Mixed Race Studies

Full Blood, Mixed Blood, Generic, and Ersatz: The Problem of Indian Identity

Arizona and the West
Volume 27, Number 4 (Winter, 1985)
pages 309-326

William T. Hagan, Professor Emeritus of History
State University of New York, Fredonia
University of Oklahoma

One of the most perplexing problems confronting American Indians today is that of identity. Who is an American Indian? The question is raised in a bewildering variety of situations. Contingent on its resolution can be the recognition of a group by the federal government, voting rights in a multimillion-dollar Alaskan corporation, or acceptance of an individual as a member of a pueblo’s tightly knit society. Nor is this a question which has arisen only recently. It has been a problem for individuals, tribes, and government administrators since the birth of this nation.

Four centuries to the year after Christopher Columbus began the semantic confusion over how to label the original inhabitants of this hemisphere, Commissioner of Indian Affairs Thomas Jefferson Morgan spoke to a more important issue. He devoted six pages of his 1892 annual report to the question: What is an Indian? “One would have supposed,” observed Morgan, “that this question would have been considered a hundred years ago and had been adjudicated long before this.” “Singularly enough, however,” he continued, “it has remained in abeyance, and the Government has gone on legislating and administering law without carefully discriminating as to those over whom it has a right to exercise such control.”…

The Near-White Female in Frances Ellen Harper’s Iola Leroy

Phylon (1960-)
Volume 45, Number 4 (4th Quarter, 1984)
pages 314-322

Vashti Lewis

During the antebellum years, the near-white black character played a central role in the American novel. In fact, almost all of the novels of that period which feature near-white characters are antislavery tracts. According to literary critics Sterling Brown and Darwin T. Turner, one of the most tenacious and pervasive stereotypes of anti-slavery fiction is the mulatto, usually a female who elicited sympathy from a white audience not because she was black but because she was an ill-fated white. The following description by Berzon of the tragic mulatto—who in fiction is indistinguishable in appearance from Caucasians—is more explicit than that of Brown’s and Turner’s but conveys the same meaning.

The tragic mulatto is usually a woman. Especially in mediocre melodramas, so often the vehicle for presenting the tragic mulatto character. Nothing supposedly inspires sympathy more than the plight of a beautiful woman whose touch of “impurity” makes her all the more attractive. The fact that many of these stereotyped characters are raised as white women—in fact as aristocratic white women and only discover their Negro blood as adults—allows white readers more identification with them than with full-blooded Negroes.

Catherine Starke in Black Portraiture in America suggests that the popular ill-fated mulatto in nineteenth-century fiction was repeated so often that it came to be archetypal and spoke to a Jungian collective unconscious of a white audience. With the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1852, the female tragic mulatto was permanently implanted in American fiction and in the American national consciousness. Turner claims that the image of Eliza, “heroine of thousands of evenings of flight across slippery floes only a half-stage’s distance ahead of drooling mongrels in stage productions of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin was popularized to such a great extent that Eliza became the prototype for the tragic mulatto type in drama.” In 1853, a year after the publication of Stowe’s novel, William Wells Brown created the mulatto near-white female prototype in black American fiction in Clotel, the first novel known to have been written by an American of African descent The popular image of the near-white black woman was later repeated in most nineteenth-century novels by black Americans—in Frank Webb’s The Garies and Their Friends (1857), in Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig (1859), in James Howard’s Bond and Free, (1886), in Frances Ellen Harper’s Iola Leroy (1892), in Charles Chesnutt’s The House Behind the Cedars (1900), and The Marrow of Tradition (1901), and in Pauline Hopkin’s Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South…

NEA grant and UW book contract awarded for War Baby/Love Child

Laura Kina
2011-11-22

Laura Kina, Associate Professor Art, Media and Design and Director Asian American Studies
DePaul University 

A National Endowment for the Arts – 2012 Art Works Grant has been awarded to a project for which I am the primary investigator (aka project organizer and co-curator/co-author):

DePaul University
Chicago, IL
$39,000

To support the exhibition, War Baby/Love Child: Mixed Race Asian American Art, and accompanying catalogue. Featuring art works by approximately 20 contemporary artists, the exhibition will investigate the construction of mixed race and mixed heritage, and Asian American identity in the United States…

ENGL 487: The Mulatto in American Fiction

Kenyon College, Gambier, Ohio
Fall 2004

Jené Schoenfeld, Assistant Professor of English

The mulatto balances precariously on the razor-thin edge of the color line between black and white. In the antebellum era, the mulatto’s proximity to whiteness made the mulatto an attractive object for Abolitionist sympathy. In the Jim Crow era, that proximity made the mulatto a threat to the security of white privilege. In our present moment, this figure has all but disappeared, though it seems to be re-emerging in a new form with Tiger Woods, Cablinasian, and Vin Diesel, “multiracial movie star.” This course will explore representations of the mulatto in American fiction and culture. In addition to reading some great works of literature, by authors such as William Faulkner, Nella Larsen, Charles Chesnutt, and Mark Twain (to name only a few), we will use our discussions about the trope of the mulatto to consider some of the more perplexing theoretical issues concerning race in America. We’ll begin with concerns generated specifically by the mulatto, such as: passing (the “problem” of the racially ambiguous body), racial allegiance, biological determinism (nature/nurture), hybrid degeneracy, and the mulatto’s “tragic” marginality. From there, we’ll move to the big questions, including, but not limited to: What is race? What is its determining factor: physical features, ancestry, culture? Can it be chosen or rejected? The course will concentrate on fiction of the Jim Crow era, a period of particularly intense struggle over the significance of race, but may also draw on other disciplines, such as science and law, and other historical moments. This course fulfills the post-1900 requirement. It can be used to fulfill requirements in African Diaspora Studies. Prerequisite: permission of instructor.

The Role of Racial Identification, Social Acceptance/Rejection, Social Cognition, and Racial Socialization in Multiracial Youth’s Positive Development

Sociology Compass
Volume 5, Issue 11 (November 2011)
pages 995-1004
DOI: 10.1111/j.1751-9020.2011.00418.x

Annamaria Csizmadia, Assistant Professor, Human Development & Family Studies
University of Connecticut, Stamford

Deficit-based scholarship has suggested that multiracial youth are maladjusted due to racial identity confusion and social marginality. This paper proposes an integrative model of multiracial youth’s positive development. This model highlights the important role of social cognition in understanding multiracial youth’s development. Drawing on Spencer’s PVEST [Phenomenological Variant of Ecological Systems], developmental research on monoracial and multiracial youth, and the racial socialization literature, I argue that multiracial youth’s perceptions of how their racial identity choices are accepted in their social environment have implications for their adjustment. Serving as developmental resources, parents can attenuate their children’s social perceptual biases or enhance their abilities to cope with actualized negative social experiences by engaging in cultural socialization, preparation for bias, and transmitting race-related messages that help multiracial children reframe their negative perceptions.

Read or purchase the article here.

Redefining their races: More students choosing to identify as mixed

The Western Front
Western Washington University
Bellingham, Washington
2011-11-18

Casey Malloy

When Western Washington University junior Emily Goronkin applied to the university three years ago, she came to a point in the application at which she was asked for her racial identity. She checked Hispanic because she is 25 percent Mexican.

Goronkin said she doesn’t always select Hispanic when she is asked for her race. The other three quarters that make up her ethnicity — Norwegian, Russian and Scottish — are considered white. She said she usually has trouble deciding what to choose.
 
“I’ve definitely selected just white on some forms,” Goronkin said. “I’ve also done mixed or chose both Mexican and Caucasian, if I could.”
 
Goronkin doesn’t celebrate any traditions of Mexican culture, but she believes selecting multiple races represents her accurately.

…When political science professor Vernon Johnson looks out his office window into Western’s Red Square, he doesn’t physically see these statistics represented on campus.
 
“If you’re walking across campus with a mass amount of people, you will pass people that consider themselves of mixed races, and with a quick observation of those particular students you could think they are white,” Johnson said. “However, they could be Hispanic, and they might have checked that box.”…

Read the entire article here.

The Mulatto in American Fiction

Phylon (1940-1956)
Volume 6, Number 1 (1st Quarter, 1945)
pages 78-82

Penelope Bullock

In its heterogenous population and the individualistic traits of its various inhabitants the United States possesses a reservoir teeming with literary potentiality. Throughout the years, the American writer has tapped these natural resources to bring forth products of value and interest. Even though the characters whom he has depicted are not always lasting literary creations, they are significant in that they are social and sociological indices. Wrought from American life, they reflect the temper of the times and the actualities and the attitudes surrounding their prototypes in life. One of these characters is the mulatto. In this study the portrayal of the mulatto by the nineteenth-century American fictionist is presented.

Who and what is the mulatto? According to Webster, he is, in the strictly generic sense. “. . . the first generation offspring of a pure negro and a white. . . The popular, general conception is that he is a Negro with a very obvious admixture of white blood. (In this study the persons considered as mulattoes are selected as such on the basis of this definition.) But the sociologist more adequately describes the mulatto as a cultural hybrid, as a stranded personality living in the margin of fixed status. He is a normal biological occurrence but a sociological problem in the United States. In the brief span of one life he is faced with the predicament of somehow resolving within himself the struggle between two cultures and two “races” which over a period of three hundred years have not yet become completely compatible in American life.

Two hundred years after the Negro-white offspring became a member of the population of the United States he made his advent into the American novel. How was he portrayed by the nineteenth-century writer?

The treatment accorded the mulatto in fiction was conditioned to a very large extent by the social and historical background out of which the authors wrote. The majority of them wrote as propagandists defending an institution or pleading for justice for an oppressed group. In depicting their characters, these writers very seldom approached them as a sociologist, or a realist, or a literary artist. They wrote only as partisans in national political issues. They wrote as propagandists: they distorted facts and clothed them in sentiment; they did not attempt to perceive and present the truth impartially. The persons of mixed blood pictured by these authors appealed to the emotional, prejudiced masses. But they are not truthful recreations of life and of…

The Black Musketeer: Reevaluating Alexandre Dumas within the Francophone World

Cambridge Scholars Press
August 2011
260 pages
8.1 x 6 x 1.1 inches
ISBN 13: 978-1-4438-2997-7
ISBN: 1-4438-2997-8

Edited by:

Eric Martone, Assistant Professor of History and Social Studies Education
Mercy College, Dobbs Ferry, New York

Alexandre Dumas, author of The Three Musketeers, The Count of Monte Cristo, and The Man in the Iron Mask, is the most famous French writer of the nineteenth century. In 2002, his remains were transferred to the Panthéon, a mausoleum reserved for the greatest French citizens, amidst much national hype during his bicentennial. Contemporary France, struggling with the legacies of colonialism and growing diversity, has transformed Dumas, grandson of a slave from St. Domingue (now Haiti), into a symbol of the colonies and the larger francophone world in an attempt to integrate its immigrants and migrants from its former Caribbean, African, and Asian colonies to improve race relations and to promote French globality. Such a reconception of Dumas has made him a major figure in debates on French identity and colonial history.

Ten tears after Dumas’s interment in the Panthéon, the time is ripe to re-evaluate Dumas within this context of being a representative of la Francophonie. The French re-evaluation of Dumas, therefore, invites a reassessment of his life, works, legacy, and previous scholarship. This interdisciplinary collection is the first major work to take up this task. It is unique for being the first scholarly work to bring Dumas into the center of debates about French identity and France’s relations with its former colonies. For the purposes of this collection, to analyze Dumas in a “francophone” context means to explore Dumas as a symbol of a “French” culture shaped by, and inclusive of, its (former) colonies and current overseas departments. The seven entries in this collection, which focus on providing new ways of interpreting The Three Musketeers, The Man in the Iron Mask, The Count of Monte Cristo, and Georges, are categorized into two broad groups. The first group focuses on Dumas’s relationship with the francophone colonial world during his lifetime, which was characterized by the slave trade, and provides a postcolonial re-examination of his work, which was impacted profoundly by his status as an individual of black colonial descent in metropolitan France. The second part of this collection, which is centered broadly around Dumas’s francophone legacy, examines the way he has been remembered in the larger French-speaking (postcolonial) world, which includes metropolitan France, in the past century to explore questions about French identity in an emerging global age.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Alexandre Dumas as a Francophone Writer—Eric Martone
• Part One: Life and Works
  • The Paternal Mystery of Alexandre Dumas—Simone Dubrovic
  • “White Negroes, Nothing More”: The Ambiguous Role of the “Mulatto” in Alexandre Dumas’s Georges—Molly Krueger Enz
  • Monte Cristo Brings the Empire Home: Alexandre Dumas and the Promise of Postcolonial Philology—Indra N. Mukhopadhyay
  • Georges, or the “Mixed-Blood” Settles Scores—Claudie Bernard
• Part Two: Legacy
  • From the Literary Myth to the Lieu de Mémoire: Alexandre Dumas–and French National Identity(ies)—Roxane Petit-Rasselle
  • “Dent pour dent”: Injustice, Revenge, and Storytelling in The Count of Monte Cristo and Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress—Barbara T. Cooper
  • “A French Precursor of Obama”: The Commemoration of General Alexandre Dumas and French Reconciliation with the Past—Eric Martone
• Contributors