Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

recent posts

about

  • CLS 413: Comparative Studies in Theme: Generation, Degeneration, Miscegenation

    CLS 413: Comparative Studies in Theme: Generation, Degeneration, Miscegenation

    Northwestern University
    Winter 2012

    César Braga-Pinto, Associate Professor of Brazilian Studies

    In this seminar we will discuss how and why late 19th-century and early 20th-century fiction often represented a crisis in models of biological reproduction. We will investigate how anxieties regarding miscegenation and degeneration impacted this three-part pattern:

    (1) the “family romance” in Latin America (and elsewhere); (2) the  so-called generative crisis in the turn of the century; (3) the homosocial, “horizontal” forms of association or affiliation that were evoked to compensate the crisis in the generative model. We will also consider the meanings of the term “generation” as a form of “affiliation” in multi-racial societies such as Brazil.

    Although we will focus primarily on Brazilian fiction, the approach will be comparative (hemispheric and/or transatlantic), and final papers may focus on U.S., Latin American, European, African or other post-colonial literatures (primarily from the period 1850’s-1930’s).

    Class Materials:

    ALL WORKS ARE AVAILABLE IN ENGLISH TRANSLATION.

    Secondary sources may include works by Doris Sommer, Edward Said, Franz Fanon, Eve Sedgwick, Judith Butler, Roberto Schwarz, Silviano Santiago and Jacques Derrida.

  • The Masters and the Slaves (Casa-grande & senzala): A Study in the Development of Brazilian Civilization

    The Masters and the Slaves (Casa-grande & senzala): A Study in the Development of Brazilian Civilization

    University of California Press
    2nd revised edition (March 1987)
    (originally published in 1933)
    622 pages
    ISBN: 9780520056657

    Gilberto Freyre (1900-1987)

    Introduction by:

    David H. P. Maybury-Lewis

    This book is out of print, but available for on-line reading here.

    Table of Contents

    • Frontmatter
    • Preface to the first English-Language Edition
    • Preface to the Second English-language Edition
    • Translator’s Acknowledgments
    • Author’s Preface to the Paperback Edition
    • Introduction to the Paperback Edition
    • I General Characteristics of the Portuguese Colonization of Brazil: Formation of an Agrarian, Slave-Holding and Hybrid Society
    • II The Native in the Formation of the Brazilian Family
    • III The Portuguese Colonizer: Antecedents and Predispositions
    • IV The Negro Slave in the Sexual and Family Life of the Brazilian
    • V The Negro Slave in the Sexual and Family Life of the Brazilian (continued)
    • Plans showing Big House of the Noruega Plantation
    • Glossary of the Brazilian Terms Used
    • Bibliography
    • Index of Names
    • Index of Subjects

    Read the entire book here.

  • Rejoining the Parts: A Conversation with Jane Lazarre About Race, Fiction, American History and Her New Novel, Inheritance

    Rejoining the Parts: A Conversation with Jane Lazarre About Race, Fiction, American History and Her New Novel, Inheritance

    Tenured Radical
    The Chronicle of Higher Education
    2011-11-15

    Claire Potter, Professor of History and American Studies
    Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut

    Jane Lazarre is a writer of fiction, memoir and poetry who has published many books, beginning with her memoir, The Mother Knot (1976; reissued in 1997 by Duke University Press) and most recently,Inheritance, A Novel (Hamilton Stone Editions, 2011). She has taught writing and literature at New York’s City College and at Yale University; and for many years directed and taught in the undergraduate writing program at Eugene Lang College at the New School.

    Tenured Radical: The title of the book — Inheritance — asks the reader to think about what is passed down, generation to generation.  But in the first chapter we are confronted with Sam’s frustration and anger that, as a young woman with a white and a black parent, she knows so little of her family history. We come to understand that our historical “inheritance” not only can’t be taken for granted and but also sometimes requires active recovery. How did you come to understand that this was the story you wanted to tell about America’s racial past?

    Jane Lazarre: From my early experiences in the late 1960s as a new member, by marriage, of an African American family, and throughout the years of raising two Black sons, I became deeply aware of how much I, as an American and as a white American, did not know about African American history — which is a central, defining part of American history. At the same time, of course, I began to understand all I was unaware of about race, despite a deeply anti-racist upbringing. As a mother, a writer and teacher, I began to study the subject. I saw that I was part of a great majority of white Americans of all ethnic backgrounds, in my ignorance of the complex forces of American racism…

    …TR: We’ve heard so much since 2008, and the election of Black president with a white mother, about the United States finally being “post-racial,” and a new kind of fantasy about the beneficial effects of race-mixing, or multiracialism, seems to play a big role in this. But several multiracial characters in Inheritance make the point strongly that they are not immune from racism and that not to be recognized as Black is to deprive them of an inheritance of struggle. Can you elaborate on this theme a bit?

    JL: I wrote extensively about this subject in my memoir, Beyond the Whiteness of Whiteness, a title that is a take on Ralph Ellison’s famous exploration, in Invisible Man (1952) of “the blackness of blackness.” I disagree strongly with the idea that the election of President Obama is the signal and sign of our “post-racialism.” I know that people of color, including people with one white parent, experience racism every day, even if there have been significant changes in our legal, and even social, attitudes. I believe that all of us, as Americans, are inheritors of the struggle of African Americans to both liberate and recreate themselves, and we deny this connection at our peril and to our great loss. Samantha Reed, the daughter of a (half) black father and a (Jewish) white mother, knows at a very early age that her identity, her history, her future, and even her unconscious (shown in the “white dream” she inherits in the Prologue of the novel,) are profoundly affected by, laced with, absorbed in, her heritage and her life as a Black woman in America. That does not mean she rejects or dismisses her other ethnic histories, nor that she does not love “the three white women whose histories flow into [her] own,” as she says in the early pages of the book. But I am saying, in this novel, as in other works, the lessons I have learned from my life as a mother, now a grandmother, as a teacher of African American literature and a writer about race: that so-called mixedness means little in American history. As I said above, many enslaved Americans, including the great Frederick Douglass, were “mixed” due to rape or forced sexual unions, and nevertheless remained enslaved. Racism in this country is not unchanged from previous centuries, or even previous decades, but as many cultural theorists have written, our educational and prison systems are evidence to the ongoing racism still permeating much of our lives…

    Read the entire interview here.

  • Inheritance, A Novel

    Inheritance, A Novel

    Hamilton Stone Editions
    2011-11-15
    308 pages
    9 x 6 x 1 inches
    ISBN: 978-0-9801786-8-5

    Jane Lazarre

    Jane Lazarre’s compelling novel explores America’s mixed racial history through the lives of four families whose fates are intertwined across several generations from slavery to the present. Unflinching in its description of the horrors of slavery and racism as well as the taboos on all sides of the racial divide,the novel moves us in the present, and prepares us for the future.

  • ENG 215: Beyond Black and White: Exploring “American” Identities

    ENG 215: Beyond Black and White: Exploring “American” Identities

    Saint Joseph’s University
    Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
    2011-2012
     
    What does race mean in contemporary writing? How does it intersect with social class? What does it mean to be “multiracial” or “biracial”? What does it mean to be “American”? This course considers a variety of writing that explores multiracial identity and its intersections with social class. The course may include particular attention to recent immigrants to the U.S. and their experience of race and class, as well as reflections on Native peoples and their encounters with Anglos. This course may periodically be offered as a first-year seminar.

  • Old Whine, New Vassals: Are Diaspora and Hybridity Postmodern Inventions?

    Old Whine, New Vassals: Are Diaspora and Hybridity Postmodern Inventions?

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

    Chapter in: New Ethnicities, Old Racisms? (pages 181-204)
    Zed Books
    May 1999
    253 pages
    ISBN-10: 185649652X; ISBN-13: 978-1856496520

    Edited by:

    Phil Cohen, Emeritus Professor
    University of East London

    The recent bag of re-poetics (recuperate, rewrite, transport, transform, and so forth) proffers the opportunity to confront many of the assumptions and confusions of identity I feel compelled to ‘reconfigure’. The site of this poetics for me, and many other multi-racial and multi-cultural writers, is the hyphen, that marked (or unmarked) space that both binds and divides… a crucial location for working out the ambivalences of hybridity… In order to actualize this hybridity … the hybrid writer must necessarily develop instruments of disturbance, dislocation and displacement. (Wah 1996:60)

    In the past six years or so, Wah’s literary summons has been answered by a virtual flourishing of North American (Canada and the United States) texts in the forms of websites, fiction, poetry, autobiographies, biographies, and academic texts by ‘mixed-race’ writers who are overwhelmingly middle-class and either academics or students. On the other hand, there have been relatively few books in England during this period by ‘mixed-race’ writers about ‘mixed-race’ identity politics. These countries’ different historical legacies vis-à-vis immigrant and indigenous communities might explain this discrepancy: ‘While the United States is a country of immigrants where ethnic diversity is constitutive of the society, British society has aspired and continues to aspire to monoculturalism: the people of the empire have no claim on British territory’ (LaForest 1996: 116). In a more profound way than in the United States and Canada, the rigidity of the class structure in Britain also limits the extent to which ‘hybrid’ writers are recognised, published, marketed and received (Sabu 1998). However, Friedman would argue that on both sides of the Atlantic a ‘hybrid’ identity is not accessible to the poor: ‘The urban poor, ethnically mixed ghetto is an arena that does not immediately cater to the construction of explicitly new hybrid identities. In periods of global stability and/or expansion, the problems of survival are more closely related to territory and to creating secure life spaces* (Friedman 1997: 84).

    My fundamental contention is that as socio-cultural and political critiques, fluid contemporary métis(se)A narratives of gendered identities engage with, challenge and yet have been muffled by two competing racialised, essentialised and oppositional dominant discourses in England. The first is the territorialised discourse of ‘English nationalism, based on indigeneity and mythical purity. That is, ‘Englishness’ is synonymous with ‘whiteness’:

    something to do with an elusive but powerful sense of one’s own Englishness and what that means in terms of belonging. The notion of the collective unconscious, after all, suggests the unity of thosewho partake of the racial memory at the same time as it defines the ‘other’. The ‘other’ is everybody else. (Maja-Pearce 1990: 132).

    The second is the deterritorialised discourse of the English African diaspora which is predicated on (mis)placement and the one-drop rule: that is, all Africans have been dispersed and one known African ancestor designates a person as ‘black’. For example, Paul Gilroy’s configuration of the ‘Black Atlantic’ is based on compulsory blackness and displacement:

    The black Atlantic, my own provisional attempt to figure a deterritorialised multiplex and anti-national basis for the affinity or “identity of passions’ between diverse black populations, took shape in making sense of sentiments like these which are not always congruent with the contemporary forms assumed by black political culture. (Gilroy 1996: 18)

    On the other hand, Avtar Brah’s formulation of ‘diaspora space’ speaks to an ‘entanglement of genealogies of dispersion with those of ‘staying put’ (Brah 1996: 181). Although Brah’s model recognises the forged dialectical relationship between settlers and indigenous communities, her conceptualisation is still both racialised and binary rather than fluid. ‘Migrants and their descendants’ (black) have been dispersed. The ‘English’ (white) are ‘natives’ (Brah 1996: 181). As a result, like Gilroy, Brah has not created conceptual space for méttis(se) individuals for whom by virtue of both English and diasporic parentage, ‘home’ is de/territorialised (Pieterse 1995)- As such, ‘home’ represents an ambivalent bi-racialised sense of both territorialised place—England—and de-territorialised diasporic longings. Their family histories are braided from the gendered, bi-racialised and sexualised residues of imperial domination and colonised submission (Young 1995; Lavie et al 1996; Fanon 1967).

    I want to illustrate the ways in which, as we hobble towards the new millennium, métis(se) declarations delimit and transgress bi-racialised discourses and point the way towards a profound realignment of thinking about ‘race’, ethnicity and ‘English’ identity. This chapter engages with notions of biological and cultural hybridities as articulated in nineteenth-and twentieth-century discourses on ‘race’ and identities. I have divided the chapter into three sections. First, I trace the origins of the term hybridity back to its problematic beginnings in ninteenth-century ‘race’ science, and especially evolutionary anthropology. Second, I critique contemporary cultural theorising on hybridities which reframes ‘race’ as difference(s). Third, the testimonies of contemporary métisse women provide necessary context and content for my discussions of continuities between theories predicated on so-called biological ‘race’ science and ‘postmodernist’ cultural explanations. These autobiographical examples illustrate that the older construct of hybridity as a biological ‘grafting’ of so-called different ‘races’ is continuous with its contemporary redefinition as cultural heterogeneity, fragmentation and diaspora(s)…

    Read the entire chapter here.

  • Students Break Out of Fixed-Race Box

    Students Break Out of Fixed-Race Box

    Teaching Tolerance: A Project of the Southern Poverty Law Center
    2011-11-15

    Pamela Cytrynbaum, Instructor of Journalism
    Northwestern University

    My journalism students were brainstorming topics for their final story projects. I urged them to come up with compelling ideas that relate to their experiences but that push deeply into national trends.

    “Stop letting all the midlife writers (like myself) tell your stories,” I pushed. “Tell your own.”

    As they went around the room, several pitches swirled around the same theme: the dramatic increase in multi-racial students and the issues of identity and self-definition they face.

    The idea caught fire and sparked a fascinating class discussion. Turns out, they identified a trend that is transforming our classrooms—and should transform our teaching as well…

    Read the entire article here.

  • The myth of the melting pot

    The myth of the melting pot

    Biodemography and Social Biology
    Volume 1, Issue 4 (1954)
    pages 248-251
    DOI: 10.1080/19485565.1954.9987204

    David C. Rife
    Institute of Genetics
    The Ohio State University

    Elton F. Paddock
    Institute of Genetics
    The Ohio State University

    Myths are fictional legends, but more often than not they carry elements of truth. Popular beliefs concerning the results of racial mixture may be classed as the myth of the melting pot According to this myth, the mixture of races is analogous to the process of manufacturing alloys. There is actually a great deal of truth in this analogy, although the true nature of alloys is frequently misunderstood.

    When molten copper and zinc are thoroughly mixed in the proper proportions, brass will be produced. Brass, bronze, and other alloys are intimate mixtures of two or more pure metals. The ideal alloy is one which combines the desired qualities of two or more metals in what appears to be a homogeneous blend.

    The appearance of homogeneity is superficial, however, as the alloy is essentially a physical mixture, not a chemical compound. Brass, for example, is a mixture of particles of pure copper and pure zinc, the size of the particles varying from atoms to tiny crystals. The result of a mixing of two races is analogous to the metallurgical melting pot in that the mixing does not result in the elimination of variability. It differs in that the end product in the human melting pot is a grosser mixture, the variation within mixed populations being more readily visible than in the metallic alloy. Concepts to the effect that either type of melting pot produces a new homogeneous product are purely fictitious.

    The myth of the human melting pot is founded on the assumption that the hybridization of different human populations will eventually result in the elimination of biological differences. According to this way of thinking mankind will eventually be characterized by a uniform shade of skin color, hair form, and various other physical characteristics, which now vary from one ethnic group to another. There can be no question but that barriers between human races are rapidly being eliminated, owing to modern transportation, education, and communication. Today it is difficult to find “pure” racial groups. In most parts of the world many cultural barriers to understanding and cooperation are on the way out. But what about genetic variability? Is it tending to become less?

    The answer is “no.” Genes, the particles of heredity, do not lose their identities but maintain them over an indefinite number of generations, regardless of what other genes they may be associated with. This principle is the essence of the classical discoveries made by Mendel almost a century ago. Mixture of races neither increases nor decreases the total genetic variability in mankind. It brings about an increase of  individual variability.

    Mixtures of Negroes and Whites provide an excellent example of this principle. The first generation offspring are intermediate or mulatto. But if these mulattoes marry other mulattoes of similar origin, their offspring will exhibit subtly varying degrees of pigmentation, ranging from the dark brown of Negroes to the light pigmentation of Whites. The genes have maintained their individuality from one generation to another. The mixed population will have much greater variability with respect to…

    Read or purchae the article here.

  • Black and White: Vestiges of Biracialism in American Discourse

    Black and White: Vestiges of Biracialism in American Discourse

    Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies
    Volume 7, Issue 1 (March 2010)
    pages 70-89
    DOI: 10.1080/14791420903511255

    Greg Goodale, Assistant Professor of Communication Studies
    Northeastern University

    Jeremy Engels, Assistant Professor of Communication Arts & Sciences
    Pennsylvania State University

    The authors argue that the application of critical methods to fragments in successive discursive formations, including oral traditions, double meanings, epithets, fictions, and fantasies, reveal that Americans have always almost known of their biracial heritage. This re-examination of archival evidence in conjunction with critiques of novels, neologisms, and epithets enables the authors to reinterpret narratives of whiteness, particularly those surrounding Jane McCrea, America’s first national martyr. Though claimed as a pure, white woman, we argue that underground traditions and a succession of discursive formations lend credence to the possibility that she exemplifies America’s biracial past.

    Why are reports of America’s biracial heritage, like Thomas Jefferson’s black descendents and South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond’s biracial child, met with a shrug? (NB: The terms “white” and “black” are problematic because they essentialize. In this essay, we gradually de-essentialize the terms even as we use them.) Given America’s history of racism, one might expect this news to be controversial. Yet illustrating a strikingly blasé attitude toward America’s biracial past, in 2008 Illinois Senator Barack Obama used stump speeches to respond to reports that he was related to the unpopular sitting Vice President: “Dick Cheney is the black sheep of my family.” The line drew laughter because successive discursive formations have perpetuated knowledge about America’s biracial heritage, even as these formations have attempted to deny this memory. Thus Americans have always almost been conscious of their biracial heritage, a near-consciousness that is responsible for both current shrugs and past violence. During the early years of the republic, the identity “American” was made white. As evidenced by Noah Webster’s first American Dictionary, after the Revolutionary War the concept African American became unthinkable to Euro-Americans. Webster defined “American” as “a native of America; originally applied to the aboriginals, or copper-colored races, found here by the Europeans; but now applied to the descendants of Europeans born in America.” In his dictionary, Webster represented “American” as white and explicitly excluded Indians while ignoring Americans of African descent. The Revolution had forced former subjects of the British Empire to rethink their identities. Those who published dictionaries, constituted a government, and constructed schools nearly effaced racial mixture by imposing their self-representation—whiteness—on the inchoate nation. As rhetorical scholars, we are deeply interested in representations, and in particular in how these shape our understanding of history. For Roger Chartier, “a double meaning and a double function are thus assigned to representation: to make an absence present, but also to exhibit its own presence as image.” Representation performed two critical functions after the Revolutionary War: it invented a reality by making an absence in the form of white American-ness present, and it exhibited the no-longer absent as reality by deifying a pantheon of exemplary “white” Americans like George Washington and Jane McCrea. The double meaning thus constituted identities while underpinning regimes of representation that almost hid such constructions.

    Like the Christian God, educated “whites” made Americans in their own image, a vision that attempted to and always almost effaced racial mixture. Chartier’s colleague Pierre Bourdieu described the effects of representation: “What is at stake here is the power of imposing a vision of the social world through principles of de-vision which, when they are imposed on a whole group, establish meaning and a consensus about meaning, and in particular about the identity and unity of the group, which creates the reality of the unity and reality of the group.” To represent, Chartier and Bourdieu argue, is to define and constitute. Yet all representations, insofar as they attempt to make an absence present, are necessarily imperfect. The double meaning retains a pre-history of the representation’s construction. In constituting a reality and a social unity predicated upon a re-presentation of history, educated whites in the founding period were unable to erase fragments of Americans’ biracial heritage that remained in the discursive formation; vestiges that have remained in the succession of discursive formations from the founding to today. When a purist vision of the social world like Webster’s is imposed, hints of diversity linger, always almost reappearing to re-present the constructed nature of the representation

    We argue that evidence of America’s biracial heritage exists in discursive clues that always almost remind Americans that race was never as pure a distinction as the lexicographers and teachers of official language and histories once inculcated. Though recent scholarship has recovered some of this heritage, we argue that this knowledge has haunted Americans, who have always almost known about their biracial past. Double meanings, oral histories, “fictions,” fantasies, and epithets perpetuated an almost awareness of this heritage even as successive discursive formations obscured its memory. Discursive formations are not monolithic. Even as they influence and to a degree determine what we take to be true and hence our ability to think, to understand, and to name, our current truths must necessarily emerge out of older regimes of representation. Truth does not spring sui generis on the scene, like Athena from Zeus’s head. Truth is made out of old truths and even older rules. Thus, each new discursive formation contains vestiges of prior knowledges and epistemologies…

    …When whites participated in lynch mobs or volunteered for black-voter registration drives, their decisions were rooted, in part, in insecurities about the purity of whiteness or an awareness of brotherhood. These reactions should be partially attributed to discursive fragments that always almost threaten to re-present America’s biracial heritage. In this essay, we offer an exploration of a few vestiges that have preserved knowledge of America’s integrated past. Beginning with double meanings that hide and betray biracial truths, we find that a close study of this unofficial history uncovers America’s biracial heritage at the same time that it reveals clues that illustrate the imperfect racial purification of America by white lexicographers and teachers. Then we turn to a sustained analysis of a popular nineteenth-century story. This critical reading of the biography of Jane McCrea exemplifies efforts to proclaim the purity of race while revealing a discursive formation that recalls Americans are not simply white or black. We are both…

    Read or purchase the article here.

  • ‘The rivers of Zimbabwe will run red with blood’: Enoch Powell and the Post-Imperial Nostalgia of the Monday Club

    ‘The rivers of Zimbabwe will run red with blood’: Enoch Powell and the Post-Imperial Nostalgia of the Monday Club

    Journal of Southern African Studies
    Volume 37, Issue 4 (December 2011)
    pages 731-745
    DOI: 10.1080/03057070.2011.613691

    Daniel McNeil, Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies
    Newcastle University, United Kingdom

    In his influential account of post-colonial melancholia, Paul Gilroy suggests that contemporary reports of violence in Southern Africa reveal Britain’s inability to work through its grim history of imperialism and colonialism. Gilroy’s study links recent discussions of tragic Southern African themes to Enoch Powell’s ‘rivers of blood’ speech in 1968. However, it does not mention Powell’s critique of Britain’s ‘post-imperial nostalgia’ in a speech about Rhodesia later that year. This is not entirely surprising – the Conservative Central Office did not disseminate Powell’s call for Britons to move beyond sentimental attachment to ‘kith and kin’ in Rhodesia, and Rhodesian sympathisers in the Conservative Monday Club attempted to work around Powell’s refusal to support the ‘White Commonwealth’. Moreover, Powell opposed non-white ‘communalism’ whether he was emphasising the importance of the British Empire to English identity or challenging the ‘harmful myth’ of empire as an English nationalist. Consequently, this article uses archival material relating to the Monday Club and the Rhodesian Ministry of Information in order to document three of the main strands of post-colonial melancholia that apply to Powellite figures on the right who defended (white) minority rule in Rhodesia and/or demonised (non-white) minority cultures in the United Kingdom. The first main strand of post-colonial melancholia involves the belief that racial intermixture will lead to violence and economic instability. The second emphasises the importance of strong white rule to limit racial violence and industrial retardation. The third attempts to contest and then seize the position of victim, alleging one set of standards for the ‘civilised’ West and another set of standards for ‘failed, incompetent and pre-modern states.’

    Read or purchase the article here.