Mixed Race Studies

English 190: Research Seminar: Literature of Racial Passing

University of California, Berkeley
Spring 2012

Cecil S. Giscombe, Professor of English

A passing narrative is an account—fiction or nonfiction—of a person (or group) claiming a racial or ethnic identity that she does not (or they do not) “possess.” Such narratives speak—directly, indirectly, and very uneasily—to the authenticity, the ambiguity, and the performance of personal identity; they also speak to issues of official and traditional categorization. The passing 
narrative—the narrative that accounts for making the “different” claim—necessarily unsettles notions of belonging and ownership and underscores that race can be viewed as a construction or a series of conventions.

The course will investigate the public nature of race by examining narratives—published and unpublished stories, novels, memoirs, and films—that call the absoluteness of its boundaries into question. We’ll look as well at texts that treat racial and sexual imitation—minstrelsy, “yellow-face,” drag, etc. All said, we’ll be looking rather closely at books and movies that reveal, document, question, and celebrate ambiguous spaces in an imposing structure, one often assumed to be “natural.”

We’ll likely read Karen Brodkin’s How Jews Became White Folks, James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, Nella Larsen’s Passing, Philip Roth’s The Human Stain, Gene Yang’s American-Born Chinese, Kenji Yoshino’s Covering, essays by Gloria Anzaldua, Noel Ignatiev, Henry Louis Gates, etc. Films will probably include Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil, Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Alien: Resurrection, Louis King’s Charlie Chan in Egypt, Alan Crosland’s The Jazz Singer, etc.

Position papers, discussions led by class members, possible midterm, final 12-15 page writing project involving research. Hybrid projects are welcome and encouraged.

The book list is tentative. Students should come to class before buying books.

ENGL 773 (or) ENGL 873: Topics in Minority Literature: (W)Rites of Passing: Narratives of Shifting African American Identities

Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Indiana, Pennsylvania
Fall 2012

Veronica Watson, Associate Professor of English

“Passing” is a term that has, until quite recently, been used to refer almost exclusively to a person classified by society as a member of one racial group choosing to live as a member of a different racial/ethnic group. In the U.S. it was borne out of an oppressive racial classification system that placed African American at the bottom of a hierarchy that denied them basic human, social, and political rights. Passing, as narrative content and form, has traditionally been understood as a response to those conditions, a critique of American social systems, and a revealing argument about the ambiguity of “race.” This almost sociological approach to reading the phenomenon of passing in literature accounts for the canonization of a fairly narrow list of titles within African American literature.
 
In this class we will engage a broader mix of 19th-21st century texts as passing narratives than is typically considered. We will also expand our understanding of the passing narrative by examining contemporary scholarship on the topic, like Mary Balkun’s The American Counterfeit: Authenticity and Identity in American Literature and Culture, Steven Belluscio’s To Be Suddenly White: Literary Realism and Racial Passing, Juda Bennett’s The Passing Figure: Racial Confusion in Modern American Literature, and Laura Browder’s Slippery Characters: Ethnic Impersonators and American Identities.

By the end of the class you are sure to have a new appreciation of the complexities and richness of these works and to have thought about new research trajectories that could lead to cutting-edge scholarship and publication opportunities.

The tentative literary reading list is as follows:
 
Charles Chesnutt: House Behind the Cedars
Willam and Ellen Craft: Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom
Grace Halsell, Soul Sister
Jessie Redmond Fauset: Plum Bun
Pauline Hopkins, Of One Blood
James Weldon Johnson: Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man
Nella Larsen, Passing
Martha A. Sandweiss, Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line
George Schuyler, Black No More
Danzy Senna, Caucasia
Walter White, Flight

Performance Studies: Interracialism: Performing Mixed Race (H42.2090)

New York University
Department of Social & Cultural Analysis: American Studies

This course will survey the emergent field of  ‘critical mixed race studies’ with a particular emphasis on the black experience in the Americas. How have people of African descent been alternately excluded from and incorporated into discourses of miscegenation and mestizaje? What role has performance played in the construction of racial categories like ‘the mulatto‘ and ‘the one-drop rule‘? How have black people sought to alternately challenge and exploit those constructions? Has the trope of ‘passing‘ helped preserve an essentialist concept of race amidst widespread racial mixing? Do recent developments around the performance of identity point toward a moment in black cultural politics that is leading us ‘beyond passing’? We will read broadly and interdisciplinarily, examining the law, politics, performance, visual culture, literature, critical theory, statistics, sociology, philosophy and anthropology as various sites in which interracialism has historically been staged.

SO 3300: ‘Race’and ‘Mixed Race’

Forham University
Spring 2010

The origins of ‘race,’its historic role and social construction are examined. Ancient and modern-day ideas are explored. Contrasts between the United States and Latin American concepts of ‘race’ and ‘mixed race’ are analyzed. Future implications are discussed.

AmSt 201 W: The American Experience: Institutions and Movements: Mixed Race in America

University of Hawaii
Spring 2010

Students will gain familiarity with American Mixed Race theory, and politics as well as explore first hand literary accounts by mixed race individuals. Analysis of social and political narratives about Mixed Race people will be facilitated by examining fiction, media, and popular culture as well as government documents and official U.S. Government websites. Topics include European and Native American contact; the Dawes Commission; Jim Crow laws and One Drop ideology; U.S. anti-miscegenation laws; Supreme Court decisions; Blood Quotas in Native American and Hawaiian contexts; the Homestead Act and the Akaka Bill; the U.S. Census and Multi-Racial Americans; Mixed Race activism; and the political effect of bi-raciality on President Obama’s election campaign.

IRISH-GA 1085: Black Irish Writing

Gluckman Ireland House
New York University
Spring 2010

This course examines the textual force-fields of similarity and difference in the writing of racial and ethnic identities in the Atlantic World.  It begins by considering works of Irish writers who engaged with Atlantic slavery and the sympathetic and testamentary discourses within abolitionism in the late 18th century; authors discussed include Hugh Mulligan, Mary Ledbetter, Edmund Burke, Thomas Brannigan, and Denis Driscoll.  The course then examines the over-lapping traces of radical and revolutionary memory in American slavery and in Irish politics, concentrating on the roles of Irish figures in the writings of Frederick Douglass and Black figures in the writings and speeches of Daniel O’Connell.  The mid-19th century explosion of writing about race and ethnicity following the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin will be explored in relation to the many imitations of Stowe’s novel that sought to explain post-famine Ireland.  The course then considers the proliferation of texts that sought to understand the antinomies of desire and prohibition surrounding persons of mixed race, reading works by Mayne Reid, Dion Boucicault, and Charles Chesnutt. Texts that convey the fusion of African-American and Irish cultural forms will be discussed, including Blackface, Minstrelsy, and Dance.  After consideration of the use of race in the development of anti-Irish caricature (via readings of English (Punch) and American (Thomas Nast and the Nativists) cartoonists), the course will conclude by looking at shared and divergent textual and political strategies in writers of the Irish and Harlem Renaissances, concentrating on the ambivalence of dialect writing (Finley Peter Dunne, John Synge, Paul Laurence Dunbar and Claude McKay), and the limits of modernist primitivism (Eugene O’Neill’s “The Emperor Jones”).  The course will conclude with a discussion of the politics of memory along and across the color line in contemporary Irish and American public life.  Primary readings will be supplemented by theoretical and critical texts, including works by Paul Gilroy, Ian Baucom, Eric Lott, Robert Young, Perry Curtis, Marx, Freud, and Foucault.

HIST 465: Mestizos, Métis, and Mulattos: Mixed-Race People in the Atlantic World, 1400-1850

Lawrence University, Appleton Wisconsin
Fall 2012

This course examines how race worked in the Atlantic World (Africa, Europe, and the Americas) between 1400 and 1850 through the perspectives of mixed-race individuals and communities. We will use a comparative framework to understand how people created, resisted, and used their cross-racial identities to navigate their lives. (Also listed as Ethnic Studies 465)

ASTD 393-03 – Mixed Race America

Saint Louis University
Fall 2012

Heidi Ardizzone, Assistant Professor of American Studies 

Despite popular images of American as a “melting” both of races and ethnicities, our institutions, values, and practices have often tried to create or maintain spatial and social distance between groups defined as racially different. This course will explore that ways in which Americans have transgressed those boundaries or found other ways of interacting across cultural lines, primarily in the 19th and 20th centuries. We will examine popular cultural perceptions of people of mixed ancestry, their social experiences, the development of various mixed-ancestry communities, and historical attempts to limit interracial socializing, relationships, and marriage. These issues were and are deeply embedded in debates over the meaning of race, gender expectations and ideas about sex and sexuality. We will also pay close attention to how minority communities have understood people of mixed ancestry in the United States, and how mixed-race identities intersect with African American, Native American, Asian, White, and Latino identities.

View the Syllabus here.

AFAM 349a/AMST 326a/WGSS 388a: Interraciality and Hybridity

Yale University
Fall 2011

Naomi Pabst, Assistant Professor of African American Studies and American Studies
Yale University

Examination of mixed-race matters in both literary and critical writings, primarily within the black/white schema.  Historical and current questions of black and interracial identity; the contemporary “mixed race movement” and the emerging rubric of “critical mixed race studies”; historical genealogy and interraciality and hybridity.  Analysis of longstanding debates on race mixing in the realms of legal classification, transracial adoption, census taking, grassroots movements, the discursive, the ideological, and the popular.

EPSY 203: Exploring Biracial/multiracial Identity Course Description

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
(Part of the EPSY 203: Social Issues Group Dialogue Courses)

EPSY 203 provides students with opportunities to converse on diversity and social justice topic areas. Each section uses a structured dialogue format to explore intergroup and intragroup differences and similarities within historical and contemporary contexts. Each section uses active learning exercises, in addition to weekly readings, reflective writing assignments, and topic-based dialogues. EPSY 203 may be repeated in separate terms to a maximum of 6 hours.

This course explores biracial/multiracial identities offers a dialogue opportunity for students to explore the different concepts, perspectives and experiences of individuals identifying as having a biracial and/or a multiracial identity within the United States. Students will have an opportunity to personally explore, understand, and describe their understandings of biracial and multiracial identities and how those identities have changed over time. The course will focus on the implications for group definitions, personal and community identities, relationships and culture.