Mixed Race Studies

Hawai′i Is My Haven: Race and Indigeneity in the Black Pacific

Duke University Press
September 2021
360 pages
17 illustrations
Paper ISBN: 978-1-4780-1437-9
Cloth ISBN: 978-1-4780-1346-4

Nitasha Tamar Sharma, Professor of African American Studies and Asian American Studies
Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois

Hawaiʻi Is My Haven maps the context and contours of Black life in the Hawaiian Islands. This ethnography emerges from a decade of fieldwork with both Hawaiʻi-raised Black locals and Black transplants who moved to the Islands from North America, Africa, and the Caribbean. Nitasha Tamar Sharma highlights the paradox of Hawaiʻi as a multiracial paradise and site of unacknowledged anti-Black racism. While Black culture is ubiquitous here, African-descended people seem invisible. In this formerly sovereign nation structured neither by the US Black/White binary nor the one drop rule, non-White multiracials, including Black Hawaiians and Black Koreans, illustrate the coarticulation and limits of race and the native/settler divide. Despite erasure and racism, nonmilitary Black residents consider Hawaiʻi their haven, describing it as a place to “breathe” that offers the possibility of becoming local. Sharma’s analysis of race, indigeneity, and Asian settler colonialism shifts North American debates in Black and Native studies to the Black Pacific. Hawaiʻi Is My Haven illustrates what the Pacific offers members of the African diaspora and how they in turn illuminate race and racism in “paradise.”

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Hawaiʻi Is My Haven
• 1. Over Two Centuries: The History of Black People in Hawaiʻi
• 2. “Saltwater Negroes”: Black Locals, Multiracism, and Expansive Blackness
• 3. “Less Pressure”: Black Transplants, Settler Colonialism, and a Radical Lens
• 4. Racism in Paradise: AntiBlack Racism and Resistance in Hawaiʻi
• 5. Embodying Kuleana: Negotiating Black and Native Positionality in Hawaiʻi
• Conclusion: Identity↔Politics↔Knowledge
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

Selected Writings on Race and Difference

Duke University Press
April 2021
376 pages
Paper ISBN: 978-1-4780-1166-8
Cloth ISBN: 978-1-4780-1052-4

Stuart Hall (1932–2014)

Edited by:

Paul Gilroy, Professor of the Humanities
Institute of Advanced Studies, University College London

Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences; Professor of American Studies
Graduate Center, City University of New York

In Selected Writings on Race and Difference, editors Paul Gilroy and Ruth Wilson Gilmore gather more than twenty essays by Stuart Hall that highlight his extensive and groundbreaking engagement with race, representation, identity, difference, and diaspora. Spanning the whole of his career, this collection includes classic theoretical essays such as “The Whites of Their Eyes” (1981) and “Race, the Floating Signifier” (1997). It also features public lectures, political articles, and popular pieces that circulated in periodicals and newspapers, which demonstrate the breadth and depth of Hall’s contribution to public discourses of race. Foregrounding how and why the analysis of race and difference should be concrete and not merely descriptive, this collection gives organizers and students of social theory ways to approach the interconnections of race with culture and consciousness, state and society, policing and freedom.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Race Is the Prism / Paul Gilroy
• Part I. Riots, Race, and Representation
  • 1. Absolute Beginnings: Reflections on the Secondary Modern Generation [1959]
  • 2. The Young Englanders [1967]
  • 3. Black Men, White Media [1974]
  • 4. Race and “Moral Panics” in Postwar Britain [1978]
  • 5. Summer in the City [1981]
  • 6. Drifting into a Law and Order Society: The 1979 Cobden Trust Human Rights Day Lecture [1982]
  • 7. The Whites of Their Eyes: Racist Ideologies and the Media [1981]
• Part II. The Politics of Intellectual Work Against Racism
  • 8. Teaching Race [1980]
  • 9. Pluralism, Race and Class in Caribbean Society [1977]
  • 10. “Africa” Is Alive and Well in the Diaspora: Cultures of Resistance: Slavery, Religious Revival and Political Cultism in Jamaica [1975]
  • 11. Race, Articulation and Societies Structured in Dominance [1980]
  • 12. New Ethnicities [1983]
  • 13. Cultural Identity and Diaspora [1990]
  • 14. C. L. R. James: A Portrait [1992]
  • 15. Calypso Kings [2002]
• Part III. Cultural and Multicultural Questions
  • 16. Gramsci’s Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity [1968]
  • 17. Subjects in History: Making Diasporic Identities [1998]
  • 18. Why Fanon? [1996]
  • 19. Race, the Floating Signifier: What More Is There to Say about “Race”? [1997]
  • 20. “In but Not of Europe”: Europe and Its Myths [2003]
  • 21. Cosmopolitan Promises, Multicultural Realities [2006]
  • 22. The Multicultural Question [2000]
• Index
• Place of First Publication

Relative Races: Genealogies of Interracial Kinship in Nineteenth-Century America

Duke University Press
October 2020
328 pages
25 illustrations
Paper ISBN: 978-1-4780-1115-6
Cloth ISBN: 978-1-4780-1010-4

Brigitte Fielder, Associate Professor, College of Letters & Science
University of Wisconsin, Madison

In Relative Races, Brigitte Fielder presents an alternative theory of how race is ascribed. Contrary to notions of genealogies by which race is transmitted from parents to children, the examples Fielder discusses from nineteenth-century literature, history, and popular culture show how race can follow other directions: Desdemona becomes less than fully white when she is smudged with Othello’s blackface, a white woman becomes Native American when she is adopted by a Seneca family, and a mixed-race baby casts doubt on the whiteness of his mother. Fielder shows that the genealogies of race are especially visible in the racialization of white women, whose whiteness often depends on their ability to reproduce white family and white supremacy. Using black feminist and queer theories, Fielder presents readings of personal narratives, novels, plays, stories, poems, and images to illustrate how interracial kinship follows non-heteronormative, non-biological, and non-patrilineal models of inheritance in nineteenth-century literary culture.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments ix
• Introduction. Genealogies of Interracial Kinship 1
• Part I. Romance. Sexual Kinship
  • 1. Blackface Desdemona, or, the White Woman “Begrimed” 29
  • 2. “Almost Eliza”: Reading and Racialization 55
• Part II. Reproduction. Genealogies of (Re)racialization
  • 3. Mothers and Mammies: Racial Maternity and Matriliny 85
  • 4. Kinfullness: Mama’s Baby, Racial Futures 119
• Part III. Residency Domestic. Racial Relations
  • 5. Mary Jemison’s Cabin: Domestic Spaces of Racialization 161
  • 6. Racial (Re)Construction: Interracial Kinship and the Interracial Nation 195
• Conclusion. “Minus Bloodlines”: White Womanhood and Failures of Interracial Kinship 229
• Notes 245
• Bibliography 283
• Index

Beneath the Surface: A Transnational History of Skin Lighteners

Duke University Press
January 2020
368 pages
85 illustrations (incl. 39 in color)
Paper ISBN: 978-1-4780-0642-8
Cloth ISBN: 978-1-4780-0538-4

Lynn M. Thomas, Professor of History
University of Washington

For more than a century, skin lighteners have been an ubiquitous feature of global popular culture—embraced by consumers even as they were fiercely opposed by medical professionals, consumer health advocates, and antiracist thinkers and activists. In Beneath the Surface, Lynn M. Thomas constructs a transnational history of skin lighteners in South Africa and beyond. Analyzing a wide range of archival, popular culture, and oral history sources, Thomas traces the changing meanings of skin color from precolonial times to the postcolonial present. From indigenous skin-brightening practices and the rapid spread of lighteners in South African consumer culture during the 1940s and 1950s to the growth of a billion-dollar global lightener industry, Thomas shows how the use of skin lighteners and experiences of skin color have been shaped by slavery, colonialism, and segregation, as well as consumer capitalism, visual media, notions of beauty, and protest politics. In teasing out lighteners’ layered history, Thomas theorizes skin as a site for antiracist struggle and lighteners as a technology of visibility that both challenges and entrenches racial and gender hierarchies.

Possessing Polynesians: The Science of Settler Colonial Whiteness in Hawai`i and Oceania

Duke University Press
November 2019
320 pages
Illustrations: 19 illustrations
Paper ISBN: 978-1-4780-0633-6
Cloth ISBN: 978-1-4780-0502-5

Maile Arvin, Assistant Professor of History and Gender Studies
University of Utah

From their earliest encounters with indigenous Pacific Islanders, white Europeans and Americans asserted an identification with the racial origins of Polynesians, declaring them to be, racially, almost white and speculating that they were of Mediterranean or Aryan descent. In Possessing Polynesians Maile Arvin analyzes this racializing history within the context of settler colonialism across Polynesia, especially in Hawai‘i. Arvin argues that a logic of possession through whiteness animates settler colonialism, through which both Polynesia (the place) and Polynesians (the people) become exotic, feminized belongings of whiteness. Seeing whiteness as indigenous to Polynesia provided white settlers with the justification needed to claim Polynesian lands and resources. Understood as possessions, Polynesians were and continue to be denied the privileges of whiteness. Yet Polynesians have long contested these classifications, claims, and cultural representations, and Arvin shows how their resistance to and refusal of white settler logic have regenerated Indigenous forms of recognition.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Polynesia Is a Project, Not a Place
• Part I. The Polynesian Problem: Scientific Production of the “Almost White” Polynesian Race
  • 1. Heirlooms of the Aryan Race: Nineteenth-Century Studies of Polynesian Origins
  • 2. Conditionally Caucasian: Polynesian Racial Classification in Early Twentieth-Century Eugenics and Physical Anthropology
  • 3. hating Hawaiians, Celebrating Hybrid Hawaiian Girls: Sociology and the Fictions of Racial Mixture
• Part II. Regenerative Refusals: Confronting Contemporary Legacies of the Polynesian Problem in Hawai’i and Oceania
  • 4. Still in the Blood: Blood Quantum and Self-Determination in Day v. Apoliona and Federal Recognition
  • 5. The Value of Polynesian DNA: Genomic Solutions to the Polynesian Problems
  • 6. Regenerating Indigeneity: Challenging Possessive Whiteness in Contemporary Pacific Art
• Conclusion. Regenerating an Oceanic Future in Indigenous Space-Time
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

Slavery Unseen: Sex, Power, and Violence in Brazilian History

Duke University Press
2018-04-06
272 pages
9 illustrations
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8223-7116-8
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-7129-8

Lamonte Aidoo, Andrew W. Mellon Assistant Professor of Romance Studies
Duke University, Durham, North Carolina

In Slavery Unseen, Lamonte Aidoo upends the narrative of Brazil as a racial democracy, showing how the myth of racial democracy elides the history of sexual violence, patriarchal terror, and exploitation of slaves. Drawing on sources ranging from inquisition trial documents to travel accounts and literature, Aidoo demonstrates how interracial and same-sex sexual violence operated as a key mechanism of the production and perpetuation of slavery as well as racial and gender inequality. The myth of racial democracy, Aidoo contends, does not stem from or reflect racial progress; rather, it is an antiblack apparatus that upholds and protects the heteronormative white patriarchy throughout Brazil’s past and on into the present.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction. Secrets, Silences, and Sexual Erasures in Brazilian Slavery and History
• 1. The Racial and Sexual Paradoxes of Brazilian Slavery and National Identity
• 2. Illegible Violence: The Rape and Sexual Abuse of Male Slaves
• 3. The White Mistress and the Slave Woman: Seduction, Violence, and Exploitation
• 4. Social Whiteness: Black Intraracial Violence and the Boundaries of Black Freedom
• 5. O Diabo Preto (The Negro Devil): The Myth of the Black Homosexual Predator in the Age of Social Hygiene
• Afterword. Seeing the Unseen: The Life and Afterlives of Ch/Xica da Silva
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

The idea of widespread interracial sex was central to the construction of Brazilian racial exceptionalism and the myth of racial democracy. Sex and its traditional connection to intimacy and interracial reproduction were used to create a racially complex society and as an effective weapon of subjugation for the enslaved. Sex was attributed a transcendental meaning by many of the nation’s white elite and racial theorists; that is, sex and reproduction had the capacity to erase barriers and served as proof that race could be and had been transcended. This conceptualization of sex and its connection to race was central to Portuguese colonialism and became the very basis of Brazilian racial exceptionalism and the myth of racial democracy.¹ The silencing and sanitization of the nation’s history of rape, sexual violence, and abuse during slavery and its aftermath laid the foundation for an enduring legacy of erasure that then created the illusion of equality and racial progressivism, while in reality, solidifying an antiblack, racist system that preserved white male supremacy in Brazil’s past and present.

Lamonte Aidoo, Slavery Unseen: Sex, Power, and Violence in Brazilian History, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018). 3

Steeped in Heritage: The Racial Politics of South African Rooibos Tea

Duke University Press
2017-10-27
272 pages
3 illustrations
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-8223-6993-6
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-6993-6

Sarah Ives, Postdoctoral Fellow and Lecturer
Stanford University

South African rooibos tea is a commodity of contrasts. Renowned for its healing properties, the rooibos plant grows in a region defined by the violence of poverty, dispossession, and racism. And while rooibos is hailed as an ecologically indigenous commodity, it is farmed by people who struggle to express “authentic” belonging to the land: Afrikaners who espouse a “white” African indigeneity and “coloureds,” who are characterized either as the mixed-race progeny of “extinct” Bushmen or as possessing a false identity, indigenous to nowhere. In Steeped in Heritage Sarah Ives explores how these groups advance alternate claims of indigeneity based on the cultural ownership of an indigenous plant. This heritage-based struggle over rooibos shows how communities negotiate landscapes marked by racial dispossession within an ecosystem imperiled by climate change and precarious social relations in the post-apartheid era.

Table of Contents

• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction. The “Rooibos Revolution”
• 1. Cultivating Indigeneity
• 2. Farming the Bush
• 3. Endemic Plants and Invasive People
• 4. Rumor, Conspiracy, and the Politics of Narration
• 5. Precarious Landscapes
• Conclusion. “Although There Is No Place Called Rooibos”
• Notes
• References
• Index

Degrees of Mixture, Degrees of Freedom: Genomics, Multiculturalism, and Race in Latin America

Duke University Press
2017-05-05
328 pages
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8223-6358-3
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-6373-6
12 illustrations

Peter Wade, Professor of Social Anthropology
University of Manchester

Race mixture, or mestizaje, has played a critical role in the history, culture, and politics of Latin America. In Degrees of Mixture, Degrees of Freedom, Peter Wade draws on a multidisciplinary research study in Mexico, Brazil, and Colombia. He shows how Latin American elites and outside observers have emphasized mixture’s democratizing potential, depicting it as a useful resource for addressing problems of racism (claiming that race mixture undoes racial difference and hierarchy), while Latin American scientists participate in this narrative with claims that genetic studies of mestizos can help isolate genetic contributors to diabetes and obesity and improve health for all. Wade argues that, in the process, genomics produces biologized versions of racialized difference within the nation and the region, but a comparative approach nuances the simple idea that highly racialized societies give rise to highly racialized genomics. Wade examines the tensions between mixture and purity, and between equality and hierarchy in liberal political orders, exploring how ideas and scientific data about genetic mixture are produced and circulate through complex networks.

Cultural Studies 1983: A Theoretical History

Duke University Press
2016
232 pages
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8223-6248-7
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-6263-0

Stuart Hall (1932–2014)

Edited by:

Jennifer Daryl Slack, Professor of Communication and Cultural Studies
Michigan Technological University

Lawrence Grossberg, Morris David Distinguished Professor of Communication and Cultural Studies
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

The publication of Cultural Studies 1983 is a touchstone event in the history of Cultural Studies and a testament to Stuart Hall’s unparalleled contributions. The eight foundational lectures Hall delivered at the University of Illinois in 1983 introduced North American audiences to a thinker and discipline that would shift the course of critical scholarship. Unavailable until now, these lectures present Hall’s original engagements with the theoretical positions that contributed to the formation of Cultural Studies. Throughout this personally guided tour of Cultural Studies’ intellectual genealogy, Hall discusses the work of Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams, and E. P. Thompson; the influence of structuralism; the limitations and possibilities of Marxist theory; and the importance of Althusser and Gramsci. Throughout these theoretical reflections, Hall insists that Cultural Studies aims to provide the means for political change.

Table of Contents

• Editor’s Introduction / Lawrence Grossberg and Jennifer Daryl Slack
• Preface to the Lectures by Stuart Hall, 1988
• Lecture 1. The Formation of Cultural Studies
• Lecture 2. Culturalism
• Lecture 3. Structuralism
• Lecture 4. Rethinking the Base and Superstructure
• Lecture 5. Marxist Structuralism
• Lecture 6. Ideology and Ideological Struggle
• Lecture 7. Domination and Hegemony
• Lecture 8. Culture, Resistance, and Struggle
• References
• Index