Mixed Race Studies

FYS 102N – Exploring Mixed Identities

University of Maryland, Baltimore County
Honors College
Summer 2012

Jessica Guzman-Rea

The aim of this course is to move beyond prevalent monoracial discourses by examining identities and experiences from a mixed race/mixed ethnicity perspective. This course explores many topics such as the history of racialization, processes of othering, acceptance and the politics of claiming, the role of education in racial formation (and vice versa), interracial dating, white and non-white mixed identities, transnational and transracial adoptions, and hybridity. This course will be interactive and discussion based.

ES 3434: Mixed Race Identities

California State University, East Bay
2012-2013

Examination of mixed race peoples—their legal and social status, U.S. Census designations, and identities from the one-drop rule to President Obama and beyond. The social science complement to ES 3430, Interracial Sex and Marriage.

AFR 108: What Passes for Freedom?: Mixed-Race Figures in U.S. Culture

Williams College, Williamstown, Massachusetts
Spring 2013
Cross Listed as AMST107, ENGL108

Vincent J. Schleitwiler, Assistant Professor of English

The idea of a distinct category of individuals identified as “biracial,” “multiracial,” or “mixed-race” has become increasingly prominent over the past few decades, despite the inescapable fact that the existence of children of interracial couples is by no means new. Indeed, historically speaking, notions of “racial purity” are a relatively recent invention—what might now be called “race-mixing” is older than the concept of “race” itself. Why, then, has the figure of the mixed-race person been receiving so much attention? Why is this figure imagined as somehow novel or unprecedented? Is there something different about the contemporary social experience of children of interracial couples? Why do people who do not share this experience take so much interest in it? Our pursuit of these questions will take us back to earlier periods in U.S. history, and to different figures appearing at the borders of established racial categories, such as the “tragic mulatta” or the “passing” figure. Most of our readings will be drawn from African American literature and works by other writers of color, but you should also expect a substantial amount of scholarly writing on theories and histories of race. These readings will lead to some highly charged discussions—which will not always end comfortably, or with everyone in agreement. Because this course is writing-intensive, we’ll spend significant time developing writing skills, with an emphasis on collaborative learning.

Pike County, Ohio – As Black as We Wish to Be

Public Radio Exchange
State of the Re:Union
2012-09-28
Length: 00:53:53

Al Letson, Producer/Host

Lu Olkowski, Reporter

In this episode Al Letson and guest producer Lu Olkowski visit a tiny town [East Jackson/Waverly] in the Appalachian foothills of Ohio where, for a century, residents have shared the common bond of identifying as African-American despite the fact that they look white. Racial lines have been blurred to invisibility, and people inside the same family can vehemently disagree about whether they are black or white. It can be tense and confusing. As a result, everyone’s choosing: Am I black? Am I mixed race? Or, am I white? Adding to the confusion, there’s a movement afoot to recognize their Native-American heritage.

Family portraits on the mantle in Judy Tanner’s living room. Photo Credit: Lu Olkowski

Listen to the episode here. For more information, click here. View photographs from Pike County, Ohio here.

Josephine Baker: A Chanteuse and a Fighter

The Journal of Transnational American Studies
Volume 2, Number 1 (2010)
18 pages

Konomi Ara
Tokyo University of Foreign Studies

This excerpt is from her newly-published biography of Josephine Baker, “A Fighting Diva.” It tells the intriguing story of Baker’s travels to Japan, her close friendship with the Japanese humanitarian Miki Sawada, and her adoption of a pair of Japanese orphans. Even after she achieved celebrity in France, Baker’s experience as a Black American led her to develop an antiracist philosophy at a worldwide level, and she combined political militancy in the public sphere with a personal commitment through the formation of an international multiracial household of children, the “Rainbow Tribe.”

Introduction: The Adoption of an Occupation Baby

Over half a century ago, in 1954, an African-American known as ‘The Amber Queen’ visited Japan. She was Josephine Baker (1906–1975), the dancer and singer who had
leaped to fame in Paris in the 1920s. The newspaper Asahi Shinbun described the feverish welcome she received on her first visit to the country:

“The amber-skinned singer Josephine Baker arrived from Paris on an Air France flight into Tokyo Haneda Airport at 9.40pm on the 13th. She has come to give fundraising performances for the abandoned mixed-race children of the Elizabeth Sanders Home in Oiso in Kanagawa Prefecture. The airport was thronged with many fans, including young women and black American soldiers, who had flocked in spite of the fine rain. Dressed in a black suit and a blue overcoat, Mrs Baker was greeted in the lobby by the director of the Sanders Home, Mrs Miki Sawada, the First Secretary of the French Embassy Monsieur Travis and the Daiei Studio actress Noboru Kiritachi among others. When two children from the Sanders Home, seven-year-olds Toshikazu Sato and Misao Kageyama, presented her with a bouquet, she gave the half-black boy and girl affectionate kisses on the cheeks. When she greeted all who had gathered, her voice was unexpectedly youthful for a 47 year old: ‘This is my first visit to Japan. Nothing could make me happier.’ She then headed for the Imperial Hotel with her pianist Milos Bartek and two others.” (14th April 1954)

As the article states, the purpose of Josephine’s visit to Japan was to give charity performances in support of abandoned mixed-race children. She had been invited by her friend Miki Sawada, the director of the Sanders Home, who was caring for the children known as ‘Occupation Babies’. The proceeds from Josephine’s performances around Japan would fund the construction of a boys’ dormitory at the Elizabeth Sanders Home, Baker Hall, and it still stands today although its use has changed. Josephine’s name and her words are carved at the bottom of a pillar on one of the corners of the building.

However, Josephine had a more important personal reason for her visit: she was going to adopt a child from the Home. Indeed, upon her arrival at the airport she asked Miki: “Where is my child?” and she was keen to meet the boy whom it was already agreed she would adopt. So Miki changed their plan, which was for Josephine to meet the child, Akio Yamamoto, three days later at the Elizabeth Sanders Home in Oiso, and instead took him to the Imperial Hotel the very next day. In the evening edition of Asahi Shinbun on the 14th, there is a photograph of a smiling Josephine holding Akio alongside an article headlined: “The First Meeting with Little Akio”.

Josephine subsequently visited the Elizabeth Sanders Home and adopted one more boy on the spur of the moment. Thus, the first two of Josephine’s 12 adopted children from different parts of the world and different cultural, religious and racial backgrounds, who would become known as The Rainbow Tribe, were from Japan. The youngsters would spend their childhoods at Josephine’s chateau, Les Milandes, in the Dordogne region of southwest France…

…This home for infants was founded in February 1948. The institution, which became well known as a home for mixed-race children, was a major project started by Miki Sawada. This eldest daughter of the Iwasaki family of the former Mitsubishi conglomerate, who had a privileged upbringing and who married the diplomat Renzo Sawada to become Miki Sawada, was moved by the problem of mixed‐race children in the wake of the War and decided to provide for such abandoned youngsters herself.

At its inception, Miki could not have imagined that the Home would turn into such a large-scale project with such longevity; but well over 1000 children subsequently arrived at and left this nest. Even today, the Home, a little altered, at any one time is home to almost 100 children whose birth parents have not been able to take care of them. Although the Home is no longer caring for ‘Occupation Babies’, the humanitarian spirit that forms the basis of its nurturing philosophy has not changed. One of the most powerful connections Miki formed was with the internationally famous African American performer Josephine Baker. Baker, who visited Japan for the first time in 1954, adopted two boys, Akio Yamamoto and Teruya Kimura, from among the mixed-race children known as ‘Occupation Babies’…

Read the entire article here.

Uneven Encounters: Making Race and Nation in Brazil and the United States

Duke University Press
2009
408 pages
19 photographs
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-4440-7
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-8223-4426-1

Micol Seigel, Associate Professor of African-American and African Diaspora Studies
Indiana University

In Uneven Encounters, Micol Seigel chronicles the exchange of popular culture between Brazil and the United States in the years between the World Wars, and demonstrates how that exchange affected ideas of race and nation in both countries. From Americans interpreting advertisements for Brazilian coffee or dancing the Brazilian maxixe, to Rio musicians embracing the “foreign” qualities of jazz, Seigel traces a lively, cultural back and forth. Along the way, she shows how race and nation for both elites and non-elites are constructed together, and driven by global cultural and intellectual currents as well as local, regional, and national ones.

Seigel explores the circulation of images of Brazilian coffee and of maxixe in the United States during the period just after the imperial expansions of the early twentieth century. Exoticist interpretations structured North Americans’ paradoxical sense of themselves as productive “consumer citizens.” Some people, however, could not simply assume the privileges of citizenship. In their struggles against racism, Afro-descended citizens living in Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, New York, and Chicago encountered images and notions of each other, and found them useful. Seigel introduces readers to cosmopolitan Afro-Brazilians and African Americans who rarely traveled far from home but who nonetheless absorbed ideas from abroad. She suggests that studies comparing U.S. and Brazilian racial identities as two distinct constructions are misconceived. Racial formation transcends national borders; attempts to understand it must do the same.

Table of Contents

• Illustrations
• Preface
• Note on Language
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Producing Consumption: Coffee and Consumer Citizenship
• 2. Maxixe’s Travels: Cultural Exchange and Erasure
• 3. Playing Politics: Making the Meanings of Jazz in Rio de Janeiro
• 4. Nation Drag: Uses of the Exotic
• 5. Another “Global Vision”: (Trans)Nationalism in the Sao Paulo Black Press
• 6. Black Mothers, Citizen Sons
• Conclusion
• Abbreviations
• Notes
• Discography
• Bibliography
• Index

American Voters Are Getting All Mixed Up

Dog Park: Media Unleased
2012-11-20

Leighton Woodhouse, Founding Partner

As anybody with a TV, radio or newspaper subscription can affirm, the big story coming out of the 2012 election is the long feared/eagerly awaited arrival of the Latino Vote as a national political force capable of deciding a presidential contest. Latinos accounted for a record ten percent of the electorate this year, and something north of 70 percent of them cast their ballots for Obama. Meanwhile, fewer Latinos than ever before voted for the Republican candidate. With the Latino segment of the electorate poised to continue expanding for many election cycles to come, leaders of both parties are tripping over each other to position themselves on immigration reform, and even in blood red states like Texas, GOP strategists are warning of imminent doom for their party if Republicans fail to break their cycle of addiction to racism, xenophobia and pandering to border-guarding lunatics.
 
The story is both accurate to a point and incomplete, as conventional wisdom is wont to be. Tavis Smiley, for instance, has highlighted the grating irony of black voters being left out of the punditocracy’s post-election anointing of the “new governing coalition,” following the second presidential election in a row in which African-Americans broke records turning out to support Barack Obama. And when it comes to speculating about long-term electoral prospects, there’s another demographic category of Americans that’s getting glossed over in this mechanical extrapolation of the present into the future. Interestingly, it’s the one that Obama himself belongs to: multiracial Americans.
 
That’s not to say that mixed-race voters were a big electoral force in this election or any other national election in history. Nor is “mixed race” really much of a coherent ethnic identity in the first place (then again, neither arguably is “Latino” or “Asian”). As a demographic category, however, it’s going to be a significant factor for both parties to grapple with in future elections. It’s simply inevitable: About fifteen percent of new marriages nationally in 2010 were interracial, according to a Pew study published earlier this year. That’s more than double the proportion of the 1980s. Those couples are having kids, and those kids are growing up to become voters. Moreover, according to the study, quaint taboos against interracial coupling are pretty close to completely breaking down, with nearly two-thirds of Americans fine with the idea, so we can expect the phenomenon to continue and accelerate going forward: more interracial couples, more mixed race kids. And in politics, as they say, demography is destiny…

Read the entire article here.

Nation Drag: Uses of the Exotic

The Journal of Transnational American Studies
ISSN 1940-0764
Volume 1, Issue 1 (2009)

Micol Seigel, Associate Professor of African-American and African Diaspora Studies
Indiana University

In Uneven Encounters, the forthcoming book from which this article is excerpted, Micol Seigel chronicles the exchange of popular culture between Brazil and the United States in the years between the World Wars, and she demonstrates how that exchange affected ideas of race and nation in both countries. From Americans interpreting advertisements for Brazilian coffee or dancing the Brazilian maxixe, to Rio musicians embracing the “foreign” qualities of jazz, Seigel traces a lively, cultural back-and-forth. Along the way, she shows how race and nation are constructed together, by both non-elites and elites, and gleaned from global cultural and intellectual currents as well as local, regional, and national ones. Seigel explores the circulation of images of Brazilian coffee and of maxixe in the United States during the period just after the imperial expansions of the early twentieth century. Exoticist interpretations structured North Americans’ paradoxical sense of self as productive “consumer citizens.” Some people, however, could not simply assume the privileges of citizenship. In their struggles against racism, Afro-descended citizens living in the cities of Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, New York, and Chicago encountered images and notions of each other, and found them useful. Seigel introduces readers to cosmopolitan Afro-Brazilians and African Americans who rarely traveled far but who absorbed ideas from abroad nonetheless. African American vaudeville artists saw the utility of pretending to “be” Brazilian to cross the color line on stage. Putting on “nation drag,” they passed not from one race to another but out of familiar racial categories entirely. Afro-Brazilian journalists reported intensively on foreign, particularly North American, news and eventually entered into conversation with the U.S. black press in a collaborative but still conflictual dialogue. Seigel suggests that projects comparing U.S. and Brazilian racial identities as two distinct constructions are misconceived. Racial formations transcend national borders; attempts to understand them must do the same.

Read the entire article here.

Boundaries, Subjectivity, and Knowledge Production in Colonial Río de la Plata

127th Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association
New Orleans, Louisiana
2013-01-03 through 2013-01-06

Conference on Latin American History 65
Saturday, 2013-01-05: 14:30-16:30 CST (Local Time)
Ursuline Salon (Hotel Monteleone)

Chair: Shawn Michael Austin, University of New Mexico

Papers:

• “The Emergence of Guaraní-Christian Subject Formation in Río de la Plata” / Kristin L. Huffine, Northern Illinois University
• “Native Gender and Kinship As Encomienda in Colonial Paraguay” / Shawn Michael Austin, University of New Mexico
• “Lost in Space: Mapping, Native Peoples, and the Making of the Banda Oriental, 1750–1838” / Jeffrey Alan Erbig Jr., University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Comment: Heidi Scott, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

In comparison to other regions of Latin America, colonization efforts in the Río de la Plata had a slow and difficult start. Indeed, it was not until the mid-sixteenth century that colonials began to establish themselves in permanent ways, seeking an exportable commodity—found in yerba mate—and by exploiting native labor. By around the turn of the seventeenth century, Franciscan and Jesuit priests stepped up their missionizing efforts, bringing to the region a greater interest in harvesting native souls. These missionaries competed with Portuguese bandeirantes, who entered into the area in search of indigenous labor. Nonetheless, the absence of mineral wealth and sedentary native populations made the region a colonial backwater for the next hundred years. But by the mid-eighteenth century, with the proliferation of cattle and other exportable goods, the region became a centerpiece for competing Spanish and Portuguese imperial projects and a hotbed for interethnic conflict.

The papers in this panel will examine topics embedded in this unusual historical trajectory. They will explain how native peoples dealt with and defined colonial institutions in the face of  Iberian ways of knowing and governing and will examine how knowledge production was at the crux of interethnic relations. The panelists will combine revisionism, novel methodologies, and unused sources to provide insight into the political, cultural, economic, and social lives in the region. Shawn Austin will propose that to understand the shape and functionality of the Spanish encomienda we must understand that native sexuality and notions of affinity are at the heart of that institution. Austin’s paper will reveal the stories and lives of Guaraní, African, and mixed-race individuals in a narrative style culled from litigation records. While Austin will focus on civil society, Kristin Huffine will explore the construction of Guaraní-Christian subject formation in the Jesuit missions through her analysis of visual cultures. Both Huffine and Austin will argue that cultural and social life in the region can only be elucidated through an understanding of native social and cultural contributions. Huffine will build upon existing scholarship on mission art by moving beyond simply recognizing Guaraní artisan labor to understanding how the Guaraní’s hands also shaped their identities, literally through their own artistic expressions. Jeffrey Erbig’s presentation will explore the production of imperial geographic knowledge by examining two eighteenth century Luso-Hispanic mapping expeditions. Erbig will show that as Iberian officials demarcated a linear divide between their South American kingdoms, they depended upon native peoples for both labor and knowledge. Nonetheless, these attempts to produce static territorial states ignored and conflicted with native land claims and territorialities. This panel brings together a variety of new approaches to the study of the Río de la Plata that promise to promote lively discussion and exchange.

Reviving Native Culture and Tradition with the Help of Elders – A Study of Maria Campbell’s Halfbreed

The Criterion: An International Journal in English
Volume III, Issue III (September 2012)
8 pages
ISSN 0976-8165

A. Kamaleswari, Assistant Professor of English
Saiva Bhanu Kshatriya (S. B. K.) College, Aruppukottai, India

Elders should be role models for everyone. Elders should be teachers of the grandchildren and all young people because of their wisdom. Elders should be advisors, law-givers, dispensers of justice. Elders should be knowledgeable in all aspects of Innu Culture. Elders should be teachers for everyone of the past history of Innu people. Elders should be teachers of values to be passed from generation to generation… We place great importance in our elders. Their directions for us will guide our lives. (Statement by the Innu delegation from Sheshatshiu Native Canadian Centre of Toronto, April 27, 1989).

The role of Elders has become increasingly meaningful in First Nation Communities, especially urban communities. Elders are important for their symbolic connection to the past and for their knowledge of traditional ways, teachings, stories and ceremonies. A number of community organizations in Toronto, such as the Native Canadian Centre, Anishnawbe Health of Toronto, Aboriginal Legal Services to Toronto, First Nations House of the University of Toronto and many more have introduced either a resident “Elder”, “a visiting Elder programme, or an Elders’ Advisory committee to provide guidance and information to the organization and its community. Such a strategy provides the community with contact with tradition, traditional beliefs, ceremonies and experiences and a philosophy unique to First Nation Cultures. If the knowledge of tradition is lost, the Native identity will be lost. They are symbols of Aboriginal culture not only in their words and actions but in their very being. This paper is an attempt in analyzing the revival of Native culture and tradition in Maria Campbell’s autobiography Halfbreed.

Intimate familiarity with Native culture is a key to the survival of the Métis. It can help them to take pride in being Métis and to retain their Métis identity. Without it, they are most likely to become nothing and fail in a pluralistic society. Maria Campbell, born in 1940 in Northern Saskatchewan, produced her book. ‘Half-breed’, in 1973. This is a story of her own life up to the time she became a writer. Campbell never dreamed of becoming a writer. It was growing frustration and anger with her powerlessness that spurred her to write about herself. Since then, she has been active in publishing short illustrated histories for children, which include ‘The People of Buffalow’ (1976), Little Badger and the Fire Spirit (1977), Riel’s People (1978) and Achimoona (1985). These books are designed to provide young Native people with Native stories, which help to instill in them a pride in their heritage and a positive self-image…

Read the entire article here.