AMST130 SC-Multiracial People and Relations in U.S. History

Posted in Barack Obama, Course Offerings, History, Law, Media Archive, Social Science, United States on 2010-09-03 17:45Z by Steven

AMST130 SC-Multiracial People and Relations in U.S. History

Scripps College, Claremont, California
2013

Matthew Delmont, Assistant Professor of American Studies

This class will explore the conditions and consequences for crossing racial boundaries in the U.S. We will take a multidisciplinary approach, exploring historical, literary, and ethnographic writings along with several feature and documentary film treatments of the subject. We will examine: Relations among Native Americans, whites, and blacks in the colonial era and nineteenth century; the legal formation of race through miscegena­tion cases; the regulation and representation of multiracial themes in film; the concept of mestizaje; contemporary debates surrounding the Mixed-race/Multiracial movement; and the racial identity of the 44th President of the United States, Barack Obama.

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Plessy as “Passing”: Judicial Responses to Ambiguously Raced Bodies in Plessy v. Ferguson

Posted in Articles, History, Law, Media Archive, Passing, United States on 2010-09-03 17:34Z by Steven

Plessy as “Passing”: Judicial Responses to Ambiguously Raced Bodies in Plessy v. Ferguson

Law & Society Review
Volume 39, Issue 3 (September 2005)
pages 563–600
DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-5893.2005.00234.x

Mark Golub, Assistant Professor of Politics & International Relations
Scripps College, Claremont, California

The Supreme Court’s decision in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) is infamous for its doctrine of “separate but equal,” which gave constitutional legitimacy to Jim Crow segregation laws. What is less-known about the case is that the appellant Homer Plessy was, by all appearances, a white man. In the language of the Court, his “one-eighth African blood” was “not discernible in him.” This article analyzes Plessy as a story of racial “passing.” The existence of growing interracial populations in the nineteenth century created difficulties for legislation designed to enforce the separation of the races. Courts were increasingly called upon to determine the racial identity of particular individuals. Seen as a judicial response to racial ambiguity, Plessy demonstrates the law’s role not only in the treatment of racial groups, but also in the construction and maintenance of racial categories.

Read or purchase the article here.

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Interrogating Identity Construction: Bodies versus Community in Cynthia Kadohata’s In the Heart of the Valley of Love

Posted in Articles, Asian Diaspora, Identity Development/Psychology, Literary/Artistic Criticism, United States on 2010-09-03 16:51Z by Steven

Interrogating Identity Construction: Bodies versus Community in Cynthia Kadohata’s In the Heart of the Valley of Love

Asian American Literature: Discourses & Pedagogies
Volume 1 (2010)
pages 61-69

Nicole Myoshi Rabin, Instructor of Liberal Arts & Interdisciplinary Studies
Emerson College, Boston. Massachusetts

In an interview for the journal MELUS, Hsiu-chuan Lee claims that Cynthia Kadohata suggests her novel In the Heart of the Valley of Love does not directly take “any specific ethnicity as its central concern,” nor deal explicitly with the “identity issue” (165, 179).  Despite these assertions by the author, In the Heart of the Valley of Love is mainly taught at the university level in Asian American Literature courses.  While Kadohata’s novel has been established within this specific canon of Asian American Literature, her novel deals with issues that resonate among all racial groups. This paper considers the ways in which Kadohata creates an imagined future not wholly detached from issues of race and identity, but where the conceptualization of race-based identity is conceived by means of self-fashioning and self-signifying. In the novel’s “futuristic” American society, concerns of class and the divides of wealth between the white “richtowns” and the multiracial majority may seem to be the central themes, but issues of race and issues of class become conflated in the novel, and Kadohata uses more subtle ways to discuss issues of racial difference.  What Kadohata suggests through her novel In the Heart of the Valley of Love is not that racialized bodies cease to be of importance in American society, but that race as a critical factor in identity formation and categorization must be reframed by self-signification and social interactions.

…Kadohata’s indictment of current racial understanding goes further as Francie, the mixed race narrator, is marginalized by our current monoracial understanding of race as the determinant factor of identity. She says, “I enjoyed the feeling of the heat making my loose shorts billow around my yellow-brown legs—the yellow from my Japanese mother, the brown from my Chinese-black father” (22). Viet Thanh Nguyen suggests in Race and Resistance that Francie embodies “the novel’s conception of nonwhite identity as being a mélange of different ethnic and racial backgrounds” (150). While the narrator does occupy the space of the raced majority within the novel, her value as a mixed race character does not end at being the embodiment of the “novel’s conception” of a “nonwhite identity.” Francie as a mixed-race subject maintains her position as marginalized in our current understanding of racial categorization. Keeping with the notion of the body, Kadohata locates Francie’s indeterminacy in her yellow-brown skin, which is not easily identified as one race or another, until Francie herself declares where she “belongs.” Knowing what races and ethnicities Francie belongs to serves a purpose beyond making her a mixture of incongruent elements of race and therefore some sort of representative of everything “nonwhite” as Nguyen suggests; her “parts” are named, and so while she may embody the majority within the text, she is still marginalized by our current understanding of race along monoracial lines. By making the protagonist a “mélange,” Kadohata renders this multiracial character incapable of being assigned identity by physical racial markers and forces Francie to seek a different means by which she must forge an identity…

Read the entire article here.

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“What is In My Blood?”: Contemporary Black Scottishness and the Work of Jackie Kay [Book Chapter]

Posted in Books, Chapter, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, United Kingdom on 2010-09-03 04:35Z by Steven

“What is In My Blood?”: Contemporary Black Scottishness and the Work of Jackie Kay [Book Chapter]

Literature and Racial Ambiguity
Rodopi B.V.
2002-09-15
328 pages
ISBN-10: 9042014180
ISBN-13: 978-9042014183
pp. 1-25(25)

edited by Teresa Hubal and Neil Brooks

Peter Clandfield, Assistant Professor of English Studies
Nipissing University, North Bay, Ontario, Canada

The work of the Scottish writer Jackie Kay (b. 1961) not only refutes simplistic definitions of race and racial attributes, but also challenges utopian idea(l)s about racial and cultural hybridity as a condition that, in itself, resolves problems arising from racial differences—that is, from dissimilarities, conflicts, and things in between. In her 1985 poem “So you think I’m a mule?,” Kay, who is of mixed black-white (African-British) biological parentage, voices what sounds like an unequivocal rejection of white attempts to theorise about people of obviously complex racial ancestry:

If you Dare mutter mulatto
hover around hybrid
hobble on half-caste
and intellectualize on the
“Mixed race problem”,
I have to tell you:
take your beady eyes offa my skin;
don’t concern yourself with
the  “dialectics of mixtures”;
don’t pull that strange blood crap
on me Great White Mother.
Say I’m no mating of a she-ass and a stallion
no half of this and half of that
to put it plainly purely
I am black (lines 29-43)

This 66-line poem is given in full as an epigraph to Heidi Safia Mirza’s Introduction to Black British Feminism: A Reader (Routledge, 1997), where it serves as a strong statement about the determination of black British women to set their own agendas. In the context of Kay’s own evolving career, though, the poem’s significance is much more ambiguous. While its speaker states emphatically that she is black and is “not mixed up” (line 50) about race, mixedrace voices in Kay’s more recent works are less certain. Without being “mixed up” in the sense of being confused or incoherent, these works delineate complex emergent forms of racial and cultural identity that undermine fixed concepts not only of Britishness, blackness, or black Britishness but also of hybridity itself…

Read the entire chapter here.

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AAS 436–Politics of Racial Ambiguity

Posted in Course Offerings, Identity Development/Psychology, New Media, Politics/Public Policy, United States on 2010-09-03 04:20Z by Steven

AAS 436–Politics of Racial Ambiguity
University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Fall 2010

Rainier Spencer, Professor and Director, Afro-American Studies Program

Interdisciplinary investigation of contemporary American black/white multiracial identities, including analyses and assessments of the “multiracial identity movement” in the United States.

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AAS 434-Constructions of Racial Ambiguity

Posted in Course Offerings, History, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Passing, Social Science, United States on 2010-09-03 04:13Z by Steven

AAS 434-Constructions of Racial Ambiguity
University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Spring 2010

Rainier Spencer, Professor and Director, Afro-American Studies Program

Interdisciplinary study of miscegenation, mulattos, and passing in the United States. Focuses on the Afro-American context, using historical, literary, and cinematic sources in order to grapple with and gain an understanding of the complexities of American race and mixed-race, both past and present.

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Diversity on a Personal Level: A First Look at Multiple Race Population

Posted in Articles, Census/Demographics, Media Archive, United States on 2010-09-02 05:09Z by Steven

Diversity on a Personal Level: A First Look at Multiple Race Population

Indiana Business Review
Summer 2001
pages 6-7

John Besl, Research Demographer
Indiana Business Research Center, Kelley School of Business
Indiana University

For many decades, census data have provided a look at racial diversity in our nation’s communities. But Census 2000 offers a truly innovative look at racial diversity, with counts of persons claiming a heritage of two or more races. Census 2000 race tabulations include six different categories of one race “alone,” and 57 different combinations of these six discrete races. Adding to the mountain of data, the 63 race categories are also cross-tabulated by two origin categories (Hispanic or Not Hispanic). The unprecedented detail afforded by 126 race-origin combinations was made possible (necessary?) by the new “check all that apply” option for identifying race on the Census 2000 questionnaire. Former Census Bureau Director Kenneth Prewitt, the man in charge of the 2000 national headcount, recently expressed his opinion that the most significant historical development from the 2000 census will be the introduction of the multiple race option…

Read the entire article here.

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HapaSC: A Place Multiracial Call Home

Posted in Articles, Asian Diaspora, Campus Life, New Media, United States on 2010-09-02 04:27Z by Steven

HapaSC: A Place Multiracial Call Home

Campus Circle News
Los Angeles, California
2010-08-16

Stephanie Forshee

Multiracial students at USC [University of Southern California] like Lauren Perez are devoting time to create a place where you can express every part of yourself. HapaSC is an organization of about 30 USC students that raises awareness for “mixed” students on campus and allows them an opportunity to embrace world change.

The phrase “hapa haole” means “half.” The term was originally used to describe people who were half Asian/Pacific Islander and half Caucasian. It has now been shortened to just “hapa.” HapaSC’s purpose is to create awareness for the rapid expansion of multiracial people. 

“We understand that identity is something you can choose and it’s always developing, so we don’t put people in a box,” says Perez, last school year’s public relations officer…

Read the entire article here.

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New England Identities: Black New England Conference

Posted in History, Identity Development/Psychology, Live Events, Media Archive, Native Americans/First Nation, United States on 2010-09-01 22:21Z by Steven

New England Identities: Black New England Conference

University of New Hampshire
2009-06-11 thorugh 2009-06-13

New England: Beyond Black & White

Moving beyond rigid racial identities, this year’s conference will explore the contemporary as well as historic interactions between Black and Indigenous communities, the presence of “passing” mixed race individuals, and the more recent immigrant experience, within a New England context. These complex interactions, connections, conflicts, experiences, and resistant efforts of Black, white, Indigenous, and multi-racial citizens will be explored through scholarly research, presentations on books, shared personal stories, and imagery.

The Black New England Conference is a 2-day conference that gathers scholars, teachers, researchers, community members and members of local organizations to share their work and insights on the Black experience past and present in New England. It is both an academic conference and a celebration of Black life and history in New England.

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Race on Trial: Passing and the Van Houten Case in Boston

Posted in History, Media Archive, Papers/Presentations, Passing, Social Science, United States on 2010-09-01 22:14Z by Steven

Race on Trial: Passing and the Van Houten Case in Boston

Paper presented at the annual meeting of the 94th Annual Convention
Association for the Study of African American Life and History
Hilton Cincinnati, Netherland Plaza
Cincinnati, Ohio
2009-09-30

Zebulon V. Miletsky, Assistant Professor of Africana Studies
Stony Brook University, State University of New York

In 1894 Anna Van Houten sued Asa P. Morse in a controversial “breach of promise” case in Boston after he withdrew his proposal of marriage upon the discovery of her black ancestry. Morse contended it was a promise that he was not bound to keep because Van Houten was passing for white and had misrepresented herself by concealing her true identity. The case caused quite a stir in the delicate social and racial hierarchy of Boston and was watched very closely by the press who fed the public’s appetite for every detail of the scandal. While many in the public sympathized with Morse for having been deceived, the court concluded that the concealment of her race was not a factor and a breach of promise had indeed been committed. As a result, Van Houten won her original case as well as a sizable settlement. However, the verdict caused a public outcry. The case was successfully appealed and eventually overturned using a legal argument that claimed race constituted valid grounds for a breach of promise.

This paper examines the Van Houten case and what it reveals about Northern anxieties over passing and interracial marriage in the late nineteenth century in cities like Boston. The court’s acceptance of Morse’s appeal is problematic in that interracial marriages or engagements required a legal remedy to prevent them even though they were not prohibited by the state. The case also provides a unique glimpse into the public’s beliefs about the physical nature of race at the very moment when those views were beginning to shift from a scientific understanding to one that is more socially constructed. Finally, this case sheds light on the phenomenon of passing which gave way to a new legal construction of race that allowed for different kinds of evidence, such as photographs and witness testimony to prove the racial identity of an individual.

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