Mixed Race Studies

The Idea of Race in Latin America, 1870-1940

University of Texas Press
1990
143 pages
10 b&w illus.
6 x 9 in.
ISBN: 978-0-292-73857-7

Edited by

Richard Graham, Emeritus Frances Higginbotham Nalle Centennial Professor of History
University of Texas, Austin

With chapters by Thomas E. Skidmore, Aline Helg, and Alan Knight

From the mid-nineteenth century until the 1930s, many Latin American leaders faced a difficult dilemma regarding the idea of race. On the one hand, they aspired to an ever-closer connection to Europe and North America, where, during much of this period, “scientific” thought condemned nonwhite races to an inferior category. Yet, with the heterogeneous racial makeup of their societies clearly before them and a growing sense of national identity impelling consideration of national futures, Latin American leaders hesitated. What to do? Whom to believe?

Latin American political and intellectual leaders’ sometimes anguished responses to these dilemmas form the subject of The Idea of Race in Latin America. Thomas Skidmore, Aline Helg, and Alan Knight have each contributed chapters that succinctly explore various aspects of the story in Brazil, Argentina, Cuba, and Mexico. While keenly alert to the social and economic differences that distinguish one Latin American society from another, each author has also addressed common issues that Richard Graham ably draws together in a brief introduction. Written in a style that will make it accessible to the undergraduate, this book will appeal as well to the sophisticated scholar.

Table of Contents

• Preface
• 1. Introduction (Richard Graham)
• 2. Racial Ideas and Social Policy in Brazil, 1870-1940 (Thomas E. Skidmore)
• 3. Race in Argentina and Cuba, 1880-1930: Theory, Policies, and Popular Reaction (Aline Helg)
• 4. Racism, Revolution, and Indigenismo: Mexico, 1910-1940 (Alan Knight)
• Bibliography
• Index

Read the intrduction here.

The Sorcery of Color: Identity, Race, and Gender in Brazil

Temple University Press
November 2006
336 pages
6×9
6 tables
Paper EAN: 978-1-59213-351-2; ISBN: 1-59213-351-7
Cloth EAN: 978-1-59213-350-5; ISBN: 1-59213-350-9
Electronic Book EAN: 978-1-59213-352-9

Elisa Larkin Nascimento, Director
IPEAFRO Afro-Brazilian Studies and Research Institute, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Originally published in 2003 in Portuguese, The Sorcery of Color argues that there are longstanding and deeply-rooted relationships between racial and gender inequalities in Brazil. In this pioneering book, Elisa Larkin Nascimento examines the social and cultural movements that have attempted, since the early twentieth century, to challenge and eradicate these conjoined inequalities.

The book’s title describes the social sleight-of-hand that disguises the realities of Brazilian racial inequity. According to Nascimento, anyone who speaks of racism—or merely refers to another person as black—traditionally is seen as racist. The only acceptably non-racist attitude is silence. At the same time, Afro-Brazilian culture and history have been so overshadowed by the idea of a general “Brazilian identity” that to call attention to them is also to risk being labeled racist.

Incorporating leading international scholarship on Pan Africanism and Afrocentric philosophy with the writing of Brazilian scholars, Nascimento presents a compelling feminist argument against the prevailing policy that denies the importance of race in favor of a purposefully vague concept of ethnicity confused with color.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• List of Tables
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction to the English Edition
• Preface – Kabengele Munanga
• Introduction
• 1. Identity, Race, and Gender
• 2. Brazil and the Making of “Virtual Whiteness”
• 3. Constructing and Desconstructing the “Crazy Creole”
• 4. Another History: Afro-Brazilian Agency (São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, 1914-1960)
• 5. The Black Experimental Theater: Plots, Texts, and Actors
• Glossary of Brazilian Words
• Bibliographical References

…The second obstacle to the discussion of race in Brazil is resistance to the idea that African populations in different parts of the world share a common experience. The presumption is that blacks in Brazil are in a unique situation determined solely by the circumstances of their society and have little or nothing in common with black populations in other parts of the world. Critics have frequently accused the black social movement in Brazil of attempting to import foreign standards and raising a problem that has never existed before. On the other hand, the concerns of the black movement often revolve around issues specific to Brazil rather than racism as a world phenomenon.

But racist domination is worldwide in scope. It derives from the historical imposition of Western hegemony over non-Western peoples and its essence is expressed in the ideology of white supremacy. The standard of whiteness affects the identity constructs of all dominated peoples, making the issue of identity crucial, but oftentimes, it is expressed in specific local terms. In Brazil, the sorcery of color transforms mixed-race identity into a permanent search for the simulation of whiteness…

Kilombismo, Virtual Whiteness, and the Sorcery of Color

Journal of Black Studies
Volume 34, Number 6 (2004)
pages 861-880
DOI: 10.1177/0021934704264009

Elisa Larkin Nascimento
Afro-Brazilian Studies and Research Institute

This article explores the legacy and current presence of racism in Brazil, particularly their unique expression in the juxtaposition of the miscegenation ideology of nonracism with the living legacy of Lombrosian criminology. The author proposes the Sorcery of Color as a metaphor for the Brazilian standard of race relations, which transforms a perverse system of racial domination into a pretense of antiracist ideals and establishes what the author describes as the category of virtual whiteness, a fulcrum of identity intrinsically intermeshed with issues of gender and patriarchy. The groundings of Afrocentric thought can be found in the writings and actions of African Brazilian intellectuals of the 20th century, and its most articulated expression is the thesis of Kilombismo, developed by Abdias do Nascimento in the context of his work in Pan-African affairs in the 1970s and 1980s.

Read or purchase the article here.

Racial Categories in Medical Practice: How Useful Are They?

PLoS Medicine
Volume 4, Number 9 (September 2007)
pages 1423-1428
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pmed.0040271

Lundy Braun
Departments of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine and Africana Studies
Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island

Duana Fullwiley, Assistant Professor of African and African American Studies and of Medical Anthropology
Harvard University

Anne Fausto-Sterling
Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology and Biochemistry, Program in Women’s Studies, and Chair of the Faculty Committee on Science and Technology Studies
Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island

Evelynn M. Hammonds, Senior Vice Provost for Faculty Development and Diversity
History of Science and of African and African American Studies programs
Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts

Alondra Nelson
Departments of Sociology and African American Studies
Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut

William Quivers
Department of Physics
Wellesley College, Wellesley, Massachusetts

Susan M. Reverby
Women’s Studies Department,
Wellesley College, Wellesley, Massachusetts

Alexandra Shields
Harvard/MGH Cente on Genomics, Vulnerable Populations and Health Disparities,
Massachusetts General Hospital
Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts

The Trouble with Race

Is it good medical practice for physicians to “eyeball” a patient’s race when assessing their medical status or even to ask them to identify their race? This question was captured in a 2005 episode of “House M.D.,”  Fox television’s medical drama. In the episode, a black patient with heart disease refuses a hospital physician’s prescription for what is clearly supposed to be BiDil, the drug approved by the United States Food and Drug Administration only for “self-identified” African-Americans. Dr. House, on seeing the patient for followup, insists on the same prescription.  The patient again refuses, telling House, “I’m not buying into no racist drug, OK?” House, a white physician asks, “It’s racist because it helps black people more than white people? Well, on behalf of my peeps, let me say, thanks for dying on principle for us.” The patient replies, “Look. My heart’s red, your heart’s red.  And it don’t make no sense to give us different drugs.”  Who is right here, House or his patient? And what does this episode tell us about the way race plays itself out in the physician-patient clinical encounter? What of clinical importance can be learned by making a quick racial assessment?  That an ACE (angiotensin-converting enzyme) inhibitor may not be effective? That screening for sickle cell anemia is a waste of time? Sorting patients by race may seem useful during a time constrained interview, but we argue that acting on rapid racial assessment can lead to missed diagnoses and inappropriate treatments…

Racial Categories Are Historical, Not Natural

…Racial definitions are historically and nationally specific. In her comparison of the history of racial categories in the US and Brazilian census from the late 18th century to the present, political scientist Melissa Nobles demonstrated that categories emerge and are  deployed in different ways over time. For example, during the mid-19th to the early 20th centuries, at the height of US anxiety about “miscegenation,” categories such as “mulatto” were vehicles for expressing and containing cultural anxiety about racial purity.  Bolstered by scientific ideas about race, data collected on the numbers of “mulattoes” were shaped by the desire to prove that “hybrids” would die out…

…A dark-skinned, curly-headed person who identifies as African American may, indeed, have much in his or her history and upbringing to justify that identification. But he or she may also have a white grandparent and several Cherokee ancestors. Thus, returning to the example of glaucoma, it is more important to know a patient’s family history than to assess his or her race.  And collecting family history ought to mean not only compiling a list of which diseases family members have, but making some attempt to assess common (familial) habits such as diet and life experiences (e.g., first- versus second-generation immigrants, living conditions, or same versus widely varied work experience and geographical locations). Similarly, when the history of passing for white is ignored, those who identify themselves as “white” are assumed to have no ancestral “black blood.”  Finally, immigration patterns constantly change. A “black” person walking into a Boston, Massachusetts clinic could easily be the child of a recent immigrant from Ethiopia or Brazil who has a genetic makeup as well as cultural and environmental exposures that differ significantly from the descendents of 19th century US slaves from the western coast of Africa…

Read the entire article here.

Watson [Program] Will Allow Reid to Study Issues Multi-Racial People Face

Davidson University
Davidson, North Carolina
2007-04-02

Rachel Andoga

“When I went abroad to Strasbourg, France, I remember meeting everybody in my program on the plane, and this one girl said to me, ‘So, can we just get this out of the way—what are you?’”
 
Amy Reid, a senior biology major and dance team captain, has heard such questions about her ethnicity for years. Her light skin and curly black hair defy pigeon-holing her as white, black, Latino or somewhere in between. Realizing that she’s not alone in ethnic no-man’s land, she wrote a successful Watson Foundation proposal that will allow her to spend the coming year exploring the concept of ethnic identity in Brazil and Namibia.

Reid’s project seeks to compare and contrast multi-racial identity development within specific communities. She chose to visit Brazil and Namibia for their unique cultural heritages. “For a long time, people believed that there was no racism in Brazil since there is such extensive interracial mixing between the native groups, descendants of African slaves, and the Portuguese,” she said. “That’s no longer the popular belief.”…

Read the entire article here.

A new paradigm of race: Visit to Brazil prompts the question: Can mixing everyone up solve the race problem?

Bloomington Herald-Times
2004-08-29
Courtesy of: Black Film Center/Archive
Indiana University

Audrey T. McCluskey, Director Neal-Marshall Black Culture Center
Indiana University

If Tiger Woods lived in Brazil he would not have had to coin the word “Cablanasian” to describe the multiracial mixture of caucasian, black, and Asian that makes up his lineage nor face derision from those of us who thought he was trippin’ (being silly, unreal). As my husband and I saw on a recent trip, in Brazil race-mixing is the rule, not the exception, with the majority of its 170 million people being visible incarnates of the slogan that officials like to tout: “We’re a multiracial democracy. We’re not white, or black, or Indian, we’re all Brazilians.”

Skeptical, but being swept along by the stunning beauty of the country and its people, I did begin to wonder if (contrary to learned opinion) Brazil had solved its race problem by just mixing everyone up. British scholar Paul Gilroy recently said that Brazil and South Africa – a country that I also visited recently and will invoke later – present “a new paradigm of race” that is more subtle and flexible than the U.S.’s old “one drop” (of black blood makes you black) rule that equates whiteness with mythical purity…

Read the entire article here.

Review Essay: Racial Relations and Racism in Brazil

Culture & Psychology
Volume 13, Number 4 (December 2007)
pages 461-473
DOI: 10.1177/1354067X07082805

Marcus Eugênio Oliveira Lima
Universidade Federal de Sergipe, Brazil

Telles, Edward Eric, Race in Another America: The Significance of Skin Color in Brazil. Princeton, NJ/Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006. 324 pp. ISBN 978–0–691–12792–7 (pbk)

Edward Telles‘ book Race in Another America: The Significance of Skin Color in Brazil (2006) has contributed to the understanding of racial and skin color relations in Brazil. The main aspects of the past and present of racism in Brazil are discussed, such as whitening, mestizaje, and the ideology of racial democracy, and some additional data are presented. This work reflects on and brings to light the reflections of Telles and of other researchers of racism about a future of more equalitarian racial and social relations in Brazil.

Read or purchase the review here.

The Impure Imagination: Toward a Critical Hybridity in Latin American Writing

University of Minnesota Press
2006
288 pages
5 7⁄8 x 9
Paper ISBN: 0-8166-4786-0; ISBN-13: 978-0-8166-4786-6
Cloth ISBN: 0-8166-4785-2; ISBN-13: 978-0-8166-4785-9

Joshua Lund, Associate Professor of Hispanic Languages and Literature
University of Pittsburgh

Challenges conventional thinking about the widely accepted concept of cultural hybridity.

“Hybridity” is a term that has been applied to Latin American politics, literature, and intellectual life for more than a century. During the past two decades, it has figured in—and been transfigured by—the work of prominent postcolonialist writers and thinkers throughout the Americas.

In this pathbreaking work, Joshua Lund offers a thoughtful critique of hybridity by reading contemporary theories of cultural mixing against their historical precursors. The Impure Imagination is the first book to systematically analyze today’s dominant theories in relation to earlier, narrative manifestations of hybridity in Latin American writing, with a particular focus on Mexico and Brazil.

Generally understood as the impurification of standard or canonized forms, hybridity has historically been embraced as a basic marker of Latin American regional identity and as a strategy of resistance to cultural imperialism. Lund contends that Latin American theories and narratives of hybridity have been, and continue to be, underwritten by a structure of colonial power. Here he provides an informed critique and cogent investigation of this connection, its cultural effects, and its political implications. Using the emergence of hybridity as an analytical frame for thinking about culture in the Americas, Lund examines the contributions of influential thinkers, including Néstor García Canclini, Homi Bhabha, Jacques Derrida, Giorgio Agamben, Jorge Luis Borges, Antonio Candido, and many others.

Distinguished by its philosophical grounding and underpinned with case studies, The Impure Imagination employs postcolonial theory and theories of race as it explores Latin American history and culture. The result is an original and interrogative study of hybridity that exposes surprising—and unsettling—similarities with nationalistic discourses.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Stakes of Hybridity
• Part I: Theorizing Hybridity Today
  • 1. Genres Are Not to Be Mixed
  • 2. Erasing Race and the Persistence of Teleology
  • 3. The Ambivalence of Theorizing Hybridity: Coloniality and Anthropology
• Part II: Mexico
  • 4. New Cultural History and the Rise of Mediation
  • 5. Back Toward a Positive Mestizaje
  • 6. They Were Not a Barbarous Tribe
  • 7. Mestizaje and Post-Revolutionary Malaise: Vasconcelos and Azuela
• Part III: Brazil
  • 8. The Brazilian Family
  • 9. On the Myth of Racial Democracy
  • 10. The Iracema-effect in Casa-grande e Senzala
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

Go-Betweens and the Colonization of Brazil: 1500-1600

University of Texas Press
2005
6 x 9 in.
391 pp., 20 figures, 11 maps, 2 tables
ISBN: 978-0-292-71276-8

Alida C. Metcalf, Harris Masterson, Jr. Professor of History
Rice University, Houston, Texas

Doña Marina (La Malinche) …Pocahontas …Sacagawea—their names live on in historical memory because these women bridged the indigenous American and European worlds, opening the way for the cultural encounters, collisions, and fusions that shaped the social and even physical landscape of the modern Americas. But these famous individuals were only a few of the many thousands of people who, intentionally or otherwise, served as “go-betweens” as Europeans explored and colonized the New World.

In this innovative history, Alida Metcalf thoroughly investigates the many roles played by go-betweens in the colonization of sixteenth-century Brazil. She finds that many individuals created physical links among Europe, Africa, and Brazil—explorers, traders, settlers, and slaves circulated goods, plants, animals, and diseases. Intercultural liaisons produced mixed-race children. At the cultural level, Jesuit priests and African slaves infused native Brazilian traditions with their own religious practices, while translators became influential go-betweens, negotiating the terms of trade, interaction, and exchange. Most powerful of all, as Metcalf shows, were those go-betweens who interpreted or represented new lands and peoples through writings, maps, religion, and the oral tradition. Metcalf’s convincing demonstration that colonization is always mediated by third parties has relevance far beyond the Brazilian case, even as it opens a revealing new window on the first century of Brazilian history.

Read an excerpt here.

Table of Contents

• A Note on Spelling and Citation
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Go-betweens
• 2. Encounter
• 3. Possession
• 4. Conversion
• 5. Biology
• 6. Slavery
• 7. Resistance
• 8. Power
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

Rethinking Mestizaje: Ideology and Lived Experience

Journal of Latin American Studies
2005
Number 37, Issue 2
Pages 239–257
DOI: 10.1017/S0022216X05008990

Peter Wade, Professor of Social Anthropology
University of Manchester

The ideology of mestizaje (mixture) in Latin America has frequently been seen as involving a process of national homogenisation and of hiding a reality of racist exclusion behind a mask of inclusiveness. This view is challenged here through the argument that mestizaje inherently implies a permanent dimension of national differentiation and that, while exclusion undoubtedly exists in practice, inclusion is more than simply a mask. Case studies drawn from Colombian popular music, Venezuelan popular religion and Brazilian popular Christianity are used to illustrate these arguments, wherein inclusion is understood as a process linked to embodied identities and kinship relations. In a coda, approaches to hybridity that highlight its potential for destabilising essentialisms are analysed.

Rethinking mestizaje as embodied experience

This article explores a key concept in the complex of ideas around race, nation and multiculturalism in Latin America, that of mestizaje – essentially the notion of racial and cultural mixture. I address mestizaje not just as a nation-building ideology – which has been the principal focus of scholarship on the issue, but also as a lived process that operates within the embodied person and within networks of family and kinship relationships. I consider how people live the process of racial-cultural mixture through musical change, as racially identified styles of popular music enter into their performing bodies, awakening or engendering potentialities in them; through religious practice, as racialised deities possess them and energise a dynamic and productive embodied diversity ; and through family relationships, as people enter into sexual and procreative relations with others identified as racially-culturally different, to produce ‘mixed’ children.

This approach emphasises the ways in which mestizaje as a lived process, which encompasses, but is not limited to, ideology, involves the maintenance of enduring spaces for racial-cultural difference alongside spaces of sameness and homogeneity. Scholars have recognised that mestizaje does not have a single meaning within the Latin American context, and contains within it tensions between sameness and difference, and between inclusion and exclusion.  Yet a scholarly concern with mestizaje as ideology has tended to privilege two assumptions: first, that nationalist ideologies of mestizaje are essentially about the creation of a homogeneous mestizo (mixed) future, which are then opposed to subaltern constructions of the nation as racially culturally diverse ; and second, that mestizaje as a nationalist ideology appears to be an inclusive process, in that everyone is eligible to become a mestizo, but in reality it is exclusive because it marginalises blackness and indigenousness, while valuing whiteness…

Read the entire article here.