Mixed Race Studies

Young Mr. Obama: Chicago and the Making of a Black President

Bloomsbury Press
2010
288 pages
5 1/2″ x 8 1/4″
Hardback ISBN: 9781608190607

Edward McClelland

Barack Obama’s inspirational politics and personal mythology have overshadowed his fascinating history. Young Mr. Obama gives us the missing chapter: the portrait of the politician as a young leader, often too ambitious for his own good, but still equipped with a rare ability to inspire change. The route to the White House began on the streets of Chicago’s South Side.

Edward McClelland, a veteran Chicago journalist, tells the real story of the first black president’s political education in the capital of the African American political community. Obama’s touch wasn’t always golden, and the unflappable and charismatic campaigner we know today nearly derailed his political career with a disastrous run for Congress in 2000.

Obama learned from his mistakes, and rebuilt his public persona. Young Mr. Obama is a masterpiece of political reporting, peeling away the audacity, the T-shirts, and the inspiring speeches to craft a compelling and surpassingly readable account of how local politics shaped a national leader.

Caribbean Racisms: Connections and Complexities in the Racialization of the Caribbean Region

Palgrave Macmillan
May 2015
216 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 9781137287274
Ebook (EPUB) ISBN: 9781137287298
Ebook (PDF) ISBN: 9781137287281

Shirley Anne Tate, Professor of Sociology
Leeds Beckett University, Leeds, United Kingdom

Ian Law, Professor of Racism and Ethnicity Studies
School of Sociology and Social Policy
University of Leeds, United Kingdom

This book identifies and engages with an analysis of racism in the Caribbean region, providing an empirically-based theoretical re-framing of both the racialisation of the globe and evaluation of the prospects for anti-racism and the post-racial.

The thirty contemporary territories of the Caribbean and their differing colonial and post-colonial contexts provide a highly dynamic setting urging a re-assessment of the ways in which contemporary processes of racialisation are working. This book seeks to develop a new account of racialisation in this region, challenging established arguments, propositions and narratives of racial Caribbeanisation.

With new insights into contemporary forms of racialisation in Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic and Haiti, this will be essential reading for scholars of Race and Ethnicity.

Contents

• Acknowledgements
• About the Authors
• 1 Racial Caribbeanization: Origins and Development
• 2 Racial States in the Post-Emancipation Caribbean
• 3 Mixing, Métissage and Mestizaje
• 4 Whiteness and the Contemporary Caribbean
• 5 The ‘Post-Race Contemporary’ and the Caribbean
• 6 Polyracial Neoliberalism
• Notes
• References
• Index 

Black Magic Woman and Narrative Film: Race, Sex and Afro-Religiosity

Palgrave Macmillan
July 2015
216 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 9781137454171
Ebook (EPUB) ISBN: 9781137454195
Ebook (PDF) ISBN: 9781137454188

Montré Aza Missouri, Associate Professor in Film
Howard University, Washington, D.C.

Contributing to emerging scholarship on representations of race, gender, sexuality and religion in film and media, Black Magic Woman focuses on the ‘tragic mulatto‘ stereotype that is conventionally portrayed as a character tormented by issues of racial and cultural ambiguity. Montré Aza Missouri explores the journey of the ‘mulatto‘ from ‘tragic’ to ’empowered’ through the character’s adherence to Yoruba-Atlantic religions such as Cuban Lucumí, Puerto Rican Santería and American Voodoo. From this religious transformation, the ‘tragic mulatto’ becomes the Black Magic Woman, a signifier of a New World cultural identity.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgements
• Introduction – From ‘Tragic Mulatto’ to Black Magic Woman: Race, Sex and Religion in Film
• Chapter 1. Womanism and Womanist Gaze
• Chapter 2. Beauty as Power: In/visible Woman and Womanist Film in Daughters of the Dust
• Chapter 3. Passing Strange: Voodoo Queens and Hollywood Fantasy in Eve’s Bayou
• Chapter 4. I’ll Fly Away: Baadasssss Mamas and Third Cinema in Sankofa
• Chapter 5. Not Another West Side Story: Nuyorican Women and New Black Realism in I Like It Like That
• Chapter 6. It Is Easy Being Green: Disney’s Post-Racial Princess and Black Magic Nostalgia in The Princess and the Frog
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Filmography
• Bibliography
• Index

Brazil through French Eyes: A Nineteenth-Century Artist in the Tropics

University of New Mexico Press
October 2015
264 pages
59 halftones
6 x 9 in.
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-8263-3745-0

Ana Lucia Araujo, Professor of History
Howard University, Washington, D.C.

In 1858 François-Auguste Biard, a well-known sixty-year-old French artist, arrived in Brazil to explore and depict its jungles and the people who lived there. What did he see and how did he see it? In this book historian Ana Lucia Araujo examines Biard’s Brazil with special attention to what she calls his “tropical romanticism”: a vision of the country with an emphasis on the exotic.

Biard was not only one of the first European artists to encounter and depict native Brazilians, but also one of the first travelers to photograph the rain forest and its inhabitants. His 1862 travelogue Deux années en Brésil includes 180 woodcuts that reveal Brazil’s reliance on slave labor as well as describe the landscape, flora, and fauna, with lively narratives of his adventures and misadventures in the rain forest. Thoroughly researched, Araujo places Biard’s work in the context of the European travel writing of the time and examines how representations of Brazil through French travelogues contributed and reinforced cultural stereotypes and ideas about race and race relations in Brazil. She further summarizes that similar representations continue and influence perspectives today.

The Cherokee Diaspora: An Indigenous History of Migration, Resettlement, and Identity

Yale University Press
2015-09-29
368 pages
17 b/w illustrations
6 1/8 x 9 1/4
Cloth ISBN: 9780300169607

Gregory D. Smithers, Associate Professor of History
Virginia Commonwealth University

The Cherokee are one of the largest Native American tribes in the United States, with more than three hundred thousand people across the country claiming tribal membership and nearly one million people internationally professing to have at least one Cherokee Indian ancestor. In this revealing history of Cherokee migration and resettlement, Gregory Smithers uncovers the origins of the Cherokee diaspora and explores how communities and individuals have negotiated their Cherokee identities, even when geographically removed from the Cherokee Nation headquartered in Tahlequah, Oklahoma. Beginning in the eighteenth century, the author transports the reader back in time to tell the poignant story of the Cherokee people migrating throughout North America, including their forced exile along the infamous Trail of Tears (1838–39). Smithers tells a remarkable story of courage, cultural innovation, and resilience, exploring the importance of migration and removal, land and tradition, culture and language in defining what it has meant to be Cherokee for a widely scattered people.

Loren Miller: Civil Rights Attorney and Journalist

University of Oklahoma Press
September 2015
304 pages
6.125″ x 9.25″
Hardcover ISBN: 9780806149165

Amina Hassan, Consultant & Researcher
The Azara Group, New York, New York

Loren Miller was one of the nation’s most prominent civil rights attorneys from the 1940s through the early 1960s, particularly in the fields of housing and education. With co-counsel Thurgood Marshall, he argued two landmark civil rights cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, whose decisions effectively abolished racially restrictive housing covenants. One of these cases, Shelley v. Kraemer (1948), is taught in nearly every American law school today. Loren Miller: Civil Rights Attorney and Journalist recovers this remarkable figure from the margins of history and for the first time fully reveals his life for what it was: an extraordinary American story and a critical chapter in the annals of racial justice.

Born the son of a former slave and a white midwesterner in 1903, Loren Miller lived the quintessential American success story, both by rising from rural poverty to a position of power and influence and by blazing his own path. Author Amina Hassan reveals Miller as a fearless critic of the powerful and an ardent debater whose acid wit was known to burn “holes in the toughest skin and eat right through double-talk, hypocrisy, and posturing.”

As a freshly minted member of the bar who preferred political activism and writing to the law, Miller set out for Los Angeles from Kansas in 1929. Hassan describes his early career as a fiery radical journalist, as well as his ownership of the California Eagle, one of the longest-running African American newspapers in the West. In his work with the California branch of the ACLU, Miller sought to halt the internment of West Coast Japanese citizens, helped integrate the U.S. military and the L.A. Fire Department, and defended Black Muslims arrested in a deadly street battle with the LAPD. Hassan charts Miller’s ceaseless commitment to improving the lives of Americans regardless of their race or ethnicity. In 1964, Governor Edmund G. Brown appointed Miller as a Municipal Court justice for Los Angeles County.

The story told here in full for the first time is of a true American original who defied societal limitations to reshape the racial and political landscape of twentieth-century America.

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself

Thayer and Eldridge
1861

Harriet Ann Jacobs (1813-1897)

Edited by Lydia Maria Child (1802-1880)

Read the entire book here or here.

Crossing the Color Line: Race, Sex, and the Contested Politics of Colonialism in Ghana

Ohio University Press
October 2015
364 pages
11 illus., 3 maps
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-8214-2179-6
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8214-2180-2
Electronic ISBN: 978-0-8214-4539-6

Carina E. Ray, Associate Professor of African and Afro- American Studies
Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts

Interracial sex mattered to the British colonial state in West Africa. In Crossing the Color Line, Carina E. Ray goes beyond this fact to reveal how Gold Coasters—their social practices, interests, and anxieties—shaped and defined these powerfully charged relations across racial lines. The interplay between African and European perspectives and practices, argues Ray, transformed these relationships into key sites for consolidating colonial rule and for contesting its racial and gendered hierarchies of power.

With rigorous methodology and innovative analyses, Ray brings Ghana and Britain into a single analytic frame by examining cases in both locales. Intimate relations between black men and white women in Britain’s port cities emerge as an influential part of the history of interracial sex and empire in ways that are connected to rather than eclipsed by relations between European men and African women in the colony.

Based on rich archival evidence and original interviews, the book moves across different registers, shifting from the micropolitics of individual disciplinary cases against colonial officers who “kept” local women to transatlantic networks of family, empire, and anticolonial resistance. In this way, Ray cuts to the heart of how interracial sex became a source of colonial anxiety and nationalist agitation during the first half of the twentieth century.

Ronnie: Tasmanian Songman

Magabala Books
January 2009
164 pages
240 x 165
Paperback ISBN: 9781921248108

Helen Gee and Ronnie Summers

Musician, storyteller and craftsman, Ronnie Summers recalls the freedom of growing up on Cape Barren Island and how the island’s music shaped his life. He draws on a childhood working the muttonbird islands, a ‘kangaroo court’ prison term as a bewildered teenager, and then turning to alcohol after the death of his baby son. Born an ‘Islander’—not Aboriginal, not white—Ronnie Summers was without race. This story documents his struggle for a place in his own country and echoes that of the Tasmanian Aboriginal community. Includes a CD featuring Cape Barren Island music—a unique blend of Cajun, blues, country and folk.

Race: An Introduction

Cambridge University Press
August 2015
272 pages
13 b/w illus. 4 tables
245 x 190 x 12 mm
Hardback ISBN: 9781107034112
Paperback ISBN: 9781107652286

Peter Wade, Professor of Social Anthropology
University of Manchester

Taking a comparative approach, this textbook is a concise introduction to race. Illustrated with detailed examples from around the world, it is organised into two parts. Part One explores the historical changes in ideas about race from the ancient world to the present day, in different corners of the globe. Part Two outlines ways in which racial difference and inequality are perceived and enacted in selected regions of the world. Examining how humans have used ideas of physical appearance, heredity and behaviour as criteria for categorising others, the text guides students through provocative questions such as: what is race? Does studying race reinforce racism? Does a colour-blind approach dismantle, or merely mask, racism? How does biology feed into concepts of race? Numerous case studies, photos, figures and tables help students to appreciate the different meanings of race in varied contexts, and end-of-chapter research tasks provide further support for student learning.

• Combines a broad historical overview (from the ancient world to the present day) with wide geographical and comparative coverage to show that race means different things in different contexts
• Detailed historical and ethnographic material in textboxes, figures, photos and tables demonstrates the operation of race in everyday life
• Offers an up-to-date, critical overview of a fast-changing field

Contents

• List of figures
• List of tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Knowing ‘race’
  • 1.1 Chronology of race
  • 1.2 Is race defined by appearance, biology and nature?
  • 1.3 Culture, appearance and biology revisited
  • 1.4 Race, comparatively and historically
  • 1.5 Comparisons
  • 1.6 Race in the history of Western modernity
  • Conclusion: so what is race?
  • Further research
• Part I race in time
  • 2 Early approaches to understanding human variation
    • 2.1 Nature and culture
    • 2.2 Ancient Greece and Rome
    • 2.3 Medieval and early modern Europe
    • 2.4 New World colonisation
    • Conclusion
    • Further research
  • 3 From Enlightenment to eugenics
    • 3.1 Transitions
    • 3.2 Changing racial theories
    • 3.3 The spread of racial theory: nation, class, gender and religion
    • 3.4 Nature, culture and race
    • 3.5 Black reaction
    • Conclusion
    • Further research
  • 4 Biology, culture and genomics
    • 4.1 Darwin (again), genetics and the concept of population
    • 4.2 Boas and the separation of biology and culture
    • 4.3 Nazism, World War II and decolonisation
    • 4.4 UNESCO and after
    • 4.5 The persistence of race in science
    • 4.6 Race and IQ
    • 4.7 Race and sport
    • 4.8 Race, genomics and medicine: does race have a genetic basis?
    • 4.9 Race, genomics and medicine: racialising populations
    • Conclusion
    • Further activities
  • 5 Race in the era of cultural racism: politics and the everyday
    • 5.1 Introduction
    • 5.2 The institutional presence of race
    • 5.3 Race, nature and biology in the everyday world of culture
    • Conclusion
    • Further research
• Part II Race in practice
  • 6 Latin America: mixture and racism
    • 6.1 Introduction
    • 6.2 Latin America and mestizaje
    • 6.3 Colombia: racial discrimination and social movements
    • 6.4 Structural disadvantage, region and mestizaje: lessons from Colombia
    • 6.5 Brazil: variations on a theme
    • 6.6 Guatemala: racial ambivalence
    • 6.7 Performing and embodying race in the Andes
    • Conclusion
    • Further research
  • 7 The United States and South Africa: segregation and desegregation
    • 7.1 Changing US demographics
    • 7.2 Caste and class in segregated Southern towns
    • 7.3 Black reaction and ‘desegregation’
    • 7.4 Segregation in practice: ‘the ghetto’
    • 7.5 Latinos and brownness
    • 7.6 South Africa
    • Conclusion
    • Further activities
  • 8 Race in Europe: immigration and nation
    • 8.1 European histories of race
    • 8.2 Issues in post-colonial migration in Europe
    • 8.3 White Britons in Leicestershire
    • 8.4 Asian Leicester
    • 8.5 The Asian gang in London
    • 8.6 Geographies of race in black Liverpool
    • 8.7 Algerians in France
    • Conclusion
    • Further activities
  • 9 Conclusion
    • 9.1 Theorising race
    • 9.2 Globalising race
    • 9.3 The future of race
  • References
  • Index