Mixed Race Studies

A brush with… Ellen Gallagher

The Week in Art
2021-06-30

An in-depth conversation on the artist’s big influences, from Keith Haring to Moby Dick

In this episode of A brush with…, Ben Luke talks to the American artist Ellen Gallagher about her life and work by exploring her greatest cultural influences. Born in Providence, Rhode Island in 1965, Gallagher studied at Oberlin College in Ohio, the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. She now lives in Rotterdam in the Netherlands. Much of Gallagher’s parents’ ancestry—in particular her Black father who is from the Cape Verde archipelago off the west coast of Africa—defines the territory of her practice, which relates to the culture and language of the Black diaspora.

Though primarily working in painting and drawing, Gallagher has also worked in sculpture, film and animation. Her early style appears Minimalist and spare from a distance but, up close, one observes intricate drawings of eyes, lips and wigs, which Gallagher has described as “the disembodied ephemera of minstrelsy”—the racist blackface entertainment common in the US from the C19th onwards. In the early 2000s, she used cut-out advertisements from Black culture magazines and transformed them with plasticine, making sculptural reliefs that were often imprinted with witty or incisive symbols and imagery. Many of her paintings refer to the sea and allude to the Afrofuturist myth of Drexciya: a Black Atlantis at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, supposedly populated with the children of the mothers of enslaved African women who were thrown—or threw themselves—overboard during their forced journey across the Middle Passage…

Read and/or listen to the interview here.

Who’s Black and Why? A Hidden Chapter from the Eighteenth-Century Invention of Race

Harvard University Press
2022-03-22
320 pages
6-1/8 x 9-1/4 inches
21 photos, 1 table
Hardcover ISBN: 9780674244269

Henry Louis Gates Jr., Alfonse Fletcher Jr. University Professor; Director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research
Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts

Andrew S. Curran, William Armstrong Professor of the Humanities
Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut

The first translation and publication of sixteen submissions to the notorious eighteenth-century Bordeaux essay contest on the cause of “black” skin—an indispensable chronicle of the rise of scientifically based, anti-Black racism.

In 1739 Bordeaux’s Royal Academy of Sciences announced a contest for the best essay on the sources of “blackness.” What is the physical cause of blackness and African hair, and what is the cause of Black degeneration, the contest announcement asked. Sixteen essays, written in French and Latin, were ultimately dispatched from all over Europe. The authors ranged from naturalists to physicians, theologians to amateur savants. Documented on each page are European ideas about who is Black and why.

Looming behind these essays is the fact that some four million Africans had been kidnapped and shipped across the Atlantic by the time the contest was announced. The essays themselves represent a broad range of opinions. Some affirm that Africans had fallen from God’s grace; others that blackness had resulted from a brutal climate; still others emphasized the anatomical specificity of Africans. All the submissions nonetheless circulate around a common theme: the search for a scientific understanding of the new concept of race. More important, they provide an indispensable record of the Enlightenment-era thinking that normalized the sale and enslavement of Black human beings.

These never previously published documents survived the centuries tucked away in Bordeaux’s municipal library. Translated into English and accompanied by a detailed introduction and headnotes written by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Andrew Curran, each essay included in this volume lays bare the origins of anti-Black racism and colorism in the West.

Table of Contents

• Preface: Who’s Black and Why?
• Note on the Translations
• I
  • Introduction: The 1741 Contest on the “Degeneration” of Black Skin and Hair
  • 1. Blackness through the Power of God
  • 2. Blackness through the Soul of the Father
  • 3. Blackness through the Maternal Imagination
  • 4. Blackness as a Moral Defect
  • 5. Blackness as a Result of the Torrid Zone
  • 6. Blackness as a Result of Divine Providence
  • 7. Blackness as a Result of Heat and Humidity
  • 8. Blackness as a Reversible Accident
  • 9. Blackness as a Result of Hot Air and Darkened Blood
  • 10. Blackness as a Result of a Darkened Humor
  • 11. Blackness as a Result of Blood Flow
  • 12. Blackness as an Extension of Optical Theory
  • 13. Blackness as a Result of an Original Sickness
  • 14. Blackness Degenerated
  • 15. Blackness Classified
  • 16. Blackness Dissected
• II
  • Introduction: The 1772 Contest on “Preserving” Negroes
  • 1. A Slave Ship Surgeon on the Crossing
  • 2. A Parisian Humanitarian on the Slave Trade
  • 3. Louis Alphonse, Bordeaux Apothecary, on the Crossing
• Select Chronology of the Representation of Africans and Race
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Credits
• Index

Generations of Freedom: Gender, Movement, and Violence in Natchez, 1779-1865

University of Georgia Press
2021-03-31
Illustrations: 13 b&w images
Trim size: 6.000in x 9.000in
Hardcover ISBN: 9-780-8203-6012-6

Nik Ribianszky, Lecturer in History
Queen’s University, Belfast, United Kingdom

In Generations of Freedom Nik Ribianszky employs the lenses of gender and violence to examine family, community, and the tenacious struggles by which free blacks claimed and maintained their freedom under shifting international governance from Spanish colonial rule (1779-95), through American acquisition (1795) and eventual statehood (established in 1817), and finally to slavery’s legal demise in 1865.

Freedom was not necessarily a permanent condition, but one separated from racial slavery by a permeable and highly unstable boundary. This book explicates how the interlocking categories of race, class, and gender shaped Natchez, Mississippi’s free community of color and how implicit and explicit violence carried down from one generation to another. To demonstrate this, Ribianszky introduces the concept of generational freedom. Inspired by the work of Ira Berlin, who focused on the complex process through which free Africans and their descendants came to experience enslavement, generational freedom is an analytical tool that employs this same idea in reverse to trace how various generations of free people of color embraced, navigated, and protected their tenuous freedom. This approach allows for the identification of a foundational generation of free people of color, those who were born into slavery but later freed. The generations that followed, the conditional generations, were those who were born free and without the experience of and socialization into North America’s system of chattel, racial slavery. Notwithstanding one’s status at birth as legally free or unfree, though, each individual’s continued freedom was based on compliance with a demanding and often unfair system.

Generations of Freedom tells the stories of people who collectively inhabited an uncertain world of qualified freedom. Taken together-by exploring the themes of movement, gendered violence, and threats to their property and, indeed, their very bodies-these accounts argue that free blacks were active in shaping their own freedom and that of generations thereafter. Their successful navigation of the shifting ground of freedom was dependent on their utilization of all available tools at their disposal: securing reliable and influential allies, maintaining their independence, and using the legal system to protect their property-including that most precious, themselves.

Marie Thérèse Coincoin

64 Parishes
2011-03-14

Elizabeth Shown Mills

Marie Thérèse Coincoin was born into slavery in French Colonial Louisiana then gained her own freedom and the freedom of many of her children.

Marie Thérèse, called Coincoin, a freed slave in colonial Natchitoches, is an icon of American slavery and Louisiana’s Creole culture. As a bondswoman who became a free planter and entrepreneur, she symbolizes female self-determination in a world that imposed economic, legal, and sexual subservience on all women. As the mother of two diverse sets of children born between 1759 and 1785, she personifies the way slavery undermined the stability of slave families. Her successes and those of her offspring reflect the critical skills needed by free people of color to navigate political and racial currents in antebellum Louisiana. Two of their institutions—Melrose Plantation and St. Augustine’s Church on Isle Brevelle, founded by her sons Louis Metoyer and Nicolas Augustin Metoyer—are historical landmarks that preserve Cane River’s Creole culture…

Read the entire article here.

Love Knows No Barriers

New American Library
1950 (originally published by Creative Age Press in 1947 as God is for White Folks)

Will Thomas [William Smith] (1900-1970)

Many Worlds Mingled at Riverbend Plantation

Riverbend Plantation, isolated and decaying, had seen many strange events, passionate conflict and tragic romance. In the shadows of its crumbling walls you will meet:

• Beau Beauchamp — the cast-off son of the white plantation owner and his ravishing, dark Creole mistress.
• Elisse Leseur — a beautiful blonde of mixed descent who shunned the offers of wealthy whites and poor Negroes.
• Bartolomew — an understanding Northerner who put his theories into practice and fought off an enraged mob.
• Gaynor Brackens — the hot-blooded son of the leading banker, who determined to have Elisse — at any price.

A Drop of Midnight: A Memoir

Amazon Crossing
2020-03-01
304 pages
5.5 x 1 x 8.25 inches
Hardcover ISBN-13: 978-1542017077
Paperback ISBN-13: 978-1542016704
Audio CD ISBN: 978-1799726296

Jason Diakité

Rachel Willson-Broyles (Translator)

World-renowned hip-hop artist Jason “Timbuktu” Diakité’s vivid and intimate journey through his own and his family’s history―from South Carolina slavery to twenty-first-century Sweden.

Born to interracial American parents in Sweden, Jason Diakité grew up between worlds―part Swedish, American, black, white, Cherokee, Slovak, and German, riding a delicate cultural and racial divide. It was a no-man’s-land that left him in constant search of self. Even after his hip-hop career took off, Jason fought to unify a complex system of family roots that branched across continents, ethnicities, classes, colors, and eras to find a sense of belonging.

In A Drop of Midnight, Jason draws on conversations with his parents, personal experiences, long-lost letters, and pilgrimages to South Carolina and New York to paint a vivid picture of race, discrimination, family, and ambition. His ancestors’ origins as slaves in the antebellum South, his parents’ struggles as an interracial couple, and his own world-expanding connection to hip-hop helped him fashion a strong black identity in Sweden.

What unfolds in Jason’s remarkable voyage of discovery is a complex and unflinching look at not only his own history but also that of generations affected by the trauma of the African diaspora, then and now.

Mixed-Race Identity in the American South: Roots, Memory, and Family Secrets

Lexington Books (an imprint of Rowman & Littlefield)
May 2021
236 pages
6½ x 9
Hardback ISBN: 978-1-7936-2706-3
eBook ISBN: 978-1-7936-2707-0

Julia Sattler, Assistant Professor of American Studies
TU Dortmund University, Dortmund, Germany

This interdisciplinary investigation argues that since the 1990s, discourses about mixed-race heritage in the United States have taken the shape of a veritable literary genre, here termed “memoir of the search.”

The study uses four different texts to explore this non-fictional genre, including Edward Ball’s Slaves in the Family and Shirlee Taylor Haizlip’s The Sweeter the Juice. All feature a protagonist using methods from archival investigation to DNA-testing to explore an intergenerational family secret; photographs and family trees; and the trip to the American South, which is identified as the site of the secret’s origin and of the family’s past. As a genre, these texts negotiate the memory of slavery and segregation in the present.

In taking up central narratives of Americanness, such as the American Dream and the Immigrant story, as well as discourses generating the American family, the texts help inscribe themselves and the mixed-race heritage they address into the American mainstream.

In its outlook, this book highlights the importance of the memoirs’ negotiations of the past when finding ways to remember after the last witnesses have passed away. and contributes to the discussion over political justice and reparations for slavery.

Table of Contents

• Introduction: Memoir of the Search: The Emergence of a Mixed-Race Literary Genre
• Chapter 1: Writing Mixed Selves at the Turn of the Millennium
• Chapter 2: Family Secrets: Uncovering Mixed Race Heritage
• Chapter 3: Media of Memory: Generating the Family
• Chapter 4: Narrating the Mixed-Race Nation
• Chapter 5: The Past in the Present: Encounters with the South
• Conclusion: Making History at the Turn of the Millennium

A Narrative of the Adventures and Escape of Moses Roper, from American Slavery

University of North Carolina Press
September 2011 (originally published in 1840)
50 pages
6 x 9, 4 illustrations
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8078-6965-9
eBook ISBN: 978-0-8078-6966-6

Moses Roper (c1815-1891)

The Narrative of the Adventures and Escape of Moses Roper can be read as an extended autobiographical meditation on the meaning of race in antebellum America. First published in England, the text documents the life of Moses Roper, beginning with his birth in North Carolina and chronicling his travels through South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. Roper was able to obtain employment on a schooner named The Fox, and in 1834 he made his way to freedom aboard the vessel. Once in Boston, he was quickly recruited as a signatory to the constitution of the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS), but he sailed to England the next year. Roper’s narrative is especially interesting because although it was published after Frederick Douglass’s much-heralded 1845 Narrative, Roper actually preceded Douglass in his involvement in AASS as well as in his travel to the United Kingdom. This text is often cited by literary scholars because of its length, its extensive detail, and its unforgiving portrayal of enslaved life in the “land of the free.”

Also, available to read via Documenting the American South (DocSouth) here.

‘I am not a beggar’: Moses Roper, Black Witness and the Lost Opportunity of British Abolitionism

Slavery & Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies
Published online 2022-02-09
DOI: 10.1080/0144039X.2022.2027656

Fionnghuala Sweeney, Reader in American and Black Atlantic Literatures
Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom

Bruce E. Baker, Historian
Paxton, Scotland, United Kingdom

Scholars have long known the Narrative of North Carolina writer and activist Moses Roper, first published in London in 1837. This article uses newly discovered sources and the multiple editions of the Narrative to reconstitute the biography of this first fugitive slave abolitionist to lecture in Ireland and Britain. It explores Roper’s interactions with British abolitionists, especially prominent Baptist ministers Francis A. Cox and Thomas Price. Roper’s indisputable witness to the horrors of American slavery played a crucial role in refocusing British and Irish attention from the completed task of West Indian emancipation to the looming work yet to be done in the United States. Supporting Roper’s independence, in both his campaigning and his creation of his own British family, proved too much for the British abolitionist establishment, resulting in Roper being cast out and a major opportunity to lead on matters of transatlantic moral consequence lost. More significantly, African American voice was denied its authority and a platform from which to speak.

Read the entire article here.

Martha Wheeler, Eye-Witness to the “Free State of Jones”

Renegade South: Histories of Unconventional Southerners
2017-07-02

Vikki Bynum, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of History
Texas State University, San Marcos

I’ll never forget the excitement I felt when, in the midst of researching The Free State of Jones, I came upon the WPA’s 1936 interview with Martha Wheeler, a former slave of Laurel, Mississippi. Today, I realize more than ever that Martha just may be the best source for verifiable remarks about Newt, Rachel, and Serena Knight, and the interracial community they built in Soso, Mississippi, in the aftermath of the Civil War.¹

Unfortunately, no Hollywood movie could have provided an in-depth treatment of both a Civil War insurrection and the remarkable mixed-race community that followed. Only a fraction of Rachel’s factual personal life was told amid the larger story of slavery, Civil War, and class resistance to Confederate authority.

Nevertheless, judging from the traffic on this blog since release of The Free State of Jones, the movie’s abbreviated portrait of the interracial Knight community piqued tremendous interest among movie audiences. Tantalizing glimpses of the 1948 miscegenation trial of Newt and Rachel’s great-grandson, Davis Knight, as well as images of Newt’s two “wives,”—one white (Serena), the other a woman of color (Rachel)—in scenes of domestic contentment in post-Civil War Mississippi sparked that interest even more…

Read the entire article here.