Mixed Race Studies

Call at Rio fashion show for more black models

Agence France-Presse
2012-01-14

Only a handful of black models sashayed down the catwalk at this week’s Rio fashion show, sparking fresh calls for quotas to ensure greater diversity in a country where more than half of the population is of African ancestry.

Some 24 labels displayed their latest designs at the Rio de Janeiro winter 2012 fashion week, that ran from Wednesday to Saturday, and as in previous years the models were overwhelmingly white.

Yet Brazil, home to 190 million people, has the world’s second largest black population after Nigeria.

Organizers refused to address this perennial lack of racial diversity, although in the past they claimed that “there is no racial discrimination” in an industry known for its preference for eurocentric standards of beauty.

For the first time in June 2009, the Sao Paulo Fashion Week (SPFW)—Latin America’s premier fashion event—imposed quotas requiring at least 10 percent of the models to be black or indigenous…

…Luana Genot, one of the eight black models out of more 200 employed by the main Rio modeling agency, 40° Models, gave details of the hurdles blacks face.

“They call us only when the the theme of the show is linked to black culture,” said the 23-year-old who is also an advertising student at Rio Catholic University (PUC).

“I am often told: What am I going to do with your hair? And for make-up, I am always the last so as not to dirty the brush with overly dark tones,” she added.

Last June, during Black Consciousness Week, Genot organized a debate on “ethnic diversity in fashion” at PUC.

“We are told that the winter collection is for whites in Europe or that black women’s butts are too big, their hips too wide. I am shocked to see that in Brazil, where more than half of the people are descendants of black slaves, there is so little space for us,” she added.

“Brazil’s population is very mixed and this must be reflected in fashion,” Genot said…

Read the entire article here.

Edward W. Blyden, W. E. B. Du Bois, and the ‘Color Complex’

The Journal of Modern African Studies
Volume 30, Number 4 (December, 1992)
pages 669-684
DOI: 10.1017/S0022278X00011101

Michael J. C. Echeruo, William Safire Professor in Modern Letters
English Department
Syracuse University

This article is an attempt to present (and thereby to come to terms with) an important aspect of the meaning of race as it relates to the experience of black people, especially in America. It commences with Edward W. Blyden because his ‘color complex’ is of a kind that brings us back, not without much embarrassment, to the realisation that while colour may be a state of the mind, it is also and even primarily a matter of the body. Blyden is particularly appropriate as a starting point, for he is an epitome, in many ways, of the African experience in the later nineteenth century, linking (as he does) the multiple experiences of the Caribbean, the United States, and mainland Africa. He wrote at a time when the intellectual and other currents in ‘Negro’ America flowed easily to the new centres of influence in Liberia and colonial West Africa. He was thus the product of the history of Africanity in his period, and for a long time after.

Blyden was an outspoken interpreter of colour and race as they related to the identity and meaning of his Africanness. For him, the so-called ‘mulatto question’ (tragic, comic, queer) had been imported into Africanist discourse from the politics and power of European racism. For Blyden, blackness was never a metaphorical construct; it was an essential condition for his Africanness. So outspoken was he in this regard that not only was his political career in Liberia actually destroyed in consequence, but many of his biographers (Hollis R. Lynch remains an exception) have become apologetic on his behalf, as if he was, in some major sense, a rather misguided race jingoist. Indeed, Thomas Livingston has gone so far as to make Blyden a failed ethnocentrist, ‘a professional representative of a stigmatized group, and (quoting another writer) likens him to those leaders who ‘instead of leaning on their crutch… get to play golf with it, ceasing, in terms of social participation, to be representative of the people they represent’. His Blyden is, he says, a poor man’s Heinrich Heine: weak in arms…

Purchase the article here.

Mark Twain and Homer Plessy

Representations
Number 24, Special Issue: America Reconstructed, 1840-1940 (Autumn, 1988)
pages 102-128

Eric J. Sundquist, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities
Johns Hopkins University

The carnivalesque drama of doubling, twinship, and masquerade that constitutes Pudd’nhead Wilson and its freakishly extracted yet intimately conjoined story, “Those Extraordinary Twins,” is likely to remain misread and controversial in estimations of Mark Twain’s literary achievement as long as the work’s virtual mimicry of America’s late-nineteenth-century race crisis is left out of account. Readers have, of course, often found a key to the novel’s interpretation in the notorious “fiction of law and custom” that makes the “white” slave Roxy legally “black” by allowing one-sixteenth of her blood to “outvote” the rest (8-9). Like so many parodic moments in the book, however. Twain’s joke about voting speaks not simply to general anxieties about miscegenation but more particularly to the deliberate campaign to disfranchise blacks and strip them of legal protections that was underway by the early 1890s. Built of the brutal artifice of racial distinctions, both American law and American custom conspired to punish black men and women in the post-Reconstruction years, and Twain’s bitter failed fiction, verging on allegory but trapped in unfinished burlesque, has been thought to participate in the black nadir without artistically transcending it or, conversely, without reaching its broader historical implications.

As Hershel Parker and others have demonstrated in detail, Twain’s chaotic process of composition and his unconcerned interchange of various manuscript versions make it impossible to place much weight on authorial intention narrowly defined. Yet this hardly leads to the conclusion that Twain’s vision had no coherent meaning or that his own comic rationale, contained in the opening of “Those Extraordinary Twins,” reveals nothing of significance about the texts critique of contemporary race theory or Twain’s authorial involvement in that critique. Indeed, one might rather argue that the confusion and seeming flaws in the manuscript and the published text, while largely attributable to his haste to produce a book that would ameliorate his financial problems, are also a measure of the social and psychic turmoil that Twain, not least as a liberal Southerner living and working in the North, felt in the post-Reconstruction years. The key phenomena in late-nineteenth-century race relations have just as much place in determining the text’s range of implication, its meaning, as do such mechanical factors as compositional sequence and manuscript emendations. Preoccupied with relevant but improperly construed issues of aesthetic unity and verisimilitude, critics have typically missed the primary ways in which Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894) and its attached tale of the Italian Siamese twins involves itself in the…

Read the entire article here.

Critical Ethnic Studies: An Anthology (Call for Papers)

Rather than attempting to pose and answer the question, “What is critical ethnic studies?,” this anthology seeks to catalyze a more wide-ranging set of critical problems for emergent scholarly work and new forms of knowledge. Building on longstanding critiques of race, imperialism, and capital in ethnic studies and related fields, some broadly framed key conceptual questions for this anthology include: Is it necessary to rethink and reframe some of the central—even taken-for-granted—analytical and theoretical rubrics of ethnic studies, such as “race,” “gender,” “sexuality,” “citizenship,” and “class?” How do long histories of multiple, incommensurable racial genocides (e.g., land conquest, racial slave trade, militarized extermination) constitute the historical present? How do we apprehend and theorize the persistent systems and structures of gendered racial violence, on the one hand, while attending to the resilience of political agency and transformation, on the other? How can we rethink the question of (racist/state) violence in rigorous and creative ways, neither reifying nor pathologizing it, but asking instead how a violence of condition produces a condition of violence? What do notions of the “subaltern,” “collective,” “popular,” and “multitude” mean in a white supremacist and settler colonial formation such as the U.S.? What is the relationship between critical ethnic studies and related emergent fields, such as critical prison studies, queer ethnic studies, and settler colonial studies? How can we create the conditions and framework for the ongoing appreciation of marginalized yet dynamic modes of critique, contestation, and inquiry within (and across) various fields, such as: critiques of sovereignty and recognition within Native and Indigenous studies; anti-Blackness as an analytical rubric within Black studies; debates about the politics and theorization of Asian settler colonialism within Asian American studies; and critiques of First World privilege and mobility within (U.S.) queer of color studies?

We invite essay submissions on a wide range of topics that may include but are not limited to the following:

• Race, colonialism, and capitalism
• Warfare and militarism
• Theories of violence
• Settler colonialism and white supremacy
• Critical genocide studies
• Cultural studies, the politics of aesthetic and cultural practice
• Critical feminist epistemologies
• Queer ethnic studies
• Decolonization and empire
• Social movements, activism, insurrection, and revolution
• Immigration and labor
• Multiculturalism and colorblindness
• Critical race studies
• Critical legal studies
• Liberationist epistemologies
• Critical ethnic studies, undisciplinarity, and relationship to other fields
• Professionalization, praxis, and the academic industrial complex
• Relationship between racism and environmental justice movements
• Sovereignty, the nation, and the nation-state
• Ethnic studies in relation to past and current eras of the privatization, corporatization, and defunding of the university
• Tension between institutionalization and movement-building in ethnic studies
• New frameworks for the comparative analysis of differential racial histories, e.g., immigrant and indigenous histories
• The erotic and sexual outlaw
• Academics of color and the erasure of class privilege

Submission Deadline: January 31, 2012
Word Limit: 4,000 – 6,000 words including notes
Format: Word document with citations in Chicago Style
Email Submission to: cesanthology@gmail.com