Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

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  • Glamour in the Pacific: Cultural Internationalism and Race Politics in the Women’s Pan-Pacific

    Glamour in the Pacific: Cultural Internationalism and Race Politics in the Women’s Pan-Pacific

    University of Hawai’i Press
    July 2009
    304 pages
    15 illustrations
    Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8248-3342-8

    Fiona Paisley, Senior Lecturer, School of Humanities
    Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia

    Perspectives on the Global Past

    Since its inception in 1928, the Pan-Pacific Women’s Association (PPWA) has witnessed and contributed to enormous changes in world and Pacific history. Operating out of Honolulu, this women’s network established a series of conferences that promoted social reform and an internationalist outlook through cultural exchange. For the many women attracted to the project—from China, Japan, the Pacific Islands, and the major settler colonies of the region—the association’s vision was enormously attractive, despite the fact that as individuals and national representatives they remained deeply divided by colonial histories.

    Glamour in the Pacific tells this multifaceted story by bringing together critical scholarship from across a wide range of fields, including cultural history, international relations and globalization, gender and empire, postcolonial studies, population and world health studies, world history, and transnational history. Early chapters consider the first PPWA conferences and the decolonizing process undergone by the association. Following World War II, a new generation of nonwhite women from decolonized and settler colonial nations began to claim leadership roles in the Association, challenging the often Eurocentric assumptions of women’s internationalism. In 1955 the first African American delegate brought to the fore questions about the relationship of U.S. race relations with the Pan-Pacific cultural internationalist project. The effects of cold war geopolitics on the ideal of international cooperation in the era of decolonization were also considered. The work concludes with a discussion of the revival of “East meets West” as a basis for world cooperation endorsed by the United Nations in 1958 and the overall contributions of the PPWA to world culture politics.

    Read the introduction here.

    The limits of internationalist interventions into the politics of “race” and the historical legacies of imperialism, nationalism and colonialism familiar to much contemporary world history were fundamental questions preoccupying women at the PPWA also. As I argue in this book, the resilience of race thinking and the limits of the cross-cultural ethos within the PPWA should be read not as constituting the organization’s failure to somehow transcend history, but rather as a reminder of the inherence of racialism to modern feminism and liberal thought more generally. Wishing to be unbounded by territory yet inevitably preoccupied by territorial issues, the Pan-Pacific conferences discussed in the following chapters provide unique insight into the profoundly interconnected histories of race and gender that have shaped feminist internationalism, as well as other progressive politics, and illustrate their on-the-ground, embodied, and passionate contestations.  By viewing the interwar Pacific as a newly conceived territory of modernity in both spatial and temporal terms, this book sees the interwar period as a pivotal moment in the twentieth century, one in which new ways of thinking about the world opened up, however partially, to questions of diversity and difference at the global level that still occupy us today. Not least, these decades saw new accounts of the flow of populations across the Pacific, encouraging a generation of ethnographers, demographers, and anthropometrists to declare the similarities between the races and cultures and in the Pacific in particular, to announce the future intermixing of peoples and cultures as the Pacific solution to world affairs, and to predict the future advancement of world civilization. Warwick Anderson points out that racial intermixture was claimed by many of those undertaking studies in the Pacific such as Felix and Marie Keesing, who feature in this study, to announce the way forward for humankind, thus envisaging interracial relations in stark contrast to the disavowal of racial mixing in the United States and its anxious management in Australia and elsewhere. The Keesings were also critical of the mandate of their own country, New Zealand, in Samoa (alongside the United States), contrasting that regime with their ideal of advancement through dynamic racial and cultural flows.  As Tony Ballantyne explains, the region was conceptualized spatially and temporally as the product of waves of population linking more recent colonization to deep time.

  • The History of White People

    The History of White People

    W. W. Norton & Company
    March 2010
    448 pages
    6.125 × 9.25 in
    ISBN: 978-0-393-04934-3

    Nell Irvin Painter

    A mind-expanding and myth-destroying exploration of “whiteness”—an illuminating work on the history of race and power.

    Eminent historian Nell Irvin Painter tells perhaps the most important forgotten story in American history. Beginning at the roots of Western civilization, she traces the invention of the idea of a white race—often for economic, scientific, and political ends. She shows how the origins of American identity in the eighteenth century were intrinsically tied to the elevation of white skin into the embodiment of beauty, power, and intelligence; how the great American intellectuals— including Ralph Waldo Emerson—insisted that only Anglo Saxons were truly American; and how the definitions of who is “white” and who is “American” have evolved over time.

    A story filled with towering historical figures, The History of White People closes an enormous gap in a literature that has long focused on the nonwhite, and it forcefully reminds us that the concept of “race” is an all-too-human invention whose meaning, importance, and reality have changed according to a long and rich history.

  • The Skin Between Us: A Memoir of Race, Beauty, and Belonging

    The Skin Between Us: A Memoir of Race, Beauty, and Belonging

    W. W. Norton
    May 2006
    240 pages
    5.8 × 8.6 in
    ISBN: 978-0-393-05890-1

    Kym Ragusa, Professor of Nonfiction &  Professor Writing
    Queens University of Charlotte, North Carolina
    Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies, Massachusetts Inistitute of Technology

    A memoir of astonishing delicacy and strength about race and physical beauty.

    Kym Ragusa’s stunningly beautiful, brilliant black mother constantly turned heads as she strolled the streets of West Harlem. Ragusa’s working-class white father, who grew up only a few streets (and an entire world) away in Italian East Harlem, had never seen anyone like her. At home their families despaired at the match, while in the streets the couple faced taunting threats from a city still racially divided—but they were mesmerized by the differences between them.

    From their volatile, short-lived pairing came a sensitive child with a filmmaker’s observant eye. Her two powerful grandmothers gave her the love and stability to grow into her own skin. Eventually, their shared care for their granddaughter forced them to overcome their prejudices. Rent parties and religious feste, baked yams and baked ziti—Ragusa’s sensuous memories are a reader’s delight, as they bring to life the joy, pain, and inexhaustible richness of a racially and culturally mixed heritage.

  • The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family

    The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family

    W. W. Norton & Company
    September 2008
    800 pages
    Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-393-06477-3
    6.5 × 9.6 in
    Paperback ISBN: 978-0-393-33776-1
    816 pages
    6.1 × 9.2 in

    Annette Gordon-Reed, Charles Warren Professor of American Legal History; Professor of History, Faculty of Arts & Sciences
    Harvard University

    Winner of the National Book Award and the 2009 Pulitzer Prize

    In the mid-1700s the English captain of a trading ship that made runs between England and the Virginia colony fathered a child by an enslaved woman living near Williamsburg. The woman, whose name is unknown and who is believed to have been born in Africa, was owned by the Eppeses, a prominent Virginia family. The captain, whose surname was Hemings, and the woman had a daughter. They named her Elizabeth.

    So begins this epic work—named a best book of the year by the Washington Post, Time, the Los Angeles Times, Amazon.com, the San Francisco Chronicle, and a notable book by the New York Times—Annette Gordon-Reed’s “riveting history” of the Hemings family, whose story comes to vivid life in this brilliantly researched and deeply moving work. Gordon-Reed, author of the highly acclaimed historiography Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy, unearths startling new information about the Hemingses, Jefferson, and his white family. Although the book presents the most detailed and richly drawn portrait ever written of Sarah Hemings, better known by her nickname Sally, who bore seven children by Jefferson over the course of their thirty-eight-year liaison, The Hemingses of Monticello tells more than the story of her life with Jefferson and their children. The Hemingses as a whole take their rightful place in the narrative of the family’s extraordinary engagement with one of history’s most important figures.

    Not only do we meet Elizabeth Hemings—the family matriarch and mother to twelve children, six by John Wayles, a poor English immigrant who rose to great wealth in the Virginia colony—but we follow the Hemings family as they become the property of Jefferson through his marriage to Martha Wayles. The Hemings-Wayles children, siblings to Martha, played pivotal roles in the life at Jefferson’s estate.

    We follow the Hemingses to Paris, where James Hemings trained as a chef in one of the most prestigious kitchens in France and where Sally arrived as a fourteen-year-old chaperone for Jefferson’s daughter Polly; to Philadelphia, where James Hemings acted as the major domo to the newly appointed secretary of state; to Charlottesville, where Mary Hemings lived with her partner, a prosperous white merchant who left her and their children a home and property; to Richmond, where Robert Hemings engineered a plan for his freedom; and finally to Monticello, that iconic home on the mountain, from where most of Jefferson’s slaves, many of them Hemings family members, were sold at auction six months after his death in 1826.

    As The Hemingses of Monticello makes vividly clear, Monticello can no longer be known only as the home of a remarkable American leader, the author of the Declaration of Independence; nor can the story of the Hemingses, whose close blood ties to our third president have been expunged from history until very recently, be left out of the telling of America’s story. With its empathetic and insightful consideration of human beings acting in almost unimaginably difficult and complicated family circumstances, The Hemingses of Monticello is history as great literature. It is a remarkable achievement.

  • Fugitive Vision: Slave Image and Black Identity in Antebellum Narrative

    Fugitive Vision: Slave Image and Black Identity in Antebellum Narrative

    Indiana University Press
    2007-12-04
    272 pages
    30 b&w photos, 6.125 x 9.25
    ISBN-13: 978-0-253-34944-6
    ISBN: 0-253-34944-3

    Michael A. Chaney, Associate Professor of English
    Dartmouth College

    Analyzing the impact of black abolitionist iconography on early black literature and the formation of black identity, Fugitive Vision examines the writings of Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, William and Ellen Craft, Harriet Jacobs, and the slave potter David Drake. Juxtaposing pictorial and literary representations, the book argues that the visual offered an alternative to literacy for current and former slaves, whose works mobilize forms of illustration that subvert dominant representations of slavery by both apologists and abolitionists. From a portrait of Douglass’s mother as Ramses to the incised snatches of proverb and prophesy on Dave the Potter‘s ceramics, the book identifies a “fugitive vision” that reforms our notions of antebellum black identity, literature, and cultural production.

    Table of Contents

    • List of Illustrations
    • Acknowledgments
    • Introduction: Looking Beyond and Through the Fugitive Icon
    • Part 1. Fugitive Gender: Black Mothers, White Faces, Sanguine Sons
      1. Racing and Erasing the Slave Mother: Frederick Douglass, Parodic Looks, and Ethnographic Illustration
      2. Looking for Slavery at the Crystal Palace: William Wells Brown and the Politics of Exhibition(ism)
      3. The Uses in Seeing: Mobilizing the Portrait in Drag in Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom
    • Part 2. Still Moving: Revamped Technologies of Surveillance
      1. Panoramic Bodies: From Banvard‘s Mississippi to Brown’s Iron Collar
      2. The Mulatta in the Camera: Harriet Jacobs’s Historicist Gazing and Dion Boucicault‘s Mulatta Obscura
      3. Throwing Identity in the Poetry-Pottery of Dave the Potter
    • Conclusion
    • Notes
    • Works Cited
    • Index

  • Assimilation and Racialism in Seventeenth and Eighteenth-Century French Colonial Policy

    Assimilation and Racialism in Seventeenth and Eighteenth-Century French Colonial Policy

    The American Historical Review
    2005
    Volume 110, Number 2

    Saliha Belmessous, Research Fellow of History
    University of Syndey

    Although the idea of race is increasingly being historicized, its emergence in the context of French colonization remains shadowy. This is despite the fact that colonization was central to the emergence of race in French culture. The French are either credited with a generous vision and treatment of Amerindians or they are kept in limbo. The publication of Richard White’s Middle Ground in 1991 shook up these conventional ideas by showing that French conciliation toward indigenous peoples had to be explained by particular political and economic factors rather than by national character. Yet the issue of race has remained almost untouched, and French America has still not taken its place in the current debate about race, color, and civility.

    The present essay is an empirical contribution to the discussion on the origins of European racialism as applied to colonial situations. It argues that racial prejudice in colonial Canada emerged only after an assimilationist approach had been tried for almost a century and had failed. In the seventeenth century, French policy toward the indigenous peoples of New France relied on the assimilation of the natives to French religion and culture. The aim was to mix colonial and native peoples in order to strengthen the nascent New France. This policy of francisation (sometimes translated as “Frenchification”) was based on a paternalistic vision of cultural difference: the French officials viewed the Amerindians as “savages,” socially, economically, and culturally inferior to the Europeans. As such, they had to be educated and brought to civility. This policy remained the official “native policy” employed throughout the period of the French regime in Canada despite the internal tensions and contradictions displayed by French officials. Historians have traditionally emphasized the implementation of this policy by missionaries and, consequently, have neglected or, at best, diminished the significance of francisation for civil authorities. The conversion of Amerindians to Christianity was undoubtedly an important part of the policy of francisation, but that importance has been overstated: francisation was more a political program than a religious one. An understanding of the central role played by the state in the promotion of the policy of assimilation has profound consequences for our comprehension of the relations between the French and Amerindians…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Bi-racial U.S.A. vs. Multi-racial Brazil: Is the Contrast Still Valid?

    Bi-racial U.S.A. vs. Multi-racial Brazil: Is the Contrast Still Valid?

    Journal of Latin American Studies
    Volume 25, Issue 2 (May 1993)
    pages 373-386
    DOI: 10.1017/S0022216X00004703

    Thomas E. Skidmore, Carlos Manuel de Céspedes Professor of History Emeritus
    Brown University

    In the last two decades the comparative analysis of race relations in the U.S.A. and Brazil has been based on a conventional wisdom. It is the corollary of a larger conventional wisdom in the study of comparative race relations. The thesis is that systems of race relations in the Western Hemisphere are primarily of two types: bi-racial and multi-racial. The distinction is normally spelled out as follows. The U.S.A. is a prime example of a bi-racial system. In the prevailing logic of the US legal and social structure, individuals have historically been either black or white. In Brazil, on the other hand, there has been a spectrum of racial distinctions. At a minimum, Brazilian social practice has recognised white, black and mulatto. At a maximum, the phenotypical distinctions have become so refined as to defy analysis, or effective application for those who would discriminate.

  • Mestizo Modernism

    Mestizo Modernism

    Rutgers University Press
    2003
    280 pages
    21 b&w illus.
    Paper ISBN 0-8135-3217-5
    Cloth ISBN 0-8135-3216-7

    Tace Hedrick, Associate Professor and Women’s Studies
    University of Florida, Gainesville

    We use the term “modernism” almost exclusively to characterize the work of European and American writers and artists who struggled to portray a new kind of fractured urban life typified by mechanization and speed. Between the 1880s and 1930s, Latin American artists were similarly engaged-but with a difference. While other modernists drew from “primitive” cultures for an alternative sense of creativity, Latin American modernists were taking a cue from local sources-primarily indigenous and black populations in their own countries. In Mestizo Modernism Tace Hedrick focuses on four key artists who represent Latin American modernism-Peruvian poet César Vallejo, Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral, Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, and Mexican artist Frida Kahlo. Hedrick interrogates what being “modern” and “American” meant for them and illuminates the cultural contexts within which they worked, as well as the formal methods they shared, including the connection they drew between ancient cultures and modern technologies. This look at Latin American artists will force the reconceptualization of what modernism has meant in academic study and what it might mean for future research.

    Table of Contents

    MESTIZO MODERNISM
    SENTIMENTAL MEN
    WOMEN’S WORK
    BROTHER MEN
    CHILDLESS MOTHERS
    HYBRID MODERN
    Acknowledgments
    Notes
    Works Cited
    Index

    Read an excerpt here.

  • Lumbee Indians in the Jim Crow South: Race, Identity, and the Making of a Nation

    Lumbee Indians in the Jim Crow South: Race, Identity, and the Making of a Nation

    University of North Carolina Press
    April 2010
    368 pages
    6.125 x 9.25
    12 illus., 3 tables, 5 genealogical charts, 3 maps, appends., notes, index
    Cloth ISBN:  978-0-8078-3368-1
    Paper ISBN:  978-0-8078-7111-9

    Malinda Maynor Lowery, Assistant Professor of History
    University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

    Awards & Distinctions

    • 2010 Labriola Center American Indian National Book Award
    • 2010 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title

    With more than 50,000 enrolled members, North Carolina‘s Lumbee Indians are the largest Native American tribe east of the Mississippi River. Malinda Maynor Lowery, a Lumbee herself, describes how, between Reconstruction and the 1950s, the Lumbee crafted and maintained a distinct identity in an era defined by racial segregation in the South and paternalistic policies for Indians throughout the nation. They did so against the backdrop of some of the central issues in American history, including race, class, politics, and citizenship.

    Lowery argues that “Indian” is a dynamic identity that, for outsiders, sometimes hinged on the presence of “Indian blood” (for federal New Deal policy makers) and sometimes on the absence of “black blood” (for southern white segregationists). Lumbee people themselves have constructed their identity in layers that tie together kin and place, race and class, tribe and nation; however, Indians have not always agreed on how to weave this fabric into a whole. Using photographs, letters, genealogy, federal and state records, and first-person family history, Lowery narrates this compelling conversation between insiders and outsiders, demonstrating how the Lumbee People challenged the boundaries of Indian, southern, and American identities

    Table of Contents

    • Preface: Telling Our Own Stories
    • Acknowledgments
    • A Note on Terms
    • Introduction: Coming Together
    • 1 ADAPTING TO SEGREGATION
    • 2 MAKING HOME AND MAKING LEADERS
    • 3 TAKING SIDES
    • 4 CONFRONTING THE NEW DEAL
    • 5 Pembroke Farms: Gaining Economic Autonomy
    • 6 MEASURING IDENTITY
    • 7 RECOGNIZING THE LUMBEE
    • Conclusion: Creating a Lumbee and Tuscarora Future
    • Appendix
    • Notes
    • Index

  • Hybridity, So What? The Anti-Hybridity Backlash and the Riddles of Recognition

    Hybridity, So What? The Anti-Hybridity Backlash and the Riddles of Recognition

    Theory, Culture & Society
    Volume 18, Numbers 2-3 (June 2001)
    pages 219-245
    DOI: 10.1177/026327640101800211

    Jan Nederveen Pieterse, Mellichamp Professor of Global Studies and Sociology
    University of California, Santa Barbara

    Take just about any exercise in social mapping and it is the hybrids, those that straddle categories, that are missing. Take most arrangements of multiculturalism and it is the hybrids that are not counted, not accommodated. So what? This article is about the recognition of hybridity, in-betweenness. The first section discusses the varieties of hybridity and the widening range of phenomena to which the term now applies. According to anti-hybridity arguments, hybridity is inauthentic and ‘multiculturalism lite’. Examining these arguments provides an opportunity to deepen and fine-tune our perspective. What is missing in the antihybridity arguments is historical depth; in this treatment the third section deals with the longue durÈeand proposes multiple historical layers of hybridity. The fourth section concerns the politics of boundaries, for in the end the real problem is not hybridity—which is common throughout history—but boundaries and the social proclivity to boundary fetishism. Hybridity is a problem only from the point of view of essentializing boundaries. What hybridity means varies not only over time but also in different cultures and this informs different patterns of hybridity. Then we come back to the original question: so what? The importance of hybridity is that it problematizes boundaries.

    Read the entire article here.