Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

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  • Historian Unmasks Quadroon Myth

    Historian Unmasks Quadroon Myth

    New Wave
    Tulane University News
    2011-08-17

    Carol J. Schlueter

    Historian Emily Clark has been here before, plowing through New Orleans archival documents from the early 1800s, handwritten in French. Her latest search has unveiled truths about a group of women that Clark says history has maligned: free women of color.

    “I want to bring them to the attention of history again,” says Clark, an associate professor who holds the Clement Chambers Benenson Professorship in American Colonial History at Tulane.

    Funding from a state Awards to Louisiana Artists and Scholars (ATLAS) grant has allowed Clark to extend a sabbatical and work on a new book, The Strange History of the American Quadroon.

    Myths abound about “quadroon balls” in early-19th-century New Orleans in which quadroons—described by Clark as “a name for any woman who seemed to be of mixed race”—were presented to groups of white men. With marriages between the two groups forbidden, what supposedly resulted was plaçage, a contractual living-together arrangement.

    But when Clark went looking in the archives, she found something else…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Half and Half

    Half and Half

    The Cornell Daily Sun
    Ithaca, New York
    2012-03-28

    Rebecca Lee

    Just about the only thing I am looking forward to about graduation is finally being able to meet all of my best friends’ parents.  In high school, we knew our friends’ parents almost as well as our own, calling them by their first names, even dropping a playful “Mom” now and then.   Au contraire, we go through college barely having met the creators of the people with whom we share everything, from our rooms to our nights to our secrets.  Meeting a friend’s parents is an “aha” moment in which you are almost in awe of the physical representation of genetics in front of you.

    Ah, genetics.  It’s where I get my mom’s smile and idealism, my dad’s olive skin and innate quietude.  It’s why I can both wear a “Kiss Me I’m Irish” shirt on St. Patrick’s Day and send out Chinese New Year cards when my family misses the traditional holiday season.  It’s why some people think I’m adopted.  It’s why I proudly refer to myself as a halfie.

    In all honesty, my Chinese dad grew up in Great Neck and I am not even that good at using chopsticks.   But even though I am thoroughly Americanized, I still feel close to my distinct Chinese heritage.  For one, I am perceptibly Asian, whereas the other half of my genes are a little more, well, recessive. I even spent the first seven years of my life in Chinatown, at a public kindergarten where I was the only kid who didn’t know how to speak Chinese. But I have to wonder whether I would feel as close a connection to my Asian heritage if my last name wasn’t Lee, if my hair wasn’t naturally dark and stick straight, if I didn’t grow up knowing my Chinese grandparents…

    …When people say that they only want to be with someone of their same race or religion, I take it as somewhat of a personal offense, since my own mixed-race existence was in such clear defiance of those beliefs.  I used to think it was closed minded of my Catholic friends to only follow up on Catholic advances.  I used to think it was cruel and unusual for my Indian friends to have to only date other Indians.   I used to see it as a kind of discrimination, even.  I used to protest, caught up by a combination of romantic whimsy and defensiveness — Give everyone a fair chance! You can’t help who you fall in love with! People are people!

    And it’s true, people are people, but people are also products of their cultures and beliefs.  Is it really discrimination to prefer to be with people who share those things with you?…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians out of Existence in New England

    Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians out of Existence in New England

    University of Minnesota Press
    2010
    296 pages
    25 b&w photos, 2 tables
    5 1/2 x 8 1/2
    Paper ISBN: 978-0-8166-6578-5
    Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8166-6577-8

    Jean M. O’Brien, (White Earth Ojibwe) Professor of History
    University of Minnesota

    Across nineteenth-century New England, antiquarians and community leaders wrote hundreds of local histories about the founding and growth of their cities and towns. Ranging from pamphlets to multivolume treatments, these narratives shared a preoccupation with establishing the region as the cradle of an Anglo-Saxon nation and the center of a modern American culture. They also insisted, often in mournful tones, that New England’s original inhabitants, the Indians, had become extinct, even though many Indians still lived in the very towns being chronicled.

    In Firsting and Lasting, Jean M. O’Brien argues that local histories became a primary means by which European Americans asserted their own modernity while denying it to Indian peoples. Erasing and then memorializing Indian peoples also served a more pragmatic colonial goal: refuting Indian claims to land and rights. Drawing on more than six hundred local histories from Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island written between 1820 and 1880, as well as censuses, monuments, and accounts of historical pageants and commemorations, O’Brien explores how these narratives inculcated the myth of Indian extinction, a myth that has stubbornly remained in the American consciousness.

    In order to convince themselves that the Indians had vanished despite their continued presence, O’Brien finds that local historians and their readers embraced notions of racial purity rooted in the century’s scientific racism and saw living Indians as “mixed” and therefore no longer truly Indian. Adaptation to modern life on the part of Indian peoples was used as further evidence of their demise. Indians did not—and have not—accepted this effacement, and O’Brien details how Indians have resisted their erasure through narratives of their own. These debates and the rich and surprising history uncovered in O’Brien’s work continue to have a profound influence on discourses about race and indigenous rights.

  • Facts of Blackness: Brazil is not Quite the United States… and Racial Politics in Brazil?

    Facts of Blackness: Brazil is not Quite the United States… and Racial Politics in Brazil?

    Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture
    Volume 4, Issue 2, 1998
    pages 201-234
    DOI: 10.1080/13504639851807

    Denise Ferreira Da Silva, Professor in Ethics
    Queen Mary University of London

    Studies of racial subordination in Brazil usually stress the puzzling co-existence of racial inequality with Brazil’s self-image as a ‘racial democracy’. Frequently, they identify the absence of racial conflict and a clear white-black distinction as explanations for the low level of black political mobilisation. In doing this, these studies (unreflectedly) take the United Sates as a universal model of racial subordination of which Brazilian difference is a mere variation. What seems to escape these analysts is that the Brazilian construction of race was set against the view that ‘racial differences’ identify distinct groups, a view which still prevails in the United States and in sociological constructions of race. Actually, an analysisof writings on Brazilian subjectivity suggests that the texts which write blackness do so by deploying various modern categories of ‘being’ (race, nation, gender, and class) both in the narratives—which have produced blacks as subordinate subjects in modernity and in the texts which aim to foster black emancipation.

    October, 1995, After three years living in the United States, during which time I had followed the unfolding of three episodes which placed race at the centre of the political debate (the L.A. riots, O.J. Simpson’s trial and the Million Man March), I was very excited by the timing of my second trip back home. I would have the opportunity to participate in an event which seemed (finally) to place race at the centre of the political debate in Brazil: the 300th anniversary of the death of Zumbi dos Palmares, the last leader of the most lasting (one hundred year) community of runaway slaves in Brazil, Quilombo dos Palmares. Over the past 20 years, the black movement has chosen Zumbi as the symbol of a separate identity and has declared 20 November (the supposed date of his death) as the national day of black consciousness.

    In 1995, however, Zumbi was at risk of being captured by the dominant racial discourse, as a national hero—as Palmares reconstructed by academics and politicians as an initial experience of racial democracy in Brazil. Throughout the year, city, state and federal administration promoted several events (conferences, parties, and political activities) to celebrate the third centennial of Zumbi’s death. Black movement organisations, on the other hand, seized the opportunity (once again) to denounce the ‘myth of racial democracy’ and the continuing subordination of blacks in Brazilian society. Excited about the…

    Read or purchase the article here.

  • From blanqueamiento to reindigenización: Paradoxes of mestizaje and multiculturalism in contemporary Colombia

    From blanqueamiento to reindigenización: Paradoxes of mestizaje and multiculturalism in contemporary Colombia

    European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies
    Number 80, (April 2006) Constructing Ethnic Labels
    pages 5-23

    Margarita Chaves, Researcher
    Instituto Colombiano de Antropología e Historia (ICANH), Bogotá

    Marta Zambrano, Associate Professor of Historical Anthropology
    Universidad Nacional Colombia, Bogotá

    During the past two decades Latin American projects of nationhood have experienced an unexpected shift towards multiculturalism. This move, accompanied by the reconfiguration of local and translocal ethnicities and constitutional reforms recognizing cultural diversity, has produced a surge of recent and provocative academic research (Gros 2000a; Kymlicka 1996; Van Cott 2000; Wieviorka 1997; Zapata 2001). Earlier, and from a different perspective, the role of ideologies and practices of mestizaje has also provoked sustained scholarly inquiry and political debate. Erstwhile cast within polar approaches that highlighted either the inclusive or the exclusive consequences of hegemonic ideologies of racial mixing, in the past years the debate has shifted focus to include a plurality of discourses and practices.

    This article interweaves these two key threads of investigation. We argue that academic discussions about pluralism and multiculturalism in Latin America have paid little attention to mestizaje as a crucial dimension of nation-making projects. Following a critical examination of the pluralist as well as the neoliberal inclination towards ‘la nación mestiza’ linking cultural recognition with rising social inequalities, we examine recent cases of indigenous resurgence and strategies of reindigenización of subaltern groups in Colombia. We explore the current pluralist turn of the Colombian imagined national community to ponder the shifting political and social elements of mestizaje, understood as a multifaceted and conflicting terrain. We argue that while in the recent past mestizaje promised a secure but ambiguous avenue to becoming white (blanqueamiento), it has now become an equally muddled path to becoming indigenous again (reindigenización).

    Read the entire article here.

  • Beyond the Pale: Unsettling “Race” and Womanhood in the Novels of Harper, Hopkins, Fauset and Larsen

    Beyond the Pale: Unsettling “Race” and Womanhood in the Novels of Harper, Hopkins, Fauset and Larsen

    McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
    December 1996
    303 pages

    Teresa Christine Zackodnik, Professor of English
    University of Alberta, Canada

    A thesis Submitted to the School of Graduate Studies in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor Of Philosophy

    This dissertation proposes that writers like Frances Harper, Pauline Hopkins, Jessie Fauset, and Nella Larsen “talk out both sides” of their mouths, parodying the values of the black bourgeoisie, racialized notions of womanhood, and understandings of racial difference popular at the turn into the twentieth century. Using complex modes of address, these authors have written novels that in all likelihood were read in different directions by their white and African American readerships. I contend that these narratives would have placated their white readership with familiar forms, while simultaneously forging a sense of community with their African American readers in novels of a highly political nature which questioned and subverted definitions of womanhood and “race”. These “tragic mulatta” and “passing” novels, published from 1892 to 1931 are contextualized with an analysis of three cultural efforts to consolidate turn-of-the-century American beliefs regarding race and gender: legal statutes codifying racial identities, theories of racial difference, and notions of gender identity disseminated through the cult of domesticity. Because the mulatto is neither white nor black, her ambivalent identity and experience make parody a significant trope with which these authors interrogate identity. In order to “pass” for “true women” or for white, these mulatto characters utilize and parody the very qualities designed to ensure the “purity” of whiteness and womanhood. This study argues that such parodies access an African American tradition of parodic performance that played to and on white notions of “blackness” and constructions of white identity. Moving from a consideration of such “signifyin(g)” acts as a challenge to gender and racial identities represented by heroines who pass for “true women,” the study concludes with a consideration of how race, as a political category of description, is destabilized through the representation of heroines who choose to pass for white.

    TABLE OF CONTENTS

    • CHAPTER 1: Codifying and Quantifying “Race” in Turn-of-the-Century America
    • CHAPTER 2: Unsettling “Race” and Womanhood in Tum-of-the-Century America: Frances Harper’s Iola Leroy and Pauline Hopkins’s Contending Forces
    • CHAPTER 3: Policing the Bounds of Race: Jessie Fauset’s The Chinaberry Tree and Nella Larsen’s Quicksand
    • CHAPTER 4: Transgressions and Excess: Passing as Parodic Performance in Jessie Fauset’s Plum Bun and Nella Larsen’s Passing
    • CONCLUSION: New Trajectories of Self-Definition

    Read the entire thesis here.

  • Passing and the figure of the Europeanized American in Edith Wharton’s fiction

    Passing and the figure of the Europeanized American in Edith Wharton’s fiction

    Purdue University
    2005
    216 pages
    Publication Number: AAT 3210795
    ISBN: 97805425959510

    Jasmina Starcevic

    A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of Purdue University by Jasmina Starcevic In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

    This dissertation traces the evolution of the Europeanized American as a passing figure in five works by Edith Wharton—The House of Mirth (1905), The Custom of the Country (1913), The Age of Innocence (1920), The Old Maid (1924), and The Mother’s Recompense (1925). By reading Wharton’s major fiction through the lens of the passing narrative, I show that the Europeanized American emerges as a vehicle of mediation and the expression of the relationship between the cultures of Europe and America, crucial for exploring the issues of gender, class, race and nationality. I argue that Wharton invests the Europeanized American with the characteristics of the passing subject, thus deploying an ostensibly white figure as the trope of racial difference. Stripped of their fitness for self-government, Europeanized Americans figure as undesirable, unfit, or traitorous subjects vying for the social privileges of the white establishment in the face of psychological persecutions, marginalization, and even death. In order to secure acceptance in the white hegemony, the Europeanized American must engage in a form of passing. Unlike Americans of European descent (or European Americans), Europeanized Americans embody “Europeaness” as an indiscernible trait, not simply visible on the surface of the subject’s body. This important distinction allows Wharton to portray Europeanized Americans as culturally and racially more complex than their European or American “cousins.”

    The body of historical and theoretical work on passing produced by prominent social, political, literary and cultural theorists provides the theoretical framework for my analysis of passing in Wharton’s fiction. In Wharton’s major works, passing denotes both psychological and performative aspects of the struggle to acquire social visibility and secure place within the national cultural matrix, and it is directly related to the production of whiteness and American identity. This study establishes the Europeanized American as a passing figure and explores the significance of the figure in Wharton’s major works.

    TABLE OF CONTENTS

    • INTRODUCTION: Passing in Edith Wharton’s Fiction
    • CHAPTER ONE: Passing Through the House of Mirth: The Figure of the Europeanized American in Wharton’s Early Fiction
    • CHAPTER TWO: The “Cool Security” of Class: Cross-Racial Theater and Upward Mobility in The Custom of the Country
    • CHAPTER THREE: Marriage, Race, and Nation: Passing in The Age of Innocence
    • CHAPTER FOUR: Old World Mothers and New World Daughters: Motherhood and Passing in The Old Maid and The Mother’s Recompense
    • BIBLIOGRAPHY
    • VITA

    Purchase the dissertation here.

  • Colonial Peru, the Caste System, and the “Purity” of Blood

    Colonial Peru, the Caste System, and the “Purity” of Blood

    South Americana: The History and Culture of the World’s Most Exotic Continent
    2012-03-20

    David Gaughran

    It was the Spaniards who gave the world the notion that an aristocrat’s blood is not red but blue. The Spanish nobility started taking shape around the ninth century in classic military fashion, occupying land as warriors on horseback. They were to continue the process for more than five hundred years, clawing back sections of the peninsula from its Moorish occupiers, and a nobleman demonstrated his pedigree by holding up his sword arm to display the filigree of blue-blooded veins beneath his pale skin—proof that his birth had not been contaminated by the dark-skinned enemy—Robert Lacey, Aristocrats
     
    The historical Spanish obsession with the purity of blood evolved into an elaborate caste system which reached its apogee with the colonization of South America and the subsequent intermingling of settlers with both South American Indians and imported African slaves, all of whose mixed offspring needed a separate classification, of course.
     
    It was an intricate system—designed to pit sections of society against each other and play on the subsequent fear of overthrow by the lower classes, so that Spain could continue to exert its top-down control. But it also signified the relative social importance of the caste members, usually in a pejorative sense, meaning that only certain rights, occupations, and institutions were open to them.
     
    If you had been born in Spain, then you automatically qualified as a member of the elite. If you had been born in South America, but your bloodline was “pure” then you were accorded privileged status, but of the second order, and the most influential posts were out of reach. However, if your ancestors had the temerity to dally with the Indians or blacks, then a complicated algorithm was brought to bear….

    …Caste membership didn’t simply determine what occupation you could hold, but also whether you could bear arms, attend university, or even the clothes you were allowed wear…

    Read the entire article here.

  • The Prophetic Voice and the Face of the Other in Barack Obama’s “A More Perfect Union” Address, March 18, 2008

    The Prophetic Voice and the Face of the Other in Barack Obama’s “A More Perfect Union” Address, March 18, 2008

    Rhetoric & Public Affairs
    Volume 12, Number 2, Summer 2009
    pp. 167-194
    DOI: 10.1353/rap.0.0101

    David A. Frank, Professor of Rhetoric
    Robert D. Clark Honors College
    University of Oregon

    Barack Obama’s address of March 18, 2008, sought to quell the controversy sparked by YouTube clips of his pastor, Jeremiah Wright of the Trinity United Church of Christ, condemning values and actions of the United States government. In this address, Obama crosses over the color line with a rhetorical strategy designed to preserve his viability as a presidential candidate and in so doing, delivered a rhetorical masterpiece that advances the cause of racial dialogue and rapprochement. Because of his mixed racial heritage, he could bring perceptions and misperceptions in black and white “hush harbors” into the light of critical reason. The address succeeds, I argue, because Obama sounds the prophetic voice of Africentric theology that merges the Jewish and Christian faith traditions with African American experience, assumes theological consilience (that different religious traditions share a commitment to caring for others), and enacts the rhetorical counterpart to Levinas’s philosophy featuring the “face of the other.”

  • The Race of a More Perfect Union: James Baldwin, Segregated Memory and the Presidential Race

    The Race of a More Perfect Union: James Baldwin, Segregated Memory and the Presidential Race

    Theory & Event
    Volume 15, Issue 1 (March 2012)
    DOI: 10.1353/tae.2012.0010

    P.J. Brendese, Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Science
    Haverford College

    The 2008 U.S. presidential race dramatized the connection between America’s segregated memory and its segregated polity. This essay makes the case that James Baldwin offers valuable insight into the legacy of segregated memory in contemporary racial politics in general, and the presidential race in particular. To do so, I provide a brief historical overview of segregated memory since the Civil War, and offer an analysis of Baldwin’s account of the conscious and unconscious dimensions of memory and the impact of myth-histories on African Americans and whites. This is followed by an exposition of Baldwin’s approach to de-segregating memory, as well as the tensions and correspondences between his contributions to addressing mnemonic divides and those of Barack Obama in his “More Perfect Union” speech on race. The essay closes by outlining the political relevance of the theoretical tensions between Baldwin and Obama in an era alleged to have been made “post-racial” by the first black president.