Mixed Race Studies

Who is an Indian?: Race, Place, and the Politics of Indigeneity in the Americas

University of Toronto Press
August 2013
272 pages
Paper ISBN: 9780802095527
Cloth ISBN: 9780802098184

Edited by:

Maximilian C. Forte, Associate Professor of Sociology and Anthropology
Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada

Who is an Indian? This is possibly the oldest question facing Indigenous peoples across the Americas, and one with significant implications for decisions relating to resource distribution, conflicts over who gets to live where and for how long, and clashing principles of governance and law. For centuries, the dominant views on this issue have been strongly shaped by ideas of both race and place. But just as important, who is permitted to ask, and answer this question?

This collection examines the changing roles of race and place in the politics of defining Indigenous identities in the Americas. Drawing on case studies of Indigenous communities across North America, the Caribbean, Central America, and South America, it is a rare volume to compare Indigenous experience throughout the western hemisphere. The contributors question the vocabulary, legal mechanisms, and applications of science in constructing the identities of Indigenous populations, and consider ideas of nation, land, and tradition in moving indigeneity beyond race.

Contents

• Preface
• Introduction: “Who Is an Indian?” The Cultural Politics of a Bad Question / Maximilian C. Forte (Concordia University, Sociology and Anthropology)
• Chapter One: Inuitness and Territoriality in Canada / Donna Patrick (Carleton University, Sociology and Anthropology and the School of Canadian Studies)
• Chapter Two: Federally-Unrecognized Indigenous Communities in Canadian Contexts / Bonita Lawrence (York University, Equity Studies)
• Chapter Three: The Canary in the Coalmine: What Sociology Can Learn from Ethnic Identity Debates among American Indians / Eva Marie Garroutte (Boston College, Sociology) and C. Matthew Snipp (Stanford University, Sociology)
• Chapter Four : “This Sovereignty Thing”: Nationality, Blood, and the Cherokee Resurgence / Julia Coates (University of California Davis, Native American Studies)
• Chapter Five: Locating Identity: The Role of Place in Costa Rican Chorotega Identity / Karen Stocker (California State University, Anthropology)
• Chapter Six: Carib Identity, Racial Politics, and the Problem of Indigenous Recognition in Trinidad and Tobago / Maximilian C. Forte (Concordia University, Anthropology)
• Chapter Seven: Encountering Indigeneity: The International Funding of Indigeneity in Peru / José Antonio Lucero (University of Washington, The Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies)
• Chapter Eight: The Color of Race: Indians and Progress in a Center-Left Brazil / Jonathan Warren (University of Washington, International Studies, Chair of Latin American Studies)
• Conclusion: Seeing Beyond the State and Thinking beyond the State of Sight / Maximilian C. Forte (Concordia University, Sociology and Anthropology)
• Contributors
• Index

Becoming Melungeon: Making an Ethnic Identity in the Appalachian South

University of Nebraska Press
2013
232 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-8032-7154-8

Melissa Schrift, Associate Professor of Anthropology
East Tennessee State University

Appalachian legend describes a mysterious, multiethnic population of exotic, dark-skinned rogues called Melungeons who rejected the outside world and lived in the remote, rugged mountains in the farthest corner of northeast Tennessee. The allegedly unknown origins of these Melungeons are part of what drove this legend and generated myriad exotic origin theories. Though nobody self-identified as Melungeon before the 1960s, by the 1990s “Melungeonness” had become a full-fledged cultural phenomenon, resulting in a zealous online community and annual meetings where self-identified Melungeons gathered to discuss shared genealogy and history. Although today Melungeons are commonly identified as the descendants of underclass whites, freed African Americans, and Native Americans, this ethnic identity is still largely a social construction based on local tradition, myth, and media.

In Becoming Melungeon, Melissa Schrift examines the ways in which the Melungeon ethnic identity has been socially constructed over time by various regional and national media, plays, and other forms of popular culture. Schrift explores how the social construction of this legend evolved into a fervent movement of a self-identified ethnicity in the 1990s. This illuminating and insightful work examines these shifting social constructions of race, ethnicity, and identity both in the local context of the Melungeons and more broadly in an attempt to understand the formation of ethnic groups and identity in the modern world.

Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Race, Identity, and the Melungeon Legend
• Chapter 1: Inventing the Melungeons
• Chapter 2: Melungeons and Media Representation
• Chapter 3: Playing the First Melungeons
• Chapter 4: Becoming Melungeon
• Chapter 5: The Mediterranean Mystique
• Chapter 6: The Melungeon Core
• Closing Thoughts
• Appendix 1: Melungeon Questionnaire
• Appendix 2: Media Articles
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index

Sex and Race, Volume I: Negro-Caucasian Mixing in All Ages and All Lands: The Old World

J. A. Rogers (1880-1966)

Helga Rogers
1941 (Ninth Edition, 1967)
302 pages
ISBN-13: 978-0960229406; ISBN 10: 096022940X

Table of Contents

• I. RACE TODAY
• II. WHICH IS THE OLDEST RACE?
• III. THE MIXING OF BLACK AND WHITE IN THE ANCIENT EAST
• IV. BLACK AND WHITE IN SYRIA, PALESTINE, ARABIA, PERSIA
• V. WHO WERE THE FIRST INHABITANTS OF INDIA?
• VI. WHO WERE THE FIRST CHINESE?
• VII. THE NEGRO IN ANCIENT GREECE
• VIII. NEGROES IN ANCIENT ROME AND CARTHAGE
• IX. WERE THE JEWS ORIGINALLY NEGROES?
• X. RACE-MIXING UNDER ISLAM
• XI. RACE-MIXING UNDER ISLAM (Cont’d)
• XII. MIXING OF WHITE AND BLACK IN AFRICA SOUTH OF THE SAHARA
• XIII. MISCEGENATION IN SOUTH AFRICA
• XIV. RACE-MIXING IN AFRICA AND ASIA TODAY
• XV. MISCEGENATION IN SPAIN. PORTUGAL, AND ITALY
• XVI. MISCEGENATION IN HOLLAND, BELGIUM, AUSTRIA, POLAND, RUSSIA
• XVII. NEGRO-WHITE MIXING IN GERMANY, ANCIENT AND MODERN
• XVIII. THE MIXING OF WHITES AND BLACKS IN THE BRITISH ISLES
• XIX. MISCEGENATION IN FRANCE
• XX. ISABEAU, BLACK VENUS OF THE REIGN OF LOUIS XV
• XXI. THE BLACK NUN–MULATTO DAUGHTER OF MARIA THERESA, QUEEN OF FRANCE
• XXII. BAUDELAIRE AND JEANNE DUVAL
• APPENDICES
  • Race-mixing in European Literature
  • Did the Negro Originate in Africa or Asia?
  • Black Gods and Messiahs
  • History of the Black Madonnas
  • Notes and References to the Negro under Islam
  • List of the Illustrations and Notes on Them

Chapter One: RACE TODAY

“A Charm of Powerful Trouble”

The conception of races once so innocent,” said Jean Finot, “has cast a veil of tragedy over the earth. From without it shows us humanity divided into unequal fractions… From within this same falsely conceived science of races likewise encourages hatred and discord among the children of the same common country . . . People against people, race against race . . . persecution and extermination on every hand.”

One writer has called it a Frankenstein monster. But that comparison is far too feeble. However, it has this point of resemblance: Frankenstein’s monster was built of scraps—scraps of corpses, a hand from this one, an eye from that, a patch of skin from this other. The evil genie of race it also created from scraps—scraps of false philosophies of past centuries; a quotation from this or that prejudiced traveller; lines from this and that semi-ignorant divine of colonial days; excerpts from Gobineau, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, the Bible; passages from this or that badly mixed-up ethnologist, all jumbled together with catch-phrases from greedy plantation owners, slave-dealers, and other traffickers in human flesh.

The purpose was to create a “pure” race, a “superior” race, a race that like the philosopher’s stone of the ancients, excelled all excellence—a race so meritorious that it had the right to enslave and use the rest of humanity.

Every newly discovered bit of anthropology was twisted into building this doctrine of a “superior” race. A Putnam Weale worked most industriously on this part of it; a Tom Dixon, Madison Grant, and Lothrop Stoddard on that; a William McDougall and a Frederick Hoffman busied themselves with that other, while a host of Southern politicians and other lesser fry assisted…

…As for the mixed-blood, he ought never to have been. No amount of Christianity or religious training, we are informed, will give him good heredity, and this as late as 1935 by no less an authority than the learned Victoria Society of London, England. In short, the mixed-blood is a creation of Satan. “God made the white man and God made the black man” said Colonial America, “but the Devil made the mulatto.”

The white race flowed from “a pure source”: Europe. Miscegenation with blacks there was unknown throughout the ages, we are told. “It was not until the discovery of the New World that the races of men strikingly different in appearance came to intermix,” says Crawfurd. Before that, he says, inferior races did mix with superior races, but both were white.

Nothing, however, is further from the truth. We shall show in these pages that sex relations between so-called whites and blacks go back to prehistoric times and on all the continents. Furthermore, since it is held by many that it is only the mixing of the black man and the white woman that can affect the “purity of the race” that it is precisely this kind that happened most in Europe…

Read the entire book here.

Race Reconciled Re-Debunks Race – Anthropology 1.6

Living Anthropologically: Anthropology – Understanding – Possibility
2013-02-27

Jason Antrosio, Associate Professor of Anthropology
Hartwick College, Oneonta, New York

In May 2009, the American Journal of Physical Anthropology published Race Reconciled, a special issue with cutting-edge work by biological anthropologists. These researchers have read the critique of Richard Lewontin, and some have been in the forefront of re-examining Lewontin’s work (see previous section Attacking Anthropology and the Race Revival and see also the post on Teaching Race Anthropologically). These researchers do not agree on everything, and they have pointed debates. They are from the number-crunching and bone-measuring side of anthropology. Some of the articles are dense and difficult reading, with enough numbers, statistical tables, and computer simulations to make it hardly like reading at all.

Still, it is important to plow through the findings, because it is what our best bone measurers and number crunchers can accomplish. They very clearly recognize human biological variation. They see variation and measure it every day, examining things people cannot even visibly discern, like tiny bone markers and genetic material. And with all the disagreements, number-crunching, and consideration of how much humans vary, they agree,

“Race is not an accurate or productive way to describe human biological variation” –Heather J.H. Edgar and Keith L. Hunley, Race Reconciled, 2009:2

Why?…

Read the entire article here.

About Biracials Learning About African-American Culture or B.L.A.A.C.

Biracials Learning About African-American Culture or B.L.A.A.C.
2013-06-18

Zebulon Miletsky, Assistant Professor of Africana Studies
Stony Brook University, State University of New York

The idea for this blog came from several discussions with students and young people who come from mixed-race backgrounds, especially so-called “white and black” biracials who, for whatever reason, grew up without learning very much about African-American life, history or culture. Whether they be trans-racially adopted, grew up in a home without the biological black parent or were perhaps raised in an area without many black people, the probability for people of mixed race descent to grow up without a solid, positive grounding in the black experience is much higher for reasons that will become fairly obvious. Not so obvious at times, however, is the more complicated truth of racism in America, a past deeply rooted in the ugly practice of white supremacy and centuries of stigmatization of African-American culture, heritage and contributions. This phenomenon, known to some scholars as “Anti-blackness”, has done more to confuse and ultimately divide than perhaps any other factor…

Read the entire article here.

Empathetic eye

Agência FAPESP: News Agency of the Sao Paulo Research Foundation
2011-06-08

Fábio de Castro

Agência FAPESP – In 1865, an expedition led by Swiss natural scientist Louis Agassiz (1807-1873) of Harvard University travelled around Brazil for 15 months to study the country. Among the voluntary collectors that participated in the expedition was a 23 year old medical student, William James (1842-1910), who would later become one of the most influential American thinkers, known mainly as one of the creators of pragmatic philosophy. 

Organized by professor Maria Helena Toledo Machado of the History Department of Universidade de São Paulo’s (USP) Philosophy, Letters and Human Sciences School (FFLCH), the book Brazil through the eyes of William James covers  the large volume of writing and drawings produced by the young James during the expedition. Unlike the travel logs typical of the period, the material left by James reveals a sensitive and empathetic traveler with unique perspectives on the nature and society of Brazil.

The book was launched on April 7 at the USP’s Maria Antônia University Center, during the opening of the exhibition Rastros e raças de Louis Agassiz: fotografia, corpo e ciência (Traces of Louis Agassiz: photography, body and science), a collection of a series of photographs obtained during the expedition on Brazilian racial types…

…James’ perspective also significantly contrasts with the bias expressed by the expedition. Agassiz, founder of Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, intended to collect fish specimen and data on their geographic distribution in Brazil, with a view to contesting Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, which he opposed.

During the trip – known as the Thayer Expedition because it was financed by magnate Nathaniel Thayer-, Agassiz became interested in studying the population, taking the initiative to document Brazilian racial types through photography with a view evaluating the results of miscegenation. The work is one of the main photographic registers of Brazil in the 19th century.

“Agassiz was a creationist and the scientific and racial focus of the expedition is a bit backwards. But this did not affect James’ perspective. Highly sensitive, he developed what I would characterize as empathy, which would be manifested throughout his work. He shows a great capacity to understand the world from the other’s perspective. Instead of the paternalistic and pious approach common among other travelers of the time, he got involved with people and managed to understand the profound differences of this unfamiliar society,” affirms Machado.

Miscegenation

According to the historian, the position James exhibited in his expedition diaries are reflected throughout the life of the thinker. Later, he would fight against imperialism, defend Darwinism, become a follower of relativism – which garnered much criticism – and would develop the notion of stream of consciousness.

“All these ideas are coherent to his manner of approaching reality, manifested during his time in Brazil. In his writings, he deconstructs the exotic perspective, the incomprehensible other, the foreigner alienated from the codes of local social life,” says Machado…

Read the entire article here.

Masculinity and whiteness in the construction of the Brazilian Republic

Agência FAPESP: News Agency of the São Paulo Research Foundation
2013-06-12

José Tadeu Arantes

Sexual discipline and whitening of the population were the guidelines of the conservative modernization promoted by the elite, affirms study

Agência FAPESP – Masculinity and whiteness were the ideals of the Brazilian elite at the end of the 19th century — ideals that represented rejection of Brazil’s colonial and monarchical past and the mixed-race heritage of its people and defining a model of sexual discipline and whitening on which to build the Brazil of the future.

From the perspective of this elite, which was at once conservative and modern, the past and the people were associated with nature, instincts and backwardness. The model that inspired the elite was the idealized portrait of more developed countries in Europe and the United States. That idea is the main thread of the book “The Desire of a Nation” by Richard Miskolci, professor in the Department of Sociology at the Universidade Federal de São Carlos (UFSCar) and coordinator of the study group “Bodies, Identities and Subjectivations,” which brings together several Brazilian universities.

The book, which was the result of post-doctoral studies at the University of Michigan in 2008 and a FAPESP Research Grant, also received funding from FAPESP for publication. The book explores how the desires and fears of this elite promoted the transition from a monarchy to a republic and the conservative modernization of the country.

“It investigated the national ideas running against the grain through analysis of the specters that haunted our elite: from fear of Negros, which after abolition became a fear of common people, to sexual anxieties and gender, which threatened the project of building a nation based on the idealized image of Europe,” commented Miskolci, who is currently a visiting professor at the Department of Feminist Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz…

Read the entire article here.

Image Matters: Archive, Photography, and the African Diaspora in Europe

Duke University Press
2012
256 pages
118 photographs, 10 illustrations
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-5074-3
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8223-5056-9

Tina M. Campt, Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies and Director of the Africana Studies Program
Barnard College

In Image Matters, Tina M. Campt traces the emergence of a black European subject by examining how specific black European communities used family photography to create forms of identification and community. At the heart of Campt’s study are two photographic archives, one composed primarily of snapshots of black German families taken between 1900 and 1945, and the other assembled from studio portraits of West Indian migrants to Birmingham, England, taken between 1948 and 1960. Campt shows how these photographs conveyed profound aspirations to forms of national and cultural belonging. In the process, she engages a host of contemporary issues, including the recoverability of non-stereotypical life stories of black people, especially in Europe, and their impact on our understanding of difference within diaspora; the relevance and theoretical approachability of domestic, vernacular photography; and the relationship between affect and photography. Campt places special emphasis on the tactile and sonic registers of family photographs, and she uses them to read the complexity of “race” in visual signs and to highlight the inseparability of gender and sexuality from any analysis of race and class. Image Matters is an extraordinary reflection on what vernacular photography enabled black Europeans to say about themselves and their communities.

Types of Mankind: or, Ethnological Researches, Based Upon the Ancient Monuments, Paintings, Sculptures, and Crania or Races and Upon their Natural, Geographical, Philological and Biblical History [Second Edition]

Lippincott, Grambo & Co.
1854
738 pages

J. C. Nott, M.D.
Mobile, Alabama

Geo. R. Gliddon, Egyptologist
Former U.S. Consul to Egypt

CONTENTS

• FRONTISPIECE — Portrait or Samuel George Morton. [Steel Engraving.]
• DEDICATION–“To the Memory of Morton”
• PREFACE — by Geo. B. Gliddon
  • Postscriptum — by J. C. Nott
• MEMOIR—” Notice of the Life and Scientific Labors of the late Samuel Geo. Morton, M. D.”—contributed by Prof. Henry S. Patterson, M.D.
• SKETCH —” of the Natural Provinces of the Animal World and their Relation to the different Types of Man” — contributed by Prof. L. Agassie, LL.D. [With colored lithographic Tableau and Map.]
• INTRODUCTION to ” Types of Mankind ” — by J. C. Nott
• PART I.
  • I. — Biographical Distribution or Animals and the Races of Men
  • II. — General Remarks on the Types of Mankind
  • III. Specific Types — Caucasian
  • IV. — Physical History of the Jews
  • V. — the Caucasian Types carried through Egyptian Monuments
  • VI. — African Types
  • VII. — Egypt and Egyptians. [Four Lithographic Plates]
  • VIII. — Negro Types
  • IX. — American and other Types — Aboriginal Races of America
  • X. — Excerpta from Morton’s Inedited Manuscripts
  • XI. — Geology and Palæontology, in Connection with Human Origins — contributed by William Usher, M.D.
  • XII. — Hybridity or Animals, viewed in Connection with the Natural History or Mankind — by J. C. Nott
  • XIII. — Comparative Anatomy or Races — by J. C. Nott
• PART II.
  • XIV.— The Xth Chapter of Genesis — Preliminary Remarks
    • Sect. A. — Analysis of the Hebrew Nomenclature
    • B. — Observations on, the annexed Genealogical Tableau of the “Sons of Noah”
      • Genealogical Tableau
    • C. — Observations on the accompanying “Map of the World”
      • Lithographic tinted Map, exhibiting the Countries more or less known to the ancient Writer of Xth Genesis
    • D. — the Xth Chapter of Genesis modernized, in its Nomenclature, to display popularly, and in Modern English, the Meaning of its ancient Writer
  • XV. — Biblical Ethnography:–
    • Sect. E. — Terms, universal and specific
    • F. — Structure of Genesis I., II., and III
    • G.—Cosmas-Indicopleustes
      • Cosmas’s Map [wood-cut]
    • H.—Antiquity of the Name “ADaM”
• PART III. — Supplement — by Geo. R. Gleddon
  • Essay I. — Archæological Introduction to the Xth Chapter of Genesis.
  • II — Palaeographic Excursus on thb Art op Writing.
    • Table — “Theory of the Order of Development in Human Writings”
  • III. — Mankind’s Chronology:—
    • Introductory
    • Chronology — Egyptian
    • Chinese
    • Assyrian
    • Hebrew
    • Hindoo
• APPENDIX I. — Notes and References to Parts I. and II.
• II. — Alphabetical List of Subscribers to “Types of Mankind”

imagining hybrid cities

The State
2013-07-25

Tiana Reid

I started this series on crossing and mixing by considering temporality and its hold on how we imagine hybridity. The recent discourse centered on the unshakable ‘browning’ or ‘beiging’ of mostly urban populations in the decades to come offers itself up through the prevailing ‘hybrid futures’ narrative. In The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory, NYU professor Tavia Nyong’o made it clear that his 2009 book was not “yet another attempt to claim mixed-race America as a utopian future that ‘will’ just happen ‘in time,’ as Theodore Tilton held.” And last month, still, a claim against this mixed futurism persisted in my writing for The State as I drew on Lee Edelman to consider the “figural Child” as the ultimate citizen.

What is in the background of this, all of this, but also undergirding it, is the hybrid city. The urban and the cosmopolitan. While ‘hybrid cities’ isn’t necessarily an accepted or used concept at large, a quick Google and Google image search shows a technology-based, almost people-free imaginary. We know, too, that hybrid cities come synonymously with hybrid cars, that is, ‘pure’ innovation and more recently perhaps, the ‘White entrepreneurial guy.’ And, what’s more, they’re Jetsons-esque, a projection in which jokes are made to signify that the future is White.

Here, I’d like to think again about hybrid futures. And, broadly speaking, how race codes the city without falling into what, say, the contested terrain of afrofuturism at large attempts to counter, i.e. that blackness and technology (/future) do not make sense together. The city, more so than the country, is emblematic of everything new. The hybrid future, then, is a decidedly urban one…

Read the entire article here.