Mixed Race Studies

Africans in Colonial Mexico: Absolutism, Christianity, and Afro-Creole Consciousness, 1570-1640

Indiana University Press
2005-02-02
288 pages
1 bibliog., 1 index, 6.125 x 9.25
Paper ISBN-13: 978-0-253-21775-2; ISBN: 0-253-21775-X

Herman L. Bennett, Professor of Latin American History
City Univerisity of New York

The African community in colonial Mexico under Spanish and Catholic rule.

In this study of the largest population of free and slave Africans in the New World, Herman L. Bennett has uncovered much new information about the lives of slave and free blacks, the ways that their lives were regulated by the government and the Church, the impact upon them of the Inquisition, their legal status in marriage, and their rights and obligations as Christian subjects.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction: Africans, Absolutism, and Archives
1. Soiled Gods and the Formation of a Slave Society
2. “The Grand Remedy”: Africans and Christian Conjugality
3. Policing Christians: Persons of African Descent before the Inquisition and Ecclesiastical Courts
4. Christian matrimony and the Boundaries of African Self-Fashioning
5. Between Property and Person: Jurisdictional Conflicts over Marriage
6. Creoles and Christian Narratives
Postscript
Glossary
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index

Desire for Race

Cambridge University Press
November 2008
256 pages
Hardback ISBN-13: 9780521862103
Paperback ISBN-13: 9780521680479
Adobe eBook Reader ISBN-13: 9780511434174

Sarah Daynes, Professor of Sociology
New School for Social Research, New York

Orville Lee, Assistant Professor of Sociology
New School for Social Research, New York

What do people mean when they talk about race? Are they acknowledging a biological fact, a social reality, or a cultural identity? Is race real, or is it merely an illusion? This book brings analytical clarity to one of the most vexed topics in the social sciences today, arguing that race is no more than a social construction, unsupported in biological terms and upheld for the simple reason that we continue to believe in its reality. Deploying concepts from the sociology of knowledge, religion, social memory, and psychoanalysis, the authors consider the conditions that contribute to this persistence of belief and suggest ways in which the idea of race can free itself from outdated nineteenth-century notions of biological essentialism. By conceiving of race as something that is simultaneously real and unreal, this study generates a new conceptualization that will be required reading for scholars in this field.

Table of Contents

Introduction
1. American sociology
2. Marxism
3. British social anthropology
4. British cultural studies
5. Intermediate reflections on essentialism
6. Belief and social action
7. Theorizing the racial ensemble
8. The politics of memory and race
9. Desire
Conclusion

Rethinking Mestizaje: Ideology and Lived Experience

Journal of Latin American Studies
2005
Number 37, Issue 2
Pages 239–257
DOI: 10.1017/S0022216X05008990

Peter Wade, Professor of Social Anthropology
University of Manchester

The ideology of mestizaje (mixture) in Latin America has frequently been seen as involving a process of national homogenisation and of hiding a reality of racist exclusion behind a mask of inclusiveness. This view is challenged here through the argument that mestizaje inherently implies a permanent dimension of national differentiation and that, while exclusion undoubtedly exists in practice, inclusion is more than simply a mask. Case studies drawn from Colombian popular music, Venezuelan popular religion and Brazilian popular Christianity are used to illustrate these arguments, wherein inclusion is understood as a process linked to embodied identities and kinship relations. In a coda, approaches to hybridity that highlight its potential for destabilising essentialisms are analysed.

Rethinking mestizaje as embodied experience

This article explores a key concept in the complex of ideas around race, nation and multiculturalism in Latin America, that of mestizaje – essentially the notion of racial and cultural mixture. I address mestizaje not just as a nation-building ideology – which has been the principal focus of scholarship on the issue, but also as a lived process that operates within the embodied person and within networks of family and kinship relationships. I consider how people live the process of racial-cultural mixture through musical change, as racially identified styles of popular music enter into their performing bodies, awakening or engendering potentialities in them; through religious practice, as racialised deities possess them and energise a dynamic and productive embodied diversity ; and through family relationships, as people enter into sexual and procreative relations with others identified as racially-culturally different, to produce ‘mixed’ children.

This approach emphasises the ways in which mestizaje as a lived process, which encompasses, but is not limited to, ideology, involves the maintenance of enduring spaces for racial-cultural difference alongside spaces of sameness and homogeneity. Scholars have recognised that mestizaje does not have a single meaning within the Latin American context, and contains within it tensions between sameness and difference, and between inclusion and exclusion.  Yet a scholarly concern with mestizaje as ideology has tended to privilege two assumptions: first, that nationalist ideologies of mestizaje are essentially about the creation of a homogeneous mestizo (mixed) future, which are then opposed to subaltern constructions of the nation as racially culturally diverse ; and second, that mestizaje as a nationalist ideology appears to be an inclusive process, in that everyone is eligible to become a mestizo, but in reality it is exclusive because it marginalises blackness and indigenousness, while valuing whiteness…

Read the entire article here.

Winnefred and Agnes: The Story of Two Women

Independent Publishing Group
September 2002
288 pages, Cloth, 5 1/2 x 8 1/2
6 B/W Photos, 1 Chart, 1 Map
ISBN: 9780795701139 (0795701136)

Agnes Lottering

This is a rare, possibly the first, first-person account of being part of the group of mixed-race families who came into existence at Ngome in the province of KwaZulu-Natal when, in the late 19th century, well-to-do British and Irish traders took Zulu wives and adopted Zulu cultural practices, including polygamy. The author recounts her life and that of her mother in this true account of a Zululand family whose lives were touched in equal measure by tribal belief and Christianity, healing herbs, magical birds, and the tokeloshe, a mischievous creature surrounded by myth and sexual innuendo. It is also a tale of betrayal, grand passion, bewitchment, abuse, and the triumph of love. Part love story and family saga, part social history, it is above all a uniquely South African tale.

Agnes Lottering was born in Ngome Forest in 1937. Due to financial and other constraints, she never completed her schooling. Yet she is a gifted storyteller, telling her tale with freshness and authenticity. She lives in Durban, South Africa.

Nagô Grandma and White Papa: Candomblé and the Creation of Afro-Brazilian Identity

University of North Carolina Press
September 2009
208 pages
6.125 x 9.25, 2 figs., 4 tables, notes, bibl., index
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8078-3177-9
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8078-5975-9

Beatriz Góis Dantas, Professor Emerita of Anthropology
Universidade Federal de Sergipe in Brazil

Translated by Stephen Berg

Nagô Grandma and White Papa is a signal work in Brazilian anthropology and African diaspora studies originally published in Brazil in 1988. This edition makes Beatriz Góis Dantas’s historioethnographic study available to English-speaking audiences for the first time.

Dantas compares the formation of Yoruba (Nagô) religious traditions and ethnic identities in the Brazilian states of Sergipe and Bahia, revealing how they diverged from each other due to their different social and political contexts and needs. By tracking how markers of supposedly “pure” ethnic identity and religious practice differed radically from one place to another, Dantas shows the social construction of identity within a network of class-related demands and alliances. She demonstrates how the shape and meaning of “purity” have been affected by prolonged and complex social and cultural mixing, compromise, and struggle over time. Ethnic identity, as well as social identity in general, is formed in the crucible of political relations between social groups that purposefully mobilize and manipulate cultural markers to define their respective boundaries–a process, Dantas argues, that must be applied to understanding the experience of African-descended people in Brazil.

Almighty God Created the Races: Christianity, Interracial Marriage, and American Law

University of North Carolina Press
December 2009
288 pages
6.125 x 9.25, notes, bibl., index
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8078-3318-6
Paper ISBN: 978-1-4696-0727-6

Fay Botham, Adjunct Professor of Religious Studies
University of Iowa

In this fascinating cultural history of interracial marriage and its legal regulation in the United States, Fay Botham argues that religion–specifically, Protestant and Catholic beliefs about marriage and race–had a significant effect on legal decisions concerning miscegenation and marriage in the century following the Civil War.

Botham argues that divergent Catholic and Protestant theologies of marriage and race, reinforced by regional differences between the West and the South, shaped the two pivotal cases that frame this volume, the 1948 California Supreme Court case of Perez v. Lippold (which successfully challenged California’s antimiscegenation statutes on the grounds of religious freedom) and the 1967 U.S. Supreme Court case Loving v. Virginia (which declared legal bans on interracial marriage unconstitutional). Botham contends that the white southern Protestant notion that God “dispersed” the races, as opposed to the American Catholic emphasis on human unity and common origins, points to ways that religion influenced the course of litigation and illuminates the religious bases for Christian racist and antiracist movements.

Exploring the Pastoral Dynamics of Mixed-Race Persons

Pastoral Psychology
Volume 52, Number 4 (March 2004)
Pages 315-328
DOI: 10.1023/B:PASP.0000016936.79800.89

Peter Yuichi Clark, Assistant Professor of Pastoral Care
American Baptist Seminary of the West, Berkeley, California

The number of persons in the United States who identify with more than one racial group is a steadily growing segment of the larger population. Yet pastoral care literature has not focused much attention to date on the spiritual care of multiracial people in America. This article intends to begin that conversation by examining their intrapersonal and interpersonal dynamics, suggesting four directions of caring, and then exploring five implications for offering compassionate and relevant ministry.

Read or purchase the article here.

Sex, Segregation, and the Sacred after Brown

The Journal of American History
Volume 91, Number 1 (June 2004)
pages 119-144
DOI: 10.2307/3659617

Jane Dailey, Associate Professor of American History
University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois

The religious history of the civil rights movement is strangely one-sided. “God was on our side,” the activists have said, and scholars have tended to agree. But the opponents of civil rights also used religion in their cause. Jane Dailey argues that historians have underestimated the role of religion in supporting segregation as well as in dismantling it. Viewing the civil rights movement as a contest over Christian orthodoxy helps explain the arguments made by both sides and the strategic actions they took. Dailey examines the connections among antimiscegenation anxiety, politics, and religion to reveal how deeply interwoven Christian theology was in the segregation ideology that supported the discriminatory world of Jim Crow.

…This article explores how religion served as a vessel for one particular language crucial to racial segregation in the South: the language of miscegenation. It was through sex that racial segregation in the South moved from being a local social practice to a part of the divine plan for the world. It was thus through sex that segregation assumed, for the believing Christian, cosmological significance. Focusing on the theological arguments wielded by segregation’s champions reveals how deeply interwoven Christian theology was in the segregationist ideology that supported the discriminatory world of Jim Crow. It also demonstrates that religion played a central role in articulating not only the challenge that the civil rights movement offered Jim Crow but the resistance to that challenge…

…Although rebutted at the time and later, Ariel’s argument remained current through the middle of the twentieth century, buttressed along the way by such widely read books as Charles Carroll’s The Negro a Beast (1900) and The Tempter of Eve (1902), both of which considered miscegenation the greatest of sins. Denounced for its acceptance of separate creations, The Negro a Beast was nonetheless enormously influential. Recalling the door-to-door sales campaign that brought the book to the notice of whites across the South, a historian of religion lamented in 1909 that “during the opening years of the twentieth century it has become the Scripture of tens of thousands of poor whites, and its doctrine is maintained with an appalling stubbornness and persistence.” In this tradition, miscegenation—or, more commonly, amalgamation or mongrelization—was the original sin, the root of all corruption in humankind.

The expulsion from Paradise did not solve the problem of miscegenation. By the time of Noah race mixing was so prevalent that, in the words of one civil rights–era pamphleteer, “God destroyed ‘all flesh’ in that part of the world for that one sin. Only Noah was ‘perfect in his generation’ … so God saved him and his family to rebuild the Adamic Race.” That perfection did not last long, however; according to some traditions, the cursed son of Ham, already doomed to a life of servitude, mixed his blood with “pre-Adamite negroes” in the Land of Nod. Again and again God’s wrath is aroused by the sin of miscegenation, and the people feel the awful weight of his punishment: Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed for this sin, as was the Tower of Babel, where, in a failed effort to protect racial purity, God dispersed the peoples across the globe. King Solomon, “reputed to be the wisest of men, with a kingdom of matchless splendor and wealth was ruined as a direct result of his marrying women of many different races,” and the “physical mixing of races” that occurred between the Israelites and the Egyptians who accompanied Moses into the wilderness “resulted in social and spiritual weakness,” leading God to sentence the Exodus generation to die before reaching the Promised Land. For evidence that the God of Noah remained as adamantly opposed to racial mixing as ever, white southern believers could look back a mere fifteen years to the Holocaust. The liquidation of six million people was caused, D. B. Red explained in his pamphlet Race Mixing a Religious Fraud (c. 1959), by the sexual “mingling” of the Jews, who suffered what Red represents as God’s final solution to the miscegenation problem: “Totally destroy the people involved.” Here, surely, was proof that segregation was “divine law, enacted for the defense of society and civilization…

Read the entire article here.

Conversation with Rev. Dr. Frederick J. Streets

The Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance & Abolition
Yale University
1990-02-02

Frederick J. Streets, University Chaplain and Senior Pastor
Church of Christ, Yale University

A conversation with Rev. Dr. Frederick J. Streets, University Chaplain and Senior Pastor of the Church of Christ, Yale University.

Dr. Streets spoke about race in America. He discussed the resistance to thinking about shared history that black and white Americans might feel. He suggested several reasons for the resistance…

…On mixed racial heritage:

(Dr. Streets is an African American of mixed heritage.)

I grew up identifying with African Americans by color while learning the Polish traditions of my maternal grandmother.

I think that acknowledging one’s mixed heritage is a rebuttal to two ideas about race. One is the linking of mixed heritage to slavery. The second is the idea of racial purity.

African Americans reject their white heritage as the story of slavery. White Americans believe that their heritage carries no genes of color. The great divide between black and white Americans is mythical and destructive.

Neither groups wants to acknowledge their mixed ancestry because a mixed racial heritage furthers the destruction of separate racial identity. As blacks begin to examine their roots, they find a confusion of identity…

Read the entire article here.

Callaloo Nation: Metaphors of Race and Religious Identity among South Asians in Trinidad

Duke University Press
October 2004
280 pages
9 b&w photos, 2 maps
Cloth ISBN: 0-8223-3376-7, ISBN13: 978-0-8223-3376-0
Paperback ISBN: 0-8223-3388-0, ISBN13: 978-0-8223-3388-3

Aisha Khan, Associate Professor of Anthropology
New York University

Mixing—whether referred to as mestizaje, callaloo, hybridity, creolization, or multiculturalism—is a foundational cultural trope in Caribbean and Latin American societies. Historically entwined with colonial, anticolonial, and democratic ideologies, ideas about mixing are powerful forces in the ways identities are interpreted and evaluated. As Aisha Khan shows in this ethnography, they reveal the tension that exists between identity as a source of equality and identity as an instrument through which social and cultural hierarchies are reinforced. Focusing on the Indian diaspora in the Caribbean, Khan examines this paradox as it is expressed in key dimensions of Hindu and Muslim cultural history and social relationships in southern Trinidad. In vivid detail, she describes how disempowered communities create livable conditions for themselves while participating in a broader culture that both celebrates and denies difference.

Khan combines ethnographic research she conducted in Trinidad over the course of a decade with extensive archival research to explore how Hindu and Muslim Indo-Trinidadians interpret authority, generational tensions, and the transformations of Indian culture in the Caribbean through metaphors of mixing. She demonstrates how ambivalence about the desirability of a callaloo nation—a multicultural society—is manifest around practices and issues, including rituals, labor, intermarriage, and class mobility. Khan maintains that metaphors of mixing are pervasive and worth paying attention to: the assumptions and concerns they communicate are key to unraveling who Indo-Trinidadians imagine themselves to be and how identities such as race and religion shape and are shaped by the politics of multiculturalism.