Mixed Race Studies

One of the Family: Métis Culture in Nineteenth-Century Northwestern Saskatchewan by Brenda Macdougall (review)

Canadian Ethnic Studies
Volume 44, Number 3, 2012
pages 147-148
DOI: 10.1353/ces.2013.0012

Frits Pannekoek, President and Professor of History
Athabasca University, Athabasca, Alberta, Canada

Brenda Macdougall, One of the Family: Metis Culture in Nineteenth-Century Northwestern Saskatchewan (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2010)

For the last several decades, scholarship in Métis genealogy has matured to the point that it can proudly claim a leading position in the field of prosopography, a field first identified in medieval studies. It has become an instrument to divine an understanding of Métis society, its construction, its past and its continuity. Macdougall has built carefully on the scholarship of amongst others: Jennifer Brown, Sylvia Van Kirk, John Foster, Gerhard Ens, Doug Sprague, Heather Devine, and Nicole St. Onge. Her book deals with Métis culture in 19th century Northwestern Saskatchewan largely around Ile a La Crosse, a real and symbolic centre to the people of the Northwest. It is organized into seven chapters with introduction and conclusion, for a total of nine chapters.

The book argues that the Métis families of the Northwest are “wahkootowin.” This, according to Macdougall, is a Cree “worldview linking land, family, and identity in one interconnected web of being.” The first chapter deals with the social landscapes of the Northwest, the second with the social construction of the Métis family, the third with residency and patronymic connections across the Northwest, the fourth with family acculturation and Roman Catholicism, and the fifth with family labor and the Hudson’s Bay Company. Two later chapters deal with free trade and the culture it contributed.

Macdougall’s contributions are significant and considerable. As noted, she used “wahkootowin” to explain the complex set of interrelationships amongst a people. She explains how marriage patterns, work lives, and religion were all mutually reinforcing and how these complex relationships or “wahkootowin” defined life. Family mattered a great deal and a study of the family structures evidences a pattern that persisted and deepened over four generations. The volume is rich in detail and anyone with roots in Northern Saskatchewan will leave with a deeper understanding of themselves. It is, to a degree, an insider’s study, but for the scholar of Métis genesis, it is now the best explanation of how a people and an identity emerged in the Saskatchewan interior.

The book is, however, not without its problems, although some will consider these its greatest strengths. First, it will be very difficult for people outside the region or new to Métis studies to read the book with any real enjoyment. The genealogical data is dense and will be in the eyes of some a major obstacle to understanding “wahkootowin.” Others, however, will find the nuanced tapestry of family information a highly compelling background to the family networks that Macdougall argues are so foundational to an understanding of the Métis. Most Métis scholars will ponder these connections and will use the questions Macdougall asks to further their own family reconstructions regardless of region or Aboriginal cultural roots.

The real question that will be posed by many is whether the findings are replicable. Are the complex interconnections of Northwestern Saskatchewan to be found in Northern Manitoba at Rossville for example? Macdougall rightfully makes much of the Catholicism of the Ile a La Crosse community, and points out how Protestant mixed bloods were probably purposefully excluded. Would the Methodist community at, for example, Rossville, the community at White Fish Lake, or that at Stanley mission have been equally exclusionary to Catholics? Would English-speaking, Protestant mixed-blood communities have differing structures? Would “wahkootowin” take on a different texture in these communities? Would the Hudson’s Bay Company have a different relationship given the dominance of Protestants in its hierarchy? Would there be Protestant Catholic intermarriages? Macdougall, I would suggest, would likely say not, but were Irene Spry still alive she would suggest that intermarriages would and did occur. A more careful reading of Anglican and Methodist archives might pose new questions. What is important is that Macdougall has moved the discussion on Métis culture from one of class, or one focusing on ethnicity to one that requires an understanding of complex Aboriginal cultural norms rather than one requiring a complex understanding of European or Euro American ones. Macdougall demands much of her readers, and those who accept the challenge will be well rewarded…

Book Review: Land of the Cosmic Race: Race Mixture, Racism and Blackness in Mexico

LSE Review of Books
London School of Economics
2013-08-30

Zalfa Feghali, Editorial Assistant
Journal of American Studies

Land of the Cosmic Race is a richly-detailed ethnographic account of the powerful role that race and colour play in organizing the lives and thoughts of ordinary Mexicans. It presents a previously untold story of how individuals in contemporary urban Mexico construct their identities, attitudes, and practices in the context of a dominant national belief system. Carefully presented and self-consciously written, this is an excellent book for anyone with an interest in how Mexican racial politics can be seen to operate on the ground, finds Zalfa Feghali.

Land of the Cosmic Race: Race Mixture, Racism, and Blackness in Mexico. Christina A. Sue. Oxford University Press. March 2013.

One prevailing fact of studying race in the Americas is that the discussion almost always turns to the US as a reference point. Studies of racial dynamics in the Americas are—obviously—rich, necessary, and often sidelined in favour of these more popular ways of thinking about race. Christina A. Sue’s Land of the Cosmic Race: Race Mixture, Racism and Blackness in Mexico attempts to redress this imbalance by complicating and problematising the dynamics of racial mixture in Mexico. Primarily an ethnographic study, this book offers new ways of thinking about race studies in the Mexican context.

The book’s title, which Sue discusses but doesn’t fully unpack, is taken from a provocative work by Jose Vasconcelos, The Cosmic Race, published in 1925. Vasconcelos’ views on mestizaje­—racial mixture—are key to understanding the dominant ideological logic behind Mexico’s national(ist) relationship with race. In The Cosmic Race, Vasconcelos sees the vast potential of (specifically) Mexicans as mestizos, and lauds them for their mestizo/a (mixed race, specifically Spanish and Indigenous) character. Significantly, he also casts the mestizos as the first stage in the creation of a new, cosmic race that will eventually take on characteristics and subsume the genetic streams of “all the races.” According to his logic, this cosmic race would take on the best or most desirable traits from each respective race and eventually lines between the “original” races will blur to the point that any one individual’s “racial heritage” would be completely indistinguishable from another’s, thus becoming the ultimate mestizo/a (something akin what some might now call a post-ethnic or post-racial world)…

Read the entire review here.

Making the Chinese Mexican: Global Migration, Localism, and Exclusion in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands [DeLeón Review]

Journal of American History
Volume 99, Issue 4 (March 2013)
page 1284
DOI: 10.1093/jahist/jas678

Arnoldo DeLeón, Professor of History
Angelo State University, San Angelo Texas

Making the Chinese Mexican: Global Migration, Localism, and Exclusion in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands. By Grace Peña Delgado. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012. xvi, 304 pp.

Several theses drive this book’s narrative, among them are three that the author develops scrupulously. First, international and national influences shaped the histories of the borderlands of Arizona and Sonora. Migration—created in the nineteenth century by civil war in China and global demands for labor—brought the Chinese to the United States and Mexico. Chinese communities sprouted in both countries by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, though they were more successful in Mexico where the Chinese established themselves as merchants. Commerce among these businessmen involved crossing borders and…

Read or purchase the review here.

Novelist Heidi Durrow Looks Up [Book Review]

Hot Metal Bridge: a literary magazine
Published by the University of Pittsburgh
2010-02-15

Liberty Hultberg

The Girl who Fell from the Sky, by Heidi W. Durrow
(Algonquin, January 2010)

Durrow’s debut novel explores modern multiracial identity within one mixed girl’s experience of love, family, class, and beauty in an American society still defining these ideas decades after the Civil Rights Movement. The main character’s perspective, if sometimes a bit sentimental, provides a precise lens through which to view a delicately complicated and shifting world.

Rachel, daughter of a mother newly emigrated from Denmark and a Black American G.I., opens the novel as the only survivor of a mysterious, tragic accident that leaves her in the care of her grandmother and the black community in Portland, Oregon. Her curly hair, light eyes, and fair skin are the source of much attention and scrutiny, forcing Rachel to examine what it means to be Black…

Read the entire review here.

Canon Fodder: ‘The Girl Who Fell From the Sky’ and the Problem of Mixed-Race Identity

Specter Magazine: A Brooklyn-based Art Journal
Ghost+Blog (August 2011)
2011-08-18

Summer McDonald

Baseball. Apple pie. Buying items in bulk. Buffets. All help create Americana, that itchy, dry-clean only fabric that bonds even the most disparate of us. As fixated as Americans are with the aforementioned, perhaps no pastime has been more consistent than toeing, monitoring, and often crossing the color line. Heidi W. Durrow’s first novel, The Girl Who Fell from the Sky (2010), a national bestseller and winner of the Bellwether Prize, explores the American obsession with racial categorization and identity through the (blue) eyes of Rachel Morse, a biracial girl forced to go live with her black grandmother in Portland, Oregon, after surviving a terrible tragedy.

With a black-identified biracial president in the White House, the timeliness of Durrow’s debut cannot be overstated. And perhaps Durrow owes a word of thanks to the POTUS for helping breathe new life into a conversation older than this hardly perfect Union we call home, for her work centers on bringing the mixed-race experience to the fore. With the tragic fall of Tiger Woods and Mariah Carey marrying Nick Cannon (still having a hard time grasping that), no other public figure but the POTUS–with help from blackcelebritykids.com–could help us keep our eye on the multiracial ball. Durrow does her best to keep us focused on the “beiging” of America through a Youtube channel, a film and literature festival, as well as a website. TGWFFTS is merely the fictional rendering of Durrow’s real life politics.

Or so it seems. Having no knowledge of Durrow’s other exploits might make gauging the larger theme of the novel slightly more difficult. Despite an interesting mystery at the core of the work, the narrative feels disjointed, incomplete, and contrived to the point of an awkward and unbelievable “happy” ending. In a very basic sense, Durrow tells way more often than she shows, rushing the stories of some of the more interesting, ancillary characters (Brick or Rachel’s father, Roger, for example), preventing the organic development of fuller, richer characters–and therefore a more compelling story– for readers to empathetically engage. What’s left, then, is Rachel’s underwhelming coming-of-age story slash devolution (the impression the novel leaves, not my opinion) into blackness…

…“I’m not black. I’m not white. I’m both.” Seems harmless and simple enough. And it’s a message Durrow, given her other work, might want her readers to have received by the end of TGWFFTS. But the idea of both, the idea of being a mixed- or multi-raced person, although a seemingly refreshing and timely one, especially since our country “came together” and elected a biracial president and everything, is inherently problematic, and for me, troubling. Mixed- or multi-racial identity in a United States context is hardly about racial harmony or progress, but instead reinforces racial hierarchies by relying upon the equality efforts spearheaded by blacks while reinforcing anxiety about (being affiliated with) blackness…

…Throughout the 1970s and 80s, interracial couples and (their) mixed-race children slowly became more visible on the landscape of an apparently racially stratified society. By the 1990s, mixed-race citizens, parents of multiracial children, and heads of interracial families were lobbying the federal government for a multiracial category on the United States Census, a move they thought would legitimize the interracial family and mixed-race children. Although the effort failed, arguing for a multiracial category on the US census form garnered the movement national attention.

Though the discourse on multiracialism addresses all the possible combinations and hues of God’s racial rainbow, blackness is uniquely affected by the idea of mixed-race identity. First, the significance of the Lovings to the formation of mixed-race identity placed particular significance to black-white pairings. Second, identifying as mixed-race relies on essentialist, de-politicized, nuclear-family-oriented notions of race: (mono)racial parent + (mono)racial parent = biracial child, thereby implicitly arguing for a kind of respectability predicated upon sexual practices and behaviors acceptable to larger (read: white) society–a space blacks have been perpetually excluded from. Such manuevers inevitably silence the fetishistic aspects of discourses concerning interracial relationships in exchange for language that could be summarized by the colloquial, Lov[ing] conquers all.

Third, mixed-race advocates will often argue that they are working against the one-drop rule, or hypodescent, a statute established precisely to monitor blacks and keep them for commingling with whites. Although the one-drop rule excluded blacks, it also worked as an umbrella identity, a force which was employed as a galvanizing mechanism to gain equal rights during the Jim Crow and civil rights periods. Blackness, then, became both an inherently multiracial and sociopolitical identity that people rallied around to fight oppression. Multiracial advocates make a similar claim about the breadth of mixed race identity, and further suggest that being bi- or multiracial is a new, post-1967 phenomenon that thusly allows one to appreciate more than one culture or racial heritage. Belief in this description of multiracial identity as a novelty requires a limited, monolithic understanding of blackness that denies the racial mixture inherent to it. This not only constricts the meaning of blackness and black identity, but also takes those varying tenets of blackness and recasts them as constitutive of multiracial identity. This process leads to misreading and ahistorical cherry-picking of black culture in order to create a multiracial history that otherwise would not exist…

Read the entire article here.

The Girl Who Fell from the Sky Explains What it Is to Be Mixed and Happy

The Huffington Post
2010-05-04

Marcia Dawkins, Clinical Assistant Professor of Communications
University of Southern California, Annenberg

Professors Ravinder Barn and Vicki Harman from the Centre for Criminology and Sociology at Royal Holloway, University of London are carrying out a groundbreaking research project about white mothers and mixed race children. Theirs is part of a wider study of mixed race children, youth and families that has spanned over twenty years. According to Dr. Harman, “white mothers of mixed-parentage children can find themselves dealing with racism directed at their children as well as facing social disapproval themselves.” Such is the case with Nella, the white mother of mixed race protagonist Rachel, in Heidi W. Durrow’s The Girl Who Fell from the Sky…

Read the entire article here.

The Stuart Hall Project (2013) (John Akomfrah – Smoking Dogs Films)

darkmatter: in the ruins of imperial culture
General Issue 10 (2013-07-18)
ISSN: 2041-3254

Dhanveer Singh Brar

“With deepest gratitude and respect” – If there is a moment when the pieces of Akomfrah’s The Stuart Hall Project fall into place, it is with this closing note. Gratitude and respect might seem like old fashioned words, pointing to sentiments which are thought to be out of date. They bring to mind images of unashamed acts of deference, of laying prostate (whether physically or intellectually) in front of an elder, but on the flip side there is nothing wrong with paying some dues. There is nothing wrong with acknowledging a debt, when you know how and why that debt has been earned. Gratitude and respect. With deepest gratitude and respect. Akomfrah is reaching for something infinite here, something he knows he owes Hall, but equally that neither he nor Hall would ever have any interest in cutting a deal on. There is a sense in which perhaps the film is clouded by those sentiments. It can be construed as one-eyed in its attempt to mark Hall’s importance to the history of intellectual and political life in this country, but I think such criticism might be missing the point: Hall is the condition of possibility for too many of us to forget what it is we owe him, and there is a danger, in our current moment, that such an act of collective forgetting might already be underway. It is between gratitude and the refusal to turn that gesture into credit, that The Stuart Hall Project goes to work…

Read the entire review here.

Imperfect Unions: Staging Miscegenation in U.S. Drama and Fiction [Fruscione review]

MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States
Volume 38, Issue 3 (September 2013)
pages 180-182
DOI: 10.1093/melus/mlt040

Joseph Fruscione, Adjunct Professor of Writing
George Washington University, Washington, D.C.

Imperfect Unions: Staging Miscegenation in U.S. Drama and Fiction. Diana Rebekkah Paulin. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. 336 pages.

Between the Civil War (1861-65) and World War I (1914-18), writes Diana Rebekkah Paulin in Imperfect Unions: Staging Miscegenation in U.S. Drama and Fiction, “Americans … literally could not stop writing about—and talking about, and enacting—the union between black and white” in fiction and theater. Paulin asserts that such literary and dramatic works telescope how “racialized citizenship and national identity formation … coalesced” in this period (x). Positioning Imperfect Unions within evolving critical conversations about writing, race, and nation, Paulin outlines her book’s central focus and questions in the introduction:

Rather than remaining hidden, this great American fear [of black-white unions] was actually paraded and spectacularized in public sites. Rather than being relegated to the realm of the invisible, black-white relations were continually staged. Why, so to speak, all the drama? Why the consistent production—and from available historical evidence, the eager consumption by the masses—of something that deeply unsettled so many Americans? (xii)

Paulin explores and complicates these questions by analyzing works by Dion Boucicault (The Octoroon, 1859), Louisa May Alcott (“M. L.” and “My Contraband,” 1863), Bartley Campbell (The White Slave, 1882), William Dean Howells (An Imperative Duty)…

Read or purchase the review here.

Imperfect Unions: Staging Miscegenation in U.S. Drama and Fiction by Diana Rebekkah Paulin (Green-Rogers review)

Theatre Journal
Volume 65, Number 2, May 2013
pages 304-306
DOI: 10.1353/tj.2013.0048

Martine Kei Green-Rogers, Post Doctorate Fellow
University of Utah

Imperfect Unions: Staging Miscegenation in U.S. Drama and Fiction by Diana Paulin is a multidisciplinary examination of how fictionalized versions of miscegenation both obfuscated and unmasked aspects of the complex black/white binary that shaped racial histories in the United States during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By combining literary and historical approaches from the fields of theatre, performance studies, race and ethnic studies, American studies, and trans-hemispheric studies to works that were disseminated through the popular press and performance, Paulin illustrates the epistemological influence that stories of miscegenation had on the term “race” and the white versus black paradigm that created a racial divide in the United States.

Using a comparative approach, Paulin typically pairs a work of fiction with a drama in each chapter, organizing her materials chronologically. Thus, for example, the first chapter, “Under the Covers of Forbidden Desire: Interracial Unions as Surrogates,” examines Dion Boucicault’s The Octoroon (1859) alongside Louisa May Alcott’s “M.L.” and “My Contraband” (1863). Paulin begins with Boucicault’s play, she explains, because it offers “a representative sample of the common tropes and themes used in narratives about interracial unions: forbidden love, the tragic death of the mulatta, and the simultaneous appeal and repulsion of black blood” (5). Both The Octoroon and Alcott’s stories served as historical and sociological precedents, voicing the idea that children of miscegenistic unions would always lead tragic lives that often ended in violence—either self-inflicted, due to the emotional burden of their mixed-race heritage in a society defined by a racial binary, or at the hands of others, given the threat they posed to the black versus white paradigm. Paulin argues that although these “multivalent figures” call into question the logic of the binary paradigm, ultimately their tragic fates reinforce the dominant values of the larger historical and social context in which these characters were created (9).

Chapter 2, “Clear Definitions for an Anxious World: Late Nineteenth-Century Surrogacy,” discusses Bartley Campbell’s play The White Slave (1882) and William Dean Howells’s novel Imperative Duty (1892). Here, Paulin analyzes these two works in relation to the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, finding that both literature and culture “marginalized blackness and glorified the past greatness of white society” (57). While Boucicault’s and Alcott’s works insinuate “democratic ideas” into their treatment of the tragic mulatta, Campbell’s play and Howells’s novel portray “unclassifiable person[s]” as objects of fear (61). Paulin explains that, in their works, such figures exceed the clearly defined boundaries of racial division and thus tap a growing fear that freed slaves would likewise exceed the boundaries of social divisions. She adds that this fear was especially trained on “intimate social spaces previously reserved for bourgeois whites, such as their parlors and bedrooms” (59). Paulin’s argument is intriguing because Campbell’s “unclassifiable” character is of European heritage (which is racially defined as “Other”) and of illegitimate birth, and within the world of the novel she is passed off as the daughter of an “octoroon.” As such an example illustrates, the fluidity of racial categories could be used paradoxically to reinforce societal structures that depended on a definitive line between “white” and everything else.

Chapter 3, “Staging the Unspoken Terror,” juxtaposes Charles Chesnutt’s novel The Marrow of Tradition (1901) with Thomas Dixon’s play The Clansman (1905), which the author adapted from his novel of the same name and which became the basis of D. W. Griffith’s 1915 film The Birth of a Nation. Although these works espouse drastically different views—€”Dixon’s play seeks the “reestablishment of white domination,” while Chesnutt’s novel critiques the “corruption and hypocrisy of southern white-supremacist ‘tradition’ and government” (106)— Paulin notes that both rely upon the assumption that women are responsible for maintaining racial purity. Both also address racial violence: if, in Dixon, it can be stopped if the threat of miscegenation is eradicated, in Chesnutt it is an inevitable consequence of white power.

Chapter 4, “The Remix: Afro-Indian Intimacies,” addresses an often ignored topic in the discourse of miscegenation because it exists outside of the black/white binary: the legal…

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…