Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

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  • Acclaimed author reveals secret Scottish roots in moving tribute

    Acclaimed author reveals secret Scottish roots in moving tribute

    Daily Record
    Glasgow, Scotland
    2011-05-08

    Maggie Barry
    Sunday Mail

    Writer Aminatta Forna has been called many things in her life but never Scottish—until today.

    The African author’s fearless books exposing betrayal and treachery in Sierra Leone have brought critical acclaim and awards.

    But only now has it emerged that Aminatta, whose father was executed when she was only 10, is half Scottish.

    As her latest book The Memory Of Love was shortlisted for the Orange Prize, she paid tribute to her mum Maureen Campbell.

    Aminatta said she was as brave and determined as her dad Mohamed, the son of an African chief, who died standing up for his beliefs.

    Aminatta, 46, said: “My mother always gets wiped from my biographies—it’s always about Sierra Leone and my father. The Scottish side is never recognised.

    “I was born at Bellshill Maternity Hospital, where my father was a doctor. My mother is from Aberdeen so suddenly being recognised as a half Scot is a bit of a breakthrough…

    …She pays tribute to her mum for being willing to marry the man she loved in the face of opposition from both their families and society’s unease with mixed marriages.

    Maureen’s parents had wanted her to marry a Scot and Mohamed’s family had wanted a dynastic marriage, in keeping with his status as the son of an African chieftain…

    Read the entire article here.

  • The Memory of Love

    The Memory of Love

    Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
    January 2011
    464 pages
    Cloth ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-1965-0
    Paperback ISBN 13: 978-0-8021-4568-0

    Aminatta Forna

    • Winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book
    • Finalist for the Orange Prize for Fiction
    • An Essence Book Club Pick

    From the award-winning author of The Devil That Danced on the Water and Ancestor Stones comes The Memory of Love, a beautiful and masterfully accomplished novel about the resilience of the human spirit and the driving force of love.

    Aminatta Forna’s The Memory of Love has been hailed as a book of rare beauty and importance, and was shortlisted for the 2011 Orange Prize for Fiction. With astounding depth and elegance, it takes the reader through the haunting atmosphere of a country at war, delicately intertwining the powerful stories of two generations of African life.

    In contemporary Freetown, Sierra Leone, a devastating civil war has left an entire populace with secrets to keep. In the capital hospital Kai, a gifted young surgeon is plagued by demons that are beginning to threaten his livelihood. Elsewhere in the hospital lies Elias Cole, a man who was young during the country’s turbulent postcolonial years and has stories to tell that are far from heroic. As past and present intersect in the buzzing city, Kai and Elias are drawn unwittingly closer by Adrian, a British psychiatrist with good intentions, and into the path of one woman at the center of their stories.

    A work of breathtaking writing and rare wisdom, The Memory of Love seamlessly weaves together the lives of these three men to create a story of loss, absolution, and the indelible effects of the past—and, at the end of it all, the very nature of love.

  • Between black and miscegenated population groups: sickle cell anemia and sickle cell trait in Brazil in the 1930s and 1940s

    Between black and miscegenated population groups: sickle cell anemia and sickle cell trait in Brazil in the 1930s and 1940s

    História, Ciências, Saúde-Manguinhos
    Volume 18, Number 2 (April/June 2011)
    29 pages
    DOI: 10.1590/S0104-59702011000200007

    Juliana Manzoni Cavalcanti, PhD candidate
    Graduate Program on History of the Sciences and Health
    Casa de Oswaldo Cruz/Fundação Oswaldo Cruz

    Marcos Chor Maio, Senior Researcher and Professor
    Graduate Program on History of the Sciences and Health
    Fiocruz – Casa de Oswaldo Cruz

    Translated by Diane Grosklaus Whitty

    The article examines medical and scientific studies of sickle cell anemia published in Brazil in the 1930s and 1940s, when the vast majority of physicians and scientists believed that miscegenation played a significant role in the epidemiology of the disease in the country. Special focus is placed on hematologist Ernani Martins da Silva, of the Oswaldo Cruz Institute, who conducted blood analyses around the interior of Brazil with the purpose of classifying miscegenated and allegedly pure population groups based on the presence of sickle cells and the racial distribution of blood groups. The article explores the ambivalences stemming from associations between sickle cell anemia and the ‘black race’ during this period.

    The term sickle cell disease (SCD) is applied to disorders caused by a specific change in the hemoglobin molecule, an oxygen-carrying molecule that is one of the most abundant within red blood cells. Genetic alteration causes one amino acid to be replaced with another in the protein chains that make up hemoglobin (with ß6 glutamic acid replaced by valine – Hb S), thereby altering the molecule’s structure. This change lowers the affinity between the oxygen molecule and hemoglobin, prompting the formation of long hemoglobin chains that clump into intracellular bundles concentrated at the ends of the red blood cell and thus distort the cell into the crescent shape from which it gains its name (Andreoli et al., 1997, p.371)…

    Read the entire article here.

  • (1)ne Drop: 2012 Tour

    (1)ne Drop: 2012 Tour

    (1)ne Drop
    National Campus Tour
    Fall 2011

    In an effort to provide audiences the opportunity to more deeply engage the issues raised by the project, the (1)ne Drop project is going on tour. The producers invite colleges and universities across the country to host a (1)ne Drop exhibit. Each exhibition will be accompanied by a multi-media lecture on skin color politics and Black racial identity by Dr. Yaba Blay, (1)ne Drop Author and Producer…

    Topics include:

    • “One-Drop: Fact? Fiction? or Fate?”
    • “Not Black Enough: The “Other” African American Experience”
    • “¿Black?: The Latin American and Caribbean Experience”
    • “Light Skin + Long Hair: Challenges to Sistahood”

    For more information, click here.

  • First Annual Convention Report: Black German Cultural Society NJ

    First Annual Convention Report: Black German Cultural Society NJ

    Black German Cultural Society of New Jersey
    German Historical Institute
    Washington, D.C.
    2011-08-19 through 2011-08-21
    14 pages

    By Priscilla Layne and S. Marina Jones

    The First Annual Black German Cultural Society, NJ Convention was an important opportunity for scholars, students, and individuals personally affected by Afrogerman history and culture, from both sides of the Atlantic, to come together. Participants included numerous members of the Afrogerman community many of whom are themselves scholars, authors, filmmakers, and activists…

    Read the entire report here.

  • The Stain of White: Liaisons, Memories, and White Men as Relatives

    The Stain of White: Liaisons, Memories, and White Men as Relatives

    Men and Masculinities
    Volume 9, Number 2 (October 2006)
    pages 131-151
    DOI: 10.1177/1097184X06287764

    Janaki Abraham, Assistant Professor Women Studies
    Jawaharlal Neru University

    During British colonial rule some matrilineal Thiyya women in North Kerala, India, had liaisons with British men. While the response of the caste (here, a Backward caste) to these liaisons shifted over time, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century many women who had liaisons and their families were excommunicated. A “white connection” became a stain and kinship with the white man was denied or shrouded. This article looks at the ways in which both the liaisons and the denial of the white man as father or relative were located within practices of matrilineal kinship. Furthermore, this article seeks to understand how these liaisons are remembered today and how the presence of the white man as a relative is layered over by processes of forgetting and remembering.

    Read or purchase the article here.

  • Review: Giller winner recounts struggles of mixed-race jazz musicians in prewar Europe

    Review: Giller winner recounts struggles of mixed-race jazz musicians in prewar Europe

    Ottowa Citizen
    2011-11-09

    Julian Gunn

    Half-Blood Blues By Esi Edugyan, Thomas Allen, 2011.

    I remember waiting for a bus and listening to a literary podcast when I heard that Victoria, B.C. author Esi Edugyan’s second novel, Half-Blood Blues, had made the Man Booker Prize long list. The book had already received strong support: Lawrence Hill, Austin Clarke and other literary figures wrote glowing responses.

    The book was subsequently shortlisted for the Booker but lost out to Julian Barnes. It was also shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award for Fiction and the Writers’ Trust Award. And it won the Giller Prize this week.

    Half-Blood Blues binds together disparate human behaviour — celebration, community and violence — in telling the story of a band of jazz musicians struggling to exist in Berlin on the cusp of the Second World War.

    American and German, dark-and light-skinned, gentile and Jewish, the members map complex racial and national identities. The musicians aren’t targets only because of their skin colour or religious identity; they’re also playing “degenerate” music, according to the SS. That’s a double whammy…

    …Hiero is Hieronymus Thomas Falk, a German citizen with a Rhinelander mother and an African father whose precise story shimmers elusively in the history of colonialism and war. “He was a Mischling,” Sid explains, “a half-breed.”

    Sid himself is “straight-haired and green-eyed” and light-skinned enough to pass, but ambiguously: “a right little Spaniard,” he says wryly. Though he’s a foreigner, he’s often safer than his friend in Hiero’s own country. Hiero, Delilah and Sid move through a shifting triangular relationship where music plays as important a role as love….

    Read the entire review here.

  • Half-Blood Blues

    Half-Blood Blues

    Picador (an imprint of Macmillan)
    2011-09-03
    304 pages
    8.5 X 5.5 X 0.9 in
    Cloth ISBN:9780887627415
    Paperback ISBN: ISBN: 9781250012708

    Esi Edugyan

    • Winner of the 2011 Scotiabank Giller Prize

    Paris, 1940.  A brilliant jazz musician, Hiero, is arrested by the Nazis and never heard from again.  He is twenty years old.  He is a German citizen.  And he is black.

    Fifty years later, his friend and fellow musician, Sid, must relive that unforgettable time, revealing the friendships, love affairs and treacheries that sealed Hiero’s fate.  From the smoky bars of pre-war Berlin to the salons of  Paris—where the legendary Louis Armstrong makes an appearance—Sid, with his distinctive and rhythmic German-American slang, leads the reader through a fascinating world alive with passion, music and the spirit of resistance.

    Half-Blood Blues, the second novel by an exceptionally talented young writer, is an entrancing, electric story about jazz, race, love and loyalty, and the sacrifices we ask of ourselves, and demand of others, in the name of art.

  • African Diasporas: Afro-German Literature in the Context of the African American Experience

    African Diasporas: Afro-German Literature in the Context of the African American Experience

    Lit Verlag
    2006
    144 pages
    ISBN: 3-8258-9612-9

    Aija Poikane-Daumke

    This book investigates the development of Afro-German literature in the context of the African American experience and shows the decisive role of literature for the emergence of the Afro-German Movement. Various Afro-German literary and cultural initiatives, which began in the 1980s, arose as a response to the experience of being marginalized—to the point of invisibility—within a dominant Eurocentric culture that could not bring the notions of “Black” and “German” together in a meaningful way. The book is a significant contribution to the understanding of German literature as multi-ethnic and of the the transatlantic networks operating in the African Diasporas.

  • “Free People of Color” in Old Virginia: The Morris Family of Gloucester County, a Case Study

    “Free People of Color” in Old Virginia: The Morris Family of Gloucester County, a Case Study

    Renegade South: histories of unconventional southerners
    2011-11-10

    Victoria E. Bynum, Emeritus Professor of History
    Texas State University, San Marcos

    Back in 1977, when I was a junior in college, history became a personal venture for me when an African American friend told me that his ancestors were from Virginia, but that he had always heard that they were not slaves. African Americans from Old Virginia who had never been slaves? That got my attention!

    A brand new history major, I decided on the spot to research my friend’s family history. Soon I was delving into microfilmed and published records from colonial Middlesex and Gloucester Counties of Virginia, where I did indeed find the ancestors of my friend—and many more—living as “free people of color” in colonial and antebellum Virginia. The following is their story.

    During the transformative years of 1680-1730, as slavery overtook servitude as the favored system of labor among planters in the English colonies of America, a small but significant population of free people of color emerged in Virginia’s Gloucester and Middlesex Counties. We know very little about their individual lives beyond their names, racial designations, and ages as recorded in church and court records. We know, for example, that Elizabeth Morris, a servant of Middlesex County, was of mixed ancestry because the vestry book of Christ Church Parish described her in 1706 as “A Mulatto Woman.” (Note 1)

    That same vestry book identified Elizabeth’s white master and mistress as “gentleman” Francis Weeks and his wife, Elizabeth. The Weeks family owned a number of slaves, raising questions about why Elizabeth was not also enslaved. Perhaps her mother was also a servant, or perhaps Elizabeth was the child of an enslaved woman and a white slave master who subsequently freed her…

    …But even in this deliberately bi-racial society, a third category of race and status intruded: that of free person of color, with ”color” often meaning light brown. Elizabeth Morris’s designation as a “Mulatto,” which technically meant half African, half European, should not be taken literally. Virginia officials used the term rather loosely; it might mean that an individual was born to a mixed-race couple, or simply that one or both parents were of mixed ancestry. Mainly, it meant that a person’s skin was lighter in tone than that of enslaved Africans being forced into the colony in ever greater numbers…

    Read the entire article here.