Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

“The debate about the slave trade, and of slavery itself, formed a critical background to everything that happens in the book. In fact, I would contend that the rhetoric around abolitionism was one of the most important factors in how the Anglo-Atlantic World thought about race at the end of the eighteenth century. For mixed-race migrants, there were three specific discussions that were relevant to them. First, activists working to abolish the slave trade started arguing in 1788 that once enslaved people were treated better and encouraged to marry one another, then they would increase naturally as a population, making the slave trade obsolete. That argument produced an ancillary claim that reformers should prevent interracial sex in the colonies because it undercut the natural growth of enslaved populations. In other words, the interracial relationships that produced mixed-race offspring suddenly became political, not just moral, problems for reformers. Second, when the Haitian Revolution broke out in 1791, French and English observers blamed abolitionists for stirring up trouble. But they also pointed to an event in the colony of Saint Domingue (that becomes Haiti) a few months before the Revolution. Vincent Ogé, a mixed-race Dominguan educated in France, led a militia of color demanding equal rights. They were quickly put down, but whites across the Caribbean assumed that his metropolitan education had radicalized him, and helped to inspire the later enslaved uprising. Jamaicans of color living in Britain, who had the same kind of biography as Ogé, were now even more threatening. Third, once the slave trade was abolished in 1807, observers immediately grew concerned that whites would flee the West Indies in droves, as the islands would no longer be economically productive. Someone still had to oversee these colonies, though, and mixed-race migrants who had been educated in Britain came to be seen as the best replacements for that white population that would inevitably leave the Caribbean.” —Daniel Livesay

Christopher Jones, “Q&A with Daniel Livesay, author of Children of Uncertain Fortune: Mixed-Race Jamaicans in Britain and the Atlantic Family, 1733-1833,” The Junto: A Group Blog on Early American History, April 20, 2018. https://earlyamericanists.com/2018/04/20/qa-with-daniel-livesay-author-of-children-of-uncertain-fortune-mixed-race-jamaicans-in-britain-and-the-atlantic-family-1733-1833/.

The Coiled Serpent: An Interview with the Poetry Anthology’s Creators

Posted in Articles, Interviews, Media Archive, United States on 2016-03-30 01:49Z by Steven

The Coiled Serpent: An Interview with the Poetry Anthology’s Creators

La Bloga
Monday, 2016-03-28

Daniel A. Olivas

As already discussed here on La Bloga in a lovely review by Olga García Echeverría, Tía Chucha Press will publish this week a landmark poetry anthology, The Coiled Serpent: Poets Arising from the Cultural Quakes and Shifts of Los Angeles. I am blessed to be one of the editors of this new book along with the very talented Neelanjana Banerjee and Ruben J. Rodriguez. The Coiled Serpent includes a powerful, eloquent introduction by the press’s founder, Los Angeles Poet Laureate Luis J. Rodriguez. Of course, without the vision and poetic reach of Luis, this anthology would not have been born.

Of this anthology, Ohio State Professor Frederick Luis Aldama observes: “The dexterous hands of this high-octane trio of editors pull together in one exquisite volume LA’s finest of polymorphous polyglot poetic voices. The 150-plus poets disparately drop us into the sights, sounds, tastes, smells, and touch of our planet’s capital: the megalopolis of LA with its hybrid, polylingual, and interstitial peoples. As we brush up with and enter into the lives of the young and old, workers and artists, border crossers and code-shifters…. Persians, Asians, Latinos, African Americans, and all sorts in between, great seismic quakes of creativity invite us to feel life at its most sand-dirt blasting harshness as well as its most soothing and sweet. With The Coiled Serpent we feel the cyclonic force of poetic talent at the epicenter of change in the making of tomorrow’s planetary republic of letters.”

The Coiled Serpent will have its formal release event on March 30 at the Ace Hotel in downtown Los Angeles the week of AWP’s annual conference (more on the conference below).

In honor of The Coiled Serpent’s release, I posed two questions to Neelanjana Banerjee, Ruben J. Rodriguez and Luis J. Rodriguez. Here are their responses:

Which poems particularly touched you and why?

Read the entire interview here.

Tags: California, Daniel A. Olivas, Daniel Olivas, La Bloga, Los Angeles, Luis J. Rodriguez, Neelanjana Banerjee, Ruben J. Rodriguez

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The Coiled Serpent: An Interview with the Poetry Anthology’s Creators

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