Mixed Race Studies

ENGLISH 56N: Mixed Race in the New Millennium: Crossings of Kin, Culture and Faith (Stanford Introductory Seminar)

Stanford University
Winter Quarter, 2011-2012

Michele Elam, Martin Luther King, Jr. Centennial Professor of English and Olivier Nomellini Family University Fellow in Undergraduate Education
Stanford University

Our course examines how literature, theater, graphic art and popular culture shape understandings of contemporary “mixed race” identity and other complex experiences of cultural hybridity. Course explores implications for racial identity, art, and politics for the new millennium.

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Mixed in America: Race, Religion, and Memoir (RELI 280, AFAN 282, or AMST 242)

Wesleyan University
Spring 2012

Elizabeth McAlister, Associate Professor of Religion

This course examines the history of “mixed-race” and “interfaith” identities in America. Using the genre of the memoir as a focusing lens, we will look at the various ways that Americans of mixed heritage have found a place, crafted an identity, and made meaning out of being considered “mixed.” How has being multiracial or bi-religious changed in the course of history in the United States? What has occasioned these changes, and what patterns can we observe? We will explore questions of racial construction; religious boundary-making; rites of passage, gender, sexuality and marriage; and some literary and media representations of mixed-heritage people.

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Hybrid Identities, Authentic Selves (SS-0217)

Hampshire College, Amherst, Massachusetts
Spring Term 2011

Kimberly Chang, Associate Professor of Cultural Psychology

This course explores two related concepts—hybridity and authenticity—that underlie many present-day struggles over cultural identity and representation. The former calls attention to the multiplicity of social identities that vie for recognition within a person, while the latter emphasizes what is unique or essential to the self. While the hybrid is often charged with being inauthentic or fake, claims to authenticity are frequently criticized for being exclusive or reactionary. How do we negotiate among multiple and often contending identities? When do we feel the need to claim an authentic self? What are the pressures to do so and what purpose do such claims serve? We will read across disciplinary perspectives—including history, philosophy, psychology and literature—and explore these questions through both analytical and creative forms. While the “mixed race” experience will be the primary lens for the course, we will interrogate the ways that racial categories intersect with other axis of difference in the making of selves, identities, and communities.

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Controversy: Race and Sexuality on the American Frontier (FRO 100.023)

Goucher College, Baltimore, Maryland

Angelo Robinson, Associate Professor of English

“Am I Black or White? Am I Straight or Gay? CONTROVERSY?”  Since its founding, and long before recording artist Prince penned these lyrics in the 1980s, America has been a space and a place demanding and mandating polarized definitions of race and sexuality. This course will examine the reasoning behind and ramifications of these dichotomies from the Colonial Period to the present in genres that include literature, film, and music.  We will also explore how these binaries affect people who identify as biracial and bisexual.

This discussion-based course requires intensive reading, viewing, and listening and will foster your critical thinking and analytical writing.  Topics of discussion will include the “one-drop rule,” the slavery debate, miscegenation, racial passing, segregation, integration, interracial desire, and sexual passing.  Special attention will be given to individuals who and organizations that refuse to follow racial and sexual dictates. Authors will include Thomas Jefferson, Harriet Jacobs, Mark Twain, Nella Larsen, James Weldon Johnson, Ralph Ellison, June Jordan, James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, Stevie Wonder, Prince, Adrienne Rich, E. Lynn Harris, and Barack Obama.

NHUM3031 Passing: (Re)Constructing Identity

The New School
Fall 2009

Tracyann Williams, Instructor

Passing: (Re)Constructing Identity: “Passing,” a term traditionally used to describe fair-skinned Blacks posing as whites, is, in fact, part of a broader cultural phenomenon that has its origins in the pursuit of “the American Dream.” For the sake of economic comforts, racially, ethnically, and sexually diverse individuals submerge certain aspects of their identity in order to “pass” into the community of “whiteness.” Passing comes with obvious advantages, but for some, great personal sacrifice. We read Helen Fremont’s memoir detailing the ethnic (and religious) journey taken by her parents, Nella Larsen’s multilayered novel Passing, and Diane Wood Middlebrook’s biography of gender-crossing jazz musician Billy Tipton. We examine how particular individuals become white while whiteness remains unattainable by others. We draw on “whiteness studies,” an interdisciplinary field that decenters hegemonic markers connected to white dominance, and through this lens, we explore the racial, ethnic, and sexual biases embedded in our culture that have propelled individuals to reinvent themselves. At the dawn of the 21st century, these biases are supposedly less potent. We test this assumption by examining passing in the contemporary context.

Race and Mixed Race

University of Michigan
College of Literature, Science, and the Arts
American Culture
AMCULT 311 –  Topics in Ethnic Studies
Section 001
Fall 2011

Evelyn Azeeza Alsultany, Assistant Professor of American Culture

This course examines how conceptions of race and mixed race have been historically shaped through law, science, and popular culture. In addition to examining the ways in which race has been socially constructed and how its meanings have changed over time, the course also explores the politics of interracial marriage, contemporary mixed race identities, and cross-racial adoption. Through an examination of historical, sociological, and autobiographical texts, the course explores a variety of themes including: census classifications, affirmative action, notions of colorblindness, questions of appearance, “authenticity,” community belonging, and the debates around the mixed race movement. Course requirements include posting a weekly discussion question, two in-class exams, and a final group project.

Mixed Dreams: Exploring “Multi” Experiences in the U.S.

EXCO (Experimental College)
Spring 2011
Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio

Nicole Asong Nfonoyim

The experiences and identities of mixed-race people in the United States have often been marginalized if not rendered invisible, silenced and subsumed under the dominant black-white binary. While mixed identities have been part of U.S. history since the nation’s birth, the year 2010 marked only the second time in U.S. history that Americans will be able to check more than one racial/ethnic category in the census. From the overwhelming 6.8 million individuals who checked “more than one box” in the 2000 U.S. Census to the election of President Barack Obama (a self-proclaimed “mutt”)—“multi”* Americans are gaining unprecedented visibility in the 21st century. With this visibility, however comes inevitable scrutiny and ambivalence as evidenced by debates over Obama’s racial identity as well as the mixed racial ancestry of the growing number of U.S-born Latino/as who are gaining considerable social and political ground. With a nation so obsessed with race and yet as intent on hastening a post-racial era on the backs of Americans of color, re-imagining conceptions of race and mixed identities has never been more important.

This course will provide an introduction to contemporary discussions, debates and narratives surrounding multi America. By reading and discussing scholarly, literary, editorial, and visual texts we will critically examine the spaces multi people occupy in the U.S. as well as the identity politics and perspectives that mark these experiences. We will also explore the growing narratives and spaces being created to build communities and express multi subjectivities. Through class discussions, assignments and a final project, students will also be encouraged to explore their own identities and subjectivities as they relate to larger discourses and narratives around race and intersecting identities.

Oberlin’s Experimental College (ExCo) is a student-run initiative that allows all members of the Oberlin community to teach and take courses outside the scope of the college’s traditional curriculum. With its flexible nature, the program reflects the current intellectual, social, and aesthetic trends of the Oberlin community, providing opportunities to explore or expand upon subject matter beyond the usual course offerings.

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Race and Mixed Race (LS 355)

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Fall 2011

Explores the history of racial classification in the U.S. with special attention to the census and the role of the state more generally in defining race. Emphasis on how race-mixing has been understood in American culture, and on the current literature on “multiracials” and the future of “race” in the U.S. Readings are drawn from interdisciplinary sources, but examined from a sociological perspective. Same as AAS 355 and SOC 355.

SOCY 57: Identity and Social Interaction of Multiracial Americans

Dartmouth College
Department of Sociology
Upper Division

Currently being taught as of Spring 2011

Melissa R. Herman, Assistant Professor of Sociology

The 2000 Census revealed that nearly 4% of youth and 2% of adult Americans belong to more than one racial category. What are the social, historical, and biological meanings of the term multi-racial? What are the challenges and benefits associated with belonging to more than one race group? How do multi-racial youth negotiate the path to developing a healthy identity differently than mono-racial youth? How has the social context of race changed the way multiracial people identify? We will consider how schools, families, peer groups, and neighborhoods influence the development of biracial Americans. (Course syllabus)

French110s: From Haiti to New Orleans

John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute
Duke University
Fall 2010

Deborah Jenson

Haiti Lab: Undergraduate Opportunities

The first Humanities Laboratory at Duke, one of the key goals of the Haiti Lab is to bring innovative, interdisciplinary research more fully into the undergraduate experience at Duke and, indeed, to invite undergraduates to participate as researchers themselves.

The Haitian Revolution  (1791-1804) was a successful revolution against slavery, leading to the defeat of the French armies of Napoleon Bonaparte and the establishment of the first black republic in the New World. During the revolution, many Creole planters (white and of mixed race) and their households, including slaves, sought refuge elsewhere; by 1809, the population of New Orleans actually doubled with this “Haitian” influx. How did the culture and literature of nineteenth century New Orleans reflect Haitian influences? We will read fascinating Francophone New Orleans literature about the socio-racially complex cultures of slavery, the bourgeoisie, and the planters’ “aristocracy” in Louisiana. Did you know you could learn about the U.S. Civil War through French-language New Orleans novels that also integrate Creole poetry from colonial Saint-Domingue? Or that the first African-American short story was written in French, about Haiti? We will read about the drama of the historical Haitian maroon slave and poisoner Macandal, and about the Haiti-influenced libertine culture that bound together white men and women of color in the common law structure of plaçage. Students will do cultural research projects on subjects such as the cultural roots of Creole and Cajun cuisine, the Quadroon Balls, or the “voodoo queen” Marie Laveaux. In this course on French literature in our own historical and regional “backyard,” students will also explore the Haitian inspiration of Durham’s historic black “Hayti” neighborhood. Course taught in French.

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