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.