Mixed Race Studies

New Contenders Emerge in Quest to Identify Yale’s First African-American Graduate

The New York Times
2014-03-16

Ariel Kaminer

For Richard Henry Green, recently declared to have been Yale College’s first known African-American graduate, fame, or at least the certainty of his claim on history, was fleeting.

Just last month, an Americana specialist at the Swann Auction Galleries made public the discovery that Mr. Green, the son of a New Haven bootmaker, had attended Yale 17 years before Edward Bouchet, an 1874 graduate previously thought to have broken its color barrier. But while Mr. Bouchet spent a century and a half on that pedestal, his accomplishments praised with every honor, from academic symposiums to undergraduate fellowships to a portrait in Yale’s main library, the scant weeks since Mr. Green unseated him have brought nothing but new challengers.

According to an article in the journal Afro-Americans in New York Life and History, a man named Moses Simons may in fact have been the first undergraduate to break Yale’s color barrier. This possibility is remarkable not just because Mr. Simons graduated long before either of the two previous contenders — all the way back in 1809, when Thomas Jefferson was president — but because Mr. Simons is already celebrated for breaking an entirely different sort of barrier…

…The record of Mr. Simons’s trial includes references to him as “coloured,” and to the discomfort that he aroused in some “Southern gentlemen.” And the author of that trial record ended his account with a rant about keeping America free of “the African tinge.”

What’s more, a number of men in the Jewish, slave-owning Simons family of Charleston, S.C., were known to have fathered children of mixed race.

But as strongly as the trial record implies African ancestry, Dale Rosengarten, founding director of the Jewish Heritage Collection at the College of Charleston, cautioned that “unless you can actually know who the parents were, you don’t actually know.” She added: “If this man did have a dark complexion, darker than the average Caucasian, it’s possible that he had other admixtures.”…

Read the entire article here.

Interracial Family Memoirs: Reconstructing Genealogies across the Color Line

Yale University
230 Prospect Street
Room 101
New Haven, Connecticut 06511
2013-09-16, 12:00-13:15 EDT (Local Time)

Cedric Essi, Ph.D. Candidate in American Studies
University of Erlangen-Nürnberg

During the last two decades numerous autobiographical works have emerged which explore family histories in black and white, such as Barack Obama’s “Dreams from My Father,” June Cross’s “Secret Daughter” or Edward Ball’s “Slaves in the Family.” Essi subsumes these works under the umbrella term ‘interracial family memoir’ and draws up a typology of ‘genealogies’ in order to categorize and interrogate the ways in which these texts thematize kinship across the color line. This talk will provide a critical overview of the genre and discusses how the US-specific ideology of the one-drop rule affects interracial family experiences, to what extent transnational affiliations conflict with racial self-identification, on what terms white motherhood is rendered visible and how the interracial family is often imagined as an allegory of the American nation. This talk is part of the GLC Brown Bag Lunch Series. Bring your lunch; drinks & dessert will be provided.

For more information, click here.

“Double Natural”

Yale University
Department of African American Studies
81 Wall St., Gordon Parks Room 201
2013-01-24, 11:45-13:15 EST (Local Time)

Ellen Gallagher, Hayden Visiting Artist
Yale University Art Gallery

Ellen Gallagher breaks the boundaries of traditional art by using materials and found images in unexpected ways. Her work often looks at how African Americans have been represented and stereotyped. She also explores her own identity and experience as an American woman of African and Irish descent. In DeLuxe (2004-2005), Gallagher experimented with printmaking by using materials including Plasticine and glitter to transform old advertisements for beauty products targeted at African Americans into a work of art.

Co-sponsored by the Yale University Art Gallery and the Dept. of African American Studies.

Living Portraits: Carl Van Vechten’s Color Photographs of African Americans, 1939-1964

Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library
Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut

Carl Van Vechten (1880-1964), photographer, promotor of literary talent, and critic of dance, theater, and opera, had an artistic vision rooted in the centrality of the talented person. He cherished accomplishment, whether in music, dance, theater, fine art, literature, sport, or advocacy. He began to make photographic portraits in 1932; in 1939 he discovered newly available color film. For a quarter century, he invited friends and acquaintances, well-known artists, fledgling entertainers, and public intellectuals to sit for him, often against backdrops reminiscent of the vivid colors and patterns of a Matisse painting. Among his subjects are a very young Diahann Carroll, Billie Holiday in tears, Paul Robeson as Othello, Althea Gibson swinging a tennis racquet, and a procession of opera stars, composers, authors, musicians, activists, educators, and journalists who made notable contributions to the cultural and intellectual life of the country. Also included are brilliant color images of notable and everyday places: Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee; the wedding of friends; pushcarts and street scenes of Harlem; children at play in a housing project’s yard.

The Collection

Color slides of Blacks.
1,884 color Kodachrome slides, 2 x 2 inches each

[Note from Steven F. Riley] Also includes photographs of: Peter Abrahams, Prince Etuka Okala Abutu, Armenta Adams, Adele Addison, Alvin Ailey, Betty Allen, Sanford Allen, Martina Arroyo, William Attaway, Ethel Ayler, Pearl Bailey, James Baldwin, Harry Belafonte, Roy Thompson Beresford, Mary McLeod Bethune, Charles Blackwell, McHenry Boatwright, Margaret Allison Bonds, Paul Bontemps, William Stanley Braithwaite, Carol Brice, Jonathan Brice, Maurice Brooks, Anne Wiggins Brown, Debria Brown, Roscoe Lee Browne, Joyce Bryant, Ralph J. Bunche, Dan Burley, Miriam Burton, John Carlis, Thelma Carpenter, Diahann Carroll, John Carter, Shirley Verrett Carter, Horace Cayton, Omar Clay, Ladybird Cleveland, Leo Coleman, Durward B. Collins, Janet Collins, Zebedee Collins, Clayton Corbin, Edna Cordoza, Eldzier Corter, Robert Curtis, Jimmy Daniels, Ossie Davis, Gloria Davy, Ruby Dee, William Demby, Beauford Delaney, Inez Dickerson, Hugh Dilworth, Mattiwilda Dobbs, Owen Dodson, W. E. B. DuBois, Todd Duncan, Roy Eaton, Bobby Evans, Martha Flowers, Benny Garland, Althea Gibson, Richard Gibson, John Birks “Dizzie” Gillespie, Shirley Graham, Reri Grist, Nicolas Guillen, Juanita Hall, Bertha “Chippie” Hill, Ramon Blancos Habana, Frank Harriott, Afrika Hayes, Marion Hayes, Roland Hayes, Chester Eugene Haynes, Godfrey Headley, Bomar Himes, Geoffrey Holder, Leo Holder, Charlotte Holloman, Nora Holt, Marilyn Horne, Langston Hughes, Phillipa Husley, Earle Hyman, Ivie Jackman, Annette Jackson, Mahalia Jackson, Raymond Jackson, Louise E. Jefferson, Charles Johnson, Hal Johnson, Hylan “Dots” Johnson, Marie Johnson, (Everett) LeRoi Jones , James Earl Jones, Laurence Clifton Jones, Ulysses Kay, William Melvin Kelly, Eartha (Mae) Kitt, George Lamming, Carmen De Lavallade, Everett Lee, Henry Lewis, Powell Lindsay, James Lowe, Robert Keith McFerrin, Claudia McNeil, Geraldyn (Gerri) Hodges Major, Claude Marchant, William Marshall, Mabel Mercer, Lizzie Miles, Arthur Mitchell, Edgar Mittelholzer, Mollie Moon, Linwood Morris, Willard Motley, Lorenzo Newby, Maidie Norman, Godfrey Nurse, Frederick O’Neal, Leonard de Paur, Louise Parker, Louis Peterson, Julius Perkins Jr., Mildred Perkins, Charles Perry, Ann Petry, Evelyn La Rue Pittman, Leontyne Price, Bertice Reading, Guy Rodgers, Percy Rodriguez, Pearl Showers, Edith Spurlock Sampson, Diana Sands, Harold Scott, George Shirley, Bobby (Robert Waltrip) Short, Merton Simpson, Noble Sissle, Clarence Smith Jr., William Gardner Smith, Rawn Spearman, Melvin Stewart, William Grant Still, Billy Strayhorn, Howard Swanson, Archie Savage, Wesley Tann, Ellen Tarry, Dorothy Taylor, Claude Thompson, Veronica Tyler, Margaret Tynes, Henry Van Dyke, Elaine Vance, William Warfield, Dorothy West, Moran Weston, Clarence Cameron White, Josh White, Lindsay H. White, Roy Wilkins, Billy Dee Williams, Camilla Williams, John Alfred Williams, Maurice Williford, Ellis Wilson, John W. Work, and Dale Wright.

To view the collection, click here.

AFAM 349a/AMST 326a/WGSS 388a: Interraciality and Hybridity

Yale University
Fall 2011

Naomi Pabst, Assistant Professor of African American Studies and American Studies
Yale University

Examination of mixed-race matters in both literary and critical writings, primarily within the black/white schema.  Historical and current questions of black and interracial identity; the contemporary “mixed race movement” and the emerging rubric of “critical mixed race studies”; historical genealogy and interraciality and hybridity.  Analysis of longstanding debates on race mixing in the realms of legal classification, transracial adoption, census taking, grassroots movements, the discursive, the ideological, and the popular.

“Spectacular wickedness”: New Orleans, prostitution, and the politics of sex, 1897-1917

Yale University
May 2005
274 pages
Publication Number: AAT 3168932
ISBN: 9780542049149

Emily Epstein Landau

A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Yale University in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

This dissertation is a history of the construction, exploitation, fulfillment, and repression of desire when prostitution was legal in New Orleans in a red-light district called Storyville, from 1897 to 1917. Through a combination of social history and cultural analysis, I show how Storyville became a site for the articulation of race, gender, and sexual relationships at the turn of the twentieth century. Storyville offered its male patrons jazz music, “sporting” culture, and fraternal camaraderie, all organized around the sale of sex for cash.

Nineteenth-century New Orleans had a reputation as the wickedest city in America, notorious for promiscuous race mixing, interracial and illicit sex, and prostitution. It symbolized sexual excess and racial disorder. Yet this same city helped to define the moral and racial order for the twentieth century, since, as is well known, the Plessy v. Ferguson case began in New Orleans. Where Plessy v. Ferguson mandated racial separation, Storyville promoted the most intimate racial mixing: the district openly advertised “colored” and “octoroon” prostitutes. Scarcely a year after the Supreme Court denied Plessy his octoroon status and reclassified him as a “colored,” his native city began showcasing “octoroons” for the enjoyment of sexual pleasure-seekers.

How could Storyville openly promote “octoroon” prostitutes in the face of intensifying racial dualism? How could Storyville brazenly advertise interracial sex in an era of disenfranchisement and lynchings? My dissertation answers these questions through an analysis of Storyville’s transgressive culture within an increasingly rigid Jim Crow regime.

 Table of Contents

• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter One: The Quadroon Connexion
• Chapter Two: The Promised Land of Harlotry
• Chapter Three: Basin Street Blues
• Chapter Four: Diamond Queen
• Chapter Five: The Last Stronghold of the Old Regime
• Conclusion
• Bibliography

Illustrations

• Figure 1: Mug Shot of Storyville Prostitute
• Figure 2: “Raleigh Rye,” by E.J. Bellocq
• Figure 3: Map: Storyville and Environs
• Figure 4: Storyville and the French Quarter
• Figure 5: Architectural Drawing, following page
• Figures 6-11: Architectural Drawings
• Figure 12: “Basin Street: Down the Line”
• Figure 12: “Basin Street: Down the Line”
• Figure 13: “Crib Girl at Home/’ by E.J. Bellocq
• Figure 14: Mug Shot of Storyville Prostitute
• Figure 15: Diagram of Storyville
• Figure 16: Mahogany Hall
• Figure 17: Storyville Diagram (Mahogany Hall)

Introduction

This dissertation is a history of the construction, exploitation, fulfillment, and repression of desire when prostitution was legal in New Orleans in a red-light district called Storyville, from 1897 to 1917. Through a combination of social history and cultural analysis, I show how Storyville became a site for the articulation of race, gender, and sexual relationships at the turn of the twentieth century. Storyville offered its male patrons jazz music, “sporting” culture, and fraternal camaraderie, all organized around the sale of sex for cash.

Nineteenth-century New Orleans had a reputation as the wickedest city in America, notorious for promiscuous race mixing, interracial and illicit sex, and prostitution. It symbolized sexual excess and racial disorder. Yet this same city helped to define the moral and racial order for the twentieth century, since, as is well known, the Plessy v. Ferguson case began in New Orleans. Homer Plessy volunteered to test the constitutionality of segregation as part of an indigenous civil rights movement. He embodied the legacy of colonial Louisiana and the complex, multi-tiered racial system that long characterized the state: he was an “octoroon.” The test-case failed, the Court upheld racial segregation, and Plessy’s name thenceforth came to be associated with Jim Crow, the “one-drop rule,” and a biracial caste system. One year later, the New Orleans City Council created a red-light district under a special ordinance. Its authors desired to restrict prostitution in their city and to create a respectable New Orleans, quite apart from its reputation for sin. In the event, however, “Storyville,” as the red-light district was called (after City Councilman Sidney Story), became the most famous quasi-legalized vice district in the country and made prostitution and interracial sex in New Orleans more visible than ever. Where Plessy v. Ferguson mandated racial separation, Storyville promoted the most intimate racial mixing: the district openly advertised “colored” and “octoroon” prostitutes. Scarcely a year after the Supreme Court denied Plessy his octoroon status and reclassified him as a “colored,” his native city began showcasing “octoroons” for the enjoyment of sexual pleasure-seekers.

How could Storyville openly promote “octoroon” prostitutes in the face of intensifying racial dualism? How could Storyville brazenly advertise interracial sex in an era of disenfranchisement and lynchings? My dissertation analyzes the conjunction of Storyville’s transgressive culture with an increasingly rigid Jim Crow regime. Like much else in New Orleans’ history, Storyville has most often been treated as sui generis in the context of the dominant trends of the nation. In contrast, I show that Storyville can only be properly understood as part of the transitional period of the turn of the century. I argue that Storyville functioned as a deliberate archaism, a place of nostalgia for the antebellum South, by offering the slave planter’s sexual prerogatives to all white men regardless of class. Storyville fashioned the memory of the exclusive and patriarchal social order of the Old South into a New South sexual playground. There was something for everyone in Storyville: white, “French,” or “Jewess”; from street girls to handsome “octoroons” (women who were supposed to be one-eighth black), from “negro” cribs to grand mansions. In a demi-monde devoted to vice and pleasure, white men shed the strictures of middle-class morality and the imperatives of Jim Crow and drank, danced, gambled, and had sex. Only white men enjoyed the privilege of paying for these pleasures. The best bordellos, including those which featured women of color, barred black men. Thus, the district prescribed a sexualized racial hierarchy even as it seemed to defy all social order.

Historians have shown that a racial identity for American “whites” coalesced against the image of a “racial other” during the period of Storyville’s heyday. At the same time, indeed, as part of the same process, American sexual identity was thoroughly racialized through the constant cultural reference to sexual “others.” The evocation of alien and racialized sexualities, and the subsequent (often immediate) repression of them, describes the kind of dialectic of racial and sexual discourse in the years around the turn of the century. Following Michel Foucault, Ann Laura Stoler writes that “desire follows from, and is generated out of, the law, out of the powerladen discourses of sexuality where it is animated and addressed.” In other words, the very language and prohibitions rejecting certain sexual practices hosts the desire for those same practices. In the turn-the-century South, the miscegenation taboo, the disparagement of black female sexuality, the parody, infantalization, and violent repression of black male sexuality, all combined to produce white male sexual desire. Storyville provided an arena in which to act out and satisfy that desire. At the same time, the subordination of black bodies, in a fraternal atmosphere of manly “sport” and transgressive sex, “educated” whiteness for the New South. This dissertation shows how Storyville both subverted and supported the race and sex order of the New South. Finally, I argue that Storyville, like a concentrating lens, displays the often hidden linkages between sexual power and racial oppression in the development of Jim Crow and modern American identity.

Most historical studies of American prostitution focus on particular locales or the national scene and rely on a range of literatures: reform, “white slavery,” medicine, and venereal disease. This literature is enormously rich and evocative. Yet, when it comes to prostitution in the South, the national discourse is inadequate. Prostitution, though perhaps the oldest profession, manifests differently depending on its particular social organization. If, as Carole Pateman argues, prostitution is an expression of patriarchal right, then the specific terms of the patriarchy in question must be addressed in understanding prostitution. In the South, patriarchy was organized not solely around male power, but specifically around white male sexual power. Among the prerogatives of mastery was the implicit right to have sex with slaves. It is impossible to understand prostitution without an understanding of this legacy for white and black Southerners. In this dissertation, I show how Storyville reimagined the patriarchal relationships of the slave plantation and the slave market in a particularly modern way, offering all white men the sexual prerogatives of mastery for a cash fee. By doing this, Storyville exaggerated and burlesqued the emerging New South order. I argue that Storyville, through its highlighting of black women in the fulfillment of white male sexual desire, reveals, in extremis, trends present in dominant society. Thus my local history tells a national story. I show how the construction of desire, its regulation, and fulfillment were central to the formation of modern American culture, from Plessy v. Ferguson to Woodrow Wilson and World War I.

Storyville celebrated interracial sex and prostitution. In the first chapter, “The Quadroon Connexion,” I explore the foundations of Storyville’s transgressive culture in the history of the slave market, the Quadroon Balls, and the “fancy girl” auctions in New Orleans. I begin with a brief history of interracial concubinage, the development of Louisiana’s three-caste society, and then, in the years preceding the Civil War through the 1890s, the repression of free-born people of color and the establishment of Jim Crow. Having established the basic pattern of race relations in New Orleans, I then turn to a different set of reflections, those of nineteenth-century travelers to the city. Most visitors agreed that New Orleans was the center of commerce and cosmopolitanism in the Mississippi Valley, some believed in the whole North American continent. Through their individual impressions, published as early as 1825 and up to the Civil War, these travelers created an image of New Orleans as a world apart, a diorama populated by specific types, engaged in a frenzy of cosmopolitan activity.

These early tourists to New Orleans focused their attentions most acutely on the city’s markets, including its traffic in light-skinned women, known as the “fancy trade,” so known because they represented the “fancies” of wealthy white men in the antebellum south who wanted concubines. Antebellum New Orleans hosted another market for concubines: Quadroon Balls. White men attended these Balls in order to select mistresses from the colored Creole population. The institution of white male-Creole female concubinage, known as placage outgrew the confines of the Quadroon Balls and settled into New Orleans culture. Visitors to the city assumed that all Creole of Color women served as concubines to wealthy white men, while asserting that all white men had their personal concubines. This was the “quadroon connexion,” in the words of Harriet Martineau. These two markets in women intrigued visitors to New Orleans and enraged abolitionists. Thus in this chapter I also look at the abolitionist literature of the “tragic octoroon” and how it anchored New Orleans in people’s minds as the North American capital for interracial sex. Storyville’s promoters exploited these associations flamboyantly. The best bordellos featured “octoroon” prostitutes, modern incarnations of antebellum “fancy” girls.

In the second chapter of the dissertation, ‘The Promised Land of Harlotry,” I trace the historical origins of Storyville in terms of New Orleans prostitution and reform. I argue that the reform administration that enacted the Storyville ordinance sought to modernize their city and to integrate it into the commercial and cultural mainstream of America. Their paramount concern was with appearances. Following the Civil War and Reconstruction, New Orleans was mired in economic depression. The city moreover suffered from a reputation of regional recalcitrance. By the late 1880s this image increasingly got in the way of business. The commercial elite behind the creation of Storyville wanted to free their city of its association with sin. Storyville, I argue, was part of a broader movement at the turn of the century to alter the appearance of New Orleans, to revive and repackage “dioramic” New Orleans for the Northern tourist, businessman, and investor in the city. Promotional pamphlets advertised New Orleans as the winter capital of the United States, an “Eden” in the Southwest; the city boosters emphasized the romantic old city, the French Quarter, emphasizing that New Orleans was at once the land of “Old Romance and New Opportunity.”

The municipal administration situated the red-light district called Storyville on the margins of old and new New Orleans, between the French Quarter and the American section. I argue that this was a strategic compromise, allowing them to disavow interracial and commercial sex, while still profiting from the city’s longstanding reputation for both. But in a fateful irony, the promoters of Storyville, too, recreated “dioramic” New Orleans in their own promotional guidebooks, reviving the discursive image of New Orleans from antebellum times but flamboyantly including “octoroons” as the primary attraction in the commercial sex district, reintegrating their services with the larger phenomenon of New Orleans.

The district reimagined the antebellum slave plantation and its patriarchal privileges for a new generation of American (and Southern) men. In chapter three, “Basin Street Blues,” I show just how “modern” the district was. Drawing on recent scholarship on the rise of popular, mass culture, I counterpose Storyville with its contemporary amusements. Historians have analyzed the varied entertainments at the turn of the twentieth century in terms of how the sites of that entertainment fostered racial solidarity among “whites,” often through the opposing figure of the “black other,” Through exclusion, ridicule, and, in some instances, pretensions to evolutionary science, white organizers of popular culture portrayed blacks as inferior biologically and socially in the scheme of western civilization and American industry.

Purchase the dissertation here.

Founding Families: Power and Authority of Mixed French and Native Lineages In Eighteenth Century Detroit

Yale University
May 2011
365 pages
Publication Number: AAT 3467517
ISBN: 9781124807232

Karen L. Marrero

A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Yale University in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosphy

This dissertation highlights French and Native contributions to Detroit’s development in the eighteenth century as one of the busiest and most politically and economically pivotal locations in the continental interior. The focus of this study are the “métis family networks,” a group of tightly interrelated mixed-blood kinship conglomerates of French and Native individuals. Members of these networks hailed predominantly from the Great Lakes, Montreal and the Laurentian Valley, but their commercial activities took them to Boston, New York, Louisiana, Hudson’s Bay, and in some cases, England, France, and Holland. They capitalized on their role as imperial representatives and emissaries to amass considerable prestige and personal fortune, becoming “coureurs de ville” or “runners of the city.” Their activities in this regard at Detroit made it a bustling thoroughfare, through which resources flowed east and west. By the mid-eighteenth century, they had become so powerful, incoming British traders and imperial officials courted their favor and influence among Native nations. As a topic of study in the history of early North American Native-European relations, Detroit has until recently been ignored. This is due to a historiographical divide between U.S. and Canadian renditions of colonial America which have artificially parsed out geographies according to nineteenth century concepts of nation that did not exist in the eighteenth century.

For this reason, this dissertation begins by examining how renditions of Detroit’s past written in the nineteenth century sacrificed nuanced depictions of French and Native early history to fit Detroit into a prevailing national story, marginalizing the significant contributions of these two groups. This author utilizes Anglo-Canadian, French- Canadian, American, and Native historiographies to reassemble what has been artificially separated since the nineteenth century. The reader is then introduced to themes, concepts, and pivotal seventeenth and eighteenth century imperial policy decisions that were the backdrop for the development of the métis family networks, including the roles of women and mothers in French and Native worlds, imperial attitudes to race and gender, and metaphors of kinship. One chapter is a microhistory of these family networks, tracing their travels, activities, and kinship ties across the continent and, at times, the Atlantic Ocean to show their geographic, political, and economic range. The story also concentrates on the extensive role of women in the transformation of members of the networks into the bourgeois coureurs de ville who would control the fur trade in the pays d’en haut by mid century. These women were married to, born of, or siblings of men who were similarly highly mobile due to their participation in the trade with Native groups. The trade also exposed French women to alternative gendered arrangements and notions of domesticity in Native communities. French women mimicked the manners of Iroquoian and Algonquian women, who moved their homes and families to seasonal hunting and in reaction to agricultural demands. Combined with the rapidly increasing ability of merchants in New France to control policy-making due to the state’s dependency on their business activities, the women of the networks had unprecedented opportunities to participate at every level. The dissertations ends when the winds of change from rebellious American colonists meeting in the first continental congress in the east threatened British hegemony and caused British imperial agents to lean more heavily on Great Lakes Native groups for support. This is also the year the Quebec Act was passed, which constituted, among other things, a concession by the British, fifteen years after the Conquest, to some aspects of the culture of métis populations. It was in 1774 that the troubled marriage of one Native woman and one French man came under the scrutiny of British imperial agents at all levels, from the local commandant at Detroit to Thomas Gage, Commander-in-Chief of British troops in North America and governor of Massachusetts. Such attention to one marriage and one family is rare in the administrative records of imperial powers, but this was no ordinary marriage. Because it involved members of an extremely powerful métis network, resolving the domestic disputes of one married couple held the potential for the resolution of the larger domestic dispute brewing between the British and their colonists.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• ABSTRACT
• DEDICATION
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• CHAPTER 1 – Writing the Chenail Ecarte: Hidden Histories and Half-Told Truths of Detroit
• CHAPTER 2 – Creating the Place Between: Euro and Native Notions of Domesticity in Early Detroit
• CHAPTER 3 – War, Slavery, Baptism and the Launching of the Métis Family Networks at Detroit
• CHAPTER 4 – “Tho’ Not To Run After the Indians”: The Indigeneity of Women of the Métis Family Networks
• CHAPTER 5 – Bastards and Bastions: Domestic Disorder and the Changing Status of the Métis Family Networks
• BIBLIOGRAPHY

Purchase the dissertation here.

“A new American comes ‘home’”: Race, nation, and the immigration of Korean War adoptees, “GI babies,” and brides

Yale University
May 2010
355 pages
Publication Number: AAT 3395980
ISBN: 9781109588873

Susie Woo

A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Yale University
in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Between 1950 and 1965, an estimated 2000 Korean children, 3500 mixed-race “GI babies,” and 7700 military brides entered the United States as the sons, daughters and wives of predominantly white, middle-class families. Together, they signaled the corporeal return of U.S. neocolonial endeavors in South Korea stateside, and embodied the possibilities and limits of Cold War liberalism. Through analysis of U.S. and South Korean government records, archival documents, mainstream and minority press, and interviews with Korean wartime orphanage employees, this dissertation focuses on the living legacies of a “forgotten war.” It traces the roots and routes of Korean and mixed-race adoptee and war bride immigration that were intimately shaped by ordinary Americans at work in South Korea between 1950 and 1965, and the complex political, social, and legal effects that this gendered and raced immigrant group had upon both countries.

This dissertation argues that the U.S. servicemen, missionaries, social workers, and voluntary aid workers, the latter three that flooded South Korea to spearhead the postwar recovery campaign, advocated for the legal and binding formation of mixed Korean/American families and brought empire home. Ironically, by adhering to its government’s cultural policy of integration intended to bolster U.S. expansionist and Cold War efforts, enthusiastic internationalist citizens tethered Americans at home to South Koreans in sentimental, material, and, eventually, familial ways that unraveled the government’s ability to contain its neocolonial objectives “over there.” Thus, by being American, U.S. citizens profoundly affected both sides of the Pacific—they forever changed the lives of thousands of Korean women and children, permanently shaped South Korea’s child welfare system, and unexpectedly forced openings in U.S. national and familial borders subsequently challenging Americans at home to broaden their conceptions of race, kinship, gender, sexuality, and national belonging during the tumultuous Cold War/civil rights era.

Table of Contents

• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• ILLUSTRATIONS
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INTRODUCTION: On Being American
• CHAPTER ONE: Wartime Sentiment: American GI’s and the Militarization of Korean Women and Children
• CHAPTER TWO: Picturing the Korean “Waif: American Campaigns of Rescue
• CHAPTER THREE: Private Matters of Public Concern: U.S. Social and Legal Management of Korean Adoptee Immigrants
• CHAPTER FOUR: A “Pre”-History of Korean War Adoptions: Racial and Institutional Legacies of Neocolonial Care in South Korea
• CHAPTER FIVE: Model Minority or Miscegenation Threat?: The Cultural Domestication of Korean War Immigrants
• CONCLUSION: Mixed Kin: U.S. Neocolonial Legacies at Home and Abroad
• BIBLIOGRAPHY

Purchase the dissertation here.