Mixed Race Studies

Sex and Race in the Black Atlantic: Mulatto Devils and Multiracial Messiahs

Routledge: Routledge Studies on African and Black Diaspora
2009-12-15
204 pages
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-415-87226-3
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-415-89391-6
eBook ISBN: 978-0-203-85736-6

Daniel R. McNeil, Associate Professor of History
Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

This is the first book to place the self-fashioning of mixed-race individuals in the context of a Black Atlantic. Drawing on a wide range of sources and a diverse cast of characters – from the diaries, letters, novels and plays of femme fatales in Congo and the United States to the advertisements, dissertations, oral histories and political speeches of Black Power activists in Canada and the United Kingdom – it gives particular attention to the construction of mixed-race femininity and masculinity during the twentieth century. Its broad scope and historical approach provides readers with a timely rejoinder to academics, artists, journalists and politicians who only use the mixed-race label to depict prophets or delinquents as “new” national icons for the twenty-first century.

Table of Contents

1. New People?
2. An Individualistic Age?
3. “Je suis métisse”
4. “I. Am. A Light Grey Canadian.”
5. “I’m Black. Not Mixed. Not Canadian. Not African. Just Black”
6. “Yes, We’re All Individuals!” “I’m Not.”
7. Conclusion

Race, Ethnicity and Football: Persisting Debates and Emergent Issues

Routledge
2011-03-29
288 pages
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-415-88205-7

Edited by:

Daniel Burdsey, Senior Lecturer of Sociology
Chelsea School of Sport
University of Brighton

As the first edited collection dedicated specifically to race, ethnicity and British football, this book brings together a range of academics, comprising both established commentators and up-and-coming voices. Combining theoretical and empirical contributions, the volume will addresses a wide variety of topics such as the experiences of Muslims, the recruitment of African players, devolution and national identities, case studies of minority ethnic clubs, “mixed-race” players, multiculturalism and anti-racism, sectarianism, education, and foreign club ownership. Covering the both amateur and professional spheres, and focusing on both players and supporters, the book elucidates the linkages between race, ethnicity, gender and masculinity.

Contents

• Introduction
  • 1. They Think It’s All Over…It Isn’t Yet! The Persistence of Structural Racism and Racialised Exclusion in Twenty-First Century Football Daniel Burdsey
• Racialised Exclusions and ‘Glocal’ Im/mobilities
  • 2. ‘Dark Town’ and ‘A Game for Britishers’: Some Notes on History, Football and ‘Race’ in Liverpool John Williams
  • 3. Is Football the New African Slave Trade? Colin King
  • 4. Football, Racism and the Irish David Hassan and Ken McCue
• Contested Fields and Cultural Resistance
  • 5. Racisms, Resistance and New Youth Inclusions: The Socio-Historical Development and Shifting Focus of Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic Football Clubs in Leicester Steven Bradbury
  • 6. What is Rangers Resisting Now? ‘Race’, Resistance and Shifting notions of Blackness in Local Football in Leicester Paul Campbell
  • 7. British Muslim Female Experiences in Football: Islam, Identity and the Hijab Aisha Ahmad
• ‘New’ Ethnicities and Emergent Communities
  • 8. Flying the Flag for England? National Identities and British Asian Female Footballers Aarti Ratna
  • 9. Mixing Up the Game: Social and Historical Contours of Black Mixed Heritage Players in British Football Mark Christian
  • 10. ‘Tough Talk’, Muscular Islam and Football: Young British Pakistani Muslim Masculinities Samaya Farooq
• The Cultural Politics of Fandom
  • 11. The Limits to Cosmopolitanism: English Football Fans at Euro 2008 Peter Millward
  • 12. ‘Wot, No Asians?’: West Ham United Fandom, the Cockney Diaspora and the ‘New’ East Enders Jack Fawbert
  • 13. ‘They Sing That Song’: Sectarianism and Conduct in the Informalised Spaces of Scottish Football John Flint and Ryan Powell
• Equity, Anti-Racism and the Politics of Campaigning
  • 14. Negative Equity? Amateurist Responses to Race Equality Initiatives in English Grass-Roots Football Jim Lusted
  • 15. Football, Racism and the Limits of ‘Colour Blind’ Law: Revisited Simon Gardiner and Roger Welch
  • 16. Marrying Passion with Professionalism: Examining the Future of British Asian Football Kuljit Randhawa

International Perspectives on Racial and Ethnic Mixedness and Mixing

Routledge
2012-05-25
224 pages
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-415-59804-0

Edited by

Suki Ali, Senior Lecturer of Sociology
London School of Economics and Political Science

Chamion Cabellero, Senior Research Fellow
Social Capital Research Group
London South Bank University

Rosalind Edwards, Professor of Sociology
University of Southampton

Miri Song, Professor of Sociology
University of Kent

People from a ‘mixed’ racial and ethnic background, and people partnering and parenting across different racial and ethnic backgrounds, are increasingly visible internationally and often construed in diametrically opposed ways. On the one hand, images of racial and ethnic diversity are posed in opposition to unity and solidarity, creating a crisis of cohesive social trust. On the other hand, there are assertions that the portrayals of segregation and conflict ignore the reality of ongoing interactions between a mix of minority and majority racial, ethnic and religious cultures, where multiculture is an ordinary, unremarkable, feature of everyday social life.

This interdisciplinary volume brings internationally well-respected researchers together to explore the different contexts and concepts underpinning discussions about mixedness and mixing. Moving beyond pathologically focused research about confused identities and a dualistic black-white conception of mixedness, the book includes chapters on:

• Multiraciality and race classification
• Mixed race couples
• Mixedness in everyday life
• Mixed race politics

International Perspectives on Racial and Ethnic Mixedness and Mixing develops theoretical perspectives and presents intellectually shaped empirical evidence that can deal with complexity and normalcy in order to move the debate onto more fruitful grounds. It is an important book for students and scholars of race and ethnicity.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction / Suki Ali, Chamion Caballero, Rosalind Edwards and Miri Song
2. Multiraciality and census classification in global perspective / Ann Morning
3. Mixed race across time and place: an international perspective / Ilan Katz
4. Scaling diversity: mixed-race couples, segregation and urban America / Steven Holloway
5. The geography of mixedness in England and Wales / Charlie Owen
6. From ‘Draughtboard Alley’ to ‘Brown Britain’: the ordinariness of mixedness in British life / Chamion Caballero
7. How mixedness is understood and experienced in everyday life / Peter Aspinall and Miri Song
8. Finding value on a council estate in Nottingham: voices of white working class women / Lisa McKenzie
9. How to find mixed people in quantitative datasets / Anne Unterreiner
10. When ethnicity became an important family issue in Slovenia / Mateja Sedmak
11. Same difference? Developing a critical methodological stance in critical mixed race studies / Minelle Mahtani
12. Mixed race politics / Suki Ali

Standing on Both Feet: Voices of Older Mixed-Race Americans

Paradigm Publishers
December 2011
208 pages
6×9
ISBN: 978-1-59451-982-6

Cathy J. Tashiro, PhD, RN, Associate Professor of Nursing
University of Washington, Tacoma

In the first book to focus on the experiences of older American of mixed race identity, Cathy Tashiro explores questions of identity and the significance of family experiences, aging and the life course, class, gender, and nationality. Including African American/White and Asian American/White individuals, the book highlights the poignant voices of people who were among the first generations to transgress the color line. Their very existence violated the deep cultural beliefs in the distinctiveness of the races at the time. Based on extensive interviews, the book offers a unique perspective on the social construction of race and racism in America.

Segregated Miscegenation: On the Treatment of Racial Hybridity in the North American and Latin American Literary Traditions

Routledge
2003-02-28
Pages: 144
Trim Size: 6 x 9
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-415-94349-9

Carlos Hiraldo, Professor of English
LaGuardia Community College, City University of New York

Through the comparative study of literatures from the United States and Latin America, Segregated Miscegenation questions received notions of race and nation. Carlos Hiraldo examines the current understanding of race in the United States alongside alternative models of racial self-definition in Latin America. His provocative analysis traces the conceptualization of blackness in fiction and theories of the novel, and troubles the racial and ethnic categories particular to each region’s literary tradition.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Coloring Latinos, Coloring the United States
  • The Novel as Popular Culture
  • Race in Latin America
  • Latinos as a U.S. Race
  • The Novel in the Dissemination and Reconfiguration of Notions about Race
• Chapter One: Novel Concepts: The Role of the Novel in Developing Ideas of Nation and Race in the Americas
  • Mikhail Bakhtin, Georg Lukacs, and the “New World” of the Novel
  • Benedict Anderson and the Novel as a Tool of National Imagination
  • Fredric Jameson and the Many Worlds in the Americas
  • Novels and the Fictionalization of Racial Attitudes
• Chapter Two: Enslaved Characters: Nineteenth-Century Abolitionist Novels and the Absence of Bi-racial Consciousness
  • Differences between Bi-racial and Mulatto Characters
  • The Myth of Racial Purity versus the Dreams of a Miscegenated Paradise
  • The Limitations of Nineteenth-Century Racial Representations
  • Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Bi-racial Characters in Nineteenth-Century U.S. and Latin American Literatures
  • Sab as a Nineteenth-Century Cuban Romantic Tale about Race
  • The Complicit Ignorance of Cecilia Valdes
  • A Thin Line between Black and White in Martin Morua Delgado’s Sofia and Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson
  • Race without Romance in Antonio Zambrana’s El negro Francisco
• Chapter Three: Mulatto Fictions: Representations of Identity-Consciousness in U.S. and Latin American Bi-racial Characters
  • Mulatto Characters as Racial and Cultural Nexus
  • Passing the Tragic Mulatta in Twentieth-Century U.S. Literature
  • Gabriela and the Sexualized Mulatia in Twentieth-Century Latin American Literature
  • Pobre negro, The Violent Land, and the Limits of Mulatto Characters in Twentieth-Century Latin American Literature
  • Joe Christmas and the Unmerry Existence of Mulatto Characters in Twentieth-Century U.S. Literature
  • Go Down, Moses and the Mumbled Recognition of Racial Confluence in the United States
  • The Bluest Eye and the Persistence of Anti-mulatto Fiction in the United States
• Chapter Four: Identity Against the Grain: Latino Authors of African European
  • Heritage and Their Encounters with the Racial Ideology of the United States
  • Latino Authors and the “One Drop” Rule
  • Piri Thomas, Julia Alvarez, and the Limitations of Choosing Sides in the U.S. Racial Divide
  • Esmeralda Santiago and Negi’s Persistent Puertoricanness in the Face of the “One Drop” Rule
• Chapter Five: Choosing Your Own Face: Future Trends of Racial
  • Discourses in the United States
  • Latino Influence in Other Cultural Products
  • The Latin American Racial Paradigm behind the “Wigga”
  • The Rock, Tiger Woods, and a Universal Race
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

Representing Mixed Race in Jamaica and England from the Abolition Era to the Present

Routledge: Routledge Research in Postcolonial Literatures
2010-10-21
204 pages
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-415-39808-4

Sarah Salih, Professor of English
University of Toronto

This study considers cultural representations of “brown” people in Jamaica and England alongside the determinations of race by statute from the Abolition era onwards. Through close readings of contemporary fictions and “histories,” Salih probes the extent to which colonial ideologies may have been underpinned by what might be called subject-constituting statutes, along with the potential for force and violence which necessarily undergird the law. The author explores the role legal and non-legal discourse plays in disciplining the brown body in pre- and post-Abolition colonial contexts, as well as how are other bodies and identities – e.g. black, white are discursively disciplined. Salih examines whether or not it’s possible to say that non-legal texts such as prose fictions are engaged in this kind of discursive disciplining, and more broadly, looks at what contemporary formulations of “mixed” identity owe to these legal or non-legal discursive formations. This study demonstrates the striking connections between historical and contemporary discourses of race and brownness and argues for a shift in the ways we think about, represent and discuss “mixed race” people.

Table of Contents

• 1: Introduction: The Mulatto in Law and Literature
• 2: Pre-Emancipation Stories of Race: Marly and The Woman of Colour
• 3: Legitimacy, Illegitimacy and Citizenship in the Nineteenth Century: Dinah Craik’s Olive [1850] and Richard Hill’s Lights and Shadows
• 4: Mulattos in the Contact Zone: Mary Seacole and Ozias Midwinter Coda: Modern Mulattos: Mona Lisa and The Crying Game
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

A Theory of Race

Routledge
2008-12-04
182 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-415-99073-8

Joshua Glasgow, Lecturer of Philosophy
Somona State University, California

Social commentators have long asked whether racial categories should be conserved or eliminated from our practices, discourse, institutions, and perhaps even private thoughts. In A Theory of Race, Joshua Glasgow argues that this set of choices unnecessarily presents us with too few options.

Using both traditional philosophical tools and recent psychological research to investigate folk understandings of race, Glasgow argues that, as ordinarily conceived, race is an illusion. However, our pressing need to speak to and make sense of social life requires that we employ something like racial discourse. These competing pressures, Glasgow maintains, ultimately require us to stop conceptualizing race as something biological, and instead understand it as an entirely social phenomenon.

Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race, 2nd Edition

Routledge
1994-12-14
248 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-415-31183-0

Robert J. C. Young, Silver Professor of English and Comparative Literature
New York University

As one of the most important books in post-colonial studies, this book argues that contemporary theories on post-colonialism and ethnicity are disturbingly close to the colonial discourse of the nineteenth century.

Rather than marking ourselves off from patterns of thought which characterized Victorian racial theory, we show remarkable complicity with historical ways of viewing ‘the other’, both sexually and racially. ‘Englishness’, Young suggests, has been less fixed and stable than uncertain, fissured with difference and a desire for otherness.

In this updated new edition, the author revisits the ideas set out in the book in light of recent developments in post-colonial theory, including projects influenced by his own work. With this fresh intervention, Robert Young is set once again to re-energize his field and open new channels of debate.

Interracial Families: Current Concepts and Controversies

Routledge
2008-11-26
176 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-415-99034-9

George Alan Yancey, Associate Professor of Sociology
University of North Texas

Richard Lewis, Jr., Special Assistant to the President and Associate Professor of Sociology
University of Texas, San Antonio

A unique book offering both a research overview and practical advice for its readers, this text allows students to gain a solid understanding of the research that has been generated on several important issues surrounding multiracial families, including intimate relations, family dynamics, transracial adoptions, and other topics of personal and scholarly interest.

Table of Contents

• List of Figures and Tables
• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Chapter 2: Overview of Intergroup Relations and Their Impact on Interethnic and Interracial Marriages
• Chapter 3: Interracial Dating
• Chapter 4: Interracial Marriage
• Chapter 5: Multiracial Identity
• Chapter 6: The Multiracial Movement and the U.S. Census Controversy
• Chapter 7: Transracial Adoption
• Chapter 8: Multiracial Families: Conclusions and Looking Ahead
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

Black Beauty: Aesthetics, Stylization, Politics

Ashgate
March 2009
188 pages
234 x 156 mm
188 pages
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-7546-7145-9
eBook ISBN: ISBN 978-0-7546-9140-2

Shirley Anne Tate, Professor of Sociology
Leeds Beckett University, Leeds, United Kingdom

Previous work discussing Black beauty has tended to concentrate on Black women’s search for white beauty as a consequence of racialization. Without denying either the continuation of such aesthetics or their enduring power, this book uncovers the cracks in this hegemonic Black beauty.

Drawing on detailed ethnographic research amongst British women of Caribbean heritage, this volume pursues a broad discussion of beauty within the Black diaspora contexts of the Caribbean, the UK, the United States and Latin America through different historical periods to the present day. With a unique exploration of beauty, race and identity politics, the author reveals how Black women themselves speak about, negotiate, inhabit, work on and perform Black beauty. As such, it will appeal not only to sociologists, but anyone working in the fields of race, ethnicity and post-colonial thought, feminism and the sociology of the body.

Table of Contents

Introduction
‘Beauty comes from within’: or does it?
Anti-racist aesthetics in the 21st century: the matter of hair
‘Race’, beauty and melancholia: shade
The shame of beauty is its transformative potential
The ‘browning’, straighteners, and fake tan
Hybrid black beauty?
Conclusion: is it all stylization and is there a need for black beauty citizenship?
Appendix
Bibliography
Index

Read the introduction here.

What is beauty?
Writing a book on Black beauty has made me face many challenges. One of these has been unease about knowing just where to start when looking at beauty itself. Should I start with Rastafarianism as a Jamaican or should I start with Ivan Van Sertima’s (1989) Black Women in Antiquity or should I start with the words of Black British women who participated in my research? As you would expect, I suppose, knowing that I am an ethnographer, women’s words are my first port of call. When I asked Ray, a twenty-three-year-old Black ‘mixed race’ British student what Black beauty meant to her she replied:

Black beauty to me is – it’s a tricky question. But I think a really beautiful Black woman or a ‘mixed race’ woman out of them all is the one that has the potential to be stunning. My ideas of Black and beautiful I would say that they originate from my mother’s side of the family also the media probably influenced it. Being at home in Jamaica, what I call home in Jamaica and also even here which has a high Black population and even just within myself as well. Accepting myself as being beautiful I believe was a big step in knowing more about and having ideas on what Black and beautiful are especially from childhood experiences as an example because I grew up in a predominantly white neighbourhood. When I was eleven or twelve I met my best friend and I started to chill with her etc. and go over to Hud and I discovered that my hair, my nose, my lips, my skin colour, everything was actually beautiful and normal if anything above normal standards, normal or better than the norms that I was used to. That is, white straight hair, thin lips you know all that kind of thing, even the colour of the eyes, blue eyes.

With these words Ray orients us to the difficulty of defining once and for all what Black beauty is or could be claimed to be. Instead she points out its complexities when she first says that beauty is about having the potential to be stunning as she makes it clear that beauty is about an appeal to the senses and a judgement is made based on that appeal. For her such judgements have a context in her home in Jamaica, her mother’s family, Black community acknowledgement and acceptance of your beauty, your own acceptance of yourself as beautiful and a continuing uneasy interconnectedness with ideals of white beauty. Black beauty then is lodged in diasporic sociality, sensibilities and processes of transculturation. It is also about racialized aesthetics, the link between the psyche and the social mediated by the surface of the skin and a process of self discovery throughout one’s life…