Mixed Race Studies

In Search of Something Akin to Freedom: Black Women, Slavery, and Power

Florida State University
2007
78 pages

Katrina Songanett Smith

A Thesis submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts
 
This thesis examines both historical and fictional representations of interracial relationships in the 18th century. My argument in this project is two-fold. First, I argue that some black women used sexual relationships with white men to gain advantages for themselves and their fellow slaves. Second, I argue that novelists of the time period re-wrote history in an attempt to erase the positive aspects of miscegenation.

Table of Contents

• Abstract
• Introduction
• Chapter One: Historical Accounts of Black Women’s Sexuality and Strategies of Resistance: The Narratives of Mary Prince, Thomas Thistlewood, John Stedman, Maria Nugent, and Janet Schaw
• Chapter Two: The Revenge of the Shrew: Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko
• Chapter Three: The Sacrifice of the Colored Woman in J.W. Orderson’s Creoleana
• Epilogue
• Works Cited

Read the entire thesis here.

UCSB Ph.D. Alum Overcomes Odds and Pays Back With History Grad Parent Award

UCSB GradPost
University of California, Santa Barbara
2012-07-20

Patricia Marroquin, Guest Editor-in-Chief

Dr. Ingrid Dineen-Wimberly believes strongly in paying back and paying forward. When she was a History Ph.D. student at UCSB just a few years ago, “graduate school was quite difficult for me. Not in terms of the intellectual rigors required but rather insofar as managing my life circumstances beyond school.” Pursuing a graduate degree is bound to be difficult when you are a disabled Navy veteran taking oral chemotherapy for a rare bone-marrow disease developed during Persian Gulf War duty; a single woman carrying a child in a high-risk pregnancy; and surviving an abusive past.

Financial awards she received from the History Department and History Associates, including a 2005 Donald Van Gelderen Memorial Fellowship, which recognizes nontraditional students who return to graduate study after pursuing career and family interests, allowed Ingrid to support her then-infant daughter, Grace.

“It was incredibly difficult to make ends meet while meeting my degree requirements,” she said. “However, earning my Ph.D. in History had become more than a mere personal goal. I realized that I was an example for other nontraditional students of color,” continued Ingrid, who is of African-American and Irish descent. “In fact, today African Americans still constitute only 1% of all graduate school students at UCSB.”…

…Ingrid, who is finishing the final edits on her forthcoming book, “By the Least Bit of Blood: The Allure of Blackness Among Mixed-Race Americans of African Descent, 1862-1935,” discusses her experiences as a teacher, student, parent, philanthropist, and role model…

Read the entire article here.

Capturing complexity in the United States: which aspects of race matter and when?

Ethnic and Racial Studies
Volume 35, Issue 8, 2012
Special Issue:Accounting for ethnic and racial diversity: the challenge of enumeration
pages 1484-1502
DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2011.607504

Aliya Saperstein, Assistant Professor of Sociology
Stanford University

The experience of race in the United States is shaped by both self-identification and ascription. One aspect reflects personal history, ancestry, and socialization while the other draws largely on appearance. Yet, most data collection efforts treat the two aspects of race as interchangeable, assuming that the relationship between each and an individual’s life chances will be the same. This study demonstrates that incorporating racial self-identification and other-classification in analyses of inequality reveals more complex patterns of advantage and disadvantage than can be seen using standard methods. These findings have implications for how racial data should be collected and suggest new directions for studying racial inequality in the United States and around the world.

It is templing to assume there are clear distinctions that identify a person as being a particular race or ethnicity. Though the characteristics that define racial or ethnic difference vary across societies, it is nevertheless common for people to maintain thai their country’s ‘others’ are easily singled out e.g., by face, accent, name, or dress. Indeed, in recent years, governments around the world have begun to mandate the collection of data to monitor racial/ethnic discrimination as if the information needed were obvious. In the United States, official racial data has been collected since at leasl 1790, and how it
should be gathered was rarely questioned because, according to commonsense belief, racial differences were ‘unmistakable’. Today, the assumption of measurement agreement can take on a different tone as racial data is put to different purposes: why quibble over…

Read or purchase the article here.

From deracialization to racial distinction: interpreting Obama’s successful racial narrative

Social Semiotics
Volume 23, Issue 1 (2013)
pages 119-145
DOI: 10.1080/10350330.2012.707039

Charlton McIlwain, Associate Professor of Media, Culture and Communication
New York University

While many scholars attribute Barack Obama’s success in the 2008 presidential election to his so-called deracialized campaign strategy, I argue that Obama constructed a persuasive message strategy that was fundamentally based on race. I argue that in pursuing what I call a racial distinction strategy, Obama mobilized race differently than previous Black candidates running in White-voter electoral majorities. Specifically, Obama’s racial distinction strategy constructed a seamless racial narrative – deployed through constellations of subtle racial language and imagery – incorporating Obama’s own personal biography within a broader narrative of the nation, specifically a narrative of American progress. The fact that Obama employed a racial distinction strategy, and the fact that he succeeded in doing so, sheds new light on, and leads us to reconsider the veracity of popular political theories such as post-Blackness, post-racialism and deracialization, along with the general ideology of colorblindness.

Barack Obama’s election as the 44th President of the United States was historic, not only because he achieved something no other Black American had accomplished, but because he attained the political heights many believed no Black American could. Few Black American candidates have been elected to federal office, especially when elections require support from White voters (Lublin 1997). Black candidates’ fear of White voters mobilizing racial prejudice against them has historically prevented Black candidates from even attempting to run in campaign contests where Blacks and other minorities do not comprise the majority of voters. However, Obama not only believed he could win, despite the historical racial odds, but also demonstrated that America was indeed ready and willing to elect a Black president.

Many explanations of Obama’s success focus on his ability to sidestep a variety of racial attacks throughout the primary and general election. Carly Fraser, for instance, writes “As a post-black candidate. Obama did not once make reference to the historic fact that he would be the first African American to have a real chance of winning the democratic nomination.” Fraser continues, saying that race was .. repeatedly acknowledged by the media, his [Obama’s] opponents, his surrogates, and eventually by the candidate himself” (Fraser 2009, 17). Similarly, Manning Marable writes, “Obama minimized the issue of race, presenting a race-neutral politics that reached out to White Republicans and independents. Yet despite his..

Read or purchase the article here.

Mixed-Race and Modernity in Colonial India: Changing Concepts of Hybridity Across Empires

Routledge
2012-02-29
208 pages
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-415-50429-4

Adrian Carton
Centre for Cultural Research
University of Western Sydney, Australia

This book traces changing concepts of mixed-race identity in early colonial India by contrasting Portuguese, British and French colonial spaces. Starting in the sixteenth century, the author shows how the emergence of race was always shaped by affiliations based on religion, class, national identity, gender and citizenship across empires. In the context of increasing British power, the central core of the book looks at the Anglo-French tensions of the eighteenth century to consider the relationship between modernity and race-making. Arguing that different forms of modernity produced divergent categories of hybridity, the book considers the impact of changing political structures on mixed-race communities. With its emphasis on specificity, it situates current and past debates on the mixed-race experience and the politics of whiteness in broader historical and global contexts.

The book contributes to the understanding of race-making as an aspect of colonial governance, and it illuminates some margins of colonial India that are often lost in the shadows of the British regime. It is of interest to academics interested in world/global history, postcolonial studies, South Asian imperial history and critical mixed-race studies.

Contents

1. Introduction
2. Portuguese Legacies
3. Race and Reform
4. Contested Colonialisms
5. French Complexions
6. Race and Fraternity
7. Conclusion

The Meeting Place: Māori and Pākehā Encounters, 1642–1840

Aukland University Press
May/June 2012
320 pages
228 x 148 mm
Paperback ISBN: 978 1 86940 594 6

Vincent O’Malley, Research Director
HistoryWorks Ltd., Wellington, New Zealand

How did Māori and Pākehā negotiate a meeting place? Would Māori observe the Sabbath? Should Pākehā fear the power of tapu? Whose view of land ownership and control would prevail? How would Māori rangatira and Pākehā leaders establish the rules of political engagement? Around such considerations about how the world would work, Māori and Pākehā in early New Zealand defined a way of being together. This is a book about that meeting time and place, about a process of mutual discovery, contact and encounter — meeting, greeting and seeing — between Māori and Pākehā from 1642 to about 1840.

After introducing the brief encounters and misunderstandings between European visitors and Māori before 1814, O’Malley focuses his study on the period between 1814 and 1840 when he argues that both peoples inhabited a ‘middle ground’ meeting place in which neither could dictate the political, economic or cultural rules of engagement.  By looking at economic, religious, political and sexual encounters, O’Malley offers a strikingly different picture to traditional accounts of imperial Pākehā power over a static, resistant Māori society.

In this meeting place, O’Malley shows, Māori and Europeans re-evaluated cultural priorities, adapted the customs of the other people that they found useful and sometimes ‘went native’ as they fell over into the other culture. O’Malley concludes with an analysis of how the middle ground gave way around 1840 to a world in which Pākehā had enough power largely to dictate terms.

Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival 2012

Multicultural Familia: Educating & Empowering Modern Familes
2012-07-27

Glenn Robinson
 
Two-thousand twelve was another fun and inspirational Mixed Roots festival in Little Tokyo, Los Angeles.
 
Highlights from the movies and readings that I attended:
 
Friday evening was the beautiful and inspirational movie The Loving Story…

…Sunday was an emotional reading by Devin Hughes of his account with racism as an 8 year old. When Hughes took the podium you saw a tall man made of bricks and steel. A couple minutes into his reading you saw him transform into an 8 year old boy. He apologized for crying. This was his first reading from his new memoir, Contrast, that will be out this summer of 2012…

..Steven Riley of Mixed Race Studies, raffled off free books both Satuday and Sunday. He wrote about the books he gave away in his post here…

Read the entire article here.

Rosario Dawson and the Ambiguous Blackness of Latinidad

antenna
2012-08-05

Keara Goin

As has become abundantly clear to me over the course of my research, in the context of contemporary popular U.S. racial discourse, one is either Latina/o or Black, not both. Moreover, we see this phenomenon replicated in U.S. cinema, where characters played by Afro-Latina/o actors are racialized as Hispanic or African American and, usually, nothing in between. Actors like Christina Milian (who is of Afro-Cuban descent) and Zoë Saldana (who is of Dominican heritage) have dark enough skin that casting them as African American seems appropriate, if not the only option. While Michelle Rodriguez (who is of mixed Latino and Dominican descent), who can better embody a generic Latina look (Clara Rodriguez 1997), can easily play a Chicana from Los Angeles primarily based on her lighter (read: whiter) skin tone. Relying on dominant conceptions of racialization to construct a racial understanding of racially mixed and ambiguous actors, casting agents are often motivated by racialized casting practices (Kristen Warner 2010)…

Read the entire article here.

Who Gets To Decide Who Is Native American?

Tell Me More
National Public Radio
2012-08-09

Michel Martin, Host

Rob Capriccioso, Washington Bureau Chief
Indian Country Today Media Network

Tiya Miles, Professor of American Culture, Afroamerican and African Studies, and Native American Studies
University of Michigan

A controversy about identity has erupted in the race for U.S. Senate in Massachusetts. News outlets revealed Democrat Elizabeth Warren claimed Cherokee ancestry during her academic career, and critics say Warren isn’t providing enough documentation to prove her identity. Host Michel Martin discusses just who is Native American.

Listen to the story here. Download the story here. Read the transcript here.

Census to Change Categories on Race

The Associated Press
2012-08-09

The Census Bureau wants to make broad changes to its surveys to keep pace with changing notions of race. The changes would drop use of the term “Negro,” leaving a choice of “black” or “African-American.” It would count Hispanics as separate from blacks and whites. It would also add write-in categories that would allow Middle Easterners and Arabs to specifically identify themselves. The census director, Robert M. Groves, says research during the 2010 census found that making these changes increased response rates and improved accuracy. The government currently defines Latino as an ethnicity. Census forms now instruct people to indicate if they have Hispanic origin and then check a race box such as “white” or “black.”