Mixed Race Studies

Professor Andrew Jolivétte to be Featured Guest on Mixed Chicks Chat

Mixed Chicks Chat (Founders of the Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival)
Hosted by Fanshen Cox, Heidi W. Durrow and Jennifer Frappier
Website: TalkShoe™ (Keywords: Mixed Chicks)
Episode: 252-Professor Andrew Jolivétte
When: Wednesday, 2012-04-11, 21:00Z (17:00 EDT, 14:00 PDT)

Andrew Jolivétte, Associate Professor of American Indian Studies
Center for Health Disparities Research and Training
San Fransisco State University

Dr. Jolivétte is a mixed-race studies specialist with a particular interest in Comparative Race Relations, the Urban Indian Experience, People of Color and Popular Culture, Critical Mixed Race Studies and Social Justice, Creole studies, Black-Indians, and mixed-race health disparities. He has been an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of San Francisco and a Researcher with the University of California, San Francisco on issues of racial violence among African American and Latino/a youth in the Bay Area.

Dr. Jolivétte is the edtitor and contributor to the recent anthology tittled, Obama and the Biracial Factor, which is the first book to explore the significance of mixed-race identity as a key factor in the election of President Obama and examines the sociological and political relationship between race, power, and public policy in the United States with an emphasis on public discourse and ethnic representation in his election.

Selected Bibliography:

• Obama and the Biracial Factor: The Battle for a New American Majority (editor), 2012.
• Cultural Representation in Native America, 2006
• Louisiana Creoles: Cultural Recovery and Mixed-Race Native American Identity, 2006

Listen to the interview here.

Doubters and Dreamers

University of Arizona Press
2011
96 pages
5.50 in x 8.50 in
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8165-2927-8

Janice Gould

Doubters and Dreamers opens with a question from a young girl faced with the spectacle of Indian effigies lynched and burned “in jest” before UC Berkeley’s annual Big Game against Stanford: “What’s a debacle, Mom?” This innocent but telling question marks the girl’s entrée into the complicated knowledge of her heritage as a mixed-blood Native American of Koyangk’auwi (Concow) Maidu descent. The girl is a young Janice Gould, and the poems and narrations that follow constitute a remarkable work of sustained and courageous self-revelation, retracing the precarious emotional terrain of an adolescence shaped by a mother’s tough love and a growing consciousness of an ancestral and familial past.

In the first half of the book, “Tribal History,” Gould ingeniously repurposes the sonnet form to preserve the stories of her mother and aunt, who grew up when “muleback was the customary mode / of transport” and the “spirit world was present”—stories of “old ways” and places claimed in memory but lost in time. Elsewhere, she remembers her mother’s “ferocious, upright anger” and her unexpected tenderness (“Like a miracle, I was still her child”), culminating in the profound expression of loss that is the poem “Our Mother’s Death.”

In the second half of the book, “It Was Raining,” Gould tells of the years of lonely self-making and “unfulfilled dreams” as she comes to terms with what she has been told are her “crazy longings” as a lesbian: “It’s been hammered into me / that I’ll be spurned / by a ‘real woman,’ / the only kind I like.” The writing here commemorates old loves and relationships in language that mingles hope and despair, doubt and devotion, veering at times into dreamlike moments of consciousness. One poem and vignette at a time, Doubters and Dreamers explores what it means to be a mixed-blood Native American who grew up urban, lesbian, and middle class in the West.

Read an excerpt here.

“Teachable Moments”: The Use of Child-Centered Arguments in the Same-Sex Marriage Debate

California Law Review
Volume 98, Issue 1 (February 2010)
pages 121-158

Ruth Butterfield Isaacson, Associate
Leland, Parachini, Steinberg, Matzger & Melnick LLP, San Francisco

Child-centered arguments have played a central role in debates over expanding marriage rights throughout history. Opponents of interracial marriage argued in Loving v. Virginia that “mixed race” children from interracial households were physically and psychologically inferior and suffered from social stigmatization. Over forty years later, child-centered arguments again took center stage in the debate over same-sex marriage. The arguments initially focused on the harms to children raised by same-sex parents—specifically, that such children suffer from stunted development and social alienation. Over the years, these arguments gradually morphed into claims that same-sex marriage harms all children, because the prevalence of same-sex marriage in society and its integration in school curriculum confuses children about gender roles and the “true” meaning of marriage. Tracing the evolution of child-centered arguments from Loving through the recent battle for same-sex marriage in California’s November 2008 election on Proposition 8 offers valuable lessons to same-sex marriage advocates about the propriety and consequences of using child-centered arguments in defining the marriage rights of adults.

INTRODUCTION

It really is what we call a teachable moment.
—Interim Director of the Creative Arts Charter School in San Francisco, describing a first-grade field trip to City Hall to watch a lesbian wedding.

On Friday, October 10, 2008, a group of first-grade children from the Creative Arts Charter School in San Francisco took a field trip to City Hall. The children’s first-grade teacher, a lesbian, was set to marry her longtime girlfriend that morning. The director of the charter school saw the wedding as a “teachable moment”—an opportunity for the children to witness firsthand the progression of civil rights in America.

Many same-sex marriage advocates heralded the first graders’ excursion as another step toward the full acceptance and integration of same-sex individuals in society. But other supporters worried that the field trip, while well intentioned, was ill timed and potentially damaging to the same-sex marriage cause. At that time, the debate over same-sex marriage had reached a significant crossroads. Earlier that year, the California Supreme Court issued a landmark decision declaring that a same-sex marriage ban violated both the due process and equal protection provisions of the California Constitution. Opponents of same-sex marriage responded quickly and forcefully with Proposition 8, a ballot initiative to amend the California Constitution to define marriage solely as a union between a man and a woman. On the day of the field trip, polls on Proposition 8 showed close to a dead heat on the issue. Many same-sex marriage advocates feared that the “teachable moment” played directly into the hands of their opponents, giving them new leverage that could ultimately shift momentum in favor of Proposition 8.

Not surprisingly, just one week later, the field trip became the target of new television advertisements supporting Proposition 8. The leading organization behind the Proposition 8 campaign, ProtectMarriage.com, had cautioned for months that state recognition of same-sex marriage would, among other things, force public schools to include teaching same-sex marriage in their curriculum. In their view, the field trip was concrete and visible evidence that their fears had been realized. Playing on those fears, their ad took advantage of news footage of the wedding, particularly footage of a first-grade girl who appeared sad, and almost confused, by her teacher’s lesbian wedding. This lasting image was paired with the warning that “children will be taught about gay marriage unless we vote yes on Proposition 8.” The ad first aired on October 28, 2008; Proposition 8 passed by a 52-48 margin exactly one week later on November 4, 2008.

Appeals to child welfare are neither new nor exclusive to the same-sex marriage debate. Such appeals have also been raised in other family law disputes, most notably the fight for interracial marriage during the era of Loving v. Virginia, the United States Supreme Court decision striking down Virginia’s ban on interracial marriage. Opponents of interracial marriage claimed that the “mixed-race” children produced by interracial couples were biologically inferior, suffered abnormal social and psychological development, and endured stigmatization by their peers. Similarly, opponents of same-sex marriage have wielded such claims for almost two decades, although the substance of their child-based fears has evolved. Like the early arguments used by interracial marriage opponents, the first child-centered arguments in the same-sex marriage debate focused on the harms to children raised by same-sex parents—specifically, that such children suffer stunted social and psychological development and face stigmatization by their peers. Over the years, these concerns gradually morphed into fears about how same-sex marriage harms all children, because the increasing prevalence of same-sex marriage in society and its integration into school curricula confuse children about gender roles and the true meaning of marriage.

This Comment examines modern views of marriage and how child-centered appeals have influenced the discourse on expanding marital rights, particularly within the context of Loving v. Virginia, Goodridge v. Dep’t of Public Health, Hernandez v. Robles, In re Marriage Cases, the battle over Proposition 8 in California, and supporting case law and legislation. These sources evince an evolution in judicial conceptions of marriage and the childbased arguments that have been used to expand or constrict such conceptions, from anxiety over “mixed-race” children during the fight for interracial marriage to concerns in the same-sex marriage debate about the psycho-social well-being of children raised by same-sex parents and, ultimately, the effects of same-sex marriage on public school curricula. The Comment concludes with an analysis of modern marriage as defined by courts and society today, the intersection of Proposition 8’s success with contemporary marital attitudes, and the role of the judiciary in the fate of same-sex marriage…

…In defending its ban on interracial marriage, Virginia appealed to many of the same child-centered arguments that motivated the enactment of the ban 276 years earlier. In its brief to the Supreme Court, Virginia declared that states have an interest in preserving the “purity of the races and in preventing the propagation of half-breed children.” Acknowledging the reality of persistent racism, Virginia claimed its interest in keeping the races “pure” stemmed not from the repulsion interracial children invoke in society, but rather from the idea that interracial children were seen as outcasts and would be “burdened . . . with ‘a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.’” Virginia also emphasized the socioscientific consequences to interracial children, including the domination of racial inferiorities within children of mixed race and the social tension that it claimed was created when races of different socioeconomic backgrounds formed a family. Interracial couples also experienced higher divorce rates, Virginia argued, which would have negative effects on the (interracial) children produced by and raised within these families…

Read the entire article here.

Morgan Goode: On Board with the Future of the Movement

The Bilerico Project
2012-03-21

Amy Andre, Project Contributor

If you haven’t heard of her already, BiNet USA board member Morgan Goode is a name for you to remember. At this year’s Creating Change conference, she co-led a workshop about mixed race issues that brought a crowd that was literally spilling out of the doors. I was in that room, and I saw the current and future leadership of the bi movement—and of the LGBT movement as a whole—sitting in there with me. Specifically, I saw it at the front of the room.

Morgan is a writer and photographer living in Brooklyn. She is a profo-queer and is affiliated with many different LGBT organizations, but her opinions are her own. She tells me that one day she is going to make good on her threat to do a photo project on white tourists photographing homeless people of color. In the meantime, she is an editor-at-large at prettyqueer.com and is also organizing the 6th Annual Amazingly Queer Race for Economic Justice. Her favorite pastimes include subverting the gaze, making people uncomfortably aware of their privilege and petting kitties.

I recently caught up with Morgan to learn more about where she’s going, where the movement is going, and how we can all get on board. Here’s what she had to say.

Amy: What inspired your workshop at Creating Change for mixed race attendees? How did it go for you? Do you plan to do more in the future?

Morgan: Mixed race issues have been on my mind since I can remember but that workshop actually came out of meeting fellow activist Ryan Li Dahlstrom at the 2010 BECAUSE Conference. The conference and the panel obviously focused on bi/pan/fluid issues, but Ryan Li and I really connected around our shared identities as mixed race queers. It wasn’t long before we knew we had to do a workshop that would give mixed race queer and trans folks the opportunity to come together and support each other as activists and allies. I think mixed race queer and trans folks are really hungry for that space to share our experiences and be heard…

Read the entire article here.

Audre Lorde – The Berlin Years 1984 to 1992

Third World Newsreel
2012
84 minutes
Germany
English/German with English Subtitles

Dagmar Schultz

2012 marks the 20th anniversary of Audre Lorde’s passing, the acclaimed Black lesbian feminist poet and activist. Throughout the 70s and 80s, Lorde’s incisive writings and speeches defined and inspired the women of color, feminist and LGBT social justice movements in the United States.

Audre Lorde – The Berlin Years 1984 to 1992  explores a little-known chapter of the writer’s prolific life, a period in which she helped ignite the Afro-German Movement and made lasting contributions to the German political and cultural scene before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the German reunification.

Lorde mentored and encouraged Black German women to write and publish as a way of asserting their identities, rights and culture in a society that isolated and silenced them, while challenging white German women to acknowledge their white  privilege. As Lorde wrote in her book Our Dead Behind Us: Poems, “It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences.”

Audre Lorde – The Berlin Years 1984 to 1992 contains previously unreleased audiovisual material from director Dagmar Schultz’s personal archive, showing Lorde on and off stage. With testimony from Lorde’s colleagues, students and friends, this film documents Lorde’s lasting legacy in Germany.

See the Audre Lorde – The Berlin Years 1984 to 1992 Study Guide here.

Navigating Multiple Identities: Race, Gender, Culture, Nationality, and Roles

Oxford University Press
March 2012
288 pages
Paperback ISBN13: 9780199732074; ISBN10: 0199732078

Edited by

Ruthellen Josselson, Professor of Psychology
Fielding Graduate University, Santa Barbara, California

Michele Harway, Faculty Research Specialist
Fielding Graduate University, Santa Barbara, California

Although questionnaires routinely ask people to check boxes indicating if they are, for example, male or female, black or white, Hispanic or American, many people do not fit neatly into one category or another. Identity is increasingly organized multiply and may encompass additional categories beyond those that appear on demographic questionnaires. In addition, identities are often fluid and context-dependent, depending on the external social factors that invite their emergence. Identity is constantly evolving in light of changing environments, but people are often uncomfortably fixed with societal labels that they must include or resist in their individual identity definition.

In our increasingly complex, globalized world, many people carry conflicting psychosocial identities. They live at the edges of more than one communal affiliation, with the challenge of bridging different loyalties and identifications. Navigating Multiple Identities considers those who are navigating across racial minority or majority status, various cultural expectations and values, gender identities, and roles. The chapters collected here by Josselson and Harway explore the ways in which individuals attain or maintain personal integration in the face of often shifting personal or social locations, and how they navigate the complexity of their multiple identities.

Features

• Discusses different forms of identity, beyond race and ethnicity
• Incorporates international perspectives

Table of Contents

• Chapter 1—The Challenges of Multiple Identity—Ruthellen Josselson and Michele Harway
• Chapter 2—Multiple Identities and Their Organization—Gary S. Gregg
• Chapter 3—The “We of Me”: Barack Obama’s Search for Identity—Ruthellen Josselson
• Chapter 4—The Varieties of the Masculine Experience—Kate A. Richmond, Ronald F. Levant, and Shamin C. J. Ladhani
• Chapter 5—Growing Up Bicultural in the United States: The Case of Japanese-Americans—James Fuji Collins
• Chapter 6—The Multiple Identities of Feminist Women of Color: Creating a New Feminism?—Janis Sanchez-Hucles, Alex Dryden, and Barbara Winstead
• Chapter 7—The Multiple Identities of Transgender Individuals: Incorporating a Framework of Intersectionality to Gender Crossing—Theodore R. Burnes and Mindy Chen
• Chapter 8—A Garden for Many Identities—Suzanne Ouellette
• Chapter 9—“I Am More (Than Just) Black”: Contesting Multiplicity Through Conferring and Asserting Singularity in Narratives of Blackness—Siyanda Ndlovu
• Chapter 10—Identities in the First Person Plural: Muslim-Jewish Couples in France—Brian Schiff, Mathilde Toulemonde, and Carolina Porto
• Chapter 11—Identity Wounds: Multiple Identities and Intersectional Theory in the Context of Multiculturalism—Michal Krumer-Nevo and Menny Malka
• Chapter 12—Evaluation of Cultural and Linguistic Practices: Constructing Finnish-German Identities in Narrative Research Interviews—Sara Helsig
• Chapter 13—“Because I’m Neither Gringa nor Latina”: Conceptualizing Multiple Identities Within Transnational Social Fields—Debora Upegui-Hernandez

The Social Negotiation of Ambiguous In-Between Stigmatized Identities: Investigating Identity Processes in Multiracial and Bisexual People

University of Massachusetts, Boston
December 2011
234 pages

Vali Dagmar Kahn

A Dissertation Presented by Submitted to the Office of Graduate Studies, University of Massachusetts Boston, in partial fulfillment of  the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in Clinical Psychology

To date, most bisexual and multiracial identity models in psychology capture a largely internal developmental process (Collins, 2000; Kich, 1992; Weinberg, Williams & Pryor, 1994). However, individuals learn to manage their socially stigmatized identities in social interactions (Goffman, 1963). While the demands to socially negotiate stigmatized identity affect all minority peoples, individuals with inbetween ambiguous stigmatized identities, such as multiracial and bisexual people, must negotiate also being situated at the margins of their own reference groups (e.g. heterosexual and gay/lesbian). Using a comparative grounded theory approach, this study explored the question: How do experiences of socially negotiating an inbetween ambiguous stigmatized identity influence one’s identity development? And the sub-question: What are the similarities and differences in these processes for multiracial and bisexual people?

between the ages of 20 and 36 years participated in semi-structured interviews addressing the following areas of inquiry: (1) Contextualizing current identifications and establishing shared understandings, (2) Experiences of social negotiations, and (3) Effects of these experiences on identities. Issues regarding the rigor and credibility of the study (Morrow, 2005) were addressed through peer debriefing; inquiry auditing; and member check discussions. Analysis followed a constant comparative method (Creswell, 2007) and a multi-step process resulting in a theory describing three negotiation cycles and associated identity effects common to both kinds of identities (multiracial and bisexual), with additional identity specific (multiracial or bisexual) variations: the first cycle was Catalyzing Experiences, the second was Active Negotiations, and the third Emerging Sense of Agency through New Understandings, Perspectives, and Positive Experiences. Cycles were described by multiracial and bisexual participants as fluid, iterative, and interacting. The model developed in this study offers a way of understanding stigma management strategies and their relation to influencing identities and stigmatizing processes. This deeper understanding can help clinicians and community organizers create inclusive environments and develop interventions to assist multiracial and bisexual individuals develop skills to deal with social stigmatizing processes, resolve initial questions, and develop a greater sense of agency in identity choice and performance.

Read the entire dissertation here.

Episode 13: An ‘All-American’ Student Leader’s Search for Identity

Say Something: College Life. One Student at a Time.
The Chronicle of Higher Education
2011-03-25

Robin Wilson

“One assumes it’s very hard to be religious and still be gay.”
 
Ari Shroyer
Roosevelt University, Chicago, Illinois

In this episode, we hear from Ari Shroyer, a sophomore at Roosevelt University, who tells us what it’s like to be a gay, conservative, biracial student-body president—and explains how the university’s openly gay president has served as an inspiration.

Listen to the interview here.

The Afro-Latin@ Reader: History and Culture in the United States

Duke University Press
2010
584 pages
9.1 x 6.1 x 1.3 inches
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8223-4558-9
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-4572-5

Edited by:

Miriam Jiménez Román, Visiting Professor of Africana Studies
New York University

Juan Flores, Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis
New York University

The Afro-Latin@ Reader focuses attention on a large, vibrant, yet oddly invisible community in the United States: people of African descent from Latin America and the Caribbean. The presence of Afro-Latin@s in the United States (and throughout the Americas) belies the notion that Blacks and Latin@s are two distinct categories or cultures. Afro-Latin@s are uniquely situated to bridge the widening social divide between Latin@s and African Americans; at the same time, their experiences reveal pervasive racism among Latin@s and ethnocentrism among African Americans. Offering insight into Afro-Latin@ life and new ways to understand culture, ethnicity, nation, identity, and antiracist politics, The Afro-Latin@ Reader presents a kaleidoscopic view of Black Latin@s in the United States. It addresses history, music, gender, class, and media representations in more than sixty selections, including scholarly essays, memoirs, newspaper and magazine articles, poetry, short stories, and interviews.

While the selections cover centuries of Afro-Latin@ history, since the arrival of Spanish-speaking Africans in North America in the mid-sixteenth-century, most of them focus on the past fifty years. The central question of how Afro-Latin@s relate to and experience U.S. and Latin American racial ideologies is engaged throughout, in first-person accounts of growing up Afro-Latin@, a classic essay by a leader of the Young Lords, and analyses of U.S. census data on race and ethnicity, as well as in pieces on gender and sexuality, major-league baseball, and religion. The contributions that Afro-Latin@s have made to U.S. culture are highlighted in essays on the illustrious Afro-Puerto Rican bibliophile Arturo Alfonso Schomburg and music and dance genres from salsa to mambo, and from boogaloo to hip hop. Taken together, these and many more selections help to bring Afro-Latin@s in the United States into critical view.

Contributors: Afro–Puerto Rican Testimonies Project, Josefina Baéz, Ejima Baker, Luis Barrios, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Adrian Burgos Jr., Ginetta E. B. Candelario, Adrián Castro, Jesús Colón, Marta I. Cruz-Janzen, William A. Darity Jr., Milca Esdaille, Sandra María Esteves, María Teresa Fernández (Mariposa), Carlos Flores, Juan Flores, Jack D. Forbes, David F. Garcia, Ruth Glasser, Virginia Meecham Gould, Susan D. Greenbaum, Evelio Grillo, Pablo “Yoruba” Guzmán, Gabriel Haslip-Viera, Tanya K. Hernández, Victor Hernández Cruz, Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof, Lisa Hoppenjans, Vielka Cecilia Hoy, Alan J. Hughes, María Rosario Jackson, James Jennings, Miriam Jiménez Román, Angela Jorge, David Lamb, Aida Lambert, Ana M. Lara, Evelyne Laurent-Perrault, Tato Laviera, John Logan, Antonio López, Felipe Luciano, Louis Pancho McFarland, Ryan Mann-Hamilton, Wayne Marshall, Marianela Medrano, Nancy Raquel Mirabal, Yvette Modestin, Ed Morales, Jairo Moreno, Marta Moreno Vega, Willie Perdomo, Graciela Pérez Gutiérrez, Sofia Quintero, Ted Richardson, Louis Reyes Rivera, Pedro R. Rivera , Raquel Z. Rivera, Yeidy Rivero, Mark Q. Sawyer, Piri Thomas, Silvio Torres-Saillant, Nilaja Sun, Sherezada “Chiqui” Vicioso, Peter H. Wood

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Editorial Note
• Introduction
• I. Historical Background before 1900
  • The Earliest Africans in North America / Peter H. Wood
  • Black Pioneers: The Spanish-Speaking Afroamericans of the Southwest / Jack D. Forbes
  • Slave and Free Women of Color in the Spanish Ports of New Orleans, Mobile, and Pensacola / Virginia Meacham Gould
  • Afro-Cubans in Tampa / Susan D. Greenbaum
  • Excerpt from Pulling the Muse from the Drum / Adrian Castro
• II. Arturo Alfonso Schomburg
  • Excerpt from Racial Integrity: A Plea for the Establishment of a Chair of Negro History in Our Schools and Colleges / Arturo Alfonso Schomburg
  • The World of Arturo Alfonso Schomburg / Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof
  • Invoking Arturo Schomburg’s Legacy in Philadelphia / Evelyne Laurent-Perrault
• III. Afro-Latin@s on the Color Line
  • Black Cuban, Black American / Evelio Grillo
  • A Puerto Rican in New York and Other Sketches / Jesus Colon
  • Melba Alvarado, El Club Cubano Inter-Americano, and the Creation of Afro-Cubanidades in New York City / Nancy Raquel Mirabel
  • An Uneven Playing Field: Afro-Latinos in Major League Baseball / Adrian Burgos Jr.
  • Changing Identities: An Afro-Latino Family Portrait / Gabriel Haslip-Viera
  • Eso era tremendo!: An Afro-Cuban Musician Remembers / Graciela Perez Gutierrez
• IV. Roots of Salsa: Afro-Latin@ Popular Music
  • From “Indianola” to “Ño Colá”: The Strange Career of the Afro-Puerto Rican Musician / Ruth Glasser
  • Excerpt from cu/bop / Louis Reyes Rivera
  • Bauzá-Gillespie-Latin/Jazz: Difference, Modernity, and the Black Caribbean / Jairo Moreno
  • Contesting that Damned Mambo: Arsenio Rodriguez and the People of El Barrio and the Bronx in the 1950s / David F. Garcia
  • Boogaloo and Latin Soul / Juan Flores
  • Excerpt from the salsa of bethesda fountain / Tato Laviera
• V. Black Latin@ Sixties
  • Hair Conking: Buy Black / Carlos Cooks
  • Carlos A. Cooks: Dominican Garveyite in Harlem / Pedro R. Rivera
  • Down These Mean Streets / Piri Thomas
  • African Things / Victor Hernandez Cruz
  • Black Notes and “You Do Something to Me” / Sandra Maria Esteves
  • Before People Called Me a Spic, They Called Me a Nigger / Pablo “Yoruba” Guzman
  • Excerpt from Jíbaro, My Pretty Nigger / Felipe Luciano
  • The Yoruba Orisha Tradition Comes to New York City / Marta Moreno Vega
  • Reflections and Lived Experiences of Afro-Latin@ Religiosity / Luis Barrios
  • Discovering Myself / Un Testimonio / Josefina Baez
• VI. Afro-Latinas
  • The Black Puerto Rican Woman in Contemporary American Society / Angela Jorge
  • Something Latino Was Up with Us / Spring Redd
  • Excerpt from Poem for My Grifa-Rican Sistah, or Broken Ends Broken Promises / Mariposa (María Teresa Fernandez)
  • Latinegras: Desired Women—Undesirable Mothers, Daughters, Sisters, and Wives / Marta I. Cruz-Janzen
  • Letter to a Friend / Nilaja Sun
  • Uncovering Mirrors: Afro-Latina Lesbian Subjects / Ana M. Lara
  • The Black Bellybutton of a Bongo / Marianela Medrano
• VII. Public Images and (Mis)Representations
  • Notes on Eusebia Cosme and Juano Hernandez / Miriam Jimenez Roman
  • Desde el Mero Medio: Race Discrimination within the Latino Community / Carlos Flores
  • Displaying Identity: Dominicans in the Black Mosaic of Washington, D.C. / Ginetta E. B. Candelario
  • Bringing the Soul: Afros, Black Empowerment, and Lucecita Benítez / Yeidy M. Rivero
  • Can BET Make You Black? Remixing and Reshaping Latin@s on Black Entertainment Television / Ejima Baker
  • The Afro-Latino Connection: Can this group be the bridge to a broadbased Black-Hispanic alliance? / Alan Hughes and Milca Esdaille
• VIII. Afro-Latin@s in the Hip Hop Zone
  • Ghettocentricity, Blackness, and Pan-Latinidad / Raquel Z. Rivera
  • Chicano Rap Roots: Afro-Mexico and Black-Brown Cultural Exchange / Pancho McFarland
  • The Rise and Fall of Reggaeton: From Daddy Yankee to Tego Calderon and Beyond / Wayne Marshall
  • Do Platanos Go wit’ Collard Greens? / David Lamb
  • Divas Don’t Yield / Sofia Quintero
• IX. Living Afro-Latinidads
  • An Afro-Latina’s Quest for Inclusion / Yvette Modestin
  • Retracing Migration: From Samana to New York and Back Again / Ryan Mann-Hamilton
  • Negotiating among Invisibilities: Tales of Afro-Latinidades in the United States / Vielka Cecilia Hoy
  • We Are Black Too: Experiences of a Honduran Garifuna / Aida Lambert
  • Profile of an Afro-Latina: Black, Mexican, Both / Maria Rosario Jackson
  • Enrique Patterson: Black Cuban Intellectual in Cuban Miami / Antonio Lopez
  • Reflections about Race by a Negrito Acomplejao / Eduardo Bonilla-Silva
  • Divisible Blackness: Reflections on Heterogeneity and Racial Identity / Silvio Torres-Saillant
  • Nigger-Reecan Blues / Willie Perdomo
• X. Afro-Latin@s: Present and Future Tenses
  • How Race Counts for Hispanic Americans / John R. Logan
  • Bleach in the Rainbow: Latino Ethnicity and Preferences for Whiteness / William A. Darity Jr., Jason Dietrich, and Darrick Hamilton
  • Brown Like Me? / Ed Morales
  • Against the Myth of Racial Harmony in Puerto Rico / Afro-Puerto Rican Testimonies Project
  • Mexican Ways, African Roots / Lisa Hoppenjans and Ted Richardson
  • Afro-Latin@s and the Latino Workplace / Tanya Kateri Hernandez
  • Racial Politics in Multiethnic America: Black and Latina/o Identities and Coalitions
  • Afro-Latinism in United States Society: A Commentary / James Jennings
• Sources and Permissions
• Contributors
• Index

Michelle Cliff and the Authority of Identity

The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association
Volume 28, Number 1, Identities (Spring, 1995)
pages 56-70

Sally O’Driscoll, Associate Professor of English
Fairfield University, Fairfield, Connecticut

Michelle Cliff has gained critical acclaim as a novelist in the United States and England; her position as an expatriate Jamaican writer is not called into question. Yet when she is read against the background of Caribbean literary criticism, her authorial identity moves into the foreground. In this perspective, Cliff, as author, becomes problematic as soon as we try to define what she “is” as a Caribbean writer: a very light-skinned woman who identifies herself as black, a product of the Jamaican upper class (she came from a family of landowners with slave owners in their past), an expatriate (who has lived in Europe and the United States since 1975), a lesbian, a feminist, and an academic. The reception of her work indicates that Cliff herself-her embodiment as an author-has been an important factor in the evaluation and classification of her writing. As author, Cliff stands at the point of connection-or rupture-between two major non-congruent constructions of identity: third-world postcolonialist and first-world postmodern. Also relevant are debates about “race” as social construction (and its different operations in an American or a Jamaican context), and about gender and sexuality as constituent components of identity.

It is not only Cliff’s authorial embodiment, of course, that raises these questions. Her work has always been overtly concerned with questions of identity, from the 1980 Claiming an Identity They Taught Me to Despise, through essays, short stories, poetry, and criticism, and three novels: the partly autobiographical Abeng (1984); No Telephone to Heaven (1987); and Free Enterprise (1993). In this essay I shall focus on No Telephone to Heaven as a site where familiar notions of identity based in race, class, gender, and sexuality are questoined; it is in critiques of this novel that we can examine how Cliff’s authorial self is implicated in evaluations of her work.

The authority of identity is a central issue for a writer who straddles first world and third world, colonizer and colonized, the postmodern and the postcolonial—the word “postcoloniai” itself being a symbol of disagreement between the two worlds. The tension arises because western post-…