Mixed Race Studies

My hero: Audre Lorde by Jackie Kay

The Guardian
Series: My Hero
2011-11-18

Jackie Kay, Professor of Creative Writing
Newcastle University

Refusal to be defined by single categories: Lorde in 1983. Photograph: Robert Alexander/Getty Images

‘Lorde was openly lesbian before the gay movement existed. Her wise words often seem eerily prescient’

Audre Lorde dropped the y from Audrey when she was still a child so she could be Audre Lorde. She liked the symmetry of the es at the end. She was born in New York City in 1934 to immigrants from Grenada. She didn’t talk till she was four and was so short-sighted she was legally blind. She wrote her first poem in eighth grade. The Black Unicorn, her most unified collection of poems, partly describes a tricky relationship with her mother. “My mother had two faces and a frying pot / where she cooked up her daughters / into girls … My mother had two faces / and a broken pot /where she hid out a perfect daughter /who was not me.”…

…I first met Audre in 1984, when I was 22. She told me her grandfather had been Scottish, and that I didn’t need to choose between being Scottish and being black. “You can be both. You can call yourself an Afro Scot,” she said in her New York drawl. Lorde was Whitman-like in her refusal to be confined to single categories. She was large. She contained multitudes…

Read the entire article here.

CLS 413: Comparative Studies in Theme: Generation, Degeneration, Miscegenation

Northwestern University
Winter 2012

César Braga-Pinto, Associate Professor of Brazilian Studies

In this seminar we will discuss how and why late 19th-century and early 20th-century fiction often represented a crisis in models of biological reproduction. We will investigate how anxieties regarding miscegenation and degeneration impacted this three-part pattern:

(1) the “family romance” in Latin America (and elsewhere); (2) the  so-called generative crisis in the turn of the century; (3) the homosocial, “horizontal” forms of association or affiliation that were evoked to compensate the crisis in the generative model. We will also consider the meanings of the term “generation” as a form of “affiliation” in multi-racial societies such as Brazil.

Although we will focus primarily on Brazilian fiction, the approach will be comparative (hemispheric and/or transatlantic), and final papers may focus on U.S., Latin American, European, African or other post-colonial literatures (primarily from the period 1850’s-1930’s).

Class Materials:

• José de Alencar (Iracema, 1865)
• Aluísio de Azevedo (O Mulato, 1881)
• Adolfo Caminha (O Bom Crioulo, 1895)
• Machado de Assis (Dom Casmurro, 1899)
• Lima Barreto (Clara dos Anjos, 1922)
• José Lins do Rego (Doidinho, 1933; Banguê, 1934)
• Graciliano Ramos (São Bernardo, 1934)
• Gilberto Freyre (The Masters and the Slaves, 1933)

ALL WORKS ARE AVAILABLE IN ENGLISH TRANSLATION.

Secondary sources may include works by Doris Sommer, Edward Said, Franz Fanon, Eve Sedgwick, Judith Butler, Roberto Schwarz, Silviano Santiago and Jacques Derrida.

Bridging: How Gloria Anzaldúa’s Life and Work Transformed Our Own

University of Texas Press
April 2011
292 pages
6 x 9 in., 6 b&w photos

Edited by:

AnaLouise Keating, Professor of Women’s Studies
Texas Woman’s University

Gloria González-López, Associate Professor of Sociology, and Faculty Associate
Center for Mexican American Studies
Center for Women’s and Gender Studies
Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies
University of Texas, Austin

The inspirational writings of cultural theorist and social justice activist Gloria Anzaldúa have empowered generations of women and men throughout the world. Charting the multiplicity of Anzaldúa’s impact within and beyond academic disciplines, community trenches, and international borders, Bridging presents more than thirty reflections on her work and her life, examining vibrant facets in surprising new ways and inviting readers to engage with these intimate, heartfelt contributions.

Bridging is divided into five sections: The New Mestizas: “transitions and transformations”; Exposing the Wounds: “You gave me permission to fly in the dark”; Border Crossings: Inner Struggles, Outer Change; Bridging Theories: Intellectual Activism with/in Borders; and “Todas somos nos/otras”: Toward a “politics of openness.” Contributors, who include Norma Elia Cantú, Elisa Facio, Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Aída Hurtado, Andrea Lunsford, Denise Segura, Gloria Steinem, and Mohammad Tamdgidi, represent a broad range of generations, professions, academic disciplines, and national backgrounds. Critically engaging with Anzaldúa’s theories and building on her work, they use virtual diaries, transformational theory, poetry, empirical research, autobiographical narrative, and other genres to creatively explore and boldly enact future directions for Anzaldúan studies.

A book whose form and content reflect Anzaldúa’s diverse audience, Bridging perpetuates Anzaldúa’s spirit through groundbreaking praxis and visionary insights into culture, gender, sexuality, religion, aesthetics, and politics. This is a collection whose span is as broad and dazzling as Anzaldúa herself.

Table of Conents

• Con profunda gratitud
• Building Bridges, Transforming Loss, Shaping New Dialogues: Anzaldúan Studies for the Twenty-First Century (AnaLouise Keating and Gloria González-López)
• I. The New Mestizas: “transitions and transformations”
  • 1. Bridges of conocimiento: Una conversación con Gloria Anzaldúa (Lorena M. P. Gajardo)
  • 2. A Letter to Gloria Anzaldúa Written from 30, Feet and 25 Years after Her “Speaking in Tongues: A Letter to 3rd-World Women Writers” (ariel robello)
  • 3. Deconstructing the Immigrant Self: The Day I Discovered I Am a Latina (Anahí Viladrich)
  • 4. My Path of Conocimiento: How Graduate School Transformed Me into a Nepantlera (Jessica Heredia)
  • 5. Aprendiendo a Vivir/Aprendiendo a Morir (Norma Elia Cantú)
  • 6. Making Face, Rompiendo Barreras: The Activist Legacy of Gloria E. Anzaldúa (Aída Hurtado)
• II. Exposing the Wounds: “You gave me permission to fly into the dark”
  • 7. Anzaldúa, Maestra (Sebastián José Colón-Otero)
  • 8. “May We Do Work That Matters”: Bridging Gloria Anzaldúa across Borders (Claire Joysmith)
  • 9. A Call to Action: Spiritual Activism . . . an Inevitable Unfolding (Karina L. Céspedes)
  • 10. Gloria Anzaldúa and the Meaning of Queer (Héctor Domínguez-Ruvalcaba)
  • 11. Breaking Our Chains: Achieving Nos/otras Consciousness (Lei Zhang)
  • 12. Conocimiento and Healing: Academic Wounds, Survival, and Tenure (Gloria González-López)
• III. Border Crossings: Inner Struggles, Outer Change
  • 13. Letters from Nepantla: Writing through the Responsibilities and Implications of the Anzaldúan Legacy (Michelle Kleisath)
  • 14. Challenging Oppressive Educational Practices: Gloria Anzaldúa on My Mind, in My Spirit (Betsy Eudey)
  • 15. Living Transculturation: Confessions of a Santero Sociologist (Glenn Jacobs)
  • 16. Acercándose a Gloria Anzaldúa to Attempt Community (Paola Zaccaria)
  • 17. Learning to Live Together: Bridging Communities, Bridging Worlds (Shelley Fisher Fishkin)
  • 18. Risking the Vision, Transforming the Divides: Nepantlera Perspectives on Academic Boundaries, Identities, and Lives (AnaLouise Keating)
• IV. Bridging Theories: Intellectual Activism with/in Borders
  • 19. “To live in the borderlands means you” (Mariana Ortega)
  • 20. A Modo de Testimoniar: Borderlands, Papeles, and U.S. Academia (Esther Cuesta)
  • 21. On Borderlands and Bridges: An Inquiry into Gloria Anzaldúa’s Methodology (Jorge Capetillo-Ponce)
  • 22. For Gloria, Para Mi (Mary Catherine Loving)
  • 23. Chicana Feminist Sociology in the Borderlands (Elisa Facio and Denise A. Segura)
  • 24. Embracing Borderlands: Gloria Anzaldúa and Writing Studies (Andrea A. Lunsford)
• V. Todas Somos Nos/otras: Toward a “Politics of Openness”
  • 25. Hurting, Believing, and Changing the World: My Faith in Gloria Anzaldúa (Suzanne Bost)
  • 26. Feels Like “Carving Bone”: (Re)Creating the Activist-Self, (Re)Articulating Transnational Journeys, while Sifting through Anzaldúan Thought (Kavitha Koshy)
  • 27. Shifting (Kelli Zaytoun)
  • 28. “Darkness, My Night”: The Philosophical Challenge of Gloria Anzaldúa’s Aesthetics of the Shadow (María DeGuzmán)
  • 29. The Simultaneity of Self- and Global Transformations: Bridging with Anzaldúa’s Liberating Vision (Mohammad H. Tamdgidi)
  • 30. For Gloria Anzaldúa . . . Who Left Us Too Soon (Gloria Steinem)
  • 31. She Eagle: For Gloria Anzaldúa (Gloria Steinem)
• Notes
• Glossary
• Works Cited
• Published Writings by Gloria E. Anzaldúa
• Contributors’ Biographies
• Index

Supremacy by Law: The One Man One Woman Marriage Requirement and Antimiscegenation Law

Journal of Bisexuality
Volume 7, Issue 3-4, 2008
pages 145-169
DOI: 10.1080/15299710802170771

Jacqueline Battalora, Associate Professor of Sociology and Criminal Justice
Saint Xavier University, Orland Park, Illinois

This article is concerned with epistemology and the assertion of supremacy. Focusing on the resources deployed to make marriage restrictions logical, this article investigates their descriptive and structural underpinnings. I juxtapose support for the Defense of Marriage Act and Federal Marriage Amendment with antimiscegenation case law and examine descriptions of fact, the patterns they shape, and the underlying structure that holds them together. These laws are an arena of contestation not only over policy choices but over God and nature, and ultimately difference. I pay attention to the ways in which constructions of difference work to exclude and erase and I argue that these laws share a common structure of supremacy. Dualistic constructions of difference work to erase those whose bodies threaten the clear lines that justify exclusion by law. Those who are multiracial, where whiteness is a contributor, and those who are bisexual represent such a threat to racial marriage bans on the one hand and same sex marriage bans on the other. The formula of difference-making, erasure, and supremacy in law has important implications not only for challenging marriage restrictions today but to measure future law and policy.

Read or purchase the article here.

Racial Queer: Multiracial College Students at the Intersection of Identity, Education and Agency

University of Texas, Austin
May 2010
495 pages

Aurora Chang-Ross

A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas a Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin

Racial Queer is a qualitative study of Multiracial college students with a critical ethnographic component. The design methods, grounded in Critical Race Methodology and Feminist Thought (both theories that inform Critical Ethnography), include: 1) 25 semi-structured interviews of Multiracial students, 2) of which 5 were expanded into case studies, 3) 3 focus groups, 4) observations of the sole registered student organization for Multiracial students on Central University’s campus, 5) field notes and 6) document analysis. The dissertation examines the following question: How do Multiracial students understand and experience their racialized identities within a large, public, tier-one research university in Texas? In addition, it addresses the following sub-questions: How do Multiracial students experience their racialized identities in their everyday interactions with others, in relation to their own self-perceptions and in response to the way others perceive them to be? How do Multiracial students’ positionalities, as they relate to power, privilege, phenotype and status, guide their behavior in different contexts and situations?

Using Holland et al.’s (1998) social practice theory of self and identity, Chicana Feminist Theory, and tenets of Queer Theory, this study illustrates how Multiracial college students utilize agency as racial queers to construct and negotiate their identities within a context where identity is both self-constructed and produced for them. I introduce the term, racial queer, to frame the unconventional space of the Multiracial individual. I use this term not to convey sexuality, but to convey the parallels of queerness (both as a term of empowerment and derogation) as they pertain to being Multiracial. In other words, queerness denotes a unique individuality as well as a deviation from the norm (Sullivan, 2003; Warner, 1993; Gamson, 2000).

The primary purpose of this study is to illustrate the agentic ways in which Multiracial college students come to understand and experience the complexity of their racialized identity production. Preliminary findings suggest the need to expand the scope of racial discourses to include Multiracial experiences and for further study of Multiracial students. Their counter-narratives access an otherwise invisible student population, providing an opportunity to broaden critical discourses around education and race.

Table of Contents

• Chapter One: Introduction
  • An Autobiographical Preface
  • Overview of Study
  • Research Question
  • Importance of the Topic
  • Outline of Study
• Chapter Two: Literature Review
  • Introduction
  • Critical Race Theory and the Social Construction/Lived Experience of Race
  • The Multiracial Population – The Census: “Check One or More”
  • Historical Origins of Multiraciality in the United States.
  • Multiracials as Underrepresented Group – One Step Forward or Backward?
  • Racial Identity Development Theories and Models – An Overview
  • Multiracial College Students
  • Student Development Theory & Campus Climate
  • Education and Multiracial Students
  • Conceptual Framework
    • Introduction
    • Social Practice Theory of Self and Identity
    • Chicana Feminist Theory
    • Tenets of Queer Theory
    • Racial Queer
• Chapter Three: Methodology
  • Reflections of a Multiracial Researcher
  • Genealogy of Methodology
  • Research Overview
  • Why Qualitative Research?
  • Setting
  • Participants
  • Selection Criteria
  • Counter Storytelling
  • Methods Rooted in Feminist Thought
  • Observations
  • Field Notes
  • Interviews
  • Case Studies
  • Focus Groups
  • Data Management and Analysis
  • Researcher’s Positionality
  • Making Sense of Methods
• Chapter Four: Portraits of Racial Queers
  • Introduction to Participant Narratives
  • Participant Narratives
    • Dee-Dee
    • Solomon
    • May
    • Jonathan
    • Melissa
    • Conclusion
• Chapter Five: Themes – Understanding and Experiencing Multiracial
  • Identity
  • Introduction
  • Racial Rubric – “I don’t have a racial rubric to follow.”
  • Racial Disclosure – “I couldn’t be passive about it. And I just told this girl, No! I am Hispanic!”
  • Identity Fusion – “There’s little way of being able to separate all of those identities out.”
  • Multiracial Entitlement–“ I felt more entitled to the [Multiracial] label.”
  • Development of Portraits/Narratives
  • Discussion
  • Agency
  • Culturally Responsive Teaching and Hidden Curriculum
  • Conclusion
• Chapter Six: Multiracial Students in the Daily Practice of Schooling
  • Introduction
  • Learning the meaning of race at school
  • General Findings
    • Identity
    • Findings Specific to Multiracial Identity
    • The Politics of racial identification terminology
    • Negotiating and Strategizing – Racial Identity and Relationships
    • Phenotype Matters
    • Collective Experiences – Multiracials as Community
    • Skills, Intuition and Perspective – Lessons in Constructing Multiracial Identity
    • Implications and Significance
    • Expansion of Racial Discourses-Challenging Racial
    • Inclusivity
    • Rethinking and Reevaluating of Educational Public Policies
  • Final Thoughts
  • Reflections of a Native Researcher
  • Recommendations for Future Research
  • Lessons Learned
• Appendix
  • -A Brief Genealogy
  • -Email to Participants
  • -Interview Questions and Prompts
  • -Informed Consent to Participate In Research
• References
• Vita

Read the entire dissertation here.

Environmental Influences on the Development of Female College Students Who Identify as Multiracial/Biracial-Bisexual/Pansexual

Journal of College Student Development
Volume 52, Number 4 (July/August 2011)
pages 440-455
E-ISSN: 1543-3382 Print ISSN: 0897-5264

Alissa R. King, Instructor in Social Sciences
Iowa Central Community College

Using Renn’s (2000, 2004) ecology of college student development model as a theoretical framework, I report and discuss the findings of my study involving 6 female college students who identify as multiracial/biracial-bisexual/pansexual. I describe how these findings validate Renn’s model, specifically discussing how the campus environment influenced the students’ identity development in relation to three themes that emerged from my study: trying on, negotiating self, and finding fit. Finally, I discuss the implications of the results of my study for student affairs practice.

Read or purchase the article here.

Politics: President Obama, of All People, Should Know That Some Rights Can’t be Left to the States

The New Gay
2011-07-18

Tony Phillips

In 1961, when Barack Hussein Obama II was born in the brand new State of Hawaii, laws on the books in 22 of the other 49 United States forbade the marriage of his White American mother to his Black Kenyan father. Arizona’s anti-miscegenation law prohibiting marriage between whites and any persons of color was repealed in 1962. Similar laws in Utah and Nebraska were overturned the following year. Indiana’s law prohibiting interracial marriage held out until 1965, Maryland’s until 1967, the same year that such laws were finally overturned in Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia and West Virginia with the Supreme Court’s ruling in Loving v. Virginia that ended all race-based legal restrictions on marriage in the United States…

…Yes, we all know about America’s racially conflicted past, so what’s the point?
 
The point is that it’s incomprehensible to me that Barack Obama, a man whose legitimacy as an American has been publicly questioned by hate-rousing provocateurs, a man whose early life confounds the prevailing norms of his generation, a man whose ascendency in the 21st Century was made possible only by the bravery of justice-seekers in the 20th, that he, of all people, would be behind the times on marriage equality. How is it possible that his stance on gay marriage is still evolving?…

Read the entire article here.

Why this Supreme Court could be the best hope for gay-marriage advocates

The Washington Post
2011-06-24

Justin Driver, Assistant Professor of Law
University of Texas, Austin

Eight years ago Sunday, the Supreme Court handed down a significant victory for gay equality when it declared anti-sodomy laws unconstitutional in Lawrence v. Texas. In response, Justice Antonin Scalia bitterly dissented, predicting that the court’s opinion would inexorably lead the judiciary to permit marriages for gays and lesbians.

It took the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court less than five months to vindicate Scalia’s prediction when it cited Lawrence in finding that the state’s own constitution protects same-sex marriage. The conservative justice has not, however, had an opportunity to directly consider the merits of same-sex marriage.

…Many advocates of same-sex marriage who worry that it is too early for a federal lawsuit cite the quest decades ago to eliminate bans on interracial marriage. The court did not invalidate such laws during the 1950s, they note, when interracial marriage remained extremely divisive. Instead, it waited to issue Loving v. Virginia until 1967, when only 16 states retained anti-miscegenation statutes. “So long as interracial marriage intensely divided the country, the Warren Court was not prepared to insist upon a norm of equality,” Yale law professor William N. Eskridge Jr. and attorney Darren Spedale wrote in May 2009. They further suggested that it would be daft to believe that the current court would issue a favorable same-sex marriage decision while opposition remained strong. Judge Richard Posner ventured a similar analysis for the New Republic last year: “Until homosexual marriage becomes as uncontroversial in most states as racial intermarriage had become by 1967, the Court will, in all likelihood, stay its hand.”

But in 1967, most Americans did not welcome interracial marriage. To suggest otherwise is profoundly misleading. While Americans registered greater approval of such marriages in the late 1960s than in the previous decade, national opinion remained clearly opposed, even after the Supreme Court decided Loving. A Gallup poll in the 1950s revealed that nine out of 10 whites disapproved of interracial marriage; in 1968, a Gallup poll showed that three out of four whites continued to frown on interracial unions. The 1968 figures taking account of all races were not much different: 73 percent of Americans disapproved of the practice.

The modest number of states that had anti-miscegenation laws when Loving was decided, moreover, hardly indicates that citizens in the other 34 states considered race irrelevant to marriage. A clear majority of Americans deemed race exceedingly relevant and had no compunction about expressing this belief to pollsters. In fact, Gallup did not register a majority approving of interracial marriage until 1997—three decades after Loving recognized the constitutional right.

By contrast, even some of the bleakest same-sex marriage polls of recent years would have cheered advocates of interracial marriage in the age of Loving. A 2008 Quinnipiac University poll, for instance, found that 55 percent of respondents opposed gay marriage. And the most recent round of data, collected this year by Gallup, CNN-Opinion Researchand the ABC News-Washington Post poll, found that slightly more than 50 percent of adults responded approvingly to questions regarding same-sex marriage…

Read the entire opinion piece here.

Drôle de Félix : A Search for Cultural Identity on the Road

Wide Screen
Volume 3, Number 1 (2011)
ISSN: 1757-3920

Zélie Asava

With the emergence of la culture beur in the 1980s—and the birth of a new type of filmmaking influenced by postcolonial politics, world cinema, the new hood films of the African-American community and its hip hop culture—questions of identity, multiculturalism and being mixed-race came to the fore.  Since then, many films have tackled the representation of France’s ethnic minorities onscreen and attempted to  move towards representing the dream 2007 presidential candidate Ségolène Royal expressed of a ‘Mixed-Race France’. This article will explore representations of ethnicity, gender and sexuality in Drôle de Félix/The Adventures of Felix (1999), through the figure of Félix, a homosexual, mixed-race (French-North African) man searching for his absent father and his ‘true’ identity.  The film focuses on the demystification of imperialist absolutes and divisions to reveal what lies between, in the interstices. Through its focus on transgressive identity it transforms traditional representations to explore what lies beyond.  This article interrogates the representational schema of Drôle de Félix, by exploring the cinematic stereotypes and taboos challenged and maintained in the film in comparison to traditional beur cinema and established ideas of Maghrebi-French characters in French cinema.

Read the entire article here.

Splitting the Difference: Exploring the Experiences of Identity and Community Among Biracial and Bisexual People in Nova Scotia

Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia
April 2011
82 pages

Samantha Loppie

Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts

The term ‘bicultural’ has been gaining acknowledgment in sociological and psycho-social research and literature. It refers to identity construction which internalizes of more than one cultural identity by an individual. This thesis uses qualitative methods and a grounded theory research design to explore how bicultural (biracial and bisexual) people navigate identity and community in Nova Scotia. While similar research has been conducted on racial and sexual identities elsewhere, this study looks to fill some of the gaps in bicultural research by specifically dealing with it in an Atlantic Canadian context. Living in a social environment steeped in historical discrimination and political struggle exerts significant influence on the identities and communities of bicultural people in Nova Scotia. The thesis research findings suggest that while social environment often creates divisions and dichotomy when interpreting bicultural identities, bicultural people manage to maintain an integrated sense of self within this environment.

Table of Contents

• Abstract
• List of Abbreviations
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter One: Introduction
• Chapter Two: Literature Review
  • Biculturalism: A Foot in Both Doors
  • Creating Context: Nova Scotia
  • Bicultural Identity: Biracial and Bisexual
  • Black and Queer: Exploring Marginalized Community
  • Discrimination and Privilege
  • Conclusion
• Chapter Three: Methodology
  • Definition of Terms
  • Qualitative Method and Research Design
  • Participant Selection
  • Research Participants
  • Data Collection
  • Ethics
  • Data Management and Analysis
• Chapter Four: A Place to Belong
  • Identity and Social Context: Nova Scotia
  • How People Talk About Identity Labels
  • Conceptualizing Identity
  • Influence and Development of Identity
  • Expressions of Identity
  • Identity Interactions with Community
  • Divergent Communities
  • Discrimination and Advantage
  • Conclusion
• Chapter Five: Conclusion: Finding Middle Ground
  • Foundations of Dichotomy: Nova Scotia
  • Seeing the Self Through Other’ Eyes: Self and Social Identity
  • Rejected and Accepted: Community Interactions
  • More Than Half: Discrimination and Legitimacy for Bicultural People
  • Invisible Advantage: Role of Privilege in Bicultural Identity
  • Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Appendices
  • Appendix A – Interview Questions and Guide
  • Appendix B – Consent Form
  • Appendix C – Code List

Read the entire dissertation here.