Mixed Race Studies

Creolization of the Atlantic World: The Portuguese and the Kongolese

Portuguese Studies
Volume 27, Number 1 (2011-03-01)
pages 56-69

Francisco Bethencourt, Professor of History
King’s College, London

In the 1930s, Gilberto Freyre’s praise of mixed-race people in Brazil challenged the idea of white supremacy, contributing to the building of a new Brazilian identity. In the 1950s, Freyre projected the idea of openness and racial mixture onto the Portuguese empire, fuelling Salazar’s colonial propaganda. The idea of Lusotropicalism was contested by Marvin Harris and Charles Boxer, who demonstrated that there were very few mixed-race people in Angola and Mozambique, and exposed the long history of racism in the Portuguese colonies. However, the fashionable notions of hybridism and creolization have been putting Freyre back on the map. The article exposes the limits of Freyre’s approach of inter-ethnic relations, structured around the flexibility (or otherwise) of white colonists. It engages with the much more interesting but problematic approach suggested by Linda Heywood and John Thornton, who shifted to Kongo and African agency the creolization of the Atlantic. It suggests a reassessment of the real Christianization of Kongo and its complex chronology, drawing attention to the royal interests of conversion, the limits of conversion among the population, and the conditions for erosion of Christianity in the long run.

Ten Questions, with Adebe DeRango-Adem

Open Book Toronto
2011-03-25

Adebe DeRango-Adem talks to Open Book about the anthology she co-edited with Andrea Thompson, Other Tongues: Mixed-Race Women Speak Out (Inanna Publications). The goal for this exciting anthology was not to nail down what identity means, but rather to open discussion and interrogate the diverse experiences of mixed-race identity and identification.
 
Open Book:
 
Tell us about the anthology Other Tongues: Mixed-Race Women Speak Out.

Adebe DeRango-Adem:
 
Other Tongues was born from a combination of necessity and a desire to see a new and refreshing literature that could be at the forefront of mixed-race discourse and women’s studies. We are very proud of the finished product and anticipate that it will make many waves in literary and academic communities across the continent!
 
OB:
 
What inspired you to put together this anthology?

ADA:
 
The idea behind this anthology of writing by and about mixed-race women in North America was planted in our minds when we each came across Miscegenation Blues: Voices of Mixed Race Women (1994), edited by Carol Camper. While we picked up this groundbreaking book at different times in our lives, the anthology had a lasting impact on both of us, an impact that would set the stage for the collaboration that became Other Tongues. We are thrilled to have had Carol Camper contribute to our anthology and continue to be inspired by the women who have responded so warmly to this book. What inspired me personally is, as many interracial women may share experientially, a feeling that my interracial history is a ripe place for critical analysis.
 
OB:
 
The subtitle, Mixed-Race Women Speak Out, suggests that identity is a significant theme for Other Tongues. What are some of the ways that your contributors approach issues of identity?
 
ADA:
 
In seeking work for this book, we asked our prospective contributors to share their own individual experiences and tell their unique stories in relation to the way(s) in which they identified themselves. This process led to the excavation of perspectives of women from diverse backgrounds, ideologies, racial mixes, ages, social classes, sexual orientations and geographical locations. This collection has become a snapshot of the North American terrain of questions about race, mixed-race, racial identity, and how mixed-race women in North America identify in the 21st Century.

Yet, Andrea and I made it clear that our agenda was not to define what or how mixed-race identity means, but to open up dialogue. Talking about identity is as dangerous as it is reifying and necessary; as contestable as it is a question of commitment. Authenticity is as much about finding oneself as it is a concept shaped by social norms. In addressing these questions, we asked the women who submitted work to be considered to make a distinction between issues of race and those of cultural identity. In Other Tongues, there are multiple visions and understandings of authenticity/identity, as exemplified by the various sections we have. Where this book treats interracial identities uniquely is in our conscious effort to link creativity to identification; recognizing our potential for creativity as a source of value for writing who we are…

Read the entire interview here.

Transcending Blackness in the 21st Century, or How Can I Be Like Barack Obama?

Global Studies: A Member of the International Instutute
University of Wisconsin, Madison
Multiracial Tales and Multicultural Discourses
494 Van Hise Hall
2011-04-18, 17:30 CDT (Local Time)

Ralina L. Joseph, Assistant Professor of Communications
University of Washington

As “postrace” is the buzzword of the new century, and Barack Obama has quickly become a poster child of the postrace, the question arises: must multiracial African Americans metaphorically transcend blackness in order to achieve success? This talk will critique the notion that mixed-race black subjects function as bridges offering safe passage to a third, interstitial, or hybridized space. I argue that a two-sided stereotype, comprised in the “new millennium mulatta” and the “exceptional multiracial,” has arisen instead through a variety of mediated discourses.

Ralina Joseph is an Assistant Professor of Communication at the University of Washington. Her forthcoming book from Duke University Press entitled Transcending Blackness: Anti-Black Racism and African American Multiraciality from the New Milennium Mulatta to the Exceptional Multiracial investigates 1998-2008 era pop culture representations of multiracial African Americans.

For more information, click here.
View the poster in color or black-and-white.

Mixed Race on Campus: Multiracial Student Identities and Issues in Higher Education

NCORE 2011
24 Annual National Conference on Race & Ethnicity in American Higher Education
San Francisco, California
2011-05-31 through 2011-06-04

Thursday, 2011-06-02, 13:15–16:15 PDT (Local Time)

Eric Hamako, Doctoral Candidate
Social Justice Education Program
University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Multiracial and Mixed‑Race students are a growing, yet under‑recognized, population at U.S. colleges and universities.  How well does your campus serve Multiracial students’ needs and Multiracial student organizations?  And how can you support improvements? 

In this interactive workshop, we’ll explore challenges facing Multiracial students and Multiracial student organizations—as well as possible solutions to those challenges.  Participants will also learn basic Multiracial terms, demography, and identity theories, as well as gain resources for learning more in the future. Participants will have the opportunity to develop personal and collaborative action plans to implement what they’ve learned. This session should particularly benefit participants interested in the success of Multiracial students and student organizations, students interested in organizing Multiracial groups, and Student Affairs professionals who are interested in policy changes to support Multiracial students.

For more information, click here.

The Family Changes Colour: Interracial Families in Contemporary Hollywood Cinema

Screen
Volume 43 Issue 3 (Autumn 2002)
pages 271-292
DOI: 10.1093/screen/43.3.271

Nicola J. Evans, Lecturer of Media and Cultural Studies
University of Wollongong, New South Wales, Australia

How profound the hatred, how deep the bigotry… that wakens in this image of black life blooming within white…. It is an image that squeezes racism out from the pores of people who deny they arc racist.
Patricia Williams

In December 1998, DNA tests identified Thomas Jefferson as the father of at least one child with his black slave woman Sally Hemings. The discovery spawned numerous commentaries in the media on the significance of this finding and many large claims were made. Superficially what was at stake was the right of Hemings’s descendants to claim Jefferson as an ancestor and to be buried in the Monticello family plot, a right long contested by some of Jefferson’s white descendants who control the foundation and the graveyard. But there were many who saw the decision as symbolic not just of a past that the USA had erased, but a future towards which it might tend. For Lucian Truscott IV, a white Jeffersonian descendant who supports the Hemings’s claim, the finding affirmed that this Country ‘is a family not only in democratic theory, but in blood’? Allusions to the national family were quickly buttressed by parallels drawn between Jefferson and William Jefferson Clinton, another president accused of extramarital liaisons, whose 1992 campaign was attended by rumours that he had fathered a black child. Lisa Jones, writing in the Village Voice, summed up the tenor of many commentaries by declaring ‘I can’t think of a more potent metaphor of American race relations at the millennium than the battle over graveyard space at Monticello’.

The findings of the Monticello committee capped a decade in which a surprising number of films, both mainstream and art-house, began to explore familial ties that cross the colour line. Some of these films, such as Made in America (Richard Benjamin, 1993), Secrets and Lies (Mike Lieigh, 1996) and A Family Thing (Richard Pearee, 1996), have plots reminiscent of abolitionist literature, in which the discovery of an interracial relationship in the past throws the family into melodramatic disarray. Other films, including Six Degrees of Separation (Fred Schepisi, 1993), Smoke (Wayne Wang, 1995), Losing Isaiah (Stephen Gyllenhaal, 1995) and Finding Forrester (Gus van Sant, 2000), feature whites who become symbolic parents to black children, often with the suggestion that these metaphorical ties are more rewarding than the relationships the parents have with their own white children. The question this paper considers is whether the growing screen presence of the interracial family is a step forward in the task of imagining more democratic race relations. If our concept of the family changed colour—from white to something more multicoloured—would this strengthen and improve interracial bonds as many activists through history have insisted, or is the fight for inclusion in the family plot indeed a fight for graveyard space?

For mainstream films to be considering interracial relations at all is a departure. When it comes to race Hollywood has toed the colour line, producing either all-black films, or white-cast films with token representation of African-Americans. The rare instances in which interracial relations occur are designed to be temporary, or to end tragically. Even the black and white buddy movie, the most popular format for including interraciality, typically suppresses or evades racial issues through rousing paeans to the race-transcendent bonds of masculinity. For mainstream films to be exploring interracial families is startling. Both on screen and off, the taboo against race-mixing within the family has seemed particularly strong. In the quotation that heads this paper, Patricia Williams suggests that the image of a mother suckling a child of another race is an idea that sticks in the gullet of even those who are most liberal on race issues. Benetton, a company famous for its taboo-breaking advertisements, appeared to agree when in 1989 they cancelled a campaign that proposed to feature a poster of a black mother breast-feeding a white child.’ What is special about the family that makes the imagination balk at the prospect of race-mixing here, even when cautiously permissive of interracial friendships outside the family?

Until recently, the censorship of interraciality on screen was matched by a paucity of interracial studies in scholarship. Gregory Stephens notes the tendency among scholars to pathologize interraciality, viewing even,’ relationship that crosses racial lines as inevitably exploitative or oppressive. As Stephens points out, such an assumption enforces the colour line by making ‘any interracial relations beyond rape or genocide unimaginable . Citing Frederick Douglass s definition of racism as ‘diseased imagination’, Stephens calls us to begin the task of creating more affirmative scripts for interraciality. It is in the spirit of this work that I examine the representation of interracial families on film. While aiming to stay alert to ways such representations may recycle racist scenarios, my goal is to see whether there is material here with which to envision more equitable relations between blacks and whites across the unnatural chasm ot the racial divide.

Although this essay will focus on film, I begin with the Monticello affair because it suggests why the family is such an explosive site tor the exploration of race issues. Specifically the Monticello case points to three aspects ol the family as an ideological entity: the family as a primary measure of social well-being, the interdependency of family and narrative, and the historical opposition between family values and race values…

Read or purchase the article here.

Representation of Coloured Identity in Selected Visual Texts about Westbury, Johannesburg

University of the Witwatersrand
December 2006
132 pages

Phyllis D. Dannhauser

A research report submitted to the Faculty of Humanities, University of the Witwatersrand, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts (Dramatic Art).

In post-apartheid South Africa, Coloured communities are engaged in reconstructing identities and social histories. This study examines the representation of community, identity, culture and historic memory in two films about Westbury, Johannesburg, South Africa. The films are Westbury, Plek van Hoop, a documentary, and Waiting for Valdez, a short fiction piece. The ambiguous nature of Coloured identity, coupled with the absence of recorded histories and unambiguous identification with collective cultural codes, results in the representation of identity becoming contested and marginal. Through constructing narratives of lived experience, hybrid communities can challenge dominant stereotypes and subvert discourses of otherness and difference. Analysis of the films reveals that the Coloured community have reverted to stereotypical documentary forms in representing their communal history. Although the documentary genre lays claim to the representation of reality and authentic experience, documentary is not always an effective vehicle for the representation of lived experience and remembered history. Fiction can reinterpret memory by accessing the emotional textures of past experiences in a more direct way.

Read the entire thesis here.

Being and Belonging: Space and Identity in Cape Town

Anthropology and Humanism
Volume 28, Issue 1 (June 2003)
pages 61–84
DOI: 10.1525/ahu.2003.28.1.61

Shannon M. Jackson, Associate Professor of Anthropology
University of Missouri, Kansas City

The post-apartheid transition has led to changes in the shape and meaning of urban space in South Africa. Cape Town is being described as a postmodern city where planning strategies and new development have begun to fragment and privatize space to the point of de-territorializing it. This has contributed to the effort by a local group, referred to as “Coloureds,” to reterritorialize Cape Town, to reinscribe history and meaning back into the urban landscape. In the process of reterritorializing the city, Coloureds are negotiating their own identities but are doing so in ways that both challenge racial boundaries and assert them. This article will explore the nature and history of the urban space being reclaimed as well as the way in which the meaning it inspires contributes to the contradictory and ambiguous quality of the boundaries of Coloured identity.

Read or purchase the article here.

Then I Was Black: South African Political Identities in Transition

Yale University Press
2000-06-19
304 pages
6 1/2 x 9 1/4
Cloth ISBN: 9780300080131

Courtney Jung, Associate Professor of Political Science
The New School

Do race and ethnicity present a danger to the consolidation of effective democratic government? Can liberal constitutionalism provide a stable basis for governance of a polity historically erected on racial and ethnic division? In this book Courtney Jung argues that when ethnic and racial identities are politically fluid and heterogeneous, as she finds they are in South Africa, ethnic and racial politics will not undermine the peaceful and democratic potential of the government.

Jung examines three important cases of politicized racial and ethnic identity in South Africa: Zulu, Afrikaner, and Coloured. Working from extensive field research and interviews, she develops a model to explain shifts in the political salience, goals, and boundaries of these groups between 1980 and 1995. Jung challenges the common assumption that cultural identities overdetermine political possibility, pointing out that individual members fail for the most part to internalize the political agenda of “their own” ethnic group. Group engagement with the state is also conditioned by contextual factors, not determined by its constitution in ethnic or racial terms. South Africa is no more divided than most other societies, she concludes, and no less likely to consolidate democracy as a result of its politicized cleavages of race and ethnicity.

Elite (re-)constructions of coloured identities in a post-apartheid South Africa: Assimilations and bounded transgressions

Rutgers The State University of New Jersey, New Brunswick
2006
328 pages
AAT 3249339

Michele René Ruiters

A Dissertation submitted to the Graduate School – New Brunswick Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Program in Political Science

This thesis engages with issues of identity, diversity and democracy through a study of the reconstruction of colouredness, a marginal identity, in post-apartheid South Africa. I argue that coloured elites reconstruct their apartheid-designated racialized identities in order to create new identities that reflect their own and their communities’ experiences and needs. This reconstruction process often results in a reification of past expressions of each identity, which needs to be negotiated in a contemporary era. Ultimately, self-definition creates agency and therefore a stronger citizen who participates more effectively within their polity and thus strengthens democratic practices. I argue that diversity enhances democracy only if a politics of recognition is practiced.

The thesis also examines the possibility of releasing identities from historical baggage in the sense that a new identity could be constructed. I show that ‘new’ identities are constrained by the past and often struggle to free themselves from existing constructions. I argue that this is possible only if elites are willing to let go of past constructions and to be more inclusive in their visions for the future. The state, however, should continue to recognize marginal groups in order to combat the emergence of isolationist and reactionary politics from those groups.

My project examines one community’s search for recognition from a state that has, since 1994, rejoined a larger African community, which is largely unknown to ordinary South Africans. I argue that this process of reconstructing a coloured identity, which certain coloured elites have undertaken, is not a social movement but is a spiritual search for belonging, which provides a social network of similar minded people who wish to redefine their identities. I also contend that the reconstruction of coloured identities has to occur within a new framework in which an African identity is more inclusive and within which attempts have been made to move away from past constructions of identities.

Table of Contents

• II. ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION
• III. DEDICATION AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• Chapter 1: Introduction and Methodology
  • Who is ‘Coloured’?
  • Why Identity?
  • Race and Ethnicity
  • Insider Re-vision of History
  • A National Identity
  • Methodology
  • Chapter Synopses
  • Conclusion
• Chapter 2: Elites, Marginal Identities and the Public Sphere
  • Political identities
  • Marginal Identities
  • Censuses and control
  • Passing
  • ‘Errors’ and ‘Mistakes’
  • The Public Sphere
  • Elites, Institutions and Ideology
  • Citizenship and Belonging
  • ‘New’ constructions of Race-Ethnic Identities
  • Marginal Groups and Agenda-setting
  • Conclusion
• Chapter 3: Colonial Constructions of Coloured Identity
  • Arrival of the Colonists
  • Race at the Cape
  • Social life and gender
  • Slavery at the Cape
  • Impositions and Adoptions
  • Miscegenation and Misfits
  • Imagined Communities
  • ‘I am Coloured’
  • Expressions of ‘coloured’ politics
  • Conclusion
• Chapter 4: Apartheid Opportunities and Constraints
  • Apartheid Apparatus
  • Definitions of ‘Coloured’
  • Social spaces and Political issues
  • Imagined Community Realized
  • Black Politics and State Repression
  • Challenging Identities
  • Language
  • Political Constraints and Opportunities post-1984
  • The End of Apartheid
  • Conclusion
• Chapter 5: Emerging Constructions of Coloured Identity – Post-1994
  • The National Question
  • Elites Change Identities
  • New Coloured Identities
  • Brown Identities
  • The December First Movement and Slave Identities
  • KhoiSan Identities
  • Creoles and Africans
  • Way Forward
• Chapter 6: The Politics of Newly Constructed Identities in South Africa
  • What is the African Renaissance?
  • Who is an African?
  • Marginal voices on African identities
  • The State’s Options
  • Existing Options
  • New Identities?
  • Conclusion
• Chapter 7: Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Appendices: Transcriptions of Three Interviews
• Curriculum Vitae

Chapter I: Introduction and Methodology

In 1994, South Africa entered a new political era. Racialism was outlawed and Black people could take their rightful place in a new democracy. The dominant party, the African National Congress, introduced a new ideological framework that was to guide our relations with each other within the country and to guide South Africa’s relations with the region, continent and world. The overarching ideology was based on an African renaissance which was to favorably reposition Africa in a global system. In this context, identity re-cmcrged as an important category in South Africa, despite the ANC’s call to non-racialism, as people jostled for what they perceived to be scarce resources. Social relations in South Africa have always been defined in terms of difference based on whether people were ‘white’, ‘Black African’, ‘Indian’ or ‘coloured’. The term Black African is newly constructed. ‘Black’ or ‘African’ were used in the past to denote people who were of Nguni origin, or in ‘other’ terms, people who were not white or coloured. Black was also used to denote a political identity in the liberation struggle and it included everyone that was not white (see Kuhn 2001:21). I have chosen to use Black African because ‘African’ presently refers to all who live on the continent while ‘Black African’ has the same constricted meaning as ‘African’ did under apartheid rule.

During the apartheid era, the state imposed racialized identities onto people and, more often than not, did not take into consideration people’s everyday experiences with their identities. Two processes are occurring simultaneously. The state is reinventing itself as an African nation with an 4 African’ identity that has not been clearly defined to date. Secondly, groups within South Africa are grappling with the process of (re-)naming themselves within this new political milieu. The South African state needs to redefine itself in a post-apartheid, globalizing world and is attempting to do so through the creation of a ‘new’ South African identity that can be shared by all South Africans. The introduction of an overarching ‘African’ identity has created insecurities in South African society and has resulted in people holding on to their apartheid-defined identities. How can South Africanness be created in the light of a fragmented society? Can we use old identities to forge a new identity and can we move beyond race and ethnicity in the twenty-first century? What can the state and groups do to construct identities that depict novel ‘imagined communities’? How docs the state overcome the past to forge a new society based on political ideals of justice, democracy, equality and humanism?…

…Who is ‘Coloured’?

The coloured people were defined as a ‘mixed’ race group that was neither white nor Black. It was constructed as a buffer group between the two racially divided extremes in this country. Some people accepted the imposed apartheid identities while others opposed the state’s denial of their agency to choose their own identities. For this reason coloured identity is very peculiar to the South African context, however, it also provides a snapshot of the experiences of many marginal groups across the world. The Cold Warand the reconfiguration of power relations within the world have provided opportunity spaces for marginal groups to claim a space and identity for themselves. How are marginal identities reconfigured and re-imagined in this globalizing world? How do they define themselves, obtain recognition and negotiate with power? These questions make it imperative that we provide a historical overview of how the state and coloured elites construct coloured identity. Under the colonial and apartheid eras colouredness was an in-between category, supposedly without a culture, without an obvious and authoritative history; and arguably without a political home. Coloured identity in South Africa remains a hotly contested subject in the twenty-first century and will continue to be so as more and more people disrupt imposed racial categorizations (see Erasmus 2001, Wasserman and Jacobs 2003, Hendricks 2000b, Jung 2000, Zegeye 2001a). This work provides a new perspective on coloured identities as they relate to the social, political and economic constraints placed on the identity by larger structural relations.

Colouredness historically dates to social interaction with the first Dutch settlers who arrived in the 1600s. The local people of the southernmost region of the continent, the Khoi and San, entered into economic and social relationships with the white settlers. When East African, Indonesian and Indian slaves came into the region and the indigenous tribes from the north moved south, a ‘new’ identity evolved through social and political interaction between the various race groups. ‘Miscegenation‘ between the white settlers, the indigenes and the slaves, gave rise to a ‘mixed’ race person. The assumption that coloured identity was born from a combination of different people is problematic because it incorrectly assumes that identities arc primordial and fixed. Identities are not immutable therefore they should be examined temporally to determine how they have addressed and dealt with changing relations within a society.

Coloured identities occupied a space that previously did not exist; one that was deemed to be ‘better than Black African but not quite white. Courtney Jung asserts:

Coloureds by their very existence, inhabited an oppositional space. They existed at the intersections of multiple racial classifications, occupying a residual, clearly non-racial category. Coloureds defied racialization. Under apartheid, those ‘outside’ racial stereotypes were redefined in racial terms, to support the ideological proposition that the world was naturally divided into separate races that belonged apart (2000:168).

Under colonial rule the state created a new racialized identity into which people labeled ‘coloured’ could fit. The apartheid government legislated those identities into formal existence and maintained racial differences until the early 1990s when F. W. de Klerk’s watershed speech unbanned the liberation movements and released Nelson Mandelaafter twenty-seven years in prison. Coloured elites have opened up debates since 1994 on coloured identities and have proposed that communities and individuals re-imagine their identities and frame them in terms they have chosen for themselves: KhoiSan, Creole, slave-descendent, and African being the more common self-chosen identities. Elites who have chosen these identities have begun to debate with the overarching concept of ‘ Africanness’ in an attempt to determine where they fit into the new political, economic and social dispensation…

Purchase the dissertation here.

Mark Tawin’s Mississippi: Race, 1800-1850

Mark Twain’s Mississippi
Project Partners: Northern Illinois University Libraries, The Newberry Library, The St. Louis Mercantile Library, Tulane University Libraries and  University of California, Berkeley
Made possible by a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services
2005

Peter J. Kastor, Associate Professor of History and American Culture Studies Program
Washington Unviversity in St. Louis

The changes in the Mississippi Valley from 1800-1850 represented a condensed version of the broader changes that would occur throughout North America during the eighteenth and nineteenth century. Not only did the last vestiges of Indian power collapse in the faced of white supremacy, but the fluid and complex relationships that had marked life for so long gave way to an increasingly simplistic racial hierarchy.

All of the factors at work in the Mississippi Valley—demography, commerce, diplomacy, and culture—came together to reshape these racial relationships. For example, the Europeans who vied for control of the Mississippi in 1800 may have each sought racial control, but they lacked the diplomatic power to do so. Meanwhile, the relative scarcity of white settlers made the Europeans dependent on Indians for trade. Indians welcomed this state of affairs, since the needs of Europeans for diplomatic allies or for trading partners often placed Indians in advantageous situations. Nothing exemplified this state of affairs better than the large population of mixed-race peoples who occupied the Mississippi Valley. In addition to the Métis in the mid and upper Mississippi Valley, the lower Mississippi Valley was home to a large population with African and European ancestry. That mixed-race population formed the majority of the free people of color in New Orleans, the largest and most prosperous free black community anywhere in North America. These mixed-race populations all secured their goals by exploiting the economic and diplomatic realities that continued to shape life on the Mississippi…

Read the entire essay here.