Mixed Race Studies

While Goldberg and Gilroy have alluded to mixed-race metaphors in their recent work, Lewis Gordon has written more extensively about the attempts to establish ‘critical’ mixed-race studies. Reflecting on the historical discrimination and colourism in an anti-black world, Gordon has argued that it is understandable – if not morally justifiable – for working-class individuals and darker-skinned individuals to be distrustful of middle-class individuals and lighter-skinned individuals who claim to be progressive. Gordon’s use of slime to describe the aims of a wide variety of mixed-race activists and ‘sensitive’ scholars – who talk politely about racial transcendence while denying the facticity of their privileged position in an anti-black world – is a particularly interesting term since it evokes animalistic behaviour, infantile play, salesmen pitching new, hip commodities for a polyethnic culture. It also offers a transracial, transdisciplinary and transnational engagement with Francophone theory. Aside from adapting Fanon’s critique of European man, Gordon’s analysis of multiracial celebration draws on Sartre’s ontology of slime (a sticky, viscoelastic material that resists shear flow and strain linearly with time when a stress is applied,) and reminds us of Barthes’s famous description of neither-norism (a ‘mythological figure which consists in stating two opposites and balancing the one by the other so as to reject them both… It is on the whole a bourgeois figure, for it relates to a modern form of liberalism… one flees from intolerable reality … one no longer needs to choose, but only to endorse.’)

Daniel McNeil, “‘Mixture is a Neoliberal Good’: Mixed-Race Metaphors and Post-Racial Masks,” Darkmatter, Volume 9, Issue 1, (Post-Racial Imaginaries), July 2, 2012. http://www.darkmatter101.org/site/2012/07/02/mixture-is-a-neoliberal-good-mixed-race-metaphors-and-post-racial-masks/

The Meaning of White: Race, Class, and the ‘Domiciled Community’ in British India 1858-1930

Oxford University Press
January 2012
288 pages
Hardback ISBN13: 9780199697700; ISBN10: 0199697701

Satoshi Mizutani

From 1858 to 1930 the concept of whiteness in British India was complex and contradictory. Under the Raj, the spread of racial ideologies was pervasive, but whiteness was never taken as self-evident. It was constantly called into question and its boundaries were disciplined and policed through socio-cultural and institutional practices.

Only those whites with social status, cultural refinement, and the right level of education were able to command the respect and awe of colonized subjects. Among those who straddled the boundaries of whiteness were the ‘domiciled community’, made up of mixed-descent ‘Eurasians’ and racially unmixed ‘Domiciled Europeans’, both of whom lived in India on a permanent basis. Members of this community, or those who were categorized as such under the Raj, unwittingly rendered the meaning of whiteness ambiguous in fundamental ways.

The colonial authorities quickly identified the domiciled community as a particularly malign source of political instability and social disorder, and were constantly urged to furnish various institutional measures—predominantly philanthropic and educational by character—that specifically targeted its degraded conditions. The Meaning of White reveals the precise ways in which the existence of this community was identified as a problem (the ‘Eurasian Question’) and examines the deeper historical meanings of this categorization. Dr Mizutani demystifies the ideology of whiteness, situating it within the concrete social realities of colonial history.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• 1. British prestige and fears of colonial degeneration
• 2. The origins and emergence of the ‘domiciled community’
• 3. The ‘Eurasian Question’: the domiciled poor and urban social control
• 4. ‘European schools’: illiteracy, unemployment, and educational uplifting
• 5. Towards a solution to the Eurasian Question: child removal and juvenile emigration
• 6. Disputing the domiciliary divide: civil-service employment and the claim for equivalence
• 7. Conclusion: Race, class, and the contours of whiteness in late British India

Anglo-Indian Nostalgia: Longing for India as Homeland

Rhizomes Postgraduate Conference
Rhizomes: Re-visioning Boundaries Conference
The School of Languages and Comparative Cultural Studies
The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia
2006-02-24 through 2006-02-25

Alzena D’Costa
Curtin University of Technology

This paper argues that the ‘nostalgia’ that the Anglo-Indian community exhibits in the telling of its (hi)stories can be seen as functioning to (re)claim India as homeland. The Anglo-Indians are the Indian-European minority community of India whose origins and history is inextricably interwoven with the politics of colonial India. Within the framework of post-independence Indian thought, the Community has been alienated from embodying the national identity and is made to feel unhomely.

In his book Long-distance Nationalism, Zlatko Skrbiŝ defines nostalgia as ‘a painful condition related to the homeland (Gr. nostos means ‘to return home’ and algia, ‘a painful condition’ (41). Roberta Rubenstein, in her book Home Matters, also describes nostalgia as a temporal separation (4). The recent nostalgic writings produced by the Anglo-Indian community remember, idealise and pine for the colonial past – a time when the Anglo-Indian community felt a sense of belonging in India. Some historians claim that nostalgia is ‘perhaps the most dangerous … of all the ways of using history’ because it glosses ‘over the past’s iniquities and indignities’. However, Rubenstein points out that nostalgia can also ‘fix’ the past and recover it in ‘narrative terms’ (6). With this insight, I will argue that via nostalgic writing the Anglo-Indian community can revisit, and hence reclaim, India as home.

Read the entire paper here.

Frantz Fanon’s reception in Brazil

Penser aujourd’hui à partir de Frantz Fanon, Actes du colloque Fanon (Symposium on Frantz Fanon)
Université Paris 7
February 2008

Antonio Sérgio Alfredo Guimarães, Professor of Sociology
University of São Paulo, Brazil

Frantz Fanon is a central figure in cultural, post-colonial and African-American studies, whether in the United States, Africa or Europe. We often speak about Fanonian studies, such is the volume of research that has been based on his work. My black Brazilian colleagues and students have the same admiration, respect and devotion for him as their black North American and African brothers. However, when I looked for material to write this paper, I was met with a conspicuous silence, both in cultural and academic journals which lasted all the way to the mid 1960s.

Although he had previously had a limited readership in Brazil, Fanon became known within cultural circles, as in other parts of the world, when revolutionary violence was the order of the day, championed by thinking revolutionary fighters such as Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Camilo Torres; or by black leaders such as Stokely Carmichael, Malcom X and Eldridge Cleaver; or Amilcar Cabral, Agostinho Neto, Kwame N’Krumah. However, after this phase, contrary to what occurred in other places, his thinking did not become the object of elucidating and critical reflection on the part of Brazilian universities and academics who were established in study centres, as was the case with other revolutionary thinkers.

In this paper, I will defend two theses. The first is that his lukewarm reception was due to a national and racial makeup totally opposed to racial conflicts, highly instilled within an intellectual middle class which was white and mixed race, yet racially colourless. That is, the Brazil of racial democracy. The second thesis explains the limited dissemination of Fanonian studies by the small number of black professors and researchers at Brazilian universities who focus on the formation of black identity or the affirmation of racially oppressed subjects as their area of study.

Fanon’s thinking came to Brazil much like all new ideas – in European books – and at a time when Marxism and existentialism competed for the limelight of the Brazilian cultural and political scene.

Read the entire paper here.

Interview with Brazilian Journalist and Activist Daniela Gomes

The Husslington Post
2011-12-04

Amil Cook, Correspondent

In this interview, Husslington Post correspondent, Amil Cook, goes in depth with journal/scholar/activist Daniela Gomes about her fight against racism in Brazil. This is the first installment in what we hope will become a series of interviews by Amil.

How influential is Hip-Hop and African American culture in Brazil?

For a long time Afro Brazilians didn’t have access to information about the black leaders in our history. The myth of the racial democracy created an important issue in our country, where a lighter skin person didn’t consider him/herself as black. So for many years for mixed people in Brazil to be black was a shame. In some cases this still happens. So after a long time we were without any understanding about black consciousness but during the 1970s some cultural and political movements started to be inspired by Afro American movements and heroes such as: the Civil Rights Movement, the Black Panther Party, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and others. And Hip Hop is a part of this because of its cultural influence.

What is racial democracy for those who may not be familiar with this term?

Racial democracy was a theory created in the early 1900s. The main creator was Gilberto Freyre, who used to affirm that Brazilian society was totally different from other countries because it was a racially mixed country and as a mixed country there wasn’t racism here. He taught that we should value our three races [indigenous (native), African and European] that formed our society because it made us better, made our slavery less painful and things like that. It is important to explain that before Freyre the theory that used to be adopted in Brazil, was the ‘whitening theory’, it was used to affirm that if we started to mix the country we could clean our race and it was believed that in little time black people would be extinct in Brazil. The main thinker of this theory was Nina Rodrigues, a doctor who used to see the black population as a shame. Gilberto Freyre was Rodrigues’ student, and “improved” Rodrigues’ racist theories when he decided to hide the racial issue in Brazil. These two theories are fundamental to understand racial thought in Brazil. The first one [Rodrigues], made Brazilians believe that if they are mixed they aren’t black and the second one [Freyre] made them believe that we are special because we are mixed; there isn’t racism in our country so we don’t need to fight against it. And although the black struggle in my country never stopped, ideas like that made our mission harder…

Read the entire interview here.

Ecco To Publish Pulitzer Prize Winning U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey’s Memoir

HarperCollins Publishers
2012-06-28

Michael McKenzie

New York, NY (June 28, 2012) – Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, is thrilled to announce that it has won the rights to publish Pulitzer Prize winning United States Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey’s untitled memoir in a very heated auction. Her book will map the intersections of personal and cultural history, as it navigates the channels and byways of memory and the legacy of race in America. Chronicling her life from early childhood – the daughter of a black mother and a white father, she was born in Gulfport, Mississippi a year before the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the anti-miscegenation laws with Loving v. Virginia – this deeply felt memoir explores Trethewey’s experience growing up mixed race in the South of the ‘70s and ‘80s, her close relationship with her mother, who was later murdered by her stepfather, a Vietnam veteran, and the repercussions and resonances of these seminal events in her life and work.

The deal was negotiated between Daniel Halpern, President and Publisher of Ecco, and Rob McQuilkin of Lippincott Massie McQuilkin. Halpern says, “I can’t remember a more emotionally intense auction for a book, ever. I truly admire Natasha’s spirit, her graceful presence on these pages, which tell a story that no one is likely to forget.”

Trethewey adds, “I am honored to work with this venerable press, and with Daniel Halpern in particular, on a book I know will be difficult to write even as it seems that the past—and geography—have rendered me destined to do so.”

The book, which Ecco acquired the North American rights to, is tentatively scheduled for 2014…

Read the entire press release here.

For Daughters of the American Revolution, a New Chapter

The New York Times
2012-07-03

Sarah Maslin Nir

Olivia Cousins can trace her family in the United States to a soldier who joined the rebelling colonists when he was just 17. But when a friend suggested she join the Daughters of the American Revolution, an organization whose members can prove they are related to someone who aided the rebels in 1776, Dr. Cousins nearly laughed.

Dr. Cousins is black. And the D.A.R., as it is commonly called, is a historically white organization with a record of excluding blacks so ugly that Eleanor Roosevelt renounced her membership in protest.

Yet last week, in a circa-1857 stone chapel in Jamaica, Queens, Dr. Cousins was named an officer in a small ceremony establishing a new chapter. Her daughter took photos. The pictures documented a singular moment for the D.A.R., founded in 1890: 5 of the 13 members of the new chapter are black.

Perhaps more strikingly, the Queens chapter is one of the first in the organization’s nearly 122-year history that was started by a black woman: Wilhelmena Rhodes Kelly, from Rosedale, who is also its regent, or president. Ms. Kelly traces her origins to the relationship between a slaveholder and a slave, who appear to have considered themselves married, and her new position is part of a remarkable journey for both her family and the organization.

“My parents understood that they were Americans and that they were a real important part of the American story,” said Dr. Cousins, who, like the other members, is a passionate student of genealogy. Her Revolutionary War ancestor was a free man of mixed race. “Their whole thing was that segregation is unacceptable,” she said of her parents. For her, she said, “de facto segregation was unacceptable.”…

Read the entire article here.

Follow MixedRaceStudies.org on Twitter

MixedRaceStudies.org
2012-07-04

Steven F. Riley

Thanks to a suggestion by University of Wisconsin History Professor Gregory Carter, all new posts on MixedRaceStudies.org will be simultaneously “tweeted” on Twitter at @mixed_race.