Mixed Race Studies

From exclusion and alienation to a ‘multi-racial community’: The image of the métis in New Caledonian literature

International Journal of Francophone Studies
ISSN: 13682679
Volume 8 Issue 3
December 2005
DOI: 10.1386/ijfs.8.3.305/1

Peter Brown 

In her 2005 New Year’s greetings, Marie-Noëlle Thémereau, the President of the New Caledonian government, expressed her confidence in the future of her multiracial country, echoing the recognition of New Caledonia’s demographic make-up in official discourse since the Noumea Accord (1998). This view of New Caledonian society has not, however, always been so optimistic or encompassing. The island’s mixed population of some 230,000 has given rise over the years to social and political tensions. In this context, representations of Self and Other found in the island’s literature, particularly as they concern the historically highly contentious issue of biological and cultural interaction, provide valuable perspectives on this subject, enabling us to trace the evolution of local attitudes to the question of métissage and acquire a broader vision of the lived experience of the island’s population.

‘Our sea of islands’: migration and métissage in contemporary Polynesian writing

International Journal of Francophone Studies
Volume 11, Issue 4 (December 2008)
pages 503-522
DOI: 10.1386/ijfs.11.4.503_1

Michelle Keown, Senior Lecturer of English Literature
University of Edinburgh

This article explores metaphors of oceanic migration in contemporary Polynesian writing, investigating the notion of a regional ‘Oceanic’ identity embraced by a variety of Pacific (and particularly Polynesian) writers and theorists, while also acknowledging the specific historical circumstances and consequences of sea migration within individual Polynesian cultures. Throughout, the essay maintains a multiple temporal focus, identifying the ways in which imagery of the sea – and more specifically the ‘traditional’ Polynesian waka/vaka (voyaging canoe) – has been deployed by Polynesian writers as a chronotope not only of pre-European (and early contact) patterns of migration and cultural exchange within the Pacific, but also of the large-scale migrations of Polynesians to various neighbouring nations since the Second World War. The essay also engages with the complex cultural exchanges brought about by various historical phases of European maritime exploration and settlement in the Pacific, analysing how Polynesian writers explore the effects of intermarriage and cultural contact between Polynesians and Europeans since the late eighteenth century. In investigating these patterns of cross-cultural exchange, the essay adopts the French term ‘métissage’, which, alongside the related concepts of ‘hybridity’ and ‘syncreticity’, denotes genetic and cultural exchanges and intermixing. Drawing upon the work of various postcolonial theorists, the essay examines métissage in the Pacific both at the level of (material) cultural exchange, and within literary texts produced by anglophone and francophone Polynesian writers, particularly those who explicitly identify themselves as of ‘mixed race’.

Read or purchase the article here.

Interracial Intimacies: Sex, Marriage, Identity, and Adoption

Vintage an imprint of Random House, Inc. Academic Resources
2003
688 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-375-70264-8 (0-375-70264-4)

Randall Kennedy, Michael R. Klein Professor of Law
Harvard Law School

From the author of Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word and Race, Crime, and the Law—a tour de force about the controversial issue of personal interracial intimacy as it exists within ever-changing American social mores and within the rule of law.

Fears of transgressive interracial relationships, informed over the centuries by ugly racial biases and fantasies, still linger in American society today. This brilliant study—ranging from plantation days to the present—explores the historical, sociological, legal, and moral issues that continue to feed and complicate that fear.

In chapters filled with provocative and cleanly stated logic and enhanced by intriguing historical anecdotes, Randall Kennedy tackles such subjects as the presence of sex in racial politics and of race in sexual politics, the prominence of legal institutions in defining racial distinction and policing racial boundaries, the imagined and real pleasures that have attended interracial intimacy, and the competing arguments around interracial romance, sex, and family life throughout American history.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• One – In the Age of Slavery
• Two – From Reconstruction to Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?
• Three – From Black-Power Backlash to the New Amalgamationism
• Four – Race, Racism, and Sexual Coercion
• Five – The Enforcement of Antimiscegenation Laws
• Six – Fighting Antimiscegenation Laws
• Seven – Racial Passing
• Eight – Passing the the Schuyler Family
• Nine – Racial Conflict and the Parenting of Children: A Survey of Competing Approaches
• Ten – The Tragedy of Race Marching in Black and White
• Eleven – White Parents and the Black Children in Adoptive Families
• Twelve – Race, Children, and Custody Battles: The Special Status of Native Americans
• Afterword
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgments
• Index

Read an excerpt of the book here.

Crossing Lines: Race and Mixed Race Across the Geohistorical Divide

Rowman & Littlefield
Paper: 0-9700-3841-0 / 978-0-9700-3841-8
June 2005
190 pages

Edited by

Marc Coronado
DeAnza College

Rudy P. Guevarra
University of California, Santa Barbara

Jeffrey A. S. Moniz, Associate Professor and Director
University of Hawai’i

Laura Furlan Szanto
University of California, Santa Barbara

Crossing Lines addresses the issues of race and mixed race at the turn of the 21st century. Representing multiple academic disciplines, including history, ethnic studies, art history, education, English, and sociology, the volume invites readers to consider the many ways that identity, community, and collectivity are formed, while addressing the challenges that multiracial identity poses to our understanding of race and ethnicity. The authors examine such subjects as social action, literary representations of multiracial people, curriculum development, community formation, Whiteness, and demographic changes.

List of Contributors
Marc Coronado (DeAnza College), Carina Evans (UC Santa Barbara), Melinda Gandara (UC Santa Barbara), Rudy P. Guevarra, Jr. (UC Santa Barbara), Tomas Jimenez (Harvard University), George Lipsitz (UC San Diego), Jeffrey Moniz (University of Hawai’i), Paul Spickard (UC Santa Barbara), Laura Furlan Szanto (UC Santa Barbara), and Nicole Marie Williams (UC Santa Barbara).

Table of Contents

• Introduction

• Clueless
  Rudy P. Guevarra, Jr.

• Noises in the Blood: Culture, Conflict, and Mixed Race Identities
  George Lipsitz

• Does Multiraciality Lighten? Me-Too Ethnicity and the Whiteness Trap
  Paul Spickard

• “My Father? Gabacho?” Ethnic Doubling in Gloria Lopez Stafford’s A Place in El Paso
  Marc Coronado

• Burritos and Bagoong: Mexipinos and Multiethnic Identity in San Diego, California
  Rudy P. Guevarra, Jr.

• Challenging the Hegemony of Multiculturalism: The Matter of the Marginalized Multiethnic
  Jeffrey A.S. Moniz

• Beyond Disobedience
  Nicole M. Williams

• “Fictive Imaginings”: Constructing Biracial Identity and Senna’s Caucasia
  Carina A. Evans

• The Beginning
  Laura Furlan Szanto

• Los Angeles Museum of Art: Looking Forward
  Melinda Gandara

• Multiethnic Mexican Americans in Demographic and Ethnographic Perspectives
  Tomas R. Jimenez

The Woman of Colour

Broadview Press
2007-01-01
268 pages
Paperback ISBN: 9781551111766 / 1551111764

Written by: Anonymous

Edited by:

Lyndon J. Dominique, Assistant Professor of English
Lehigh University, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania

The Woman of Colour is a unique literary account of a black heiress’ life immediately after the abolition of the British slave trade. Olivia Fairfield, the biracial heroine and orphaned daughter of a slaveholder, must travel from Jamaica to England, and as a condition of her father’s will either marry her Caucasian first cousin or become dependent on his mercenary elder brother and sister-in-law. As Olivia decides between these two conflicting possibilities, her letters recount her impressions of Britain and its inhabitants as only a black woman could record them. She gives scathing descriptions of London, Bristol, and the British, as well as progressive critiques of race, racism, and slavery. The narrative follows her life from the heights of her arranged marriage to its swift descent into annulment and destitution, only to culminate in her resurrection as a self-proclaimed “widow” who flouts the conventional marriage plot.

The appendices, which include contemporary reviews of the novel, historical documents on race and inheritance in Jamaica, and examples of other women of colour in early British prose fiction, will further inspire readers to rethink issues of race, gender, class, and empire from an African woman’s perspective.

Table of Contents:

Acknowledgements

Introduction

A Chronology of Women of Color in Drama and Long Prose Fiction

A Note on the Text

The Woman of Colour, A Tale

Appendix A: Lucy Peacock, “The Creole” (1786)

Appendix B: Anonymous Poem “written by a Mulatto Woman” (1794)

Appendix C: Minor Heiresses of Color in British Long Prose Fiction

1. From Agnes Musgrave, Solemn Injunction (1798)
2. From Jane Austen, Fragment of a Novel (1817)
3. From Edmund Marshall, Edmund and Eleonora: or Memoirs of the Houses of Summerfield and Gretton (1797)
4. From Robert Bissett, Douglas; or, The Highlander (1800)
5. From Mrs. Charles Mathews, Memoirs of a Scots Heiress (1791)

Appendix D: Historical and Social Accounts of People of Color in Jamaica

1. From Bryan Edwards, The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies (1799)
2. From Edward Long, The History of Jamaica (1774)
3. From J.B. Moreton, West India Customs and Manners (1793)

Appendix E: People of Color in British Epistolary Narratives

1. From Richard Griffith, The Gordian Knot (1769)
2. From Hester Thrale, “Letter to Mrs. Pennington” (1802)
3. From Clara Reeve, Plans of Education (1792)
4. John Wesley, “Letter to William Wilberforce” (1791)

Appendix F: The Woman of Colour: Contemporary Reviews

1. The British Critic (March 1810)
2. The Critical Review (May 1810)
3. The Monthly Review (June 1810)

Appendix G: Jamaican Petitions, Votes of the Assembly, and an Englishman’s Will

1. From Votes of the Honourable House of Assembly of Jamaica (1792)
2. From Andrew Wright’s “Last Will and Testament” (1806)

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.

Mixed-Race Identities

American Psychology Association
Item #: 4310742
ISBN: 1-59147-365-9
ISBN 13: 978-1-59147-365-7
Running Time: Over 100 minutes
Format: DVD

With Maria P. P. Root, PhD
Hosted by John Carlson, PsyD, EdD

Part of the Multicultural Counseling APA Psychotherapy Video Series

About the Video

In Mixed-Race Identities, Dr. Maria P. P. Root demonstrates her approach to working with clients who are experiencing conflicts or distress because of mixed-race identity. Dr. Root’s multiculturally sensitive approach seeks to strengthen or find a client’s own voice and validate the client’s experiences and ways of belonging in the world.

In this session, Dr. Root works with a young woman in her mid-20s whose mother is African and whose father is Latino. Dr. Root helps her client to look at various effects that her mixed-race heritage has had on her life. She illuminates the various struggles surrounding the client’s identity as well as her resilience and the need for continued vigilance in discerning how society’s “race rules” are causing much of the stress she is experiencing.

About the Appoach

Dr. Root’s therapeutic orientations blend multicultural sensitivities with feminist perspectives. This means that she helps people strengthen or find their own voice and validate their experiences, taking into account historical events that have affected their family, their ethnic or racial group, gendered experience, or way of belonging and identifying in this world.

Continuing Education in Psychology: Independent Study

4 CE Credits, 50 Test Items
You can take the test in two ways: online (with instant test results) or with mail delivery of a paper version. The DVD is not included with the test and must be purchased separately.

This course is designed to help you:

1. Comprehend a general model and approach to working with clients who have issues related to mixed-race identity,
2. Recognize particular techniques and strategies for engaging clients in a dialogue regarding their mixed-race identity issues,
3. Identify particular strengths that clients with mixed-race identities bring to the counseling process,
4. Identify particular limitations that working with some clients with mixed-race identities can entail, and
5. Recognize specific research-based findings about psychosocial and developmental issues that impact the psychological and social development of clients who have mixed-race identities.

Puchase the test here.

Mixed-Race Identity Politics in Nella Larsen and Winnifred Eaton (Onoto Watanna)

Ohio University
English (Arts and Sciences) Department
November 2001
217 pages
Advisor: David Dean McWilliams

Sachi Nakachi

A dissertation presented to the faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences of Ohio University In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy.

The dissertation examines how two women authors of mixed-race, Nella Larsen and Winnifred Eaton (Onoto Watanna), resisted American identity politics in their works.  The ideological complexities of mixed-race identity, which is “in-between” races, are the focus of my argument. To discuss what Judith Butler calls “the performativity of identity” in the interracial context, “passing,” “masquerading” and “mimicking” are used as key strategies. I examine whether the space of hybridity, in which the incompatible notions of difference and sameness exist together, opens up the horizon of transformation of significations . In Chapter One, I discuss how Larsen used her “mulatto” heroines to criticize the essentialist notion of identity. I probe how crossing boundaries (passing, geographical crossing and transgressing sexual norms) functions in her novels. In Chapter Two, I examine the works of Winnifred Eaton, who passed as Japanese in her authorship. By crossing the “authentic” ethnic boundaries and placing herself in a fictional identity, Eaton challenged racism and sexism. The dynamics of Orientalism, race and gender in Eaton’s works are examined in this chapter. Postmodern feminist theories and postcolonial theories are used in tandem to support my argument, which tries to discuss how the system of racial oppression operates in multi-racial/multi-ethnic women’s literature.

Read the entire dissertation here.

Making Multiracials: State, Family, and Market in the Redrawing of the Color Line

Stanford University Press
2007
280 pages
3 tables, 2 figures, 4 illustrations.
Cloth ISBN-10: 0804755450; ISBN-13: 9780804755450
Paper ISBN-10: 0804755469; ISBN-13: 9780804755467

Kimberly McClain DaCosta, Associate Professor
Gallatin School of Individualized Study, New York University

When in 1997 golfer Tiger Woods described his racial identity on Oprah as “cablinasian,” it struck many as idiosyncratic. But by 2003, a New York Times article declared the arrival of “Generation E.A.”—the ethnically ambiguous. Multiracial had become a recognizable social category for a large group of Americans.

Making Multiracials tells the story of the social movement that emerged around mixed race identity in the 1990s. Organizations for interracial families and mixed race people—groups once loosely organized and only partially aware of each other—proliferated. What was once ignored, treated as taboo, or just thought not to exist quickly became part of the cultural mainstream.

How did this category of people come together? Why did the movement develop when it did? What is it about “being mixed” that constitutes a compelling basis for activism? Drawing on extensive interviews and fieldwork, the author answers these questions to show how multiracials have been “made” through state policy, family organizations, and market forces.

Table of Contents

• Tables, Figures and Photos
• Acknowledgements
• The Making of a Category
• Becoming a Multiracial Entrepreneur: Four Stories
• Making Multiracial Families
• Creating Multiracial Identity and Community
• Consuming Multiracials
• Redrawing the Color Line?: The Problems and Possibilities of Multiracial Families and Group Making
• Appendix A: List of Respondents
• Appendix B: Methodology
• Appendix C: Situating Multiracial Group Making in the Literature on Social Movements, Race, and the Work of Pierre Bourdieu
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

For the press release, click here.
For an excerpt of chapter 2, click here.

Race Mixing: Black-White Marriage in Postwar America

Harvard University Press
April 2003
382 pages
11 halftones, 1 line drawing
ISBN 13: 978-0-674-01033-8
ISBN 10: 0-674-01033-7

Renee C. Romano, Professor of History, Comparative American Studies, and Africana Studies
Oberlin College

Marriage between blacks and whites is a longstanding and deeply ingrained taboo in American culture. On the eve of World War II, mixed-race marriage was illegal in most states, politicians argued for segregated facilities in order to prevent race mixing, and interracial couples risked public hostility, legal action, even violence. Yet, sixty years later, black-white marriage is no longer illegal or a divisive political issue, and the number of such couples and their mixed-race children has risen dramatically. Renee Romano explains how and why such marriages have gained acceptance, and what this tells us about race relations in contemporary America.

Although significant numbers of both blacks and whites still oppose interracial marriage, larger historical forces have greatly diminished overt racism and shaped a new consciousness about mixed-race families. The social revolutions of the 1950s and ’60s (with their emphasis on individualism and nonconformity), the legal sanctions of new civil rights laws, and a decline in the institutional stability of marriage have all contributed to the growing tolerance for interracial relationships. Telling the powerful stories of couples who married across the color line, Romano shows how cultural shifts are lived by individuals, and how they have enabled mixed couples to build supportive communities for themselves and their children.

However, Romano warns that the erosion of this taboo does not mean that racism no longer exists. The history of interracial marriage helps us understand the extent to which America has overcome its racist past, and how much further we must go to achieve meaningful racial equality.