Mixed Race Studies

Machado de Assis: Multiracial Identity and the Brazilian Novelist

Penn State University Press
2012-05-19
336 pages
6 x 9, 1 illustration
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-271-05246-5

G. Reginald Daniel, Professor of Sociology
University of California, Santa Barbara

Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839–1908) was Brazil’s foremost novelist of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As a mulatto, Machado experienced the ambiguity of racial identity throughout his life. Literary critics first interpreted Machado as an embittered misanthrope uninterested in the plight of his fellow African Brazilians. By midcentury, however, a new generation of critics asserted that Machado’s writings did reveal his interest in slavery, race, and other contemporary social issues, but their interpretations went too far in the other direction. Reginald Daniel, whose expertise on Brazilian race relations gives him special insights, takes a fresh look at how Machado’s life—especially his experience of his own racial identity—was inflected in his writings. The result is a new interpretation that sees Machado as endeavoring to transcend his racial origins by universalizing the experience of racial ambiguity and duality into a fundamental mode of human existence.

Intertextual Links: Reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin in James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man

College Literature
Volume 40, Number 1, Spring 2013
pages 121-138
DOI: 10.1353/lit.2013.0004

Robin Miskolcze, Associate Professor of English
Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, California

Though literary critics of James Weldon Johnson’s 1912 The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man convincingly regard the novel as reminiscent of the slave narrative, few readers have considered the scope and significance of Johnson’s reference to a major best-selling literary predecessor: Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Johnson’s explicit reference to Stowe’s 1852 novel early in his story solicits a reading of the intertextual links between the two novels. Specifically, I explore how Johnson’s narrator and Stowe’s Uncle Tom are connected by the symbol of the coin necklace, a gift from white men that carries a paternalistic force. In addition to Uncle Tom, I also analyze the similarities between Johnson’s narrator and Stowe’s biracial character, Adolph. Comparing Johnson’s and Stowe’s narrative choices for their biracial characters illustrates the trajectory of cultural politics involved in defining race and normative sexuality from the pre-Civil War years to the early twentieth century.

6 Hilariously Failed Attempts at Making Comics More Diverse: #3. Connor Hawke, the Mixed Race (and Possibly Gay) Green Arrow

Cracked Magazine
2013-01-26

Ed Johnson

Since the 1970s, the DC Comics superhero Green Arrow has had sex with pretty much every female he’s been able to impress with arrow-based innuendo. So it wasn’t much of a surprise when, in the early ’90s, he discovered that he had a biracial son. He was named Connor Hawke, and he was meant to replace his father as Green Arrow to once again try to breathe new life into the character by adding some diversity. The problem was, they couldn’t seem to agree on exactly what Connor’s parentage was, so they decided to make him a golden-haired blackasian…

Read the entire article here.

Methodologies of Socio-Cultural Classification: Contexutalizing the Casta Painting (1710-1800) as a Product of Time

Undergraduate Journal of Gender and Women’s Studies
Volume 1, Issue 1 (2012)
17 pages

Pooja Chaudhuri
University of California, Berkeley

The “casta painting” appeared in the early 18th century Colonial Mexico (New Spain). The paintings illustrated different offspring produced from sexual unions between men and women of Spanish, native Indian and African descent in the Americas. Series of casta paintings came in sets of typically sixteen panels, each featuring a mixed race couple and their one or sometimes, two children over a period of multiple generations. The viewer’s attention is drawn to phenotypic distinctions like skin color, styles of clothing and posture, all of which serve to racially distinguish each figure. The casta paintings were generally produced by criollo (creole) painters, a term used to refer to Spaniards who were born and raised in Spanish America. The paintings served to an extent, the viewing pleasure of creole elites in colonial Mexico, as well as in the Iberian Peninsula. Some casta paintings were commissioned by colonial officials who intended to take them back to Spain. Other sets were exhibited at the Royal Cabinet of Natural History, founded by Charles III in Madrid to display a plethora of objects and cultural artifacts from overseas territories belonging to the Castilian Crown. Over the course of the century, the paintings developed into elaborate taxonomic and ethnographic projects.

Conceptions of raza, or race are central to situating casta paintings in the history of Colonial Mexico. For the Spanish, ‘raza’ converged with views on religion, occupation, gender and the separate functions of male and female bodies. Such complex vocabularies of race were articulated in the casta paintings as mestizaje, or race mixing between people of Indian, African, Spanish and Mixed descent in the Colonial Mexico. Not only do these paintings visually depict intimate spheres between people living in the colony, they point to a greater colonial preoccupation with classifying and categorizing reproductive outcomes from sex across racial boundaries. Granted that the paintings circulated as artifacts of popular culture in elite Spanish circles, they relied on a system of racial logic that developed over the course of centuries as the Spanish encountered new ideas, people, and places.

Furthermore, casta paintings represent a map making project that place racialized bodies of men, women, and children as points of reference in a larger narrative of human action. Each painting serves as a stage for exposing narratives of race mixing, which were informed by a range of historical processes and changing discourses on gender, race, class and sexuality. This analysis of casta paintings posits them as maps of socio-cultural, racial, and gendered hierarchy. In addition, the paintings are targeted towards an elite Spanish audience and serve as instructive maps of both desirable and undesirable mixed race combinations. Their didactic purpose points to a desire on the part of painters to classify the population of Colonial Mexico within a map of sexual reproduction thereby, endorsing the colonial management of the most intimate relations among men and women in the colony.

Over the course of different time periods, the term, ‘race’ has been woven with ideas of gender and class. In its modern twentieth century usage, race developed from biological explanations that defined it as a cluster of genetic characteristics linking a group of people together. Genetic similarities within a group are thought to determine phenotype like skin color, hair texture, and body structure. Ian F. Haney Lopéz argues against the idea that “racial divisions reflect fundamental genetic differences.” Lopéz cites several scientific findings which have shown that variations between two or more different populations (or, intragroup differences) exceed variations within a ‘racial’ group (or, intergroup differences). This argument supports the view that race is not biologically determined but socially and historically constructed. In other words, the notion of race as a social construct suggests that different racial systems rely on interactions between humans rather than on natural distinctions.

Moreover, because ideas about race have changed over time, racial logic has significantly transformed the ‘social fabric’ of different histories. Gender, class and sexuality are integral to this ‘social fabric’. Race is therefore not a strictly genetic category and is instead enmeshed with gender, class and long histories of colonization; at different points in time the term has been associated more with either the biological or the social. This understanding of race as a fluid category presents important insight into looking at the casta painting as a methodology of socio-cultural classification…

Read the entire article here.

You Don’t Know Me: Picture Books to Make Biracial and Multiracial Children Comfortable with Dual Identities

Multicultural Review
Volume 18, Issue 4 (Winter 2009)
pages 20-24

Kena Sosa

Next year, in 2010, our country will be due for round two of the census containing an option for biracial or multiracial people. This feature debuted in the 2000 census cycle, when for the first time in U.S. history, people had the chance to choose their racial description as they pleased, and to include their multiple backgrounds. At that time, 6,826,228 Americans were recognized as being of more than one race, 2.4 percent of the counted population. This number may be fairly accurate or slightly deceiving. Although many people were pleased to determine the categorization of their own heritage, others preferred to claim only the blood to which they felt most closely connected. As Americans, we appreciate our right to choose.

Now that we have a multiracial president for the first time in our history, will the results of the 2010 census show a sudden surge in those taking pride in being biracial? Will Barack Obama’s enthusiasm for inclusion and his exploration of his own roots encourage others to take a more introspective look at themselves and proclaim themselves as both halves of the whole of their parents as they were born?…

Read the entire article here.

Stories of Multiracial Experiences in Literature for Children, Ages 9–14

Children’s Literature in Education
December 2013, Volume 44, Issue 4
pages 359-376
DOI: 10.1007/s10583-013-9196-5

Amina Chaudhri, Assistant Professor of Teacher Education
Northeastern Illinois University, Chicago

William H. Teale, Professor of Literacy, Language and Culture
University of Illinois, Chicago

This study analyzed 90 realistic novels written and published in the United States between the years 2000 and 2010 and featuring mixed race characters. The researchers examined specific textual features of these works of contemporary and historical fiction and employed Critical Race Theory to contextualize the books within paradigms about multiracial identity. Findings indicated three broad trends in representations of mixed race identity with an almost equal number of novels falling among three descriptive categories. Books in the Mixed Race In/Visibility category depicted stereotypical experiences and provided little or no opportunity for critique of racism. Mixed Race Blending books featured characters whose mixed race identity was descriptive but not functional in their lives. Mixed Race Awareness books represented a range of possible life experiences for biracial characters who responded to social discomfort about their racial identity in complex and credible ways. This study has implications for research and pedagogy in the fields of education and children’s literature as they expand to become more inclusive of this type of diversity.

Introduction

There has long been, and continues to be, debate about what literature “is” and the roles it plays in people’s lives (Garber, 2011; Kant, 1892): Does it serve social ends? Moral ends? Is it fundamentally an aesthetic experience? But no matter what one’s beliefs about literature’s purposes, theory and research in children’s literature make one thing clear: literature can serve as a tool for growth, a significant factor in children’s identity formation (Gee, 2001; Heath, 2011). Thus, the content of what is available for children to read and what teachers select for use in their classrooms can influence the direction of children’s growth.

Over the past two decades in the United States, as issues of multiculturalism and civil and human rights have become more prominent on the cultural landscape, identity-based movements have received increasing attention. One issue in this realm that is currently taking on increased significance is mixed race/multiracial identity. In the 1990s, pressure from groups such as Project RACE and The Association for MultiEthnic Americans forced Congress to urge a change in the U.S. Census standards. Accordingly, the 2000 Census allowed Americans to “mark one or more” racial categories, and 6.8 million people identified as multiracial. In 2010 that number increased to 9 million. These figures suggest a significant shift in the ways Americans view themselves racially.

Parallel to the ways that feminist, civil rights, and LGBTQ movements have impacted the creation of various bodies of literature, the multiracial movement can be viewed as influencing the work being published as children’s literature. Whether young readers are actively seeking racial affirmation or looking for insights into others not like themselves, representation in bcx)ks can explicitly or subliminally influence understanding of racial identity. Accordingly, we examined all the children’s books we were able to identify using various processes (described below) featuring multiracial characters that were deemed appropriate for 9-14 year-olds and were published between 2000 and 2010 in order to get a sense of what young readers might understand about multiracial identity as imagined by the authors of these works.

Stones of Multiracial Experiences

Novels featuring mixed race characters are generally folded into the larger category of multicultural literature and frequently are classified according to the non-white element in the story. In some respects, in the U.S. context, creators are ahead of researchers in addressing the role of mixed race for readers in the 9-14 age group. Authors such as Jacqueline Woodson, Mildred Taylor, Jamie Adoff, Sharon Flake, and Richard Peck, for example, have been including characters of mixed racial heritage and addressing this heritage as a central feature of their stories.

In general, the hotly of research in multicultural literature makes only sporadic or tangential mention of mixed race issues. Yokota and Frost (2002/2003), Smith (2001a), Sands-O’Connor (2001), and Reynolds (2009) have written specifically about multiracial characters in literature, but this work has not comprehensively examined novels written for the intermediate/middle school student. The relative lack…

White Negroes

Guy Foster, Assistant Professor of English

Bowdoin College, Brunswick, Maine
Africana Studies/Gender and Women’s Studies
Spring 2013

Close readings of literary and filmic texts that interrogate widespread beliefs in the fixity of racial categories and the broad assumptions these beliefs often engender. Investigates “whiteness” and “blackness” as unstable and fractured ideological constructs. These are constructs that, while socially and historically produced, are no less “real” in their tangible effects, whether internal or external. Includes works by Charles Chesnutt, Nella Larsen, Norman Mailer, Jack Kerouac, John Howard Griffin, Sandra Bernhard, and Warren Beatty.

Interracial Narratives

Bowdoin College, Brunswick, Maine
Africana Studies
Fall 2012

Guy Foster, Assistant Professor of English

Examines the stories that Americans have told about intimate relationships that cross the color line in twentieth- and twenty-first-century imaginative and theoretical texts. Considers how these stories have differed according to whether the participants are heterosexual or homosexual, men or women, Black, White, Asian, Latino, or indigenous. Explores the impact historically changing notions of race, gender, sexuality, and U.S. citizenship have had on the production of these stories. Texts include literature, film, Internet dating sites, and contemporary debates around mixed-race identity and the United States census.

Harry Potter and the mistaken myth of the Mixed-Race messiah

Paper presented at the Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference
DePaul University, Chicago, Illinois
2012-11-03
6 pages

Eric Hamako
University of Massachusetts, Amherst

The Harry Potter franchise has worldwide popularity. Contained within Harry Potter are popular stories about Mixed-Race, both appealing and toxic. Harry Potter and other science fiction and fantasy narratives attempt to address popular anxieties about racism and racial power. But what are they saying? Will vigorous hybrid messiahs herald racial salvation? Will degenerate hybrid monsters cause a racial apocalypse? In this paper, I explore White Supremacist and Christian Supremacist ideas about Mixed-Race prevalent in current science fiction & fantasy movie franchises, such as Harry Potter, and why people shouldn’t believe the hybrid hype… or the hate.

Read the entire paper here.

Tragic No More: Mixed Race Women and the Nexus of Sex and Celebrity

University of Massachusetts Press
December 2012
176 pages
6 x9; 6 illustrations
ISBN (paper): 978-1-55849-985-0
ISBN (cloth): 978-1-55849-984-3

Caroline A. Streeter, Associate Professor of English
University of California, Los Angeles

A timely exploration of gender and mixed race in American culture

This book examines popular representations of biracial women of black and white descent in the United States, focusing on novels, television, music, and film. Although the emphasis is on the 1990s, the historical arc of the study begins in the 1930s. Caroline A. Streeter explores the encounter between what she sees as two dominant narratives that frame the perception of mixed race in America. The first is based on the long-standing historical experience of white supremacy and black subjugation. The second is more recent and involves the post–Civil Rights expansion of interracial marriage and mixed race identities. Streeter analyzes the collision of these two narratives, the cultural anxieties they have triggered, and the role of black/white women in the simultaneous creation and undoing of racial categories—a charged, ambiguous cycle in American culture.

Streeter’s subjects include concert pianist Philippa Schuyler, Dorothy West’s novel The Wedding (in print and on screen), Danzy Senna’s novels Caucasia and Symptomatic, and celebrity performing artists Mariah Carey, Alicia Keys, and Halle Berry. She opens with a chapter that examines the layered media response to Essie Mae Washington-Williams, Senator Strom Thurmond’s biracial daughter. Throughout the book, Streeter engages the work of feminist critics and others who have written on interracial sexuality and marriage, biracial identity, the multiracial movement, and mixed race in cultural studies.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Essie Mae Washington-Williams’s Secrets and Strom Thurmond’s Lies
• 2. The Wedding’s Black/White Women in Prime Time
• 3. Sex and Femininity in Danzy Senna’s Novels
• 4. Faking the Funk? Mariah Carey, Alicia Keys, and the Politics of Passing
• 5. From Tragedy to Triumph: Dorothy Dandridge, Halle Berry, and the Search for a Black Screen Goddess
• 6. High (Mulatto) Hopes: The Rise and Fall of Philippa Schuyler
• Afterword
• Notes
• Index