Mixed Race Studies

Hazel Carby: Where Are You From?

Duke Franklin Humanities Institute
2018-11-05

An account of how a young black girl, growing up in South London, had to learn to negotiate the racial fictions of post World War Two Britain, drawn from Dr. Carby’s forthcoming book, “Imperial Intimacies” (Verso 2019).

Hazel Carby is Charles C. & Dorothea S. Dilley Professor of African American Studies & American Studies and the Director of the Initiative on Race, Gender, and Globalization at Yale University. Born in postwar UK, trained at the University of Birmingham under Stuart Hall’s mentorship, she is a foundational scholar of US black feminist intellectual history. Her books include Reconstructing Womanhood (1987), Race Men (1998), and Cultures in Babylon (1999). She was named the 2014 recipient of the Jay B. Hubbell Medal for Lifetime Achievement in American Literary Studies.

Co-directed by Richard Powell, Jasmine Nichole Cobb, and Lamonte Aidoo, the From Slavery to Freedom Lab examines the life and afterlives of slavery and emancipation, linking Duke University to the Global South.

Watch the address here.

An Intimate History of the British Empire

The New Yorker
2019-10-09

Maya Binyam

Hazel Carby as a child. Photograph Courtesy Hazel Carby

In “Imperial Intimacies,” Hazel Carby weaves together the story of colonialism and the story of her family.

After Carl Carby arrived in England from Jamaica, in 1943, he wore starched shirts, polished dress shoes, and neatly knotted ties. He was from the colonies, but his mannerisms evinced a restrained, British sensibility. Like most early immigrants from the Caribbean, he was expected to provide a service: his entrance to England was predicated on his employment as a bomber pilot in the Royal Air Force, which recruited around six thousand people from England’s “black colonies” to fight in the Second World War. At a dance in Worcester, he met Iris Leaworthy, a young, white Welsh woman who worked as a civil servant in the Air Ministry, and the two bonded over the surprising similarities of their upbringings. Both had grown up in poverty. As schoolchildren, each donned a starched uniform and, on Empire Day, a holiday designed to instill in children a feeling of belonging to a great nation, waved the Union Jack. When England went to war, both of them enthusiastically offered their service. The pair soon married, and had a daughter named Hazel. To her, Carl spoke little of Jamaica. “It was as if he had been born an airman in the Royal Air Force,” Hazel Carby writes in “Imperial Intimacies,” her new book of political history, which came out last month…

Read the entire review here.

Archive Fever

Bookforum
2019-10-03

Tiana Reid, Ph.D. Candidate
Department of English and Comparative Literature
Columbia University, New York, New York

Autobiography and archival research collide in Hazel Carby’s memoir

Imperial Intimacies: A Tale of Two Islands by Hazel V. Carby. Verso. 416 pages. $29.

“Are we going to burn it?” A question about the fate of the future concludes Hazel Carby’s Race Men (1998), a powerful academic book about suffocating representations of black American masculinities based on a lecture the author delivered at Harvard. In her newest book, Carby is already burnt, the result of a smoldered past. “Imperial Intimacies is a very British story,” she writes in the preface. It is also her story: about growing up after World War II, about her childhood in the area now known as South London, about the family histories of her white Welsh mother and black Jamaican father, about, in all, the public and private agonies of imperialism and colonialism.

Probing the auto-historical, Carby studies her parents’ experiences in Jamaica and the United Kingdom, the “two islands” of the book’s subtitle. Her parents’ islands are connected not only by biological reproduction or a chance romance but also by the entanglement of ideologies. Her familial research at the National Archives of Jamaica and the United Kingdom offers at the same time a glimpse into the machinery of colonialism: the vexing racial iconography of postwar Britain, the psychic drains of poverty, the endlessness of wartime…

Read the entire review here.

The Allure of Blackness among Mixed-Race Americans, 1862-1916

University of Nebraska Press
October 2019
320 pages
7 photos, 3 drawings, index
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4962-0507-0

Ingrid Dineen-Wimberly, Professor of History
University of La Verne, Point Mugu, California

In The Allure of Blackness among Mixed-Race Americans, 1862–1916, Ingrid Dineen-Wimberly examines generations of mixed-race African Americans after the Civil War and into the Progressive Era, skillfully tracking the rise of a leadership class in Black America made up largely of individuals who had complex racial ancestries, many of whom therefore enjoyed racial options to identity as either Black or White. Although these people might have chosen to pass as White to avoid the racial violence and exclusion associated with the dominant racial ideology of the time, they instead chose to identify as Black Americans, a decision which provided upward mobility in social, political, and economic terms.

Dineen-Wimberly highlights African American economic and political leaders and educators such as P. B. S. Pinchback, Theophile T. Allain, Booker T. Washington, and Frederick Douglass as well as women such as Josephine B. Willson Bruce and E. Azalia Hackley who were prominent clubwomen, lecturers, educators, and settlement house founders. In their quest for leadership within the African American community, these leaders drew on the concept of Blackness as a source of opportunities and power to transform their communities in the long struggle for Black equality.

The Allure of Blackness among Mixed-Race Americans, 1862–1916 confounds much of the conventional wisdom about racially complicated people and details the manner in which they chose their racial identity and ultimately overturns the “passing” trope that has dominated so much Americanist scholarship and social thought about the relationship between race and social and political transformation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Table of Contents

• List of Illustrations
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. “As a Negro I will be Powerful”: The Leadership of P.B.S. Pinchback
• Chapter 2. Post-Bellum Strategies to Retain Power and Status: From Political Appointments to Property Ownership
• Chapter 3. New Challenges and Opportunities for Leadership: From Domestic Immigration to “The Consul’s Burden”
• Chapter 4. “Lifting as We Climb”: The Other Side of Uplift
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index

Adella Hunt Logan

Harvard Magazine
September-October 2019

Adele Logan Alexander, Emeritus Professor of History
George Washington University, Washington, D.C.

Hunt Logan in June 1901, after earning her “honorary” master’s degree from Atlanta University Collection of the author; reproduction photograph by Mark Gulezian

Historian Adele Logan Alexander ’59 is Adella Hunt Logan’s only granddaughter. Her family memoir Princess of the Hither Isles: A Black Suffragist’s Story from the Jim Crow South (Yale), appears this month. The portrait of Hunt Logan opposite, by the Parisian-trained, African-American painter William Edouard Scott, was begun in 1915 while he was in residence at Tuskegee and completed at her daughter’s direction in 1918.

Brief life of a rebellious black suffragist: 1863-1915

Soon after meeting Susan B. Anthony in 1895 at a convention of the National-American Woman Suffrage Association (N-AWSA) in Atlanta, Adella Hunt Logan wrote to the suffragist leader, “I am working with women who are slow to believe that they will get help from the ballot, but someday I hope to see my daughter vote right here in the South.” She strove to spur often frightened or otherwise reluctant black women to political action through gaining access to the ballot; she lobbied for equal pay as well, and ultimately espoused women’s reproductive rights.

The letter and Hunt Logan herself were virtually unique, because in her own eyes, and as specified by law, she was “a Negro.” Due to her predominantly Caucasian ancestry, however (both her mother and her black-Cherokee-white maternal grandmother maintained longstanding, consensual relationships with slaveholding white men), Hunt Logan herself looked white. As an adult, she occasionally “passed” to travel on the Jim Crow South’s railways, and to attend segregated political gatherings, such as the N-AWSA’s, from which she brought suffrage tactics and materials back to share with her own people. At the time, she was the N-AWSA’s only African-American lifetime member, and the only such member from ultraconservative Alabama, where she lived with her husband, Warren Logan, and their children, and taught for three decades at Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute, the agricultural and industrial school for black Southerners that drew such prominent visitors as Frederick Douglass, Presidents William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt, and philanthropists Andrew Carnegie and Julius Rosenwald….

Read the entire article here.

Complexities of Complexion

Reviews in American History
Volume 47, Number 3, September 2019
pages 327-332

Martha Hodes, Professor of History
New York University

Sharon Block. Colonial Complexions: Race and Bodies in Eighteenth-Century America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. 217 pp. Appendices, notes, and index. $45.00.

This is a book about the endeavor of racial classification in the service of racism. The word complexion held expansive meaning in the eighteenth century. Rather than simply a sign by which others presumed to determine a person’s racial classification, complexion signified sickness and health, conduct and comportment, emotional disposition and indisposition. In Colonial Complexions: Race and Bodies in Eighteenth-Century America, Sharon Block investigates appearance as a “commonplace tool of race-making” (p. 5) and the ways in which that process both reflected and determined dominant ideas about race in early America. Given the capacious meaning of the word, Colonial Complexions explores far more than skin color—in fact only a single chapter is devoted to that aspect of human bodies.

Opening with a learned essay on European ideas about human complexion and human bodies, Block enlightens her readers about the contours of early modern humoralism: beliefs about the ways in which appearance reflected a person’s condition and character. From there, Block takes her readers to British North America, on a journey through the meaning and significance of an array of descriptive categories. Her analysis is based on a meticulous and rigorous reading of newspaper advertisements for runaway slaves and servants. These thousands of documents become, as Block writes, “cultural transformations of individual lives into print” (p. 36). Her interpretations of these seemingly mundane, repetitive sources are razor-sharp, often dazzling.

Block has assembled more than 4000 missing-person advertisements in over two dozen newspapers from eight colonies between 1750 and 1775, a historical moment, she points out, “before skin color became increasingly equivalent to race” (p. 2). Because advertisements for runaway laborers were voluminous and widely consumed by colonists, no other sort of document from colonial America—not legal records, not military records, not prison records—”offers an opportunity to aggregate thousands of parallel descriptions of physical appearance of enslaved and free people” (p. 145). The owners and employers who wrote these advertisements made choices about which descriptive categories to include and which to exclude, and Block treats each choice as significant, as she weighs, compares, and explicates. How much information did the writer believe would be enough for strangers to identify a particular fugitive? What vocabulary should be invoked to best portray not only skin color but also body size, hair texture, clothing, and voice timbre? How best concisely to convey a runaway’s behavior and personality? In selecting the details and composing succinct narratives, owners and employers of slaves and servants participated in “making race in daily life” (p. 141).

Block’s sample is not random; instead, she sought temporal and geographical variety, and sought in particular to include harder-to-find advertisements for fugitive girls and women. Because colonial advertisements for runaways included only a small number of people of Native American descent, Block turned to travel accounts to find descriptions of Native men and women. Then, to clarify all facets of her analysis with a sharper sense of meanings and usages, Block supplemented her data with many more kinds of documents: dictionaries, almanacs, plantation records, medical treatises, and natural histories, as well as more lyrical sources such as diaries and letters, poetry, sermons, literature, and in one instance a treatise on vampires (in order to make sense of descriptions of ruddiness).

Block allows many of her questions to arise from the evidence, and findings across categories are consistent. Owners and employers commodified people of African descent by describing them in generalized terms. British colonists described people of European descent, by contrast, far more often as particular individuals. Take the supposedly objective factors of age and height. Whereas advertisers described people of African descent as young or old, short or tall, they more often gave people of European descent specific ages and measurements. When advertisers noted indicators of ill health, they tended to write about the external features of people of African descent (bloodshot eyes, for example, or stooped posture), as compared to identifying “individual underlying causes or experiences…

Read or purchase the review here.

Princess of the Hither Isles: A Black Suffragist’s Story from the Jim Crow South

Yale University Press
2019-09-24
352 pages
6⅛ x 9¼
9 b/w illus.
Hardcover ISBN: 9780300242607

Adele Logan Alexander, Emeritus Professor of History
George Washington University, Washington, D.C.

Born in the late nineteenth century into an affluent family of mixed race—black, white, and Cherokee—Adella Hunt Logan (1863–1915) was a key figure in the fight to obtain voting rights for women of color. A professor at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama and a close friend of Booker T. Washington, Adella was in contact with luminaries such as Frederick Douglass, George Washington Carver, and W. E. B. Du Bois. Despite her self-identification as an African American, she looked white and would often pass for white at segregated suffrage conferences, gaining access to information and political tactics used in the “white world” that might benefit her African American community.

Written by Adella’s granddaughter Adele Logan Alexander, this long-overdue consideration of Adella’s pioneering work as a black suffragist is woven into a riveting multigenerational family saga and shines new light on the unresolved relationships between race, class, gender, and power in American society.

Imperial Intimacies: A Tale of Two Islands

Verso Books
2019-09-24
416 pages
6 x 9-1/4
Hardcover ISBN: 9781788735094
Ebook ISBN: 9781788735124

Hazel V. Carby, Charles C. and Dorothea S. Dilley Professor of African American Studies; Professor of American Studies
Yale University

A haunting and evocative history of British empire, told through one woman’s search through her family’s story

“Where are you from?” was the question hounding Hazel Carby as a girl in post–World War II London. One of the so-called brown babies of the Windrush generation, born to a Jamaican father and Welsh mother, Carby’s place in her home, her neighbourhood, and her country of birth was always in doubt.

Emerging from this setting, Carby untangles the threads connecting members of her family to each other in a web woven by the British Empire across the Atlantic. We meet Carby’s working-class grandmother Beatrice, a seamstress challenged by poverty and disease. In England, she was thrilled by the cosmopolitan fantasies of empire, by cities built with slave-trade profits, and by street peddlers selling fashionable Jamaican delicacies. In Jamaica, we follow the lives of both the “white Carbys” and the “black Carbys,” as Mary Ivey, a free woman of colour, whose children are fathered by Lilly Carby, a British soldier who arrived in Jamaica in 1789 to be absorbed into the plantation aristocracy. And we discover the hidden stories of Bridget and Nancy, two women owned by Lilly who survived the Middle Passage from Africa to the Caribbean.

Moving between the Jamaican plantations, the hills of Devon, the port cities of Bristol, Cardiff, and Kingston, and the working-class estates of South London, Carby’s family story is at once an intimate personal history and a sweeping summation of the violent entanglement of two islands. In charting British empire’s interweaving of capital and bodies, public language and private feeling, Carby will find herself reckoning with what she can tell, what she can remember, and what she can bear to know.

The Secret Trust of Aspasia Cruvellier Mirault: The Life and Trials of a Free Woman of Color in Antebellum Georgia

University of Arkansas Press
August 2008
180 pages
6 x 0.8 x 9 inches
Hardcover ISBN-13: 978-1557288806

Janice L. Sumler-Edmond, Professor Emerita of History
Huston-Tillotson University, Austin, Texas

In this fascinating biography set in nineteenth-century Savannah, Georgia, Janice L. Sumler-Edmond resurrects the life and times of Aspasia Cruvellier Mirault, a free woman of color whose story was until now lost to historical memory. It’s a story that informs our understanding of the antebellum South as we watch this widowed matriarch navigate the social, economic, and political complexities to create a legacy for her family.

The Greek-American R&B Legend Who Passed as Black

Zócalo Public Square
2018-12-17

Kristen E. Broady, Dean and Professor of Economics
College of Business
Dillard University, New Orleans, Louisiana

An Excelsior Records advertisement features R&B pioneer Johnny Otis between blues singer Jimmy Rushing and bandleader Gerald Wilson. Courtesy of Flickr.

Johnny Otis Felt He Had Been ‘Saved’ by the Political, Spiritual, and Moral Force of African-American Culture

If a role exists in black music that Johnny Otis couldn’t play, it would be hard to find. Known as the godfather of rhythm and blues, Otis was a bandleader, talent scout, singer, drummer, minister, journalist, and television show host. Between 1950 and 1952, Johnny and his band recorded 15 top 40 R&B blues hits. He discovered, produced and promoted a roster of stars, including Etta James, Little Esther, and Jackie Wilson.

Otis was not only a trailblazer in the world of music but also a religious leader and political activist. Born seven months after the beginning of the 1921 Tulsa Race Riot, he lived through Supreme Court decisions that decriminalized interracial marriage, barred racial gerrymandering of political districts, and ended covenants barring black Americans from owning property. He witnessed the inauguration of the nation’s first African-American president and was a friend of Malcolm X and an enemy of racial oppression. Yet Johnny Otis, arguably one of the most important figures in mid-century black music in America, was not actually black. He was white, passing as black…

Read the entire article here.