Mixed Race Studies

America’s new racial heroes: Mixed race Americans and ideas of novelty, progress, and Utopia

University of Texas, Austin
May 2007
250 pages
Publication Number: AAT 3345886
ISBN: 9781109010473

Gregory Thomas Carter, Associate Professor of History
University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee

The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

My dissertation, “America’s New Racial Heroes,” is the first full-length intellectual history examining the fascination with mixed race people that has been concurrent with the stereotypes that pathologize them. Through five moments in United States history, this project asks what the idea of racially mixed people does for America, uncovering a set of vanguards who suggested that, rather than fear racial mixing, we should embrace it as a means to live up to ideals of equality and inclusion, thus benefiting the nation as a whole. Whether the subject is abolitionist Wendell Phillips’s defense of racial amalgamation, the popularity of the Melting Pot trope, Time Magazine’s 1993 New Face of America issue, or the promises of a “Multiracial” category on the 2000 census, similar notions regarding novelty, progress, and utopia repeat themselves. Rounding out “America’s New Racial Heroes” is an examination of contemporary praise of ambiguity at the same time Americans wish for quantifiable racial makeup. Overall, this project warns against the giddy hope that racially mixed people alone can solve America’s racial problems.

I have several models in bringing together these five cases, including George M. Fredrickson’s The Black Image in the White Mind, Philip J. Deloria’s Playing Indian, and Robert Lee’s Orientals. Each of these shows how discourses of science, nationality, and popular culture shape the identities of dominant and minority groups concurrently. Like these works, my project brings together archival research, cultural studies readings, and theories of racial formation to examine how pro-mixing advocates situate themselves within their own contexts and resonate through time. This work on mixed race identity has many intersections with both fields, accentuating the richness that can result from comparative, ethnic studies work across disciplinary boundaries.
 
Table of Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1: Wendell Phillips: Unapologetic Abolitionist, Unreformed
Amalgamationist
Introduction
From Brahmin to Radical
Marriage Law Petition and Europe
The United States of the United Races and Beyond
Phillips and Miscegenation
Conclusion

Chapter 2: Israel Zangwill’s Melting Pot vs. Jean Toomer’s Stomach

Chapter 3: The New Face of America: The Beauty, the Beast

Chapter 4: Census 2000 and the End of Race as We Know It

Chapter 5 Praising Ambiguity, Preferring Certainty
Introduction
Tiger Woods: 100% Unambiguous
Mixed Race Models: Who’s the Fairest of Them All?
DNAPrint: Racial Makeups ‘R’ Us
Conclusion

Conclusion
Bibliography
Vita

Read the entire dissertation here.

Multiple choice: Literary racial formations of mixed race Americans of Asian descent

Rice University
May 2001
194 pages

Shannon T. Leonard
Rice University

A thesis submitted in partial fulfullment of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy

This dissertation reassesses key paradigms of Asian American literary studies in the interest of critically accounting for the cultural productions of mixed race Asian Americans. Over the last twenty years, Asian American literary criticism has focused narrowly on a small body of writers, such as Maxine Hong Kingston, David Henry Hwang, and Amy Tan, who achieved mainstream popularity with U.S. feminists and/or multiculturalists, or focused on authors like Frank Chin and John Okada whose literary personas and works lend themselves to overt appropriations for civil rights causes and/or identity politics. “Multiple Choice” participates in a renewed interest in the expansion of Asian American literary boundaries and critical inquiry. “Multiple Choice” addresses the complex racial formations of select mixed race Asian American authors and subjects from the turn of the century to the present. My study situates, both theoretically and historically, the diverse ways in which mixed race peoples variously represent themselves. As the dissertation’s metaphorical title suggests, self-representations, or an individual’s ethnic choices, especially in the case of mixed race Americans, are constantly adjudicated by others (e.g. cultural critics, the media, or U.S. census designers and evaluators). Notwithstanding the omnipresence of these external forces, “Multiple Choice” also engages the complex sets of choices made from within specific Asian American communities, particularly those choices that come in conflict with other Asian American identities. The dissertation looks at writers both well-known and virtually unknown: Edith Eaton, Winnifred Eaton, Sadakichi Hartmann, Aimee Liu, Chang-rae Lee, Amy Tan, Shawn Wong, Jessica Hagedorn, Peter Bacho, Thaddeus Rutkowski, and Paisley Rekdal.

Read the entire dissertation here.