Mixed Race Studies

Mixed Race Hollywood

New York University Press
2008
352 pages
20 illustrations
Paperback ISBN: 9780814799895
Cloth ISBN: 9780814799888

Edited by

Mary C. Beltrán, Associate Professor of Media Studies
University of Texas, Austin

Camilla Fojas, Associate Professor and Director of Latin American and Latino Studies
DePaul University

A Kansas City Star 2008 Notable Book

Since the early days of Hollywood film, portrayals of interracial romance and of individuals of mixed racial and ethnic heritage have served to highlight and challenge fault lines within Hollywood and the nation’s racial categories and borders. Mixed Race Hollywood is a pioneering compilation of essays on mixed-race romance, individuals, families, and stars in U.S. film and media culture.

Situated at the cutting-edge juncture of ethnic studies and media studies, this collection addresses early mixed-race film characters, Blaxploitation, mixed race in children’s television programming, and the “outing” of mixed-race stars on the Internet, among other issues and contemporary trends in mixed-race representation. The contributors explore this history and current trends from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives in order to better understand the evolving conception of race and ethnicity in contemporary culture.

“I’m Black an’ I’m Proud”: Ruth Negga, Breakfast on Pluto, and Invisible Irelands

Invisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visible Culture
Issue number 13 (Spring 2009): After Post-Colonialism
University of Rochester, New York

Charlotte McIvor, Lecturer in Drama
National University Ireland, Galway

This article examines Ethiopian-Irish actress Ruth Negga‘s performance in Neil Jordan’s 2005 Breakfast on Pluto in light of recent cultural, racial, and socio-economic shifts in Irish society. How does Negga’s identity as an Irish actress of color influence possible receptions of this film in post-Celtic Tiger Ireland and contest notions of Irishness that have typically been allied only with whiteness?

Roddy Doyle famously posited a relationship between the Irish and African-Americans thus in his 1987 novel The Committments:

–The Irish are the niggers of Europe, lads.
They nearly gasped: it was so true.
–An’ Dubliners are the niggers of Ireland. The culchies have fuckin’ everythin’. An’ the northside Dubliners are the niggers o’ Dublin. —–Say it loud, I’m black an’ I’m proud.
He grinned. He’d impressed himself again.
He’d won them. They couldn’t say anything.

Jimmy Rabitte, band manager, uses this turn of phrase to convince his motley crowd of Dublin Irish musicians to form a soul band, although the phrase was later reimagined in the film as, “The Irish are the blacks of Europe” [emphasis mine]….

…Negga’s performance models an ideal vision of Irish belonging that does not erase the co-mingling of Irish pasts and presents with histories of other peoples. Negga forces the audience towards a contemporary engagement with a transnational Irish history that illuminates the history of a “global Irish” who have now come to the island of Ireland either as returned white Irish emigrants or as would-be citizens who share colonial and European histories with their new neighbors, despite racial and cultural differences. Negga, in an article fittingly entitled, “Ruth Negga, a star without a label,” observes: “For the moment, I don’t have to worry about people trying to fit me into a box. Up until now, there were no mixed-race roles in Ireland. It’s not like in the UK, where these roles do exist and then you are typecast from then on.”…

Charlotte McIvor is a Ph.D. candidate in Performance Studies at University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on the production of Irish and Indian (Bengali) colonial and post-colonial nationalism and performance in their transnational and gendered contexts. McIvor’s dissertation is titled “Staging the ‘Global’ Irish: Transnational Genealogies in Irish Performance.” She is a graduate student instructor in the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies. She has directed several plays at UC Berkeley and in Allentown, Pennsylvania.

Read the entire article here.

Queer in Black and White: Interraciality, Same Sex Desire, and Contemporary African American Culture

Indiana University Press
2009-04-21
152 pages
5 b&w photos, 5.5 x 8.25
ISBN-13: 978-0-253-22109-4

Stefanie K. Dunning, Associate Professor
Miami University, Oxford, Ohio

This book analyzes representative works of African American fiction, film, and music in which interracial desire appears in the context of same sex desire. In close readings of these “texts,” Stefanie K. Dunning explores the ways in which the interracial intersects with queerness, blackness, whiteness, class, and black national identity. She shows that representations of interracial desire do not follow the logic of racial exclusion. Instead they are metaphorical and anti-biological. Rather than diluting race, interracial desire makes race visible. By invoking the interracial, black gay and lesbian artists can remake our conception of blackness.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. “Ironic Soil”: Recuperative Rhythms and Negotiated Nationalism
• 2. “No Tender Mercy”: Same-Sex Desire, Interraciality, and the Black Nation
• 3. (Not) Loving Her: A Locus of Contradictions
• 4. “She’s a B*(u)tch”: Centering Blackness in The Watermelon Woman
• Epilogue: Reading Robert Reid-Pharr
• Notes
• Index

What Does Race Have to Do with Ugly Betty? An Analysis of Privilege and Postracial(?) Representations on a Television Sitcom

Television & New Media
Volume 10, Number 6 (November 2009)
pages 521-535
DOI: 10.1177/1527476409340906

Jennifer Esposito, Associate Professor of Research, Measurement & Statistics
Georgia State University, Atlanta

This article examines ABC’s television comedy Ugly Betty, in particular one episode that explores race-based affirmative action decisions and quotas, to argue that race and racial categories are ever more present in our society and that they need to be. Asserting how and in what ways race “matters” is important in a social and political climate that often suggests race dare not speak its name. Circulating within sociology and education discourse is the notion of a “color-blind society” (meaning that we no longer see color or that the color of one’s skin will not determine his or her life chances).  This idea has been has been recently redefined by the media as “postracial” (meaning that we have moved beyond race and that race no longer structures our thinking or our actions). Either discourse silences talk of racial privilege and disadvantage.  As a discursive racial project, the Ugly Betty text helps reify notions of race and difference.

Read or purchase the article here.

Biracial Identity in the Media

Annual Meeting of the International Communication Association, TBA
Montreal, Quebec, Canada
2008-05-22
18 Pages

Iliana Rucker
University of New Mexico

Many scholars have studied racial representations and have determined that images of racial groups we see on television shape the way we view these racial groups (Gorham, 1999; Tamborini & Mastro, 2000). This paper looks at how biracial/multiracial characters in film are represented and the language or lack of language used in the representation. In this paper, I examine the language in the films Imitation of Life and Get on the Bus, particularly regarding the biracial characters and how this racially mixed representation is either silenced or given a voice. The importance of this topic lies in the influential aspect of media.  There are very few biracial characters in the media. Their race plays into the message that they are sending, and I am curious in seeing who has the power to name their identity.

Read the entire paper here.

Political Discourse on Racial Mixture: American Newspapers, 1865 to 1970

Paper presented at the annual meeting of the MPSA Annual National Conference
Palmer House Hotel
Hilton, Chicago, IL
2008-04-03

Jennifer L. Hochschild, Henry LaBarre Jayne Professor of Government & Professor of African and African American Studies
Harvard University

Brenna Marea Powell
Harvard University

Vesla Weaver, Assistant Professor
The Woodrow Wilson Department of Politics
University of Virginia

We trace American political discourse around multiracialism, race-mixing, and mixed-race people from the end of the Civil War through the civil rights era. We use two new sources of data: counts of keywords such as “mulatto” and “multiracial” in two black and four white newspapers over 150 years, and a content analysis of themes and assumptions in almost 2,100 articles from the same newspapers, also using keywords that indicate racial mixture.

These datasets provide evidence on two analytic and two substantive points: First, the press’s treatment of mixture permits us to analyze “racial meaning,” defined as the varied ways in which Americans construe, practice, and judge group-based identities and identifications. Second, the datasets enable us to trace the timing of changes in ideas about racial meaning, and to map these changes onto a new periodization of distinct institutional treatments of racial mixture. Substantively, the dataset show vividly how much Americans argued over what counted as a race, how people were to be allocated to and across races, and what implications racial groupings should have. The contemporary racial order, which looks inevitable and orderly in hindsight, was not at all clear while it was being created. Most importantly, the language of the newspaper articles shows vividly that Americans’ debates over racial mixture and racially mixed people were (and continue to be) a critical site for contestation over racial hierarchy, advance, and equality.

Read the entire paper here.

Policing the Borderlands: White- and Black-American Newspaper Perceptions of Multiracial Heritage and the Idea of Race, 1996–2006

Journal of Social Issues
Volume 65, Number 1 (March 2009)
pages 105-127
DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-4560.2008.01590.x

Michael C. Thornton
University of Wisconsin-Madison

By employing a new policy of “check all that apply,” the Census Bureau accommodated a mushrooming multiracial lobby demanding that its members be allowed a right to self-identification. With its implied shifting meaning of race, newspapers portrayed the reaction to this change as a firestorm of debate along racial fault lines, highlighted by Black-American inferences that this was a perilous decision. Using textual analysis, I examine from 1996 to 2006 how five Black-American and three White-American newspapers characterized multiracial people. White-American papers framed the discussion in two ways: (a) multiracial people epitomize a new era in which race has lost its bite, and (b) Black America stands in the way of their gaining their civil rights.  There were also two frames for the Black-American papers: (a) The lobby advocates individual identity and is undergirded by denial or distancing from Blackness, and (b) that focus undermines Black America’s future by playing into the misguided notion that race is socially insignificant.

Read or purchase the entire article here.