Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

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  • Mixed Race Peoples in the Korean National Imaginary and Family

    Mixed Race Peoples in the Korean National Imaginary and Family

    Korean Studies
    Volume 32 (2008)
    pages 56-85
    DOI: 10.1353/ks.0.0010
    E-ISSN: 1529-1529; Print ISSN: 0145-840X

    Mary Lee, Director
    Pacific Policy Research Center, Honolulu, Hawaii

    This article discusses the production of “mixed-race” subjectivity in South Korea.  It asks: how can we understand the lived experiences and histories of mixed-race people as integral to the logic of national governance, both past and present?  Instead of regarding mixed-race people in Korea as an aberration or regrettable phenomenon, this article contends that their “otherness” is an outcome of the intensions, contradictions, and insecurities of national governance which coheres around discourse and legislation on the family.  The testimony of various mixed-race people living in Korea reveals the racial, gendered, and sexual discursive modalities through which they were rendered outside the scope and meaning of Koreanness.  Their testimony also corresponds with the discursive limits set forth by the government, particularly in the establishment of laws that govern desired familial relations within the climate of Cold War militarism, industrialization, and the post-democratization era of globalization and official multiculturalism.  The longstanding and still practiced abjection of mixed-race people from South Korean society cannot be understood without exploring the intersection between a racial politics of “blood purity” and a gendered politics of patriarchy that works in service of an imagined Korean homogeneity.

  • Driven: Branding Derek Jeter, Redefining Race

    Driven: Branding Derek Jeter, Redefining Race

    NINE: A Journal of Baseball History and Culture
    Volume 17, Number 2, Spring 2009
    pages  70-79
    E-ISSN: 1534-1844 Print ISSN: 1188-9330
    DOI: 10.1353/nin.0.0041

    Roberta Newman

    Promoting the opening of the Museum of the City of New York’s exhibit, “The Glory Days: New York Baseball, 1947-1957,” curator Ann Meyerson noted that for the first time since Jackie Robinson crossed the major league’s color line in 1947, not a single African American player was likely to be included on either of the city’s teams’ twenty-five man rosters in 2007. Excluding, for the sake of argument, Mets prospect Lastings Milledge, now with the Nationals, where did that leave the captain of the New York Yankees, Derek Jeter?  In a 2005 interview with the St. Petersburg Times, Jeter handled the subject of his race with characteristic, media-savvy care: “My Dad is black, my Mom is Irish, and I’m Catholic, so I hear everything. I’m in New York and there are all different people, all races and religions. I can relate to everyone.”

    Since his 1996 rookie season, Derek Jeter has not only played shortstop for the New York Yankees, he has parlayed his ability to “relate to everyone” into what advertisers hope will translate into an ability to “sell to everyone,” working overtime as a pitching machine.  Most of the products Jeter pitched before 2006 were ones generally associated with baseball and conventionally endorsed by its players-Nike sneakers, Gatorade sports drink, Ford cars and trucks, and a variety of breakfast and snack foods, including Ritz crackers, Post cereals, Skippy peanut butter, and, perhaps inevitably, Oreos.  Not so surprisingly for one of the most generously compensated players in the game, Jeter also endorsed a financial institution, Fleet Bank. In his role as a well-known man about town, not altogether unfamiliar to the readers of New York’s gossip columns, Jeter also appeared with his equally famous, generous compensator, George M. Steinbrenner, in a Visa commercial. Recently, however, Jeter has branched out beyond the expected, connecting his image to two very different…

  • Sonata Mulattica: Poems

    Sonata Mulattica: Poems

    W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
    2009
    240 pages
    6.3 × 9.3 in
    Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-393-07008-8

    Rita Dove, Commonwealth Professor of English
    University of Virginia

    In a book-length lyric narrative inspired by history and imagination, a much celebrated poet re-creates the life of a nineteenth-century virtuoso violinist.

    The son of a white woman and an “African Prince,” George Polgreen Bridgetower (1780–1860) travels to Vienna to meet “bad-boy” genius Ludwig van Beethoven.  The great composer’s subsequent sonata is originally dedicated to the young mulatto but George, exuberant with acclaim, offends Beethoven over a woman. From this crucial encounter evolves a grandiose yet melancholy poetic tale.

  • Representations of the Black Body in Mexican Visual Art: Evidence of an African Historical Presence or a Cultural Myth?

    Representations of the Black Body in Mexican Visual Art: Evidence of an African Historical Presence or a Cultural Myth?

    Journal of Black Studies
    Volume 39, Number 5 (May 2009)
    pages 761-785
    DOI: 10.1177/0021934707301474

    Wendy E. Phillips, Photographer
    Atlanta, GA

    Although Africans have been present in Mexico since the time of the Afro-Atlantic slave trade, the larger Mexican culture seems to have forgotten this aspect of its history.  Although the descendents of these original Africans continue to live in the communities of coastal Oaxaca, Guerrero, and Veracruz states, many Mexicans seem to be unaware of their existence. This article reviews works of visual art made from the 1700s through the present that represent images of Mexicans of African descent and provide evidence of a historical Afromestizo presence in Mexico.  The works are also considered as possible sources of evidence about prevailing attitudes about Mexicans of African descent and anxieties about race mixing.  This article provides a brief overview of Mexico’s historical relationship with Africa as a participant in the Afro-Atlantic slave trade and considers the work of muralists, painters, and photographers who have created works of art in various regions of the country.

    Read or purchase the article here.

  • Assessing Multiracial Identity Theory and Politics: The Challenge of Hypodescent

    Assessing Multiracial Identity Theory and Politics: The Challenge of Hypodescent

    Ethnicities
    Volume 4, Number 3 (September 2004)
    pages 357-379
    DOI: 10.1177/1468796804045239

    Rainier Spencer, Professor
    Department of Anthropology & Ethnic Studies
    University of Nevada, Las Vegas

    It is increasingly possible to detect a split in regard to current analyses of multiracial identity in the United States. On the one hand there remains a relatively naive brand of multiracial activism and identity politics that has deep roots in the recent movement to institute a US federal multiracial category; while on the other hand we find a steadily maturing body of scholarship on mixed-race identity that is several levels removed in terms of intellectual rigor and objectivity.  As this latter movement continues to mature, it increasingly forces the former to acknowledge and to confront important issues of logical consistency in the multiracial identity debate. This article represents an effort to guide and shape that discussion in assessing the ideological foundation of multiracial identity politics in the United States.

    Read or purchase the article here.

  • Experiences of racism and the changing nature of white privilege among lone white mothers of mixed-parentage children in the UK

    Experiences of racism and the changing nature of white privilege among lone white mothers of mixed-parentage children in the UK

    Ethnic and Racial Studies
    Volume 33, Issue 2 (February 2010)
    pages 176-194
    DOI: 10.1080/01419870903023652

    Vicki Harman, Lecturer in the Centre for Criminology and Sociology
    Royal Holloway, University of London

    In a context where mixed relationships are often seen as a visible indicator of increased tolerance, this paper holds up a lens to the particular experiences of racism negotiated by lone white mothers of mixed-parentage children. Based on qualitative interviews with thirty mothers, this paper illustrates how, through their parenting, racism and racial injustice became more visible to the mothers in the study.  It is argued that, as well as experiencing racism directed at their children in a range of contexts (including the extended family, school and the local area), lone white mothers of mixed-parentage children are frequently facing social disapproval themselves.  Drawing on the notion of whiteness as a seemingly unmarked and invisible category, this paper argues that mothers’ experiences can challenge and complicate dominant conceptualizations of white privilege.

    Read or purchase the article here.

  • Barriers between Us: Interracial Sex in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

    Barriers between Us: Interracial Sex in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

    Indiana University Press
    2004-10-12
    160 pages
    1 bibliog., 1 index, 6.125 x 9.25
    Paper ISBN-13: 978-0-253-21733-2; ISBN: 0-253-21733-4

    Cassandra Jackson, Professor of English
    The College of New Jersey

    This provocative book examines the representation of characters of mixed African and European descent in the works of African American and European American writers of the 19th century.  The importance of mulatto figures as agents of ideological exchange in the American literary tradition has yet to receive sustained critical attention. Going beyond Sterling Brown’s melodramatic stereotype of the mulatto as “tragic figure,” Cassandra Jackson’s close study of nine works of fiction shows how the mulatto trope reveals the social, cultural, and political ideas of the period. Jackson uncovers a vigorous discussion in 19th-century fiction about the role of racial ideology in the creation of an American identity.  She analyzes the themes of race-mixing, the “mulatto,” nation building, and the social fluidity of race (and its imagined biological rigidity) in novels by James Fenimore Cooper, Richard Hildreth, Lydia Maria Child, Frances E. W. Harper, Thomas Detter, George Washington Cable, and Charles Chesnutt.

  • The Geographical Imagination of Barack Obama: Representing Race and Space in America

    The Geographical Imagination of Barack Obama: Representing Race and Space in America

    Southeastern Geographer
    Volume 49, Number 3, Fall 2009
    pages 221-239
    E-ISSN: 1549-6929 Print ISSN: 0038-366X
    DOI: 10.1353/sgo.0.0049

    Robert J. Kruse, II

    It has been noted that the geographical work on race and space has often overlooked the geographies of individual African-Americans. This paper adds to the literature on race and space by focusing upon Barack Obama, the 44th president of the United States.  Unusual in many ways, Obama offers the opportunity to combine two types of analysis in this paper. First, his memoir, Dreams From My Father, is treated as a geographical text through which we may gain insight into his geographical imagination. Second, this paper discusses the spatialization of racial identities, particularly whiteness, that have informed the public’s impressions of Obama.  Together, these discussions may help us to understand the point at which Barack Obama’s personal geographies intersect with larger racialized landscapes that show increasing hybridity and permeability.

  • The Specter of Sex: Gendered Foundations of Racial Formation in the United States

    The Specter of Sex: Gendered Foundations of Racial Formation in the United States

    State University of New York (SUNY) Press
    August 2009
    323 pages
    Hardcover ISBN13: 978-1-4384-2753-9
    Paperback ISBN13: 978-1-4384-2754-6

    Sally L. Kitch, Distinguished Professor of Women and Gender Studies
    Arizona State University

    Genealogy of the formation of race and gender hierarchies in the U.S.

    Theories of intersectionality have fundamentally transformed how feminists and critical race scholars understand the relationship between race and gender, but are often limited in their focus on contemporary experiences of interlocking oppressions. In The Specter of Sex, Sally L. Kitch explores the “backstory” of intersectionality theory—the historical formation of the racial and gendered hierarchies that continue to structure U.S. culture today. Kitch uses a genealogical approach to explore how a world already divided by gender ideology became one simultaneously obsessed with judgmental ideas about race, starting in Europe and the English colonies in the late seventeenth century. Through an examination of religious, political, and scientific narratives, public policies and testimonies, laws, court cases, and newspaper accounts, The Specter of Sex provides a rare comparative study of the racial formation of five groups—American Indians, African Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans, and European whites—and reveals gendered patterns that have served white racial dominance and repeated themselves with variations over a two-hundred-year period.

    “This gracefully written synthesis of existing historical scholarship advances a position that both asserts distinction between ‘race’ and ‘gender’ as categories and privileges the gendered process of racial formation as key to understanding power and hierarchy in the United States. It is perfect for the classroom and will serve as a guide for theorists who need grounding in history.

    Table Of Contents

    • Acknowledgments
    • Introduction: The “Purloined Letter” of Gendered Race
    • Part I: Roots As the Twig is Bent
      • 1. “Women are a Huge Natural Calamity”: The Roots of Western Gender Ideology
      • 2. The First Races in Society: Gendered Roots of Race Formation
      • 3. Gendered Racial Institutions: World Slavery and Nationhood
      • Conclusion: From Gender to Race
    • Part II: Bodies Whose Too, Too Solid Flesh?
      • 4. The American “Body Shop”: Gendered Racial Formation in the Colonies and New Republic
      • 5. Enslaved Bodies and Gendered Race
      • 6. Sexual Projection and Race: Science, Politics, and Lust
      • Conclusion: Embodying Race
    • Part III: Blood “Off Women Com Owre Manhed”
      • 7. Defining, Measuring, and Ranking Racial Blood: The Ungendered Surface
      • 8. Hardly Gender Neutral
      • 9. Gendered Anti-Miscegenation: Laws and Their Interpretation
      • 10. Preserving White Racial Blood: Rape Accusations and Motherhood
      • Conclusion: Miscegenation as Racial Reconciliation?
    • Part IV: Citizenship “My Folks Fought for This Country”
      • 11. What is Citizenship?: Gender and Race
      • 12. Engendering Citizenship: Dependency and Sex
      • 13. “No Can Do” Men and Their Others: Dependency and Inappropriate Gender
      • 14. Mixed Race, Suspect Gender: Both White and . . . Whatever
      • Conclusion: Homosexual Citizenship: A Gendered Racial Oxymoron
    • Part V: Implications Patterns for a New Bridge
      • 15. Implications for Feminist Theories of Racial Difference and Antisubordination Politics
      • 16. Gender Implications for Theories of Racial Formation
    • Conclusion: Interdependence
    • Notes
    • Index

  • Hybrid Border-Crossers? Towards a Radical Socialisation of ‘Mixed Race’

    Hybrid Border-Crossers? Towards a Radical Socialisation of ‘Mixed Race’

    Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies
    Volume 35, Issue 1 (January 2009)
    pages 115 – 132
    DOI: 10.1080/13691830802489275

    Jin Haritaworn, Assistant Professor in Gender, Race and Environment at the Faculty of Environmental Studies
    York University, Canada

    The celebration of ‘mixed race’ as the model ‘transgressive’ (post-)identity obfuscates the ambivalence at the root of this construct.  Far from ‘abolishing’ race or throwing it into crisis, ‘mixed-race’ bodies and minds continue to be evaluated as disparate, unwholesome and non-belonging, and appear to invite dissective reading practices such as stares, intrusive questions and comments which are commonly treated as a ‘normal reaction to abnormal bodies’. In this article I examine semi-structured interviews with 22 people of Thai and non-Thai parentage in Britain and Germany.  Drawing on Fanon’s existential phenomenology, I theorise interviewees’ everyday confrontations with intrusive reading practices of their bodies, origins, loyalties and families.  The persistence of pathologising discourses and practices on ‘mixed race’ renders celebratory notions of ‘hybrid border-crossers’ problematic.  Rather than a pre-social property of particular bodies which trigger intrusive labelling attempts, ‘ambiguous phenotype’ is socially produced in biologistic race discourses and violent reading practices. ‘Mixed race’ should be more aptly theorised as a dissective racialising technology which mobilises essentialised forms of knowledge and entitles some to gaze at and define others.   It is constituted in power relations which are socially produced and, hence, also open to contestation and change.

    Read or purchase the article here.