Mixed Race Studies

Showing Our Colors: Afro-German Women Speak Out

Orlanda Frauenverlag (German)
1986
University of Massachusetts Press (English)
1992
ISBN: 0-87023-759-4
Likely out of print.

Edited by

May Opitz [Ayim]
Katharina Oguntoye
Dagmar Schultz

Translated by Anne V. Adams

Foreword by Audre Lorde

Passing and the Fictions of Identity

Duke University Press
1996
312 pages
6 illustrations
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8223-1755-5
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-1764-7

Edited by

Elaine K. Ginsberg, Professor of English (Retired)
West Virginia University

Passing refers to the process whereby a person of one race, gender, nationality, or sexual orientation adopts the guise of another. Historically, this has often involved black slaves passing as white in order to gain their freedom. More generally, it has served as a way for women and people of color to access male or white privilege. In their examination of this practice of crossing boundaries, the contributors to this volume offer a unique perspective for studying the construction and meaning of personal and cultural identities.

These essays consider a wide range of texts and moments from colonial times to the present that raise significant questions about the political motivations inherent in the origins and maintenance of identity categories and boundaries. Through discussions of such literary works as Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom, The Autobiography of an Ex–Coloured Man, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, The Hidden Hand, Black Like Me, and Giovanni’s Room, the authors examine issues of power and privilege and ways in which passing might challenge the often rigid structures of identity politics. Their interrogation of the semiotics of behavior, dress, language, and the body itself contributes significantly to an understanding of national, racial, gender, and sexual identity in American literature and culture.

Contextualizing and building on the theoretical work of such scholars as Judith Butler, Diana Fuss, Marjorie Garber, and Henry Louis Gates Jr., Passing and the Fictions of Identity will be of value to students and scholars working in the areas of race, gender, and identity theory, as well as U.S. history and literature.

Contributors. Martha Cutter, Katharine Nicholson Ings, Samira Kawash, Adrian Piper, Valerie Rohy, Marion Rust, Julia Stern, Gayle Wald, Ellen M. Weinauer, Elizabeth Young

Multiracial Americans and Social Class: The Influence of Social Class on Racial Identity

Routledge
2010-04-21
256 pages
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-415-48397-1
Papeback ISBN: 978-0-415-48399-5
E-Book ISBN: 978-0-203-88373-0

Edited by

Kathleen Odell Korgen, Professor of Sociology
William Paterson University

As the racial hierarchy shifts and inequality between Americans widens, it is important to understand the impact of social class on the rapidly growing multiracial population. Multiracial Americans and Social Class is the first book on multiracial Americans to do so and fills a noticeable void in a growing market.

In this book, noted scholars examine the impact of social class on the racial identity of multiracial Americans in highly readable essays from a range of sociological perspectives. In doing so, they answer the following questions: What is the connection between class and race? Do you need to be middle class in order to be an ‘honorary white’? What is the connection between social class and culture? Do you need to ‘look’ White or just ‘act’ White in order to be treated as an ‘honorary white’? Can social class influence racial identity? How does the influence of social class compare across multiracial backgrounds?

Multiracial Americans and Social Class is a key text for undergraduate and postgraduate students, researchers and academics in the fields of Sociology, Race and Ethnic Studies, Race Relations, and Cultural Studies.

Table of Contents

Part 1: Who are Multiracial Americans?

• 1. Multiracial Americans and Social Class, Kathleen Odell Korgen
• 2. In-Between Racial Status, Mobility and Promise of Assimilation: Irish, Italians Yesterday, Latinos and Asians Today, Charles Gallagher
• 3. ‘What’s Class Got to Do with It?’: Images and Discourses on Race and Class in Interracial Relationships, Erica Chito Childs
• 4. Social Class: Racial/Ethnic Identity, and the Psychology of Choice, Peony Fhagen-Smith
• 5. Stability and Change in Racial Identities of Multiracial Adolescents, Ruth Burke and Grace Kao

Part 2: Culture, Class, Racial Identity, and Blame

• 6. Country Clubs and Hip-Hop Thugs: Examining the Role of Social Class and Culture in Shaping Racial Identity, Nikki Khanna
• 7. Language, Power, and the Performance of Race and Class, Benjamin Bailey
• 8. Black and White Movies: Crash between Class and Biracial Identity Portrayals of Black/White Biracial Individuals in Movies, Alicia Edison and George Yancey
• 9. ‘Who is Really to Blame?’ Biracial Perspectives on Inequality in America, Monique E. Marsh

Part 3: Social Class, Demographic, and Cultural Characteristics

• 10. ‘Multiracial Asian Americans’, C. N. Le
• 11. A Group in Flux: Multiracial American Indians and the Social Construction of Race, Carolyn Liebler
• 12. Socioeconomic Status and Hispanic Identification in Part-Hispanic Multiracial Adolescents, Maria L. Castilla and Melissa R. Herman

Part 4: Social Class, Racial Identities, and Racial Hierarchies

• 13. Social Class and Multiracial Groups: What Can We Learn from Large Surveys? Mary E. Campbell
• 14. The One-Drop Rule through a Multiracial Lens: Examining the Roles of Race and Class in Racial Classification of Children of Partially Black Parents, Jenifer Bratter
• 15. It’s Not That Simple: Multiraciality, Models, and Social Hierarchy, Ingrid Dineen-Wimberly and Paul Spickard

Contributors

Benjamin Bailey is an Associate Professor of Communication at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. His research on the interactional negotiation of ethnic and racial identity in US contexts has appeared in Language in Society, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology and International Migration Review.

Jenifer L. Bratter is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Associate Director of the Institute for Urban Research at Rice University. Her research focuses on the dynamics of racial intermarriage, marriage and multiracial populations, and has recently been published in Social Forces, Sociological Quarterly, Sociological Forum and Family Relations.

David L. Brunsma is Associate Professor of Sociology and Black Studies at the University of Missouri. He is author or editor of numerous books, including Beyond Black: Biracial Identity in America. His research has appeared in Social Forces, Social Science Quarterly, Sociological Quarterly, and Identity.

Ruth H. Burke is a Graduate Student in Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on racial inequality in the United States and racial identification.

Mary E. Campbell is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Iowa. Her research focuses on racial inequality and identification, and has recently been published in American Sociological Review, Social Problems, Social Science Quarterly and Social Science Research.

Maria Castilla earned her BA in 2009 from Dartmouth College, with high honors in sociology. She currently attends Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University.

Erica Chito Childs is an Associate Professor at Hunter College. Her research interests focus on issues of race, black/white couples, gender and sexuality in relationships, families, communities and media/popular culture. Her publications include Navigating Interracial Borders: Black-White Couples and Their Social Worlds (2005) and Fade to Black and White (2009).

Ingrid Dineen-Wimberly is a historian and lecturer at UC Santa Barbara, whose forth-coming book, By the Least Bit of Blood, examines the uplift potential a vocal Black identity provided mixed-raced leaders during the 19th and 20th centuries. Her analysis extends beyond the U.S. to include the function of race in the process of Latin-American nation-making.

Alicia L. Edison is a Graduate Student at the University of North Texas. Her research focuses on race and ethnicity, biracial identity formation, and the perpetuation of racial stereotypes within the media.

Peony Fhagen-Smith is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Wheaton College in Norton, MA. Her research centers on racial/ethnic identity development across the life-span and has published in Journal of Black Psychology, Journal of Counseling Psychology, Journal of Multicultural Counseling and Development, and The Counseling Psychologist.

Melissa R. Herman, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Dartmouth, studies how identity affects developmental outcomes among multiracial adolescents. Her current research projects examine perceptions of multiracial people and interracial relationships. Her recent work appears in Child Development, Sociology of Education, and Social Psychology Quarterly.

Charles A. Gallagher is Professor and Chair of the Department of Sociology, Social Work and Criminal Justice at La Salle University in Philadelphia. In addition to numerous book chapters, his research on how the media, popular culture and political ideology shapes perceptions of racial and social inequality has been published in Ethnic and Racial Studies, Social Forces and Race, Gender and Class.

Grace Kao is Professor of Sociology and Education at University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on race and immigrant differences in educational outcomes. Currently, she serves on the editorial boards of Social Science Research, Social Psychology Quarterly and Social Science Quarterly.

Nikki Khanna is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Vermont. Her research on racial identity negotiation and gender in group processes has been published in Social Psychology Quarterly, Advances in Group Processes, and The Sociological Quarterly.

C. N. Le is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology and Director of Asian/Asian American Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He focuses on racial/ethnic relations, immigration, institutional assimilation among Asian Americans, and public sociology through his Asian-Nation.org website.

Carolyn A. Liebler is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Minnesota. Her research on indigenous populations, racial identity and the measurement of race has been published in Ethnic and Racial Studies, Social Science Research, and Social Science Quarterly.

Monique E. Marsh is a Graduate Student of Sociology at Temple University. Her research focuses on racial inequality and identification, and has recently been presented at the Eastern Sociological Society Annual Conference and at the National Science Foundation’s GLASS AGEP Research Conference.

Paul Spickard teaches history and Asian American studies at UC Santa Barbara. The author of fourteen books, including Almost All Aliens: Immigration, Race, and Colonialism in American History and Identity. He is currently studying race in Hawaii and in Germany.

George A. Yancey is a Professor of Sociology at the University of North Texas. His work has focused on interracial families and multiracial churches. His latest book is Interracial Families: Current Concepts and Controversies.

The Masters and the Slaves: Plantation Relations and Mestizaje in American Imaginaries

Palgrave Macmillan
January 2005
176 pages
Size 5 1/2 x 8 1/4
Paperback ISBN: 1-4039-6708-3
Hardcover ISBN: 1-4039-6563-3

Edited by:

Alexandra Isfahani-Hammond, Assistant Professor of Luso-Brazilian Literature
University of California, San Diego

The Masters and the Slaves theorizes the interface of plantation relations with nationalist projects throughout the Americas. In readings that cover a wide range of genres–from essays and scientific writing to poetry, memoirs and the visual arts–this work investigates the post-slavery discourses of Brazil, the United States, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Haiti and Martinique. Indebted to Orlando Patterson‘s Slavery and Social Death (1982) and Paul Gilroy‘s The Black Atlantic (1993), these essays fill a void in studies of plantation power relations for their comparative, interdisciplinary approach and their investment in reading slavery through the gaze of contemporary theory, with particularly strong ties to psychoanalytic and gender studies interrogations of desire and performativity.

Table of contents

• Introduction
• The Sugar Daddy: Gilberto Freyre and the White Man’s Love for Blacks—César Braga-Pinto
• Writing Brazilian Culture—Alexandra Isfahani-Hammond
• Authority’s Double Shadow: Thomas Jefferson and the Architecture of Illegitimacy—Helena Holgersson
• Fixing History: Race, Nation, and the Symbolics of Servitude in Haitian Noirisme —Valerie Kaussen
• Fanon as ‘Metrocolonial’ Flaneur in the Caribbean Post-Plantation/Algerian Colonial City—Nalini Natarajan
• From the Tropics: Cultural Subjectivity and Politics in Gilberto Freyre—Jossiana Arroyo
• Hybridity and Mestizaje: Syncretism or Subversive Complicity—Ramón Grosfoguel
• Giants of Three Colors: A Writer and an Artist Imagine Racial Mixture in 1940s Brazil—Luiza Franco Moreira
• Messianic Melancholic Imagination: Imagine Community with the Dead—Shreerekha Subramanian

Taboo: Essays on Culture and Education

Peter Lang Publishing Group
2010
250 pages
Paparback ISBN: 978-1-4331-0840-2

Edited by:

Shirley R. Steinberg
McGill University

Lindsay Cornish

Taboo: Essays on Culture and Education is a collection of 15 compelling and controversial articles from the pages of Taboo: The Journal of Cultural Studies and Education. Scholars including Henry A. Giroux, Deborah P. Britzman, and Lawrence Grossberg explore intersections of race, gender, sexuality, social class, and power by examining cultural icons such as Forrest Gump and Borat, and social phenomena including cheerleading and the depiction of Jewish mothers on television. Taboo: Essays on Culture and Education is an indispensable resource for cultural studies scholars and students alike.

Table of Contents

• Lawrence Grossberg: What’s in a Name (One More Time)
• Deborah P. Britzman: What Is This Thing Called Love?
• Aaron D. Gresson III: Postmodern America and the Multicultural Crisis: Reading Forrest Gump as the “Call Back to Whiteness”
• Henry A. Giroux: Black, Bruised, and Read All Over: Public Intellectuals and the Politics of Race
• Kurt Kors: The Scenography of HIV Infection for Young Gay Men: Educating Emotion and Desire
• Kathalene A. Razzano: Tiger Woods: A Discursive Struggle over the Construction of a Multiracial Image
• Awad Ibrahim: “Hey, Whadup Homeboy?” Identification, Desire, and Consumption Hip Hop, Performativity, and the Politics of Becoming Black
• Molly Quinn: Getting Thrown Around: Little Girls and Cheerleading
• Myrna Hant: TV Jewish Mothers: The Creation of a Multiethnic Antiheroine
• Michelle Stack: Made for TV: Selling Kids’ Suffering and Creating Angels to Save Them
• Priya Parmar: Cultural Studies and Rap: The Poetry of an Urban Lyricist
• Eric J. Weiner: Constructions of Innocence in Times of War: Breaking into the Hegemony of Peace
• Dennis Parsons: Almost Feminist: Truth, the Trope of the Writer, and the Male Gaze in Almost Famous
• Roymieco A. Carter/Leila E. Villaverde: Laughing at Ourselves (in the Dark): Comedy and the Critical Reflections of Social Actions

Zadie Smith: Critical Essays

Peter Lang Publishing Group
March 2008
221 pages
Paparback ISBN: 9978-0-8204-8806-6

Edited by:

Tracey L. Walters, Associate Professor of Literature
Stony Brook University

Zadie Smith: Critical Essays is a timely collection of critical articles examining how Zadie Smith‘s novels and short stories interrogate race, postcolonialism, and identity. Essays explore the various ways Smith approaches issues of race, either by deconstructing notions of race or interrogating the complexity of biracial identity; and how Smith takes on contemporary debates concerning notions of Britishness, Englishness, and Black Britishness. Some essays also consider the shifting identities adopted by those who identify with both British and West Indian, South Asian, or East Asian ancestry. Other essays explore Smith’s contemporary postcolonial approach to Britain’s colonial legacy, and the difference between how immigrants and first-generation British-born children deal with cultural alienation and displacement. This thought-provoking collection is a much-needed critical tool for students and researchers in both contemporary British literature and Diasporic literature and culture.

Table of Contents

• Tracey L. Walters: Introduction
• Matthew Paproth: The Flipping Coin: The Modernist and Postmodernist Zadie Smith
• Ulka Anjaria: On Beauty and Being Postcolonial: Aesthetics and Form in Zadie Smith
• Urszula Terentowicz-Fotyga: The Impossible Self and the Poetics of the Urban Hyperreal in Zadie Smith’s “The Autograph Man”
• Maeve Tynan: “Only Connect”: Intertextuality and Identity in Zadie Smith’s “On Beauty”
• Raphael Dalleo: Colonization in Reverse: “White Teeth” as Caribbean Novel
• Susan Alice Fischer: “Gimme Shelter”: Zadie Smith’s “On Beauty”
• Tracey L. Walters: Still Mammies and Hos: Stereotypical Images of Black Women in Zadie Smith’s Novels
• Sharon Raynor: From the Dispossessed to the Decolonized: From Samuel Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners to Zadie Smith’s “Hanwell in Hell”
• Lexi Stuckey: Red and Yellow, Black and White: Color-Blindness as Disillusionment in Zadie Smith’s “Hanwell in Hell”
• Kris Knauer: The Root Canals of Zadie Smith: London’s Intergenerational Adaptation
• Z. Esra Mirze: Fundamental Differences in Zadie Smith’s “White Teeth”
• Katarzyna Jakubiak: Simulated Optimism: The International Marketing of “White Teeth”

Communication, Race, and Family: Exploring Communication in Black, White, and Biracial Families

Routledge
1999-08-01
Pages: 264
Trim Size: 6 x 9
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-8058-2938-9
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8058-2939-6

Edited by:

Thomas J. Socha

Rhunette C. Diggs

This groundbreaking volume explores how family communication influences the perennial and controversial topic of race. In assembling this collection, editors Thomas J. Socha and Rhunette C. Diggs argue that the hope for managing America’s troubles with “race” lies not only with communicating about race at public meetings, in school, and in the media, but also—and more fundamentally—with families communicating constructively about race at home.

African-American and European-American family communication researchers come together in this volume to investigate such topics as how Black families communicate to manage the issue of racism; how Black parent-child communication is used to manage the derogation of Black children; the role of television in family communication about race; the similarities and differences between and among communication in Black, White, and biracial couples and families; and how family communication education can contribute to a brighter future for all. With the aim of developing a clearer understanding of the role that family communication plays in society’s move toward a multicultural world, this volume provides a crucial examination of how families struggle with issues of ethnic cultural diversity.

Table of Contents

• M.K. Asante, Foreword. Preface
• T.J. Socha, R.C. Diggs, At the Crossroads of Communication, Race, and Family: Toward Understanding Black, White, and Biracial Family Communication
• J.L. Daniel, J.E. Daniel, African-American Childrearing: The Context of a Hot Stove
• I.B. Ferguson, African-American Parent-Child Communication About Racial Derogation
• S.L. Parks, Race and Electronic Media in the Lives of Four Families: An Ethnographic Study
• R.A. Davilla, White Children’s Talk About Race and Culture: Family Communication and Intercultural Socialization
• R.C. Diggs, African-American and European-American Adolescents’ Perceptions of Self-Esteem as Influenced by Parent and Peer Communication and Support Environments
• M. Dainton, African-American, European-American, and Biracial Couples’ Meanings for and Experiences in Marriage. M.P. Orbe, Communicating About “Race” in Interracial Families
• B.K. Alexander, H.P. LeBlanc, III, Cooking Gumbo–Examining Cultural Dialogue About Family: A Black-White Narrativization of Lived Experience in Southern Louisiana
• T.J. Socha, J. Beigle, Toward Improving Life at the Crossroads: Family Communication Education and Multicultural Competence
• K. Galvin, Epilogue: Illuminating and Evoking Issues of Race and Family Communication

The Idea of Race in Latin America, 1870-1940

University of Texas Press
1990
143 pages
10 b&w illus.
6 x 9 in.
ISBN: 978-0-292-73857-7

Edited by

Richard Graham, Emeritus Frances Higginbotham Nalle Centennial Professor of History
University of Texas, Austin

With chapters by Thomas E. Skidmore, Aline Helg, and Alan Knight

From the mid-nineteenth century until the 1930s, many Latin American leaders faced a difficult dilemma regarding the idea of race. On the one hand, they aspired to an ever-closer connection to Europe and North America, where, during much of this period, “scientific” thought condemned nonwhite races to an inferior category. Yet, with the heterogeneous racial makeup of their societies clearly before them and a growing sense of national identity impelling consideration of national futures, Latin American leaders hesitated. What to do? Whom to believe?

Latin American political and intellectual leaders’ sometimes anguished responses to these dilemmas form the subject of The Idea of Race in Latin America. Thomas Skidmore, Aline Helg, and Alan Knight have each contributed chapters that succinctly explore various aspects of the story in Brazil, Argentina, Cuba, and Mexico. While keenly alert to the social and economic differences that distinguish one Latin American society from another, each author has also addressed common issues that Richard Graham ably draws together in a brief introduction. Written in a style that will make it accessible to the undergraduate, this book will appeal as well to the sophisticated scholar.

Table of Contents

• Preface
• 1. Introduction (Richard Graham)
• 2. Racial Ideas and Social Policy in Brazil, 1870-1940 (Thomas E. Skidmore)
• 3. Race in Argentina and Cuba, 1880-1930: Theory, Policies, and Popular Reaction (Aline Helg)
• 4. Racism, Revolution, and Indigenismo: Mexico, 1910-1940 (Alan Knight)
• Bibliography
• Index

Read the intrduction here.

Mixed: An Anthology of Short Fiction on the Multiracial Experience

W. W. Norton & Company
August 2006
336 pages
5.5 × 8.2 in
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-393-32786-1

Edited by Chandra Prasad

With an Introduction by Rebecca Walker

With a roster of acclaimed fiction writers, Mixed shatters expectations of what it means to be multiracial.

Globally, the number of multiracial people is exploding. In 10 US states, the percentage of multiracial residents who are of school age—between 5 and 17—is at least 25 percent. In California alone, it is estimated that 15 percent of all births are multiracial or multiethnic. Despite these numbers, mixed-race people have long struggled for a distinct place on the identity map. It was only as recently as 2000 that the U.S. Census Bureau began to allow citizens to check off as many racial categories as are applicable-White, African American, Asian, Hispanic, Native Hawaiian, American Indian, and Alaska Native. Previously, Americans were allowed to check off only one, leaving multiracial people invisible and unaccounted for.

Though multiracialism has recently become a popular aspect of many memoirs and novels, Mixed is the first of its kind: a fiction anthology with racial overlap as its compass. With original pieces by both established and emerging writers, Mixed explores the complexities of identity that come with being a multiracial person. Every story, crafted by authors who are themselves mixed-race, broaches multiracialism through character or theme. With contributors such as Cristina Garcia, Danzy Senna, Ruth Ozeki, Mat Johnson, Wayde Compton, Diana Abu-Jaber, Emily Raboteau, Mary Yukari Waters, and Peter Ho Davies, and an illuminating introduction by Rebecca Walker, Mixed gives narrative voice to the multiple identities of the rising generation.

The Chinese in the Caribbean

Markus Wiener Publishers
November 2004
240 pages
Hardcover ISBN 10: 1-55876-314-7; ISBN 13: 978-1-55876-314-2
Paperback ISBN 10: 1-55876-315-5; ISBN 13: 978-1-55876-315-9

Edited by

Andrew R. Wilson, Professor
Strategy and Policy Department
United States Naval War College

The history of the Caribbean is a history of migrations. The peoples of the region came as conquerors and planters, slaves and indentured laborers from all parts of the globe. Each group contributed to the social fabric, culture, and commerce of the region. The Chinese diaspora has spread Chinese people and culture around the world, including to the Caribbean, where Chinese exist both as distinct ethnic groups within Caribbean societies and as shapers of unique Caribbean cultures.

The book describes not merely the arrival and experience of Chinese in the Caribbean but also the ways in which Chinese have adapted to and altered the region. Included are the histories of Chinese people in Cuba, Jamaica, Panama, and the British West Indies, and overcame, their slow rise to economic independence and success, their contribution to art, theater, cuisine, and literature, their roles in the region’s national revolutions, their place in post-colonial politics, and the subsequent remigrations of individuals, families, and entire communitites to North America.