Mixed Race Studies

Creole: The History and Legacy of Louisiana’s Free People of Color

Louisiana State University Press
August 2000
344 pages
Trim: 6 x 9 , Illustrations: 14 halftones
Paper ISBN-13: 978-0-8071-2601-1

Edited by:

Sybil Kein (born Consuela Marie Moore), Distinguished Professor of English Emerita
University of Michigan

The word Creole evokes a richness rivaled only by the term’s widespread misunderstanding. Now both aspects of this unique people and culture are given thorough, illuminating scrutiny in Creole, a comprehensive, multidisciplinary history of Louisiana’s Creole population. Written by scholars, many of Creole descent, the volume wrangles with the stuff of legend and conjecture while fostering an appreciation for the Creole contribution to the American mosaic.

The collection opens with a historically relevant perspective found in Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson’s 1916 piece “People of Color of Louisiana” and continues with contemporary writings: Joan M. Martin on the history of quadroon balls; Michel Fabre and Creole expatriates in France; Barbara Rosendale Duggal with a debiased view of Marie Laveau; Fehintola Mosadomi and the downtrodden roots of Creole grammar; Anthony G. Barthelemy on skin color and racism as an American legacy; Caroline Senter on Reconstruction poets of political vision; and much more. Violet Harrington Bryan, Lester Sullivan, Jennifer DeVere Brody, Sybil Kein, Mary Gehman, Arthé A. Anthony, and Mary L. Morton offer excellent commentary on topics that range from the lifestyles of free women of color in the nineteenth century to the Afro-Caribbean links to Creole cooking.

By exploring the vibrant yet marginalized culture of the Creole people across time, Creole goes far in diminishing past and present stereotypes of this exuberant segment of our society. A study that necessarily embraces issues of gender, race and color, class, and nationalism, it speaks to the tensions of an increasingly ethnically mixed mainstream America.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• I HISTORY
  • 1 People of Color in Louisiana – Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson
  • 2 Marcus Christian’s Treatment of Les Gens de Couloir Libre – Violet Harrington Bryan
  • 3 Plaçage and the Louisiana Gens de Couleur Libre: How Race and Sex Defined the Lifestyles of Free Women of Color – Joan M. Martin
  • 4 Composers of Color of Nineteenth-Century New Orleans: The History Behind the Music – Lester Sullivan
  • 5 The Yankee Hugging the Creole: Reading Dion Boucicault’s The Octoroon – Jennifer DeVere Brody
  • 6 The Use of Louisiana Creole in Southern Literature – Sybil Kein
• II LEGACY
  • 7 Marie Laveau: The Voodoo Queen Repossessed – Barbara Rosendale Duggal
  • 8 New Orleans Creole Expatriates in France: Romance and Reality – Michel Fabre
  • 9 Visible Means of Support: Businesses, Professions, and Trades of Free People of Color – Mary Gehman
  • 10 The Origin of Louisiana Creole – Fehintola Mosadomi
  • 11 Louisiana Creole Food Culture: Afro-Caribbean Links – Sybil Kein
  • 12 Light, Bright, Damn Near White: Race, the Politics of Genealogy, and the Strange Case of Susie Guillory – Anthony G. Barthelemy
  • 13 Creole Poets on the Verge of a Nation – Caroline Senter
  • 14 “Lost Boundaries”: Racial Passing and Poverty in Segregated New Orleans – Arthé Anthony
  • 15 Creole Culture in the Poetry of Sybil Kein – Mary L. Morton
• Contributors
• Index

PBS series explores black culture in Latin America

2011-04-18

Jennifer Kay
Associated Press

MIAMI—On a street in a seaside city in Brazil, four men describe themselves to Henry Louis Gates Jr. as black. Flabbergasted, the Harvard scholar insists they compare their skin tones with his.

In a jumble, their forearms form a mocha spectrum. Oh, the men say: We’re all black, but we’re all different colors.

Others in the marketplace describe Gates, who is black and renowned for his African American studies, with a variety of terms for someone of mixed race—more of an indication of his social status as a U.S. college professor than of his skin color.

“Here, my color is in the eye of the beholder,” Gates says, narrating over a scene filmed last year for his new series for PBS, “Black in Latin America.” The first of four episodes filmed in six Caribbean and Latin American countries begins airing Tuesday. A book expanding on Gates’ research for the series is set for publication in July.

Throughout the series, Gates finds himself in conversations about race that don’t really happen in the U.S., where the slavery-era “one-drop” concept—that anyone with even just one drop of black blood was black—is still widely accepted.

The idea for the series stems from a surprising number: Of the roughly 11 million Africans who survived the trans-Atlantic slave trade, only about 450,000 came to the U.S. By contrast, about 5 million slaves went to Brazil alone, and roughly 700,000 went to Mexico and Peru. And they all brought their music and religion with them…

…New U.S. census figures are revealing how complicated and surprising conversations about race can be. For example, the number of Puerto Ricans identifying themselves solely as black or American Indian jumped about 50 percent in the last 10 years, suggesting a shift in how residents of the racially mixed U.S. territory see themselves…

Read the entire article here.

Exploring the Popularization of the Mixed Race American

The Human Experience: Inside the Humanities at Stanford University
2011-04-22

Stanford Scholar Investigates the “Mulatto Millennium” through Literature, Theatre, Art, & Pop Culture

The United States has its first mixed race president, a man with a black African father and white American mother. Actress Halle Barry, golfer Tiger Woods, rocker Lenny Kravitz and singer Alicia Keyes—all people acknowledging a blended racial heritage—are household names. Since the 2000 U.S Census granted the MOOM (mark one or more) racial option, mixed race advocacy groups have gained political visibility and influence. Are there proportionally more mixed race Americans today then say twenty years ago? Or has something changed about how Americans see mixed race, thereby contributing to the increased prominence of the mixed race American in our country’s landscape?

In considering those questions, Stanford University English professor Michele Elam analyzed why and with what effect those identified (and identifying) as mixed race in the U.S. have gained such tremendous cultural cachet in the last decade.

Looking beyond the usual explanations for the increased visibility of mixed race people, such as immigration trends and the 1967 Supreme Court Loving Decision lifting bans on interracial marriage, Elam is interested in how contemporary literature, theatre, art and popular culture are re-shaping the way we perceive and understand mixed race in the new millennium. The creative works she examines in The Souls of Mixed Folk: Race, Politics, and Aesthetics in the New Millennium, released by Stanford University Press in March, include comic strips, novels, art exhibitions, websites, theater, and even Comedy Central late night TV…

…“I started noticing more the popularization of certain kinds of images of mixed race people in media,” a popularity that extended into education curricula, from children’s books on how to raise a mixed race kindergartener through to college courses in “mixed race studies” Elam explained when discussing what inspired her to research mixed race in America. “I also noticed there wasn’t a lot of conversation about what impact these cultural works are having on our society, I would like to see more attention to literature, performance and art that is using the debates about mixed race to think more carefully about race’s saliency in the new millennium.”…

…Artists and Writers Help to Define what it means to be Biracial

To get a sense of Elam’s wide-ranging scholarship, start by looking at the cartoon displayed on the outside of her office door. It’s a copy of one of The Boondocks cartoons created by social satirist Aaron McGruder containing a pointed message about the issues biracial people encounter. In the comic, mixed race pre-teen Jazmine sits alone in a grassy field, lamenting that she feels so different from everyone else, even though her parents assure her that her blended background makes her special. Then the strip’s realist, Huey, appears and bluntly declares: “You’re black. Get over it.”

Elam said the strip sparked anger among some mixed race advocacy group members who were upset because the Huey character so flatly dismissed Jazmine’s desire to be biracial.  “That’s why I put it out there, somewhat as a provocation and also kind of as an illustration of the pop cultural engagements with mixed race that I think are interesting,” Elam said.

Her examination extends to other artwork, including Baby Halfie, the unique doll sitting on her office desk that she says no child would ever love.

The toy’s look is arresting, a mahogany-hued baby head atop a pudgy, nude, white-skinned infant body.  The plaything was part of an exhibition by African-American assemblage artist Lezley Saar that is now visible on Saar’s web site mulattonation.com.

“Baby Halfie’s arms are raised high as if asking to be lifted up for parental comfort and affirmation, but I suspect no parents will embrace it, let alone purchase it for their tots in hopes of inspiring proud mixed race identification or development empowerment—and that is no doubt precisely the point,” Elam writes in The Souls of Mixed Folks. “The doll is not an effort to capture how a person of mixed black and white descent might actually appear in the flesh. Its creative affront provides a vivid example of the alternative progressive directions for mixed race art and activism in the post-civil rights era that are at the center of this book.”…

Read the entire article here.

The Great Southern Babylon: Sex, Race, and Respectability in New Orleans, 1865–1920

Louisiana State University Press
2004
282 pages
6 x 9, 27 Halftones, 2 Maps
paper ISBN-13: 978-0-8071-3112-1

Alecia P. Long, Assistant Professor of History
Louisiana State University

With a well-earned reputation for tolerance of both prostitution and miscegenation, New Orleans became known as the Great Southern Babylon in antebellum times. Following the Civil War, a profound alteration in social and economic conditions gradually reshaped the city’s sexual culture and erotic commerce. Historian Alecia P. Long traces sex in the Crescent City over fifty years, drawing from Louisiana Supreme Court case testimony to relate intriguing tales of people both obscure and famous whose relationships and actions exemplify the era.

Long uncovers a connection between the geographical segregation of prostitution and the rising tide of racial segregation. She offers a compelling explanation of how New Orleans’s lucrative sex trade drew tourists from the Bible Belt and beyond even as a nationwide trend toward the commercialization of sex emerged. And she dispels the romanticized smoke and perfume surrounding Storyville to reveal in the reasons for its rise and fall a fascinating corner of southern history. The Great Southern Babylon portrays the complex mosaic of race, gender, sexuality, social class, and commerce in turn-of-the-twentieth-century New Orleans.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• 1 “It’s Because You Are a Colored Woman” Sex, Race, and Concubinage after the Civil War
• 2 The Business of Pleasure: Concert Saloons and Sexual Commerce in the Economic Mainstream
• 3 “Where the Least Harm Can Result”: Sex, Race, and Respectability in a Single Neighborhood
• 4 “Unusual Situations and Remarkable People”: Mary Deubler, Respectability, and the History of Storyville
• 5 “As Rare as White Blackbirds”: Willie Piazza, Race, and Reform
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Biibliography
• Index