Mixed Race Studies

Jared Sexton: People of Color-Blindness: Notes on the Afterlife of Slavery

University of Northern Arizona
Gardner Auditorium, W.A. Franke College of Business, NAU
2010-03-25, 17:30 to 19:00 CDT (Local Time)

Jared Sexton, Associate Professor of African American Studies and Film & Media Studies
University of California, Irvine
 
This lecture explores the significance of the ongoing shift in the color line from a white/non-white to black/non-black configuration in the post-civil rights era United States. It asks how we might reframe discussions of immigration, multiracialism (race mixture), and coalition-building among people of color in this context.

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Crises of Whiteness and Empire in Colonial Indochina: The Removal of Abandoned Eurasian Children From the Vietnamese Milieu, 1890–1956

Journal of Social History
Volume 43, Number 3 (Spring 2010)
pages 587-613
E-ISSN: 1527-1897 Print ISSN: 0022-4529
DOI: 10.1353/jsh.0.0304

Christina Firpo, Assistant Professor of History
California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo

From 1890–1956, non-governmental welfare agencies worked with the French colonial government in Indochina to remove Eurasian children, who had been abandoned by their French fathers, from their Vietnamese mothers and the Vietnamese cultural environment. In an era marked by historical exigencies, perceived threats to white prestige, and inherent challenges to the colonial patriarchy, such children were believed to be a threat to colonial security and white prestige. The racial formations of abandoned Eurasian children in colonial Indochina changed repeatedly in response to these threats. Drawing from the rhetoric of racial sciences and led by anxieties over changes colonial security, French civilians increasingly and colonial government administrators increasingly made the case that these children where white and must be removed from their Vietnamese mothers’ care, using force if necessary.

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The beauty of difference

In The Fray
2005-12-04

Nicole Marie Pezold

Zadie Smith’s latest novel, “On Beauty”, is many things. Chief among them: an homage to differences.

For those of mixed heritage — who straddle more than one race, nationality, faith, class, or whatever else — uncovering a coherent identity can be a complicated emotional journey. There are multiple, potentially conflicting, avenues and models, and choosing one or melding several is difficult business. This may be part of why Zadie Smith—herself the product of an English father and Jamaican mother—returns to this endlessly rich topic in her third novel, On Beauty, which was short-listed for the 2005 Man Booker Prize. As with her acclaimed debut novel, White Teeth, published when she was a mere 23 years old, and her less stunning second book, The Autograph Man, Smith ambitiously mines the cultural morass of mixed worlds. Now, with her latest work, she paints her most vivid portrait of the challenges and ecstasies of multiculturalism…

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2010 Association for Asian American Studies Conference

Omni Austin Hotel Downtown
Austin, Texas
2010-04-07 through 2010-04-10

Theme: Emergent Cartographies: Asian American Studies in the Twenty-first Century

Selected programs from the conference schedule:

Panel
Transnational Perspectives on Beauty and Skin Color: China, Indonesia, and the Philippines
Friday 2010-04-09, 08:30-10:00 CDT (Local Time)

Chair: Paul Spickard, University of California, Santa Barbara

Amy Chang, Brown University
Rich and Fair: The Culture of Skin Whitening in China and Its Impact on Chinese-Americans

Joanne L. Rondilla, University of California, Berkeley
“From Ebony to Ivory”: Global Beauty, the Mixed Race Body and Cosmetics Advertising

L. Ayu Saraswati, University of Kansas
Affecting Whiteness: The Performativity of Affect in Constructing Whiteness Transnationally

Panel
Queer Takes on Asian American Culture Production
Friday 2010-04-09, 14:45-16:15 CDT (Local Time)

Chair: Victor Roman Mendoza, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Kekoa C. Kaluhiokalani, Muskingum University
Mixploitation, Counter-Apophasis, and James Duval: Mixed-Race Representation in Gregg Araki’s Teenage Apocalypse Trilogy

Rick H. Lee, Rutgers University
From A to Q: Literacy, Sexuality, and Shame in the Work of Justin Chin

Martin Joseph Ponce, Ohio State University
At Sea: Traveling Desires in The Book of Salt

Panel
Re-examining Japanese America
Saturday, 2010-04-10, 08:30-10:00 CDT (Local Time)

Chair: Eiichiro Azuma, University of Pennsylvania (?)

Cathleen K. Kozen, University of California, San Diego
‘Never Again!’: The Case of Japanese Latin/American Redress and the Politics of (Un)redressability

Christina Chin, University of California, Los Angeles
“Aren’t you a little short to play basketball?”: Gender roles and dynamics within Japanese American youth basketball leagues

Rachel Endo, The College of Saint Mary
Beyond Kodomo No Tame Ni: Japanese Immigrant Mothers and the Socialization of the New Nisei

Lily Anne Yumi Welty, University of California, Santa Barbara
Multiraciality and Migration: Mixed Race American Japanese 1945-1972

For more information, click here.

The Masters and the Slaves: Plantation Relations and Mestizaje in American Imaginaries

Palgrave Macmillan
January 2005
176 pages
Size 5 1/2 x 8 1/4
Paperback ISBN: 1-4039-6708-3
Hardcover ISBN: 1-4039-6563-3

Edited by:

Alexandra Isfahani-Hammond, Assistant Professor of Luso-Brazilian Literature
University of California, San Diego

The Masters and the Slaves theorizes the interface of plantation relations with nationalist projects throughout the Americas. In readings that cover a wide range of genres–from essays and scientific writing to poetry, memoirs and the visual arts–this work investigates the post-slavery discourses of Brazil, the United States, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Haiti and Martinique. Indebted to Orlando Patterson‘s Slavery and Social Death (1982) and Paul Gilroy‘s The Black Atlantic (1993), these essays fill a void in studies of plantation power relations for their comparative, interdisciplinary approach and their investment in reading slavery through the gaze of contemporary theory, with particularly strong ties to psychoanalytic and gender studies interrogations of desire and performativity.

Table of contents

• Introduction
• The Sugar Daddy: Gilberto Freyre and the White Man’s Love for Blacks—César Braga-Pinto
• Writing Brazilian Culture—Alexandra Isfahani-Hammond
• Authority’s Double Shadow: Thomas Jefferson and the Architecture of Illegitimacy—Helena Holgersson
• Fixing History: Race, Nation, and the Symbolics of Servitude in Haitian Noirisme —Valerie Kaussen
• Fanon as ‘Metrocolonial’ Flaneur in the Caribbean Post-Plantation/Algerian Colonial City—Nalini Natarajan
• From the Tropics: Cultural Subjectivity and Politics in Gilberto Freyre—Jossiana Arroyo
• Hybridity and Mestizaje: Syncretism or Subversive Complicity—Ramón Grosfoguel
• Giants of Three Colors: A Writer and an Artist Imagine Racial Mixture in 1940s Brazil—Luiza Franco Moreira
• Messianic Melancholic Imagination: Imagine Community with the Dead—Shreerekha Subramanian

White Negritude: Race, Writing, and Brazilian Cultural Identity

Palgrave Macmillan
December 2007
208 pages
Size 5 1/2 x 8 1/4
Hardcover ISBN: 1-4039-7595-7

Alexandra Isfahani-Hammond, Associate Professor of Luso-Brazilian Literature
University of California, San Diego

White Negritude analyzes the discourse of mestiçagem (mestizaje, métissage, or “mixing”) in Brazil. Focused on Gilberto Freyre‘s sociology of plantation relations, it interrogates the relation of power to writing and canon formation, and the emergence of an exclusionary, ethnographic discourse that situates itself as the gatekeeper of African “survivals” in decline. Taking Freyre’s master/slave paradigm as a point of departure for theorizing a particular form of racial and authorial impostery, this book analyzes the construction of race and raced writing in Brazil in relation to U.S. identity politics and Caribbean “mestizo projects.”

Table of Contents

• Vanishing Primitives: An Introduction
• Poetry and the Plantation: Jorge de Lima‘s White Authorship in a Caribbean Perspective
• White Man in the Tropics: Authorship and Atmospheric Blackness in Gilberto Freyre
• Joaquim Nabuco: Abolitionism and Erasure in the Americas
• From the Plantation Manor to the Sociologist’s Study: Democracy, Lusotropicalism, and the Scene of Writing

Uma Mulata, Sim!: Araci Cortes, ‘the mulatta’ of the Teatro de Revista

Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory
Volume 16, Issue 1 (March 2006)
pages 7-26
DOI: 10.1080/07407700500514996

Judith Michelle Williams, Professor of African and African-American Studies
University of Kansas

Araci Cortes, a mulata assumida, rose to be one of the most successful performers in Rio de Janeiro‘s teatro de revista (revue theatre) during the 1920s and 1930s. In this essay I place her career in the context of the Afro-Brazilian artists of her generation and evaluate how her embodiment of the Brazilian mulata on and off the stage interacted with the emerging discourse of Brazil as a mulatto nation. Lauded for her distinct Brazilianness and criticized for her petulant and uncompromising personality, Cortes excelled as a singer, dancer and comic actress, most often portraying the mulatta roles that before her fame were enacted by white actresses. Cortes is a complicated figure who was able to exploit the narratives and stereotypes that surrounded her mixed-race body and gain, fame, fortune and success. Although rather than leave behind her Afro-Brazilian connections she maintained relationships with even the most militant of Brazilian blacks she spoke about race only in the vague terms of her era. Yet through her emblematic performances she reconfigured ideas of gender and race in Brazil. She provides an example of how Afro-Brazilians have used performance to create an alternative discourse of race in Brazil.

Read or purchase the article here.

Indians and Mestizos: Identity and Urban Popular Culture in Andean Peru

Journal of Southern African Studies
Volume 26, Issue 2 (June 2000)
pages 239 – 253
DOI: 10.1080/03057070050010093

Fiona Wilson

The article begins with a discussion of the chronology of conquest and liberation in Peru and reflects on the changing meanings given to the racial categories of Indian and mestizo (half-caste) in colonial and post-colonial periods. Using popular culture as a lens, the transformations taking place in images of race and urban social identities are analysed, using as a case study a provincial town in the Andean highlands in the course of the twentieth century. Through changing forms of street theatre urban groups worked out new identities by weaving together, juxtaposing and contesting different cultural forms. The article explores in detail two manifestations of street theatre that predominated. These are the Dance of the Inca in the 1900s that addressed Indian/white relations, and carnaval where relations between mestizo and white were played out for much of the twentieth century.

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Biracial (Black/White) Women: A Qualitative Study of Racial Attitudes and Beliefs and Their Implications for Therapy

Women & Therapy
Volume 27, Issue 1 & 2 (January 2004)
pages 45 – 64
DOI: 10.1300/J015v27n01_04

Tamara R. Buckley, Associate Professor of Counseling
Hunter College, City University of New York

Carter T. Robert, Professor of Psychology and Education
Department of Counseling and Clinical Psychology
Teachers College, Columbia University

This study examined racial attitudes and beliefs in five biracial (Black/White) women. Participants completed three one-hour semistructured interviews designed to explore the impact of race on psychosocial development and psychological functioning from early childhood through the adult years. Results of thematic analyses and implications for clinical practice are presented.

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Slave Mothers and White Fathers: Defining Family and Status in Late Colonial Cuba

Slavery & Abolition
Volume 31, Issue 1 (March 2010)
pages 29-55
DOI: 10.1080/01440390903481647

Karen Y. Morrison, Assistant Professor of Afro-American Studies
University of Massachusetts, Amherst

This paper outlines the mechanisms used to position the offspring of slave women and white men at various points within late nineteenth-century Cuba’s racial hierarchy. The reproductive choices available to these parents allowed for small, but significant, transformations to the existing patterns of race and challenged the social separation that typically under girded African slavery in the Americas. As white men mated with black and mulatta women, they were critical agents in the initial determination of their children’s status-as slave, free, mulatto, or even white. This definitional flexibility fostered an unintended corruption of the very meaning of whiteness. Similarly, through mating with white men, enslaved women exercised a degree of procreative choice, despite their subjugated condition. In acknowledging the range of rape, concubinage, and marriage exercised between slave women and white men, this paper highlights the important links between reproductive practices and the social construction of race.

Read or purchase the article here.