Mixed Race Studies

The Widows

NeWest Press
April 1998
256 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-896300-30-6

Suzette Mayr

Hannelore, Clotilde, and Frau Schnadelhuber are three old women tired of living in a world which does not allow old women to be seen or heard. Deciding to shake their fists at such a world, the three women plot to go over Niagara Falls in a bright orange space-age barrel. With the assistance of Cleopatra Maria, the 26-year-old genius granddaughter of Hannelore and grandniece of Clotilde, the four women steal the barrel from a travelling show and drive it across Canada determined to prove their worth to a world devoted to youth.

Moon Honey

NeWest Press
September 1995
224 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-896300-00-9

Suzette Mayr

In this modern, magical tale, Carmen and Griffin, young and white, are goofy, head-over-heels in love. When Carmen turns into a black woman, Griffin thrills at a love turned exotic. But Carmen’s transformation means trouble for Griffin’s racist mother, already struggling with a new lover and a husband nicknamed God. The question is, can love be relied on to save the day?

Moon Honey is an inventive, funny, sexy tale of love affairs and magical transformations.

“The Quiltings of Human Flesh”—Constructions of Racial Hybridity in Contemporary African-Canadian Literature

University of Greifswald, Greifswald, Germany
2010-05-02
366 pages

Heike Bast

Dissertation to obtain the academic degree of Doctor of Philosophy, Division of the Humanities, University of Greifswald

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• ‘RACE’ MATTERS’: A PERSONAL NOTE ON BELONGING
• 1. INTRODUCTION: ‘SOLE OR WHOLE’ – QUILTING THE RACIALIZED SUBJECT
• 2. SIGNIFYING THE IN-BETWEEN: ‘RACE’, ‘RACIAL HYBRIDITY’ AND QUESTIONS OF BELONGING
  • 2.1. The Language of ‘Race’ – Notes on Terminology
  • 2.2. Identities in Flux: Discourses on ‘Race’ and Subjectivity
    • 2.2.1 ‘Race Theory’ – a Brief Historical Review
    • 2.2.2. “Identities Without Guarantees” and the Critique of Sameness: Contemporary Race Theory
  • 2.3. Uncertain Crossings: Racial Hybridity and Post-Colonial Belonging
• 3. APPROACHING AFRICAN-CANADIAN BORDERLANDS
  • 3.1. The African-Canadian Experience: Unearthing the History of Miscegenation in Canada
  • 3.2. Canadian Multiculturalism and Cultural Violence: Mixed-Race Identities and the Intricacies of Belonging
  • 3.3. Living and Writing the In-Between: Tracing a Black Literary Tradition in Canada
  • 3.4. From ‘Tragic Mulatto’ to ‘Zebra Poetics’? – Racial Hybridity in African-Canadian literature
• 4. EXPLORING AFRICAN-CANADIAN BORDERLANDS
  • 4.1. Borderlands Poetics in the Writings of Suzette Mayr
    • 4.1.1. Suzette Mayr’s Zebra Talk (1991)
    • 4.1.2. Metamorphoses and the Racialized Body: Suzette Mayr’s Moon Honey (1995)
    • 4.1.3. Canadian Hodgepodge in Suzette Mayr’s The Widows (1998)
  • 4.2. ‘Reverse Doublestuff’, or from Halfness to Wholeness: The Poetry of Mercedes Baines
  • 4.3. Polyvalent Blackness in African-Canadian Drama: Difference and Healing in Maxine Bailey’s and Sharon Lewis’s Sistahs (1994)
  • 4.4. ‘An Exile in the Land of My Birth’: Racial Mixture and National Belonging in the Autobiographical Writings of Camille Hernandez-Ramdwar
  • 4.5. Anti-Mulatto Rhetoric in Haitian and Haitian-Canadian History, Literature, and Culture
    • 4.5.1. Unmasking the Carnival: Max Dorsinville’s Erzulie Loves Shango (1998)
    • 4.5.2. Torment, Memory and Desire: Gérard Étienne’s La Pacotille (1991)
  • 4.6. ‘In Pursuit of Wholeness’: ‘Race’, Class and Black Masculinity in Kim Barry Brunhuber’s Kameleon Man (2003)
• 5. ‘FROM SOLE TO WHOLE’ – AFRICAN-CANADIAN MIXED-RACE POETICS
• 6. BIBLIOGRAPHY
• APPENDIX I: BIO-BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES ON AUTHORS
• APPENDIX II: INTERVIEW WITH SUZETTE MAYR (JULY 25TH, 2009)
• Danksagung

Read the entire dissertation here.

Becoming Mexipino: Multiethnic Identities and Communities in San Diego [Floyd Review]

The Journal of San Diego History
Volume 59, Number 4 (Fall 2013)
pages 291-292

Carlton Floyd, Associate Professor of English
University of San Diego

Becoming Mexipino: Multiethnic Identities and Communities in San Diego. By Rudy P. Guevarra, Jr. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012. Maps, photographs, tables, notes, and index. 256 pp. $25.95 paper.

Becoming Mexipino: Multiethnic Identities and Communities in San Diego by Rudy P. Guevarra Jr. deftly explores his Filipino and Mexican familial history from its origins in Spanish colonialism to its current Mexipino configurations in San Diego. Addressing a subject that has received little extended critical attention, Guevarra argues that Spain’s sixteenth-century colonial enterprises brought Mexicans and Filipinos together in ways that facilitated their intimate interaction. First, they shared or, more aptly, endured enslavement and indentured servitude as well as the interest in surviving these perilous conditions. Second, Mexicans and Filipinos took on a common language and religion: Spanish and Catholicism. Third, they discovered themselves in possession of a similar sense of familial arrangements—in the notions of godparents and in the practice of coming-of-age ceremonies for young women, to cite two examples. These various conditions facilitated intimate interethnic relationships then, and foreshadowed similar intimate interactions centuries later, particularly in the western parts of the United States…

Read the entire review here.

Science in support of racial mixture: Charles-Augustin Vandermonde’s Enlightenment program for improving the health and beauty of the human species

Endeavor
Available online 2013-12-25 (Corrected Proof)
DOI: 10.1016/j.endeavour.2013.11.001

Clara Pinto-Correia
Instituto de Investigação Científica Bento da Rocha Cabral, Lisboa, Portugal
Centro de Estudos de História e Filosofia das Ciências, Évora, Portugal

João Lourenço Monteiro
Departamento de Ciências Sociais Aplicadas
Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal

In 1756, while he was regent of the Faculté de Médecine in Paris, Charles-Augustin Vandermonde published his Essai sur la Manière de Perfectionner l’Espèce Humaine. This treatise was situated within the French-led medical movement of meliorism, meant to increase public health by boosting the medical arrangement of marriages from all strata of society. What made Vandermonde different from his colleagues is that he was not just looking for a way to improve the health of society: he was also proposing a series of measures meant to increase the beauty of humankind. And, for the first time in the history of European medicine, he advocated mixed-race couplings as a means to obtain the best results. This latter development is so unexpected in the global setting of the Enlightenment that we could arguably hail Vandermonde as the founding father of what Michel Foucault later called ‘biopolitique’.

Read or purchase the article here.

Memoirs of Elleanor Eldridge

West Virginia University Press
December 2013
160 pages
Cloth ISBN: 978-1-935978-24-4
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-935978-23-7
ePub ISBN: 978-1-935978-25-1
PDF ISBN: 978-1-938228-64-3

Original Text by Frances Harriet Whipple (1805-1878) with Elleanor Eldridge (1794-1862)

Edited by:

Joycelyn K. Moody, Sue E. Denman Distinguished Chair in American Literature and Professor of English
University of Texas, San Antonio

Elleanor Eldridge, born of African and US indigenous descent in 1794, operated a lucrative domestic services business in nineteenth century Providence, Rhode Island. In defiance of her gender and racial background, she purchased land and built rental property from the wealth she gained as a business owner. In the 1830s, Eldridge was defrauded of her property by a white lender. In a series of common court cases as defendant and plaintiff, she managed to recover it through the Rhode Island judicial system. In order to raise funds to carry out this litigation, her memoir, which includes statements from employers endorsing her respectable character, was published in 1838. Frances Harriet Whipple, an aspiring white writer in Rhode Island, narrated and co-authored Eldridge’s story, expressing a proto-feminist outrage at the male “extortioners” who caused Eldridge’s loss and distress.

With the rarity of Eldridge’s material achievements aside, Memoirs of Elleanor Eldridge forms an exceptional antebellum biography, chronicling Eldridge’s life from her birth. Because of Eldridge’s exceptional life as a freeborn woman of color entrepreneur, it constitutes a counter-narrative to slave narratives of early 19th-century New England, changing the literary landscape of conventional American Renaissance studies and interpretations of American Transcendentalism.

With an introduction by Joycelyn K. Moody, this new edition contextualizes the extraordinary life of Elleanor Eldridge—from her acquisition of wealth and property to the publication of her biography and her legal struggles to regain stolen property. Because of her mixed-race identity, relative wealth, local and regional renown, and her efficacy in establishing a collective of white women patrons, this biography challenges typical African and indigenous women’s literary production of the early national period and resituates Elleanor Eldridge as an important cultural and historical figure of the nineteenth century.

Read the original text from 1838 here.

De Blasio’s Daughter Reveals Substance Abuse

The New York Times
2013-12-24

Javier C. Hernandez and Michael M. Grynbaum

Chiara de Blasio, right, with her parents in September. Michael Appleton for The New York Times

Days before her father’s inauguration, the 19-year-old daughter of Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio disclosed a history of drug and alcohol abuse that his campaign had taken pains to shield throughout a candidacy that relied heavily on the image of a happy and tight-knit family from Brooklyn.

In a carefully crafted video distributed on Tuesday by her father’s staff, Chiara de Blasio spoke in candid terms about a battle with depression throughout her adolescence that led to drinking and drug use, habits that worsened when she was attending college in California last year.

“It didn’t start out as like a huge thing for me, but then it became a really huge thing for me,” Ms. de Blasio said in the five-minute video, in which she sat alone on screen, accompanied by soft piano music…

…Such is the celebrity of Mr. de Blasio’s children that Ms. de Blasio’s announcement on Tuesday was met with a statement from the director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy at the White House, who praised her “tremendous bravery in speaking out about her recovery.”…

…Hank Sheinkopf, a political consultant, said the city had elected a family when it chose Mr. de Blasio in November, and that New Yorkers should expect his wife and children to continue to play a prominent role…

Read the entire article here.