Mixed Race Studies

Native Guard: Poems

Mariner Books an Imprint of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
2007-04-03
64 pages
Trim Size: 5.50 x 8.25
Paperback ISBN-13/EAN: 9780618872657; ISBN-10: 0618872655

Natasha Trethewey, Charles Howard Candler Professor of English and Creative Writing
Emory University

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize

Through elegiac verse that honors her mother and tells of her own fraught childhood, Natasha Trethewey confronts the racial legacy of her native Deep South—where one of the first black regiments, the Louisiana Native Guards, was called into service during the Civil War. Trethewey’s resonant and beguiling collection is a haunting conversation between personal experience and national history.

Excerpt:

Miscegenation

In 1965 my parents broke two laws of Mississippi;
they went to Ohio to marry, returned to Mississippi.

They crossed the river into Cincinnati, a city whose name
begins with a sound like sin, the sound of wrong – mis in Mississippi.

A year later they moved to Canada, followed a route the same
as slaves, the train slicing the white glaze of winter, leaving Mississippi.

Faulkner’s Joe Christmas was born in winter, like Jesus, given his name
for the day he was left at the orphanage, his race unknown in Mississippi.

My father was reading War and Peace when he gave me my name.
I was born near Easter, 1966, in Mississippi.

When I turned 33 my father said, It’s your Jesus year – you’re the same
age he was when he died. It was spring, the hills green in Mississippi.

I know more than Joe Christmas did. Natasha is a Russian name –
though I’m not; it means Christmas child, even in Mississippi.

The Aborigines Act, 1911 [Australia]
1911-12-07
Number 1048
Source: Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies

An Act to make provision for the better Protection and Control of the Aboriginal and Half-caste Inhabitants of the State of South Australia.

1. This Act may be cited as ‘‘ The Aborigines Act, 1911.”
2. The Ordinance No. 12 of 1844, being an Ordinance to provide for the protection, maintenance, and up-bringing of orphans and other destitute children of the aborigines, is hereby repealed : Provided that such repeal shall not alter the effect of the doing or omission of any thing before the passing of this Act, and shall not affect any right granted, obligation imposed, liability incurred, or any offence committed by, under, or against the said Ordinance, or any proceedings commenced before or after the passing of this Act with respect to any of such matters or things…

• …10. (1) The Chief Protector shall be the legal guardian of every aboriginal and every half-caste child, notwithstanding that any such child has a parent or other relative living, until such child attains the age of twenty-one years, except whilst such child is a State child within the meaning of ‘‘ The State Children Act, 1895,” or any Act amending or substituted for that Act. (2) Every Protector shall, within his district, be the local guardian of every such child within his district. (3) Such local guardian shall have and exercise the powers and duties prescribed…

Read the entire act here.

The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture

University of Pennsylvania Press
2000
384 pages
6 1/8 x 9 1/4
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8122-3541-8
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8122-1722-3
Ebook ISBN: 978-0-8122-0014-0

Roxann Wheeler, Associate Professor of English
Ohio State University

In the 1723 Journal of a Voyage up the Gambia, an English narrator describes the native translators vital to the expedition’s success as being “Black as Coal.” Such a description of dark skin color was not unusual for eighteenth-century Britons—but neither was the statement that followed: “here, thro’ Custom, (being Christians) they account themselves White Men.” The Complexion of Race asks how such categories would have been possible, when and how such statements came to seem illogical, and how our understanding of the eighteenth century has been distorted by the imposition of nineteenth and twentieth century notions of race on an earlier period.

Wheeler traces the emergence of skin color as a predominant marker of identity in British thought and juxtaposes the Enlightenment’s scientific speculation on the biology of race with accounts in travel literature, fiction, and other documents that remain grounded in different models of human variety. As a consequence of a burgeoning empire in the second half of the eighteenth century, English writers were increasingly preoccupied with differentiating the British nation from its imperial outposts by naming traits that set off the rulers from the ruled; although race was one of these traits, it was by no means the distinguishing one. In the fiction of the time, non-European characters could still be “redeemed” by baptism or conversion and the British nation could embrace its mixed-race progeny. In Wheeler’s eighteenth century we see the coexistence of two systems of racialization and to detect a moment when an older order, based on the division between Christian and heathen, gives way to a new one based on the assertion of difference between black and white.

Table of Contents

• List of Illustrations
• Introduction. The Empire of Climate: Categories of Race in Eighteenth-Century Britain
• 1. Christians, Savages, and Slaves: From the Mediterranean to the Atlantic
• 2. Racializing Civility: Violence and Trade in Africa
• 3. Romanticizing Racial Difference: Benevolent Subordination and the Midcentury Novel
• 4. Consuming Englishness: On the Margins of Civil Society
• 5. The Politicization of Race: The Specter of the Colonies in Britain
• Epilogue. Theorizing Race and Racism in the Eighteenth Century
• Notes
• Index
• Acknowledgments