
3.2.1.2. Salience model: Ethnic Identity Development Theory
3.2.2. Implications for Afro-Europeans and immigrants
3.3. Cultural Differences and the Salience of Ethnic and Racial Identity and Oppositional Identity
3.3.1. Voluntary and involuntary minorities
3.3.2. Oppositional identity and the burden of “acting White”
3.3.3. Accommodation without assimilation
3.3.4. Personal and group attributions to racism and discrimination
3.4. Racial and Ethnic Identity’s Role in the Self-Esteem of Minorities
3.4.1. Self-esteem
3.5. Social Identity and Stigmatized Identities
3.5.1. Social identity and stigmatized identities
3.5.1.1. Coping with attribution ambiguity
3.5.1.2. Maintaining a sense of Self independent of the “spoiled collective identity”
3.5.1.3. Ethnicity, race, gender and other socially defined groups as developmental contexts
3.6. Summary

4. Identity Choices in Multiple Contexts: Concepts, Properties and Dimensions
4.1. Methodology
4.1.1. Participants
4.1.2. Procedure
4.1.2.1. The narrative interview: Identity Choices of Multiracial & Multicultural Afro-European and Black Women in Germany
4.1.2.2. The interviewing process
4.1.2.3. The interview
4.1.2.4. Underlying ethnographic aspects: field notes and observations
4.2. Verification of Concepts and Categories
4.2.1. Verification
4.2.1.1. Quality verification

5. Analysis and Results
5.1. Sources of Influence
5.1.1. Direct and indirect dispositional and situational sources of influence
5.1.1.1. Dispositional factor
5.1.1.2. Situational factors
5.1.2. Higher categories
5.1.2.1. Coping strategies
5.1.2.2. Personal characteristics
5.1.2.3. Social identity: content and salience
5.1.2.4. Threats
5.1.2.5. Opportunities
5.1.3. Core Category, phenomena, and consequences
5.1.3.1. Core category as causal condition
5.1.3.2. Phenomenon resulting from racial socialization parental racial-beliefs
5.1.3.3. Context in which coping strategies develop Identity Choices of Multiracial & Multicultural Afro-European and Black Women in Germany
5.1.3.4. Intervening conditions influencing coping strategies
5.1.3.5. Consequences of strategies against powerlessness, helplessness and victimization
5.2. Multicultural-Multiracial Narratives: Excerpts from two lives
5.2.1. Jennifer’s story
5.2.1.1. Explicitness of experienced discrimination and perception
5.2.1.2. Racial salience
5.2.1.3. Sense of self
5.2.2. Angela’s story
5.2.2.1. Attribution ambiguity
5.2.2.2. Parent’s experiences with racism and racial discrimination
5.2.2.3. Internalized racism and race salience

6. Discussion: Implications for Multicultural Counselling and Empowerment
6.1. Focus on Primary Socialization Issues and Subjectivity
6.1.2. Focus on strengths and assets

References

List of Tables

1. Ratio of German to Foreighn Students According to School Track in the Year 2002 in Germany
2. Discourse on Immigration as Represented in two Major German Publications
3. Summary of Salient Points in Poston and Kich Multiracial Identity Development Model
4. Table 4 Participants Ethnic Backgrounds
5. Dispositional and Situational, Direct and Indirect Factors

List of Figures

1. Conceptual framework: The embeddedness of identity
2. Identity construction as patch-working
3. Descriptive model of the relationship between ego identity and Nigrescence
4. Factor Model of Multiracial Identity
5. Paradoxes found in self-esteem research
6. Research results on the detrimental effects of membership in devalued Social-groups
7. Summary of research results on social-group membership and its Consequences
8. Results of research on the factors affecting social identity development and how they interact
9. In-group and out-group identification in relation to expectations and Aspirations; group vs. individual based strategies; and attribution style
10. The results of axial coding: Higher categories and their respective subcategories
11. Theoretical model for understanding idenitity and strategy choices of multiracial and multicultural women

Read the entire dissertation here.

Afro-German Biracial Identity Development

Virginia Commonwealth University
May 2010
75 pages

Rebecca R. Hubbard

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science at Virginia Commonwealth University

An increase in the biracial population has heightened our awareness of unique issues that pervade the experience of these individuals. The importance of environmental influences on biracial identity development has been established, but investigations concerning racial socialization of biracial individuals are scarce. This study, utilizing a qualitative design, explores racial identity development of biracial Afro-Germans living in Germany. The purpose of the study is to understand the strategies that biracial individuals use to negotiate their racial identity, factors that influence their development, cultural influences, and racial socialization processes. Interviews with biracial Afro-Germans were conducted using phenomenological interviewing techniques. Twelve themes emerged from the data that are best conceptualized in an ecological model. Inter-rater reliability was established in two phases. Implications of the findings include a need for continued research with Black-White biracial populations.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgements
• List of Tables
• List of Figures
• Abstract
• Problem Statement
• Review of the Literature
  • Developmental Models
  • Developmental Models of Biracial Identity Development
  • Ecological Models
  • Ecological Models of Biracial Identity Development
  • Racial Socialization
  • Racial Socialization of Biracial Individuals
  • Value of Cross-Cultural Comparisons
  • Historical Context of People of African Descent in Germany
  • Empirical Research with Afro-German Populations
  • Theoretical Conceptualization
  • Research Questions
• Method
  • Purpose
  • Design
  • Role of the Researcher
  • Sampling & Recruitment of Participants
  • Procedure
  • Data Analysis
  • Verification
  • Limitations
• Themes
  • Intersectional Identity
  • Black Identity
  • German/White Identity
  • Disconnect/Denial
  • Positive Internal Coping
  • Environmental Support
  • Injured Family
  • Person-Environment Discrepancy
  • Multi Kulti
  • American Familiarity
  • Racism, Marginalization, Conflict
  • Progress and Change
  • Ecological Conceptualization of Themes
• Discussion
  • The Essence of Biracial Afro-German Identity
  • Culture and Nationality
  • Lack of Appropriate Language
  • Future Directions
• List of References

List of Tables

1. Table 1 Mean Age and Parental Heritage by Gender
2. Table 2 Participant Demographics

List of Figures

1. Figure 1 Root’s Ecological Model of Biracial Identity
2. Figure 2 “Sarotti Mohr” Trademark of a German chocolate company
3. Figure 3 Hubbard’s Ecological Model of Afro-German Biracial Identity (HEMBAGI)

Read the entire thesis here.

Europe’s Indians: Producing Racial Difference, 1500–1900

Duke University Press
2010
296 pages
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8223-4745-3
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-4764-4

Vanita Seth, Associate Professor of Politics
University of California, Santa Cruz

Europe’s Indians forces a rethinking of key assumptions regarding difference—particularly racial difference—and its centrality to contemporary social and political theory. Tracing shifts in European representations of two different colonial spaces, the New World and India, from the late fifteenth century through the late nineteenth, Vanita Seth demonstrates that the classification of humans into racial categories or binaries of self-other is a product of modernity. Part historical, part philosophical, and part a history of science, her account exposes the epistemic conditions that enabled the thinking of difference at distinct historical junctures. Seth’s examination of Renaissance, Classical Age, and nineteenth-century representations of difference reveals radically diverging forms of knowing, reasoning, organizing thought, and authorizing truth. It encompasses stories of monsters, new worlds, and ancient lands; the theories of individual agency expounded by Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau; and the physiological sciences of the nineteenth century. European knowledge, she argues, does not reflect a singular history of Reason, but rather multiple traditions of reasoning, of historically bounded and contingent forms of knowledge. Europe’s Indians shows that a history of colonialism and racism must also be an investigation into the historical production of subjectivity, agency, epistemology, and the body.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Self and Similitude: Renaissance Representations of the New World
2. “Constructing” Individuals and “Creating” History: Subjectivity in Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau
3. Traditions of History: Mapping India’s Past
4. Of Monsters and Man: The Peculiar History of Race
Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Not So Plain as Black and White: Afro-German Culture & History, 1890-2000

University of Rochester Press
2005-03-01
266 pages
Pages: 266
Size: 9 x 6
Hardback 13 Digit ISBN: 9781580461832
Imprint: University of Rochester Press

Edited by

Patricia M. Mazón, Associate Professor of History
State University of New York, Buffalo

Reinhild Steingröver, Assistant Professor of German
University of Rochester, Eastman School of Music

Since the Middle Ages, Africans have lived in Germany as slaves and scholars, guest workers and refugees. After Germany became a unified nation in 1871, it acquired several African colonies but lost them after World War I. Children born of German mothers and African fathers during the French occupation of Germany were persecuted by the Nazis. After World War II, many children were born to African American GIs stationed in Germany and German mothers. Today there are 500,000 Afro-Germans in Germany out of a population of 80 million. Nevertheless, German society still sees them as “foreigners,” assuming they are either African or African American but never German.

In recent years, the subject of Afro-Germans has captured the interest of scholars across the humanities for several reasons. Looking at Afro-Germans allows us to see another dimension of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century ideas of race that led to the Holocaust. Furthermore, the experience of Afro-Germans provides insight into contemporary Germany’s transformation, willing or not, into a multicultural society. The volume breaks new ground not only by addressing the topic of Afro-Germans but also by combining scholars from many disciplines.

Table of Contents

1. Dangerous Liaisons: Race, Nation, and German Identity
2. The First Besatzungskinder: Afro-German Children, Colonial Childrearing Practices, and Racial Policy in German Southwest Africa, 1890-1914
3. Converging Specters of an Other Within: Race and Gender in Pre- 1945 Afro-German History
4. Louis Brody and the Black Presence in German Film Before 1945
5. Narrating “Race” in 1950s’ West Germany: The Phenomenon of the Toxi Films
6. Will Everything Be Fine? Anti-Racist Practice in Recent German Cinema
7. Writing Diasporic Identity: Afro-German Literature since 1985
8. The Souls of Black Volk: Contradiction? Oxymoron?

ART & DESIGN FACULTY – Shelleen Greene awarded IRE Faculty Diversity Research Award

Peck School of The Arts News
University of Wisconsin, Madison
2010-06-15

The award will allow Assistant Professor Shelleen Greene to complete her book project, Equivocal Subjects: Mixed-Race Identity in the Italian Cinema. The book examines the representation of mixed-race subjects of Italian and African descent in the Italian cinema, arguing that the changing cultural representations of mixed-race identity reveal shifts in the country’s conceptual paradigms of race and nation. Greene’s work further contends that these representations of mixed-race identity inform African diasporic filmmakers seeking to “write” the history of post-colonial Italy as a means of narrating African disaporic identity formation in the present era of global migration…

Read the entire article here.

The Color of Water: A Black Man’s Tribute to His White Mother (10th Anniversary Edition)

Riverhead an Imprint of Penguin Publishing Group
2006-02-07
352 pages
8.26 x 5.23in
Paperback ISBN: 9781594481925

James McBride

James McBride, journalist, musician, and son, explores his mother’s past, as well as his own upbringing and heritage, in a poignant and powerful debut.

Who is Ruth McBride Jordan? A self-declared “light-skinned” woman evasive about her ethnicity, yet steadfast in her love for her twelve black children. James McBride, journalist, musician, and son, explores his mother’s past, as well as his own upbringing and heritage, in a poignant and powerful debut, The Color Of Water: A Black Man’s Tribute to His White Mother.

The son of a black minister and a woman who would not admit she was white, James McBride grew up in “orchestrated chaos” with his eleven siblings in the poor, all-black projects of Red Hook, Brooklyn. “Mommy,” a fiercely protective woman with “dark eyes full of pep and fire,” herded her brood to Manhattan’s free cultural events, sent them off on buses to the best (and mainly Jewish) schools, demanded good grades, and commanded respect. As a young man, McBride saw his mother as a source of embarrassment, worry, and confusion—and reached thirty before he began to discover the truth about her early life and long-buried pain.

In The Color of Water, McBride retraces his mother’s footsteps and, through her searing and spirited voice, recreates her remarkable story. The daughter of a failed itinerant Orthodox rabbi, she was born Rachel Shilsky (actually Ruchel Dwara Zylska) in Poland on April 1, 1921. Fleeing pogroms, her family emigrated to America and ultimately settled in Suffolk, Virginia, a small town where anti-Semitism and racial tensions ran high. With candor and immediacy, Ruth describes her parents’ loveless marriage; her fragile, handicapped mother; her cruel, sexually-abusive father; and the rest of the family and life she abandoned.

At seventeen, after fleeing Virginia and settling in New York City, Ruth married a black minister and founded the all- black New Brown Memorial Baptist Church in her Red Hook living room. “God is the color of water,” Ruth McBride taught her children, firmly convinced that life’s blessings and life’s values transcend race. Twice widowed, and continually confronting overwhelming adversity and racism, Ruth’s determination, drive and discipline saw her dozen children through college—and most through graduate school. At age 65, she herself received a degree in social work from Temple University.

Interspersed throughout his mother’s compelling narrative, McBride shares candid recollections of his own experiences as a mixed-race child of poverty, his flirtations with drugs and violence, and his eventual self- realization and professional success. The Color of Water touches readers of all colors as a vivid portrait of growing up, a haunting meditation on race and identity, and a lyrical valentine to a mother from her son.

‘If You Can’t Pronounce My Name, You Can Just Call Me Pride’: Afro-German Activism, Gender and Hip Hop

Gender & History
Volume 15 Issue 3 (November 2003)
Pages 460 – 486
DOI: 10.1111/j.0953-5233.2003.00316.x

Fatima El-Tayeb, Assistant Professor of African-American Literature and Culture
University of California, San Diego

The history of the black German minority, now estimated at around 500,000, goes back several centuries. It is only since the twentieth century, however, that Germans of African descent have been perceived as a group. This did not lead to their recognition as a national minority, but rather, from the 1910s to the 1960s, they were defined as a collective threat to Germany’s racial and cultural ‘purity’. When a sense of identity emerged among Afro-Germans themselves in the 1980s, the majority population continued to deny the existence of ethnic diversity within German society. At the turn of the twenty-first century, Afro-Germans seemingly suddenly appeared as a new, ‘hip’ minority. This appearance was largely focused on the immense public success of the Hip Hop collective ‘Brothers Keepers’, conceived as an anti-racist, explicitly Afro-German intervention into German debates around national identity and racist violence. This article explains the success of ‘Brothers Keepers’ by contextualising it within the tradition of two decades of Afro-German feminist activism and the transnational Hip Hop movement of European youth of colour.

Read or purchase the article here.