Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

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  • Theatrical Medicine: Aboriginal performance, ritual and commemoration

    Theatrical Medicine: Aboriginal performance, ritual and commemoration

    The Medicine Project
    2008-03-25

    Michelle La Flamme

    Dr. Michelle La Flamme is an Afro-NDN performer, activist and educator who completed a Ph.D. at UBC [University of British Columbia] in English literature (May 2006). In her other life, she is an avid performer and has worked in film and video production. She tries her best to bridge the world of academia and her creative life and she is often asked to speak or perform at Canadian conferences addressing representations of race in contemporary Canadian art and literature. She was born and raised here on the “best Coast” and has had the good fortune of taking her ideas abroad as a guest lecturer in Germany, Spain and The Netherlands. These days she is particularly interested in Native/Black issues as her bloodlines encompass both sides of the 49th and include Métis, Creek and African-American strains. Currently, she teaches Canadian literature, Academic Writing, Introduction to Fiction and Introduction to Poetry at UBC. She makes the time to write, perform and be involved in community activism when she has the energy.

    There are many different definitions of Medicine. As a woman of mixed heritage (Métis, African-Canadian and Creek) I have been exposed to many Aboriginal teachings and ceremonies. My own definition of medicine is based on the teachings of traditional elders who have shared their cultural insight with me regarding the power and meaning of medicine. There are Medicine Wheel ceremonies that involve respect for the four directions and the balance between the physical, mental, spiritual and emotional aspects of an individual. Medicine can be understood in a psychological or philosophical way whereby individuals go through a form of catharsis when they are guided by the teachings. There is medicine involved in seeking advice from elders by way of offering them tobacco. There is participatory medicine involved in being a witness or participant in talking circles, and there is medicine that is physical in the form of tobacco, sweet grass, sage and cedar. There is medicine in ceremony whether these be sweat lodge ceremonies, moon lodge ceremonies, naming ceremonies or longhouse ceremonies. There is medicine in the practice of creating art whether that be carving, weaving or painting. Some traditional languages do not have a word for theatrical performance, so they use the closest word, which is ceremony. These cultural beliefs about medicine and practices which are referred to as medicinal reflect a belief in the power of performance and the possibility of the performance being medicinal for any and all of these cultural associations with medicine. The performances and plays that I examine in this essay can be understood as medicine in that they bring balance to the witnesses through honouring the deceased by way of naming rituals, they bring balance to communities by showing the humanity of Aboriginal women and they provide a cathartic ritual or ceremony for the release of trauma…

    Read the entire article here.

  • The erasure of the Afro element of mestizaje in modern Mexico: the coding of visibly black mestizos according to a white aesthetic in and through the discourse on nation during the cultural phase of the Mexican Revolution, 1920-1968

    The erasure of the Afro element of mestizaje in modern Mexico: the coding of visibly black mestizos according to a white aesthetic in and through the discourse on nation during the cultural phase of the Mexican Revolution, 1920-1968

    University of British Columbia
    September 2001
    166 pages

    Marco Polo Hernández Cuevas, Associate Professor of Spanish
    North Carolina Central University

    A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Faculty of Graduate Studies.

    “The Erasure of the Essential Afro Element of Mestizaje in Modern Mexico: The Coding of Visibly Black Mestizos According to a White Aesthetic In and Through the Discourse on Nation During the Cultural Phase of the Mexican Revolution, 1920-1968″ examines how the Afro elements of Mexican mestizaje were erased from the ideal image of the Mexican mestizo and how the Afro ethnic contributions were plagiarized in modern Mexico. It explores part of the discourse on nation in the narrative produced by authors who subscribed to the belief that only white was beautiful, between 1920 and 1968, during a period herein identified as the “cultural phase of the Mexican Revolution.” It looks at the coding and distortion of the image of visibly black Mexicans in and through literature and film, and unveils how the Afro element “disappeared” from some of the most popular images, tastes in music, dance, song, food, and speech forms viewed as cultural texts that, by way of official intervention, were made “badges” of Mexican national identity.

    The premise of this study is that the criollo elite and their allies, through government, disenfranchised Mexicans as a whole by institutionalizing a magic mirror—materialized in the narrative of nation—where mestizos can “see” only a partial reflection of themselves. The black African characteristics of Mexican mestizaje were totally removed from the ideal image of “Mexican-ness” disseminated in and out of the country. During this period, and in the material selected for study, wherever Afro-Mexicans—visibly Afro or not—are mentioned, they appear as “mestizos” oblivious of their African heritage and willingly moving toward becoming white.

    The analysis adopts as critical foundation two essays: “Black Phobia and the White Aesthetic in Spanish American Literature,” by Richard L. Jackson; and “Mass Visual Productions,” by James Snead. In “Black Phobia…” Jackson explains that, to define “superior and inferior as well as the concept of beauty” according to how white a person is perceived to be, is a “tradition dramatized in Hispanic Literature from Lope de Rueda’s Eufemia (1576) to the present” (467). For Snead, “the coding of blacks in film, as in the wider society, involves a history of images and signs associating black skin color with servile behavior and marginal status” (142).

    Read the entire thesis here.

  • Mixed Messages [Theatrical Play]

    Mixed Messages [Theatrical Play]

    Written by
    Michelle La Flamme
    University of British Columbia

    with help from

    Minelle Mahtani, Associate Professor of Geography and Planning
    University of Toronto

    Burcu Ozdemir

    Mixed Messages is a satirical look at the exclusive rules for membership in academic spaces and a jab at racial identity politics in the “mixed race” movement. It was first  performed as part of the monthly Transculturalisms series at UBC, Fall 2002.

    Read the script here.

  • Living, writing and staging racial hybridity

    Living, writing and staging racial hybridity

    University of British Columbia
    January 2006
    380 pages
    37 photographs/illustrations

    Lisa Michelle La Flamme

    A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Faculty of Graduate Studies.

    Contemporary Canadian literature and drama that features racial hybridity represents the racially hybrid soma text as a unique form of embodiment and pays particular attention to the power of the racialized gaze. The soma text is the central concept I have developed in order to identify, address, and interrogate the signifying qualities of the racially hybrid body. Throughout my dissertation, I use the concept of the body as a text in order to draw attention to the different visual “readings” that are stimulated by this form of embodiment. In each chapter, I identify the centrality of racially hybrid embodiment and investigate the power of the racialized gaze involved in the interpellation of these racially hybrid bodies.

    I have chosen to divide my study into discrete chapters and to use specific texts to illuminate my central concepts and to identify the strategies that can be used to express agency over the process of interpellation. In Chapter One I explain my methodology, define the terminology and outline the theories that are central to my analysis. In Chapter Two, I consider the experiences of mixed race people expressing agency by self-defining in the genre of autobiography. In Chapter Three, I explore the notion of racial drag as represented in fiction. In Chapter Four, I consider the ways in which the performative aspects of racial hybridity are represented by theatrical means and through performance.

    My analysis of the soma text and racialized gaze in these three genres offers critical terms that can be used to analyze representations of racial hybridity. By framing my analysis by way of the construction of the autobiographical voice I suggest that insight into the narrative uses of racial hybridity can be deepened and informed by a thorough analysis of the representation of the lived experience of racial hybridity in a given context. My crossgeneric and crossracial methodology implicitly asserts the importance of the inclusion of different types of racial hybridity in order to understand the power of the racially hybrid body as a signifier in contemporary Canadian literature and drama.

    Read the entire dissertation here.

  • Race: Social Fact, Biological Fiction

    Race: Social Fact, Biological Fiction

    Focus on Adoption
    Volume 17, Number 3
    June/July 2009
    pages 16-17

    Andrew Martindale, Assistant Professor of Anthropology
    University of British Columbia

    Andrew Martindale, an adoptive parent, and assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia, explains that the concept of race is man-made and, though it holds enormous power, has no biological basis.

    …Why races exist
    If races are not biological divisions, why do they exist? The answer is complex and partly that races exist because people want to believe they exist.  Although race identities can lead to racism, they also have considerable value in social terms. People who have been marginalized historically, based on a flawed concept of race, find solidarity with people who share the same history. Ironically, the concept of race can have a positive role in repudiating racism. For this reason, the concept of race is not likely to disappear any time soon…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Language and the Politics of Ethnicity in the Caribbean

    Language and the Politics of Ethnicity in the Caribbean

    Center for Research on Latin America and the Caribbean
    York University, Toronto, Ontario
    The Fourth Annual Jagan Lecture
    Presented at York University on 2002-03-02

    George Lamming, Visiting Professor
    Brown University

    The Jagan Lectures commemorate the life and vision of the late Dr. Cheddi Jagan, Caribbean thinker, politician, and political visionary. The series of annual lectures is founded upon the idea that the many and varied dimensions of Cheddi Jagan’s belief in the possibility of a New Global Human Order should be publicly ac-knowledged as part of his permanent legacy to the world.

    This lecture was given by the renowned Caribbean writer and intellect George Lamming as part of the Jagan Lecture Series commemorating the late Dr. Cheddi Jagan. Lamming looks at the problem of ethnicity – and especially of relations between Africans and Indians in the territories where they form almost equal populations, namely Guyana and Trinidad – from multiple perspectives. He re-calls dramatizing strategies employed by the old colonial power in this region, strategies that are still used today by contemporary politicians. He proposes that race and ethnicity are socially constructed categories, and draws upon many Barbadian examples to illustrate the absurdity of racial prejudice in a Caribbean context where cultural miscegenation is so deep, and where habits of perception, accents, and tastes are so mixed, that wearing several categories of identity at once is common to all. His conclusion, however, is far from being a curse: the challenges of cultural, linguistic and ra-cial/ethnic diversity faced by the Caribbean constitute part of the wealth of the region, as amply demonstrated by its cultural workers, and its distinct traditions and peoples.

    Read the entire paper here.

  • PAGE ONE — No Biological Basis For Race, Scientists Say / Distinctions prove to be skin deep

    PAGE ONE — No Biological Basis For Race, Scientists Say / Distinctions prove to be skin deep

    San Fransisco Gate Chronicle
    1998-02-23

    Charles Petit, Chronicle Science Writer

    This is one of a series of articles in “About Race,” a year-long public journalism project in which The Chronicle, KRON-TV, BayTV and KQED-FM are examining various aspects of race relations in the Bay Area.

    The President’s Initiative on Race, designed to attack prejudice by bringing people of different races together to talk, may have overlooked something.

    Namely, that the very concept of race is bogus and has no basis in biology, according to most scientists.

    “This dialogue on race is driving me up the wall,” said Jefferson Fish, a psychologist at St. John’s University in New York who has written extensively about race in America. “Nobody is asking the question, ‘What is race?’ It is a biologically meaningless category. It is a cultural term that Americans use to describe what a person’s ancestry is…

    …Despite this, many Americans still believe in three great racial groups, a system developed in Europe and North America in the 18th century…

    …If anything, the president’s initiative should have been on racism, say the scientists. For, even without race, racism can exist as a belief that ancestry is a significant factor in cultural and behavioral differences among peoples…

    …In years past, children of mixed marriages “were assigned the racial (and legal) status of the more subordinate parent,” said Faye Harrison, an anthropologist at the University of South Carolina [now University of Florida].

    “That rule, called . . . the ‘one drop rule’ (for one drop of blood), has worked to classify me as African American, period,” said Harrison. “Despite the fact that I, like most other African Americans I know, have a mixed heritage and mixed ‘race’ genealogy. But that multicultural or multiracial reality is part of my extended family’s private transcript, not our public identity as blacks, as African Americans.”

    Studies show that the ancestry of American blacks is about 70 percent African, with the rest European and American Indian….

    Read the entire article here.

  • Interrogating Identities: Exploring Racism, Community and Belonging Among Mixed Race Youth in Canada

    Interrogating Identities: Exploring Racism, Community and Belonging Among Mixed Race Youth in Canada

    Centre for Culture, Identity and Education
    University of British Columbia
    2008-04-02
    Video Length: 00:27:20

    Leanne Taylor
    York University

    Youth Research Symposium – Video-stream. (April 2, 2008). These video streams feature speakers from the Day-Long Youth Research Symposium and showcase the role of interdisciplinary research in rethinking conceptualizations of ‘marginalized’ youth identity’, debates on youth subcultures versus post-subcultures, issues of gender, sexuality and social exclusion, and the history of policing and surveillance of young bodies over time and across national spaces.

    Download the video here. [Warning: Due to extremely large file size (257 MB) right-click the link and download the video to your computer.]

  • Colonial Proximities: Crossracial Encounters and Juridical Truths in British Columbia, 1871-1921

    Colonial Proximities: Crossracial Encounters and Juridical Truths in British Columbia, 1871-1921

    University of British Columbia Press
    2009-05-15
    288 pages
    Hardcover ISBN: 9780774816335
    Paperback ISBN: 9780774816342

    Renisa Mawani, Associate Professor of Sociology
    University of British Columbia

    Contemporary discussions of multiculturalism and pluralism remain politically charged in former settler societies. Colonial Proximities historicizes these contestations by illustrating how crossracial encounters in one colonial contact zone — late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century British Columbia—inspired juridical racial truths and forms of governance that continue to inform contemporary politics, albeit in different ways.

    Drawing from a wide range of legal cases, archival materials, and commissions of inquiry, this book charts the racial encounters between aboriginal peoples, European colonists, Chinese migrants, and mixed-race populations. By exploring the real and imagined anxieties that informed contact in salmon canneries, the illicit liquor trade, and the (white) slavery scare, this book reveals the legal and spatial strategies of rule deployed by Indian agents, missionaries, and legal authorities who, in the interests of racial purity and European resettlement, aspired to restrict, and ultimately prevent, crossracial interactions. Linking histories of aboriginal-European contact and Chinese migration, this book demonstrates that the dispossession of aboriginal peoples and Chinese exclusion were never distinct projects, but part of the same colonial processes of racialization that underwrote the formation of the settler regime.

    Colonial Proximities shows us that British Columbia’s contact zone was marked by a racial heterogeneity that not only produced anxieties about crossracial contacts but also distinct modes of exclusion including the territorial dispossession of aboriginal peoples and legal restrictions on Chinese immigration. It is essential reading for students and scholars of history, anthropology, sociology, colonial/ postcolonial studies, and critical race and legal studies.

    Table of Contents

    • List of Illustrations
    • Acknowledgments
    • 1. Introduction: Heterogeneity and Interraciality in British Columbia’s Colonial “Contact Zone”
    • 2. The Racial Impurities of Global Capitalism: The Politics of Labour, Interraciality, and Lawlessness in the Salmon Canneries
    • 3. (White) Slavery, Colonial Knowledges, and the Rise of State Racisms
    • 4. National Formations and Racial Selves: Chinese Traffickers and Aboriginal Victims in British Columbia’s Illicit Liquor Trade
    • 5. “The Most Disreputable Characters”: Mixed-Bloods, Internal Enemies, and Imperial Futures
    • Conclusion: Colonial Pasts, Entangled Presents, and Promising Futures
    • Notes
    • Bibliography
    • Index

    Read the front matter and chapter 1 here.

  • The politics of everyday hybridity: Zadie Smith’s White Teeth

    The politics of everyday hybridity: Zadie Smith’s White Teeth

    Wasafiri: The Magazine Of International Contemporary Writing
    Volume 18, Issue 39
    Summer 2003
    pages 11-17
    DOI: 10.1080/02690050308589837

    Laura Moss, Associate Professor of English
    University of British Columbia

    Read the entire article here.