Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

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  • The Complexities of the Visible: Mexican Women’s Experiences of Racism, Mestizaje and National Identity

    The Complexities of the Visible: Mexican Women’s Experiences of Racism, Mestizaje and National Identity

    Goldsmiths College, University of London
    2006

    Monica Moreno Figueroa, Lecturer in Sociology
    Newcastle University, United Kingdom

    The thesis analyses the contemporary practices of racism in relation to discourses of mestizaje in Mexico. It focuses on the qualities of women’s experiences of racism and explores the significance of mestizaje in relation to Mexican discourses of race and nation. It provides a historical revision of the ways in which such discourses have developed in Mexico, emphasising the cultural conditions that make it possible to ‘think’ the nation, and relating them to the ways in which systems of differentiation amongst the population have operated. The thesis assesses the politics of difference in Mexico in relation to the ways in which notions of race and practices of racism have been detached from each other. For this, I analyse the historical development of the notion of mestizaje and the mestiza identity, and consider its impact and relevance in contemporary Mexico, calling into question official policies and public discourses that support the idea of the mestiza as the subject of national identity.

    Through focus group discussions and life-story interviews based on family photographic albums, I explore how the women who participated in this study understand and experience their racialised, gendered and classed bodies and national identity, in a context where racism has been rendered invisible. The thesis then looks at the specificity of the participants’ social location and analyses how these women today in Mexico think through the notions of racism, mestizaje, and national identity. The focus on the qualities of their everyday experience of racism led me to explore the significance of the role of emotions in revealing the lived experience of racism. In this way, my analysis associates racial and class displacement with inadequacy; beauty, ugliness and ordinariness with shame; and the anxiety about family belonging with slightedness; and exposes the contradictory and ambivalent ways in which the experiences of racism are lived and understood. The experience of racism is explored from the particular perspective of the visible, specifically looking at the relationship between visual representations of identities and racist practices, and in this context the ways in which women see themselves and perceive how they are seen by others: the meanings and metaphors of their own image.

    Read this thesis at the Integrated Catalogue of the British Library here.

  • Mutants, mudbloods, and futureheroes: Mixed race identity in contemporary narrative

    Mutants, mudbloods, and futureheroes: Mixed race identity in contemporary narrative

    The University of New Mexico
    May 2008
    327 pages
    Publication Number: AAT 3318087
    ISBN: 9780549676652

    Felecia Rose Caton-Garcia

    A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy American Studies The University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, New Mexico

    At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the United States is experiencing the expansion of a self-identified biracial, multiracial, and mixed race citizenry. This work examines the dominant tropes operative in the study of mixed race narrative cultural production, specifically film, fiction, and life-writing, in order to historicize and contextualize contemporary cultural production. In particular, this dissertation examines contemporary narratives with regard to the “tragic mulatto” trope in US culture throughout the 19th and 20th century and articulates the ways in which the abundance of contemporary work on mixed race both sustains and resists old archetypes and narratives. To this end, a survey of life-writing, fiction, and speculative film and fiction of the past fifteen years is conducted to determine new narrative tropes governing mixed race identity, particularly those identities that deviate from the historical black/white binary of biracial identity.

    While some texts remain grounded in the idea of the mixed race person as deficient or problematic with regards to race and gender identity development, the dissertation identifies a general turn away from the “tragic mulatto” archetype, and a turn toward the mixed race identity as a holistic hybrid identity that is more than the sum of its parts. The study reveals that contemporary renderings of mixed race identity have become transnational, dynamic, unsettling, and synergistic. Further, the emergent tropes in mixed race narratives suggest hybridity as the inevitable future of humanity and some contemporary texts suggest that this hybridity is the mechanism through which humanity will progress toward racial equity and substantive democratic principles. These new narratives are explicated, analyzed, and critiqued with regard to their function in contemporary United States culture and politics.

    Table of Contents

    • Chapter One—Beguiling and Mysterious: Multiracialism Comes of Age
      • The Mulatto Millennium
      • A Note on Terms
      • Interracial Intimacy and Miscegenation in U.S. History and Law
      • Mixed Race in the Social Sciences
      • The Tragic Mulatto y Mas: the Need for a Hybrid Criticism
    • Chapter Two—Like Mother Like Daughter?: The Poetics of Mixed Race Autobiography
      • “Likeness” and Culture
      • A Matter of Perspective: The Autobiographical Impulse
      • Hands Across the Ouija Board: The Process of Writing Autobiography
      • Who Are Your People?: Racial Identity and Family
      • “Don’t ask so many questions”: The Color of Family
      • “I find family there”: Choosing Blackness in Bulletproof Diva
      • Beyond Family: Class, Gender, and Sexuality in Racial Formation
      • Blood and Water
    • Chapter Three—Graceful Monsters: Mixed Race, Desire, Love, and Family in Contemporary Fiction
      • The Borders of the Tragic Mulatto
      • Hybrid Arts: The Use of Aesthetics to Narrate Mixed Race Identity
      • The Man in the Mirror: Double-Consciousness, Alternative Realities, and Mixed Race in Diaz, Alexie, Tenorio, and Davies
    • Chapter Four—Vin Ordinaire: Hollywood Film and the Mixed Race Futurehero
      • Geek Nation: The Rise of Science Fiction in Hollywood Film
      • Beautiful Mutants: Transgressive Bodies and Futuresexuals
      • Saving Humanity, Sacrificing Self: Tragedy and Triumph for the New Mulatto
    • Chapter Five—Mudbloods, Mutants, and Mulattos: New Speculative Fiction
      • Multiplicities: Histories, Futures, Realities, Races, Genders
      • Technologies of Hybridity: William Gibson and China Mieville
      • Half-Blood Magic: Harry Potter’s Muddy Dilemma
    • Conclusion—Synergy and Symbiosis: What’s at Stake in the Stories We Tell
      • References Cited

    Read or purchase the dissertation here.

  • “They Call It Marriage”: the Louisiana Interracial Family and the Making of American Legitimacy

    “They Call It Marriage”: the Louisiana Interracial Family and the Making of American Legitimacy

    Book Manuscript In Progress

    Diana Irene Williams, Assistant Professor of History, Law and Gender Studies
    University of Southern California

    Winner of the 2008 William Nelson Cromwell Dissertation Prize in Legal History.

    “They Call it Marriage” examines interracial marriage between black women and white men in nineteenth-century Louisiana. It explores how broad political and social struggles affected the ways white men and black women related to each other. And it considers why mid-nineteenth-century Louisiana was such an important setting for national struggles over race, gender, legitimacy, and power.

    After the Civil War, Louisiana authorities repealed the interracial marriage prohibition and permitted retroactive legitimation of “private religious” marriages. In doing so, they exposed an obscure past in which many had refused to submit to the law as authoritatively given. Some people laid claim to the language of legitimate matrimony in defiance of state law, demanding justice on their own terms and with a keen awareness of competing regional, religious, and civil jurisdictions. In highlighting the perspective of those outside the legal profession, I focus on law as a terrain of struggle rather than a fixed set of rules.

    The use of interracial marriage laws to regulate the inheritance of both property and social status dated back to Louisiana’s earliest French colonial government. Mandating that mixed-race children inherit the status of their (black) mother only, these regulations established the parameters of enslaved and racialized populations. Because legal kinship affected titles to household property in Louisiana, these laws encouraged distant kin and creditors to monitor interracial families’ internal affairs…

    …The disputed illegitimate past of Louisiana interracial families had significance beyond the state’s borders. This manuscript traces the rhetoric of interracial genealogy and racial indeterminacy in antecedents of Plessy v. Ferguson. Louisiana authorities’ persistence in invoking racial fluidity well into the 1890s complicates historians’ efforts to locate a transition point at which the region exchanged a fluid Latin racial system for a strictly binary American one. In this regard, “They Call it Marriage” explores the gendered history of private life in order to offer a means of reconsidering the nature of Jim Crow segregation.

    Chapters

    1. Licensing Marriage in Early Louisiana
    2. “Religion Law” vs. Civil Law
    3. Quadroon Balls, Plaçage, and Consensus Narratives
    4. Concubinage and Legal Narratives
    5. Forced Heirs and Family Drama
    6. Interracial Marriage and the Law in Post-emancipation Louisiana
    7. “Bastards Begat by their Masters”

    Read the entire description here.

  • Contentious Legacies: Mixed-Race in the Age of Colorblindess and Beyond

    Contentious Legacies: Mixed-Race in the Age of Colorblindess and Beyond

    University of Illinois, Urbana-Champiagn
    Asian American Cultural Center
    2010-03-30
    12:00 CDT (Local Time)

    Tessa Winklemann

    This presentation is about Mixed Race issues, the 2010 Census, and the history of the construction of race and the census in the United States.

    For more information, click here.

  • Professor G. Reginald Daniel to be Featured Guest on Mixed Chicks Chat

    Professor G. Reginald Daniel to be Featured Guest on Mixed Chicks Chat

    Mixed Chicks Chat (The only live weekly show about being racially and culturally mixed. Also, founders of the Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival) Hosted by Fanshen Cox and Heidi W. Durrow
    Website: TalkShoe™ (Keywords: Mixed Chicks)
    Episode: #146 – Professor G. Reginald Daniel
    When: Wednesday, 2010-03-24 22:00Z (17:00 EDT, 14:00 PDT)

    G. Reginald Daniel, Professor of Sociology
    University of California, Santa Barbara

    Key Publications: Race and Multiraciality in Brazil and the United States: Converging Paths? (2006); “Multiracial Identity in Global Perspective: The United States, Brazil, and South Africa,” New Faces in a Changing America: Multiracial Identity in the 21st Century (2002); More Than Black? Multiracial Identity and the New Racial Order (2001); “Black and White Identity in the New Millennium: Unsevering the Ties That Bind,” The Multiracial Experience: Racial Borders as the New Frontier (1996); “Passers and Pluralists: Subverting the Racial Divide,” Racially Mixed People in America (1992).

    Most Recent Publications:

    From February 2003: G. Reginald Daniel discusses his book, More Than Black? Multiracial Identity and the New Racial Order.

  • Race marks: Miscegenation in nineteenth-century American fiction

    Race marks: Miscegenation in nineteenth-century American fiction

    University of Massachusetts, Amherst
    1997
    195 pages

    Kimberly Anne Hicks

    This dissertation examines the process of miscegenation in the work of four authors who occupy pivotal positions in American writing about race. It is concerned with a variety of fictional and non-fictional texts produced by William Wells Brown, George Washington Cable, Pauline Hopkins, and Thomas Dixon between the years 1846 and 1915. This study will examine how miscegenation provided these authors with a way of narrativizing American race relations in a period which encompasses slavery, emancipation, Reconstruction and Redemption, as well as the creation of a segregated South and an imperial America.

    Individual chapters engage in cultural as well as literary analyses by reading mixed-race characters as literary signs which gave rise to a wide range of narrative possibilities, as political instruments which allowed each author to intervene in contemporary debates about the construction of American history, the nature of race, and laws designed to regulate interracial contact. While remaining aware of the personal and political differences which separate the writers under consideration, this study notes similarities in the ways in which each makes use of mixed-race characters and miscegenation plots.

    Attention to gender likewise unites the individual chapters. The fact of mixed parentage signifies differently for male and female characters, no matter what plot these authors chose. For each, the figure of the quadroon woman presented special problems, as indicated by the sheer number of pages each devoted to telling child re-telling her story. This study traces the permutations of plots centered around quadroon women by reading a number of fictional works by each of the primary authors. It also examines the ways in which constructions of gender are overdetermined by methods of race representation which appear in the works of African-American writers, as well as in that of their white counterparts.

    By focusing on a works which illustrate the interconnectedness between black and white Americans from slavery through segregation–works created by authors who themselves represent, in their persons as well as their politics, a variety of subject positions–this dissertation seeks to locate itself in the context of current efforts to produce a new canon of American literature, one more truly reflective of the varied nature of American life. It examines a literature not of race, but of race relations; one which repeatedly describes positions on a racial continuum too complicated to be characterized in terms of black and white.

    Read or purchase the dissertation here.

  • Acts of Intercourse: “Miscegenation” in three 19th Century American Novels

    Acts of Intercourse: “Miscegenation” in three 19th Century American Novels

    American Studies in Scandinavia
    Volume 27 (1995)
    pages 126-141

    Domhnall Mitchell, Professor of English
    Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway

    Until this period of the evening, the duties of hospitality and the observances of religion had prevented familiar discourse. But the regular offices of the housewife were now ended for the night; the handmaidens had all retired to their wheels; and as the bustle of a busy and more stirring domestic industry ceased, the cold and selfrestrained silence, which had hitherto only been broken by distant and brief observations of courtesy, or by some wholesome allusion to the lost and probationary condition of man, seemed to invite an intercourse of a more general character.

    James Fenimore Cooper, The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish (Columbus, Ohio; Charles E. Merrill, 1970).

    In a 19th century American novel like Cooper’s The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish, intercourse usually means conversation, an important activity which supports, sustains and secures a community’s perception of its shared identity. If we take the above quotation as an example, Cooper manages to convey a sense of common purpose and harmonious enterprise, to such an extent that the people described seem almost to function as members of one family. But intercourse of another, sexual kind also takes place in the novel, between one of the white daughters of this family and a Narragansett sachem. The second kind of intercourse takes place outside the confines of, and disturbs the kind of stability and integrity represented by, the first. The unanimity of social institutions is disrupted and threatened first by the arrival and second by the acceptance of the Indian within the white family. When it is remembered that, in 19th century American history, the word intercourse is further associated with a series of acts regulating the transaction of land and goods between European Americans and Native Americans, and that there was contention about exactly what kind of contact, if any, should be maintained between the two groups, then it can be seen that this single word carries with it a complex sequence of literary and cultural connotations.

    Intercourse, then, is a useful term with which to begin looking at aspects of relations between Native American Indians and Europeans in certain 19th Century American novels. For the word can have several definitions. It implies physical intimacy; it can also mean commercial exchange, including the transaction of property: and finally, it suggests discourse, or dialogue. These different meanings indicate different levels we might profitably look at.

    In its modern sense, intercourse suggests sexual relations, and several 19th century novels imagine the possibility of union between Indians and Whites. I have chosen three of these; Hobomok, written by Lydia Maria Child and published in 1824; Catharine Maria Sedgwick‘s Hope Leslie, which appeared in 1827; and the second, revised, 1833 edition of The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish (or The Borderers), by James Fenimore Cooper, which was first printed in 1829. Although all three of the works under consideration were written by Americans in the 1820s, the time and place of their narration is 17th century New England, so there is an element of dialogue between texts and historical contexts. The dialogue also involves a reconstruction of early colonial history. These novels integrate or negotiate with Indian versions of historical events as well as attempting to create colourful rather than credible Native characters. For example, in 1653, a woman was hanged for taking the Indian demigod Hobbamock as her husband, and it is therefore interesting that Child’s novel Hobomok begins with Mary Conant going into the forest late at night and meeting the Indian character of the same name, who she later marries and has a child by.  Instead of the dominant 17th century imperatives of war and suspicion, Hobomok dramatizes the possibility of an assimilation which is at once sexual and cultural. And yet, what I intend to show in this article is that Indian loving is in fact not very different in its final results from the kind of Indian hating which characterized later works such as James Hall’s Sketches of History, Life and Manners in the West (1835) and Robert Montgomery Bird’s Jibbenainosay, or Nick of the Woods (1837)…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Multiracial students speak out on campus

    Multiracial students speak out on campus

    The Vermont Cynic
    2010-03-15

    Patrick Dowd

    The question of racial identity isn’t always black and white. 

    Multiracial students on campus  say that struggle for identity extends beyond stereotypes and name mispronunciations, according to the four student panelists who spoke on behalf of UVM’s multicultural students at Harris/Millis.

    “Since I came to UVM, I’ve become confused about my racial identity,” senior Tania Khartabil said. “I don’t feel authentic anymore.”

    The panelists all shared this feeling and expressed similar frustration in constantly being culturally labeled without acknowledgement of their mixed identity…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Taboo: Essays on Culture and Education

    Taboo: Essays on Culture and Education

    Peter Lang Publishing Group
    2010
    250 pages
    Paparback ISBN: 978-1-4331-0840-2

    Edited by:

    Shirley R. Steinberg
    McGill University

    Lindsay Cornish

    Taboo: Essays on Culture and Education is a collection of 15 compelling and controversial articles from the pages of Taboo: The Journal of Cultural Studies and Education. Scholars including Henry A. Giroux, Deborah P. Britzman, and Lawrence Grossberg explore intersections of race, gender, sexuality, social class, and power by examining cultural icons such as Forrest Gump and Borat, and social phenomena including cheerleading and the depiction of Jewish mothers on television. Taboo: Essays on Culture and Education is an indispensable resource for cultural studies scholars and students alike.

    Table of Contents

    • Lawrence Grossberg: What’s in a Name (One More Time)
    • Deborah P. Britzman: What Is This Thing Called Love?
    • Aaron D. Gresson III: Postmodern America and the Multicultural Crisis: Reading Forrest Gump as the “Call Back to Whiteness”
    • Henry A. Giroux: Black, Bruised, and Read All Over: Public Intellectuals and the Politics of Race
    • Kurt Kors: The Scenography of HIV Infection for Young Gay Men: Educating Emotion and Desire
    • Kathalene A. Razzano: Tiger Woods: A Discursive Struggle over the Construction of a Multiracial Image
    • Awad Ibrahim: “Hey, Whadup Homeboy?” Identification, Desire, and Consumption Hip Hop, Performativity, and the Politics of Becoming Black
    • Molly Quinn: Getting Thrown Around: Little Girls and Cheerleading
    • Myrna Hant: TV Jewish Mothers: The Creation of a Multiethnic Antiheroine
    • Michelle Stack: Made for TV: Selling Kids’ Suffering and Creating Angels to Save Them
    • Priya Parmar: Cultural Studies and Rap: The Poetry of an Urban Lyricist
    • Eric J. Weiner: Constructions of Innocence in Times of War: Breaking into the Hegemony of Peace
    • Dennis Parsons: Almost Feminist: Truth, the Trope of the Writer, and the Male Gaze in Almost Famous
    • Roymieco A. Carter/Leila E. Villaverde: Laughing at Ourselves (in the Dark): Comedy and the Critical Reflections of Social Actions

  • Zadie Smith: Critical Essays

    Zadie Smith: Critical Essays

    Peter Lang Publishing Group
    March 2008
    221 pages
    Paparback ISBN: 9978-0-8204-8806-6

    Edited by:

    Tracey L. Walters, Associate Professor of Literature
    Stony Brook University

    Zadie Smith: Critical Essays is a timely collection of critical articles examining how Zadie Smith‘s novels and short stories interrogate race, postcolonialism, and identity. Essays explore the various ways Smith approaches issues of race, either by deconstructing notions of race or interrogating the complexity of biracial identity; and how Smith takes on contemporary debates concerning notions of Britishness, Englishness, and Black Britishness. Some essays also consider the shifting identities adopted by those who identify with both British and West Indian, South Asian, or East Asian ancestry. Other essays explore Smith’s contemporary postcolonial approach to Britain’s colonial legacy, and the difference between how immigrants and first-generation British-born children deal with cultural alienation and displacement. This thought-provoking collection is a much-needed critical tool for students and researchers in both contemporary British literature and Diasporic literature and culture.

    Table of Contents

    • Tracey L. Walters: Introduction
    • Matthew Paproth: The Flipping Coin: The Modernist and Postmodernist Zadie Smith
    • Ulka Anjaria: On Beauty and Being Postcolonial: Aesthetics and Form in Zadie Smith
    • Urszula Terentowicz-Fotyga: The Impossible Self and the Poetics of the Urban Hyperreal in Zadie Smith’s “The Autograph Man”
    • Maeve Tynan: “Only Connect”: Intertextuality and Identity in Zadie Smith’s “On Beauty”
    • Raphael Dalleo: Colonization in Reverse: “White Teeth” as Caribbean Novel
    • Susan Alice Fischer: “Gimme Shelter”: Zadie Smith’s “On Beauty”
    • Tracey L. Walters: Still Mammies and Hos: Stereotypical Images of Black Women in Zadie Smith’s Novels
    • Sharon Raynor: From the Dispossessed to the Decolonized: From Samuel Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners to Zadie Smith’s “Hanwell in Hell”
    • Lexi Stuckey: Red and Yellow, Black and White: Color-Blindness as Disillusionment in Zadie Smith’s “Hanwell in Hell”
    • Kris Knauer: The Root Canals of Zadie Smith: London’s Intergenerational Adaptation
    • Z. Esra Mirze: Fundamental Differences in Zadie Smith’s “White Teeth”
    • Katarzyna Jakubiak: Simulated Optimism: The International Marketing of “White Teeth”