Mixed Race Studies

Collective Identity, Oppression, and the Right to Self-Ascription

Lexington Books
May 2012
142 pages
Size: 6 x 9
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-7391-7190-5
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-7391-9057-9
eBook ISBN: 978-0-7391-7191-2

Andrew J. Pierce, Lecturer
Department of Philosophy
Sacred Heart University, Fairfield, Connecticut

Collective Identity, Oppression, and the Right to Self-Ascription argues that groups have an irreducibly collective right to determine the meaning of their shared group identity, and that such a right is especially important for historically oppressed groups. The author specifies this right by way of a modified discourse ethic, demonstrating that it can provide the foundation for a conception of identity politics that avoids many of its usual pitfalls. The focus throughout is on racial identity, which provides a test case for the theory. That is, it investigates what it would mean for racial identities to be self-ascribed rather than imposed, establishing the possible role racial identity might play in a just society. The book thus makes a unique contribution to both the field of critical theory, which has been woefully silent on issues of race, and to race theory, which often either presumes that a just society would be a raceless society, or focuses primarily on understanding existing racial inequalities, in the manner typical of so-called “non-ideal theory.”

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Minority Cultures and Oppressed Groups: Competing Explanatory Frameworks
• Chapter 2: Collective Identity, Group Rights, and the Liberal Tradition of Law
• Chapter 3: Identity Politics Within the Limits of Deliberative Democracy
• Chapter 4: The Future of Racial Identity: A Test Case

Traveling Texts and the Work of Afro-Japanese Cultural Production: Two Haiku and a Microphone

Lexington Books (an imprint of Rowman & Littlefield)
June 2015
302 pages
6 1/2 x 9 1/4
Hardback ISBN: 978-1-4985-0547-5
eBook ISBN: 978-1-4985-0548-2

Edited by:

William H. Bridges IV, Assistant Professor of Japanese Studies
University of California, Irvine

Nina Cornyetz, Associate Professor
Gallatin School of Individualized Study
New York University

Traveling Texts and the Work of Afro-Japanese Cultural Production analyzes the complex conversations taking place in texts of all sorts traveling between Africans, African Diasporas, and Japanese across disciplinary, geographic, racial, ethnic, linguistic, and cultural borders. Be it focused on the make-up of the blackface ganguro or the haiku of Richard Wright, Rastafari communities in Japan or the black enka singer Jero, the volume turns its attention away from questions of representation to ones concerning the generative aspects of transcultural production. The contributors are interested primarily in texts in motion—the contradictory motion within texts, the traveling of texts, and the action that such kinetic energy inspires in readers, viewers, listeners, and travelers. As our texts travel and travail, the originary nodal points that anchor them to set significations loosen and are transformed; the essays trace how, in the process of traveling, the bodies and subjectivities of those working to reimagine the text(s) in new sites moderate, accommodate, and transfigure both the texts and themselves.

Beyond Blood Identities: Posthumanity in the Twenty-First Century

Lexington Books: an imprint of Rowman & Littlefield
October 2009
262 pages
6 1/2 x 9 1/2
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-7391-3842-7
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-7391-3843-4
eBook ISBN: 978-0-7391-3844-1

Jason D. Hill, Professor of Philosophy
DePaul University

Beyond Blood Identities uncovers the social psychology of those who hold strong blood identities. In this highly original work, Jason D. Hill argues that strong racial, ethnic and national identities, which he refers to as “tribal identities,” function according to a separatist logic that does irreparable damage to our moral lives. Drawing on scholarship in philosophy, sociology, and cultural anthropology, Hill contends that strong tribalism is a form of pathology.

Beyond Blood Identities shows how a particular understanding of culture could lead to a new theoretical approach to enriched human living. Hill develops a new version of cosmopolitanism that he calls post-human cosmopolitanism to solve a number of challenges in contemporary society. From the problem of defining culture, the failure of multiculturalism, the question of who owns native culture, the identification of Jews as post-human people and the problem of their status as “chosen people” in a modern world, the author applies a cosmopolitan analysis to some of the major problems in our global and interdependent world. He posits a world in which community has been dispensed with and replaced by its successor term sociality—the broad unmarked space in which creative social intercourse takes place. Hill applies a new cosmopolitanism to ideate a new post-humanity for the twenty-first century.

Table of Contents

• Chapter 1. Introduction
• Chapter 2. Moral Reasoning From a Cosmopolitan Perspective: The Problem of Culture
• Chapter 3. Who Owns Culture: A Moral Cosmopolitan Inquiry
• Chapter 4. Moral Culture is Public Culture: Cosmopolitanism and Culture Warfare
• Chapter 5. Theorizing Post Humanity: Radical Inclusion; Jews as the Chosen People; and the Identity Politics of St. Paul
• Chapter 6. The Psychopathology of Tribalism: An Exposé
• Chapter 7. Appendix: Conscientious Objections to Cosmopolitanism: A Response

Brazilian Telenovelas and the Myth of Racial Democracy

Lexington Books
March 2012
136 pages
Size: 6 1/2 x 9 1/2
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-7391-6964-3
eBook ISBN: 978-0-7391-6965-0

Samantha Nogueira Joyce, Assistant Professor in Communication Studies
Indiana University, South Bend

Brazilian Telenovelas and the Myth of Racial Democracy, by Samantha Nogueira Joyce, examines what happens when a telenovela directly addresses matters of race and racism in contemporary Brazil. This investigation provides a traditional textual analysis of Duas Caras (2007-2008), a watershed telenovela for two main reasons: It was the first of its kind to present audiences with an Afro-Brazilian as the main hero, openly addressing race matters through plot and dialogue. Additionally, for the first time in the history of Brazilian television, the author of Duas Caras kept a web blog where he discussed the public’s reactions to the storylines, media discussions pertaining to the characters and plot, and directly engaged with fans and critics of the program.

Joyce combines her investigation of Duas Caras with a study of related media in order to demonstrate how the program introduced novel ideas about race and also offered a forum where varying perspectives on race, class, and racial relations in Brazil could be discussed. Brazilian Telenovelas is not a reception study in the traditional sense, it is not a story of entertainment-education in the strict sense, and it is not solely a textual analysis. Instead, Joyce’s text is a study of the social milieu that the telenovela (and especially Duas Caras) navigates, one that is a component of a contemporary progressive social movement in Brazil, and one that views the text as being located in social interactions. As such, this book reveals how telenovelas contribute to social change in a way that has not been fully explored in previous scholarship.

Table of Contents

• Chapter I – Episode 1: And Let There be White
• Chapter II – Black Flows: Duas Caras / The Legacy of Whitening and Racial Democracy
• Chapter III – “My Little Whitey” / “My Big, Delicious Negro:” Telenovelas, Duas Caras, and the Representation of Race
• Chapter IV – Deu no Blogão! (“It was in the Big Blog!”): Writing a Telenovela, a Blog, and a Metadiscourse
• Chapter V – Duas Caras as a New Approach to Social Merchandising
• Chapter VI – Conclusions
• References
• About the Author
• Index

Biracial in America: Forming and Performing Racial Identity

Lexington Books (a division Rowman & Littlefield publishing group)
2011-08-28
224 pages
Cloth ISBN: 0-7391-4574-6 / 978-0-7391-4574-6
Electronic ISBN: 0-7391-4576-2 / 978-0-7391-4576-0

Nikki Khanna, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of Vermont

Elected in 2008, Barack Obama made history as the first African American President of the United States. Though recognized as the son of his white Kansas-born mother and his Kenyan father, the media and public have nonetheless pigeonholed him as black, and he too self-identifies as such. Obama’s experiences as a biracial American with black and white ancestry, although compelling because of his celebrity, however, is not unique and raises several questions about the growing number of black-white biracial Americans today: How are they perceived by others with regard to race? How do they tend to identify? And why? Taking a social psychological approach, this book identifies influencing factors and several underlying processes shaping racial identity. Unlike previous studies which examine racial identity as if it was a one-dimensional concept, this book examines two dimensions of identity—a public dimension (how they identify themselves to others) and an internalized dimension (how they see themselves internally)—noting that both types of identity may not mesh, and in fact, they may be quite different from one another. Moreover, this study investigates the ways in which biracial Americans perform race in their day-to-day lives. One’s race isn’t simply something that others prescribe onto the individual, but something that individuals “do.” The strategies and motivations for performing black, white, and biracial identities are explored.

Table of Contents

• Chapter 1: Questions of Identity
• Chapter 2: Black and White in America: Then and Now
• Chapter 3: Through the “Looking Glass”: Reflected Appraisals and the One Drop Rule
• Chapter 4: The Push and Pull of Day-to-Day Interactions
• Chapter 5: Social Comparisons and Social Networks
• Chapter 6: Identity Work: Strategies and Motivations
• Chapter 7: Concluding Thoughts

Beyond White Ethnicity: Developing a Sociological Understanding of Native American Identity Reclamation

Lexington Books (an imprint of Rowman & Littlefield)
October 2006
262 pages
Cloth: 0-7391-1393-3 / 978-0-7391-1393-6
Paper: 0-7391-1394-1 / 978-0-7391-1394-3

Kathleen J. Fitzgerald, Professor of Sociology
University of New Orleans, New Orleans, Louisiana

Through qualitative analysis of individuals, Kathleen J. Fitzgerald studies the social construction of racial and ethnic identity in Beyond White Ethnicity. Fitzgerald focuses on Native Americans, who despite a previously unacknowledged and uncelebrated background, are embracing and reclaiming their heritage in their everyday lives. Focusing on the purpose, process, and problems of this reclamation, Fitzgerald’s research provides an understanding of these issues. She also exposes how institutional power relations are racialized and how race is a social and political construction, and she helps us understand larger cultural transformations. This insightful collection of research sparks the interest of those who study sociology, anthropology, and cultural studies.

Table of Contents

1. Reclaimer Narratives: Exposing the Duality of Structure in Identity Formation
2. Challenging White Hegemony: Reclaimers and the Culture Wars
3. Reclaimer Practices: Religion, Spirituality, Language, Family, and Food
4. “If It Looks Like a Duck”: Physical Appearance and Reclaimer Identity
5. “Wanna-bes” and “Indian Police”: The Battle Over Authenticity

Is That Your Child? Mothers Talk about Rearing Biracial Children

Lexington Books (an imprint of Rowman & Littlefield)
October 2008
146 pages
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-7391-2763-6
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-7391-2764-3
eBook ISBN: 978-0-7391-3208-1

By Marion Kilson and Florence Ladd

“Is That Your Child?” is a question that countless mothers of biracial children encounter whether they are African American or European American, rearing children today or a generation ago, living in the city or in the suburbs, are upper middle class or lower middle class. Social scientists Marion Kilson and Florence Ladd probe mothers’ responses to this query and other challenges that mothers of biracial children encounter.

Organized into four chapters, the book begins with Kilson and Ladd’s initial interview of one another, continues with an overview of the challenges and rewards of raising biracial children gleaned from their interviews with other mothers, presents profiles of mothers highlighting distinctive individual experiences of biracial parenting, and concludes with suggestions of positive biracial parenting strategies.

This book makes a unique contribution to the growing body of literature by and about biracial Americans. Although in the past twenty years biracial Americans like Rebecca Walker, June Cross, and James McBride have written of their person experiences and scholars like Kathleen Korgen, Maria Root, and Ruth Frankenberg have explored aspects of the biracial experience, none has focused on the experiences of a heterogeneous set of black and white mothers of different generations and socioeconomic circumstances as Kilson and Ladd do.

About the Authors
Marion Kilson is an anthropologist and the author of Claiming Place: Biracial Young Adults of the Post-Civil Rights Era (Bergin & Garvey 2000). Florence Ladd is a psychologist and won the Black Caucus of the American Library Association award for her novel, Sarah’s Psalm (Scribner 1997).

Table of Contents

• Foreword
• Chapter 1: The Back Story of Is That Your Child?
• Chapter 2: Challenges and Rewards for Mothers of Biracial Children
• Chapter 3: Profiles of Mothers of Biracial Children
• Chapter 4: Nurturing Biracial Children: Some Lessons Learned
• Appendix I: Interracial Marriages in the United States
• Appendix II: Some Sociological Attributes of Mothers
• Appendix III: Selected Multiracial Resources