Mixed Race Studies

The Skin We’re In: A Literary Analysis of Representations Of Mixed Race Identity in Children’s Literature

University of Illinois, Chicago
2012
232 pages
Publication Number: AAT 3530952
ISBN: 9781267715739

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

A Thesis Submitted as partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Curriculum and Instruction in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Chicago

This study systematically analyzed novels of contemporary and historical fiction with mixed race content intended for readers age 9-14. In the context of an increasingly multiracial and multicultural society, this study was primarily concerned with the question of identity representation: What is contemporary children’s literature saying about the experience of being racially mixed? This question was investigated along three strands: 1) How can literature about multiracial identity be usefully described and define? 2) What historical perspectives inform books about multiracial people? and 3) To what degree are contemporary authors maintaining or challenging racial paradigms?

A content analysis of ninety novels with mixed race content was undertaken to determine specific features such as gender, age, racial mix, family situation, socio-economic situation, racial makeup of environment, and setting. Three categories were created based historical paradigms about mixed race identity, and themes that emerged from the novels: 1) Mixed Race In/Visibility, 2) Mixed Race Blending, and 3) Mixed Race Awareness. All ninety novels were evaluated with respect to the criteria of the categories. Thirty-three novels were selected for deep literary analysis, demonstrating the ways historical perspectives about mixed race identity inform contemporary children’s literature.

Findings indicated three broad trends in representations of mixed race identity in children’s literature with novels falling almost equally between the three categories. Books in the Mixed Race In/Visibility category depicted stereotypically traumatic experiences for mixed race characters and provide little or no opportunity for critique of racism. Books in the Mixed Race Blending category 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 respond to social discomfort to their racial identity in complex and credible ways.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• I. INTRODUCTION
  • Background
  • Rationale
  • Overview of the Study
  • Research Questions
• II. REVIEW OF LITERATURE
  • Literary Criticism
    • Literary Criticism in Children’s Literature
  • Critical Race Theory
    • Critical Race Theory in Children’s Literature
  • Mixed Race Perspectives
    • Theorizing Mixed Race Identity
    • Mixed Race Research in Children’s Literature
    • Setting the Stage
• III. METHODOLOGY
  • Text Identification
  • Search Parameters
    • Publication Date
    • Genre
    • Age of Intended Readership
  • Text Selection for Literary Analysis
  • Text Analysis – Content Analysis
  • Text Analysis – Literary Analysis
  • Terminology
• IV. FINDINGS AND ANALYSIS OF REPRESENTATIVE TEXTS
  • The Big Picture
  • Mixed Race Identity in the Categories
    • Mixed Race In/Visibility (MRIV)
    • Mixed Race Blending (MRB)
    • Mixed Race Awareness (MRA)
  • Trends in Contemporary Realistic Fiction
  • Trends in Historical Fiction
  • Literary Analysis of Representative Books in Each Category
    • MRI/V in Contemporary Realistic Fiction
    • MRI/V in Historical Fiction
    • MRB in Contemporary Realistic Fiction
    • MRB in Historical Fiction
    • MRA in Contemporary Realistic Fiction
    • MRA in Historical Fiction
• V. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS
  • Themes in the Categories
    • Mixed Race In/Visibility
      • Wounded by Words
      • Inferior Vitality
      • Incomplete Amalgamation
      • Conclusion: Mixed Race In/Visibility
    • Mixed Race Blending
      • One Drop Still Rules
      • Revelations
      • All-American Biracials
      • Conclusion: Mixed Race Blending
    • Mixed Race Awareness
      • Conclusion: Mixed Race Awareness
  • Talking About Mixed Race Identity
  • Contributions
  • Limitations
  • Future Research
  • Conclusion
• VI. APPENDICES
  • APPENDIX A: Books Identified for this Study
  • APPENDIX B: Books Listed by Genre
  • APPENDIX C: Books Listed by Category
  • APPENDIX D: Books Listed by Racial Mix
  • APPENDIX E: Instrument for Collecting Individual Text Data
• VII. REFERENCES
  • CHILDREN’S LITERATURE CITED
• VIII. CURRICULUM VITAE

LIST OF TABLES

• TABLE III–1. Categories for Content Analysis
• TABLE IV–1. Author Race
• TABLE IV–2. Features of Books With Mixed Race Characters
• TABLE IV–3. Mixed Race Representation Across Genre and Category

Read the entire dissertation here.

HCOL 86 E: D1: Mixed: Multiracialism in U.S. Culture

University of Vermont
The Honors College
Spring 2013

John Gennari, Associate Professor of English

This seminar will examine the theme of multiracial identity and culture in the United States. We’ll consider how U.S. concepts and ideologies of race have developed historically, and why within that history multiracial people and culture have been considered both a problem (e.g. the “tragic mulatto” figure in pre-1960s fiction and film) and a solution (e.g. the vaunted racial pluralism of jazz, the reformist rhetoric and ideology of post-civil rights era multiculturalism). We’ll consider how mixed-race identity and experience challenge and complicate racial classification schemes that govern U.S. institutional life, public policy, popular perception, and private imagination. We’ll reckon with the myriad ways multiracial people and culture point up the massive confusion of American thinking about race—a confusion perhaps best typified by the heralding of a so-called “post-racial” order upon the election of a mixed-raced President, only immediately to see Barack Obama’s racial and national identity become a source of lurid obsession. Course materials include historical and theoretical literature, personal essays and narratives, film, music, and other forms of popular culture. In addition to participating actively in class discussions, students will engage in regular informal and formal writing (in-class free writing, short essays, a longer final paper) and will stage a group presentation.

Carnival, Convents, and the Cult of St. Rocque: Cultural Subterfuge in the Work of Alice Dunbar-Nelson

Georgia State University
2012-08-09
57 pages

Sibongile B. N. Lynch

A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in the College of Arts and Sciences Georgia State University 2012

In the work of Alice Dunbar-Nelson the city and culture of 19th century New Orleans figures prominently, and is a major character affecting the lives of her protagonists. While race, class, and gender are among the focuses of many scholars the eccentricity and cultural history of the most exotic American city, and its impact on Dunbar-Nelson’s writing is unmistakable. This essay will discuss how the diverse cultural environment of New Orleans in the 19th century allowed Alice Dunbar Nelson to create narratives which allowed her short stories to speak to the shifting identities of women and the social uncertainty of African Americans in the Jim Crow south. A consideration of New Orleans’ cultural history is important when reading Dunbar-Nelson’s work, whose significance has often been disregarded because of what some considered its lack of racial markers.

Read the entire thesis here.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• 1. “CREOLES OF ANY COLOR”
• 2. CARNIVAL AND CULTURAL SUBTERFUGE
• 3. CONVENTS AND CULTS
• CONCLUSION
• BIBLIOGRAPHY

“Well, It Is Because He’s Black”: A Critical Analysis of the Black President in Film and Television

Bowling Green State University
August 2011
183 pages

Phillip Lamarr Cunningham

Submitted to the Graduate College of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

With the election of the United States’ first black president Barack Obama, scholars have begun to examine the myriad of ways Obama has been represented in popular culture. However, before Obama’s election, a black American president had already appeared in popular culture, especially in comedic and sci-fi/disaster films and television series. Thus far, scholars have tread lightly on fictional black presidents in popular culture; however, those who have tend to suggest that these presidents—and the apparent unimportance of their race in these films—are evidence of the post-racial nature of these texts.
 
However, this dissertation argues the contrary. This study’s contention is that, though the black president appears in films and televisions series in which his presidency is presented as evidence of a post-racial America, he actually fails to transcend race. Instead, these black cinematic presidents reaffirm race’s primacy in American culture through consistent portrayals and continued involvement in comedies and disasters. In order to support these assertions, this study first constructs a critical history of the fears of a black presidency, tracing those fears from this nation’s formative years to the present. This history is followed by textual analyses of those films and television series featuring a black president, with an emphasis on showing how the narratives and codes within these films reflect those historic fears.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• INTRODUCTION
  • Filling the Void: Situating the Black President in Film Studies
• CHAPTER I: THE THING SO GREATLY FEARED: HISTORICIZING FEARS OF A BLACK PRESIDENCY
  • Harding, Jefferson, and Lincoln: White Presidents as the First “Black” Presidents
  • Fear of a Black Republic
  • From Impossible to Improbable
  • Jesse Jackson and the Changing Face of Politics
  • Powell for President
  • Return of the Black Cinematic President
• CHAPTER II: BEING BLACK MATTERS: A CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF THE MAN
  • The Man and the Apparently Declining Significance of Whiteness and Racism
  • Black Militancy as Barrier to Racial Harmony
  • Douglas Dilman: “A Well-Dressed Rebuttal to the Militants”
• CHAPTER III: THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT: BLACK CINEMATIC PRESIDENTS IN CRISIS
  • Fear of a Black President: The Birth of a Nation as Precursor
  • From Deep Impact to 2012: The Black President in Crisis
  • Modern Day Ben Camerons: White Heroes in Black Presidential Films
• CHAPTER IV: THIS COUNTRY IS UPSIDE DOWN! THE ABSURD BLACK CINEMATIC PRESIDENT
  • Not Exactly Ideal Presidents: Rufus Jones for President and Idiocracy
  • “That Ain’t Right”: Black Cinematic Presidents and the Act of “Laughing Mad”
• EPILOGUE: POLITICS AS USUAL: BLACK CINEMATIC PRESIDENTS IN THE OBAMA AGE
• WORKS CITED

Read the entire dissertation here.

Quilombismo and the Afro-Brazilian Quest for Citizenship

Journal of Black Studies
Volume 43, Number 8 (November 2012)
pages 847-871
DOI: 10.1177/0021934712461794

Niyi Afolabi, Professor of African & African Diaspora Studies
University of Texas, Austin

Between the radicalism of Black Brazilian movements of the 1980s, an aftermath of the negation and rejection of the myth of “racial democracy” that denies Brazilian subtle racism, the rise of re- Africanization sensibilities among Afro-Carnival groups, and the current ambivalent co-optation that has been packaged as “affirmative action” in the new millennium, a missing link to the many quests for Afro-Brazilianness lies in the (dis)locations that permeate the issues of identity, consciousness, and Africa-rootedness. Recent studies have remained invested in the polarity between the rigidity of “race” (one-drop rule) from the North American perspective and the fluidity of identity as professed by the South American miscegenation thesis. Regardless of the given schools of thought, or discourses, that have not resolved the oppressive sociopolitical realities on the ground, one must face the many levels of (dis)locations that define Afro-Brazilian identities. This essay draws upon the cultural productions of five Afro-Brazilian poets from various regions of Brazil, namely, Oliveira Silveira, Lepê Correia, Jamu Minka, Abelardo Rodrigues, and Carlos de Assumpção. Beyond exposing the marginalized poets to a wider readership in English, the essay also engages the current debate in the shift from racial democracy to affirmative action in Brazil and the implications for continued racial tensions and contradictions in the Brazilian state.

Read or purchase the article here.

Afro-Brazilians: Cultural Production in a Racial Democracy

University of Rochester Press (an imprint of Boydell & Brewer)
2009-04-01
443 pages
9 x 6
Hardback ISBN: 9781580462624
eBook ISBN: 9781580467100

Niyi Afolabi, Professor of African & African Diaspora Studies
University of Texas, Austin

Brazil, the most racially diverse Latin American country, is also the most contradictory: for centuries it has maintained fantasy as reality through the myth of racial democracy. Enshrined in that mythology is the masking of exclusionism that strategically displaces and marginalizes Afro-Brazilians from political power.

In this absorbing new study, Niyi Afolabi exposes the tensions between the official position on racial harmony and the reality of marginalization experienced by Afro-Brazilians by exploring Afro-Brazilian cultural production as a considered response to this exclusion. The author examines major contributions in music, history, literature, film, and popular culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to reveal how each performance by an Afro-Brazilian artist addresses issues of identity and racism through a variety of veils that entertain, ridicule, invoke, provoke, protest, and demand change at the same time.

Raising cogent questions such as the vital role of Afro-Brazilians in the making of Brazilian national identity; the representation of Brazilian women as hapless, exploited, and abandoned; the erosion of the influence of black movements due to fragmentation and internal disharmony; and the portrayal of Afro-Brazilians on the national screen as domestics, Afolabi provides insightful, nuanced analyses that tease out the complexities of the dilemma in their appropriate historical, political, and social contexts.

Contents

1. Negotiating Cultural Production in a Racial Democracy
2. Two Faces of Racial Democracy
3. Quilombhoje as a Cultural Collective
4. Beyond the Curtains: Unveiling Afro-Brazilian Women Writers
5. (Un)Broken Linkages
6. The Tropicalist Legacy of Gilberto Gil
7. Afro-Brazilian Carnival
8. Film and Fragmentation
9. Ancestrality and the Dynamics of Afro-Modernity
10. The Forerunners of Afro-Modernity
11. (Un)Transgressed Tradition
12. Ancestrality, Memory, and Citizenship
13. Quilombo without Frontiers
14. Ancestral Motherhood of Leci Brandao
15. The Future of Afro-Brazilian Cultural Production

Figuring Abjection: The Slave Mother in the Early Creole Novel

French Studies
Volume 67, Issue 1, January 2013
pages 61-75
DOI: 10.1093/fs/kns232

Maeve McCusker
School of Modern Languages
Queen’s University Belfast

While twentieth-century Caribbean literature in French has generated a substantial body of criticism, earlier writings have largely been neglected. This article begins by contextualizing the Creole novel of the 1830s in cultural and historical terms, then proceeds to analyse two novels published by Martinican authors in 1835: Outre-mer by Louis de Maynard de Queilhe and Les Créoles by Jules Levilloux. The few studies that exist of these texts tend to contrast their portrayal of the (male) mulatto; Levilloux has generally been considered the more progressive writer in this regard. However, both writers are in striking harmony in their depiction of the black mother, a figure (in both senses, as her physiognomy is central in her portrayal) who has until now been overlooked. In Outre-mer, as in Les Créoles, the elderly black mother is an abject and wretched creature, a source of phobic disgust. She has necessarily to be shown to be repulsive, filthy, and morally hideous in old age in order to counteract the fascination she provokes, and to embody a phantasized repellent to the desires of the white male.

Read or purchase the article here.

“Incestuous Sheets” and “Adulterate Beasts”: Incest and Miscegenation in Early Modern Drama

University of Michigan
2011
199 pages

Kentston D. Bauman

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (English Language and Literature)

This dissertation explores the centrality of incest and miscegenation in the early modern cultural imaginary. Incest, which occurs with surprising frequency in the drama of the period but with equally surprising scarcity in everyday social life, is frequently invoked in conjunction with miscegenation in all of its various forms (social, religious, ethnic/cultural/racial). As boundary phenomena – the two extreme ends of the spectrum of sexual alliance – incest and miscegenation served as powerful and surprisingly flexible dramatic tropes, providing a useful means of interrogating the social processes that create, instill, and redefine acceptable choices in sexual and social partners. I divide the project into two sections. In the first, I investigate the interplay among incest, social miscegenation, and social mobility. Looking at Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy and Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, I explore how these issues become filtered through the figure of the incestuous widow, whose treatment serves as both a critique of aristocratic hierarchies and a means of promoting sexual and social mobility. The second, which examines the relations between incest and ethnic miscegenation, centers on Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus. Noting that Shakespeare takes the incestuous rape in Ovid’s tale of Philomel and replaces it with the miscegenistic rape of Lavinia, I investigate how this transposition interrogates the family’s relationship to itself and to the state. I situate my readings of these plays in a socio-political context that takes into account two different, yet intricately connected, cultural issues: the painful transition of a society still highly stratified along feudal lines to one suddenly faced with the possibilities for radical economic and political advancement; and the anxieties of a culture just as suddenly exposed, through exploration and trade, to other geographic and cultural realms. The attempt to navigate the new terrain opened up by changes in the social, political, and geographic climate, I argue, disrupts long-established institutions – the family, marriage, hierarchical stratification. Significantly, the tensions between incest and miscegenation so apparent in the period’s drama express, in part, cultural anxieties fostered by a new social openness combined with a newly heightened sense of an enticing yet threatening Other.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• DEDICATION
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• CHAPTER
  • Introduction. Incest and Miscegenation on the Early Modern Stage
  • One. The Incestuous Widow and Social Mobility in Early Modern Drama
  • Two. Aristocratic Endogamy and Social Miscegenation in Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy and Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi
  • Three. “Unkind and Careless of Your Own”: Incest, Miscegenation, and Family in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus
  • Epilogue. Looking Forward: A Pattern for Reading
• BIBLIOGRAPHY

Read the entire dissertation here.

Blackface Cuba, 1840-1895

University of Pennsylvania Press
2005
288 pages
6 x 9
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8122-3867-9

Jill Lane, Associate Professor of  Theater and Performance Studies
New York University

Blackface Cuba, 1840-1895 offers a critical history of the relation between racial impersonation, national sentiment, and the emergence of an anticolonial public sphere in nineteenth-century Cuba. Through a study of Cuba’s vernacular theatre, the teatro bufo, and of related forms of music, dance, and literature, Lane argues that blackface performance was a primary site for the development of mestizaje, Cuba’s racialized national ideology, in which African and Cuban become simultaneously mutually exclusive and mutually formative.

Popular with white Cuban-born audiences during the period of Cuba’s anticolonial wars, the teatro bufo was celebrated for combining Spanish elements with supposedly African rhythms and choreography. Its wealth of short comic plays developed a well-loved repertory of blackface stock characters, from the negrito to the mulata, played by white actors in blackface. Lane contends that these practices were embraced by white audiences as especially national forms that helped define Cuba’s opposition to Spain, at the same time that they secured prevailing racial hierarchies for a future Cuban nation. Comparing the teatro bufo to related forms of racial representation, particularly those created by black Cubans in theatres and in the press, Lane analyzes performance as a form of social contestation through which an emergent Cuban national community struggled over conflicting visions of race and nation.

Table of Contents

• Preface. On the Translation of Race
• Introduction. ImpersoNation in Our America
• Chapter 1. Blackface Costumbrismo, 1840-1860
• Chapter 2. Anticolonial Blackface, 1868
• Chapter 3. Black(face) Public Spheres, 1880-1895
• Chapter 4. National Rhythm, Racial Adulteration, and the Danzón, 1881-82
• Chapter 5. Racial Ethnography and Literate Sex, 1888
• Conclusion. Cubans on the Moon, and Other Imagined Communities
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Acknowledgments

Remarkable Particulars: David Gamut and the Alchemy of Race in The Last of the Mohicans

ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance
Volume 58, Number 1, 2012 (No. 226 O.S.)
pages 36-70
DOI: 10.1353/esq.2012.0010

Deidre Dallas Hall
University of North Carolina, Greensboro

David Gamut, the hapless psalmodist traveling with Major Heyward and his charges in The Last of the Mohicans, could not appear less suited to life in the wilderness of upstate New York, a war zone fiercely contested by the French, the English, and the Indians. With a temperament “given to mercy and love,” the pious and pacific Gamut brandishes a pitch pipe instead of a rifle or a sword; according to the wily Hawk-eye, in a frontier fight, “this singer is as good as nothing.” Hawk-eye’s dismissal of Gamut mirrors critical neglect: as David Seed notes, “to judge by Cooper criticism David Gamut seems to be the most forgettable character” in the 1826 novel. Within wider considerations of Cooper’s text, Gamut appears only fleetingly as a figure of fun, a stock character “representing the absurdity and pathos in the wilderness of men who will not touch a gun but take quite literally the Christian injunction to return good for evil.” Such assessments stem from the ostensible “incongruity of his presence in the wilderness,” for “as a psalmodist, he can scarcely have any conceivable connection with the novel’s central themes of nostalgia for the disappearing Indian and anxiety over the question of miscegenation.”

However, I find the psalmodist more than “conceivably connected” to these themes. Complicating traditional readings that focus exclusively on the novel’s rhetorical reinforcement of nineteenth-century race thinking, I argue that this quirky character enables The Last of the Mohicans to introduce important exceptions to the racial rules. I read the body of David Gamut as a hybridized construction around which signs not only of the Puritan but also of the Indian and the Jew gather. This body increasingly emerges as a site of racial ambiguity, a screen upon which a drama of cultural flux unfolds—a drama that points to the pull of the disappearing Indian and push of the arriving immigrant in Cooper’s own time. Such representation suggests an active engagement, substantiated by retrospective reflections in Cooper’s travel writing and late novels on the increasing prominence of Jews in the early republic, with the contemporary discourse of probationary whiteness. Described by Matthew Jacobson as a kind of “racial alchemy,” this discourse “whitened” suspect Europeans such as Jews and Catholics through imaginary contrast with the Indian in the West and the slave in the South, facilitating a national consolidation of whiteness essential to the rhetoric of nonwhite removal and containment. With the astonishing survival of the hybridized, pseudo-Jewish Gamut, Cooper’s text seems to anticipate the masses of immigrants that would flood ports in the North only a few years after the publication of The Last of the Mohicans, but ultimately, this early work stands as uneasy witness to the discursive whitening of American Jews and questionable immigrants: when Cooper revisits the question of probationary whiteness in his last novel, The Oak Openings (1848), that narrative’s analogue to David Gamut quickly meets a violent end—a clear corrective to the racial redefinitions suggested by The Last of the Mohicans.
 
Jews in America: David Gamut and the Confluence of Race Thinking
 
The grotesquely attenuated figure of David Gamut appears in the opening moments of the narrative as a “marked exception” to the bystanders watching the departure of a British detachment from the frontier stronghold of Fort Edward. As this mysterious stranger falls in with the Duncan Heyward party, the narrator withholds the newcomer’s name and history, instead…