Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

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  • Machado de Assis: The Brazilian Master and His Novels

    Machado de Assis: The Brazilian Master and His Novels

    University of California Press
    1970
    270 pages
    ISBN: 9780520016088

    Helen Caldwell

    Machado de Assis is among the most original creative minds in Brazils rich, four-century-long literary tradition. Miss Caldwell’s critical and biographical study explores Machado’s purpose, meaning, and artistic method in each of his nine novels, published between 1872 and 1908. She traces the ideas and recurrent themes, and identifies his affinities with other authors.

    In tracing Machado’s experimentation with narrative techniques, Miss Caldwell reveals the increasingly subtle use he made of point of view, sometimes indirect or reflected, sometimes multiple and “nested” like Chinese boxes.

    Miss Caldwell shows the increasing sureness with which he individualized his characters, and how. in advance of his time, he developed action, not by realistic detail, but by the boldest use of allusion and symbol. Each novel is shown to be an artistic venture, and not in any sense a regurgitation from a sick soul as some critics have argued.

    In searching out the unity of his novels. Miss Caldwell explores the other aspects of Machado’s intellectual life—as poet, journalist, playwright, conversationalist, and academician. Of particular interest is her attention to his shift away from the social criticism of his early novels into the labyrinth of individual psychology in the last five—all of which rank among world literature. But this perceptive account never loses sight of the one element present in every piece of Machado’s fiction, in every one of his personages; that is, superlative comedy, in its whole range: wit, irony, satire, parody, burlesque, humor.

    Altogether, Miss Caldwell reveals to us a writer, in essence a poet, who is still the altus prosator of Brazilian letters.

    Read the entire book here or here.

  • Don’t put race in a box

    Don’t put race in a box

    The Eastern Echo
    Ypsilanti, Michigan
    2015-01-11

    C.A. Joseph Peters

    One ought to talk about race like one talks about their mother’s age: very rarely and very discreetly. Given the Census Bureau’s outdated categories, I say it’s time for one of those rare and discreet conversations.

    In January 2013, Haya El Nasser of USA Today reported that “many [Hispanics] feel boxed in by the current race categories . . . 95 percent of those who selected ‘some other race’ are Hispanic.” Last July, Fox News Latino reported that Detroit’s Mexico town not only withstood the brunt of Detroit’s most recent downturns but was spearheading Detroit’s economic recovery. But Detroit’s growing Hispanic community gets whitewashed by the Census.

    By attempting to define race with neat little boxes, the Census Bureau is forcing an increasing number of Americans to check “other,” doing a disservice to Detroit’s growing Hispanic community and to Dearborn’s already sizable Middle Eastern community. In 2010, the Census categorized Dearborn, a city where one third of the residents speak Arabic, as over 89 percent white. But with a term nebulous enough to include everyone from Morocco to Murmansk and from Riyadh to Reykjavik, it should be no great surprise that the Census categorizes Dearborn as whiter than Montana. Race is difficult enough without the government trying to define it too…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Critical Mixed-Race In Transnational Perspective: The US, China, And Hong Kong, 1842-1943

    Critical Mixed-Race In Transnational Perspective: The US, China, And Hong Kong, 1842-1943

    Center for East Asian Studies
    Lathrop East Asia Library, Room 224
    Stanford University
    518 Memorial Way, Stanford, California
    Thursday, 2015-01-15, 16:15-17:30 PST (Local Time)

    Emma Teng, T.T. and Wei Fong Chao Professor of Asian Civilizations
    Massachusetts Institute of Technology

    This paper will examine the intersection of Sinophone Studies and Critical Mixed-Race Studies (CMRS) – two new and critical paradigms of inquiry – as productive forces in reshaping Chinese Studies beyond the old Area Studies model. My work analyzes the evolving discourses on mixed-race as well as the lived experiences of Eurasians in China, Hong Kong, and the US during the era between 1842 and 1943, and thus lies at the intersection of these two emergent and dynamic fields. Through my research on transnational Chinese-Western mixed families I aim to expand the horizons of Critical Mixed-Race Studies, which has been dominated by the study of black-white interracialism. I ask how a transpacific comparative approach might shift the theoretical frameworks for critical race and ethnic studies by challenging the presumed universality of US-centric models. At the same time, I aim to expand the horizons of “Chinese” studies, asking how mixed-race or transracial hybrid identities contest racially bounded, Han Chinese-centric definitions of Chineseness.

    For more information and to RSVP, click here.

  • California Attorney General Announces Run for Senate

    California Attorney General Announces Run for Senate

    The New York Times
    2015-01-13

    Adam Nagourney, Los Angeles Bureau Chief

    Kamala Harris Makes Bid for Barbara Boxer’s Old Seat

    LOS ANGELES — No exploratory committees here: Kamala D. Harris, the California attorney general, announced on Tuesday she was running for the Senate seat that is opening up with Barbara Boxer’s retirement at the end of the year.

    Ms. Harris’ announcement, posted on a new campaign website, came a day after the California lieutenant governor, Gavin Newsom, who was widely viewed here as the other major contender for the seat, announced that he was not going to run. Friends say that Mr. Newsom is more interested in running for governor when Jerry Brown retires in four years.

    Democrats here have long suggested that Ms. Harris and Mr. Newsom would avoid running against each other, because they are both such strong candidates, with their own fund-raising bases and they both come from Northern California.

    Ms. Harris, who is 50, is the daughter of a Jamaican-American father and an Indian-American mother.

    She was re-elected to a second term as attorney general last year…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Caught In-between

    Caught In-between

    Mixed Humans ~ Reflections on occupying a space of inbetweenness. Persistently grappling with identity.
    2015-01-13

    Brian Kamanzi
    Cape Town, South Africa

    Caught In-between.

    So for the longest time. I had grown up thinking of myself as an “almost” Indian. A half-Indian. Half caste. Whatever the hell sort of awful approximation of an authentic identity I desired. Loathed. Loved. And pursued.

    I had dealt with a lot of people who felt at complete ease telling me what it “is” that I am.

    My Dad is black you see. And many attempts I’ve made to connect with my mother’s heritage sending me packing. As if somehow invoking the dominance of the influence of “the father” is going to resolve the annoyance of having to decide which “box” I’m allowed to be in. It was always a tricky thing to even communicate to my own mother, who was not a cultural woman herself and could not understand what I was looking for. She could not understand why their rejection of me mattered to me – and I couldn’t understand why it was I was being denied my authenticity…

    Read the entire article here.

  • “The Christened Mulatresses”: Euro-African Families in a Slave-Trading Town

    “The Christened Mulatresses”: Euro-African Families in a Slave-Trading Town

    The William and Mary Quarterly
    Volume 70, Number 2, April 2013
    pages 371-398
    DOI: 10.5309/willmaryquar.70.2.0371

    Pernille Ipsen, Assistant Professor
    Department of Gender and Women’s Studies, Department of History
    University of Wisconsin, Madison

    “MULATRESSE Lene”—or Lene Kühberg, as she is also called in the Danish sources—grew up and lived in a social world created by the Atlantic slave trade. Her name suggests that she was a daughter of slave traders—a Ga woman and a Danish man—and in the 1760s she was cassaret (married) to Danish interim governor and slave trader Frantz Joachim Kühberg. She lived in a European-style stone house in Osu (today a neighborhood in Accra) on the Gold Coast, and she was both racially and culturally Euro-African. The color of her skin and her name alone would have made it clear to everyone who met her that she was related to Europeans, but her clothes would also have marked her difference, and she may even have worn little bells and ornamental keys to show her heritage and connections. European travel writers described how Euro-African women on the Gold Coast who wore such little bells jingled so much that they could be heard at a great distance. Through their Euro-African heritage and marriages to European men, Euro-African women such as Lene Kühberg occupied a particular and important position as intermediaries in the West African slave trade.

  • CMRS Mixed-Race Irish Film Keynote Links

    CMRS Mixed-Race Irish Film Keynote Links

    Mixed Roots Stories
    2015-01-11

    Zélie Asava, Lecturer and Joint-Programme Director of Video and Film
    Dundalk Institute of Technology, Louth, Ireland

    Following my keynote on mixed representations in contemporary Irish cinema and television at the 2014 Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference, here are some links to the films discussed…

    View all of the keynote links here.

  • Daughters of the Trade: Atlantic Slavers and Interracial Marriage on the Gold Coast

    Daughters of the Trade: Atlantic Slavers and Interracial Marriage on the Gold Coast

    University of Pennsylvania Press
    January 2015
    288 pages
    6 x 9 | 17 illus.
    Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8122-4673-5
    Ebook ISBN: ISBN 978-0-8122-9058-5

    Pernille Ipsen, Assistant Professor
    Department of Gender and Women’s Studies, Department of History
    University of Wisconsin, Madison

    Examining five generations of marriages between African women and European men in a Gold Coast slave trading port, Daughters of the Trade uncovers the vital role interracial relationships played in the production of racial discourse and the increasing stratification of the early modern Atlantic world.

    Severine Brock’s first language was Ga, yet it was not surprising when, in 1842, she married Edward Carstensen. He was the last governor of Christiansborg, the fort that, in the eighteenth century, had been the center of Danish slave trading in West Africa. She was the descendant of Ga-speaking women who had married Danish merchants and traders. Their marriage would have been familiar to Gold Coast traders going back nearly 150 years. In Daughters of the Trade, Pernille Ipsen follows five generations of marriages between African women and Danish men, revealing how interracial marriage created a Euro-African hybrid culture specifically adapted to the Atlantic slave trade.

    Although interracial marriage was prohibited in European colonies throughout the Atlantic world, in Gold Coast slave-trading towns it became a recognized and respected custom. Cassare, or “keeping house,” gave European men the support of African women and their kin, which was essential for their survival and success, while African families made alliances with European traders and secured the legitimacy of their offspring by making the unions official.

    For many years, Euro-African families lived in close proximity to the violence of the slave trade. Sheltered by their Danish names and connections, they grew wealthy and influential. But their powerful position on the Gold Coast did not extend to the broader Atlantic world, where the link between blackness and slavery grew stronger, and where Euro-African descent did not guarantee privilege. By the time Severine Brock married Edward Carstensen, their world had changed. Daughters of the Trade uncovers the vital role interracial marriage played in the coastal slave trade, the production of racial difference, and the increasing stratification of the early modern Atlantic world.

    Table of Contents

    • Maps
    • Introduction. Severine’s Ancestors
    • Chapter 1. Setting Up
    • Chapter 2. A Hybrid Position
    • Chapter 3. “What in Guinea You Promised Me”
    • Chapter 4. “Danish Christian Mulatresses”
    • Chapter 5. Familiar Circles
    • Epilogue. Edward Carstensen’s Parenthesis
    • Notes
    • Note on Sources
    • Bibliography
    • Index
    • Acknowledgments

  • Reflections on Black German History

    Reflections on Black German History

    Arriving In The Future: Black German Stories of Home and Exile
    2015-01-10

    Asoka Esuruoso & Philipp Khabo Koepsell

    “Unsere Geschichte nicht erst nach 1945 begann. Vor unseren Augen stand unsere Vergangenhait, die eng verknupft ist mit der kolonialien und nationalsozialistischen deutschen Geschichte.” Our history did not begin after 1945. Before our eyes stands our past, closely bound with colonial and national socialist German history.

    –Farbe bekennen: Afro-deutsche Fraunen auf den Spuren ihrer Geschichte (Showing Our Colors: Afro German Women Speak Out)

    For centuries people of African descent have been born and raised in Germany. The Black experience in Germany has been documented for over 300 years with the first known research on the African experience in Germany presented in Latin by the West African scholar Anton Wilhelm Amo, in his dissertation “The Rights of Moors in Europe” (De jure Mauro in Europa) written in 1729. He was a Ghanaian brought to Germany in 1703 ‘as a present’ form the Dutch West India Company to count Anton Ulrich von Wolfenbuttel. The count despite all expectations would eventually send Amo to the University of Halle to receive and education in Enlightenment philosophy where Amo would later teach before being appointed a member of the State Council of the Prussian crown by Fredrick William I. Amo was not alone. There are records of Black African legions being brought to Germany by Julius Caesar. Many Africans were shipped to Germany as “tokens” by German merchants during the Middle Ages. More would arrive during Germany’s colonial period, many of their own independent agency as the son’s of wealthy and powerful African families. French African solders would be stationed on German soil after the First World War only to be followed by the African American solders who would be stationed there after the Second. Students from the African Diaspora would study at German Universities. Countless refugees, asylum seekers, immigrants, professors, academics, scientists, artists, writers, workers, performers, and more, much more from the African Diaspora would come to live, work, study, and be born upon Germany’s soil. Yet despite their presence Afro German stories are still unnoticed within Germany’s dominant society and literature and stereotypical clichés continue to dominate images of the Black Diaspora within greater German society…

    Read the entire article here.

  • Carl N. Degler, Scholarly Champion of the Oppressed in America, Dies at 93

    Carl N. Degler, Scholarly Champion of the Oppressed in America, Dies at 93

    The New York Times
    2015-01-10

    Sam Roberts, Urban Affairs Correspondent

    For four decades, as a Stanford University scholar, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and a commentator who envisioned a future that did not repeat the mistakes of the past, Carl N. Degler endeavored to remedy American myopia.

    “Virtually from the beginning,” Professor Degler once lamented, “Americans have seen themselves outside history, as a people constituting a nation of the future.”

    Delving into overlooked corners of history, he illuminated the role of women, the poor and ethnic minorities in the nation’s evolution and was embraced as a feminist and defender of affirmative action. He explored the 19th century American South; compared race relations in the United States and Brazil; and traced a revival of biological Darwinism in debates over human behavior.

    He died on Dec. 27 at 93 in Palo Alto, Calif., his wife, Therese, confirmed.

    As an emeritus professor of American history at Stanford, Professor Degler encouraged his students to pursue less traveled intellectual paths, as he had with his book “Neither Black Nor White,” which was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for history in 1972. In it he compared the origins and legacy of slavery in the United States and Brazil…

    Read the entire obituary here.