Mixed Race Studies

Poetry: Three Treasures by Hannah Lowe

Freeword: a global meeting place for literature, argument and free thinking
2012-06-12

Hannah Lowe

A panelist at ‘2 Nations’, our recent event exploring national identity, Hannah Lowe is a poet of Chinese, Jamaican and English heritage. In this poem she performed for the audience that night, she explores how her background has influenced her sense of her own identity.

Three Treasures

Jamaica in the attic in a dark blue trunk,
sea-salt in the hinges. What must it look like
all that wide blue sea?

England downstairs in a rocking chair.
Nanna rocking with her playing cards,
cigs and toffee, tepid tea.

Jamaica frying chicken in the kitchen,
pig-snout in the stew-pot,
breakfast pan of saltfish, akee

China in the won-ton skin,
gold songbird on the brittle porcelain,
pink pagoda silk settee…

Read the entire poem here.

Subgenation: The Theory of the Normal Relation of the Races; an Answer to “Miscegenation”

John Bradburn Publishing
1864
72 pages
Classification Number: CAGE E185.62.V24 1864

John H. Van Evrie (1814-1896)

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• I.—The Diversity of the Races.
• II.—Miscegenation; or, the Mixture of the Races.
• III.—The Future of the Races.
• IV.—The Effect of Subgenation Upon the White Race.
• V.—Subgenation, the Basis of Democracy.
• VI.—Women and Subgenation.
• VII.—Subgenation and the Presidential Election.
• VIII.— The Recognition of the Confederate States.
• IX.—The Millennium Solved.
• X.—An Omen.

Introduction

Scaliger quaintly observes “that nothing will sell better than a scurrile pamphlet,” and the extensive sale of a recent brochure, entitled “Miscegenation,” in which the most indecent doctrines are seductively inculcated under the garb of philosophy, seems to prove the assertion. While there is no excuse for the gross violation of natural instincts which that author recommends, yet there is probably some good reason why there is a want of a popular knowledge as to the true relation of the races. The juxtaposition of the Caucasian, Indian, and Negro races on this continent, in considerable numbers, has no parallel in history. If we except the Egyptians and the Carthagenians, there were no ancient nations which had other than a homogeneous population. A negro was a curiosity in Greece and Rome.   All modern Europe, from which we derive our language, is composed of one race or the varieties of it. The question, as to the proper relation of distinct races, is, therefore, a new one, and has been committed to this country for solution.

The writer to whom allusion has been made offers a solution, and it is no less a proposition than the annihilation of all the existing races and the formation of a new one! He proposes to bring this about by mingling the races, and has invented the word Miscegenation to express his idea (miscere, to mix; genus, a race). The suggestion of the word is a good one. The necessity of new terms to express the proper, as well as the improper, relation of the races on this continent has long been felt by thoughtful minds. The words slavery and slave are derived from Sclavi—Sclavonians, who were conquered by the Germans and reduced to abject bondage. The word, therefore, expresses a relation existing between persons of the same race, and not between those of different races. Hence it is a misnomer as applied to the American form of society. The present writer proposes to profit by the suggestion of the author of of “Miscegenation” and coin another word, long needed.  It is subgenation, from sub, lower, and generatus and genus, a race born or created lower than another; i.e., the natural or normal relation of an inferior to a superior race. The invention of new words has the high authority of Horace:

“Si forte necesse est
Indiciis monstrare recentribus abdita rerum.”

They were never so much needed as now. The simple truths—There is no slavery in this country; there are no slaves in the Southern States. We are fighting about a myth. For three centuries the Christian world was deluged in blood upon the assumption that there was a Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem. There was no Holy Sepulchre there. The world was fighting on a false premise. This country is now repeating the same insensate folly.  In the following pages the writer proposes to show how and why this is so, to expose the errors and absurdities of the author of “Miscegenation,” and to give such a solution to the question of the proper relation of the races as shall commend itself to the conscience 0f every intelligent friend of Humanity…

Read the entire book here.

Blackness and Transatlantic Irish Identity: Celtic Soul Brothers

Routledge
2012-07-11
234 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-415-65367-1
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-415-80189-8
eBook ISBN: 978-0-203-85989-6

Lauren Onkey, Vice President of Education and Public Programs
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum
Cleveland, Ohio

Blackness and Transatlantic Irish Identity analyzes the long history of imagined and real relationships between the Irish and African-Americans since the mid-nineteenth century in popular culture and literature. Irish writers and political activists have often claimed—and thereby created—a “black” identity to explain their experience with colonialism in Ireland and revere African-Americans as a source of spiritual and sexual vitality. Irish-Americans often resisted this identification so as to make a place for themselves in the U.S. However, their representation of an Irish-American identity pivots on a distinction between Irish-Americans and African-Americans. Lauren Onkey argues that one of the most consistent tropes in the assertion of Irish and Irish-American identity is constructed through or against African-Americans, and she maps that trope in the work of writers Roddy Doyle, James Farrell, Bernard MacLaverty, John Boyle O’Reilly, and Jimmy Breslin; playwright Ned Harrigan; political activists Bernadette Devlin and Tom Hayden; and musicians Van Morrison, U2, and Black 47.

Contents

• 1. Introduction: “Aren’t We a Little White for That Kind of Thing?”
• 2. “A Representative Americanized Irishman”: John Boyle O’Reilly
• 3. Melees
• 4. Bernadette’s Legacy
• 5. Ray Charles on Hyndford Street: Van Morrison’s Caledonian Soul
• 6. Born Under a Bad Sign
• Conclusion: Micks for O’Bamagh

Prestigious grant award for research on President Obama

Edge Hill University
Ormskirk, Lancashire, United Kingdom
News
2010-06-04

Edge Hill University and key partners have been awarded a prestigious grant to develop a research network on The Presidency of Barack Obama.

The Arts and Humanities Research Council has given an award of £31,320 to the institution in collaboration with the University of Manchester.

The special two-year project, which will run from January 2011 to December 2012, is particularly unique because the research will be undertaken while Obama is still in office and will cover topical issues and developments as they happen.

It will provide a unique opportunity to analyse key issues President Obama has had to deal with around race relations, foreign policies, the economy crisis and Obama’s wars. The funding will also be used to organise a series of high-profile lectures, the creation of an interactive website, a book, new teaching tools, a schools’ conference to run alongside the actual American presidential election in 2012, an exhibition and other community events.

Professor Kevern Verney, Associate Head of the History Department at Edge Hill, explained: “The election of Barack Obama in November 2008 was a key moment in the history of the United States as he was the first African American President. It attracted enormous popular and scholarly interest not just in America but around the world. The inspirational ideas and rhetoric of the Obama campaign generated high expectations of change. In sharp contrast to such high expectations the political realities confronting the new President could hardly have been more discouraging. From the outset his administration faced unprecedented domestic and foreign policy challenges, including the worst national and international economic crisis since the 1930s and involvement in two costly unresolved foreign wars, in Iraq and Afghanistan. Race also remains an issue.

“The success or failure of the Obama administration in addressing these issues will have profound implications not just for the citizens of the United states but also for governments and people around the world. This important project will discuss a number of key issues as they unfold and in the wake of either his continued presidency or his legacy.”…

Read the entire news release here.

The Victorian Reinvention of Race: New Racisms and the Problem of Grouping in the Human Sciences

Routledge
2010-06-23
248 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-415-65278-0
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-415-88125-8
eBook ISBN: 978-0-203-84498-4

Edward Beasley, Associate Professor of History
San Diego State University

In mid-Victorian England there were new racial categories based upon skin colour. The ‘races’ familiar to those in the modern west were invented and elaborated after the decline of faith in Biblical monogenesis in the early nineteenth century, and before the maturity of modern genetics in the middle of the twentieth. Not until the early nineteenth century would polygenetic and racialist theories win many adherents. But by the middle of the nineteenth century in England, racial categories were imposed upon humanity. How the idea of ‘race’ gained popularity in England at that time is the central focus of The Victorian Reinvention of Race: New Racisms and the Problem of Grouping in the Human Sciences.

Scholars have linked this new racism to some very dodgy thinkers. The Victorian Reinvention of Race examines a more influential set of the era’s writers and colonial officials, some French but most of them British. Attempting to do serious social analysis, these men oversimplified humanity into biologically-heritable, mentally and morally unequal, colour-based ‘races’. Thinkers giving in to this racist temptation included Alexis de Tocqueville when he was writing on Algeria; Arthur de Gobineau (who influenced the Nazis); Walter Bagehot of The Economist; and Charles Darwin (whose Descent of Man was influenced by Bagehot). Victorians on Race also examines officials and thinkers (such as Tocqueville in Democracy in America, the Duke of Argyll, and Governor Gordon of Fiji) who exercised methodological care, doing the hard work of testing their categories against the evidence. They analyzed human groups without slipping into racial categorization. Author Edward Beasley examines the extent to which the Gobineau-Bagehot-Darwin way of thinking about race penetrated the minds of certain key colonial governors. He further explores the hardening of the rhetoric of race-prejudice in some quarters in England in the nineteenth century – the processes by which racism was first formed.

Contents

1. Introduction – Reinventing Racism
2. Tocqueville and Race
3. Gobineau, Bagehot’s Precursor
4. The Common Sense of Walter Bagehot
5. Bagehot Rewrites Gobineau
6. Darwin and Race
7. Argyll, Race, and Degeneration
8. Frederick Weld and the Unnamed Neighbours
9. By Way of a Conclusion – Arthur Gordon

Racing Romance: Love, Power, and Desire Among Asian American/ White Couples

Rutgers University Press
June 2009
208 pages
6 x 9
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8135-4533-2
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8135-4532-5
Web PDF ISBN: 978-0-8135-4852-4

Kumiko Nemoto, Associate Professor of Sociology
Western Kentucky University

Despite being far from the norm, interracial relationships are more popular than ever. Racing Romance sheds special light on the bonds between whites and Asian Americans, an important topic that has not garnered well-deserved attention until now. Incorporating life-history narratives and interviews with those currently or previously involved with an interracial partner, Kumiko Nemoto addresses the contradictions and tensions—a result of race, class, and gender—that Asian Americans and whites experience.

Similar to black/white relationships, stereotypes have long played crucial roles in AsianAmerican/white encounters. Partners grapple with media representations of Asian women as submissive or hypersexual and Asian men are often portrayed as weak laborers or powerful martial artists. Racing Romance reveals how allegedly progressive interracial relationships remain firmly shaped by the logic of patriarchy and gender inherent to the ideal of marriage, family, and nation in America, even as this ideal is juxtaposed with discourses of multiculturalism and color blindness.

The Romance of Race: Incest, Miscegenation, and Multiculturalism in the United States, 1880-1930

Rutgers University Press
January 2013
240 pages
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8135-5462-4
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8135-5463-1
eBook ISBN: 978-0-8135-5464-8

Jolie A. Sheffer, Associate Professor, English and American Culture Studies
Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, Ohio

In the United States miscegenation is not merely a subject of literature and popular culture. It is in many ways the foundation of contemporary imaginary community. The Romance of Race examines the role of minority women writers and reformers in the creation of our modern American multiculturalism.

The national identity of the United States was transformed between 1880 and 1930 due to mass immigration, imperial expansion, the rise of Jim Crow, and the beginning of the suffrage movement. A generation of women writers and reformers—particularly women of color—contributed to these debates by imagining new national narratives that put minorities at the center of American identity. Jane Addams, Pauline Hopkins, Onoto Watanna (Winnifred Eaton), María Cristina Mena, and Mourning Dove (Christine Quintasket) embraced the images of the United States—and increasingly the world—as an interracial nuclear family. They also reframed public debates through narratives depicting interracial encounters as longstanding, unacknowledged liaisons between white men and racialized women that produced an incestuous, mixed-race nation.

By mobilizing the sexual taboos of incest and miscegenation, these women writers created political allegories of kinship and community. Through their criticisms of the nation’s history of exploitation and colonization, they also imagined a more inclusive future. As Jolie A. Sheffer identifies the contemporary template for American multiculturalism in the works of turn-of-the century minority writers, she uncovers a much more radical history than has previously been considered.

Quicksand and Passing

Rutgers University Press
1986
246 pages
Paper ISBN: 0-8135-1170-4

Nella Larsen (1891-1964)

Edited by

Deborah E. McDowell, Alice Griffin Professor of English
University of Virginia

Nella Larsen’s novels Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929) document the historical realities of Harlem in the 1920s and shed a bright light on the social world of the black bourgeoisie. The novels’ greatest appeal and achievement, however, is not sociological, but psychological. As noted in the editor’s comprehensive introduction, Larsen takes the theme of psychic dualism, so popular in Harlem Renaissance fiction, to a higher and more complex level, displaying a sophisticated understanding and penetrating analysis of black female psychology.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Notes to Introduction
• Selected Bibliography
• A Note on the Texts
• Quicksand
• Passing
• Explanatory Notes

For minorities in France, Obama still casts a spell

France 24: International News
2012-08-09

Jon Frosch

Though his reputation among blacks and Arabs in France is showing ever-so-slight signs of wear and tear, US President Barack Obama remains a powerful symbol for French citizens of colour. France24.com takes a closer look.

When Barack Obama was elected in 2008, Anthony Borval, a black Frenchman of Caribbean descent, was elated.

“It was intense, I felt almost American,” the 29-year-old office manager confided. “Obama indirectly sent us a message that anything was possible, a message of hope for minorities in France, where it’s difficult for us to succeed.”

Four years later, as Obama spends the end of his tumultuous first term fighting a tough re-election battle against Republican challenger Mitt Romney, the US president is still a hero for Borval. “His victory taught French people of colour to believe in ourselves,” he said. “Today, I still feel great pride that an African-American is running the world’s superpower.”…

…Perhaps more common than that bluntly pragmatic view is a sense among some French minorities that Obama is an admirable figure who has not fully lived up to his promise. Aziz Senni, 36, is a Moroccan-born Frenchman who founded an investment fund specialising in economic development in the “banlieue”. Like many people of colour in France, Senni says he was captivated by Obama’s rise and impressed with Americans for voting a black man into the White House just decades after the civil rights movement.

But Senni also noted that “like all new things, time goes by, the shine fades, and there are disappointments”. He cited Obama’s failure to advance the Mideast peace process, something that has tarnished the US president’s image among Arabs around the world. “We had a lot of hope after his Cairo speech, but he’s mainly been the same as his predecessors on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” Senni assessed. “That’s the reality of being an American president.”…

…French mistrust of multiculturalism has deep roots: since the French Revolution, the country has clung to the notion that a common French identity could override differences in race and creed. The problem, according to Ndiaye, is that “Frenchness” has not always been as inclusive in practice as it is in principle. “After France’s colonies became independent, France thought of itself as essentially white,” the historian stated. “And many French people feared that immigration from former colonies would cause the republic to be fractured.”

The result is a theoretically colour-blind country in which close-knit ethnic and religious groups are often viewed warily, politicians avoid referring to specific communities of voters, and disdain for affirmative action (known here as “positive discrimination”) is common on both sides of the political aisle.

According to Ndiaye, however, it is affirmative action that could eventually help France create conditions from which a French Obama might one day emerge. “Obama didn’t come out of nowhere,” he explained. “There is a critical mass of 10,000 elected black officials in America, from sheriffs to mayors to Congressmen to the president. Affirmative action helped. We need that in France.”…

Read the entire article here.

Argentina: Land of the Vanishing Blacks

Ebony Magazine
October 1973
pages 74-85

Era Bell Thompson

Once outnumbering whites five to one, blacks were absorbed and inundated by massive immigration

“If you are looking for black people, why,” they asked helpfully, “did you come to Argentina? Why don’t you go to Brazil?”

Well, I had been to Brazil (Ebony July, September 1965), the “most mulatto” nation in South America, hopefully in the process of becoming white through amalgamation. Now I was in Argentina where massive European immigration was the catalyst that converted an erstwhile mixed-blood people into the whitest nation on the continent.

I had read that there were no more blacks in that Spanish-speaking country. But I had also heard rumors of a small black colony in Buenos Aires, the capital. So what happened to Argentina’s involuntary immigrants, those African slaves and their mulatto descendants who once outnumbered whites five to one, and who were for 250 years “an important element” in the total populations which is now 97 percent white? Had they been entirely absorbed by, or simply inundated in successive waves of the new Argentines?

What I found was not a viable, but a vanishing black people: relatively few in numbers, relatively free of racial discrimination and relatively content. Summarized one gentleman, “If there were more of us, perhaps it would be different.”

The white Argentine, who is overwhelmingly of Italian and Spanish descent, doubts there ever were many blacks in their section of the old Rio de la Plata viceroyalty and are unaware of those still within their midst. The ranks of the few slaves channeled into the port of Buenos Aires, they believe, were decimated largely by disease and war. The survivors who did not emigrate to neighboring countries were absorbed by the mestizos.

The question of what happened to Argentine blacks is not a new one. Ysabel P. Rennie, author of the book. The Argentine Republic, calls it “one of the most intriguing riddles of Argentine history.” In his book, Argentina, a City and a Nation, James R. Scobie says “the disappearance of the Negro from the Argentine scene has puzzled demographers far more than the vanishing Indian.”

When Josephine Baker visited the country during Juan Peron’s first term as president, the entertainer asked Dr. Ramon Carrillo, mulatto minister of public health, “Where are the Negroes?”

“There are only two,” he laughingly replied. “You and I.”

My first impressions of Buenos Aires were: the man was right. In Buenos Aires, the city, and Buenos Aires province, where the preponderance of the entire population is found. Afro-Argentines, especially the fair-skinned ones, and not easily distinguishable from Latin-type whites. And then there is a matter of definitions. The terms Negro and mulatto are still used, but with slightly different connotations. Negro (small ‘n’) is the Spanish word for black. It took me some time to get used to hearing négro sprinkled throughout conversations that had nothing to do with race. Mulatto (or moreno) is an African-Spanish mixture, as differentiated from mestizo, which technically means only Spanish-Indian, but more often than Argentines care to admit, includes an admixture of black blood. Zambo (not Sambo) means African-Indian, but the term—if not the practice which produced it—has been discontinued, as have the names of two social classes: the gaucho, now cowboy, and cabecitas négras, or little black heads, as people fresh in from the provinces were once called. A Creole is an Argentine-born white.

When I posed Josephine Baker’s question, the average creole could recall only a doorman here or a porter there. Brown people who were not mestizos were Brazilian tourists. A secretary in a government office said she was 16 before she saw a black man. Fortunately, I did not have to wait that long…

Read the entire article here.