Mixed Race Studies

Chapter 8 – “Theresa” and the Early Transatlantic Mixed-Race Heroine

Chapter in: African American Literature in Transition, 1800–1830
Cambridge University Press
March 2021
DOI: 10.1017/9781108632003.014
pages 202-226

Brigitte Fielder, Associate Professor of U.S. Literature
University of Wisconsin, Madison

This chapter examines the publication of “Theresa” in Freedom’s Journal, a short story about women’s wartime heroism into the broader history of the Haitian Revolution. “Theresa” paints an image of mixed-race womanhood that was not insignificant for both this American venue and for a larger transatlantic context. Like the anonymously written British epistolary novel, The Woman of Colour, A Tale (1808), “Theresa” shows mixed-race women who are aligned with Black racial uplift rather than white assimilation. Moreover, both of these texts present images of mixed-race heroines who differ significantly from those of the “tragic mulatta” genre that would gain popularity during the antebellum period. Instead, “Theresa” frames its mixed-race heroines as models not only of racial solidarity but also of radical abolitionist action. In this, “Theresa” anticipates postbellum mixed-race heroines, through foregoing mixed-race women’s heterosexual union with Black men with their political action alongside them. The chapter offers an analysis of early nineteenth-century texts such as Laura Sansay’s Secret History; or, the Horrors of St. Domingo (1808) and Zelica the Creole (1820), which make the safety of white women the priority of their mixed-race characters.

Read or purchase the chapter here.

Sovereign Joy: Afro-Mexican Kings and Queens, 1539-1640

Cambridge University Press
June 2022
Hardback ISBN: 9781316514382
eBook ISBN: 9781009086905

Miguel A. Valerio, Assistant Professor of Spanish
Washington University, St Louis, Missouri

Sovereign Joy explores the performance of festive black kings and queens among Afro-Mexicans between 1539 and 1640. This fascinating study illustrates how the first African and Afro-creole people in colonial Mexico transformed their ancestral culture into a shared identity among Afro-Mexicans, with particular focus on how public festival participation expressed their culture and subjectivities, as well as redefined their colonial condition and social standing. By analyzing this hitherto understudied aspect of Afro-Mexican Catholic confraternities in both literary texts and visual culture, Miguel A. Valerio teases out the deeply ambivalent and contradictory meanings behind these public processions and festivities that often re-inscribed structures of race and hierarchy. Were they markers of Catholic subjecthood, and what sort of corporate structures did they create to project standing and respectability? Sovereign Joy examines many of these possibilities, and in the process highlights the central place occupied by Africans and their descendants in colonial culture. Through performance, Afro-Mexicans affirmed their being: the sovereignty of joy, and the joy of sovereignty.

Table of Contents

• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: Sovereign Joy
• 1. ‘With their king and queen’: Early Colonial Mexico, the Origins of Festive Black Kings and Queens, and the Birth of the Black Atlantic
• 2. ‘Rebel Black Kings (and Queens)’?: Race, Colonial Psychosis, and Afro-Mexican Kings and Queens
• 3. ‘Savage Kings’ and Baroque Festival Culture: Afro-Mexicans in the Celebration of the Beatification of Ignatius of Loyola
• 4. ‘Black and Beautiful’: Afro-Mexican Women Performing Creole Identity
• Conclusion: Where did the black court go?
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Index

Patchwork Freedoms: Law, Slavery, and Race beyond Cuba’s Plantations

Cambridge University Press
February 2022
320 pages
236 x 156 x 25 mm
0.64kg
Hardback ISBN: 9781108499545
Paperback ISBN: 9781108730808

Adriana Chira, Assistant Professor of Atlantic World History
Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia

In nineteenth-century Santiago de Cuba, the island of Cuba’s radical cradle, Afro-descendant peasants forged freedom and devised their own formative path to emancipation. Drawing on understudied archives, this pathbreaking work unearths a new history of Black rural geography and popular legalism, and offers a new framework for thinking about nineteenth-century Black freedom. Santiago de Cuba’s Afro-descendant peasantries did not rely on liberal-abolitionist ideologies as a primary reference point in their struggle for rights. Instead, they negotiated their freedom and land piecemeal, through colonial legal frameworks that allowed for local custom and manumission. While gradually wearing down the institution of slavery through litigation and self-purchase, they reimagined colonial racial systems before Cuba’s intellectuals had their say. Long before residents of Cuba protested for national independence and island-wide emancipation in 1868, it was Santiago’s Afro-descendant peasants who, gradually and invisibly, laid the groundwork for emancipation.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• 1. Unenclosed people, unenclosed lands: Santiago de Cuba to 1800
• 2. Foreign implants: The Saint-Domingue refugees and the limits of plantation development, 1791–1808
• 3. Keeping people put: Enslaved families, policing, and the re-emergence of coffee planting, 1810s–1830s
• 4. Manumission’s legalities: From need-based prerogatives to merit-based entitlements
• 5. ‘A freedom with further bonds’: Free people of African descent, property ownership, and color status
• 6. ‘Para levantar los negros y proclamar la República’: The beginnings of the Cuban wars of independence in Santiago de Cuba
• Conclusion
• Appendices
• Bibliography

Finding Afro-Mexico: Race and Nation after the Revolution

Cambridge University Press
June 2020
348 pages
Hardback ISBN: 9781108493017
Paperback ISBN: 9781108730310
eBook ISBN: 9781108639521

Theodore W. Cohen, Associate Professor of Africana Studies and History
Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, Illinois

Highlights

• Bridges the rich historical literature on slavery and race in the colonial period with scholarship on the contemporary politics of Blackness
• Traces the long history of African-American intellectual engagements with Mexico
• Contributes to the expanding literature on the politics of racial comparison and connection along sub-national, national, and transnational lines

In 2015, the Mexican state counted how many of its citizens identified as Afro-Mexican for the first time since independence. Finding Afro-Mexico reveals the transnational interdisciplinary histories that led to this celebrated reformulation of Mexican national identity. It traces the Mexican, African American, and Cuban writers, poets, anthropologists, artists, composers, historians, and archaeologists who integrated Mexican history, culture, and society into the African Diaspora after the Revolution of 1910. Theodore W. Cohen persuasively shows how these intellectuals rejected the nineteenth-century racial paradigms that heralded black disappearance when they made blackness visible first in Mexican culture and then in post-revolutionary society. Drawing from more than twenty different archives across the Americas, this cultural and intellectual history of black visibility, invisibility, and community-formation questions the racial, cultural, and political dimensions of Mexican history and Afro-diasporic thought.

Awards

• Co-winner, 2021 Howard F. Cline Book Prize in Mexican History, Latin American Studies Association
• Honorable Mention, 2021 Best Book Award in the Social Sciences, Mexico Section, Latin American Studies Association

Table of Contents

• List of Figures and Maps
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Part I. Making Blackness Mexican, 1810-1940s
  • Introduction
  • 1. Black Disappearance
  • 2. Marxism and Colonial Blackness
  • 3. Making Blackness Transational
• Part II. Finding Afro-Mexico, 1940s-2015
  • 4. Looking Back to Africa
  • 5. Africanizing “La bamba”
  • 6. Caribbean Blackness
  • 7. The Black Body in Mexico
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index

Asian Slaves in Colonial Mexico: From Chinos to Indians

Cambridge University Press
June 2014
300 pages
9 b/w illus. 3 maps
Hardback ISBN: 9781107063129
Paperback ISBN: 9781107635777
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9781107477841

Tatiana Seijas, Associate Professor of History
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

Winner of the 2014 Berkshire Conference of Women Historians’ Book Prize

During the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, countless slaves from culturally diverse communities in the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia journeyed to Mexico on the ships of the Manila Galleon. Upon arrival in Mexico, they were grouped together and categorized as chinos. Their experience illustrates the interconnectedness of Spain’s colonies and the reach of the crown, which brought people together from Africa, the Americas, Asia and Europe in a historically unprecedented way. In time, chinos in Mexico came to be treated under the law as Indians, becoming indigenous vassals of the Spanish crown after 1672. The implications of this legal change were enormous: as Indians, rather than chinos, they could no longer be held as slaves. Tatiana Seijas tracks chinos’ complex journey from the slave market in Manila to the streets of Mexico City, and from bondage to liberty. In doing so, she challenges commonly held assumptions about the uniformity of the slave experience in the Americas.

Becoming Free, Becoming Black: Race, Freedom, and Law in Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana

Cambridge University Press
January 2020
320 pages
17 b/w illus. 6 maps 2 tables
228 x 152 mm
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1108480642

Alejandro de la Fuente, Robert Woods Bliss Professor of Latin American History and Economics; Professor of African and African American Studies
Harvard University

Ariela J. Gross, John B. and Alice R. Sharp Professor of Law and History
University of Southern California

Highlights

• Examines the development of the legal regimes of slavery and race in Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana from the sixteenth century to the dawn of the Civil War
• Demonstrates that the law of freedom, not slavery, determined the way race developed over time
• Draws on a variety of primary sources, including local court records, original trial records of freedom suits, legislative case, and petition

How did Africans become ‘blacks’ in the Americas? Becoming Free, Becoming Black tells the story of enslaved and free people of color who used the law to claim freedom and citizenship for themselves and their loved ones. Their communities challenged slaveholders’ efforts to make blackness synonymous with slavery. Looking closely at three slave societies—Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana—Alejandro de la Fuente and Ariela J. Gross demonstrate that the law of freedom—not slavery—established the meaning of blackness in law. Contests over freedom determined whether and how it was possible to move from slave to free status, and whether claims to citizenship would be tied to racial identity. Laws regulating the lives and institutions of free people of color created the boundaries between black and white, the rights reserved to white people, and the degradations imposed only on black people.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• 1. ‘A Negro and by consequence an alien’: local regulations and the making of race, 1500s–1700s
• 2. The ‘inconvenience” of black freedom: manumission, 1500s–1700s
• 3. ‘The natural right of all mankind’: claiming freedom in the age of revolution, 1760s–1830
• 4. ‘Rules … for their expulsion’: foreclosing freedom, 1830s–1860
• 5. ‘Not of the same blood’: policing racial boundaries, 1830s–1860
• Conclusion: ‘Home-born citizens: the significance of free people of color.

Black Saint of the Americas: The Life and Afterlife of Martín de Porres

Cambridge University Press
2014-10-13
311 pages
16 b/w illus.
229 x 152 x 18 mm
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1107034372
Paperback ISBN: 9781108404174
Online ISBN: 9781139540599

Celia Cussen, Associate Professor of History
Universidad de Chile

In May 1962, as the struggle for civil rights heated up in the United States and leaders of the Catholic Church prepared to meet for Vatican Council II, Pope John XXIII named the first black saint of the Americas, the Peruvian Martín de Porres (1579–1639), and designated him the patron of racial justice. The son of a Spanish father and a former slavewoman from Panamá, Martín served a lifetime as the barber and nurse at the great Dominican monastery in Lima. This book draws on visual representations of Martín and the testimony of his contemporaries to produce the first biography of this pious and industrious black man from the cosmopolitan capital of the Viceroyalty of Peru. The book vividly chronicles the evolving interpretations of his legend and his miracles, and traces the centuries-long campaign to formally proclaim Martín de Porres a hero of universal Catholicism.

• The first full-length work dedicated to Martín de Porres from a scholarly viewpoint
• An analysis of witness testimonies and images that portrayed the virtues and miracles of Martín
• A readable discussion of how the cult of the first black saint of the Americas evolved along with the needs and attitudes of Catholics in Peru and elsewhere

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Part I. The Life:
  • 1. Race and family
  • 2. The convent and the colonial world
  • 3. Healing and faith
  • 4. Death and the heavenly transit
• Part II. The Afterlife:
  • 5. Creating a Vida from a life
  • 6. The miracles
  • 7. Images in black and white
  • 8. Sainthood
• Conclusion
• Appendixes
• Bibliography
• Endnotes

Afro-Latin American Studies: An Introduction

Cambridge University Press
April 2018
400 pages
233 x 165 x 43 mm
Hardback ISBN: 9781107177628
Paperback ISBN: 9781316630662
eBook ISBN: 9781316835890

Editors:

Alejandro de la Fuente, Robert Woods Bliss Professor of Latin American History and Economics; Professor of African and African American Studies
Harvard University, Boston, Massachusetts

George Reid Andrews, Distinguished Professor of History
University of Pittsburgh

Alejandro de la Fuente and George Reid Andrews offer the first systematic, book-length survey of humanities and social science scholarship on the exciting field of Afro-Latin American studies. Organized by topic, these essays synthesize and present the current state of knowledge on a broad variety of topics, including Afro-Latin American music, religions, literature, art history, political thought, social movements, legal history, environmental history, and ideologies of racial inclusion. This volume connects the region’s long history of slavery to the major political, social, cultural, and economic developments of the last two centuries. Written by leading scholars in each of those topics, the volume provides an introduction to the field of Afro-Latin American studies that is not available from any other source and reflects the disciplinary and thematic richness of this emerging field.

• Presents systematic and synthetic overviews of recent scholarship on topics of major importance in the field of Afro-Latin American studies, for example Afro-Latin American religions, Afro-Latin American political movements, and Afro-Latin American music
• Covers a broad range of topics, embracing most of the humanities and social sciences
• Serves as the authoritative introduction for Afro-Latin American history, covering the period from 1500 to the present

Table of Contents

• 1. Afro-Latin American studies: an introduction Alejandro de la Fuente and George Reid Andrews
• Part I. Inequalities:
  • 2. The slave trade to Latin America: a historiographical assessment Roquinaldo Ferreira and Tatiana Seijas
  • 3. Inequality: race, class, gender George Reid Andrews
  • 4. Afro-indigenous interactions, relations, and comparisons Peter Wade
  • 5. Law, silence, and racialized inequalities in the history of Afro-Brazil Brodwyn Fischer, Keila Grinberg and Hebe Mattos
• Part II. Politics:
  • 6. Currents in Afro-Latin American political and social thought Frank Guridy and Juliet Hooker
  • 7. Rethinking black mobilization in Latin America Tianna Paschel
  • 8. ‘Racial democracy’ and racial inclusion: hemispheric histories Paulina Alberto and Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof
• Part III. Culture:
  • 9. Literary liberties: the authority of Afrodescendant authors Doris Sommer
  • 10. Afro-Latin American art Alejandro de la Fuente
  • 11. A century and a half of scholarship on Afro-Latin American music Robin Moore
  • 12. Afro-Latin American religions Stephan Palmié and Paul Christopher Johnson
  • 13. Environment, space and place: cultural geographies of colonial Afro-Latin America Karl Offen
• Part IV. Transnational Spaces:
  • 14. Transnational frames of Afro-Latin experience: evolving spaces and means of connection, 1600–2000 Lara Putnam
  • 15. Afro-Latinos: speaking through silences and rethinking the geographies of blackness Jennifer A. Jones

Politics beyond Black and White: Biracial Identity and Attitudes in America

Cambridge University Press
2018-03-29
251 pages
Online ISBN: 978-1108694605
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1108425988
Paperback ISBN: 978-1108444330
DOI: 10.1017/9781108694605

Lauren D. Davenport, Assistant Professor of Political Science
Stanford University, California

The US is transforming into a multiracial society: today one-in-six new marriages are interracial and the multiple-race population is the fastest-growing youth group in the country. In Politics Beyond Black and White, Lauren D. Davenport examines the ascendance of multiracial identities and their implications for American society and the political landscape. Amassing unprecedented evidence, this book systematically investigates how race is constructed and how it influences political behavior. Professor Davenport shows that biracials’ identities are the product of family, interpersonal interactions, environment, and, most compellingly, gender stereotypes and social class. These identities, in turn, shape attitudes across a range of political issues, from affirmative action to same-sex marriage, and multiracial identifiers are shown to be culturally and politically progressive. But the book also reveals lingering prejudices against race-mixing, and that intermarriage and identification are highly correlated with economic prosperity. Overall findings suggest that multiracialism is poised to dismantle some racial boundaries, while reinforcing others.

The Politics of Blackness: Racial Identity and Political Behavior in Contemporary Brazil

Cambridge University Press
December 2017
260 pages
Hardback ISBN: 9781107186101
Paperback ISBN: 9781316637043

Gladys L. Mitchell-Walthour, Assistant Professor of Public Policy and Political Economy
Department of Africology (African Diaspora Studies)
University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee

This book uses an intersectional approach to analyze the impact of the experience of race on Afro-Brazilian political behavior in the cities of Salvador, São Paulo, and Rio de Janeiro. Using a theoretical framework that takes into account racial group attachment and the experience of racial discrimination, it seeks to explain Afro-Brazilian political behavior with a focus on affirmative action policy and Law 10.639 (requiring that African and Afro-Brazilian history be taught in schools). It fills an important gap in studies of Afro-Brazilian underrepresentation by using an intersectional framework to examine the perspectives of everyday citizens. The book will be an important reference for scholars and students interested in the issue of racial politics in Latin America and beyond.

• Uses an intersectional approach that allows readers to understand how race, class, gender, and aesthetics shape Afro-Brazilian political behavior
• Appeals to social scientists using quantitative and qualitative methods to study race, gender, group behavior, and politics
• Develops a theory of racial spatiality that gives readers a bottom-up understanding of political representation and its reliance on everyday Afro-Brazilian citizens

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• 1. Afro-Brazilian political underrepresentation
• 2. Blackness and racial identification in contemporary Brazil
• 3. Negro group attachment in Brazil
• 4. Negro linked fate and racial policies
• 5. Afro-descendant perceptions of discrimination and support for affirmative action