{"id":17734,"date":"2011-11-04T21:36:21","date_gmt":"2011-11-04T21:36:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=17734"},"modified":"2015-02-24T01:29:28","modified_gmt":"2015-02-24T01:29:28","slug":"assumed-identities-the-meanings-of-race-in-the-atlantic-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=17734","title":{"rendered":"Assumed Identities: The Meanings of Race in the Atlantic World"},"content":{"rendered":"

Assumed Identities: The Meanings of Race in the Atlantic World<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Texas A&M University Press<\/a>
\n2010-07-12
\n168 pages
\n6 x 9, Illus.
\nCloth ISBN: 978-1-60344-192-6<\/p>\n

Edited by:<\/strong><\/p>\n

John D. Garrigus<\/a><\/strong>, Associate Professor of History
\nUniversity of Texas, Austin<\/em><\/p>\n

Christopher Morris<\/a><\/strong>, Associate Professor of History
\nUniversity of Texas, Austin<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

With the recent election of the nation\u2019s first African American president\u2014an individual of blended Kenyan and American heritage who spent his formative years in Hawaii and Indonesia\u2014the topic of transnational identity is reaching the forefront of the national consciousness in an unprecedented way. As our society becomes increasingly diverse and intermingled, it is increasingly imperative to understand how race and heritage impact our perceptions of and interactions with each other. Assumed Identities<\/em> constitutes an important step in this direction.<\/p>\n

However, \u201cidentity is a slippery concept,\u201d say the editors of this instructive volume. This is nowhere more true than in the melting pot of the early trans-Atlantic cultures formed in the colonial New World during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. As the studies in this volume show, during this period in the trans-Atlantic world individuals and groups fashioned their identities but also had identities ascribed to them by surrounding societies. The historians who have contributed to this volume investigate these processes of multiple identity formation, as well as contemporary understandings of them.<\/p>\n

Originating in the 2007 Walter Prescott Webb Memorial Lectures presented at the University of Texas at Arlington, Assumed Identities: The Meanings of Race in the Atlantic World<\/em> examines, among other topics, perceptions of racial identity in the Chesapeake community, in Brazil, and in Saint-Domingue (colonial-era Haiti). As the contributors demonstrate, the cultures in which these studies are sited helped define the subjects\u2019 self-perceptions and the ways others related to them.<\/p>\n

Table of Contents<\/strong><\/p>\n