Mixed Race Studies

The JCMRS inaugural issue will be released on Summer, 2013

Journal of Critical Mixed Race Studies
c/o Department of Sociology
SSMS Room 3005
University of California, Santa Barbara
Santa Barbara, California  93106-9430
E-Mail: socjcmrs@soc.ucsb.edu
2012-10-10

The Journal of Critical Mixed Race Studies (JCMRS) is a peer-reviewed online journal dedicated to developing the field of Critical Mixed Race Studies (CMRS) through rigorous scholarship. Launched in 2011, it is the first academic journal explicitly focused on Critical Mixed Race Studies.

JCMRS is transracial, transdisciplinary, and transnational in focus and emphasizes the critical analysis of the institutionalization of social, cultural, and political orders based on dominant conceptions and constructions of ‘race.’ JCMRS emphasizes the constructed nature and thus mutability of race and the porosity of racial boundaries in order to critique processes of racialization and social stratification based on race. JCMRS addresses local and global systemic injustices rooted in systems of racialization.

Sponsored by University of California, Santa Barbara’s Sociology Department, JCMRS is hosted on the eScholarship Repository, which is part of the eScholarship initiative of the California Digital Library. JCMRS functions as an open-access forum for critical mixed race studies scholars and will be available without cost to anyone with access to the Internet.

Volume 1, Issue 1, Spring 2013 will include:

• “Editor’s Note”—G. Reginald Daniel
• “Emerging Paradigms in Critical Mixed Race Studies”—Laura Kina, Wei Ming Dariotis, G. Reginald Daniel, and Camilla Fojas

Articles

1. “Historical Origins of the One-Drop Racial Rule in the United States”—Winthrop Jordan edited by Paul Spickard
2. “Retheorizing the Relationship Between New Mestizaje and New Multiraciality as Mixed Race Identity Models”—Jessie Turner
3. “Critical Mixed Race Studies: New Directions in the Politics of Race and Representation,” Keynote Address presented at the Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference, November 5, 2010, DePaul University—Andrew Jolivétte
4. “Only the News We Want to Print”—Rainier Spencer
5. “The Current State of Multiracial Discourse”—Molly McKibbin
6. “Slimy Subjects and Neoliberal Goods”—Daniel McNeil

Editorial Board

Founding Editors: G. Reginald Daniel, Wei Ming Dariotis, Laura Kina, Maria P. P. Root, and Paul Spickard

Editor-in-Chief: G. Reginald Daniel

Managing Editors: Wei Ming Dariotis and Laura Kina

Editorial Review Board: Stanley R. Bailey, Mary C. Beltrán, David Brunsma, Greg Carter, Kimberly McClain DaCosta, Michele Elam, Camilla Fojas, Peter Fry, Kip Fulbeck, Rudy Guevarra, Velina Hasu Houston, Kevin R. Johnson, Andrew Jolivette, Rebecca Chiyoko King-O’Riain, Laura A. Lewis, Kristen A. Renn, Maria P. P. Root, Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu, Gary B. Nash, Kent A. Ono, Rita Simon, Miri Song, Rainier Spencer, Michael Thornton, Peter Wade, France Winddance Twine, Teresa Williams-León, and Naomi Zack

For more information, click here.

Professor Mary Beltrán to be Featured Guest on Mixed Chicks Chat

Mixed Chicks Chat (Founders of the Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival)
Hosted by Fanshen Cox, Heidi W. Durrow and Jennifer Frappier
Website: TalkShoe™ (Keywords: Mixed Chicks)
Episode: #255 Professor Mary Beltrán
When: Wednesday, 2012-05-09, 21:00Z (17:00 EDT, 14:00 PDT)

Mary C. Beltrán, Associate Professor of Media Studies
University of Texas, Austin

Mary Beltrán an Assistant Professor of Radio-Television-Film at the University of Texas at Austin, is of Mexican and German, English, and Scotch Irish heritage. Her research is focused on the production and narration of race, ethnicity, gender and class in U.S. television, film, and celebrity culture, with an emphasis on Latina/o and mixed race representation. She is the co-editor (with Camilla Fojas) of Mixed Race Hollywood (NYU Press 2008), an anthology of scholarship on mixed-race representation in film, television, and new media. She also is the author of Latina/o Stars in U.S. Eyes: The Making and Meanings of Film and TV Stardom (University of Illinois Press, 2009), which explores the construction and marketing of Latina and Latino stars in the U.S. in relation to the evolving status of Mexican Americans and other Latinos since the 1920s. Mary is a former journalist and social worker; her experiences working in San Francisco with Latina and African American teens and interest in the complexities of popular culture and its impact on young people of color spurred her to pursue a career that would allow her to combine her various interests and conduct research at the intersections of race, class, and gender and entertainment media studies. Since becoming a faculty member of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and now the University of Texas, Beltrán has taught a variety of classes on race and entertainment meida, including first-ever courses at both universities on Mixed Race and U.S. Media Culture. Aside from her books, she has published on such topics as mixed-race actors and characters in U.S. media culture, racial representation in millennial television, ethnic media activism targeting the television networks, and the racial politics of beauty and body ideals as reinforced in Hollywood media productions. She has been conducting research for a new book, Post-Race Pop: Interrogating Racelessness in Millennial Media Culture. Post-Race Pop explores the emphasis on racial ambiguity and utopic presentations of racial and ethnic diversity in contemporary television and other millennial media culture, particularly in light of the imperatives of the media industries to appeal to an increasingly diverse audience and popular political rhetoric that has utilized notions of post-racial America to widely divergent ends.

Selected Bibliography:

• Mixed Race Hollywood, New York University Press, 2008.
• “Everywhere and Nowhere: Mediated Mixed Race and Mixed Race Critical Studies,” Keynote address video at the 2010 Critical Mixed Race Conference (Requires Apple’s iTunes application).
• “The New Hollywood Racelessness: Only the Fast, Furious, (and Multiracial) Will Survive,” 2005.

RTF 386 – Beyond Binaries: Mixed Race Representation and Critical Theory

University of Texas, Austin
Spring 2012

Mary Beltrán, Associate Professor of Media Studies

This graduate seminar surveys historical and critical and cultural studies scholarship on the evolution of mixed race in U.S. film and media culture. American histories, cultures, and identities have traditionally been understood through rubrics of racial binaries and negations. Given this tradition, characters of mixed racial and ethnic heritage and interracial romances have served as powerful symbols within mediated story worlds, while mixed-race actors also seen be seen to highlight fault lines in the nation’s and Hollywood’s construction of race. We’ll explore the growing body of scholarship analyzing the evolution of mixed-race representation within film, media, and celebrity culture and its implications with respect to past and contemporary notions of race and the increasingly diverse U.S. audience.

Multiracialism on The Real World and the Reconfiguration of Politics in MTV’s Brand During the 2000s

Popular Communication
Volume 8, Issue 2, 2010
pages 132-146
DOI: 10.1080/15405701003676105

Jon Kraszewski, Assistant Professor of Communication
Seton Hall University, South Orange, New Jersery

The Real World’s focus on multiracial identity is part of the MTV’s efforts to rebrand itself as being more tolerant of all political opinions in the 2000s. Post-2000 seasons of The Real World contain two different portraits of multiracialism that appeal to viewers across the political spectrum. The liberalism in these seasons comes from multiracialism functioning as a liberal utopia free of racism, one where fluidity, not hostility, defines race relations. At the same time, these seasons appeal to conservative sensibilities by making multiracial cast members models of neoliberal self-management that conservatives recently have used to justify dismantling the welfare state and civil rights initiatives. While neither the liberal nor the conservative portraits of multiracialism on post-2000 seasons of The Real World appear to be overtly racist, I unearth subtext where The Real World articulates multiracialism to white supremacy and anti-blackness.

The Real World is one of the longest running series in American television history. Premiering in 1992. the series has already completed 22 seasons, and MTV recently contracted for four more. Scholars have interrogated the racial politics of the series, but they have equated race with either blackness, specifically the series’ stereotypical portraits of black masculinity, or tensions between urban blacks and rural whites (Bell-Jordan, 2008; Kraszewski, 2009; Orbe, 1998; Park, 2008). This focus has excluded scholarly engagement with other racial identities on the series. This essay unsettles the scholarly equation of race with blackness in The Real World by exploring the politics of multiracialism on the series in the 2000s. A list of multiracial characters on recent seasons includes Aneesa from The Real World, Chicago; Irulon and Arissa from The Real World, Las Vegas; Adam from The Real World, Paris, and Brianna from The Real World, Hollywood. These cast members has one parent who is black and one who is white. The erasure of these characters from discussions about race relates to a larger omission of mixed-race people from media studies scholarship. In Mixed Race Hollywood, Beltrán and Fojas (2008) write that despite “the veritable explosion of multiracial imagery in Hollywood film and media culture today, there has been little published scholarship to dale on the history or current representation of mixed-race individuals, romances, families, or stars on screen” (p. 2).

Analyzing a long-running series such as The Real World presents methodological and historical problems: a channel undergoes branding changes over the course of 18 years, which…

Read or purchase the article here.

A Review of “Mixed Race Hollywood”

Quarterly Review of Film and Video
Volume 28, Issue 5 (2011)
pages 428-433
DOI: 10.1080/10509200902820589

Delia Konzett, Associate Professor of English
University of New Hampshire

Mixed Race Hollywood, edited by Mary Beltrán and Camilla Fojas. New York: New York University Press, 2008

The problem of the 20th century, W. E. B. Dubois would famously write in 1903, is that of the color line. Over 100 years later, we can unfortunately still say the problem of the 21st century is the color line, particularly our inability to move beyond entrenched binary conceptions of race (white/black or white/nonwhite) and acknowledge the new multiracial contexts that inform our present global, multicultural, and multimedia era. Mixed Race Hollywood is a timely and extremely valuable collection of essays that explores the various facets of the history of mixed race representation in mainstream American film and media.

Such representation has a long and complex tradition in Hollywood, ranging from the notorious depiction of the treacherous mulatto in Birth of a Nation (D. W. Griffith, 1915) and the non-threatening interracial pairing of Shirley Temple and Bojangles Robinson in The Little Colonel (David Butler, 1935) and The Littlest Rebel (David Butler, 1935) to the mixed race love affair in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (Stanley Kramer, 1967) that symbolically announced the arrival proper of civil rights. Since the mid 1990s, as the anthology’s editors Mary Beltrán and Camilla Fojas note, there has been a significant cultural shift in mixed race representation as seen in the “veritable explosion of multiracial imagery in…

Read or purchase the article here.

Video from 2010 Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference at DePaul now available on iTunes U

If you missed the Nov 5-6, 2010 “Emerging Paradigms in Critical Mixed Race Studies” conference or any of the keynote talks or the welcoming address, you can now download the videos via Apple’s iTunes U.

Here is a link to the following videos:

• November 5th (00:19:48): Welcoming Remarks by DePaul’s Liberal Arts & Sciences Dean Charles Suchar and conference organizers Camilla Fojas, Wei Ming Dariotis, and Laura Kina.
• November 5th (00:50:36): Keynote Address by Andrew Jolivette, “Critical Mixed Race Studies: New Directions in the Politics of Race and Representation”
• November 6th(01:00:04): Keynote Address by Mary Beltrán, “Everywhere and Nowhere: Mediated Mixed Race and Mixed Race Critical Studies”
• November 6th (00:57:08): Keynote Address by Louie Gong, “Halfs and Have Nots”

Please note that your computer must have Apple’s iTunes installed in order to view the video.  It can be download here.

The New Hollywood Racelessness: Only the Fast, Furious, (and Multiracial) Will Survive

Cinema Journal
Volume 44, Number 2, Winter 2005
pages 50-67

Mary C. Beltrán, Associate Professor of Media Studies
University of Texas, Austin

This article interrogates the rise of the “multiculti” action film and the casting of multiracial actors as Hollywood action film protagonists. These trends are examined in light of shifts in U.S. ethnic demographics and youth-oriented popular culture.

Recent Hollywood films such as Romeo Must Die (Andrzej Bartkowiak, 2000) and The Fast and the Furious (Rob Cohen, 2001) are notable for their multiethnic casts and stylized urban settings. Correspondingly, the key to the survival of the protagonists in these “multiculti” action narratives is their ability to thrive in environments defined by cultural border crossings and pastiche. Perhaps not coincidentally, the heroes who command these environments increasingly are played by biracial and multiethnic actors, such as Vin Diesel in The Fast and the Furious and XXX (Rob Cohen, 2002) and Russell Wong, who plays a pivotal role in Romeo Must Die.

This trend reflects contemporary shifts in U.S. ethnic demographics and ethnic identity, while subtly reinforcing notions of white centrism that are the legacy of the urban action movie. In particular, as I shall argue, the new, ethnically ambiguous protagonist embodies contemporary concerns regarding ethnicity and race relations with respect to the nation’s burgeoning cultural creolization and multiethnic population. The analysis presented here shall be situated in the history of Hollywood representations of the multiethnic inner city, as well as in relation to shifts in the country’s ethnic demographics, cultural interests, and popular culture…

Read the entire article here.

What’s at stake in claims of “post-racial” media?

FlowTV
Department of Radio, Television, and Film at the University of Texas at Austin
2010-06-03

Mary C. Beltrán, Associate Professor of Media Studies
University of Texas, Austin

Tracy Morgan, comedic actor best known for his role as comedic performer Tracy Jordan on the NBC series 30 Rock (2006+), trumpeted America’s supposed post-racial identity at the Golden Globe Awards in January 2009. When 30 Rock was awarded Best Musical or Comedy Television Series, he gleefully snatched the statuette from Tina Fey, creator and star of the series, quipping, “Tina Fey and I had an agreement that if Barack Obama won, I would speak for the show from now on.” He continued, “Welcome to post-racial America! I am the face of post-racial America. Deal with it, Cate Blanchett! We’d like to thank the Hollywood Foreign Press … especially me, ’cause a black man can’t get no love at the Emmys. I love you, Europe! That’s what’s up!”…

…Unsurprisingly, when used in description of media trends, post-racial has taken on differing meanings both for scholars and media professionals. For one, it’s been used as shorthand to describe purported progress in ethnic/racial inclusion in employment and casting, as appears to be at least part of what Morgan had in mind in his claim that he is the face of post-racial America. In fact, a fair number of television series and films now integrate a few characters of color into their casts (notably, this was described recently by the Hollywood Reporter as perhaps due in part to an “Obama effect”), and we’ve witnessed a growing number of non-white and mixed race stars. Important to note and study, a major catalyst of these shifts is a turn away from niche productions targeting African American or Latina/o audiences to media texts that aim instead to appeal to a broad, multicultural audience. Arguably this does not make these texts post-racial (Dale Hudson’s concept of “multicultural whiteness” comes closer to describing this trend in relation to the continuing centrism of whiteness), but does raise the need for new methodological tools and theoretical frameworks for studying ethnic and racial representation in this supposed post-racial era. Also important to take into consideration is the continuing and sometimes growing underrepresentation of creative professionals of color behind the screen in tandem with “post-racial” shifts.

There is a need in such study to also take note of the casting and portrayal of mixed-race actors and individuals in Hollywood media productions. I’ve noted in my own work that the rhetoric of post-race has followed in the wake of the rising vogue for mixed-race and racially ambiguous actors and models since the 1990s. The “raceless” or “ethnically ambiguous” aesthetic (as I and journalist Ruth La Ferla described this trend, respectively), particularly noticeable in contemporary tween programming and stardom, is an important strand of contemporary media formations that at times falls into descriptions of post-racial trends. Given that mixed-race representation does offer the potential to highlight the constructed nature of race and fissures in racial boundaries, as Camilla Fojas and I discuss in the introduction to Mixed Race Hollywood, this will be an important site of study in relation to the implications of contemporary trends in ethnic and racial representation…

Read the entire article here.

The Politics of Biracialism [Issue]

The Black Scholar
Journal of Black Studies and Research
Fall 2009 (2009-09-22)
Volume 39, No. 3/4

Guest Editors:

Laura Chrisman, Professor of English
University of Washington

Habiba Ibrahim, Assistant Professor of English
University of Washington

Ralina Joseph, Assistant Professor of Communications
University of Washington

Why a biracial issue, and why now? As black Americans we have mixed ancestry; one might ask what is gained by giving this obvious fact the attention of a special issue. Rather than focus on this broad history, however, we instead highlight here the situations of first-generation biracial black people. Perhaps this does not simplify matters. Foregrounding their specific experiences, identities, and concerns may stir up the anger of those who feel judged “not black enough” and the anger of those who feel betrayed and devalued by self-identifying biracial individuals. The politics of biracialism, seen this way, are individualistic, diminishing our community’s cohesion. Yet we feel that the time is right for an exploration of the topic. Biracial or multiracial studies is fast-growing and itself extremely varied in its methods, disciplines, and orientation. Acknowledging the important and interesting work that has been produced in the last two decades, we provide a forum for such work. Another factor in our choice of topic is the emergence, in 2008, of Obama as a presidential candidate. Both his blackness and his first generation biracialism have prompted new consideration, within black communities and within the U.S. population as a whole, of the operations and meanings of race, nation, family and community within the U.S.A. This gives us additional incentive to explore biracialism in the present moment. Our moment differs from the fraught late 1990s when the multiracial social movement campaigned for recognition in the 2000 Census, and was opposed by influential black voices. The present adds some confidence and optimism: to profile biracialism now, we suggest, is not to jeopardize black collectivity so much as it is to recognize and join the healthy debates that are flourishing within and beyond black studies…

Table of Contents

• Introduction to “The Politics of Biracialism” / Laura Chrisman
• Interracial Intimacies, Barack Obama, and the Politics of Multiracialism / Kimberly McClain DaCosta
• Review Essay: Performing the Twenty-first Century Tragic Mulatto: Black, White, and Jewish: Autobioraphy of Shifting Self by Rebecca Walker / Ralina Joseph
• Toward Black and Multiracial “Kinship” After 1997, or How a Race Man Became “Cablinasian” / Habiba Ibrahim
• Poetry: “The Art of Loving” / Madeleine Clifford
• Baby janay and Naomi Pabst: Negotiating Race Mixing, Adoption, and Transnationality / Naomi Pabst
• Reframing the National Family: Race Mixing and Re-telling American History / Catherine Squires
• Race, Multiraciality, and Barack Obama: Toward a More Perfect Union? / G. Reginald Daniel
• Books Reviews
  • Amalgamation Schemes: Anti-blackness and the Critique of Multiracialism by Jared Sexton / LeiLani Nishime
  • Dispatches from the Color Line: The Press and Multiracial America  by Catherine R. Squires / Manoucheka Celeste
  • Framing the Black Panthers: The Spectacular Rise of a Black Power Icon by Jane Rhodes / Madhavi Murty
  • Mixed Race Hollywood Edited by Mary C. Beltrán and Camilla Fojas / Sarita Cannon

Mixed Race Hollywood (review) [Emily D. Edwards]

Journal of Film and Video
Volume 61, Number 4 (Winter 2009)
E-ISSN: 1934-6018
Print ISSN: 0742-4671
DOI: 10.1353/jfv.0.0051

Emily D. Edwards, Professor of Broadcasting and Cinema
University of North Carolina, Greensboro

Mixed Race Hollywood is a collection of essays that could not be timelier. As popular media, journalists, and citizen bloggers actively dispute the impact of President Barack Obama’s election on attitudes toward race, editors Mary Beltrán and Camilla Fojas have compiled a series of essays that explore ways popular media and celebrity have presented miscegenation and racial identity for Americans. These historical and critical essays analyze specific films, television programs, Internet sites, and the appearance of celebrity image to help explain the ways popular media presentations of race correspond with the development of social behaviors and attitudes. Though some might credit “liberal Hollywood” for ushering America into the “mulatto millennium,” it is obvious from the collection of essays in this book that Hollywood is not always the leader of public opinion but often takes the more conservative approach, lagging behind fairly widespread social attitudes.

The editors divide the book into four sections: themes of mixed race representation, miscegenation and romance, genre and mixed race characters, and finally, a section that examines the shift in media presentation of mixed race characters from tragic to heroic. The introduction by Beltrán and Fojas helps set the background and the overall argument that media presentations reveal a cultural shift in American attitudes toward mixed race characters. The introduction also provides some useful notes on terminology.

The essays begin, appropriately, with J. E. Smyth’s chapter, “Classical Hollywood and the Filmic Writing of Interracial History, 1931–1939.” This chapter examines films such as Cimarron (1931), Ramona (1936), Show Boat (1936), Jezebel (1938)…

Read the entire review here.