Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

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  • What are you? For multiracial students, declaring an identity can be complicated

    What are you? For multiracial students, declaring an identity can be complicated

    Princeton Alumni Weekly
    Princeton University
    2010-01-13 Issue

    Maya Rock (Class of 2002)

    In my first few weeks at Princeton, I became accustomed to fielding questions: What’s your background? Where are your parents from? And the strikingly ­existential: What are you?  

    What the questioners really meant was, what race was I? The question said a lot to me about how important race was in America, even if direct discussion of the topic seemed reserved for special holidays or ­incendiary news stories. My answer was, “I’m half black and half white” — a response that made me an anomaly. People were used to divvying one another up into five neat racial categories. After giving my response, I knew, white students would censor what they said about race in front of me, and black students would expect a certain solidarity. I often wished I did not respond at all; I didn’t want to be a spokeswoman for an experience many considered fascinating but which was, for me, ­completely normal…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Review Essay: Racial Relations and Racism in Brazil

    Review Essay: Racial Relations and Racism in Brazil

    Culture & Psychology
    Volume 13, Number 4 (December 2007)
    pages 461-473
    DOI: 10.1177/1354067X07082805

    Marcus Eugênio Oliveira Lima
    Universidade Federal de Sergipe, Brazil

    Telles, Edward Eric, Race in Another America: The Significance of Skin Color in Brazil. Princeton, NJ/Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006. 324 pp. ISBN 978–0–691–12792–7 (pbk)

    Edward Telles‘ book Race in Another America: The Significance of Skin Color in Brazil (2006) has contributed to the understanding of racial and skin color relations in Brazil. The main aspects of the past and present of racism in Brazil are discussed, such as whitening, mestizaje, and the ideology of racial democracy, and some additional data are presented. This work reflects on and brings to light the reflections of Telles and of other researchers of racism about a future of more equalitarian racial and social relations in Brazil.

    Read or purchase the review here.

  • Challenging Mestizaje: A Gender Perspective on Indigenous and Afrodescendant Movements in Latin America

    Challenging Mestizaje: A Gender Perspective on Indigenous and Afrodescendant Movements in Latin America

    Critique of Anthropology
    Vol. 25, No. 3
    pages 307-330
    (2005)
    DOI: 10.1177/0308275X05055217

    Helen I. Safa, Professor Emerita of Anthropology/Latin American Studies
    University of Florida

    This article compares the contemporary movements for cultural autonomy and social legitimation organized by the indigenous and Afrodescendant populations of Latin America. These movements are challenging the concept of blanqueamiento or whitening embedded in the process of mestizaje in Latin America. Whitening proclaimed the superiority of white European culture over indigenous and black culture, a concept these movements are challenging by proclaiming their own cultural autonomy. In particular, the article will examine the increasing role of women in both these movements, and how women are reconciling the tension between ethnic/racial and gender consciousness.

     Read or purchase the article here.

  • Patrolling Borders: Hybrids, Hierarchies and the Challenge of Mestizaje

    Patrolling Borders: Hybrids, Hierarchies and the Challenge of Mestizaje

    Political Research Quarterly
    Vol. 57, No. 4
    pages 597-607
    (2004)
    DOI: 10.1177/106591290405700408

    Cristina Beltran, Associate Professor of Political Science
    Haverford College

    “Hybridity” has become a popular concept among scholars of critical race theory and identity, particularly those studying Chicano identity. Some scholars claim that hybridity—premised on multiplicity and fluidity—represents a new approach to subjectivity, challenging the idea of a stable and unified subject. In “Patrolling Borders,” I argue that scholars are mistaken in their belief that “hybrid” or “bordered” identities are inherently transgressive or antiessentialist. By constructing a genealogy of Chicano hybridity (i.e., mestizaje) I show how Chicano nationalists produced a politicized subjectivity during the Chicano Movement that emerged as the basis for recent notions of hybridity put forward by writers like Gloria Anzaldúa. By tracing the historical construction of mestizaje, I show how hybridity continues to be a discursive practice capable of comfortably coexisting with dreams of privileged knowledge, order, and wholeness.

    Read or purchase the article here.

  • Reconstructing the Household: Families, Sex, and the Law in the Nineteenth-Century South

    Reconstructing the Household: Families, Sex, and the Law in the Nineteenth-Century South

    University of North Carolina Press
    March 1998
    382 pages
    6.125 x 9.25
    8 tables, notes, bibl., index
    Paper ISBN  978-0-8078-4712-1

    Peter W. Bardaglio, Associate Professor of History
    Goucher College, Baltimore, Maryland

    Winner of the 1996 James A. Rawley Prize, Organization of American Historians

    In Reconstructing the Household, Peter Bardaglio examines the connections between race, gender, sexuality, and the law in the nineteenth-century South. He focuses on miscegenation, rape, incest, child custody, and adoption laws to show how southerners struggled with the conflicts and stresses that surfaced within their own households and in the larger society during the Civil War era. Based on literary as well as legal sources, Bardaglio’s analysis reveals how legal contests involving African Americans, women, children, and the poor led to a rethinking of families, sexuality, and the social order. Before the Civil War, a distinctive variation of republicanism, based primarily on hierarchy and dependence, characterized southern domestic relations. This organic ideal of the household and its power structure differed significantly from domestic law in the North, which tended to emphasize individual rights and contractual obligations. The defeat of the Confederacy, emancipation, and economic change transformed family law and the governance of sexuality in the South and allowed an unprecedented intrusion of the state into private life. But Bardaglio argues that despite these profound social changes, a preoccupation with traditional notions of gender and race continued to shape southern legal attitudes.

    Read the preface here.

  • The Impure Imagination: Toward a Critical Hybridity in Latin American Writing

    The Impure Imagination: Toward a Critical Hybridity in Latin American Writing

    University of Minnesota Press
    2006
    288 pages
    5 7⁄8 x 9
    Paper ISBN: 0-8166-4786-0; ISBN-13: 978-0-8166-4786-6
    Cloth ISBN: 0-8166-4785-2; ISBN-13: 978-0-8166-4785-9

    Joshua Lund, Associate Professor of Hispanic Languages and Literature
    University of Pittsburgh

    Challenges conventional thinking about the widely accepted concept of cultural hybridity.

    “Hybridity” is a term that has been applied to Latin American politics, literature, and intellectual life for more than a century. During the past two decades, it has figured in—and been transfigured by—the work of prominent postcolonialist writers and thinkers throughout the Americas.

    In this pathbreaking work, Joshua Lund offers a thoughtful critique of hybridity by reading contemporary theories of cultural mixing against their historical precursors. The Impure Imagination is the first book to systematically analyze today’s dominant theories in relation to earlier, narrative manifestations of hybridity in Latin American writing, with a particular focus on Mexico and Brazil.

    Generally understood as the impurification of standard or canonized forms, hybridity has historically been embraced as a basic marker of Latin American regional identity and as a strategy of resistance to cultural imperialism. Lund contends that Latin American theories and narratives of hybridity have been, and continue to be, underwritten by a structure of colonial power. Here he provides an informed critique and cogent investigation of this connection, its cultural effects, and its political implications. Using the emergence of hybridity as an analytical frame for thinking about culture in the Americas, Lund examines the contributions of influential thinkers, including Néstor García Canclini, Homi Bhabha, Jacques Derrida, Giorgio Agamben, Jorge Luis Borges, Antonio Candido, and many others.

    Distinguished by its philosophical grounding and underpinned with case studies, The Impure Imagination employs postcolonial theory and theories of race as it explores Latin American history and culture. The result is an original and interrogative study of hybridity that exposes surprising—and unsettling—similarities with nationalistic discourses.

    Table of Contents

    • Acknowledgments
    • Introduction: The Stakes of Hybridity
    • Part I: Theorizing Hybridity Today
      • 1. Genres Are Not to Be Mixed
      • 2. Erasing Race and the Persistence of Teleology
      • 3. The Ambivalence of Theorizing Hybridity: Coloniality and Anthropology
    • Part II: Mexico
      • 4. New Cultural History and the Rise of Mediation
      • 5. Back Toward a Positive Mestizaje
      • 6. They Were Not a Barbarous Tribe
      • 7. Mestizaje and Post-Revolutionary Malaise: Vasconcelos and Azuela
    • Part III: Brazil
      • 8. The Brazilian Family
      • 9. On the Myth of Racial Democracy
      • 10. The Iracema-effect in Casa-grande e Senzala
    • Notes
    • Bibliography
    • Index

  • Go-Betweens and the Colonization of Brazil: 1500-1600

    Go-Betweens and the Colonization of Brazil: 1500-1600

    University of Texas Press
    2005
    6 x 9 in.
    391 pp., 20 figures, 11 maps, 2 tables
    ISBN: 978-0-292-71276-8

    Alida C. Metcalf, Harris Masterson, Jr. Professor of History
    Rice University, Houston, Texas

    Doña Marina (La Malinche) …Pocahontas …Sacagawea—their names live on in historical memory because these women bridged the indigenous American and European worlds, opening the way for the cultural encounters, collisions, and fusions that shaped the social and even physical landscape of the modern Americas. But these famous individuals were only a few of the many thousands of people who, intentionally or otherwise, served as “go-betweens” as Europeans explored and colonized the New World.

    In this innovative history, Alida Metcalf thoroughly investigates the many roles played by go-betweens in the colonization of sixteenth-century Brazil. She finds that many individuals created physical links among Europe, Africa, and Brazil—explorers, traders, settlers, and slaves circulated goods, plants, animals, and diseases. Intercultural liaisons produced mixed-race children. At the cultural level, Jesuit priests and African slaves infused native Brazilian traditions with their own religious practices, while translators became influential go-betweens, negotiating the terms of trade, interaction, and exchange. Most powerful of all, as Metcalf shows, were those go-betweens who interpreted or represented new lands and peoples through writings, maps, religion, and the oral tradition. Metcalf’s convincing demonstration that colonization is always mediated by third parties has relevance far beyond the Brazilian case, even as it opens a revealing new window on the first century of Brazilian history.

    Read an excerpt here.

    Table of Contents

    • A Note on Spelling and Citation
    • Acknowledgments
    • 1. Go-betweens
    • 2. Encounter
    • 3. Possession
    • 4. Conversion
    • 5. Biology
    • 6. Slavery
    • 7. Resistance
    • 8. Power
    • Notes
    • Bibliography
    • Index

  • Adding up preoccupations about color, race in literature

    Adding up preoccupations about color, race in literature

    Emory Report
    Emory University
    1999-02-22
    Volume 51, Number 21

    The class listed in Emory’s spring course atlas as “The Calculus of Color” might at first sound like an art class on color theory, but instructor Cassandra Jackson intends for her class to explore mulatto figures and miscegenation in 19th and 20th century American literature.

    The course takes its title from a chapter in Werner Sollors‘ book, Neither Black Nor White, a thematic exploration of biracial characters in European and American literature.

    Jackson said students were drawn to the course for specific reasons. “A number of my students felt as though biracial people are very much a part of American culture and history, yet they hold an invisible space. Personal history also had an influence. A few are biracial or have a biracial parent. The students work hard and are really committed. Many of them feel a personal investment in the class because they see race issues as relevant to their lives.”…

    Read the entire article here.

  • The Future of Ethnicity Classifications

    The Future of Ethnicity Classifications 

    Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies
    Volume 35, Issue 9
    November 2009
    pages 1417 – 1435
    DOI: 10.1080/13691830903125901

    Peter J. Aspinall, Senior Research Fellow
    Centre for Health Services Studies (CHSS)
    University of Kent

    In the first decade of the twenty-first century, ‘diversity’ has emerged as a key value in its own right, celebrated through human rights and similar policies promoting identity and providing an additional focus to that of the more traditional equalities agenda and its concern with ‘statistical proportionality’. It has been conjectured that classifications rooted in diversity policy will either propel data collection practices into the use of finer-grained distinctions or that these measurement systems will collapse under their own weight. In Britain pressure to increase the number of categories in ethnicity classifications highlights the tension between the validity of granular categories and their utility (in terms of practicality of data collection). Similarly, the interest in identity evokes a trade-off between the selective attribution of such measures and the greater stability of operationally defined ethnicity. In meeting the challenge of the diversity agenda, a number of approaches—innovative for Britain—are now being debated to accommodate greater numbers of categories in census collections. These include multi-ticking across categories (thereby capturing multiplicity) and the shift from classifications framed by colour to those privileging ethnic background (but attended by category proliferation). Conceptually, the measurement of the multiple dimensions of ethnicity has found favour but not so far encompassing ethnic origin/ancestry collected in US and Canadian Censuses. While some have argued that ethnicity classifications are already unwieldy and that retrenchment is needed, validity—increasingly insisted upon by the collectivities themselves and other non-state organisations—is seen as winning out. The demands of inclusiveness and identity visibility indicate that classifications are headed in the direction of greater complexity. 

    Read or purchase the article here.

  • The Mercurial Nature and Abiding Power of Race: A Transnational Family Story

    The Mercurial Nature and Abiding Power of Race: A Transnational Family Story

    The American Historical Review
    Volume 108, Number 1 (February 2003)
    pages 84-118

    Martha Hodes, Professor of History
    New York University

    There are many ways to expose the mercurial nature of racial classification. Scholars of U.S. history might note, for example, that the category of “mulatto” first appeared in the federal census of 1850 and then disappeared in 1930, or they might discover that immigrants who had not thought of themselves as “black” at home in the Caribbean found themselves classified as such upon passage to the United States. Such episodes serve to unmask the instability of racial systems, yet simply marshaling evidence to prove taxonomies fickle tells only a partial story. In an effort to tell a fuller story about the workings of “race”—by which I mean principally the endeavors of racial categorization and stratification—I focus here on historical actors who crossed geographical boundaries and lived their lives within different racial systems. A vision that accounts for the experiences of sojourners and migrants illuminates the ways in which racial classification shifts across borders and thus deepens arguments about racial construction and malleability.

    At the same time, however, the principal argument of this essay moves in a different direction. We tend to think of the fluid and the mutable as less powerful than the rigid and the immutable, thereby equating the exposure of unstable racial categories with an assault on the very construct of race itself. In a pioneering essay in which Barbara J. Fields took a historical analysis of the concept of race as her starting point, she contended that ideologies of race are continually created and verified in daily life. More recently, Ann Laura Stoler has challenged the assumption that an understanding of racial instability can serve to undermine racism, and Thomas C. Holt has called attention to scholars’ “general failure to probe beyond the mantra of social constructedness, to ask what that really might mean in shaping lived experience.” Hilary McD. Beckles affirms that “the analysis of ‘real experience’ and the theorising of ‘constructed representation’ constitute part of the same intellectual project.” Drawing together these theoretical strands, I argue that the scrutiny of day-to-day lives demonstrates not only the mutability of race but also, and with equal force, the abiding power of race in local settings. Neither malleability nor instability, then, necessarily diminishes the potency of race to circumscribe people’s daily lives…

    Read the entire article here or here.