Mixed Race Studies

Frederick Douglass, A Life in American History

Bloomsbury
2025-02-06
320 pages
235 x 156 mm
Hardback ISBN: 9798216170464
Ebook (PDF) ISBN: 9798216170471
Ebook (ePub & Mobi) ISBN: 9798216170488

Mark Christian, Professor, Urban Education, Africana Studies
Lehman College, City University of New York

Meet one of the most influential men in the United States’ history of emancipation and Black rights.

Chronicling Frederick Douglass’s life in an accessible way, this biography engages with history and wrestles with biases, falsehoods, and unknown facts in order to tell Douglass’s story as accurately as possible. Taking a comprehensive look at Douglass’s life from birth to death, the book delves into Douglass’s time as an enslaved African American, his escape, his experiences as a prominent orator and champion of Black rights, his writings and publications, and the influence he had on shaping society of the time. A detailed timeline allows students to quickly reference and recall major points in Douglass’s history, and the book is further augmented by the inclusion of primary documents, which include samples of Douglass’s own copious works, as well as words written about Douglass by his contemporaries. Readers will walk away with not only a better understanding of American history but an appreciation for Frederick Douglass’s impact in his own time and his lasting relevance for all those who continue to fight for a more equal society today.

Table of Contents

• Series Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Historical Context
• 2. Born in Bondage with Dreams of Liberty
• 3. Finding Freedom and the Abolitionist Cause
• 4. No More Master and Mastering Self-Determination Abroad
• 5. A Man of Independence in Public and Private Life
• 6. The Erudite Douglass in Letters, Speech, and Prose
• 7. Why Frederick Douglass Matters
• Timeline
• Primary Documents
• Bibliography
• Index

Biofictions: Race, Genetics and the Contemporary Novel

Bloomsbury
2020-02-20
224 pages
Hardback ISBN: 9781350099838
EPUB eBook ISBN: 9781350099852
PDF eBook ISBN: 9781350099845

Josie Gill, Lecturer in Black British Writing
University of Bristol, United Kingdom

In this important interdisciplinary study, Josie Gill explores how the contemporary novel has drawn upon, and intervened in, debates about race in late 20th and 21st century genetic science. Reading works by leading contemporary writers including Zadie Smith, Kazuo Ishiguro, Octavia Butler and Colson Whitehead, Biofictions demonstrates how ideas of race are produced at the intersection of science and fiction, which together create the stories about identity, racism, ancestry and kinship which characterize our understanding of race today. By highlighting the role of narrative in the formation of racial ideas in science, this book calls into question the apparent anti-racism of contemporary genetics, which functions narratively, rather than factually or objectively, within the racialized contexts in which it is embedded. In so doing, Biofictions compels us to rethink the long-asked question of whether race is a biological fact or a fiction, calling instead for a new understanding of the relationship between race, science and fiction.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• 1. The Roots of African Eve: Science Writing on Human Origins and Alex Haley’s Roots
• 2. Race, Genetic Ancestry Tracing and Facial Expression: “Focusing on the Faces” in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go
• 3. “One Part Truth and Three Parts Fiction”: Race, Science and Narrative in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth
• 4. “The Sick Swollen Heart of This Land”: Pharmacogenomics, Racial Medicine and Colson Whitehead’s Apex Hides the Hurt
• 5. Mutilation and Mutation: Epigenetics and Racist Environments in Octavia Butler’s Kindred and Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index

The Life and Times of a Very British Man

Bloomsbury
2019-05-02
352 pages
Integrated B&W photographs
198 x 129 mm
Paperback ISBN: 9781408889244

Kamal Ahmed, Editorial Director
BBC News, London

Kamal Ahmed’s childhood was very ‘British’ in every way – except for the fact that he was brown. Half English, half Sudanese, he was raised at a time when being mixed-race meant being told to go home, even when you were born just down the road.

Latin Blackness in Parisian Visual Culture, 1852-1932

Bloomsbury
2019-02-21
232 pages
9 colour and 37 bw illus
229 x 152 mm
Hardback 9781501332357

Lyneise E. Williams, Associate Professor of Art History
University of North Carolina

Latin Blackness in Parisian Visual Culture, 1852-1932 examines an understudied visual language used to portray Latin Americans in mid-19th to early 20th-century Parisian popular visual media. The term ‘Latinize’ is introduced to connect France’s early 19th-century endeavors to create “Latin America,” an expansion of the French empire into the Latin-language based Spanish and Portuguese Americas, to its perception of this population.

Latin-American elites traveler to Paris in the 1840s from their newly independent nations were denigrated in representations rather than depicted as equals in a developing global economy. Darkened skin, etched onto images of Latin Americans of European descent mitigated their ability to claim the privileges of their ancestral heritage. Whitened skin, among other codes, imposed on turn-of-the-20th-century Black Latin Americans in Paris tempered their Blackness and rendered them relatively assimilatable compared to colonial Africans, Blacks from the Caribbean, and African Americans.

After identifying mid-to-late 19th-century Latinizing codes, the study focuses on shifts in latinizing visuality between 1890-1933 in three case studies: the depictions of popular Cuban circus entertainer Chocolat; representations of Panamanian World Bantamweight Champion boxer Alfonso Teofilo Brown; and paintings of Black Uruguayans executed by Pedro Figari, a Uruguayan artist, during his residence in Paris between 1925-1933.

Table of contents

• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
  • The Term “Latin American”
  • Why Paris?
  • Much More Than Primitivism
  • Reduced to Latin Americans
  • Parisian Figurations of Blackness from the Mid-Nineteenth to the Early Twentieth Century
  • Overview of the Study
• Chapter 1: Playing Up Blackness and Indianness; Downplaying Europeanness
  • Editing Francisco Laso: Racializing Spanish and Portuguese Americans
  • Performing Rastaquerismo
  • Justified by Anthropology: Quatrefages, Hamy, and the Casta Paintings
  • Latin American Self-Representation
  • The Shifting Rastaquouère
  • Maintaining Anthropological Interpretations in the Early Twentieth Century
  • Conclusion
• Chapter 2: Chocolat the Clown: Not Just Black
  • Chocolat and Footit: Partners in Contrast
  • The Auguste Chocolat
  • The Give and Take of Chocolat and Footit
  • Chocolat and Footit at the Nouveau Cirque
  • Chocolat as Brand Image
  • Beneath the Surface
  • Chocolat as Mixed Animal
  • Chocolat the Contaminant
  • Impure Chocolat(e)
  • Chocolat, That Special Ingredient: The Racially Mixed Object of Desire
  • Complicating Notions of Minstrelsy
  • Lip Interventions
  • Representations Through Clothing
  • Sexualizing Black Dandies
  • Assimilating the Latin
  • Beyond the Circus
  • Chocolat, Object of Gay Desire
  • Chocolat and the Elite and the Virile
  • Conclusion
• Chapter 3: Alfonso Teofilo Brown: Agency and Impositions of Blackness and Europeanness
  • Sport and the Imagined Ideal Male Body
  • Black Boxers in Turn-of-the-Century France
  • Gangly Brown
  • The Purity and Hybridity of Gangly Brown
  • Brown the Gentleman
  • Images of Black Difference
  • Brown the Philanthropist
  • Conclusion
• Chapter 4: Figari’s Blacks: Negotiating French and Southern Cone Blackness
  • Figari and Paris
  • Contested Whiteness and the Black Body
  • Conceptualizing Regional Identity
  • Through the Anthropological Gaze
  • Candombe as Framing Device
  • Gender and Race in Candombe
  • Objects as Markers
  • Figari as “Naïf” Painter
  • Increasing Latin American Presence in Paris
  • Perceptions of Black Uruguayans
  • Figari’s Evolution in Paris
  • Contradictions and Contrasts between Figari’s Paintings and Written Work
  • Conclusion
• Coda
• Select Bibliography

Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls, A Memoir

Bloomsbury
2019-03-05
336 pages
16 B&W illustrations throughout
5 1/2″ x 8 1/4″
Hardback ISBN: 9781635571851
EPUB eBook ISBN: 9781635571868

T Kira Madden

Acclaimed literary essayist T Kira Madden’s raw and redemptive debut memoir is about coming of age and reckoning with desire as a queer, biracial teenager amidst the fierce contradictions of Boca Raton, Florida, a place where she found cult-like privilege, shocking racial disparities, rampant white-collar crime, and powerfully destructive standards of beauty hiding in plain sight.

As a child, Madden lived a life of extravagance, from her exclusive private school to her equestrian trophies and designer shoe-brand name. But under the surface was a wild instability. The only child of parents continually battling drug and alcohol addictions, Madden confronted her environment alone. Facing a culture of assault and objectification, she found lifelines in the desperately loving friendships of fatherless girls.

With unflinching honesty and lyrical prose, spanning from 1960s Hawai’i to the present-day struggle of a young woman mourning the loss of a father while unearthing truths that reframe her reality, Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls is equal parts eulogy and love letter. It’s a story about trauma and forgiveness, about families of blood and affinity, both lost and found, unmade and rebuilt, crooked and beautiful.

Mixed Race Cinemas Multiracial Dynamics in America and France

Bloomsbury
2017-09-07
216 pages
10 bw illus
6″ x 9″
Hardback ISBN: 9781501312458
EPUB eBook ISBN: 9781501312489
PDF eBook ISBN: 9781501312465

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

Using critical race theory and film studies to explore the interconnectedness between cinema and society, Zélie Asava traces the history of mixed-race representations in American and French filmmaking from early and silent cinema to the present day. Mixed Race Cinemas covers over a hundred years of filmmaking to chart the development of (black/white) mixed representations onscreen. With the 21st century being labelled the Mulatto Millennium, mixed bodies are more prevalent than ever in the public sphere, yet all too often they continue to be positioned as exotic, strange and otherworldly, according to ‘tragic mulatto‘ tropes. This book evaluates the potential for moving beyond fixed racial binaries both onscreen and off by exploring actors and characters who embody the in-between. Through analyses of over 40 movies, and case studies of key films from the 1910s on, Mixed Race Cinemas illuminates landmark shifts in local and global cinema, exploring discourses of subjectivity, race, gender, sexuality and class. In doing so, it reveals the similarities and contrasts between American and French cinema in relation to recognising, visualising and constructing mixedness. Mixed Race Cinemas contextualizes and critiques raced and ‘post-race’ visual culture, using cinematic representations to illustrate changing definitions of mixed identity across different historical and geographical contexts.

Contents

• Introduction
  • 1. Race and Ideology
  • 2. Mixed-Race Cinema Histories
  • 3. Interrogating Terminology
  • 4. Methodology and Frameworks
  • 5. Mixed-Race Spaces in French and American Cinema
  • 6. Franco-American Narratives and Beur Cinema
  • 7. Summary of Chapters
• Chapter One: the Mixed Question
  • 1. Language, Representation and Casting
  • 2. The Historical Mulatta Screen Stereotype in America
  • 3. The Historical Mulatta Screen Stereotype in France
• Chapter Two: Hollywood’s ‘Passing‘ Narratives
  • 1. ‘Passing’ Representations as Ideological Construct
  • 2. The Dichotomies of Post-War Mixed-Race Women Onscreen
  • 3. Gender, ‘Passing’ and Love
• Chapter Three: The Limits of the Classic Hollywood ‘Tragic Mulatta’
  • 1. Imitation of Life (1934): Interrogating Mixed Identities
  • 2. Casting and Representation
  • 3. Shadows and the Interracial Family
  • 4. Imitation of Life, 1959: Gender, Difference and Voiced Rebellion
  • 5. Performative Identities: Sara Jane, Dandridge and Monroe
• Chapter Four: Cultural Shifts: New Waves in Racial Representation
  • 1. Representing ‘Mixed-Race France’
  • 2. Reimagining the Nation: Mixed Families
  • 3. Questioning Mixed Masculinity: Les Trois frères
  • 4. Melodrama, Motherhood and Masks: Métisse
  • 5. Racial-Sexual Mythology and the Interracial Family
• Chapter Five: Transnational Families in Drôle de Félix
  • 1. A Search for Identity on the Road
  • 2. Citizenship, Violence and Scopophilia
  • 3. Trauma and Redemption
  • 4. Destabilising the Primary Authority of the Father
  • 5. Reuniting Transnational Families
• Conclusion
  • 1. ‘Post-Race’ Politics in America and France
  • 2. Enduring Stereotypes
  • 3. Mixed-Race Sci-Fi
  • 4. Mixed Representational Potentials
• Bibliography
• Index