Mixed Race Studies

Beyond Confronting the Myth of Racial Democracy: The Role of Afro-Brazilian Women Scholars and Activists

Gettysburg College Faculty Publications
Paper 1 (November 2007)
55 pages

Nathalie Lebon, Assistant Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Gettysburg College, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania

This paper offers a synopsis of the current scholarship mapping the social and economic exclusion of women of African descent in Brazil. It highlights the work of and role played by Afro-Brazilian women scholars and activists in redressing the paucity, until recently, of basic data and research on the life conditions of women of African descent. Finally, it provides some initial thoughts on the national and transnational dynamics of knowledge production underlying this state of affairs.

Despite its rank as the ninth largest economy in the world, Brazil holds the unsavory distinction of being a showcase for the socio-economic inequalities that characterize much of Latin America. The divide cuts many ways, European versus African or Native American descent, male versus female, urban versus rural, as well as along class of origin and region of residence. Forty-five percent of Brazilians are of African descent (or, according to census categories 5.39% “preto” (black) and 39.9% “pardo” (brown)). This places Brazil second only to Nigeria in the world in terms of the size of its black population. Women of African descent thus represent nearly a quarter of all Brazilians (Articulação de Mulheres Brasileiras (Brazilian Women’s Articulation, hereafter AMB), 2001: 10). Despite this incontrovertible fact, until recently, very little research has been conducted about this segment of the Brazilian population. This paper offers a synopsis of the emerging scholarship mapping the social and economic exclusion of women of African descent in Brazil. The race and gender disaggregated statistics that pioneering scholars and activists, in many cases Afro-Brazilian women, have been painstakingly gathering and/or compiling, are beginning to reveal in concrete ways the depth of the inequalities that shape the lives of women of African descent in the birthplace of the now embattled myth of racial democracy…

…INTERLOCKING RACE AND GENDER HIERARCHIES AND THE DYNAMICS OF KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION

Understanding the paucity of data on the lived experiences of women of African descent, especially in some areas, demands that we consider both racial and gender ideology and related structural features in the social, political and academic realms. For most of the 20th century, the notion that Brazil was a racial democracy was an essential component of the Brazilian racial formation. Later denounced as myth, this founding narrative of the modern Brazilian nation focused on mestiçagem (racial mixing), claiming since the 1930s, that there is no racism in Brazil due to the fact that most Brazilians are of mixed descent. It is interesting to note that it was equally adopted by elites as by pre-64 black movements as an ideal to be reached. While there is much debate as to what extent this myth truly prevailed in the past and to what extent it still is -as sociologist Antonio Guimarães (2001) argues-, the first roadblock to the dismantling of racial inequalities in Brazil, most would agree that we now need to move beyond simply denouncing it. Yet there is no doubt that some form of denial of racial inequalities has contributed to the erasure of race as a fundamental structuring axis of Brazilian institutions, including the academy, and daily life. In academia, throughout most of the 20th century and until the late 1990s, the majority of scholars of racial difference steered clear of discussions of contemporary racial inequalities to focus on studies of African culture and religions, synchretisms, and regional variation in and resistance to slavery (Reichmann, 1999: 24). Reichman rightly surmises that this was in part a result of the difficulties of facing white privilege for the majority of academics, and of the insecure position within academia of the first academics of African descent (ibid: 24). One could argue it was even more difficult in a cultural and political context, which extolled racial harmony.

More pointedly, at the hands of the authoritarian State, the myth of racial democracy was used to justify the complete elimination of the gathering of racially disaggregated data from the 1970 census, leading to almost twenty years without information (Berquó, 2001). As late as the 1990s, Brazilian scholars still faced an indifferent census bureau administration, unable “to disseminate timely statistical data on race and to disaggregate socioeconomic indicators by race (or gender)” (Reichmann 1999:26). Due to scarce resources many were unable to pay for the much needed “special tabulations”(ibid: 26) as well as suffered from having to work in isolation…

Read the entire article here.

Race, Nation, And Cultural Identity In Brazil (AN200)

IES Abroad
Chicago, Illinois
Program(s): Rio de Janeiro – Study Brazil
Terms offered: Fall, Spring

Enrique Larreta, Director of the Institute of Cultural Pluralism
Candido Mendes University

The main focus of the course is the construction of national identity in modern Brazil, exploring the different processes that led to a range of cultural representations.  The course will start examining the concepts of race, racism and ethnicity in a comparative perspective, and will then discuss the issues of miscigenação, or the myth of racial democracy, and the contemporary politics of identity. Through the analysis of Brazilian modernism in architecture and culture, students will become acquainted with the dimension of Brazil as a future-oriented country.  A special focus of the course will be the study of the African slave trade until the abolition of slavery in 1888: during their visit to Bahia, students will be exposed to the ground-breaking work of photographer Pierre Verger.

Learning outcomes: By the end of the course, students will be able to:

• Articulate the many dimensions of Brazilian cultural identity
• Conceptualize race and ethnicity in a comparative perspective
• Study the religious experience in Brazilian culture and society
• Elaborate on the notion of Brazil as land of the future

For more infomation, click here.

Gilberto Freyre: Social Theory in the Tropics

Peter Lang
2008
261 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-906165-09-3
Softcover ISBN: 978-1-906165-04-8

Peter Burke
University of Cambridge

Maria Lúcia G. Pallares-Burke
Centre for Latin American Studies
University of Cambridge

Gilberto Freyre was arguably the most famous intellectual of twentieth-century Latin America. He was active as a sociologist, a historian, a journalist, a deputy in the Brazilian Assembly, a novelist, poet and artist. He was a cultural critic, with a good deal to say about architecture, past and present, and a public intellectual, whose pronouncements on race, region and empire – not to mention sex – made him famous in some quarters and notorious in others.

The Masters and the Slaves, his most famous work, went through forty editions and has been translated into nine languages, made into a comic book and a television miniseries, while two directors (one of them Robert Rossellini) planned to turn it into a film. Yet he is not well known outside Brazil. Freyre was a major social thinker, one of the few who have not come from Western Europe or the USA, and this book argues that we should take account of the pioneering work of this gifted intellectual. His ideas are of particular relevance today for both political and academic reasons. His interest in gender, ethnicity, hybridity, identity, globalization, and capitalism ensures that his ideas are still provocative and topical, and ready to be introduced to a wider audience.

Contents

• The Importance Of Being Gilberto
• Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
• Masters and Slaves
• A Public Intellectual
• Empire and Republic
• The Social Theorist
• Gilberto Our Contemporary

Race, Religion and Law in Colonial India: Trials of an Interracial Family

Cambridge University Press
November 2011
286 pages
6 b/w illus. 3 maps
228 x 152 mm; 0.51kg
Hardback ISBN: 9781107012615
Adobe eBook ISBN: 9781139181242
Mobipocket eBook: ISBN:9781139184861

Chandra Mallampalli, Associate Professor of History
Westmont College, Santa Barbara, California

How did British rule in India transform persons from lower social classes? Could Indians from such classes rise in the world by marrying Europeans and embracing their religion and customs? This book explores such questions by examining the intriguing story of an interracial family who lived in southern India in the mid-nineteenth century. The family, which consisted of two untouchable brothers, both of whom married Eurasian women, became wealthy as distillers in the local community. When one brother died, a dispute arose between his wife and brother over family assets, which resulted in a landmark court case, Abraham v. Abraham. It is this case which is at the center of this book, and which Chandra Mallampalli uses to examine the lives of those involved and, by extension, of those – 271 witnesses in all – who testified. In its multilayered approach, the book sheds light not only on interracial marriage, class, religious allegiance, and gender, but also on the British encounter with Indian society. It shows that far from being products of a “civilizing mission” who embraced the ways of Englishmen, the Abrahams were ultimately – when faced with the strictures of the colonial legal system – obliged to contend with hierarchy and racial difference.

Features

• A singular court case from the nineteenth century is at the heart of this intriguing book on race and hierarchy in colonial India
• A rich and engaging multi-layered approach which interrogates legal documents and interviews with witnesses to unveil social history of the period
• For students and scholars of colonial India, and legal and social historians

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• 1. Remembering family
• 2. Embodying ‘Dora-hood’: the brothers and their business
• 3. A crisis of trust: sedition and the sale of arms in Kurnool
• 4. Letters from Cambridge
• 5. The path to litigation
• 6. Litigating gender and race: Charlotte sues at Bellary
• 7. Francis appeals: the case for continuity
• 8. Choice, identity, and law: the decision of London’s Privy Council.

Multiracial youths show similar vulnerability to peer pressure as whites

University of Washington News
2012-07-10

Molly McElroy

Researchers who studied a large sample of middle- and high-school students in Washington state found that mixed-race adolescents are more similar to their white counterparts than previously believed.
 
Experts have thought that multiracial adolescents, the fastest growing youth group in the United States, use drugs and engage in violence more than their single-race peers. Racial discrimination and greater vulnerability to peer pressure have been blamed for these problems, due to the belief that as mixed-race youngsters struggle to fit in they become more likely to fall in with bad crowds.
 
Multiracial youth in the new study, by researchers at the University of Washington and the University of Chicago, reported fewer behavioral problems than seen in previous studies. The findings are published in the July issue of the Journal of Youth and Adolescence.
 
Youth who reported greater use of alcohol and instances of violent fights also reported having friends with similar problem behaviors. But when asked how likely they would be to cave to peer pressure, multi- and single-race participants did not differ.
 
Family background, including income level and parental marital status, also had a role. Multiracial youths who reported higher rates of problem behaviors were more likely to come from poor families.
 
“People usually portray multiracial children as facing greater challenges growing up than single-race children,” said Yoonsun Choi, lead author and associate professor at the UChicago’s School of Social Service Administration…

Read the entire article here.

The Long Walk to Freedom: Runaway Slave Narratives

Beacon Press
2012-08-21
288 pages
6″ x 9″
Cloth ISBN: 978-080706912-7

Devon W. Carbado, Professor of Law and African American Studies
University of California, Los Angeles

Donald Weise, Independent Scholar in African American history

The first book about the runaway slave phenomenon written by fugitive slaves themselves.

In this groundbreaking compilation of first-person accounts of the runaway slave phenomenon, editors Devon W. Carbado and Donald Weise have recovered twelve narratives spanning eight decades-more than half of which have been long out of print. Told in the voices of the runaway slaves themselves, these narratives reveal the extraordinary and often innovative ways that these men and women sought freedom and demanded citizenship. Also included is an essay by UCLA history professor Brenda Stevenson that contextualizes these narratives, providing a brief yet comprehensive history of slavery, as well as a look into the daily life of a slave. Divided into four categories-running away for family, running inspired by religion, running by any means necessary, and running to be free-these stories are a testament to the indelible spirit of these remarkable survivors.

The Long Walk to Freedom presents excerpts from the narratives of well-known runaway slaves, like Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, as well as from the narratives of lesser-known and virtually unknown people. Several of these excerpts have not been published for more than a hundred years. But they all portray the courageous and sometimes shocking ways that these men and women sought their freedom and asserted power, often challenging many of the common assumptions about slaves’ lack of agency.

Among the remarkable and inspiring stories is the tense but triumphant tale of Henry Box Brown, who, with a white abolitionist’s help, shipped himself in a box-over a twenty-seven-hour train ride, part of which he spent standing on his head-to freedom in Philadelphia. And there’s the story of William and Ellen Craft, who fled across thousands of miles, with Ellen, who was light-skinned, disguised as a white male slave-owner so she and her husband could achieve their dream of raising their children as free people.

Gripping, inspiring, and captivating, The Long Walk to Freedom is a remarkable collection that celebrates those who risked their lives in pursuit of basic human rights.

Read the Introduction here.

Blackface Cuba, 1840-1895

University of Pennsylvania Press
2005
288 pages
6 x 9
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8122-3867-9

Jill Lane, Associate Professor of  Theater and Performance Studies
New York University

Blackface Cuba, 1840-1895 offers a critical history of the relation between racial impersonation, national sentiment, and the emergence of an anticolonial public sphere in nineteenth-century Cuba. Through a study of Cuba’s vernacular theatre, the teatro bufo, and of related forms of music, dance, and literature, Lane argues that blackface performance was a primary site for the development of mestizaje, Cuba’s racialized national ideology, in which African and Cuban become simultaneously mutually exclusive and mutually formative.

Popular with white Cuban-born audiences during the period of Cuba’s anticolonial wars, the teatro bufo was celebrated for combining Spanish elements with supposedly African rhythms and choreography. Its wealth of short comic plays developed a well-loved repertory of blackface stock characters, from the negrito to the mulata, played by white actors in blackface. Lane contends that these practices were embraced by white audiences as especially national forms that helped define Cuba’s opposition to Spain, at the same time that they secured prevailing racial hierarchies for a future Cuban nation. Comparing the teatro bufo to related forms of racial representation, particularly those created by black Cubans in theatres and in the press, Lane analyzes performance as a form of social contestation through which an emergent Cuban national community struggled over conflicting visions of race and nation.

Table of Contents

• Preface. On the Translation of Race
• Introduction. ImpersoNation in Our America
• Chapter 1. Blackface Costumbrismo, 1840-1860
• Chapter 2. Anticolonial Blackface, 1868
• Chapter 3. Black(face) Public Spheres, 1880-1895
• Chapter 4. National Rhythm, Racial Adulteration, and the Danzón, 1881-82
• Chapter 5. Racial Ethnography and Literate Sex, 1888
• Conclusion. Cubans on the Moon, and Other Imagined Communities
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Acknowledgments

Lecture: Unbearable Blackness

Terror and the Inhuman (2012-10-25 through 2012-10-27)
Brown University
Sidney Frank Hall, Room 220
185 Meeting St.
2012-10-25, 18:30 EDT (Local Time)

Jared Sexton, Associate Professor, African American Studies; Associate Professor, Film & Media Studies
University of California, Irvine

The Department of Modern Culture and Media presents a lecture by Jared Sexton titled “Unbearable Blackness,” as part of a conference called “Terror and the Inhuman.” In this lecture, Sexton will address the psychic life struggles of black freedom within the political culture and cultural politics. Sexton, associate professor of African American studies and film and media studies at the University of California, is the author of Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism (2008) and is the editor of Racial Theories in Context (2013).

For more information, click here.

Students more likely to identify as multiracial

The Stanford Daily: Breaking News from the Farm Since 1892
Stanford University
2012-10-24

Taylor Chambers

Erika Roach ’13 identifies herself as “Blasian,” while Marcus Montanez-Leaks ’13 says he’s “Blexican.”

These terms and others used to describe mixed race individuals are becoming more common in conversation and student groups focused on mixed race issues have begun popping up on campus, a trend mirroring the rise in applications.

Mixed race applicants to Stanford are “one of the fastest growing groups,” according to Dean of Admissions Richard Shaw.

During the 2011-12 academic year, 11.6 percent of undergraduates identified their racial/ethnic category as “two or more races,” up from 8.4 percent the previous year. 2010-11 was the first year the University began collecting data on mixed race individuals.

In 2011, the Department of Education started requiring universities to collect more information about applicants’ race and ethnicity. Many college applications, including the Common Application that Stanford uses, now allow students to check multiple boxes when it comes to describing their racial and ethnic identities.

“Students [telling] us exactly what their racial background is … not a mandatory request. It is optional,” Shaw said. He added that the ability to self-identify accurately is a crucial part of the college admissions process.

For students who identify with more than one heritage, the ability to check all that apply on the racial background section of college admissions proves crucial to establishing their identity…

…Michele Elam, English professor and author of a 2011 book on mixed race, The Souls of Mixed Folk: Race, Politics and Aesthetics in the New Millennium, argues that diversity remains an important consideration among many others in college admissions, but does not believe that students are simply “cynically trying to game the system by checking as many boxes as possible.”
 
“A lot of young high school students when doing college admissions are just coming of age politically and racially,” Elam said. “Some may not have thought of themselves as having a distinct mixed identity before being asked to check multiple boxes.”…

Read the entire article here.

Against Black-Face Roles in German Theatre

Avaaz: Community Petitions
2012-10-14

Gyavira Lasana

Last January Schlosspark Theatre in Berlin opened “I’m Not Rappaport” by Herb Gardner. The production featured a white actor in black-face in the role of Midge Carter, portrayed in New York by Ossie Davis. When concerned theatre professionals complained on the website of Schlosspark, they were blocked; yet neo-Nazis, who charged that the “niggers should go back to Africa,” were allowed access. Schlosspark insisted the production was not “racist,” that they cast a white actor because they could not find a “qualified black actor.” The widow of Herb Gardner has deflected inquiries about the rights to “Rapport” to the agent in Germany. And she points to a 1986 conversation in which Gardner agreed to black-face “if a suitable black actor could not be found.” That time and circumstance have passed. I am asking Actors Equity and the Dramatists Guild to decline participation in productions featuring black-face and condemn its use in Germany.

Why this is important

The German theatre use of “black-faced” white actors in roles written and designed for blacks subverts the intentions of the dramatists and denies work to black actors. On a broader scale, black-face demeans black Germans and reinforces racist societal and political positions of power.

For more information, click here.