Mixed Race Studies

The colour of money in multiracial Jamaica

The Jamaica Gleaner
Jamaica, West Indies
2012-09-23

Carolyn Cooper, Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies
University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica

On a flight from Miami several years ago, I sat next to a little girl who seemed to be about 10 or so years of age. She was looking through a magazine and came across a picture of three little girls – black, white and brown. I mischievously asked her, “Which one of them looks like you?” She picked the black child.

I then asked her, “Which one do you look like?” And, believe it or not, she chose the brown child. ‘Mi nearly dead.’ I wondered if she had misunderstood. After all, it was a kind of trick question I was asking her about racial identity. But no, she did understand. As far as she was concerned, the black girl looked like her but she did not look like the black girl. And, in a funny way, it made perfectly good sense. It’s OK for the black girl to look like her; but not for her to look like the black girl.

So who is responsible for this crazy conundrum? Was this just an exceptional case of a little child confused by the ‘fool-fool’ questions of a nosy adult? Or were the little girl’s curious answers a sign of our collective paranoia about race in Jamaica? How does our national motto complexify the problem, as the Americans say? Oh, yes! If you can simplify, it’s perfectly logical to complexify…

Read the entire essay here.

Prestigious grant award for research on President Obama

Edge Hill University
Ormskirk, Lancashire, United Kingdom
News
2010-06-04

Edge Hill University and key partners have been awarded a prestigious grant to develop a research network on The Presidency of Barack Obama.

The Arts and Humanities Research Council has given an award of £31,320 to the institution in collaboration with the University of Manchester.

The special two-year project, which will run from January 2011 to December 2012, is particularly unique because the research will be undertaken while Obama is still in office and will cover topical issues and developments as they happen.

It will provide a unique opportunity to analyse key issues President Obama has had to deal with around race relations, foreign policies, the economy crisis and Obama’s wars. The funding will also be used to organise a series of high-profile lectures, the creation of an interactive website, a book, new teaching tools, a schools’ conference to run alongside the actual American presidential election in 2012, an exhibition and other community events.

Professor Kevern Verney, Associate Head of the History Department at Edge Hill, explained: “The election of Barack Obama in November 2008 was a key moment in the history of the United States as he was the first African American President. It attracted enormous popular and scholarly interest not just in America but around the world. The inspirational ideas and rhetoric of the Obama campaign generated high expectations of change. In sharp contrast to such high expectations the political realities confronting the new President could hardly have been more discouraging. From the outset his administration faced unprecedented domestic and foreign policy challenges, including the worst national and international economic crisis since the 1930s and involvement in two costly unresolved foreign wars, in Iraq and Afghanistan. Race also remains an issue.

“The success or failure of the Obama administration in addressing these issues will have profound implications not just for the citizens of the United states but also for governments and people around the world. This important project will discuss a number of key issues as they unfold and in the wake of either his continued presidency or his legacy.”…

Read the entire news release here.

The Victorian Reinvention of Race: New Racisms and the Problem of Grouping in the Human Sciences

Routledge
2010-06-23
248 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-415-65278-0
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-415-88125-8
eBook ISBN: 978-0-203-84498-4

Edward Beasley, Associate Professor of History
San Diego State University

In mid-Victorian England there were new racial categories based upon skin colour. The ‘races’ familiar to those in the modern west were invented and elaborated after the decline of faith in Biblical monogenesis in the early nineteenth century, and before the maturity of modern genetics in the middle of the twentieth. Not until the early nineteenth century would polygenetic and racialist theories win many adherents. But by the middle of the nineteenth century in England, racial categories were imposed upon humanity. How the idea of ‘race’ gained popularity in England at that time is the central focus of The Victorian Reinvention of Race: New Racisms and the Problem of Grouping in the Human Sciences.

Scholars have linked this new racism to some very dodgy thinkers. The Victorian Reinvention of Race examines a more influential set of the era’s writers and colonial officials, some French but most of them British. Attempting to do serious social analysis, these men oversimplified humanity into biologically-heritable, mentally and morally unequal, colour-based ‘races’. Thinkers giving in to this racist temptation included Alexis de Tocqueville when he was writing on Algeria; Arthur de Gobineau (who influenced the Nazis); Walter Bagehot of The Economist; and Charles Darwin (whose Descent of Man was influenced by Bagehot). Victorians on Race also examines officials and thinkers (such as Tocqueville in Democracy in America, the Duke of Argyll, and Governor Gordon of Fiji) who exercised methodological care, doing the hard work of testing their categories against the evidence. They analyzed human groups without slipping into racial categorization. Author Edward Beasley examines the extent to which the Gobineau-Bagehot-Darwin way of thinking about race penetrated the minds of certain key colonial governors. He further explores the hardening of the rhetoric of race-prejudice in some quarters in England in the nineteenth century – the processes by which racism was first formed.

Contents

1. Introduction – Reinventing Racism
2. Tocqueville and Race
3. Gobineau, Bagehot’s Precursor
4. The Common Sense of Walter Bagehot
5. Bagehot Rewrites Gobineau
6. Darwin and Race
7. Argyll, Race, and Degeneration
8. Frederick Weld and the Unnamed Neighbours
9. By Way of a Conclusion – Arthur Gordon

Racing Romance: Love, Power, and Desire Among Asian American/ White Couples

Rutgers University Press
June 2009
208 pages
6 x 9
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8135-4533-2
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8135-4532-5
Web PDF ISBN: 978-0-8135-4852-4

Kumiko Nemoto, Associate Professor of Sociology
Western Kentucky University

Despite being far from the norm, interracial relationships are more popular than ever. Racing Romance sheds special light on the bonds between whites and Asian Americans, an important topic that has not garnered well-deserved attention until now. Incorporating life-history narratives and interviews with those currently or previously involved with an interracial partner, Kumiko Nemoto addresses the contradictions and tensions—a result of race, class, and gender—that Asian Americans and whites experience.

Similar to black/white relationships, stereotypes have long played crucial roles in AsianAmerican/white encounters. Partners grapple with media representations of Asian women as submissive or hypersexual and Asian men are often portrayed as weak laborers or powerful martial artists. Racing Romance reveals how allegedly progressive interracial relationships remain firmly shaped by the logic of patriarchy and gender inherent to the ideal of marriage, family, and nation in America, even as this ideal is juxtaposed with discourses of multiculturalism and color blindness.

The Romance of Race: Incest, Miscegenation, and Multiculturalism in the United States, 1880-1930

Rutgers University Press
January 2013
240 pages
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8135-5462-4
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8135-5463-1
eBook ISBN: 978-0-8135-5464-8

Jolie A. Sheffer, Associate Professor, English and American Culture Studies
Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, Ohio

In the United States miscegenation is not merely a subject of literature and popular culture. It is in many ways the foundation of contemporary imaginary community. The Romance of Race examines the role of minority women writers and reformers in the creation of our modern American multiculturalism.

The national identity of the United States was transformed between 1880 and 1930 due to mass immigration, imperial expansion, the rise of Jim Crow, and the beginning of the suffrage movement. A generation of women writers and reformers—particularly women of color—contributed to these debates by imagining new national narratives that put minorities at the center of American identity. Jane Addams, Pauline Hopkins, Onoto Watanna (Winnifred Eaton), María Cristina Mena, and Mourning Dove (Christine Quintasket) embraced the images of the United States—and increasingly the world—as an interracial nuclear family. They also reframed public debates through narratives depicting interracial encounters as longstanding, unacknowledged liaisons between white men and racialized women that produced an incestuous, mixed-race nation.

By mobilizing the sexual taboos of incest and miscegenation, these women writers created political allegories of kinship and community. Through their criticisms of the nation’s history of exploitation and colonization, they also imagined a more inclusive future. As Jolie A. Sheffer identifies the contemporary template for American multiculturalism in the works of turn-of-the century minority writers, she uncovers a much more radical history than has previously been considered.

Quicksand and Passing

Rutgers University Press
1986
246 pages
Paper ISBN: 0-8135-1170-4

Nella Larsen (1891-1964)

Edited by

Deborah E. McDowell, Alice Griffin Professor of English
University of Virginia

Nella Larsen’s novels Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929) document the historical realities of Harlem in the 1920s and shed a bright light on the social world of the black bourgeoisie. The novels’ greatest appeal and achievement, however, is not sociological, but psychological. As noted in the editor’s comprehensive introduction, Larsen takes the theme of psychic dualism, so popular in Harlem Renaissance fiction, to a higher and more complex level, displaying a sophisticated understanding and penetrating analysis of black female psychology.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Notes to Introduction
• Selected Bibliography
• A Note on the Texts
• Quicksand
• Passing
• Explanatory Notes