Mixed Race Studies

Cultural Reconstruction: Nation, Race, and the Invention of the American Magazine, 1830-1915

University of Maryland
2003-12-19
504 pages

Reynolds J. Scott-Childress, Assistant Professor of History
New Paltz, State University of New York

Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Cultural Reconstruction asks: How did the U.S. develop a national culture simultaneously unified and fractured by race? The little-examined history of American magazines offers a vital clue. The dissertation’s first part demonstrates how post-Jacksonian American culturists, deeply disturbed by the divisive partisanship of “male” politics, turned to the “female” culture of sentimentality with the hope of creating a coherent and inclusive nation. These culturists believed a nationally circulating magazine would be the medium of that culture. This belief derived from the wide success of the penny press revolution of the 1830s. Cutting against the traditional reading of the penny press, Cultural Reconstruction claims that newspapers were a major proponent of sentimentality but were barred from creating a national audience by their intense local appeal. Antebellum magazinists, from Edgar Allen Poe to James Russell Lowell, attempted to adapt the sentimental worldview of the penny press to a national audience, but were frustrated by a series of cultural rifts expressed chiefly in gendered terms. Part two of the dissertation examines how the post-Civil War magazine furthered the project of sentimentality and became the leading medium of national culture. Responding to the 1870s collapse of Political Reconstruction, editors such as Richard Watson Gilder at the Century employed a series of innovative aesthetic strategiesgreater realism, local color, and regional dialect believing they were creating a cultural panorama of American life. But this project of reconstruction was riven by two fundamentally conflicting visions of American identity: the regional versus the racial. The dissertation explores correspondence between Northern magazinists and white and black Southern authors (George Washington Cable, Charles Chesnutt, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and Thomas Nelson Page) to reveal how race won out: Northern editors helped invent and popularize “Southern” memories of the Old South and the Civil War. In the process, the magazines nationalized white Southern conceptions of racial separation and prepared the way for the explosive nationwide reaction to the 1915 film The Birth of a Nation. Cultural Reconstruction shows how twentieth-century American national unity was paradoxically bound up in racial division.

Table of Contents

• Introduction. Forgetting the Magazine: The Birth of a National Culture
• Part I The Rise of Sentimental Public Culture
  • 1. The Fall of the Millennial Nation: The Failure of the Atlantic Cable and the Coming of the Civil War
  • 2. Printing Urban Society: The Social Imagination and the Rise of the Daily Newspaper
  • 3. The Whole Tendency of the Age Is Magazineward: The Post-Jacksonian Magazine and National Culture
• Part II Cultural Reconstruction: The American Magazine
  • 4. Competing for Culture: The Rise of the General Magazine
  • 5. The Evolution of Magazine Culture: Sentimentality, Class, and the Editors of Scribner’s:
  • 6. The Genre of Sentimental Realism: The Thematics, Stylistics, and Form of the Postbellum Magazine
  • 7. Cultural Reconstruction: National Unity and Racial Division in the American Magazine
  • 8. From Local Color to Racial Color: The Century and African American Authors
  • 9. A Hazard of New Cultures
• Bibliography

Read the entire dissertation here.

The Mixed-race MilkBite™

Brad’s Blog: musings on sociology, religion, higher ed, and whatever else is going on in my life
2012-04-16

Bradley Koch, Assistant Professor of Sociology
Georgia College & State University

Here are a few commercials for the new MilkBite™ from Kraft. They play on stereotypes about mixed-race individuals.

There are other spots on Kraft’s YouTube page, most playing on these same themes. The problem with a marketing campaign like this is that it trivializes the experience of people with multiple racial/ethnic identities who are still often met with derision and confusion. The first ad above perpetuates the self-fulfilling prophecy about “confused” identities. As a child, I remember my own parents telling me that they didn’t have a problem with interracial couples but worried about how others might react to their children. The second ad exotifies (exoticizes?) mixed-race identities…

Read the entire essay here.

Defining Mixed Race on Television: an Analysis of Barack Obama and Saturday Night Live

California State University, Sacramento
Fall 2011
109 pages

Amanda Joy Davis

THESIS Submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS in COMMUNICATION STUDIES

This study uses a semiotic approach to textual analysis to examine social constructions of Barack Obama’s race in televised sketch comedy to discover how this construction contributes to the process of hegemony regarding society’s treatment of mixed race. Polysemy will be explored as a key contributing factor. The television program chosen for this study is Saturday Night Live (SNL); the program will be examined for visual and linguistic references to Obama and mixed race. The absence of mixed race references will also be analyzed for their contribution to the show’s overall message. This study argues that while SNL mentions mixed race, it ultimately adds to the hegemonic treatment of mixed race individuals. That is, it identifies Obama as monoracial, ignoring his mixed race heritage in favor of a neat, pre-existing category. While SNL had the opportunity to step outside of the typical dismissal of mixed race and defend their choice of actor to portray Obama, and refer to him as mixed race on a consistent basis, they opted instead to categorize him as monoracial. In doing so, SNL upholds the silent treatment given to the mixed race community, forcing a monoracial identification based on appearance, a hegemonic course of action.

Read the entire thesis here.

The Case for Cablinasian: Multiracial Naming From Plessy to Tiger Woods

Communication Theory
Volume 22, Issue 1 (February 2012)
pages 92–111
DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-2885.2011.01399.x

LeiLani Nishime, Assistant Professor of Communication
University of Washington, Seattle

This article advocates for the interdisciplinary use of critical race theory and critical rhetorical theory in communication to analyze racialized language and to evaluate the cultural and political significance of new racial discourses in the United States. The article examines the dissenting opinion in Plessy v Ferguson (1896) and the congressional hearings on the Tiger Woods Bill (1997), two key instances of public debate over multiracial categories. The article then turns to Tiger Woods’ term “Cablinasian” and the possibilities of an alternative and contestory multiracial nomenclature, shifting the critique away from Woods’ celebrity or politics and toward the legal history and rhetorical potential of the word itself.

Read or purchase the article here.

The Obama Effect: Multidisciplinary Renderings of the 2008 Campaign

SUNY Press
September 2010
300 pages
Hardcover ISBN10: 1-4384-3659-9; ISBN13: 978-1-4384-3659-3
eBook SBN10: 1-4384-3661-0; ISBN13: 978-1-4384-3661-6

Edited by:

Heather E. Harris, Associate Professor of Business Communication
Stevenson University, Stevenson, Maryland

Kimberly R. Moffitt, Assistant Professor of American Studies
University of Maryland, Baltimore County

Catherine R. Squires, John and Elizabeth Bates Cowles Professor of Journalism, Diversity, and Equality
University of Minnesota

Timely, multidisciplinary analysis of Obama’s presidential campaign, its context, and its impact.

November 4, 2008 ushered in a historic moment: Illinois Senator Barack Obama was elected the forty-fourth President of the United States of America. In The Obama Effect, editors Heather E. Harris, Kimberly R. Moffitt, and Catherine R. Squires bring together works that place Barack Obama’s candidacy and victory in the context of the American experience with race and the media. Following Obama’s victory, optimists claimed that the campaign signaled the arrival of an era of postracism and postfeminism in the United States. This collection of essays, all presented at a national conference to discuss the meaning and impact of the nomination of the first presidential candidate of African descent, remind the reader that reaching a point in U.S. history where a biracial man could be deemed “electable” is part of a still-ongoing struggle. It resists the temptation to dismiss the uncertainty, hope, and fear that characterized the events and discourse of the two-year primary and general election cycle and brings together multidisciplinary approaches to assessing “the Obama effect” on public discourse and participation. This volume provides readers with a means for recalling and mapping out the enduring issues that erupted during the campaign—issues that will continue to shape how our society views itself and President Obama in the coming years.

Performativity and the Latina/o-white hybrid identity: performing the textual self

University of South Florida
2005
192 pages

Shane T. Moreman, Associate Professor of Communications
California State University, Fresno

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Communication College of Arts and Sciences

This study is an exploration of Latina/o-White hybrid identity for constructions and negotiations of hybridity as performed in the lives of individuals and as rearticulated in discourse. These discourses are drawn from interviews with nine individuals, stories of my own life, and three published memoirs. Despite these different forms, all the self identified Latina/o-White hybrid individuals speak to the difficulty of imagining and enacting a hybrid identity within todays discourse on race and ethnicity. This study articulates these difficulties as lived experience, theory, and performance come together to argue for and against hybridity as a model for contemporary identity. The project rests mainly on the theory of performativity and the theory of hybridity. In Chapter Two, I interview nine participants. While Whiteness was consistently re-centered in their self-perceptions, this re-centering disrupts naturalness to their racial identity.
 
Race is understood beyond the visual and into the performative.This disruption of naturalness allows room for a more imaginative approach to race. In Chapter Three, I utilize the Mexican pop singer, Paulina Rubio, as a backdrop to my own theoretical and material performative embodiments of hybridity. I deconstruct the perceived hybridity of Paulina Rubio, and I theorize the lived-experience of my own hybrid performativity. I demonstrate how hybrid performativity,while theoretically achievable, loses its material efficacy.In Chapter Four, I do a close-reading of three memoirs written about and by Latina/o-White hybrid individuals. The range of hybridity, being thrust upon and beinga strategy, is reproduced as a continuum across different hybridities of the Latina/o-White hybrid individual. The continuum moves across five hybrid strategies for languaging identity: imposter, mongrel, homeless, bridge, and twin. Chapter Five is a summary of the dissertation.

Table of Contents

• List of Tables
• Abstract
• Chapter One: Introduction
  • Rationale for the Study
  • Identity: Self, Other, and Racial Other
  • Performing an Identity
  • Multiplicity of Self and Other
  • Preview of the Chapters
• Chapter Two: Acting in Concert and Acting In Accord: Performativity of Latina/o-White Identity
  • The Terms of Latina/o Identity
  • The Ineffable White
  • Between the Many-Named and the Never-Need-to-be-Named
  • Constructing and Negotiating Identity through Material Practices
  • Constructing and Negotiating Identity through the Visual
  • Constructing and Negotiating Identity through Discourse
  • Constructing and Negotiating Identity through Performative Acts
  • Conclusion
• Chapter Three: Paulina Rubio Y Yo: Questioning Hybrid Perfomativity
  • Paulina Rubio: ?Eres la persona que te dices?
  • Moving as She Moves and Mouthing Her Words: Hybrid Performativity
  • Globalized Media as an Opportunity for Hybridity
  • A Hybrid Identity Foreclosed
• Chapter Four: Memoir as Equipment for Living: Hybrid Performative Identities
  • Textual Production of Hybrid Performativity
  • Performative Trappings: Language as Binary/Hierarchy Trap
  • Performative Trappings: Performing Whiteness
  • Performative Trappings: Words that Produce Their Subjects and Effects
  • When Performativity Meets Hybridity: Beyond the Trappings
  • A Continuum of Strategies of Hybrid Performativity: The Imposter
  • A Continuum of Strategies of Hybrid Performativity: The Mongrel
  • A Continuum of Strategies of Hybrid Performativity: The Homeless
  • A Continuum of Strategies of Hybrid Performativity: The Bridge
  • A Continuum of Strategies of Hybrid Performativity: The Twin
  • Hybridizing Art with Love
• Chapter Five: A Grammar of Hybridity in the Subjunctive Mood
  • Overview of Significant Findings within the Chapters
  • Performativity & the Latina/o-White Hybrid Identity: Performing the Textual Self
  • Implications for Future Research in Hybridity
• References
• Appendices
  • Appendix A: Informed Consent
  • Appendix B: Interview Schedule
  • Appendix C: Letter of Support
• About the Author

Read the entire dissertation here.

Obama and the Biracial Factor: The Battle for a New American Majority

Policy Press
February 2012
256 pages
234 x 156 mm
Hardback ISBN-10: 1447301005; ISBN-13: 978-1447301004

Andrew J. Jolivétte, Associate Professor of American Indian Studies (Also see biographies at Speak Out! and Native Wiki.)
Center for Health Disparities Research and Training
San Fransisco State University

Since the election in 2008 of Barack Obama to the Presidency of the United States there have been a plethora of books, films, and articles about the role of race in the election of the first person of color to the White House. None of these works though delves into the intricacies of Mr. Obama’s biracial background and what it means, not only in terms of how the President was elected and is now governing, but what multiraciality may mean in the context of a changing U.S. demographic. Obama and the Biracial Factor is the first book to explore the significance of mixed-race identity as a key factor in the election of President Obama and examines the sociological and political relationship between race, power, and public policy in the United States with an emphasis on public discourse and ethnic representation in his election. Jolivette and his co-authors bring biracial identity and multiraciality to forefront of our understanding of racial projects since his election. Additionally, the authors assert the salience of mixed-race identity in U.S. policy and the on-going impact of the media and popular culture on the development, implementation, and interpretation of government policy and ethnic relations in the U.S. and globally. This timely work offers foundational analysis and theorization of key new concepts such as mixed-race hegemony and critical mixed race pedagogy and a nuanced exploration of the on-going significance of race in the contemporary political context of the United States with international examples of the impact on U.S. foreign relations and a shifting American electorate. Demographic issues are explained as they relate to gender, race, class, and religion. These new and innovative essays provide a template for re-thinking race in a ‘postcolonial’, decolonial, and ever increasing global context. In articulating new frameworks for thinking about race and multiraciality this work challenges readers to contemplate whether we should strive for a ‘post-racist’ rather than a ‘post-racial’ society. Obama and the Biracial Factor speaks to a wide array of academic disciplines ranging from political science and public policy to sociology and ethnic studies. Scholars, researchers, undergraduate and graduate students as well as community organizers and general audiences interested in issues of equity, social justice, cross-cultural coalitions and political reform will gain new insights into critical mixed race theory and social class in multiracial contexts and beyond.

Contents

• Part I
  • Obama and the biracial factor: An introduction – Andrew Jolivette
  • Race, multiraciality, and the election of Barack Obama: Toward a more perfect union? – G. Reginald Daniel
  • “A Patchwork Heritage” Multiracial citation in Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father – Justin Ponder
  • Racial revisionism, caste revisited: Whiteness, blackness and Barack Obama – Darryl G. Barthé, Jr.
• Part II: Beyond black and white identity politics
  • Obama mamas and mixed race: Hoping for “A More Perfect Union” – Wei Ming Dariotis and Grace Yoo
  • Is ‘no one as Irish as Barack O’Bama’? Racial authenticity, cognitive flexibility and the racial Rorschach test – Rebecca Chiyoko King O’Riain
  • Mixed race kin-aesthetics in the Age of Obama – Wei Ming Dariotis
  • Mutt like me: Barack Obama and the mixed race experience in historical perspective – Zebulon Miletsky
• Part III: The battle for a new American majority
  • A different kind of blackness: The question of Obama’s blackness and intraracial variation among African Americans – Robert Keith Collins
  • Obama and race in the recessionary period of the colorblind era – Kathleen Odel Korgen and David L. Brunsma
  • Barack Obama and the rise to power: Emmett Till revisited – Andrew Jolivette

RTF 386 – Beyond Binaries: Mixed Race Representation and Critical Theory

University of Texas, Austin
Spring 2012

Mary Beltrán, Associate Professor of Media Studies

This graduate seminar surveys historical and critical and cultural studies scholarship on the evolution of mixed race in U.S. film and media culture. American histories, cultures, and identities have traditionally been understood through rubrics of racial binaries and negations. Given this tradition, characters of mixed racial and ethnic heritage and interracial romances have served as powerful symbols within mediated story worlds, while mixed-race actors also seen be seen to highlight fault lines in the nation’s and Hollywood’s construction of race. We’ll explore the growing body of scholarship analyzing the evolution of mixed-race representation within film, media, and celebrity culture and its implications with respect to past and contemporary notions of race and the increasingly diverse U.S. audience.

Claudia Unterweger – Austria’s first black News presenter

Afro-Europe: International Blog
2012-02-18

^©ORF (Ali Schafler)

Claudia Unterweger (39) is the first black TV News presenter in Austria. She was born to an African-American father and an Austrian mother. Since February 2011 she is one of the News presenters of “Zib-flash”, a program of the Austrian Broadcasting Corporation ORF.

Unterweger caused a stir in 2011 because of the simple fact that she had a different skin color than the general population. “I define myself as black, or as an African-Austrian woman,” says the Vienna-born Unterweger.

She sees herself as a part of the media history. “Arabella Kiesbauer (an Afro-Austrian) was over 30 years on the screen and was already a pioneer in the entertainment field. We are now taking a step forward and I hope that many more steps will follow.”

Unterweger continues. “I personally call and see myself as an Afro-Austrian, a black Austrian, but also as part of a whole generation of black people who grew up here in Austria, but who are still perceived as an anomaly.”…

Read the entire article here.

Making Güeras: Selling white identities on late-night Mexican television

Gender, Place and Culture
Volume 12, Number 1 (March 2005)
pages 71–93
DOI: 10.1080/09663690500082984

Jamie Winders, Associate Professor of Geography
Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York

John Paul Jones III, Professor of Geography and Development
University of Arizona, Tucson

Michael James Higgins (1946-2011), Professor Emeritus of Anthropology
University of Northern Colorado

This article examines discourses of whiteness and color in Mexico through a discussion of White Secret, a widely available skin-lightening cosmetic product. In an analysis of a televised infomercial advertising the product, we examine contextualizations of whiteness in Mexico, as figured through the product’s representations of light-skinned female bodies and advanced cosmetic technology. We consider the ways that White Secret can speak to broader conceptualizations of whiteness and identity and, furthermore, argue that such an engagement points to the need to interrogate the geographical and epistemological limits of current understandings of whiteness based in Anglo-American and Latin-American contexts.

‘la güera’: fair-skinned. Born with the features of my Chicana mother, but the skin of my Anglo father, I had it made. No one ever quite told me this (that light was right), but I knew that being light was something valued in my family. (Moraga, 1981, p. 28)

These lines from Cherrie Moraga’s 1979 essay, ‘La Güera’, succinctly describe the chromatic privilege into which she was born. With her mother’s Chicana features but her father’s white skin, Moraga, in her words, ‘had it made’. The only güera in her family, she could escape the correlation between being Chicana and being ‘less’ (p. 28), a connection that haunted her mother and other family members. Although her essay goes on to chart her denial of ‘the voice of [her] brown mother’ (1981, p. 31) and her struggles to grasp the specificities of various forms of sexual and racial oppression, Moraga’s initial discussion of an upbringing that ‘attempted to bleach me of what color I did have’ (1981, p. 28) captures several processes that we analyze in this article. As Moraga quipped, she was ‘“anglicized” ’; the more effectively we could pass in the white world, the better guaranteed our future’ (ibid.).

This article analyzes one contemporary path to that ‘white world’ as it operates within the context of Mexico. We examine discourses of whiteness and coloration through an analysis of ‘White Secret’, a cosmetic product marketed across Mexico that explicitly guarantees lighter skin and implicitly offers the lifestyle associated with such a chromatic change1. Historian Kathy Peiss (2002) has recently charted the ways that US cosmetics companies have relied upon and reinforced connections between healthy bodies, ‘made-up’ (female, white) faces and modernity, in efforts to market their products globally and create international mass markets. In this article, we trace similar links between bodies, race, cosmetic products and modernity, as we raise questions about whiteness and identity in Mexico, processes neatly packaged within a 30-minute, late-night infomercial peddling a skin-care solution that can produce in two weeks a white skin tone which previously required generations of racial miscegenation.

To think through how this skin-lightening product and its marketing strategies become legible and convincing within Mexico, we draw from a number of literatures that together help unpack the secrets of White Secret and the desire for white skin on which it depends. As Moraga’s autobiographical reflections and Peiss’s documenting of ‘American cosmetics abroad’ both make evident, in many contexts, ‘light’ was—and, we would add, still is—seen as ‘right’. White Secret is located squarely within this framing, as it explicitly promises white(r) skin and implicitly offers the improved socio-economic position of white privilege. As we subsequently suggest, what remains ‘secret’ in White Secret is why Mexican women want to move away from that ‘brown body’ of which Moraga wrote—a desire for lighter skin that signals the traces of a colonial past and present in Mexico. Postcolonial studies, driven ‘to invert, expose, transcend or deconstruct knowledges and practices associated with colonialism’ (Sidaway, 2000, p. 592), provide one particularly useful means of prising open these silences around questions of bodies, race and desire, as White Secret, as both product and text, resonates with many practices linked to colonialism and its deployment of racialized discourses. Postcolonial studies, in conjunction with whiteness studies and examinations of race and ethnicity in Latin America, create a useful theoretical framework through which to engage White Secret. It is to this White Secret that we now turn…

…Stepan (1991), in her analysis of eugenics in Latin America, suggests that historically, a whitening thesis in Mexico focused on a mestizo (mixed ‘blood’) ‘cosmic race’ rather than a ‘pure’ white race. This ‘cosmic race’, made famous by Mexican intellectual José Vasconcelos, was composed, at least in theory, of a racial configuration whose racial and ethnic mix surpassed all initial ingredients. The path by which Mexico could reach this ‘cosmic race’, however, led through eugenics to a set of practices that in Latin America constituted ‘above all an aesthetic-biological movement concerned with beauty and ugliness, purity and contamination, as represented in race’ (Stepan, 1991, p. 135). At the pinnacle of this movement was lighter skin, a location at which beauty and purity were concentrated and from which the ‘brown body’ denied by Moraga was successively removed over time.

Across Mexico’s ancient practice of whitening, Latin America’s eugenics of the early 1900s and a White Secret of the twenty-first century, then, the aesthetic and the biological are imbricated in a chromatic system that revolves around purity and contamination, beauty and ugliness. In all three instances that span Mexico’s post-conquest history, the chromatic system in operation is also a hierarchy of lightness for which, as Moraga noted, light is right. In this system where darker pigments signify what Ann Laura Stoler (1995) calls the ‘enemy within’ (p. 52), being Moraga’s ‘brown’ and ‘less’ remains the unspoken…

Read the entire article here.