Mixed Race Studies

Second Biennial: Interdisciplinary Conference on Race – Examining Race in the 21st Century

2010-11-11 through 2010-11-13
Monmouth University, West Long Branch, New Jersey

The idea of race continues to be controversial. In spite of different historical developments in various parts of the world, the meaning of race and its significance remains an open issue.

Some of the questions this conference will address are:

• Why do the issues that surround race continue to be important?
• Is race a useful construct?

How are systems of racial classification and identity manifested in social institutions and relationships?
We seek individual papers, panels, workshops, and posters that can include but are not restricted to the following topics:

• Race and identity in different cultures
• Race, gender, ethnicity, color, and class
• Race in the Obama era
• Race and diversity in higher education
• The concept of post-racialism in history and society
• Race and popular culture
• Race and urbanization
• Race change[s]: Racial formation, then and now
• Race and identity in local and global perspective
• Race, continuity, and change
• Implications of racial discourse
• Race and ethnicity: similarities and differences
• Race and power

The deadline for the submission of abstracts is 2010-08-30.

For more information, click here.

Woman of Color, Daughter of Privilege: Amanda America Dickson, 1849–1893

University of Georgia Press
1996
248 pages
Illustrated
Trim size: 6 x 9
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8203-1871-4

Kent Anderson Leslie

The true story of a slave who became the wealthiest black woman in the South

This fascinating story of Amanda America Dickson, born the privileged daughter of a white planter and an unconsenting slave in antebellum Georgia, shows how strong-willed individuals defied racial strictures for the sake of family. Kent Anderson Leslie uses the events of Dickson’s life to explore the forces driving southern race and gender relations from the days of King Cotton through the Civil War, Reconstruction, and New South eras.

Although legally a slave herself well into her adolescence, Dickson was much favored by her father and lived comfortably in his house, receiving a genteel upbringing and education. After her father died in 1885 Dickson inherited most of his half-million dollar estate, sparking off two years of legal battles with white relatives. When the Georgia Supreme Court upheld the will, Dickson became the largest landowner in Hancock County, Georgia, and the wealthiest black woman in the post-Civil War South.

Kent Anderson Leslie’s portrayal of Dickson is enhanced by a wealth of details about plantation life; the elaborate codes of behavior for men and women, blacks and whites in the South; and the equally complicated circumstances under which racial transgressions were sometimes ignored, tolerated, or even accepted.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• CHAPTER 1. Exceptions to the Rules
• CHAPTER 2. A Story
• CHAPTER 3. The Dickson Will
• CHAPTER 4. The Death of a Lady
• Appendixes
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

“It’s a Kind of Destiny″: The Cultural Mulatto in the “New Black Aesthetic” and ‘Sarah Phillips’

The Humanities Review
A Publication of St. John’s University English Department, Jamaica, New York
Volume 6.1 (Fall 2007)
pages 21-28

Habiba Ibrahim, Assistant Professor of English
University of Washington

An Essay

IN “THE NEW BLACK AESTHETIC,” published in Callaloo in 1989, Trey Ellis identifies a rupture between the black aesthetics of previous generations, and the “new” aesthetics of black artists who came of age in a post-integration era. These younger artists, unfettered by concerns over racial authenticity or, more pertinently, black cultural traditions, borrow as easily from white culture as from black, and are therefore what Ellis refers to as “cultural mulattoes.” He writes, “Just as a genetic mulatto is a black person of mixed parents who can often get along fine with his white grandparents, a cultural mulatto, educated by a multi-racial mix of cultures, can also navigate easily in the white world” (235). This easy navigation between black and white worlds is the key distinction between a “new” black aesthetic-which, according to Ellis, encompasses such varied forms as the comedy of Eddie Murphy and Chris Rock, the films of Spike Lee, the jazz of Wynton Marsalis-and older black aesthetic movements, most notably the Black Arts Movement, which often focused on delineating an essential blackness through art and meaning. Ellis proposes that the young black artists who came of age after integration form a black arts movement that constantly challenges what blackness “is.”..

Read the entire article here.