Mixed Race Studies

The Free State of Jones: A Roundtable

Civil War History
Volume 63, Number 4, December 2017
pages 400-420

Joseph Beilein (JB), Assistant Professor of History
Pennsylvania State University, Behrend

Margaret Storey (MS), Professor of History and Associate Dean
DePaul University, Chicago, Illinois

Andrew Slap (AS), Professor of History
East Tennessee State University, Johnson City, Tenneessee

Jarret Ruminski (JR), Freelance Writer, researcher, and Consultant
Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Ryan Keating (RK), Civil War History book review editor; Assistant Professor of History
California State University, San Bernardino

The summer of 2016 saw the release of the first large-budget Civil War film since 2012’s critically acclaimed Lincoln. The Free State of Jones, directed by Gary Ross and starring Matthew McConaughey, is not simply, however, another film about the Civil War. Based on historian Victoria Bynum’s acclaimed book The Free State of Jones: Mississippi’s Longest Civil War, this film marks an important shift in the popular depiction of America’s greatest conflict as it takes viewers inside the complex inner civil wars many Americans fought during this period. Long defined as a conflict pitting the north against the south, the realities of the Civil War were, as this film attempts to show, much more complex. Questions of loyalty and issues of patriotism have become an important part of the historiography of the Civil War era, illustrating the ways average men and women, North and South, struggled with the collision of national and local issues. Although the nuances of patriotism and loyalty have long driven the scholarly community, these issues have played a less important role in public, and especially Hollywood, portrayals of the war and the Reconstruction era. Certainly, past films have touched on the subject. Ride with the Devil, Pharaoh’s Army, and Cold Mountain, for example, all touch on patriotism and loyalty, as the main characters struggle with the consequences of the war on the home front. Based on a true story, Free State of Jones, is, however, the first to truly analyze this struggle through the lens of southern dissent. Following the experiences of Mississippian Newton Knight, a disillusioned southern soldier who returns home to lead a revolt against Confederate authorities in Mississippi, the film strikes at the heart of the complex nature of identity, patriotism, and loyalty during the Civil War and Reconstruction and gives viewers a rare glimpse into aspects of the war often overlooked by Hollywood film.

Multiracial Identity and Racial Politics in the United States

Oxford University Press
2017-09-27
280 pages
6-1/8 x 9-1/4 inches
Hardcover ISBN: 9780190657468
Paperback ISBN: 9780190657475

Natalie Masuoka, Associate Professor of Political Scienc
Tufts University, Medford, Massachusetts

• Provides readers seeking to understand the history of American race relations with both historical methods and analyses of empirical data
• Offers a new theory of thinking about race, the “identity choice” framework which is situated in the major debates on U.S. racial formation
• Will be of interest to scholars of critical race theory and identity theory, in addition to multiracial individuals and others interested in US racial politics

While pundits point to multiracial Americans as new evidence of a harmonious ethnic melting pot, in reality mixed race peoples have long existed in the United States. Rather than characterize multiracial Americans as a “new” population, this book argues that instead we should view them as individuals who reflect a new culture of racial identification. Today, identities such as “biracial” or “swirlies” are evoked alongside those more established racial categories of white, black Asian and Latino. What is significant about multiracial identities is that they communicate an alternative viewpoint about race: that a person’s preferred self-identification should be used to define a person’s race. Yet this definition of race is a distinct contrast to historic norms which has defined race as a category assigned to a person based on certain social rules which emphasized things like phenotype, being “one-drop” of African blood or heritage.

In Multiracial Identity and Racial Politics in the United States, Natalie Masuoka catalogues how this cultural shift from assigning race to perceiving race as a product of personal identification came about by tracing events over the course of the twentieth century. Masuoka uses a variety of sources including in-depth interviews, public opinion surveys and census data to understand how certain individuals embrace the agency of self-identification and choose to assert multiracial identities. At the same time, the book shows that the meaning and consequences of multiracial identification can only be understood when contrasted against those who identify as white, black Asian or Latino. An included case study on President Barack Obama also shows how multiracial identity narratives can be strategically used to reduce anti-black bias among voters. Therefore, rather than looking at multiracial Americans as a harbinger of dramatic change for American race relations, this Multiracial Identity and Racial Politics in the United States shows that narratives promoting multiracial identities are in direct dialogue with, rather than in replacement of, the longstanding racial order.

Table of Contents

• CHAPTER 1: Identity Choice: Changing Practices of Race and Multiracial Identification
• CHAPTER 2: Exclusive Categories: Historical Formation of Racial Classification in the United States
• CHAPTER 3: Advocating for Choice: Political Views of Multiracial Activists
• CHAPTER 4: Declaring Race: Understanding Opportunities to Self-Identify as Multiracial
• CHAPTER 5: Implications of Racial Identity: Comparing Monoracial and Multiracial Political Attitudes
• CHAPTER 6: In the Eye of the Beholder: American Perceptions of Obama’s Race
• CHAPTER 7: Multiracial and Beyond: Racial Formation in the 21st Century
• References
• Appendices

Still Processing: Being Biracial

Still Processing
The New York Times
2017-10-05

Wesley Morris and Jenna Wortham

Rashida Jones as Santamonica, the sister of Tracee Ellis Ross’s character on ABC’s “Black-ish.” Credit Kelsey McNeal/Getty Images

For months, the two of us have been trying to figure out a way to have a conversation about the experience of being biracial. This week we just go for it. First, we talk about the cultural and historical suspicion America still has of black-white interracial romantic relationships. It gives us an excuse to revisit the reason “Get Out” has been one of the year’s major movies: It articulates the previously inarticulable about race. Then we consider the offspring of interracial coupling — whether the possibility of occupying two identities (or more) is a choice, a luxury or a delusion; and what fears, doubts or envy nonbiracial black Americans might feel about biracial black Americans. We drop in on Spike Lee’s “School Daze” and the sitcom “Black-ish.” We consider our feelings about Rashida Jones, Drake and Vin Diesel. We unpack the writings of Zadie Smith and Barack Obama. And we kind of have to ask: Aren’t we all a little bit mixed?

Read the entire article here.

Mixed Race Cinemas Multiracial Dynamics in America and France

Bloomsbury
2017-09-07
216 pages
10 bw illus
6″ x 9″
Hardback ISBN: 9781501312458
EPUB eBook ISBN: 9781501312489
PDF eBook ISBN: 9781501312465

Zélie Asava, Lecturer and Programme Director of Video and Film
Dundalk Institute of Technology, Louth, Ireland

Using critical race theory and film studies to explore the interconnectedness between cinema and society, Zélie Asava traces the history of mixed-race representations in American and French filmmaking from early and silent cinema to the present day. Mixed Race Cinemas covers over a hundred years of filmmaking to chart the development of (black/white) mixed representations onscreen. With the 21st century being labelled the Mulatto Millennium, mixed bodies are more prevalent than ever in the public sphere, yet all too often they continue to be positioned as exotic, strange and otherworldly, according to ‘tragic mulatto‘ tropes. This book evaluates the potential for moving beyond fixed racial binaries both onscreen and off by exploring actors and characters who embody the in-between. Through analyses of over 40 movies, and case studies of key films from the 1910s on, Mixed Race Cinemas illuminates landmark shifts in local and global cinema, exploring discourses of subjectivity, race, gender, sexuality and class. In doing so, it reveals the similarities and contrasts between American and French cinema in relation to recognising, visualising and constructing mixedness. Mixed Race Cinemas contextualizes and critiques raced and ‘post-race’ visual culture, using cinematic representations to illustrate changing definitions of mixed identity across different historical and geographical contexts.

Contents

• Introduction
  • 1. Race and Ideology
  • 2. Mixed-Race Cinema Histories
  • 3. Interrogating Terminology
  • 4. Methodology and Frameworks
  • 5. Mixed-Race Spaces in French and American Cinema
  • 6. Franco-American Narratives and Beur Cinema
  • 7. Summary of Chapters
• Chapter One: the Mixed Question
  • 1. Language, Representation and Casting
  • 2. The Historical Mulatta Screen Stereotype in America
  • 3. The Historical Mulatta Screen Stereotype in France
• Chapter Two: Hollywood’s ‘Passing‘ Narratives
  • 1. ‘Passing’ Representations as Ideological Construct
  • 2. The Dichotomies of Post-War Mixed-Race Women Onscreen
  • 3. Gender, ‘Passing’ and Love
• Chapter Three: The Limits of the Classic Hollywood ‘Tragic Mulatta’
  • 1. Imitation of Life (1934): Interrogating Mixed Identities
  • 2. Casting and Representation
  • 3. Shadows and the Interracial Family
  • 4. Imitation of Life, 1959: Gender, Difference and Voiced Rebellion
  • 5. Performative Identities: Sara Jane, Dandridge and Monroe
• Chapter Four: Cultural Shifts: New Waves in Racial Representation
  • 1. Representing ‘Mixed-Race France’
  • 2. Reimagining the Nation: Mixed Families
  • 3. Questioning Mixed Masculinity: Les Trois frères
  • 4. Melodrama, Motherhood and Masks: Métisse
  • 5. Racial-Sexual Mythology and the Interracial Family
• Chapter Five: Transnational Families in Drôle de Félix
  • 1. A Search for Identity on the Road
  • 2. Citizenship, Violence and Scopophilia
  • 3. Trauma and Redemption
  • 4. Destabilising the Primary Authority of the Father
  • 5. Reuniting Transnational Families
• Conclusion
  • 1. ‘Post-Race’ Politics in America and France
  • 2. Enduring Stereotypes
  • 3. Mixed-Race Sci-Fi
  • 4. Mixed Representational Potentials
• Bibliography
• Index

Black Twitter Asks Rachel: Racial Identity Theft in “Post-Racial” America

Howard Journal of Communications
Published online: 2017-08-18
pages 1-17
DOI: 10.1080/10646175.2017.1354789

Leslie Stevens
Department of Rhetoric & Communication Studies
University of Richmond, Richmond, Virginia

Nicole Maurantonio, Associate Professor
Department of Rhetoric & Communication Studies
University of Richmond, Richmond, Virginia

On Monday, June 15, 2015, Rachel Dolezal resigned from her post as president of the Spokane chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People amid allegations that she had been lying about her race. Dolezal, her White parents claimed, had been “presenting herself as a black person when she is not.” This article explores Black Twitter’s response to Dolezal’s “outing” as a White woman with particular emphasis on the #AskRachel hashtag, to which users posted a series of questions intended to discern Dolezal’s “true” racial identity. Although the hashtag has been alternately praised for its wit and critiqued for its cruelty, this article suggests that both critiques underestimate the hashtag’s significance. This article argues that the hashtag provided a site for the articulation, contestation, and negotiation of Blackness, capturing larger cultural anxieties surrounding racial identity in a “post-racial” United States.

Read the entire article here.

Edith Eaton’s Expanding Oeuvre

American Periodicals: A Journal of History & Criticism
Volume 27, Number 1, 2017
pages 6-10

Mary Chapman, Professor of English
University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

Since the early 1980s, when S. E. Solberg published a short checklist of twenty-two works of fiction and journalism by Chinese American author Sui Sin Far (Edith Eaton), our knowledge of her oeuvre has grown considerably. By 2007, through the efforts of Annette White-Parks and Amy Ling, as well as Dominika Ferens and Martha Cutter, Eaton’s oeuvre included about one hundred works of fiction, poetry, and journalism, many of which addressed the experiences of diasporic Chinese in North America. In the past ten years, I have discovered more than one hundred fifty texts by Eaton, some of which are collected in Becoming Sui Sin Far: Early Fiction, Journalism and Travel Writing by Edith Maude Eaton.¹ Eaton’s expanded oeuvre demonstrates that she was a much more complicated author than formerly believed, a writer who worked in a range of genres and styles, addressed numerous themes beyond the Chinese diaspora, and published in a wide assortment of turn-of-the-century magazines and newspapers in three national contexts: the United States, Canada, and Jamaica.

To locate uncollected works by Eaton, I took inspiration from the impressive detective work of White-Parks and Diana Birchall,² who wrote biographies of Eaton and her sister Winnifred (Onoto Watanna), respectively, as well as from Ferens’s recovery of Eaton’s Jamaican journalism. To begin, I developed a list of periodicals and newspapers in which Eaton published or to which she submitted work, based on information about twenty-four periodicals provided in the acknowledgments of her only book, Mrs. Spring Fragrance (1912):

I have to thank the Editors of The Independent, Out West, Hampton’s, The Century, Delineator, Ladies’ Home Journal, Designer, New Idea, Short Stories, Traveler, Good Housekeeping, Housekeeper, Gentlewoman, New York Evening Post, Holland’s, Little Folks, American Motherhood, New England, Youth’s Companion, Montreal Witness, Children’s, Overland, Sunset, and Westerner magazines, who were kind enough to care for my children when I sent them out into the world, for permitting the dear ones to return to me to be grouped together within this volume.³

Inspired by Jean Lee Cole’s recovery of periodical works by Winnifred Eaton, I also scoured Eaton’s autobiographical writings, correspondence with editors, and reviews of and introductions to her periodical publications for any mention of publications to which she may have submitted work.⁴ Eaton’s reference in “Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian” to “local [Montreal] papers” that gave her a “number of assignments, including most of the local Chinese reporting,”⁵ for example, prompted me to consult late 1880s and 1890s issues of the Montreal Star, Montreal Witness, and Montreal Gazette. In “A Word from Miss Eaton” in the Westerner, Eaton mentions publishing in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.⁶ The literary editor of the Westerner also notes in his preamble to “A Word from Sui Sin Far” that Eaton’s works had appeared in Woman’s Home Companion.⁷ Eaton’s correspondence with Land of Sunshine editor Charles Lummis and Century editor Robert Underwood Johnson, as well as a letter that Los Angeles Express editor Samuel Clover wrote to Johnson, also mention periodicals to which Eaton submitted fiction.⁸ To this list of publications, I added Fly Leaf, Lotus, the Chautauquan, and the Boston Globe—publications in which White-Parks and Ling had located works by Eaton—as well as Metropolitan Magazine, Gall’s News Letter, and Leslie’s Weekly—periodicals in which Cutter, Ferens, and June Howard had located additional texts.⁹

I then searched as many issues of these publications as possible for relevant years, in either digitized or paper form. Given the brevity of Eaton’s career (twenty-six years between 1888 and her death in 1914), looking through bound volumes or tables of contents for key years of nondigitized (and sometimes short-lived) monthly magazines was not arduous. Comprehensive searches of nondigitized daily newspapers were more challenging, however, so I searched the Los Angeles Express, Montreal Star, Montreal Gazette, Montreal Witness, Chicago Evening Post, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and New York Evening Post for only particular periods during which Eaton was likely to…

Barack Obama and the Nommo Tradition of Afrocentric Orality

JSTOR Daily: Where News Meets Its Scholarly Match
2017-08-23

Shannon Luders-Manuel

President Obama delivers the State of the Union in 2011 via Flickr/White House

Black actors, entertainers, and everyday citizens often have a particular cadence to their voices that others can identify as “black,” whether or not the listeners can see the individual speaking. Popular culture seems to think that black men sound wise simply by their voices alone, leading to black actors narrating myriad commercials, including Dennis Haysbert for Allstate Insurance and Samuel L. Jackson for Capital One. In an article for Guernica, John McWhorter breaks down this speech pattern: “It differs from standard English’s sound in the same way that other dialects do, in certain shadings of vowels, aspects of intonation, and also that elusive thing known as timbre, most familiar to singers—degrees of breathiness, grain, huskiness, ‘space.’”

While sound influences dialect, black oration goes back much further, to the idea of nommo, which is rooted in West African tradition. Through both dialect and nommo, former President Barack Obama was able to inspire black and white audiences, altering his word choice and patterns accordingly…

Scholarship of nommo is wanting. However, in the Journal of Black Studies, Sheena C. Howard defines it in the following manner: “Nommo, the creative power of the word, is a delivery style that is unique to African Americans. Nommo is manifested in characteristics of African orality.” She focuses on four characteristics of nommo: rhythm, call and response, mythication, and repetition, and she analyzes their use in two of Obama’s speeches: one at Howard University and the other at Southern New Hampshire University, both in 2007…

Read the entire article here.

How I Got Over: Soledad O’Brien on Race, Politics and the Media

The Greene Space
2017-03-27

Soledad O’Brien

During the 2016 election, award-winning journalist and writer Soledad O’Brien charged cable news and media companies of profiting off hate speech normalized by then-candidate Donald Trump’s campaign. What made for good TV ratings did not make for good journalism.

WNYC editor Rebecca Carroll hosts an unconventional conversation with O’Brien about her new political magazine show “Matter of Fact” and how black and brown journalists and media makers can deliver balanced coverage with President Trump in the White House for the next four years.

View the entire conversation (01:21:57) here.

CFA: Special Issue of The History of the Family – Mixed Marriage, Interracial Relationships, and Binational Couples from Global and Comparative Perspectives

H-Black-Europe
2017-06-30

Call for papers to special issue in The History of the Family: An International Quarterly

Special issue theme: Mixed Marriage, Interracial Relationships and Binational Couples from Global and Comparative Perspectives

Guest-editors:

Julia Moses
University of Sheffield/University of Gottingen

Julia Woesthoff
DePaul University

Call for Article Proposals

In response to the mass globalization of the twenty-first century and associated migration, a recent boom in social-scientific research has analyzed various manifestations of binational and interracial romantic relationships in the present and recent past. This theme issue seeks to historicize this research by drawing on key case studies from across the world and across time and drawing on relevant historiography and theoretical literature. This call for proposals welcomes both quantitative and qualitative studies that shed light on individual experiences of, as well as various practices of regulating, ‘interracial’, ‘binational’ and ‘mixed marriages’. The issue aims to parse the assumptions behind these contested concepts and to trace how these categories have shifted over time and space. In doing so, it also seeks to chart how intermarriages and other forms of interracial, binational and cross-confessional relationships took shape: who participated in these relationships? How common were they, and in which circumstances were they practiced (or banned)? Contributions investigating relationships involving regions in the Americas, Africa and Asia are particularly welcome.

The papers in this issue chart these relationships over various periods of time. Some papers will focus on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This era was a flashpoint for considerations about the relationship between race, culture and family formation. It was during the contested ‘first age of globalization’ at the turn of the twentieth century that new cultural encounters took form, forged through the expansion of European empires, a spike in global economic migration facilitated by new transportation technologies and the rise of mass communication through daily newspapers and the telegraph. At the same time, the growth of anthropology and related social sciences as disciplines contributed to the problematization of race, culture and cultural difference. These encounters came to a head in the First and Second World Wars, which witnessed a new era of nationalism across the world alongside a call to return to the home and family as a safeguard against the uncertainties of a world at war and faced by severe economic fluctuations. How were the perception and practice of intermarriage and other forms of cross-cultural romantic relationships affected by these historical developments? Other papers will focus on earlier periods, including moments of religious reformation and counterreformation as well as various early experiments in trade and imperialism. How did early colonial and commercial encounters shape attitudes towards interracial relationships? How have changing religious conflicts shaped attitudes towards intermarriage across confessional lines?

Ultimately, the theme issue will build on a selection of papers from a panel organized by the co-editors that will take place at the upcoming European Social Science History Conference (Belfast, 2018). Proposals that complement the themes and regions presented in the panel are particularly welcome, and those participating in the theme issue are also very welcome to come along to the ESSHC to join in the discussions there and help shape this joint venture.

Deadline for proposing articles (max 500 word abstracts only): Friday, 29 September 2017 (by e-mail to: j.moses@sheffield.ac.uk and j.woesthoff@depaul.edu).

The acceptance of abstracts will be announced to authors in early December 2017. The proposals selected are to be submitted initially as extended abstracts or working draft papers before Friday, 23 March 2018 so they can be considered together with the papers that will be presented at the ESSHC. Complete drafts (max 10,000 words) should be submitted by Friday, 20 July 2018 to the guest editors. After internal editing and revision by the author, the papers will be sent out for external peer-review via the journal. Please note that inclusion in the theme issue is subject to final external peer review.

We warmly welcome your proposal!

For more information, click here.

Wait, NBC Sports Announcer Mike Tirico Isn’t Black?

The Root
2017-07-17

Stephen A. Crockett Jr., Senior Editor

Getty Images Staff/Getty Images

Wait … hol’ up. Normally when we wade into these blackness waters, it’s because some fair-skinned pop star is refusing to accept that the back of her hair—you know, the area above the neck; the area that old folks call the “kitchen”; the area that used to make my sisters cry when my mom really dug in with the hairbrush and Posner Light Touch hair grease … that area—is a little thicker than the rest.

But this news here is mind-boggling. Longtime ESPN broadcaster-turned-NBC Sports announcer Mike Tirico doesn’t believe himself to be black. To hear him tell it, he’s just an Italian kid who grew up in Queens, N.Y., who people keep insisting is black.

In a recent interview with the New York Times titled, “Mike Tirico Would Like to Talk About Anything but Mike Tirico,” the sportscaster had this to say about race:…

Read the entire article here.