Mixed Race Studies

American Creoles: The Francophone Caribbean and the American South

Liverpool University Press
May 2012
256 pages
234 x 156 mm
Hardback ISBN: 9781846317538

Edited by:

Celia Britton, Professor of French and Francophone Studies
University College London

Martin Munro, Professor of French and Francophone Studies
Florida State University

The Francophone Caribbean and the American South are sites born of the plantation, the common matrix for the diverse nations and territories of the circum-Caribbean. This book takes as its premise that the basic configuration of the plantation, in terms of its physical layout and the social relations it created, was largely the same in the Caribbean and the American South. Essays written by leading authorities in the field examine the cultural, social, and historical affinities between the Francophone Caribbean and the American South, including Louisiana, which among the Southern states has had a quite particular attachment to France and the Francophone world. The essays focus on issues of history, language, politics and culture in various forms, notably literature, music and theatre. Considering figures as diverse as Barack Obama, Frantz Fanon, Miles Davis, James Brown, Édouard Glissant, William Faulkner, Maryse Condé and Lafcadio Hearn, the essays explore in innovative ways the notions of creole culture and creolization, terms rooted in and indicative of contact between European and African people and cultures in the Americas, and which are promoted here as some of the most productive ways for conceiving of the circum-Caribbean as a cultural and historical entity.

Contents

• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction – Martin Munro and Celia Britton
• Creolizations
  • Lafcadio Hearn’s American Writings and the Creole Continuum – Mary Gallagher
  • Auguste Lussan’s La Famille creole: How Saint-Domingue Emigres Bcame Louisiana Creoles – Typhaine Leservot
  • Caribbean and Creole in New Orleans – Angle Adams Parham
  • Creolizing Barack Obama – Valerie Loichot
  • Richard Price or the Canadian from Petite-Anse: The Potential and the Limitations of a Hybrid Anthropology – Christina Kullberg
• Music
  • ‘Fightin’ the Future’: Rhythm and Creolization in the Circum-Caribbean – Martin Munro
  • Leaving the South: Frantz Fanon, Modern Jazz, and the Rejection of Negritude – Jeremy F. Lane
  • The Sorcerer and the Quimboiseur: Poetic Intention in the Works of Miles Davis and Edourard Glissant – Jean-Luc Tamby
  • Creolizing Jazz, Jazzing the Tout-monde: Jazz, Gwoka and the Poetics of Relation – Jerome Camal
• Intertextualities: Faulkner, Glissant, Conde
  • Go Slow Now: Saying the Unsayable in Edouard Glissant’s Reading of Faulkner – Michael Wiedorn
  • Edouard Glissant and the Test of Faulkner’s Modernism – Hugh Azerad
  • The Theme of the Ancestral Crime in the Novels of Faulkner, Glissant, and Conde – Celia Britton
  • An American Story – Yanick Lahen
• Notes on Contributors
• Index

Estimating Genetic Ancestry Proportions from Faces

PLoS ONE
Volume 4, Number 2, e4460 (February 2009)
8 pages
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0004460

Yann C. Klimentidis
Department of Biostatistics
University of Alabama, Birmingham

Mark D. Shriver, Associate Professor of Anthropology
Pennsylvania State University

Ethnicity can be a means by which people identify themselves and others. This type of identification mediates many kinds of social interactions and may reflect adaptations to a long history of group living in humans. Recent admixture in the US between groups from different continents, and the historically strong emphasis on phenotypic differences between members of these groups, presents an opportunity to examine the degree of concordance between estimates of group membership based on genetic markers and on visually-based estimates of facial features. We first measured the degree of Native American, European, African and East Asian genetic admixture in a sample of 14 self-identified Hispanic individuals, chosen to cover a broad range of Native American and European genetic admixture proportions. We showed frontal and side-view photographs of the 14 individuals to 241 subjects living in New Mexico, and asked them to estimate the degree of NA admixture for each individual. We assess the overall concordance for each observer based on an aggregated measure of the difference between the observer and the genetic estimates. We find that observers reach a significantly higher degree of concordance than expected by chance, and that the degree of concordance as well as the direction of the discrepancy in estimates differs based on the ethnicity of the observer, but not on the observers’ age or sex. This study highlights the potentially high degree of discordance between physical appearance and genetic measures of ethnicity, as well as how perceptions of ethnic affiliation are context-specific. We compare our findings to those of previous studies and discuss their implications.

Read the entire article here.

Parading Respectability: An Ethnography of the Christmas Bands movement in the Western Cape, South Africa

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
May 2012
238 pages

Sylvia R. Bruinders

The Christmas Bands march through Adderley Street late at night during the “festive season” in Cape Town, 2001.
Picture by Henry Trotter. The author releases it to the public domain.

A Dissertation Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Musicology

In this dissertation I investigate the Christmas Bands Movement of the Western Cape of South Africa. I document this centuries-old expressive practice of ushering in the joy of Christmas through music by way of a social history of the colored communities. The term colored is a local racialized designation for people of mixed descent–often perceived as of mixed-race by the segregationist and apartheid ideologues. In the complexity of race relations in South Africa these communities have emerged largely within the black/white interstices and remained marginal to the socio-cultural and political landscape. Their ancestral area is the Western Cape where most still live and where several of their expressive practices can be witnessed over the festive season in the summer months from December through March. The Christmas Bands Movement is one of three parading practices that are active during this period.

Drawing on Foucault’s notion of “embodied subjectivity” and Butler’s work on gender and performativity, I explore three main themes, two of which are overlapping, throughout this dissertation. First, I investigate how the bands constitute themselves as respectable members of society through disciplinary routines, uniform dress, and military gestures. Second, I show how the band members constitute their subjectivity both individually as a member and collectively as a band; each has a mutual impact on the other. Even though the notion of subjectivity is more concerned with the inner thoughts and experiences and their concern with respectability is an outward manifestation of a social ideal, these two themes overlap as both relate to how the members constitute themselves. Third, I explore how the emergent gender politics, given renewed emphasis in the new South African constitution (1995) has played out in local expressive practices through the women’s insistence on being an integral part of the performance activities of the Christmas Bands Movement. Their acceptance into the Christmas Bands has transformed the historically gendered perception of the bands as male-only expressive forms. Furthermore, I will illustrate how this cultural practice has gained in popularity during the last seventeen years of democratic rule in South Africa, which may suggest that the historical marginality of the communities is still very present.

Read the entire dissertation here.

The aesthetic escape hatch: carnaval, blocos afro and the mutations of baianidade under the signs of globalisation and re-Africanisation

Journal of Iberian and Latin American Research
Volume 5, Issue 2, 1999
pages 65-98
DOI: 10.1080/13260219.1999.10431798

Piers Armstrong
Universidade Federal da Bahia, Brazil

This article examines the notion of baianidade, the cultural cosmovision traditionally associated with the state of Bahia and more specifically with the region of the Baía de Todos os Santos. A series of connotations for the term are examined, including cordiality, racial democracy and miscegenation. Through the cultural practice of baianidade, a social compromise is effected whereby material space and symbolic prestige are conceded to the black community in exchange for a relative political passivity. This exchange is not construed here as a conscious manoeuvre by the established powers, but rather in terms of the internal logic of an economy of symbolic capital. To exemplify both the fluidity and the semantic essentialism characteristic of baianidade, the article proceeds to the cultural semantics of the related term, baiana, a nominalized adjective which etymologically denotes a female native of the region, but by extension also denotes one among the various local religions and an associated culinary tradition. Against this essentializing consolidation, the article then considers contemporary uses of the term within a more individualistic consumer society. Finally, baianidade is compared synchronically to other major ideo-esthetic discourses of the Black diaspora.

Introduction: Bahian carnaval

The carnaval of Salvador, capital of Bahia State in Brazil, has grown immensely in popularity in recent years, so that it now rivals the more famous Rio carnaval in terms of numbers of visitors. Carnaval culture—music, dance, consumption and consequent entrepreneurial opportunities—has spread to the whole calendar of annual and weekly festivities, religious and secular, and has transformed Bahian society both in terms of its internal recreation patterns and in terms of its relations with external society. While the prominent traditional agricultural industries (cocoa, cattle, and vegetables) have encountered difficulties and contracted, tourism, largely based around carnaval or carnavalesque attractions, has increased spectacularly and become the centre of growth strategies. The old centre of Salvador has been transformed from extreme poverty and physical decay into the central tourist destination. Bahian pop music has penetrated the national and international markets. Bahian practices such as capoeira (martial arts dance) have spread around the world. An ever-growing number of international visitors (about 400,000 a year in a city of 2.5 million) arrive by plane, in search of cultural vitality and authenticity. The sheer volume of international visitors and the prominence of tourism as a source of new employment has also transformed local experience through personal exposure to foreigners with different ideas. A significant number of persons from previously completely marginalised classes have visited or lived in Western European countries as a result of this contact. While world globalisation (access and interaction between different locations) has been the pre-condition of the cultural marketing of Salvador to the world, the city itself has undergone globalisation in terms of qualitative culture as well as economic modernisation…

Read the entire article here.

Artspeak: Macys misses the boat on celebration of Brazil

InsightNews.com
2012-06-12

Irma McClaurin, Ph.D., Culture and Education Editor

What a delightful surprise to open my mailbox and see Macys touting a celebration of Brazil.  The merchandise colors are vibrant oranges, yellows, and shocking turquoise.  However, as I looked at the models chosen to represent Brazil, it was clear that Macys had missed the boat. Brazil is a multi-racial country. Everyone knows that its people represent a human rainbow, and in fact, after World War II, American scholars often pointed to Brazil as the racial ideal.  Thus was born what anthropologist Dr. France Winddance Twine has critiqued as the myth of Brazil as a “racial democracy.”…

Read the entire article here.

Discovering the life of Afro-Germans

The Philadelphia Inquirer
2012-06-06

Edward Colimore, Inquirer Staff Writer

When she was growing up in Willingboro as the only child of Walter and Perrie Haymon, she felt like “a little princess.” She was the center of her parents’ lives, attended private school, and took piano and ballet lessons.

But Wanda Lynn Haymon “always had something gnawing” at her, she said. Relatives whispered about her at family gatherings and cousins told her that she was not really part of the family.

She had recurrent nightmares, too, of being an infant abandoned on a snowy doorstep with uniformed men – possibly soldiers – standing around her.

“I really had doubts,” she said. “I’d go to my parents and ask if I was adopted and they’d say, ‘Do you feel adopted?’ I would say ‘No’ because I was treated so well.”

She found out—through documentation in 1994—that “I wasn’t who I thought I was.”

Wanda Lynn Haymon was actually Rosemarie Larey, a native of Germany who had been adopted. Her biological father was black, possibly an African American soldier, and her mother was white and a German national.

She was born in 1956, only 11 years after the Nazis, who regarded blacks as racially inferior, sent 25,000 Afro-Germans to concentration camps, where many were subjected to medical experiments and sterilization.

Even after the war, the stigma of having a biracial child caused many mothers – including Rosemarie’s – to give up their children for possible placement with African American families.

Now, as Rosemarie Peña, she heads the Black German Cultural Society of New Jersey ( http://blackgermans.us/), an organization whose name belies its reach: It connects Afro-Germans internationally and seeks to document their experience.

About 200 people attended the group’s convention last year in Washington and a greater number is expected for the second convention, Aug. 10-11 at Barnard College in New York City…

Read the entire article here.

A Case of Identity: Ethnogenesis of the New Houma Indians

Ethnohistory
Volume 48, Number 3 (Summer 2001)
pages 473-494
DOI: 10.1215/00141801-48-3-473

Dave D. Davis
University of Southern Maine

Throughout the twentieth century, anthropologists and historians have regarded the Houma Indians of southern Louisiana as the descendants of the Houma Indians encountered along the Mississippi River by French explorers and settlers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Oral history of the contemporary Houma traces the group’s origin to Native Americans of the Houma and other tribes who moved into the bayou country of southeastern Louisiana during the late eighteenth or early nineteenth centuries. However, anthropologists and historians from the Bureau of Indian Affairs have concluded that there is no documentary evidence of any cultural or genealogical link between the modern Houma and the Houma of the French colonial period. Available documentary sources indicate that the modern Houma originated in the nineteenth century as a multiethnic group that included Europeans, African Americans, and some Native Americans, none of whom are known to have been Houmas. The genesis of the modern group’s identity as Houma Indians can be understood as a response to legally sanctioned racial classifications and race discrimination in Louisiana from the late nineteenth century on.

Read or purchase the article here.

Race, Ethnicity, and Nation: Perspectives from Kinship and Genetics

Berghahn Books
Winter 2007
210 pages
Hardback ISBN: 978-1-84545-355-8
Paperback ISBN:978-1-84545-681-8

Edited by

Peter Wade, Professor of Social Anthropology
University of Manchester

Race, ethnicity and nation are all intimately linked to family and kinship, yet these links deserve closer attention than they usually get in social science, above all when family and kinship are changing rapidly in the context of genomic and biotechnological revolutions. Drawing on data from assisted reproduction, transnational adoption, mixed race families, Basque identity politics and post-Soviet nation-building, this volume provides new and challenging ways to understand race, ethnicity and nation.

Contents

• Preface and Acknowledgements
• 1. Race, Ethnicity and Nation: Perspectives from Kinship and Genetics / Peter Wade
• 2. Race, Genetics and Inheritance: Reflections upon the Birth of ‘Black’ Twins to a ‘White’ IVF Mother / Katharine Tyler
• 3. Race, Biology and Culture in Contemporary Norway: Identity and Belonging in Adoption, Donor Gametes and Immigration / Signe Howell and Marit Melhuus
• 4. ‘I want her to learn her language and maintain her culture’: Transnational Adoptive Families’ Views of ‘Cultural Origins’ / Diana Marre
• 5. Racialization, Genes and the Reinventions of Nation in Europe / Ben Campbell
• 6. Kinship Language and the Dynamics of Race: The Basque Case / Enric Porqueres i Gené
• 7. The Transmission of Ethnicity: Family and State – A Lithuanian Perspective / Darius Daukšas
• 8. Media Storylines of Culturally Hybrid Persons and Nation / Ben Campbell
• Notes on Contributors
• Glossary
• Index

What DNA Says About Human Ancestry—and Bigotry

The Village Voice
1997-10-28
pages 34-35

Mark Schoofs, Senior Editor
ProPublica

Race and genetics form their own double helix, twisting together through history. The Nazis, as everyone knows, justified the death camps on the grounds that Jews and Gypsies were genetically inferior—but what is less known is that the Nazis took their cue from eugenics legislation passed in the United States. Here, race is defined primarily by skin color. Since that’s a genetic trait, the logic goes, race itself must be genetic, and there must be differences that are more than skin deep.

But that’s not what modern genetics reveals. Quite the contrary, it shows that race is truly skin deep. Indeed, genetics undermines the whole concept that humanity is composed of ”races”—pure and static groups that are significantly different from one another. Genetics has proven otherwise by tracing human ancestry, as it is inscribed on DNA.

Demystifying race may be the most important accomplishment of this research, but it has also solved some of the most intriguing mysteries of human history…

Read the entire article here.

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.