Mixed Race Studies

Back to race, not beyond race: multiraciality and racial identity in the United States and Brazil

Comparative Migration Studies
Volume 10, Article Number 22 (2022)
DOI: 10.1186/s40878-022-00294-0

Jasmine Mitchell, Associate Professor of American Studies and Media
State University of New York-Old Westbury, Old Westbury, New York

In contrast to discourses of multiraciality as leading to a future beyond race, this commentary looks at how multiracial discourses and symbols underline race. Taking an overview of multiracial discourses and identities in relation to Blackness in the United States and Brazil, this commentary examines the deployment of multiraciality to maintain white supremacy. Under global capitalism, United States multicultural discourses, and Latin American foundational narratives, multiracial peoples are often propped up as a solution to racism, the eradication of race, or reduced to racial binaries centering whiteness. The section ends with considerations of how fears of racial passing and fraud coincide with multiracial identities. Questions for further consideration on the nexus of political identities and racial identities are proposed in relation to multiraciality.

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Mixed-Race Superheroes

Rutgers University Press
2022-04-16
288 pages
24 color images
6 x 9
Paperback ISBN: 9781978814592
Cloth ISBN: 9781978814608
EPUB ISBN: 9781978814615
PDF ISBN: 9781978814639
Kindle ISBN: 9781978814622

Edited by:

Sika A. Dagbovie-Mullins, Associate Professor of English
Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton

Eric L. Berlatsky, Associate Professor of English
Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton

American culture has long represented mixed-race identity in paradoxical terms. On the one hand, it has been associated with weakness, abnormality, impurity, transgression, shame, and various pathologies; however, it can also connote genetic superiority, exceptional beauty, and special potentiality. This ambivalence has found its way into superhero media, which runs the gamut from Ant-Man and the Wasp’s tragic mulatta villain Ghost to the cinematic depiction of Aquaman as a heroic “half-breed.”

The essays in this collection contend with the multitude of ways that racial mixedness has been presented in superhero comics, films, television, and literature. They explore how superhero media positions mixed-race characters within a genre that has historically privileged racial purity and propagated images of white supremacy. The book considers such iconic heroes as Superman, Spider-Man, and The Hulk, alongside such lesser-studied characters as Valkyrie, Dr. Fate, and Steven Universe. Examining both literal and symbolic representations of racial mixing, this study interrogates how we might challenge and rewrite stereotypical narratives about mixed-race identity, both in superhero media and beyond.

Table of Contents

• Introduction by Sika A. Dagbovie-Mullins and Eric L. Berlatsky
• Part I Superheroes in Black and White
  • 1. Guess Who’s Coming Home? Mixed Metaphors of Home in Spider-Man’s Comic and Cinematic Homecomings by Sika A. Dagbovie-Mullins
  • 2. The Ride of the Valkyrie Against White Supremacy: Tessa Thompson’s Casting in Thor: Ragnarok by Jasmine Mitchell
  • 3. “Which World Would You Rather Live In?” The Anti-utopian Superheroes of Gary Jackson’s Poetry by Chris Gavaler
  • 4. Flash of Two Races: Incest, Miscegenation, and the Mixed-Race Superhero in The Flash Comics and Television Show by Eric L. Berlatsky
• Part II Metaphors of/and Mixedness
  • 5. “Let Yourself Just Be Whoever You Are!” Decolonial Hybridity and the Queer Cosmic Future in Steven Universe by Corrine E. Collins
  • 6. The Hulk and Venom: Warring Blood Superheroes by Gregory T. Carter
  • 7. Monsters, Mutants, and Mongrels: The Mixed-Race Hero in Monstress by Chris Koenig-Woodyard
  • 8. Examining Otherness and the Marginal Man in DC’s Superman through Mixed-Race Studies by Kwasu David Tembo
• Part III Multiethnic Mixedness (or Mixed-Race Intersections)
  • 9. Talented Tensions and Revisions: The Narrative Double Consciousness of Miles Morales by Jorge J. Santos Jr.
  • 10. “They’re Two People in One Body”: Nested Sovereignties and Mixed-Race Mutations in FX’s Legion by Nicholas E. Miller
  • 11. Into to the Spider-Verse and the Commodified (Re)imagining of Afro-Rican Visibility by Isabel Molina-Guzmán
  • 12. Truth, Justice, and the (Ancient) Egyptian Way: DC’s Doctor Fate and the Arab Spring by Adrienne Resha
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on Contributors
• Index

Commentary and Book Review: Multiracials and Civil Rights: Mixed-Race Stories of Discrimination

Journal of Civil Rights and Economic Development
Volume 34, Issue 1 (Spring 2021)
pages 1-11

Jasmine Mitchell, Associate Professor of American Studies and Media Studies
State University of New York, Old Westbury

Can a drop of whiteness or “looking white” save someone from anti-Blackness? Are mixed-race peoples special, and should they be a protected class under the law? Did Loving v. Virginia’s legalization of interracial marriage lead to race becoming insignificant? Tanya Hernández’s Multiracials and Civil Rights: Mixed-Race Stories of Discrimination debunks persistent myths that racial mixture will eradicate racism and heal the racial wounds of the United States. Using cases and other legal sources, Hernández persuasively argues that multiracials are not exempt from racial discrimination. Multiracials and Civil Rights crystalizes the pervasiveness of white supremacy while offering a sociopolitical lens by which to tackle racial injustices.

Hernández’s book hails from legal studies and offers a much needed lens to augment understandings of race, law, and the state. Much of the scholarship on mixed race studies comes from sociology, political science, psychology, history, media studies, and literature. The book accomplishes an important intervention, with an evident dedication to engaged research and scholarship, marking the tangible material realities of multiracials in the legal system. Presenting a valuable archive of legal records, Hernández addresses how multiracials experience discrimination and captures a U.S. landscape of white supremacy and racial discrimination coexisting with ideologies of colorblindness and racial progress. Multiracials and Civil Rights: Mixed-Race Stories of Discrimination converses with literature in several fields and joins a recent plethora of scholarship on mixed-race identities, stories, and experiences.

Read the entire commentary and review here.

CMRS Book Talk With Dr. Jasmine Mitchell

Critical Mixed Race Studies
2021-03-08

We’re happy to announce that our first book talk with Dr. Jasmine Mitchell on Imagining the Mulatta: Blackness in U.S. and Brazilian Media is available for you to view on our website and YouTube.

Also, keep a look out for the details of our upcoming book talks! We’ve lined up a couple of recently released books that you’ll love…

Our next one will be with some of the authors from Multiracial Experiences in Higher Education: Contesting Knowledge, Honoring Voice, and Innovating Practice, edited by Drs. Marc P. Johnston-Guerrero and Charmaine L. Wijeyesinghe.

Afterwards, we’ll talk with Drs. Chinelo L. Njaka and Jennifer Patrice Sims on their book, Mixed-Race in the US and UK: Comparing the Past, Present, and Future.

Imagining the Mulatta: Blackness in U.S. and Brazilian Media

University of Illinois Press
May 2020
288 pages
9 color photographs
6 x 9 in.
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-252-04328-4
Paper ISBN: 978-0-252-08520-8

Jasmine Mitchell, Assistant Professor of American Studies and Media Studies
State University of New York, Old Westbury

Mixed-race women and popular culture in Brazil and the United States

Brazil markets itself as a racially mixed utopia. The United States prefers the term melting pot. Both nations have long used the image of the mulatta to push skewed cultural narratives. Highlighting the prevalence of mixed race women of African and European descent, the two countries claim to have perfected racial representation—all the while ignoring the racialization, hypersexualization, and white supremacy that the mulatta narrative creates.

Jasmine Mitchell investigates the development and exploitation of the mulatta figure in Brazilian and U.S. popular culture. Drawing on a wide range of case studies, she analyzes policy debates and reveals the use of mixed-Black female celebrities as subjects of racial and gendered discussions. Mitchell also unveils the ways the media moralizes about the mulatta figure and uses her as an example of an “acceptable” version of blackness that at once dreams of erasing undesirable blackness while maintaining the qualities that serve as outlets for interracial desire.

As a key figure of national and transnational desire, the mulata was famed for her corporal functions—sex and dance. Beginning in the 1970s, Brazilian governmental tourism agencies utilized the image of the sexually available mulata for the promotion of Brazil as a tourist destination. From the 1970s to the 1990s, white Rio de Janeiro businessman Oswaldo Sargentelli, a self-described mulatólogo (mulata expert), presented samba spectacles of scantily clad dancing women to the Brazilian elite and tourists alike. With the branding of brasilidade as a sexual paradise of mulatas, the archetype of the sensual sexually available mulata who dances with abandon became a thematic fixture memorialized in popular Brazilian cultural politics and in the international imagination.

Jasmine Mitchell, “Sensual Not Beautiful: The Mulata as Erotic Spectacle,” ReVista: Harvard Review of Latin America, Spring 2017. https://revista.drclas.harvard.edu/book/sensual-not-beautiful.

Sensual Not Beautiful: The Mulata as Erotic Spectacle

ReVista: Harvard Review of Latin America
Spring 2017 (Black is Beautiful)

Jasmine Mitchell, Assistant Professor of American Studies and Media Studies
State University of New York, Old Westbury

The iconic mulata female body is portrayed in Brazil as glistening brown. Photo courtesy of Jasmine Mitchell.

While white actresses and models still dominate beauty and fashion magazines in Brazil, on my last few visits to Brazil, I’ve noticed that actresses of African descent such as Camila Pitanga and Taís Araújo have also graced the covers. Since 2009, both actresses have also starred in telenovelas. Miss Brazil 2016 is the first black winner since Deise Nunes’s crowning in 1986. The 2016 competition had the largest number of black candidates in its history. The dominant conceptualizations of beauty in Brazil are shifting. Erika Moura, the Mulata Globeleza of 2017, did not appear as a bodypainted nude Rio de Janeiro samba dancer, but instead performed in various costumes and dance styles representing a breadth of Brazilian regional cultures.

It’s certainly not been this way for very long. In 2001, on my first trip to Brazil, I yearned to find a refuge, a place where my background as a mixed-race black woman from the United States was neither exotic nor fetishized. Relying on Brazil’s reputed celebration of racial mixing, I believed that it would become my racial paradise in which brown was beautiful and I would find a resistance to the exclusivity of white U.S. beauty norms.

Instead, I became familiar with a Brazilian saying, “Branca para casar, mulata para fornicar, negra para trabalhar (white women for marriage, mulata women for sex, black women for work).”…

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