Mixed Race Studies

Thinking Outside the White Box

University of Southern California
USC News

Cristy Lytal
On: 2009-10-12 18:31

“I am not part this or part that but whole. I am me.” That’s how one of USC’s multiracial students described herself at the Face It!: Project ReMiX Kickoff event at El Centro Chicano on Sept. 22.

More than 50 students posted Polaroids of themselves on a wall and scribbled self-descriptions that ranged from humorous to heady…

…Hosted by Asian Pacific American Student Services, the Center for Black Cultural and Student Affairs and El Centro Chicano, Project ReMiX — now in its second year — provides a space for USC students to discuss and explore the mixed-race generation.

“Multiracial communities are the fastest-growing communities in this country,” said Sumun Pendakur, director of Asian Pacific American Student Services. “And here at USC, about 17 percent of the incoming Asian Americans are mixed, about 24 percent of the incoming African Americans and about 29 percent of the incoming Latino/Chicano students are mixed. So that’s a huge number of students we’re talking about.”…

Read the entire article here.

From Jamestown 1607 to 2007, the American Mosaic: A Multicultural Society

National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS)
People of Color Conference 2006

Christine Madsen
Rocky Mount Academy (North Carolina)

Some of the original settlers in colonial Virginia formed self-sustaining mixed race communities. The history of these communities will be used as an entrance point to discuss the invention of racial identities as social constructs.

View the Powerpoint presentation here.

What Are You? The Changing Face of America with Kip Fulbeck

National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS)
2010 Annual Conference
Dates: 2010-02-24 through 2010-02-26
Moscone Convention Center West
San Francisco, California, USA
Adapt, Survive, Thrive: Unleashing the Superpowers Within

Kip Fulbeck, Professor of Performative Studies, Video
University of California, Santa Barbara

Friday, 2010-02-26
13:30 – 14:30 PDT (Local Time)

A seminal artist exploring multiracial identity, Kip Fulbeck captivates audiences with his videos, performances, and writings. His words and artwork have received a landslide of attention from media as diverse as MTV and CNN. On stage his uniquely personal monologues and multimedia shows combine stand-up comedy with a powerful and politically charged edge, leading audiences to honestly consider Who Am I? Using his own Cantonese, English, Irish, and Welsh background as a springboard, Fulbeck confronts media imagery of Asian men, interracial dating patterns, and icons of race and sex in the U.S., constantly questioning where Hapas “fit in” in a country that ignores multiracial identity. His work invites and inspires viewers to explore how ethnic stereotypes and opinions on interracial dating, gender roles, and personal identity are formed. A professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Fulbeck has performed and exhibited across the U.S. and in more than 20 countries. He has twice keynoted the National Conference on Race in Higher Education to standing ovations; directed 13 independent videos; and authored the critically acclaimed books Paper Bullets: A Fictional Autobiography and Part Asian, 100% Hapa, featuring portraits of multiracials of Asian/Pacific Islander descent, with an introduction by Sean Lennon.

Parenting ‘mixed’ children: difference and belonging in mixed race and faith families

Joseph Rowntree Foundaton
2008-06-20

Chamion Caballero, Senior Research Fellow
Families & Social Capital Research Group
London South Bank University 

Rosalind Edwards, Professor in Social Policy
Families and Social Capital Research Group
London South Bank University

Shuby Puthussery, Senior Research Fellow
Family and Parenting Institute

Insights into parenting ‘mixed’ children.

More and more is known about the ‘mixed’ population of Britain – those brought up in families with different racial, ethnic and faith backgrounds. But less is known about their parents. Who are they and what are their experiences of bringing up their children?

This report aims to provide insights about parenting mixed children to inform debates about family life and professional strategies for support. Focusing on mothers and fathers living together, it:

• Investigates how parents from different racial, ethnic and/or faith backgrounds give their children a sense of belonging and identity.
• Examines parents’ approaches to cultural difference and how they pass on aspects of belonging and heritage across generations.
• Explores the opportunities, constraints, challenges and tensions in negotiating a sense of identity and heritage between parents.

Click here for the 4 page summary.
Click here for the 76 page full report.

The House at the End of the Road: The Story of Three Generations of an Interracial Family in the American South

HarperCollins
Imprint: Smithsonian
2009-05-19
224 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 9780061375736; ISBN10: 006137573X
On Sale: 2009-05-19

W. Ralph Eubanks, Bernard Schwartz Fellow
New America Foundation

In 1914, in defiance of his middle-class landowning family, a young white man named James Morgan Richardson married a light-skinned black woman named Edna Howell. Over more than twenty years of marriage, they formed a strong family and built a house at the end of a winding sandy road in South Alabama, a place where their safety from the hostile world around them was assured, and where they developed a unique racial and cultural identity. Jim and Edna Richardson were Ralph Eubanks’s grandparents.

Part personal journey, part cultural biography, The House at the End of the Road examines a little-known piece of this country’s past: interracial families that survived and prevailed despite Jim Crow laws, including those prohibiting mixed-race marriage. As he did in his acclaimed 2003 memoir, Ever Is a Long Time, Eubanks uses interviews, oral history, and archival research to tell a story about race in American life that few readers have experienced. Using the Richardson family as a microcosm of American views on race and identity, The House at the End of the Road examines why ideas about racial identity rooted in the eighteenth century persist today. In lyrical, evocative prose, this extraordinary book pierces the heart of issues of race and racial identity, leaving us ultimately hopeful about the world as our children might see it.

Browse the contents of the book here.

Scattered Belongings: Cultural Paradoxes of Race, Nation and Gender

Routledge an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group
1999-01-14
240 pages
234×156 mm
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-415-17096-3

Jayne O. Ifekwunigwe, Visiting Associate Professor of African and African American Studies
Duke University

When the American golfer Tiger Woods proclaimed himself a “Caublinasian”, affirming his mixed Caucasian, Black, Native American and Asian ancestry, a storm of controversy was created.  This book is about people faced by the strain of belonging and not belonging within the narrow confines of the terms ‘Black’ or ‘White’.

This is a unique and radical study. It interweaves the stories of six women of mixed African/African Caribbean and white European heritage with an analysis of the concepts of hybridity and mixed race identity.

Table of Contents

• Illustrations
• Prologue
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Cracking the Coconut:Resisting Popular Folk Discourses on “Race,” “Mixed Race” and Social Hierarchies
• 2. Returning(s):Relocating the Critical Feminist Auto- Ethnographer
• 3. Setting the Stage:Invoking the Griot(te)Traditions as Textual Strategies
• 4. Ruby
• 5. Similola
• 6. Akousa
• 7. Sarah
• 8. Bisi
• 9. Yemi
• 10. Let Blackness and Whiteness Wash Through: Competing Discourses on Bi-Racialization and the Compulsion of Genealogical Erasures
• Epilogue
• Select Bibiographies
• Index

Black, White or Mixed Race? Race and Racism in the Lives of Young People of Mixed Parentage, 2nd Edition

Routledge an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group
2001-11-22
272 pages
ISBN: 978-0-415-25982-8 Binding: Paperback (also available in Hardback)
Trim Size: 216 x 138

Ann Phoenix, Professor and Co-Director of the Thomas Coram Research Unit
University of London, Institute of Education

Barbara Tizard, Professor Emeritus
University of London, Institute of Education

The number of people in racially mixed relationships has grown steadily over the last thirty years, yet these people often feel stigmatised and unhappy about their identities.

The first edition of Black, White or Mixed Race? was a ground-breaking study: this revised edition uses new literature to consider what is now known about racialised identities and changes in the official use of ‘mixed’ categories. All new developments are placed in a historical framework and in the context of up-to-date literature on mixed parentage in Britain and the USA.

Based on research with young people from a range of social backgrounds the book examines their attitudes to black and white people; their identity; their cultural origins; their friendships; their experiences of racism. This was the first study to concentrate on adolescents of black and white parentage and it continues to provide unique insights into their identities. It is a valuable resource for all those concerned with social work and policy.

Table of Contents

1. Setting the Scene
2. People of Mixed Black and White Parentage in Britain: A Brief History
3. Identity and Mixed Parentage: Theory, Policy and Research
4. The ‘Transracial Adoption’/’same race’ Placement Debate
5. How the Research Was Carried Out
6. The Radicalised Identities of Young People of Mixed Parentage Today
7. Friendships and Allegiances
8. Experiencing Racism
9. Dealing with Racism
10. Some Parents’ Accounts
11. But What About the Children? An Overview, With Some Comments

Race Mixture in Nineteenth-Century U.S. and Spanish American Fictions: Gender, Culture, and Nation Building

University of North Carolina Press
October 2004
192 pages
5.5 x 8.5, notes, bibl., index
Paper ISBN:  978-0-8078-5564-5

Debra J. Rosenthal, Associate Professor of English
John Carroll University

Race mixture has played a formative role in the history of the Americas, from the western expansion of the United States to the political consolidation of emerging nations in Latin America. Debra J. Rosenthal examines nineteenth-century authors in the United States and Spanish America who struggled to give voice to these contemporary dilemmas about interracial sexual and cultural mixing.

Rosenthal argues that many literary representations of intimacy or sex took on political dimensions, whether advocating assimilation or miscegenation or defending the status quo. She also examines the degree to which novelists reacted to beliefs about skin differences, blood taboos, incest, desire, or inheritance laws. Rosenthal discusses U.S. authors such as James Fenimore Cooper, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Walt Whitman, William Dean Howells, and Lydia Maria Child as well as contemporary novelists from Cuba, Peru, and Ecuador, such as Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, Clorinda Matto de Turner, and Juan León Mera. With her multinational approach, Rosenthal explores the significance of racial hybridity to national and literary identity and participates in the wider scholarly effort to broaden critical discussions about America to include the Americas.

Mixing Race, Mixing Culture: Inter-American Literary Dialogues

University of Texas Press
2002
6 x 9 in.
324 pp., 4 photos, 1 chart
ISBN: 978-0-292-74348-9
Print-on-demand title

Edited by

Monika Kaup, Assistant Professor of English
University of Washington, Seattle

Debra Rosenthal, Assistant Professor of English
John Carroll University

Over the last five centuries, the story of the Americas has been a story of the mixing of races and cultures. Not surprisingly, the issue of miscegenation, with its attendant fears and hopes, has been a pervasive theme in New World literature, as writers from Canada to Argentina confront the legacy of cultural hybridization and fusion.

This book takes up the challenge of transforming American literary and cultural studies into a comparative discipline by examining the dynamics of racial and cultural mixture and its opposite tendency, racial and cultural disjunction, in the literatures of the Americas. Editors Kaup and Rosenthal have brought together a distinguished set of scholars who compare the treatment of racial and cultural mixtures in literature from North America, the Caribbean, and Latin America. From various angles, they remap the Americas as a multicultural and multiracial hemisphere, with a common history of colonialism, slavery, racism, and racial and cultural hybridity.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• I. Mixed-Blood Epistemologies
  1. Werner Sollors, Can Rabbits Have Interracial Sex?
  2. Doris Sommer, Who Can Tell? The Blanks in Villaverde
  3. Zita Nunes, Phantasmatic Brazil: Nella Larsen‘s Passing, American Literary Imagination, and Racial Utopianism
• II. Métissage and Counterdiscourse
  1. Françoise Lionnet, Narrating the Americas: Transcolonial Métissage and Maryse Condé‘s La Migration des coeurs
  2. Michèle Praeger, Créolité or Ambiguity?
• III. Indigenization, Miscegenation, and Nationalism
  1. Priscilla Archibald, Gender and Mestizaje in the Andes
  2. Debra J. Rosenthal, Race Mixture and the Representation of Indians in the U.S. and the Andes: Cumandá, Aves sin nido, The Last of the Mohicans, and Ramona
  3. Susan Gillman, The Squatter, the Don, and the Grandissimes in Our America
• IV. Hybrid Hybridity
  1. Rafael Pérez-Torres, Chicano Ethnicity, Cultural Hybridity, and the Mestizo Voice
  2. Monika Kaup, Constituting Hybridity as Hybrid: Métis Canadian and Mexican American Formations
• V. Sites of Memory in Mixed-Race Autobiography
  1. Rolando Hinojosa-Smith, Living on the River
  2. Louis Owens, The Syllogistic Mixedblood: How Roland Barthes Saved Me from the indians
• Coda: From Exoticism to Mixed-Blood Humanism
  1. Earl E. Fitz, From Blood to Culture: Miscegenation as Metaphor for the Americas
• Contributors
• Works Cited
• Index

Read the entire introduction here.

Demystifying the Tragic Mulatta: The Biracial Woman as Spectacle

Stanford Black Arts Quarterly
Volume 2, Issue 3 (Summer/Spring 1997)
pages 12-14

Stefanie Dunning, Associate Professor
Miami University (of Ohio)

To talk about the complexities of subjectivity is to enter into a discussion which necessarily locates itself at the intersection of race, clans, gender and sexuality. When thinking about my own subjective position, I am confronted by constructions that simultaneously identify, name, abridge and abstract me. Sometimes they help guide my thoughts about myself; at other times, they limit my thinking, reducing me to general categories of color, class, and desire. My present task, interrogation of a biracial subject position, is as much a gender discussion as it is a racial one. My investments in this discussion are deep; I am writing theoretically and distantly about myself— looking for truths about biraciality that I recognize in the words of other theorists, hoping to trace for myself and my audience one thread within a complex, unraveling cultural text. I am not interested here with how biracial subjects manage their subjectivites; such an approach inherently positions biraciality as problematic, the historical consideration of which falls beyond the scope of this project. Instead I will explore the way biracial subjectivity is gendered through its construction.

Women are the primary signifiers of miscegenation in literature and film. Likewise, the critical discourse on biraciality foregrounds the “tragic mulatta.” Yet, theorists regularly circumvent the issue of gender and theories lack interrogation of the point at which race and gender meet to sign biraciality. Visibility, i.e. what biracial people “look” like, makes up a significant part of biracial women’s experiences with uniracial onlookers. Moreover, visibility informs biracial women’s response to the uniracial “gaze.” This paper posits that biraciality is read differently “along gender lines.” While discourses about “mulattos” efface biracial men, biracial women are discursively foregrounded as “exotic.” Effectively, biraciality is inscribed with a specifically female status: the desire of ‘uniracial’ onlookers to exoticize biracial women inform the “gaze” which casts biracial women, “spectacle.”…

Read the entire article here.