Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

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  • A new paradigm of race: Visit to Brazil prompts the question: Can mixing everyone up solve the race problem?

    A new paradigm of race: Visit to Brazil prompts the question: Can mixing everyone up solve the race problem?

    Bloomington Herald-Times
    2004-08-29
    Courtesy of: Black Film Center/Archive
    Indiana University

    Audrey T. McCluskey, Director Neal-Marshall Black Culture Center
    Indiana University

    If Tiger Woods lived in Brazil he would not have had to coin the word “Cablanasian” to describe the multiracial mixture of caucasian, black, and Asian that makes up his lineage nor face derision from those of us who thought he was trippin’ (being silly, unreal). As my husband and I saw on a recent trip, in Brazil race-mixing is the rule, not the exception, with the majority of its 170 million people being visible incarnates of the slogan that officials like to tout: “We’re a multiracial democracy. We’re not white, or black, or Indian, we’re all Brazilians.”

    Skeptical, but being swept along by the stunning beauty of the country and its people, I did begin to wonder if (contrary to learned opinion) Brazil had solved its race problem by just mixing everyone up. British scholar Paul Gilroy recently said that Brazil and South Africa – a country that I also visited recently and will invoke later – present “a new paradigm of race” that is more subtle and flexible than the U.S.’s old “one drop” (of black blood makes you black) rule that equates whiteness with mythical purity…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Prejudice inspires filmmaker to discover Afro-German roots

    Prejudice inspires filmmaker to discover Afro-German roots

    Indiana Daily Student
    Indiana University
    2010-01-24

    Abby Liebenthal, Staff Reporter

    “It all started with a public threat on my life.”

    Within the first few minutes of Mo Asumang’s documentary “Roots Germania,” students, faculty and Bloomington residents became part of a search for the director’s identity…

    …Asumang said the journey to find her identity was driven by a desire to understand where racism toward Afro-Germans originated.

    “It’s like a job to search for identity,” Asumang said. “It starts when you’re born in Germany – it’s not so easy to be part of that country.”

    The film was triggered by a song, written by a Neo-Nazi band the “White Aryan Rebels,” that calls for Asumang’s murder. Lyrics in the song include “This bullet is for you, Mo Asumang.”…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Coloring the Caribbean: Agostino Brunias and the Painting of Race in the British West Indies, 1765-1800

    Coloring the Caribbean: Agostino Brunias and the Painting of Race in the British West Indies, 1765-1800

    Mia L. Bagneris, Doctoral Candidate in the Department of African and African American Studies
    Harvard University

    This dissertation explores interracial themes in the work of Agostino Brunias, a little known but fascinating Italian artist who painted for British patrons in the late-eighteenth-century colonial Caribbean. Brunias came to the Caribbean around 1770 in the employ of Sir William Young, a British aristocrat who had recently been appointed governor of the West Indian islands ceded to Britain from France at the conclusion of the Seven Years War. For the next twenty-five years the prolific artist created romanticized images of communities of color including native Caribs, enslaved Africans, and free mulattoes that obscured the horrors of colonial domination and plantation slavery. Instead of slave markets or sugar plantations, Brunias’s canvases offered picturesque market scenes, lively dances, and outdoor fantasies tinged with rococo naughtiness that selectively recorded the life of the colonized for the eye of the colonizer. Local Colors explores Brunias’s use of interracial sexuality, mixed-race bodies, and racial ambiguity in creating this selective visual record, aiming to discover why the bodies of mixed-race women in particular made such perfect canvases for mapping out the colonial desires of British patriarchs. The project also explores how Brunias’s work might be understood as simultaneously participating in and subtly, but significantly, troubling the solidification of racial classification of the eighteenth-century.

    Comments by Steven F. Riley

    Read a excellent essay about the life of Agostino Brunias by Dr. Lennox Honychurch at his website here.

  • Reconstruction, Segregation, and Miscegenation: Interracial Marriage and the Law in the Lower South, 1865-1900

    Reconstruction, Segregation, and Miscegenation: Interracial Marriage and the Law in the Lower South, 1865-1900

    American Nineteenth Century History
    Volume 6, Issue 1
    March 2005
    pages 57-76
    DOI: 10.1080/14664650500121827

    Peter Wallenstein, Professor of History
    Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

    On the eve of Congressional Reconstruction, all seven states of the Lower South had laws against interracial marriage. During the Republican interlude that began in 1867-68, six of the seven states (all but Georgia) suspended those laws, whether through judicial invalidation or legislative repeal. Yet by 1894 all six had restored such bans. The trajectory of miscegenation laws in the Lower South between 1865 and 1900 permits a reconsideration of the range of possibilities the Reconstruction era brought to public policy. More than that, it forces a reconsideration of the origins of the Jim Crow South. Legally mandated segregation in public transit, as C. Vann Woodward observed in 1955, took hold late in the century. But such segregation in public education, as Howard R. Rabinowitz pointed out with his formula ‘from exclusion to segregation,’ originated during the first postwar years. Segregation on the marital front – universal at the start of the period and again at the end, but relaxed in most Lower South states for a time in between – combined the two patterns into yet a third. Adding another layer of complexity was the issue of where the color line was located, and thus which individuals were classified on each side of it.

    Read or purchase the article here.

  • Tell the Court I Love My Wife: Race, Marriage, and Law: An American History

    Tell the Court I Love My Wife: Race, Marriage, and Law: An American History

    Palgrave Macmillan
    2002
    336 pages
    6 1/8 x 9 1/4 inches, 16-page b/w photo insert
    ISBN: 978-1-4039-6408-3, ISBN10: 1-4039-6408-4

    Peter Wallenstein, Professor of History
    Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

    The first in-depth history of miscegenation law in the United States, this book illustrates in vivid detail how states, communities, and the courts have defined and regulated mixed-race marriage from the colonial period to the present. Combining a storyteller’s detail with a historian’s analysis, Peter Wallenstein brings the sagas of Richard and Mildred Loving and countless other interracial couples before them to light in this harrowing history of how individual states had the power to regulate one of the most private aspects of life: marriage.

    Table of Contents

    • Introduction: “That’s No Good Here”
    • Part I. Abominable Mixture and Spurious Issue
      • Sex, Marriage, Race, and Freedom in the Early Chesapeake
      • Indian Foremothers and Freedom Suits in Revolutionary Virginia
      • From the Chesapeake Colonies to the State of California
      • Race, Marriage, and the Crisis of the Union
    • Part II. Equal Protection of the Laws
      • Post-Civil War Alabama
      • Reconstruction and the Law of Interracial Marriage
      • Accommodating the Law of Freedom of the Law of Race
      • Interracial Marriage and the Federal Courts, 1857-1917
      • Interlude: Polygamy, Incest, Fornication, Cohabitation – and Interracial Marriage
    • Part III. Problem of the Color Line
      • Drawing and Redrawing the Color Line
      • Boundaries – Race and Place in the Law of Marriage
      • Racial Identiy and Family Property
      • Miscegenation Laws, the NAACP, and the Federal Courts, 1941-1963
    • Part IV. A Breakthrough Case in California
      • Contesting the Antimiscegenation Regime – the 1960s
      • Virginia vesus the Lovings – and the Lovings versus Virginia
      • America after Loving v. Virginia
    • Epilogue: The Color of Love after Loving
      • Appendices
      • Permanent Repeal of State Miscegenation Laws, 1780-1967
      • Intermarriage in Nazi Germany and Apartheid South Africa
      • Indentity and Authority: An Interfaith Couple in Israel
      • Transsexuals, Gender Identity, and the Law of Marriage

  • Deciding on Doctrine: Anti-Miscegenation Statutes and the Development of Equal Protection Analysis

    Deciding on Doctrine: Anti-Miscegenation Statutes and the Development of Equal Protection Analysis

    Virginia Law Review
    Number 95, Issue 3 (May 2009)
    pages 627-665

    Rebecca Schoff
    University of Virginia School of Law

    In 1967, the Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States were in complete agreement that the statutory scheme before them in Loving v. Virginia, which criminalized interracial marriage, should be invalidated. They did not, however, agree on which legal doctrines justified the invalidation. Eight Justices signed on to an opinion that carefully hedged the question with arguments related to both the equal protection and the due process clauses. Justice Potter Stewart authored a terse concurring opinion asserting that there could be no valid state law “which makes the criminality of an act depend upon the race of the actor.” Although no other member of the Court was willing to sign on to this concurrence, it gave voice to a doctrine that had been a central argument of civil rights litigation, articulated as early as Justice [John Marshall] Harlan’s famed dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson.

    This Note will explore why the Warren Court chose the path it did to invalidate anti-miscegenation laws. More generally, it will analyze the Warren Court’s treatment of anti-miscegenation statutes with the object of gaining perspective on the relationship between decision and doctrine: assuming that Justices are in agreement as to which party should prevail, what factors, legal and non-legal, can influence the Court’s preference for one doctrine over another? In Loving, the decision to reject Justice Stewart’s rationale had far-reaching consequences. Had the Court followed Justice Stewart’s reasoning, review of criminal statutes, at least, would not require even a cursory analysis of the legislature’s purpose once a racial classification was detected. It might be argued that the Court was simply seeking the narrowest grounds on which to decide the case and that Justice Stewart’s reasoning was simply too broad. Loving’s now-controversial place as a precedent supporting substantive due process analysis in right-to-marriage jurisprudence, however, would have been minimized, if not eliminated, by Justice Stewart’s approach. It may be difficult to predict the ramifications of doctrinal choices, particularly with respect to the interaction be-tween equal protection, due process, and fundamental rights. Ultimately, this Note will argue that the Warren Court showed a preference for a less rule-like approach to equal protection analysis, in part because the conditions surrounding desegregation exacer-bated the difficulty of analyzing the scope of rules. Dissecting the circumstances under which the Warren Court viewed its potential paths to a ruling against Virginia in Loving may help us to under-stand how and why the Court resolves such problems in particular ways…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Mapping Identity – Opening Lecture by Kwame Anthony Appiah

    Mapping Identity – Opening Lecture by Kwame Anthony Appiah

    Haverford University
    KINSC Sharpless Auditorium
    2010-03-19 16:00 EDT (Local Time)

    Kwame Anthony Appiah, Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Philosophy
    Princeton University

    Haverford College’s Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery presents Mapping Identity, curated by Carol Solomon, Visiting Associate Professor, and Janet Yoon, HC ’10. The show will run Friday, March 19 – Friday, April 30, 2010, with an opening reception Friday, March 19, from 5:30-7:30 p.m. in the Gallery.

    Opening Lecture – Kwame Anthony Appiah
    Called a post-modern Socrates, Kwame Anthony Appiah asks profound questions about identity and ethics in a world where the sands of race, ethnicity, religion and nationalism continue to realign and reform before our eyes. His seminal book Cosmopolitanism is a moral manifesto for a world where identity has become a weapon and where difference has become a cause of pain and suffering. In intellectually stimulating language, Appiah challenges you to look beyond the boundaries — real and imagined — that divide us, and to see our common humanity…

    For more information, click here.

  • Reconstructing Hybridity: Post-Colonial Studies in Transition

    Reconstructing Hybridity: Post-Colonial Studies in Transition

    Rodopi
    2007
    330 pages
    Hardback: 978-90-420-2141-9 / 90-420-2141-1

    Edited by:

    Joel Kuortti, Adjunct Professor of Contemporary Culture
    University of Jyväskylä, Finland

    Jopi Nyman, Acting Professor of English
    University of Joensuu, Finland

    This interdisciplinary collection of critical articles seeks to reassess the concept of hybridity and its relevance to post-colonial theory and literature. The challenging articles written by internationally acclaimed scholars discuss the usefulness of the term in relation to such questions as citizenship, whiteness studies and transnational identity politics. In addition to developing theories of hybridity, the articles in this volume deal with the role of hybridity in a variety of literary and cultural phenomena in geographical settings ranging from the Pacific to native North America. The collection pays particular attention to questions of hybridity, migrancy and diaspora.

    Table of Contents

    • Contributors
    • Joel KUORTTI and Jopi NYMAN: Introduction: Hybridity Today
    • Part One: Reconstructing Theories of Hybridity
      • David HUDDART: Hybridity and Cultural Rights: Inventing Global Citizenship
      • Sabine BROECK: White Fatigue, or, Supplementary Notes on Hybridity
      • Dimple GODIWALA: Postcolonial Desire: Mimicry, Hegemony, Hybridity
      • Jeroen DEWULF: As a Tupi-Indian, Playing the Lute: Hybridity as Anthropophagy
      • Paul SHARRAD: Strategic Hybridity: Some Pacific Takes on Postcolonial Theory
      • Andrew BLAKE: From Nostalgia to Postalgia: Hybridity and Its Discontents in the Work of Paul Gilroy and the Wachowski Brothers
    • Part Two: Reading Hybridity
      • Zoe TRODD: Hybrid Constructions: Native Autobiography and the Open Curves of Cultural Hybridity
      • Sheng-Mei MA : The Necessity and Impossibility of Being Mixed-Race in Asian American Literature
      • Jopi NYMAN: The Hybridity of the Asian American Subject in Cynthia Kadohata’s The Floating World
      • Joel KUORTTI: Problematic Hybrid Identity in the Diasporic Writings of Jhumpa Lahiri
      • Andrew HAMMOND: The Hybrid State: Hanif Kureishi and Thatcher’s Britain
      • Valerie KANEKO LUCAS: Performing British Identity: Fix Up and Fragile Land
      • Samir DAYAL: Subaltern Envy? Salman Rushdie’s Moor’s Last Sigh
      • Mita BANERJEE: Postethnicity and Postcommunism in Hanif Kureishi’s Gabriel’s Gift and Salman Rushdie’s Fury
      • Index

  • Caught Between Cultures: Women, Writing & Subjectivities

    Caught Between Cultures: Women, Writing & Subjectivities

    Rodopi
    2002
    152 pages
    Hardback: 978-90-420-1378-0 / 90-420-1378-8
    Paperback: 978-90-420-1368-1 / 90-420-1368-0

    Edited by:

    Elizabeth Russell, Professor of Womens Studies and British Literature
    University Rovira i Virgili, Tarragona

    The essays in this collection (on Canada, the USA, Australia and the UK) question and discuss the issues of cross-cultural identities and the crossing of boundaries, both geographical and conceptual. All of the authors have experienced cross-culturalism directly and are conscious that positions of ‘double vision’, which allow the / to participate positively in two or more cultures, are privileges that only a few can celebrate. Most women find themselves “caught between cultures”. They become involved in a day-to-day struggle, in an attempt to negotiate identities which can affirm the self and, at the same time, strengthen the ties which unites the self with others. Theoretical issues on cross-culturalism, therefore, can either liberate or constrict the /. The essays here illustrate how women’s writing negotiates this dualism through a colourful and complex weaving of words – thoughts and experiences both pleasurable and painful – into texts, quilts, rainbows. The metaphors abound. The connecting thread through their writing and, indeed, in these essays, is the concept of ‘belonging’, a theoretical/emotional composite of be-ing and longing. ‘Home’, too, assumes a variety of meanings; it is no longer a static geographical place, but many places. It is also a place elsewhere in the imagination, a mythic place of desire linked to origin.

    Policies of multiculturalism can throw up more problems than they solve. In Canada, the difficulties surrounding the cross-cultural debate have given rise to a state of “messy imbroglio”. Notions of authenticity move dangerously close to essentialist identities. ‘Double vision’ is characteristic of peoples who have been uprooted and displaced, such as Australian Aboriginal writers of mixed race abducted during childhood. ‘Passing for’ black or white is full of complications, as in the case of Pauline Johnson, who passed as an authentic Indian. People with hyphenated citizenship (such as Japanese-Canadian) can be either free of national ties or trapped in subordination to the dominant culture; in these ‘visible minorities’, it is the status of being female (or coloured female) that is so often ultimately rendered invisible.

    Examination of Canadian anthologies on cross-cultural writing by women reveals a crossing of boundaries of gender and genre, race and ethnicity, and, in some cases, national boundaries, in an attempt to connect with a diasporic consciousness. Cross-cultural women writers in the USA may stress experience and unique collective history, while others prefer to focus on aesthetic links and literary connections which ultimately silence difference. Journeying from the personal space of the / into the collective space of the we is exemplified in a reading of texts by June Jordan and Minnie Bruce Pratt. For these writers identity is in process. It is a painful negotiation but one which can transform knowledge into action.

    Contributors
    Isabel Carrera Suárez
    Dolors Collellmir
    Mary Eagleton
    Teresa Gómez Reus
    Aritha van Herk
    Elizabeth Russell
    María Socorro Suárez Lafuente

    Table of Contents

    • Preface
    • Acknowledgements
    • ELIZABETH RUSSELL: Introduction
    • ARITHA VAN HERK: Cross-Dressed Writing in Canada
    • ISABEL CARRERA SUÁREZ: Hyphens, Hybridities and Mixed-Race Identities: Gendered Readings in Contemporary Canadian Women’s Texts
    • MARÍA SOCORRO SUÁREZ LAFUENTE: Creating Women’s Identity in Australian Civilization
    • DOLORS COLLELLMIR: Australian Aboriginal Women Writers and the Process of Defining and Articulating Aboriginality
    • ELIZABETH RUSSELL: Cross-Cultural Subjectivities: Indian Women Theorizing in the Diaspora
    • TERESA GÓMEZ REUS: Weaving / Framing / Crossing Difference: Reflections on Gender and Ethnicity in American Literary and Art Practices
    • MARY EAGLETON: Working Across Difference: Examples from Minnie Bruce Pratt and June Jordan
    • List of Contributors

  • What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America (Review)

    What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America (Review)

    Law and Politics Book Review
    American Political Science Association
    2009-03-23
    pp. 218-220

    Mark Kessler, Chair of the Department of History & Government and Professor of Government
    Texas Woman’s Univeristy

    What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America. By Peggy Pascoe. (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 2009. 404 pages. Cloth ISBN13: 9780195094633, ISBN10: 0195094638)

    In this highly original and important book, Peggy Pascoe describes and analyzes three centuries of laws in the United States prohibiting interracial marriages and sexual relations. In perhaps the most comprehensive and systematic study of legal marriage and sex prohibitions to date, Pascoe argues that these laws were central ideological tools used in constituting and reproducing white supremacy in the United States. Placing her study in its broadest context, she argues that examining the rise and decline of these laws “provides a locus for studying the history of race in America” (p.2). Pascoe’s study demonstrates how historical research, combined with critical cultural theory and analysis, may shed new light on significant questions regarding the power of law and legal interpretation in constructing and reconstructing social reality.

    Throughout this work, the writing is admirably accessible, while the analyses and arguments are deeply nuanced. Pascoe begins many of the eleven chapters with stories describing the people and circumstances involved in miscegenation cases throughout history. These stories are carefully selected to show the great variation in characteristics of participants, laws, and regions of the country in which the cases arose, and to help address the broader questions of nation-building and nation-formation that emerge from this study. Pascoe uses these very human stories, along with landmark appellate court decisions and local legal practices, to explore the many and varied ways in which social and political relations based on race, gender, and sexuality illuminate the rise and fall of miscegenation law in the United States.

    Pascoe’s narrative begins in the Reconstruction era, when the term “miscegenation” was first invented and applied to interracial marriage and sex. Her discussion focuses on the ways in which judges, legislators, and lawyers employed notions of what is “natural” and “unnatural” in conventional cultural discourses about sex, gender, and sexuality to create and apply laws prohibiting interracial marriage and sex. Such laws emerged first in the South and North and typically applied exclusively to relations between those categorized racially as “white” and as “black.”…

    Read the entire review here.