Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

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  • Scattered Belongings: Cultural Paradoxes of Race, Nation and Gender

    Scattered Belongings: Cultural Paradoxes of Race, Nation and Gender

    Routledge an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group
    1999-01-14
    240 pages
    234×156 mm
    Paperback ISBN: 978-0-415-17096-3

    Jayne O. Ifekwunigwe, Visiting Associate Professor of African and African American Studies
    Duke University

    When the American golfer Tiger Woods proclaimed himself a “Caublinasian”, affirming his mixed Caucasian, Black, Native American and Asian ancestry, a storm of controversy was created.  This book is about people faced by the strain of belonging and not belonging within the narrow confines of the terms ‘Black’ or ‘White’.

    This is a unique and radical study. It interweaves the stories of six women of mixed African/African Caribbean and white European heritage with an analysis of the concepts of hybridity and mixed race identity.

    Table of Contents

    • Illustrations
    • Prologue
    • Acknowledgements
    • 1. Cracking the Coconut:Resisting Popular Folk Discourses on “Race,” “Mixed Race” and Social Hierarchies
    • 2. Returning(s):Relocating the Critical Feminist Auto- Ethnographer
    • 3. Setting the Stage:Invoking the Griot(te)Traditions as Textual Strategies
    • 4. Ruby
    • 5. Similola
    • 6. Akousa
    • 7. Sarah
    • 8. Bisi
    • 9. Yemi
    • 10. Let Blackness and Whiteness Wash Through: Competing Discourses on Bi-Racialization and the Compulsion of Genealogical Erasures
    • Epilogue
    • Select Bibiographies
    • Index

  • Black, White or Mixed Race? Race and Racism in the Lives of Young People of Mixed Parentage, 2nd Edition

    Black, White or Mixed Race? Race and Racism in the Lives of Young People of Mixed Parentage, 2nd Edition

    Routledge an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group
    2001-11-22
    272 pages
    ISBN: 978-0-415-25982-8 Binding: Paperback (also available in Hardback)
    Trim Size: 216 x 138

    Ann Phoenix, Professor and Co-Director of the Thomas Coram Research Unit
    University of London, Institute of Education

    Barbara Tizard, Professor Emeritus
    University of London, Institute of Education

    The number of people in racially mixed relationships has grown steadily over the last thirty years, yet these people often feel stigmatised and unhappy about their identities.

    The first edition of Black, White or Mixed Race? was a ground-breaking study: this revised edition uses new literature to consider what is now known about racialised identities and changes in the official use of ‘mixed’ categories. All new developments are placed in a historical framework and in the context of up-to-date literature on mixed parentage in Britain and the USA.

    Based on research with young people from a range of social backgrounds the book examines their attitudes to black and white people; their identity; their cultural origins; their friendships; their experiences of racism. This was the first study to concentrate on adolescents of black and white parentage and it continues to provide unique insights into their identities. It is a valuable resource for all those concerned with social work and policy.

    Table of Contents

    1. Setting the Scene
    2. People of Mixed Black and White Parentage in Britain: A Brief History
    3. Identity and Mixed Parentage: Theory, Policy and Research
    4. The ‘Transracial Adoption’/’same race’ Placement Debate
    5. How the Research Was Carried Out
    6. The Radicalised Identities of Young People of Mixed Parentage Today
    7. Friendships and Allegiances
    8. Experiencing Racism
    9. Dealing with Racism
    10. Some Parents’ Accounts
    11. But What About the Children? An Overview, With Some Comments

  • Race Mixture in Nineteenth-Century U.S. and Spanish American Fictions: Gender, Culture, and Nation Building

    Race Mixture in Nineteenth-Century U.S. and Spanish American Fictions: Gender, Culture, and Nation Building

    University of North Carolina Press
    October 2004
    192 pages
    5.5 x 8.5, notes, bibl., index
    Paper ISBN:  978-0-8078-5564-5

    Debra J. Rosenthal, Associate Professor of English
    John Carroll University

    Race mixture has played a formative role in the history of the Americas, from the western expansion of the United States to the political consolidation of emerging nations in Latin America. Debra J. Rosenthal examines nineteenth-century authors in the United States and Spanish America who struggled to give voice to these contemporary dilemmas about interracial sexual and cultural mixing.

    Rosenthal argues that many literary representations of intimacy or sex took on political dimensions, whether advocating assimilation or miscegenation or defending the status quo. She also examines the degree to which novelists reacted to beliefs about skin differences, blood taboos, incest, desire, or inheritance laws. Rosenthal discusses U.S. authors such as James Fenimore Cooper, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Walt Whitman, William Dean Howells, and Lydia Maria Child as well as contemporary novelists from Cuba, Peru, and Ecuador, such as Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, Clorinda Matto de Turner, and Juan León Mera. With her multinational approach, Rosenthal explores the significance of racial hybridity to national and literary identity and participates in the wider scholarly effort to broaden critical discussions about America to include the Americas.

  • Mixing Race, Mixing Culture: Inter-American Literary Dialogues

    Mixing Race, Mixing Culture: Inter-American Literary Dialogues

    University of Texas Press
    2002
    6 x 9 in.
    324 pp., 4 photos, 1 chart
    ISBN: 978-0-292-74348-9
    Print-on-demand title

    Edited by

    Monika Kaup, Assistant Professor of English
    University of Washington, Seattle

    Debra Rosenthal, Assistant Professor of English
    John Carroll University

    Over the last five centuries, the story of the Americas has been a story of the mixing of races and cultures. Not surprisingly, the issue of miscegenation, with its attendant fears and hopes, has been a pervasive theme in New World literature, as writers from Canada to Argentina confront the legacy of cultural hybridization and fusion.

    This book takes up the challenge of transforming American literary and cultural studies into a comparative discipline by examining the dynamics of racial and cultural mixture and its opposite tendency, racial and cultural disjunction, in the literatures of the Americas. Editors Kaup and Rosenthal have brought together a distinguished set of scholars who compare the treatment of racial and cultural mixtures in literature from North America, the Caribbean, and Latin America. From various angles, they remap the Americas as a multicultural and multiracial hemisphere, with a common history of colonialism, slavery, racism, and racial and cultural hybridity.

    Table of Contents

    • Acknowledgments
    • Introduction
    • I. Mixed-Blood Epistemologies
      1. Werner Sollors, Can Rabbits Have Interracial Sex?
      2. Doris Sommer, Who Can Tell? The Blanks in Villaverde
      3. Zita Nunes, Phantasmatic Brazil: Nella Larsen‘s Passing, American Literary Imagination, and Racial Utopianism
    • II. Métissage and Counterdiscourse
      1. Françoise Lionnet, Narrating the Americas: Transcolonial Métissage and Maryse Condé‘s La Migration des coeurs
      2. Michèle Praeger, Créolité or Ambiguity?
    • III. Indigenization, Miscegenation, and Nationalism
      1. Priscilla Archibald, Gender and Mestizaje in the Andes
      2. Debra J. Rosenthal, Race Mixture and the Representation of Indians in the U.S. and the Andes: Cumandá, Aves sin nido, The Last of the Mohicans, and Ramona
      3. Susan Gillman, The Squatter, the Don, and the Grandissimes in Our America
    • IV. Hybrid Hybridity
      1. Rafael Pérez-Torres, Chicano Ethnicity, Cultural Hybridity, and the Mestizo Voice
      2. Monika Kaup, Constituting Hybridity as Hybrid: Métis Canadian and Mexican American Formations
    • V. Sites of Memory in Mixed-Race Autobiography
      1. Rolando Hinojosa-Smith, Living on the River
      2. Louis Owens, The Syllogistic Mixedblood: How Roland Barthes Saved Me from the indians
    • Coda: From Exoticism to Mixed-Blood Humanism
      1. Earl E. Fitz, From Blood to Culture: Miscegenation as Metaphor for the Americas
    • Contributors
    • Works Cited
    • Index

    Read the entire introduction here.

  • Demystifying the Tragic Mulatta: The Biracial Woman as Spectacle

    Demystifying the Tragic Mulatta: The Biracial Woman as Spectacle

    Stanford Black Arts Quarterly
    Volume 2, Issue 3 (Summer/Spring 1997)
    pages 12-14

    Stefanie Dunning, Associate Professor
    Miami University (of Ohio)

    To talk about the complexities of subjectivity is to enter into a discussion which necessarily locates itself at the intersection of race, clans, gender and sexuality. When thinking about my own subjective position, I am confronted by constructions that simultaneously identify, name, abridge and abstract me. Sometimes they help guide my thoughts about myself; at other times, they limit my thinking, reducing me to general categories of color, class, and desire. My present task, interrogation of a biracial subject position, is as much a gender discussion as it is a racial one. My investments in this discussion are deep; I am writing theoretically and distantly about myself— looking for truths about biraciality that I recognize in the words of other theorists, hoping to trace for myself and my audience one thread within a complex, unraveling cultural text. I am not interested here with how biracial subjects manage their subjectivites; such an approach inherently positions biraciality as problematic, the historical consideration of which falls beyond the scope of this project. Instead I will explore the way biracial subjectivity is gendered through its construction.

    Women are the primary signifiers of miscegenation in literature and film. Likewise, the critical discourse on biraciality foregrounds the “tragic mulatta.” Yet, theorists regularly circumvent the issue of gender and theories lack interrogation of the point at which race and gender meet to sign biraciality. Visibility, i.e. what biracial people “look” like, makes up a significant part of biracial women’s experiences with uniracial onlookers. Moreover, visibility informs biracial women’s response to the uniracial “gaze.” This paper posits that biraciality is read differently “along gender lines.” While discourses about “mulattos” efface biracial men, biracial women are discursively foregrounded as “exotic.” Effectively, biraciality is inscribed with a specifically female status: the desire of ‘uniracial’ onlookers to exoticize biracial women inform the “gaze” which casts biracial women, “spectacle.”…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Mixing It Up: Multiracial Subjects

    Mixing It Up: Multiracial Subjects

    University of Texas Press
    2004
    6 x 9 in.
    225 pages
    ISBN: 978-0-292-74345-8
    Print-on-demand title

    Edited by:

    SanSan Kwan, Associate Professor of Dance, Performance Studies
    University of California, Berkeley

    and

    Kenneth Speirs (1964-2013), Professor of English
    University of California, Berkeley

    Foreword by

    Naomi Zack, Professor of Philosophy
    University of Oregon

    The United States Census 2000 presents a twenty-first century America in which mixed-race marriages, cross-race adoption, and multiracial families in general are challenging the ethnic definitions by which the nation has historically categorized its population. Addressing a wide spectrum of questions raised by this rich new cultural landscape, Mixing It Up brings together the observations of ten noted voices who have experienced multiracialism first-hand.

    From Naomi Zack’s “American Mixed Race: The United States 2000 Census and Related Issues” to Cathy Irwin and Sean Metzger’s “Keeping Up Appearances: Ethnic Alien-Nation in Female Solo Performance,” this diverse collection spans the realities of multiculturalism in compelling new analysis. Arguing that society’s discomfort with multiracialism has been institutionalized throughout history, whether through the “one drop” rule or media depictions, SanSan Kwan and Kenneth Speirs reflect on the means by which the monoracial lens is slowly being replaced.

    Itself a hybrid of memoir, history, and sociological theory, Mixing It Up makes it clear why the identity politics of previous decades have little relevance to the fluid new face of contemporary humanity.

    Table of Contents

    • Preface (Naomi Zack)
    • Acknowledgments
    • Introduction (SanSan Kwan and Kenneth Speirs)
    • I. Issues and Trends
      • 1. American Mixed Race: The United States 2000 Census and Related Issues (Naomi Zack)
      • 2. Misceg-narrations (Raquel Scherr Salgado)
    • II. Multiracial Subjects
      • 3. A Passionate Occupant of the Transnational Transit Lounge (Adrian Carton)
      • 4. Miscegenation and Me (Richard Guzman)
      • 5. “What Is She Anyway?”: Rearranging Bodily Mythologies (Orathai Northern)
      • 6. Resemblance (Alice White)
      • 7. “Brown Like Me”: Explorations of a Shifting Self (Stefanie Dunning)
      • 8. Toward a Multiethnic Cartography: Multiethnic Identity, Monoracial Cultural Logic, and Popular Culture (Evelyn Alsultany)
      • 9. Keeping Up Appearances: Ethnic Alien-Nation in Female Solo Performance (Cathy Irwin and Sean Metzger)
      • 10. Against Erasure: The Multiracial Voice in Cherríe Moraga’s Loving in the War Years (Carole DeSouza)
    • About the Contributors

  • Queer in Black and White: Interraciality, Same Sex Desire, and Contemporary African American Culture

    Queer in Black and White: Interraciality, Same Sex Desire, and Contemporary African American Culture

    Indiana University Press
    2009-04-21
    152 pages
    5 b&w photos, 5.5 x 8.25
    ISBN-13: 978-0-253-22109-4

    Stefanie K. Dunning, Associate Professor
    Miami University, Oxford, Ohio

    This book analyzes representative works of African American fiction, film, and music in which interracial desire appears in the context of same sex desire. In close readings of these “texts,” Stefanie K. Dunning explores the ways in which the interracial intersects with queerness, blackness, whiteness, class, and black national identity. She shows that representations of interracial desire do not follow the logic of racial exclusion. Instead they are metaphorical and anti-biological. Rather than diluting race, interracial desire makes race visible. By invoking the interracial, black gay and lesbian artists can remake our conception of blackness.

    Table of Contents

    • Acknowledgments
    • Introduction
    • 1. “Ironic Soil”: Recuperative Rhythms and Negotiated Nationalism
    • 2. “No Tender Mercy”: Same-Sex Desire, Interraciality, and the Black Nation
    • 3. (Not) Loving Her: A Locus of Contradictions
    • 4. “She’s a B*(u)tch”: Centering Blackness in The Watermelon Woman
    • Epilogue: Reading Robert Reid-Pharr
    • Notes
    • Index

  • The Historical Problematization of ‘Mixed Race’ in Psychological and Human-Scientific Discourses

    The Historical Problematization of ‘Mixed Race’ in Psychological and Human-Scientific Discourses

    Defining difference: Race and Racism in the History of Psychology
    2004
    Edited by Andrew Winston
    pages pp. 79-108
    American Psychological Association

    Thomas Teo, Associate Professor
    Department of Psychology
    York University

    This paper reconstructs techniques of problematization regarding “mixed race” from Enlightenment inspired anthropological discourses to the North-American psychological discourses of the present time. Two central techniques of problematization are discussed. The conceptual technique of problematization, used in bio-psychological discourse at the beginning of the 20th century, transformed a lack of evidence into invoking metaphysical concepts such as disharmony. Sociological and social-psychological discourses changed problems of society with hybridity into problems of individuals. The empirical technique of problematization refers to the repeated testing of the inferiority of hybrid groups, for example of the “mulatto hypothesis.” Finally, it is shown how multiracial academics in the contemporary discourse shifted the discourse by focusing on problems that biracial people experience within society. It is suggested that the reconstruction of hybridity illustrates the epistemological and ethical shortcomings of a paradigm that considers humans as objects and not as subjects of research.

    Read the entire chapter here.

  • Our Problems with Race: Addressing Biological Versus Social Definitions

    Our Problems with Race: Addressing Biological Versus Social Definitions

    Appalachian State University
    Blue Ridge Ballroom PSU
    Wednesday, 2009-10-28 19:00 EDT (Local Time)                                   

    Joseph L. Graves, Jr, Dean of University Studies and Professor of Biological Sciences
    North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University

    What does evolution tell us about race and what are we taught to believe about race? What are the implications for how we view, group, and value others?  Using his research background in evolutionary biology, Dr. Joseph L. Graves, Jr. explains how most Americans still believe that there is some biological legitimacy to our socially constructed racial categories despite the modern scientific evidence that discredits all of our social stereotypes. Dr. Graves has written two books that address the myths and theories of race in American society. He has published over 50 papers and book chapters and has appeared in six documentary films and numerous television interviews on these general topics.

  • Crimes of ‘Blood’: A comparative analysis of South Africa’s Immorality Act (1927 & 1950) and Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act (1949), and Miscegenation Laws in North America

    Crimes of ‘Blood’: A comparative analysis of South Africa’s Immorality Act (1927 & 1950) and Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act (1949), and Miscegenation Laws in North America

    W.E.B. DuBois Insitute for African and African American Research at Harvard University
    Date: Spring 2010

    Zimitri Erasmus, Senior Lecturer in Sociology
    University of Cape Town

    This study compares the effects of Miscegenation Laws in 20th century North America with those of apartheid South Africa’s Immorality (1927 & 1950) and Prohibition of Mixed Marriages (1949) Acts. It draws on three sets of primary data: a) law reports of cases tried and sent for appeal – under various versions of the Immorality Act – before 1948 under the government of the Union of South Africa and after 1948, under the Apartheid government; b) House of Assembly and Senate Debates of the South African Parliament, under both the Union and Apartheid governments; and c) related Government Commission Reports. It also draws on already existing analyses of similar data from the North American experience to produce a comparative analysis of relevant laws in South Africa and North America.

    The project examines the logic, procedures and socio-political effects of these key laws of Grand Apartheid. I ask four broad questions:

    • What can we learn from the North American body of knowledge on the administration of ‘interracial’ sex and marriage that might be of relevance to such administration in colonial and apartheid South Africa?
    • What is different about the South African case?
    • How does this difference contribute to knowledge in this field?
    • What does this comparative analysis offer in support of a critical literacy for the use of ‘race’?