Mixed Race Studies

Imagining Brazil: Seduction, Samba

Canadian Woman Studies / Les Caheiers de la Femme
Volume 20, Number 2 (2000)
pages 48-56

Natasha Pravaz, Associate Professor
Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

En utilisant des paroles de chants rythmés sur la samba et d‘autre matériel ethnographique, l‘auteure detecte la presence du mulâtre et de propos racistes dans la construction du nationalisme brézilien et discute sur l‘évidente ambivalence dans le discours ethnique local entre le désir et la rejection envers ce personage.

Using the words of songs and rhythmic samba on other ethnographic material, the author detects the presence the mulatto and racism in the construction of Brazilian nationalism and discusses the obvious ambivalence in the local ethnic discourse between desire and rejection to this personage.

A polysemic category, mulata in the Brazilian context can refer to “a woman of mixed racial descent,” but it also connotes voluptuosity, sensuality, and ability for dancing the samba. In its restricted sense, however, it names an occupation. That is, only women who engage in dancing the samba in a commodified spectacle and receive some form of remuneration for it can be called mulatas. Under this specific signification, the concept of the mulata can be contrasted to that of the passita, a solo dancer in the Carnival parades who performs, not for money, but out of love for samba and for her Samba School of choice. However, regardless of the subtleties of this and other distinctions, mulata and passista are perhaps merely privileged signifiers in a larger paradigmatic chain associating multiple cultural terms such as cabrocha, morena, criouh, brasileira, nega, pretinha, baiana, to name just a few. These multiple signifiers denoting “black woman” in Brazil may be seen as lexicological crystallisations of what has been described by Marvin Harris as a fluid “system of racial classification.” In Brazil, “race talk” has a dermal character, where slight gradations in skin colour are constructed as distinctions begging specific denomination. Depending on the context of utterance, most of the above mentioned racialized and gendered terms carry with them a certain fetishistic quality. In Brazil, the mulata is commonly portrayed as a woman always ready to deploy her tricks of sorcery and bewitching, embodying sensuality, voluptuosity, and dexterity in dancing the samba. She has become a figure of desire in the Brazilian imaginary. It is due to this semantic proliferation that I have decided to use the Brazilian lexicon, rather than to reduce its meaning by making reference to a “mulatto woman.”

Using a series of samba lyrics as my ethnographic material, I will address the figuration of the mulata as the embodiment of sensuality in the Brazilian imaginary; explore the use of racialized tropes and the figure of the mulata in the constitution of Brazilian discourses of national identity; and briefly discuss the conspicuous ambivalence between desire and abjection toward the mulata in local discourses of race…

Read the entire article here.

Celebrating Afro-Venezuelan Heritage

Global Exchange
Reality Tour Blog
2013-12-13

The following post is written by Reality Tours communications intern William Jones Jr as he explores Afro-Venezuelan identity historically and in its current context. Visit Venezuela on a Reality Tour to learn more about the struggles, contributions, and successes of Afro-Venezuelans.

History and Legacy

Under the leadership of the late President Hugo Chávez, Venezuela has made strides toward combating the historical legacy of racism and recognizing the national importance of African heritage, promoting social inclusion and respect for Afro-Venezuelans. Among them is the official celebration of the Month of Africa in May and Day of Afro-Venezuelans on May 10.

Although Abolition occurred in 1854, freedom did not bring equality. Venezuela, like many other Latin American countries, used the idea of the mestizo born of European, Indigenous, and African blood, to uphold a myth of racial democracy that denied rampant discrimination on the basis of skin color and African identity on paper.  In reality African cultural traditions remained marginalized and European traditions were promoted. Blacks remained at the bottom of the economic and social hierarchy…

Read the entire article here.

Veteran Served as a White, Convicted of Miscegenation

The Milwaukee Journal
Monday, 1948-12-20
page 20, columns 2 & 3

Davis Knight —AP Wirephoto

Ellisville, Miss.—(AP)—A young veteran who served in the navy as a white man and later married a white woman has been convicted of miscegenation and sentenced to five years in prison.

Dist. Atty Paul Swartzfager said the conviction Saturday of 23 year old Davis Knight was believed to be the first under the state’s miscegenation law, in force since reconstruction days. The law forbids marriage or cohabitation between white persons and those with at least one-eighth Negro or Mongolian blood. Conviction automatically cancels the marriage.

Knight whose marriage was performed in April, 1946, by the mayor of this south Mississippi town of 3,000, filed notice of appeal. Knight was arrested when “people started talking” and told his employer in Laurel that he was a Negro. Quitman Ross, his attorney, explained.

The main issue in the trial was the ancestry of Knight’s great-grand-mother, who was known as Rachel and who lived on the plantation of Capt. Newt Knight a picturesque character in Mississippi history. Rachel the state contended, was a Negro, and witnesses were introduced who testified that she and her children were known as Negroes. Among these witnesses was Tom Knight, 89 year old son of Capt. Knight who said that the young navy veteran’s grandfather was a son of Rachel.

Defense witnesses testified that they believed Rachel was a Cherokee Indian.

Swartzfager said no charges were planned against the white woman who married Knight under the impression that he was of all white blood.

Knight was drafted as a white, man at Camp Shelby in 1943 and his discharge papers. Swartzfager said, listed him as white.

Note from Steven F. Riley: For more about the Knight family, please read Victoria E. Bynum’s superb monograph, The Free State of Jones: Mississippi’s Longest Civil War.

Professor shifts the lens on race through portraiture, new book

FIU News
Florida International University
2014-01-02

Evelyn Perez

What is blackness? What does it mean to be black? Is blackness a matter of biology or consciousness? Who and what determine who is black and who is not?

A new book by Yaba Blay, co-director of the Africana Studies Program at Drexel University, and Noelle Théard MA’10, adjunct professor in the FIU African and African Diaspora Studies Program, explores these questions and challenges society’s narrow perception of blackness and what it looks like. Titled (1)ne Drop: Shifting the Lens on Race, its name is a reference to the “one-drop rule” from the early 20th century, meaning that anyone with 1/32 of “African black blood” was black.

“Although we live in a ‘post-racial’ society with a president of mixed-race ancestry and a lot of strides have been made since the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, we still live in a society where issues of race and racial identity are salient,” Théard said. “There is a tendency for folks to not want to have conversations pertaining to issues of race…

Read the entire article here.

DNA Double Take

The New York Times
2013-09-16

Carl Zimmer

From biology class to “C.S.I.,” we are told again and again that our genome is at the heart of our identity. Read the sequences in the chromosomes of a single cell, and learn everything about a person’s genetic information — or, as 23andme, a prominent genetic testing company, says on its Web site, “The more you know about your DNA, the more you know about yourself.”

But scientists are discovering that — to a surprising degree — we contain genetic multitudes. Not long ago, researchers had thought it was rare for the cells in a single healthy person to differ genetically in a significant way. But scientists are finding that it’s quite common for an individual to have multiple genomes. Some people, for example, have groups of cells with mutations that are not found in the rest of the body. Some have genomes that came from other people…

Read the entire article here.

The Alternative History of 2013: Alt-Weeklies Year in Review

AAN News
Association of Alternative Newsmedia
2013-12-19

Jason Zaragoza

For our first-ever Alt-Weeklies Year in Review, we asked AAN editors and reporters to share the stories they are the most — and least — proud of from the past year. What follows is an edited version of their responses.

…Stephen Segal, Philadelphia Weekly

Philly Weekly produced an awful lot in 2013 that I’m proud of — but if I have to pick one single piece I found most noteworthy, I’ll point to an issue where our staff got out of the way and let the primary source speak for itself. We excerpted as a cover story Prof. Yaba Blay’s provocative new book “One Drop: Shifting the Lens on Race,” which presents stunning photographic portraits of variously-hued and multiracial Black Americans alongside essays by those subjects in which they discussed how their specific skin color, and its relationship to their lives, has shaped their unique identities. Just fascinating reading. (And an editorial note: Among other things, I find this story has pushed me into the school of thought that, AP style notwithstanding, “Black” should indeed be a capitalized ethnic term.)…

Read the entire article here.

The trouble with ‘passing’ for another race/sexuality/religion…

The Guardian
2014-01-02

Koa Beck
Brooklyn, New York

The broadening of the definition historically used for those of mixed-race who ‘passed’ as white exposes the power of privilege

“Racial passing“, or “passing”, was originally coined to define the experience of mixed raced individuals, particularly in America, who were accepted as a member of a different racial group, namely white. Although passing dates all the way back to the 18th century, the term didn’t prominently surface in the American lexicon until around the 19th century, specifically with a slew of literature. Mark Twain and Charles Chesnutt were among the early American novelists to explore this phenomenon, but Nella Larson’s 1929 novel Passing was the first English language book to explicitly brand itself with the term.

Many years and an entire civil rights movement later, passing still carries a largely racially charged definition – especially for me. As an American biracial woman who passes as white, I live daily with a pronounced array of privileges that are coupled with the assumption that I am white. But my passing isn’t just limited to my racial identity. I’ve also spent several chapters of my young adulthood unwillingly passing as something else: straight. A fairly conventional femininity has imbued me – at least at first glance – with heterosexual privilege, even though I’m partnered to a woman…

Read the entire article here.

Melissa Harris-Perry: LGBT Advocates Need Public Progressive Faith

Religion Dispatches
Sexuality/Gender
University of Southern California
2011-05-31

Peter Montgomery, Associate Editor

Political scientist Melissa Harris-Perry has developed a devoted following with her appearances on Bill Moyers Journal and Rachel Maddow’s MSNBC show, and her insightful commentaries on race, history, politics and culture in The Nation and elsewhere. Less well known among progressive activists may be that the self-described social-scientific data geek also makes a compelling case for a more powerful progressive religious voice in the public arena.

On May 23 (in the midst of a very public debate with her former Princeton colleague Cornel West) Harris-Perry gave the keynote address at the Human Rights Campaign’s Clergy Call, which drew hundreds of LGBT-equality-supporting clergy to Washington, D.C. for inspiration, mutual support, training, and lobbying visits on Capitol Hill.

The Civil Rights Agenda of Our Time

“My work is based in the empirical, not in the spiritual… I like data points. I like survey analysis. So what in the world am I doing here, an empirical social scientist straight girl at a clergy call around LGBT issues?” she asked. Her answer: “I believe that the struggle for equal human and civil rights for lesbian, gay, transgender, bisexual, same-sex-loving, gender-nonconforming and queer persons is the civil rights agenda of our time.” And, she said, “faith must be part of the work we’re doing.”   

The religious history of Harris-Perry’s own family has the sweep of an American saga. Her mother, whose Mormon ancestors pushed handcarts across the country to their promised land in Utah, graduated from Brigham Young University in 1964, having spent most of her time there, Harris-Perry says, writing articles about Mormon womanhood. Meanwhile, her father, whose great-great-grandmother was sold as a slave on a street corner in Richmond, Virginia, attended Howard University where he was “converted to Black nationalism” and shared a room with Stokely Carmichael. By the time her mother and father met in Seattle in the early 1970s, each had become a parent and had been divorced. After they had Melissa, they moved their blended family and children—white, black, and mixed-race—to Virginia in the immediate aftermath of the civil rights movement. “In that context you had to be Unitarian Universalist,” she said to knowing laughter…

Read the entire article here.

“Global Mixed Race,” the 3rd biennial Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference, will be held at DePaul University in Chicago November 13-15, 2014.

Critical Mixed Race Studies
2013-09-16

Conference Description: Global Mixed Race, the third biennial Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference, will be hosted at DePaul University in Chicago, November 13th-15th, 2014. It will bring together scholars from a variety of disciplines around the world to facilitate a global conversation about the transnational, transdisciplinary, and transracial field of Critical Mixed Race Studies.

Registration: Conference registration is free, compliments of DePaul University, however, registration is still required. You are highly encouraged to register early, but “day-of,” or “walk-in,” registration will also be permitted. Confirmed presenters must register by October 1, 2014, in order to be recognized in the printed program.” Register here: http://condor.depaul.edu/dpulas/cmrs/2014/

Proposals: We invite panels, roundtables, and papers that address the conference theme, although participants are also welcome to submit proposals that speak to their own specialized research, pedagogical, or community-based interests. The primary criterion for selection will be the quality of the proposal, not its connection to the conference theme. Proposals might consider the ways different disciplines approach or provide methodologies for critical analyses of mixed race issues. Proposals might also consider the following ideas as related to this year’s themes:

• tracing the history and historiography of mixed race in academic, popular, and legal discourses in a global context;
• identifying and measuring the impact of global migration, settlement, and sociocultural encounter and interaction on these mixed-race histories and historiographies;
• encouraging broad, interdisciplinary debate connecting different historical periods and seemingly disparate or far-flung regions of the world, such as comparative racial ideology in Europe, Africa, Latin America, and Asia or the study of comparative anti-miscegenation laws.

Panels, papers, and roundtable proposal submission deadline: January 15^th, 2014
Completed applications should be e-mailed back to cmrs@depaul.edu with the subject line appropriate to the type of submission (e.g., CMRS 2014 Panel Application).

• CMRS 2014 Panel Application
• CMRS 2014 Paper Application
• CMRS 2014 Roundtable Application

Information Fair Exhibitor Application deadline: August 28, 2014

CMRS 2014 Exhibitor Application

Mixed Roots Stories

Mixed Roots Stories is partnering with Critical Mixed Race Studies in bringing arts and cultural programming to the 2014 conference. We are seeking submissions from performing artists and filmmakers whose work explores stories of racial and cultural mixing as a central theme. The overall theme for the 2014 conference is “Global Mixed Race,” and submissions that reflect this will be given special consideration.

We will be screening short films on Thursday evening, November 13, 2014, and holding a live performance showcase on Friday evening, November 14, 2014.

Films: We are looking for short films under 15 minutes. Your submission should include an online link to your film (private link is fine), a press kit, and a short statement (50 words or less) on how the film addresses the mixed experience and fits the theme “Global Mixed Race” (trailers for feature films will be accepted).

Live performance showcase: We are looking for stand-up comedy, spoken word, dance, short scenes, monologues, vocalists, musicians – or other forms of live performance. Your piece for the showcase should not be longer than 8 minutes. Your submission should include an online link with no less than a 2 minute preview of exactly what you will present, and a short statement (50 words or less) on how the piece addresses the mixed experience and fits the theme “Global Mixed Race.”

Mixed Roots Stories submission deadline: January 15th, 2014
Please e-mail Mixed Roots Stories submission materials to: cmrs@depaul.edu with the subject line:CMRS 2014 Mixed Roots Stories Application.

Contacts

CMRS Conference organizer:

Camilla Fojas, Professor Latin American and Latino Studies and Vincent de Paul Professor
e-mail: mailto:cfojas@depaul.edu
phone: (773) 325-4994

Mixed Roots Stories and arts programming contact:

Laura Kina, Associate Professor Art, Media, & Design and Vincent de Paul Professor
e-mail: lkinaaro@depaul.edu
phone: (773) 325-4048

Whiter Shades of Pale: “Coloring In” Machado de Assis and Race in Contemporary Brazil

Latin American Research Review
Volume 48, Number 3 (2013)
pages 3-24
DOI: 10.1353/lar.2013.0046

Alex Flynn, Lecturer in Anthropology
Durham University, Durham, United Kingdom

Elena Calvo-González, Professor of Anthropology
Universidade Federal da Bahia, Brazil

Marcelo Mendes de Souza
Department of Comparative Literature
University of Auckland

Debates surrounding race in Brazil have become increasingly fraught in recent years as the once hegemonic concept of racial democracy (democracia racial) continues to be subject to an ever more agnostic scrutiny. Parallel to these debates, and yet ultimately inseparable from them, is the question of what it is to be “white.” In this interdisciplinary paper, we argue that whiteness has become increasingly established in Brazilian public discourse as a naturalized category. Seeking a fresh perspective on what we perceive to have become a sterile debate, we examine Machado de Assis and his work to illustrate how assumptions surrounding his short story “Pai contra mãe,” and indeed comments on the author’s very body, reveal the extent to which whiteness has come to be seen as nonnegotiable and fixed. Placing a close reading of Machado’s text at the heart of the article, we explain its implications for the scholarly debates now unfolding in Brazil concerning the construction of whiteness. The article then develops an anthropological reading of whiteness by pointing to the inherent differences between perspectives of race as a process and perspectives of race as a fixed and naturalized given.

Debates surrounding race in Brazil have become increasingly fraught in recent years as the once hegemonic concept of racial democracy (democracia racial) is subjected to an ever more agnostic scrutiny. In a public sphere where certain ‘“types of mixture’ are clearly preferred to the detriment of others” (Pinho 2009), what can be understood as whiteness has an obvious and tangible importance, with various signifiers having varying levels of meaning. The texture of hair, the shape of facial features, even certain embodied notions of interaction can connote discrete positions on a racialized hierarchy. As Pinho (2009, 40) states, following the tradition of 1950s anthropologists such as Oracy Nogueira (1998) or Donald Pierson (1971), skin color is perhaps only the beginning of someone’s subjective judgment: “One’s ‘measure of whiteness,’ therefore, is not defined only by skin color; it requires a much wider economy of signs where, together with other bodily features, hair texture is almost as important as epidermal tone. In any given context, the definition of whiteness is also, necessarily, shaped by the contours of gender and class affiliation.”

These judgments take place within a wider historical discourse that has promoted the “whitening” of Brazil as a country and race. Dávila (2003) describes how from the turn of the nineteenth century, state actors in Brazil implemented policies that had at their heart a belief in whiteness as a naturalized state identified with strength, health, and virtue. This racial category was gradually shaped in opposition to “blackness,” a status that carried an explicit cargo of laziness, primitive and childlike nature, and an inherently antimodern gaze to the past. Dávila outlines how state actors believed that the nation could be “whitened” by educating people out of a black identity and leading them toward a white set of behaviors and morals. In this way, race was not a biological fact, it was rather a metaphor for the imagining of Brazil’s modernist trajectory; race was a malleable tool with which to better the future. Thus, the racial mixing of Brazilian society was a deterministic process toward securing a brighter, “whiter” future, one where blackness and its degeneracy could be cast aside and social ascension would guarantee a more productive population. Dávila (2003, 6) states that in the 1930s, “white Brazilians could safely celebrate race mixture because they saw it as an inevitable step in the nation’s evolution.” But it is important to note here that the supposedly realizable goal at the end of this process was essentially being cast as a naturalized category. There were no searching questions as to exactly what whiteness represented on this hierarchical trajectory; the definition was based upon a certain Europeanness and was whatever blackness or  indigenousness was not. As Dávila (2003, 7) states, “whiteness” was defined through both “positive and negative affirmation,” becoming a sedimented and fixed category without any internalized processes of self-reflection.

Despite this historical lack of analysis, recent state interventions have prompted a more quotidian interest into questions of whiteness in Brazil. Carlos Hasenbalg and Nelson do Vale Silva’s groundbreaking research in the 1970s had already demonstrated the disparities linked to race in socioeconomic indicators between self=-classified “whites” and “browns/blacks,” with the latter grouped together due to the similarity of results when compared to the “white” group. Such work helped to destabilize the myth of racial democracy, as well as the “mulatto escape hatch” thesis, the idea that the space ceded to people of mixed race in Brazil allowed some to escape the “disabilities of blackness” (Degler 1971, 178). However, the recent introduction of racial quotas at federal and state universities has brought into sharp relief how binary manners of self-identification can have a profound influence on one’s social trajectory, or as Vron Ware (2004, 38) describes it, “the relationship between social and symbolic power.” With an expanding middle class and growing competition for places, university places reserved for those who do not identify as white has brought into the open questions and prejudices that many people might have perhaps preferred to remain opaque. The debates around the implementation of affirmative action policies have brought into sharp focus the serious issues that a bureaucratic reconfiguration of racial categories implies, given that the category “black” subsumed those that self-declared as mixed race. At the center of these debates is the question of what it is to be black and, discussed much less, what it is to be white, a subject that has acquired all the more significance with the recent publication of census data demonstrating that for the first time since records began, those that self-identify as white are in a minority (47.7 percent) in Brazil (Phillips 2011). In this article we will build upon recent literature on whiteness as well as more classical work on race and race relations to reinforce the idea that, rather than being a fixed category, whiteness is in fact a volatile and nuanced construction continually subject to social reinterpretations as well as state-determined reconfiguration…

Read the entire article here.