Mixed Race Studies

Gladys Zimmerman, Mother Of George Zimmerman, Says Her Family Is ‘Proudly Afro-Peruvian,’ But Do His Black Roots Matter In Trayvon Martin Case?

Latin Times
New York, New York
2013-07-15

David Iaconangelo

As protests mount against the verdict in the trial of George Zimmerman, the question of how the public ought to see Zimmerman’s racial background continues to provoke. Many continue to view him as “white,” as he was described in initial reports. Others have turned to “white Hispanic.”  But in a September 2012 interview on Univision with Jorge Ramos, Zimmerman’s brother Robert spoke out against media characterizations of George as “white,” while George’s mother Gladys said she came from a family that was proud of its Afro-Peruvian roots…

…”In Peru we have a saying that goes, ‘If you don’t have the blood of the Incas, you’ve got the blood of the Mandingas,” which means that if you don’t have Indian blood, you’ve got black blood,” Gladys Zimmerman said on Univision. “In my family we proudly come from the Afro-Peruvian race. My sons know their uncles, they know their aunts, they know their roots and my roots are not white, my roots are Afro-Peruvian.  So they’ve been educated, not just at home as a family, at school.  My sons don’t look at color.”

According to Tanya Golash-Boza, a sociologist at the University of California and the author of “Yo Soy Negro: Blackness in Peru,” Gladys Zimmerman’s description of herself as “Afro-Peruvian” is somewhat unusual.

“The word ‘Afro-Peruvian’ is kind of a new concept in Peru,” she told the Latin Times. “The idea that some people are African-descendent, some people are indigenous-descendent, some people are Hispanic-descendent has some currency in Peru, but it hasn’t really reached down to the level of popular sentiment. Instead, people tend to be identified as black if they have visible African ancestry. If people can look at them and make a guess that their ancestors probably came from Africa—very curly hair, darker skin.”…

Read the entire article here.

An African American’s Perspective on the Korean Wave

The Chosunilbo
Seoul, Korea
2013-07-09

Emanuel Pastreich, Associate Professor
Humanitas College, Kyunghee University

I received an unexpected email in February 2013, from a young woman who was studying public health at Harvard University. Mariesa Lee Ricks explained that her mother was Korean and that she had a great interest in Korean culture. Mariesa said that she hoped to find out how K-Pop and Korean social media can play a role in bringing positive messages to youth around the world.

Mariesa added that she hopes to visit Korea to carry out research. I wrote back to her telling her that I would be in Boston soon for a business trip and we agreed to meet up while I was there.

I did not recognize her at first. I was taken aback for a split second when she introduced herself because she turned out to be African American, and I had imagined a half-Korean, half-Caucasian woman who looked like my daughter Rachel. I was impressed that Mariesa did not display the slightest sense of discomfort or uncertainty in the few seconds that it took me to get over my embarrassment. She was clearly an extremely mature and composed woman with a strong sense of herself…

…That vision is linked to the critical role Mariesa’s Korean and African heritage has played in her cultural and intellectual development. Her Korean heritage was essential when she grew up in Atlanta. Her grandmother and mother maintained close ties with Korean culture and the Korean community, which was made easier by the burgeoning Korean population in the part of the city where they lived.

“My father’s family had a limited understanding of Korean culture, but fortunately my mother and grandmother were eager to introduce their culture, whether through funny stories from their childhood in Korea or through cooking kimchi jjigae (spicy Korean stew), for everyone, or teaching some Korean phrases,” she said. “So I developed an appetite to try new things and to explore new combinations of culture. That is the appeal of the Korean Wave for me.”

“Thanks in large part to my Korean heritage, I have developed an intense desire to honor my parents and family — a trait that has spurred me to be extremely aware of how my decisions and actions impact others,” she said. “At the same time, American values of individuality have allowed me to feel comfortable takings risks and exploring my own interests.”…

Read the entire article here.

Ethnic Identity Problems and Prospects for the Twenty-first Century – Fourth Edition

AltaMira Press
June 2006
436 pages
7 x 9 1/4
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-7591-0972-8
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-7591-0973-5

Edited by:

Lola Romanucci-Ross, Professor Emerita of Family and Preventive Medicine
University of California, San Diego

De George A. Vos (1922-2010), Professor Emeritus of Anthropology
University of California, Berkeley

Takeyuki Tsuda, Associate Professor of Anthropology
Arizona State University

In this thoroughly revised fourth edition, with ten new chapters, the editors provide thought-provoking discussions on the importance of ethnicity in different cultural and social contexts. The authors focus especially on changing ethnic and national identities, on migration and ethnic minorities, on ethnic ascription versus self-definitions, and on shifting ethnic identities and political control. The international group of scholars examines ethnic identities, conflicts and accommodations around the globe, in Africa (including Zaire and South Africa), Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Italy, Japan, Lithuania, Macedonia, the Netherlands, the United States, Thailand, and the former Yugoslavia. It will serve as an excellent text for courses in race & ethnic relations, and anthropology and ethnic studies.

Afro-Rebel (Or Why I am not an Afropolitan)

Black Girl Dancing at Lughnasa
2013-07-09

Emma Dabiri, Teaching Fellow
Africa Department, School of African and Oriental Studies, London
Visual Sociology Ph.D. Researcher, Goldsmiths University of London

The following is from a discussion I recently took part in ‘Fantasy or Reality? Afropolitan Narratives of the 21st Century’ as part of the Africa Writes 2013 Festival. I was joined on the panel by Minna Salami and Nana Ocran, and the Chair was Professor Paul Gilroy.

When I first heard Afropolitan I was excited. I am always looking for language that expresses my position as an Irish/Nigerian woman who is deeply connected to her Nigerianess. I’d rather refrain as describing myself as half anything, and I detest the word mixed-race. I thought perhaps Afropolitan presented an alternative to this terminology and interestingly, positioned me with others through a shared cultural and aesthetic leaning rather than a perceived racial classification. Further it identified that you could be black or African without having to subscribe to the depressingly limited identities widely perceived as being authentic.

The enduring insights of Afropolitanism as interpreted by Mdembe, should be its promise of vacating the seduction of pernicious racialised thinking, its recognition of African identities as fluid, and the notion that the African past is characterised by mixing, blending and superimposing. In opposition to custom, Mdembe insists the idea of ‘tradition’ never really existed and reminds us there is a pre-colonial African modernity that has not been taken into account in contemporary creativity.

As Minna Salami writes on her blog Africans should be as free to have multiple subcultures as anyone else but the problem with Afropolitism to me is that that the insights on race, modernity and identity appear to be increasingly sidelined in sacrifice to the consumerism Mdembe also identifies as part of the Afropolitan assemblage. The dominance of fashion and lifestyle in Afropolitanism is worthy of note due to the relationship between these industries, consumption and consumerism…

Read the entire article here.

Beyond Blood Identities: Posthumanity in the Twenty-First Century

Lexington Books: an imprint of Rowman & Littlefield
October 2009
262 pages
6 1/2 x 9 1/2
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-7391-3842-7
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-7391-3843-4
eBook ISBN: 978-0-7391-3844-1

Jason D. Hill, Professor of Philosophy
DePaul University

Beyond Blood Identities uncovers the social psychology of those who hold strong blood identities. In this highly original work, Jason D. Hill argues that strong racial, ethnic and national identities, which he refers to as “tribal identities,” function according to a separatist logic that does irreparable damage to our moral lives. Drawing on scholarship in philosophy, sociology, and cultural anthropology, Hill contends that strong tribalism is a form of pathology.

Beyond Blood Identities shows how a particular understanding of culture could lead to a new theoretical approach to enriched human living. Hill develops a new version of cosmopolitanism that he calls post-human cosmopolitanism to solve a number of challenges in contemporary society. From the problem of defining culture, the failure of multiculturalism, the question of who owns native culture, the identification of Jews as post-human people and the problem of their status as “chosen people” in a modern world, the author applies a cosmopolitan analysis to some of the major problems in our global and interdependent world. He posits a world in which community has been dispensed with and replaced by its successor term sociality—the broad unmarked space in which creative social intercourse takes place. Hill applies a new cosmopolitanism to ideate a new post-humanity for the twenty-first century.

Table of Contents

• Chapter 1. Introduction
• Chapter 2. Moral Reasoning From a Cosmopolitan Perspective: The Problem of Culture
• Chapter 3. Who Owns Culture: A Moral Cosmopolitan Inquiry
• Chapter 4. Moral Culture is Public Culture: Cosmopolitanism and Culture Warfare
• Chapter 5. Theorizing Post Humanity: Radical Inclusion; Jews as the Chosen People; and the Identity Politics of St. Paul
• Chapter 6. The Psychopathology of Tribalism: An Exposé
• Chapter 7. Appendix: Conscientious Objections to Cosmopolitanism: A Response

Quiting India: the Anglo-Indian Culture of Migration

sites: a Journal of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies
Volume 4, Number 2 (2007)
pages 32-56
DOI: 10.11157/sites-vol4iss2id73

Robyn Andrews, Lecturer, Social Anthropology Programme
Massey University

In my work with the Anglo-Indians in Calcutta I was reminded of Caplan’s (1995) comment that Anglo-Indians had a ‘culture of emigration’, as I observed a steady stream of Anglo-Indians leaving India. Even though destination opportunities are being eroded, the Anglo-Indians I spoke with regularly referred to relatives living abroad, and in the main wanted to emulate this pattern of migration.

In this paper I draw particularly on case study material collected in India and Australia over the past five years. I explore the nexus between Anglo-Indian identity, which they often regarded as more Western than Indian, and their migration patterns. Concentrating on their reasons for leaving, I contribute to the ‘culture of migration’ literature through this analysis of the migration culture of an ethnic group which exhibits variations on the set of reasonably distinct characteristics associated with groups having a ‘culture of migration’.

Read the entire article here.

Anglo-Indians: Is their culture dying out?

BBC News Magazine
2013-01-03

Kris Griffiths

A product of the British Empire, with a mixture of Western and Indian names, customs and complexions, 2,000 Anglo-Indians are to attend a reunion in Calcutta. But their communities in both the UK and the subcontinent are disappearing, writes Anglo-Indian Kris Griffiths.

Southall in west London is home to Britain’s first pub accepting rupees, railway station signs in English and Punjabi, and main thoroughfares alive all year with street food stalls, colourful saris and Bhangra music.

It’s my hometown, where I spent my first 20 years among the country’s most concentrated population of Indians, but as one of the minority 10% white British inhabitants. Indeed, I was the only white person on my avenue in the years before I left.

My mother is Anglo-Indian, raised in Jamshedpur, near Calcutta, before moving eventually to London’s own “Little India”. After she married a Welshman, I and my siblings were born fair with blue eyes.

We are symptomatic of the biggest problem facing the global Anglo-Indian community – it is dying out. In the UK and the Commonwealth, it is losing its “Indianness”, while back home in India its “Anglo” element is fading…

…The definition of Anglo-Indian has become looser in recent decades. It can now denote any mixed British-Indian parentage, but for many its primary meaning refers to people of longstanding mixed lineage, dating back up to 300 years into the subcontinent’s colonial past.

In the 18th Century, the British East India Company followed previous Dutch and Portuguese settlers in encouraging employees to marry native women and plant roots. The company would even pay a sum for every child born of these cross-cultural unions.

By the late 19th Century, however, after the Suez Canal’s construction had made the long journey shorter, British women were arriving in greater numbers, mixed marriages dwindled and their offspring came to be stigmatised by many Indians as “Kutcha-Butcha” (half-baked bread).

When the British finally departed in 1947 they left behind a Westernised mixed-race subpopulation about 300,000-strong who weren’t necessarily glad to see them leave…

Read the entire article here.

Dala or Diaspora? Obama and the Luo Community of Kenya

African Affairs
Volume 108, Issue 431 (2009)
pages 197-219
DOI: 10.1093/afraf/adp002

Matthew Carotenuto, Associate Professor History
St. Lawrence University, Canton, New York

Katherine Luongo, Assistant Professor of History
Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts

As members of the ethnic group to which the American President’s paternal family belongs, Luo people in Kenya and in the diaspora have been eagerly claiming Barack Obama as ‘their own’ since 2004. This embrace speaks to a range of ethno-political developments in Kenya throughout the twentieth century. Luo identity has been primarily constituted within a diasporic context, beginning with the large-scale labour migrations of the early twentieth century and continuing with the activities of the ‘dot.com’ generation into the present. Simultaneously, patrimonial politics constituted along ethnic lines have rendered Luos political outsiders and heightened the urgency of securing a powerful patron. Given these two trends, Luo people at home and abroad have reached into the diaspora with hopes of finding their biggest ‘Big Man’ in the figure of Barack Obama.

Read or purchase the article here.

The Mestizo Mind: The Intellectual Dynamics of Colonization and Globalization

Routledge
2002-09-06
272 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-415-92879-3
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-415-92878-6

Serge Gruzinski, Research Director
National Scientific Research Center (CNRS, Paris)

Mestizo: a person of mixed blood; specifically, a person of mixed European and American Indian ancestry.

Serge Gruzinski, the renowned historian of Latin America, offers a brilliant, original critique of colonization and globalization in The Mestizo Mind. Looking at the fifteenth-century colonization of Latin America, Gruzinski documents the mélange that resulted: colonized mating with colonizers; Indians joining the Catholic Church and colonial government; and Amerindian visualizations of Jesus and Perseus. These physical and cultural encounters created a new culture, a new individual, and a phenomenon we now call globalization. Revealing globalization’s early origins, Gruzinski then fast forwards to the contemporary mélange seen in the films of Peter Greenaway and Wong Kar-Wai to argue that over 500 years of intermingling has produced the mestizo mind, a state of mixed thinking that we all possess.

A masterful alchemy of history, anthropology, philosophy and visual analysis, The Mestizo Mind definitively conceptualizes the clash of civilizations in the style of Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak and Anne McClintock.

The Mestizo State: Reading Race in Modern Mexico

University of Minnesota Press
June 2012
248 pages
5 1/2 x 8 1/2
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8166-5637-0
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8166-5636-3

Joshua Lund, Associate Professor of Spanish
University of Pittsburgh

The Mestizo State examines how the ideas, images, and public discourse around race, nation, and citizen formation have been transformed in Mexico from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Starting with the Porfiriato, Joshua Lund investigates the rise of a racialized “mestizo state,” its reinvention after the Mexican Revolution, and its mobilization as a critical lever that would act both on behalf of and against mainstream Mexican political culture during the long hegemony of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional.

Lund takes race as his object of critical reflection in the context of modern Mexico. An analysis that does not confuse race with mestizaje, indigeneity, African identity, or whiteness, the book sheds light on the history of the materialism of race as it unfolds within the cultural production of modern Mexico, grounded on close readings of four writers whose work explicitly challenged the politics of race in Mexico: Luis Alva, Ignacio Manuel Altamirano, Rosario Castellanos, and Elena Garro.

In seeking to address race as a cultural-political problematic, Lund considers race as integral to the production of the materiality of Mexican national history: constitutive of the nation form, a mediator of capitalist accumulation, and a central actor in the rise of modernity.

Contents

• Introduction: The Mestizo State
• 1. Colonization and Indianization in Liberal Mexico: The Case of Luis Alva
• 2. Altamirano’s Burden
• 3. Misplaced Revolution: Rosario Castellanos and the Race War
• 4. Elena Garro and the Failure of Alliance
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index