Mixed Race Studies

Sex, Love, Race: Crossing Boundaries in North American History

New York University Press
1999
416 pages
Cloth ISBN: 9780814735565
Paperback ISBN: 9780814735572

Edited by

Martha Hodes, Professor of History
New York University

Since pre-colonial days, America has been both torn apart and united by love, sex, and marriage across racial boundaries. Whether motivated by violent conquest, economics, lust, or love, such unions have disturbed some of America’s most sacred beliefs and prejudices.

Sex, Love, Race provides a historical foundation for contemporary discussions of sex across racial lines, which, despite the numbers of interracial marriages and multiracial children, remains a controversial issue today. The first historical anthology to focus solely and widely on the subject, Sex, Love, Race gathers new essays by both younger and well-known scholars which probe why and how the specter of sex across racial boundaries has so threatened Americans of all colors and classes.

Traversing the whole of American history, from liaisons among Indians, Europeans, and Africans to twentieth-century social scientists’ fascination with sex between “Orientals” and whites, the essays cover a range of regions, races, ethnicities, and sexual orientations. In so doing, Sex, Love, Race, sketches a larger portrait of the overlapping construction of racial, ethnic, and sexual identities in America.

The Sea Captain’s Wife: A True Story of Love, Race, and War in the Nineteenth Century

W. W. Norton & Company
September 2007
384 pages
5.5 × 8.3 in
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-393-33029-8

Martha Hodes, Professor of History
New York University

Finalist for the Lincoln Book Prize.

Award-winning historian Martha Hodes brings us into the extraordinary world of Eunice Connolly. Born white and poor in New England, Eunice moved from countryside to factory city, worked in the mills, then followed her husband to the Deep South. When the Civil War came, Eunice’s brothers joined the Union army while her husband fought and died for the Confederacy. Back in New England, a widow and the mother of two, Eunice barely got by as a washerwoman, struggling with crushing depression. Four years later, she fell in love with a black sea captain, married him, and moved to his home in the West Indies. Following every lead in a collection of 500 family letters, Hodes traced Eunice’s footsteps and met descendants along the way. This story of misfortune and defiance takes up grand themes of American history—opportunity and racism, war and freedom—and illuminates the lives of ordinary people in the past.

Midwinter 1881, Ellen Merrill received a letter. It came from the West Indies, written by a man Ellen didn’t know, and the news was bad. That was clear from the second sentence, in which the stranger spoke of “the late Mr. and Mrs. Connolly.” When Ellen reached the end of the letter, she read it again, and then again, before she took out a sheet of paper. “My Dear Brother,” she wrote to Henry Richardson, “I have at last succeeded in learning the fate of Mrs. Connolly and family.” She asked Henry to impart the news to their mother and to their sister Ann McCoy. As Ellen signed off, she thought about dangerous weather. “We had a Storm here last week which blowd the tide in and nearly washed us away for three days.” She posted the letter from Mississippi to Massachusetts.

The hurricane that swirled off the Miskito Cays of Central America in September 1877 took the life of an American woman named Eunice Connolly. Eunice was an ordinary woman who led an extraordinary life by making momentous decisions within a world that offered her few choices. Eunice Richardson Stone Connolly was born white and working class in New England in 1831. She married a fellow New Englander who took her to the South and fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War, while Eunice’s two brothers fought for the Union. After the war, Eunice married a well-to-do man of color and went to live in a settlement of former slaves on the British Caribbean island of Grand Cayman. This book tells her story…

…Eunice’s story and the choices she made expose the complexities of racial classification across geographical borders. Her family traced their lineage back to England and France, but as Eunice worked in the mills and labored as a servant, she came precariously close to the degraded status of impoverished Irish and black women. Later, when she married a “man of color” (that was the phrase invoked at the time), she found out that reputation also counted in a person’s racial status and that for women, whiteness depended upon specific ideas about purity. Then, when Eunice took up residence on a West Indian island, she realized that labels like “white,” “black,” “mulatto,” and “colored” carried different meanings in different places. Eunice’s story illuminates the complexities of racism too: Her unusual experiences make clear just how mercurial racial categories could be in the nineteenth century, but her life also proves just how much power those mercurial markers could exert to confine—or transform—a person’s life. In her voyages from New England to the Deep South to the British Caribbean, Eunice also made a journey from the life of an impoverished white woman in the United States to the life of an elite woman of color in the West Indies…

Read chapter 1 in PDF or HTML format.

White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-Century South

Yale University Press
January 1997
352 pages
6 1/8 x 9 1/4
ISBN: 9780300077506
ISBN-10: 0300077505

Martha Hodes, Professor of History
New York University

• Winner of the Allan Nevins Prize given by the Society of American Historians.
• Honorable mention in the Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Awards, sponsored by the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights in North America.

This book is the first to explore the history of a powerful category of illicit sex in America’s past: liaisons between Southern white women and black men. Martha Hodes tells a series of stories about such liaisons in the years before the Civil War, explores the complex ways in which white Southerners tolerated them in the slave South, and shows how and why these responses changed with emancipation.

Hodes provides details of the wedding of a white servant-woman and a slave man in 1681, an antebellum rape accusation that uncovered a relationship between an unmarried white woman and a slave, and a divorce plea from a white farmer based on an adulterous affair between his wife and a neighborhood slave. Drawing on sources that include courtroom testimony, legislative petitions, pardon pleas, and congressional testimony, she presents the voices of the authorities, eyewitnesses, and the transgressors themselves—and these voices seem to say that in the slave South, whites were not overwhelmingly concerned about such liaisons, beyond the racial and legal status of the children that were produced. Only with the advent of black freedom did the issue move beyond neighborhood dramas and into the arena of politics, becoming a much more serious taboo than it had ever been before. Hodes gives vivid examples of the violence that followed the upheaval of war, when black men and white women were targeted by the Ku Klux Klan and unprecedented white rage and terrorism against such liaisons began to erupt. An era of terror and lynchings was inaugurated, and the legacy of these sexual politics lingered well into the twentieth century.

Casta Painting: Images of Race in Eighteenth-Century Mexico

Yale University Press
2004-04-10
252 pages
8 1/2 x 11
100 b/w +100 color illus.
Paper ISBN: 9780300109719
Cloth ISBN: 9780300102413

Ilona Katzew, Associate Curator of Latin American Art
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Selected for Honorable Mention for a 2003-2004 Book Award given by the Association for Latin American Art.

The pictorial genre known as casta painting is one of the most compelling forms of artistic expression from colonial Mexico. Created as sets of consecutive images, the works portray racial mixing among the main groups that inhabited the colony: Indians, Spaniards, and Africans. In this beautifully illustrated book, Ilona Katzew places casta paintings in their social and historical context, showing for the first time the ways in which the meanings of the paintings changed along with shifting colonial politics.

The book examines how casta painting developed art historically, why race became the subject of a pictorial genre that spanned an entire century, who commissioned and collected the works, and what meanings the works held for contemporary audiences. Drawing on a range of previously unpublished archival and visual material, Katzew sheds new light on racial dynamics of eighteenth-century Mexico and on the construction of identity and self-image in the colonial world.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Painters and Paintings: A Visual Tradition and Its Historiography
• 2. “A Marvelous Variety of Colors?”: Racial Ideology and the Sistema de Castas
• 3. The Rise of Casta Painting: Exoticism and Creole Pride, 1711-1760
• 4. Changing Perspectives: Casta Painting in the Era of the Bourbon Reforms, 1760-1790
• 5. The Theater of Marvels: Casta Paintings in the Textual Microcosmos
• Concluding Remarks: A Genre with Many Meanings
• Abbreviations
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Photograph Credits
• Index

Creoles of Color in the Bayou Country

University Press of Mississippi
1994
192 pages
Paper ISBN: 0878059490, ISBN 13: 9780878059492

Carl A. Brasseaux, Professor of History and Director of the Center for Cultural and Eco-Tourism
University of Louisiana, Lafayette

Claude F. Oubre

Keith P. Fontenot

Creoles of Color are rightfully among the first families of south-western Louisiana. Yet in both antebellum and postbellum periods they remained a people considered apart from the rest of the population. Historians, demographers, sociologists, and anthropologists have given them only scant attention.

This probing book, focused on the mid-eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries, is the first to scrutinize this multiracial group through a close study of primary resource materials.

During the antebellum period they were excluded from the state’s three-tiered society–white, free people of color, and slaves. Yet Creoles of Color were a dynamic component in the region’s economy, for they were self-compelled in efforts to become and integral part of the community.

Nagô Grandma and White Papa: Candomblé and the Creation of Afro-Brazilian Identity

University of North Carolina Press
September 2009
208 pages
6.125 x 9.25, 2 figs., 4 tables, notes, bibl., index
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8078-3177-9
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8078-5975-9

Beatriz Góis Dantas, Professor Emerita of Anthropology
Universidade Federal de Sergipe in Brazil

Translated by Stephen Berg

Nagô Grandma and White Papa is a signal work in Brazilian anthropology and African diaspora studies originally published in Brazil in 1988. This edition makes Beatriz Góis Dantas’s historioethnographic study available to English-speaking audiences for the first time.

Dantas compares the formation of Yoruba (Nagô) religious traditions and ethnic identities in the Brazilian states of Sergipe and Bahia, revealing how they diverged from each other due to their different social and political contexts and needs. By tracking how markers of supposedly “pure” ethnic identity and religious practice differed radically from one place to another, Dantas shows the social construction of identity within a network of class-related demands and alliances. She demonstrates how the shape and meaning of “purity” have been affected by prolonged and complex social and cultural mixing, compromise, and struggle over time. Ethnic identity, as well as social identity in general, is formed in the crucible of political relations between social groups that purposefully mobilize and manipulate cultural markers to define their respective boundaries–a process, Dantas argues, that must be applied to understanding the experience of African-descended people in Brazil.

Almighty God Created the Races: Christianity, Interracial Marriage, and American Law

University of North Carolina Press
December 2009
288 pages
6.125 x 9.25, notes, bibl., index
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8078-3318-6
Paper ISBN: 978-1-4696-0727-6

Fay Botham, Adjunct Professor of Religious Studies
University of Iowa

In this fascinating cultural history of interracial marriage and its legal regulation in the United States, Fay Botham argues that religion–specifically, Protestant and Catholic beliefs about marriage and race–had a significant effect on legal decisions concerning miscegenation and marriage in the century following the Civil War.

Botham argues that divergent Catholic and Protestant theologies of marriage and race, reinforced by regional differences between the West and the South, shaped the two pivotal cases that frame this volume, the 1948 California Supreme Court case of Perez v. Lippold (which successfully challenged California’s antimiscegenation statutes on the grounds of religious freedom) and the 1967 U.S. Supreme Court case Loving v. Virginia (which declared legal bans on interracial marriage unconstitutional). Botham contends that the white southern Protestant notion that God “dispersed” the races, as opposed to the American Catholic emphasis on human unity and common origins, points to ways that religion influenced the course of litigation and illuminates the religious bases for Christian racist and antiracist movements.

Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self

Oxford University Press
2006
344 pages
6-1/8 x 9-1/4
ISBN13: 978-0-19-513735-4
ISBN10: 0-19-513735-3

Linda Martín Alcoff, Professor of Philosophy
Hunter College/CUNY Graduate Center

Winner of the 2009 Frantz Fanon Prize

In the heated debates over identity politics, few theorists have looked carefully at the conceptualizations of identity assumed by all sides. Visible Identities fills this gap. Drawing on both philosophical sources as well as theories and empirical studies in the social sciences, Martin Alcoff makes a strong case that identities are not like special interests, nor are they doomed to oppositional politics, nor do they inevitably lead to conformism, essentialism, or reductive approaches to judging others. Identities are historical formations and their political implications are open to interpretation. But identities such as race and gender also have a powerful visual and material aspect that eliminativists and social constructionists often underestimate.

Visible Identities offers a careful analysis of the political and philosophical worries about identity and argues that these worries are neither supported by the empirical data nor grounded in realistic understandings of what identities are. Martin Alcoff develops a more realistic characterization of identity in general through combining phenomenological approaches to embodiment with hermeneutic concepts of the interpretive horizon. Besides addressing the general contours of social identity, Martin Alcoff develops an account of the material infrastructure of gendered identity, compares and contrasts gender identities with racialized ones, and explores the experiential aspects of racial subjectivity for both whites and non-whites. In several chapters she looks specifically at Latino identity as well, including its relationship to concepts of race, the specific forms of anti-Latino racism, and the politics of mestizo or hybrid identity.

Table of Contents

• Part One: Identities Real and Imagined
  • Introduction: Identity and Visibility.
  • 1. The Pathologizing of Identity.
  • 2. The Political Critique.
  • 3. The Philosophical Critique.
  • 4. Real Identities.
• Part Two: Gender Identity and Gender Differences
  • 5. The Identity Crisis in Feminist Theory.
  • 6. The Metaphysics of Gender and Sexual Difference.
• Part Three: Racialized Identities and Racist Subjects
  • 7. A Phenomenology of Racial Embodiment.
  • 8. Racism and Visible Race.
  • 9. The Whiteness Question.
• Part Four: Latino/a Particularity
  • 10. Latinos and the Categories of Race.
  • 11. Latinos, Asian Americans, and the Black-White Binary.
  • 12. On Being Mixed.
• Conclusion.
• Notes.
• Bibliography.
• Index.

Race, Hybridity, and Miscegenation

Thoemme Continuum
2005-06-30
657 pages
ISBN: 1843711044
EAN/ISBN13: 9781843711049

Edited by:

Robert Bernasconi, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Philosophy
Pennsylvania State University

Kristie Dotson, Assistant Professor of Philosophy
Michigan State University

Volumes 1 and 2 of this 3 volume set collect the major contributions to the scientific debate on the unity of the human race in the 1850s, focusing particularly on the idea of hybridity. Volume 3 republishes the major contributions to the political debate on miscegenation.

This set brings together very rare primary sources of two central debates in the USA from the second half of the 19th century and early 20th century. Many of the essays in all three volumes have not been republished since their original publication and are extraordinarily hard to find. Volumes 1 and 2 collect the major contributions to the scientific debate on the unity of the human race in the 1850s focusing particularly on the idea of hybridity, which since Ray and Buffon had been central to species definition. The main book-length contributions to the debate were recently republished in “American Theories of Polygenesis” (Thoemmes Press, 2002). However, alongside these books and feeding off them are passionate debates which helped to define scientific racism for that time, not only in the US, but also Europe, because to a certain extent Europeans were willing to defer to American observers for their knowledge of Africans and particularly the effects of racism. Volume 3 republishes the major contributions to the political debate on miscegenation.The term “miscegenation” was coined in the anonymous text “Miscegenation: The Theory of the Blending of the Races, Applied to the American White Man and Negro”, now attributed to David Croly. Some of the works included are overtly racist in highly objectionable ways and serve to document a context that is too often ignored. A particular feature of this volume is the inclusion of works by African-American authors. Some of the authors and texts included have been forgotten, but even the better-known texts can be properly understood now they are restored to their context. The debates about hybridity and miscegenation are not only of deep historical significance, they are also of interest in the light of the contemporary rehabilitation of the idea of hybridity in the work of Homi Bhabha, as well as the current interest in the idea of “mixed race”.  The set comes with two separate introductions by editor Robert Bernasconi. These substantial essays (5,000-10,000 words each) record the history of the debates including reference to works not here republished, brief biographical information on the authors included, and insights into the larger intellectual and political context.

The Idea Of Race

Hackett Publishing Company
2000
256 pages
Cloth ISBN: 0-87220-459-6, ISBN-13: 978-0-87220-459-1
Paper ISBN: 0-87220-458-8, ISBN-13: 978-0-87220-458-4

Edited by

Robert Bernasconi, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Philosophy
Pennsylvania State University

Tommy L. Lott, Professor of Philosophy
San José State University

A survey of the historical development of the idea of race, this anthology offers pre-twentieth century theories about the concept of race, classic twentieth century sources reiterating and contesting ideas of race as scientific, and several philosophically relevant essays that discuss the issues presented. A general Introduction gives an overview of the readings. Headnotes introduce each selection. Includes suggested further readings.

Table of Contents
Introduction

The Classification of Races

1. Francois Bernier, “A new division of earth, according to the different species or races of men who inhabit it”
2. Francois-Marie Voltaire, “Of the Different Races of Men,” from The Philosophy of History
3. Immanuel Kant, “Of the Different Human Races”
4. Johann Gottfried von Herder, Ideas on the Philosophy of the History of Humankind
5. Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, On the Natural Variety of Mankind
6. G. W. F. Hegel, “Anthropology,” from The Encyclopedia of Philosophical Science

Science and Eugenics

1. Arthur de Gobineau, The Inequality of Human Races
2. Charles Darwin, “On the Races of Man,” from The Descent of Man
3. Francis Galton, “Eugenics: Its Definition, Scope and Aims”

Heredity and Culture

1. Franz Boas, “Instability of Human Types”
2. Alain Locke, “The Concept of Race as applied to Social Culture”
3. Ashley Montagu, “The Concept of Race in the Human Species in the Light of Genetics”

Race and Political Ideology

1. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Conservation of Races
2. Anthony Appiah, “The Uncompleted Argument: Du Bois and the Illusion of Race”
3. Leopold Senghor, “What is Negritude?”

Racial Identity

1. Linda Alcoff, “Mestizo Identity”
2. Michael Hanchard, “Black Cinderella? Race and the Public Sphere in Brazil”
3. Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States.