Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

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  • A Home Elsewhere: Reading African American Classics in the Age of Obama

    A Home Elsewhere: Reading African American Classics in the Age of Obama

    Harvard University Press
    May 2010
    192 pages
    5-1/2 x 8-1/4 inches
    no illustrations
    Hardcover ISBN: 9780674050969

    Robert B. Stepto, Professor of English, African American Studies, and American Studies
    Yale University

    In this series of interlocking essays, which had their start as lectures inspired by the presidency of Barack Obama, Robert Burns Stepto sets canonical works of African American literature in conversation with Obama’s Dreams from My Father. The elegant readings that result shed surprising light on unexamined angles of works ranging from Frederick Douglass’s Narrative to W.E.B. Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folk to Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon.

    Stepto draws our attention to the concerns that recur in the books he takes up: how protagonists raise themselves, often without one or both parents; how black boys invent black manhood, often with no models before them; how protagonists seek and find a home elsewhere; and how they create personalities that can deal with the pain of abandonment. These are age-old themes in African American literature that, Stepto shows, gain a special poignancy and importance because our president has lived through these situations and circumstances and has written about them in a way that refreshes our understanding of the whole of African American literature.

    Stepto amplifies these themes in four additional essays, which investigate Douglass’s correspondence with Harriet Beecher Stowe; Willard Savoy’s novel Alien Land and its interracial protagonist; the writer’s understanding of the reader in African American literature; and Stepto’s account of his own schoolhouse lessons, with their echoes of Douglass’ and Obama’s experiences.

    Table of Contents

    • Part One: The W.E.B. Du Bois Lectures
      • Introduction
      • 1. Frederick Douglass, Barack Obama, and the Search for Patrimony
      • 2. W.E.B. Du Bois, Barack Obama, and the Search for Race: School House Blues
      • 3. Toni Morrison, Barack Obama, and Difference
    • Part Two
      • Introduction
      • 4. A Greyhound Kind of Mood
      • 5. Sharing the Thunder: The Literary Exchanges of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry Bibb, and Frederick Douglass
      • 6. Willard Savoy’s Alien Land: Biracial Identity in a Novel of the 1940s
      • Afterword: Distrust of the Reader in Afro-American Narratives
    • Notes
    • Index

  • Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America

    Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America

    Harvard University Press
    2012-11-19
    320 pages
    6-1/8 x 9-1/4 inches
    15 halftones, 2 maps, 4 tables
    Hardcover ISBN: 9780674066663

    Vivek Bald, Assistant Professor of Writing and Digital Media
    Massachusetts Institute of Technology

    In the final years of the nineteenth century, small groups of Muslim peddlers arrived at Ellis Island every summer, bags heavy with embroidered silks from their home villages in Bengal. The American demand for “Oriental goods” took these migrants on a curious path, from New Jersey’s beach boardwalks into the heart of the segregated South. Two decades later, hundreds of Indian Muslim seamen began jumping ship in New York and Baltimore, escaping the engine rooms of British steamers to find less brutal work onshore. As factory owners sought their labor and anti-Asian immigration laws closed in around them, these men built clandestine networks that stretched from the northeastern waterfront across the industrial Midwest.

    The stories of these early working-class migrants vividly contrast with our typical understanding of immigration. Vivek Bald’s meticulous reconstruction reveals a lost history of South Asian sojourning and life-making in the United States. At a time when Asian immigrants were vilified and criminalized, Bengali Muslims quietly became part of some of America’s most iconic neighborhoods of color, from Tremé in New Orleans to Detroit’s Black Bottom, from West Baltimore to Harlem. Many started families with Creole, Puerto Rican, and African American women.

    As steel and auto workers in the Midwest, as traders in the South, and as halal hot dog vendors on 125th Street, these immigrants created lives as remarkable as they are unknown. Their stories of ingenuity and intermixture challenge assumptions about assimilation and reveal cross-racial affinities beneath the surface of early twentieth-century America.

    For more information, visit the Bengali Harlem website here.

    Table of Contents

    • Author’s Note
    • Introduction: Lost in Migration
    • 1. Out of the East and into the South
    • 2. Between Hindoo and Negro
    • 3. From Ships’ Holds to Factory Floors
    • 4. The Travels and Transformations of Amir Haider Khan
    • 5. Bengali Harlem
    • 6. The Life and Times of a Multiracial Community
    • Conclusion: Lost Futures
    • List of Abbreviations
    • Notes
    • Acknowledgments
    • Index

  • David Domke & Christopher Parker: Obama, the Tea Party, and Racism

    David Domke & Christopher Parker: Obama, the Tea Party, and Racism

    Town Hall Seattle
    Great Hall; enter on Eight Avenue
    2012-09-24, 19:30-21:00 PDT (Local Time)

    David Domke, Chair of the University of Washington Department of Communications and a winner of the school’s Distinguished Teaching Award, believes President Barack Obama has been subjected to historically unprecedented disrespect by legislators and many citizens. Is this evidence of racism toward our first African-American president? What role has the Tea Party played in this animosity? What does public-opinion data tell us; what do we learn from public rhetoric; and what does news coverage suggest? Speaking to the data, UW Professor of Social Justice and Political Science and author of the forthcoming book Change They Can’t Believe In, Christopher Parker joins Dr. Domke in a candid, evidence-based conversation around this explosive topic. Presented as part of the Town Hall Civic series, with Elliott Bay Book Company. 

    For more information, click here.

  • The Eurasian Face

    The Eurasian Face

    Blacksmith Books
    November 2010
    140 pages
    70+ b/w images
    Bilingual: English/Chinese
    20.5 x 31 cm
    Hardcover ISBN: 978-988-99799-9-7

    Kirsteen Zimmern

    No one represents diversity better than Eurasians—those individuals with a mix of Caucasian and Asian heritage. Once a source of shame, the Eurasian face has become the face that sells. It is the face with which everyone can identify. In an ever-shrinking world, the search is on for a one-size-fits-all global image. Eurasians have become the world’s poster boys and girls, much sought after as actors and models.

    Taking advantage of increasingly tolerant times and the growing commercial and cultural exchanges between East and West, Eurasians have gained prominence as entrepreneurs, professionals and athletes. This book of interviews and black-and-white portraits reveals how seventy Eurasians of diverse backgrounds see their place in the world today.

    Kirsteen Zimmern is a photographer of Chinese and Scottish ancestry. She has always been fascinated by the tell-tale signs of East and West in the faces of fellow Eurasians, and has found this fascination to be widespread: few days go by without strangers examining her appearance to discern her ethnicity. She lives in Hong Kong.

    View pages 48-59 here.

  • The Fifth Figure

    The Fifth Figure

    Bloodaxe Books
    2006-09-28
    80 pages
    Paperback ISBN-10: 1852247320; ISBN-13: 978-1852247324

    Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze

    Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze is a popular Jamaican Dub poet and storyteller whose performances are so powerful she has been called a ‘one-woman festival’. The Fifth Figure is a book-length sequence mixing poetry and prose which chronicles the lives of five generations of Caribbean and Black British women of mixed ancestry.

    Part novel, part poem, part family memoir, its structure is based on the Jamaican quadrille, a hybrid version of the dance brought from Europe by the island’s former colonial masters. Beginning in the late 19th century with her great-great grandmother’s first quadrille, Breeze tells a many-layered tale of love and betrayal, innocence and suffering, hardship and joy over a hundred years as each mother sees her daughter join a dance that shapes her life.

    The Fifth Figure is her fifth book, and sees Breeze breathing new life into the dramatic monologue. Steeped in the history of Jamaica, the book develops the possibilities of narrative, voice and rhythm, offering an eloquent and empowering vision of Caribbean lives and culture.

    In 2011 Bloodaxe published Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze’s Third World Blues: Selected Poems, a DVD-book selection of new and previously published work with live performances on the accompanying DVD. This does include work from The Fifth Figure, which remains available as a separate edition.

  • Travel Light Travel Dark

    Travel Light Travel Dark

    Bloodaxe Books
    2013-06-30
    96 pages
    216 x 138 mm
    Paperback ISBN: 9781852249915

    John Agard

    John Agard has been broadening the canvas of British poetry for the past 35 years with his mischievous, satirical fables which overturn all our expectations. In this new symphonic collection, Travel Light Travel Dark, Agard casts his unique spin on the intermingling strands of British history, and leads us into metaphysical and political waters. Cross-cultural connections are played out in a variety of voices and cadences. Prospero and Caliban have a cricket match encounter, recounted in calypso-inspired rhythms, and in the long poem, “Water Music of a Different Kind,” the incantatory orchestration of the Atlantic’s middle passage becomes a moving counterpoint to Handel’s Water Music.

    Travel Light Travel Dark brings a mythic dimension to the contemporary and opens with a meditation on the enigma of colour. Water often appears as a metaphoric riff within the fabric of the collection, as sugar cane tells its own story in “Sugar Cane’s Saga” and water speaks for itself in a witty debate with wine, inspired by the satirical tradition of the goliards, wandering clerics of the Middle Ages.

  • Poetry: Three Treasures by Hannah Lowe

    Poetry: Three Treasures by Hannah Lowe

    Freeword: a global meeting place for literature, argument and free thinking
    2012-06-12

    Hannah Lowe

    A panelist at ‘2 Nations’, our recent event exploring national identity, Hannah Lowe is a poet of Chinese, Jamaican and English heritage. In this poem she performed for the audience that night, she explores how her background has influenced her sense of her own identity.

    Three Treasures

    Jamaica in the attic in a dark blue trunk,
    sea-salt in the hinges. What must it look like
    all that wide blue sea?

    England downstairs in a rocking chair.
    Nanna rocking with her playing cards,
    cigs and toffee, tepid tea.

    Jamaica frying chicken in the kitchen,
    pig-snout in the stew-pot,
    breakfast pan of saltfish, akee

    China in the won-ton skin,
    gold songbird on the brittle porcelain,
    pink pagoda silk settee…

    Read the entire poem here.

  • As has been shown in these pages, the mixed or mongrel people perish, and are blotted from the face of the earth.

    The writer of “Miscegenation” considers it a most providential event, and as one significant of the type-man or miscegens of the future, that the statue on the dome of the Capitol at Washington is of a “bronze tint.” But it is possible that he mistakes its significance. As has been shown in these pages, the mixed or mongrel people perish, and are blotted from the face of the earth. The Egyptians, the Carthagenians, and now the Mexicans, are historical examples of God’s punishment upon those who dare to mar the works of His creation. The dome of the Capitol, therefore, with its mulatto statue, has the symbol of decay upon it, and it would seem to constantly point to the triumph of the Confederate or White Constitution in the place of the mongrelized one which the folly of the hour has deified.

    John H. Van Evrie, Subgenation: The Theory of the Normal Relation of the Races; an Answer to “Miscegenation,” (New York: John Bradburn Publishing, 1864): 67.

  • Subgenation: The Theory of the Normal Relation of the Races; an Answer to “Miscegenation”

    Subgenation: The Theory of the Normal Relation of the Races; an Answer to “Miscegenation”

    John Bradburn Publishing
    1864
    72 pages
    Classification Number: CAGE E185.62.V24 1864

    John H. Van Evrie (1814-1896)

    TABLE OF CONTENTS

    • I.—The Diversity of the Races.
    • II.—Miscegenation; or, the Mixture of the Races.
    • III.—The Future of the Races.
    • IV.—The Effect of Subgenation Upon the White Race.
    • V.—Subgenation, the Basis of Democracy.
    • VI.—Women and Subgenation.
    • VII.—Subgenation and the Presidential Election.
    • VIII.— The Recognition of the Confederate States.
    • IX.—The Millennium Solved.
    • X.—An Omen.

    Introduction

    Scaliger quaintly observes “that nothing will sell better than a scurrile pamphlet,” and the extensive sale of a recent brochure, entitled “Miscegenation,” in which the most indecent doctrines are seductively inculcated under the garb of philosophy, seems to prove the assertion. While there is no excuse for the gross violation of natural instincts which that author recommends, yet there is probably some good reason why there is a want of a popular knowledge as to the true relation of the races. The juxtaposition of the Caucasian, Indian, and Negro races on this continent, in considerable numbers, has no parallel in history. If we except the Egyptians and the Carthagenians, there were no ancient nations which had other than a homogeneous population. A negro was a curiosity in Greece and Rome.   All modern Europe, from which we derive our language, is composed of one race or the varieties of it. The question, as to the proper relation of distinct races, is, therefore, a new one, and has been committed to this country for solution.

    The writer to whom allusion has been made offers a solution, and it is no less a proposition than the annihilation of all the existing races and the formation of a new one! He proposes to bring this about by mingling the races, and has invented the word Miscegenation to express his idea (miscere, to mix; genus, a race). The suggestion of the word is a good one. The necessity of new terms to express the proper, as well as the improper, relation of the races on this continent has long been felt by thoughtful minds. The words slavery and slave are derived from Sclavi—Sclavonians, who were conquered by the Germans and reduced to abject bondage. The word, therefore, expresses a relation existing between persons of the same race, and not between those of different races. Hence it is a misnomer as applied to the American form of society. The present writer proposes to profit by the suggestion of the author of of “Miscegenation” and coin another word, long needed.  It is subgenation, from sub, lower, and generatus and genus, a race born or created lower than another; i.e., the natural or normal relation of an inferior to a superior race. The invention of new words has the high authority of Horace:

    “Si forte necesse est
    Indiciis monstrare recentribus abdita rerum.”

    They were never so much needed as now. The simple truths—There is no slavery in this country; there are no slaves in the Southern States. We are fighting about a myth. For three centuries the Christian world was deluged in blood upon the assumption that there was a Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem. There was no Holy Sepulchre there. The world was fighting on a false premise. This country is now repeating the same insensate folly.  In the following pages the writer proposes to show how and why this is so, to expose the errors and absurdities of the author of “Miscegenation,” and to give such a solution to the question of the proper relation of the races as shall commend itself to the conscience 0f every intelligent friend of Humanity…

    Read the entire book here.

  • Blackness and Transatlantic Irish Identity: Celtic Soul Brothers

    Blackness and Transatlantic Irish Identity: Celtic Soul Brothers

    Routledge
    2012-07-11
    234 pages
    Paperback ISBN: 978-0-415-65367-1
    Hardback ISBN: 978-0-415-80189-8
    eBook ISBN: 978-0-203-85989-6

    Lauren Onkey, Vice President of Education and Public Programs
    Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum
    Cleveland, Ohio

    Blackness and Transatlantic Irish Identity analyzes the long history of imagined and real relationships between the Irish and African-Americans since the mid-nineteenth century in popular culture and literature. Irish writers and political activists have often claimed—and thereby created—a “black” identity to explain their experience with colonialism in Ireland and revere African-Americans as a source of spiritual and sexual vitality. Irish-Americans often resisted this identification so as to make a place for themselves in the U.S. However, their representation of an Irish-American identity pivots on a distinction between Irish-Americans and African-Americans. Lauren Onkey argues that one of the most consistent tropes in the assertion of Irish and Irish-American identity is constructed through or against African-Americans, and she maps that trope in the work of writers Roddy Doyle, James Farrell, Bernard MacLaverty, John Boyle O’Reilly, and Jimmy Breslin; playwright Ned Harrigan; political activists Bernadette Devlin and Tom Hayden; and musicians Van Morrison, U2, and Black 47.

    Contents

    • 1. Introduction: “Aren’t We a Little White for That Kind of Thing?”
    • 2. “A Representative Americanized Irishman”: John Boyle O’Reilly
    • 3. Melees
    • 4. Bernadette’s Legacy
    • 5. Ray Charles on Hyndford Street: Van Morrison’s Caledonian Soul
    • 6. Born Under a Bad Sign
    • Conclusion: Micks for O’Bamagh