Mixed Race Studies

The Cherokee Kid: Will Rogers, Tribal Identity, and the Making of an American Icon

University Press of Kansas
June 2015
400 pages
7 illustrations, 6 x 9
Cloth ISBN 978-0-7006-2100-2
Ebook ISBN 978-0-7006-2101-9

Amy M. Ware

Early in the twentieth century, the political humorist Will Rogers was arguably the most famous cowboy in America. And though most in his vast audience didn’t know it, he was also the most famous Indian of his time. Those who know of Rogers’s Cherokee heritage and upbringing tend to minimize its importance, or to imagine that Rogers himself did so—notwithstanding his avowal in interviews: “I’m a Cherokee and they’re the finest Indians in the World.” The truth is, throughout his adult life and his work the Oklahoma cowboy made much of his American Indian background. And in doing so, as Amy Ware suggests in this book, he made Cherokee artistry a fundamental part of American popular culture.

Rogers, whose father was a prominent and wealthy Cherokee politician and former Confederate slaveholder, was born into the Paint Clan in the town of Oolagah in 1879 and raised in the Cooweescoowee District of the Cherokee Nation. Ware maps out this milieu, illuminating the familial and social networks, as well as the Cherokee ranching practices, educational institutions, popular publications and heated political debates that so firmly grounded Rogers in the culture of the Cherokees. Through his early career, from Wild West and vaudeville performer to Ziegfeld Follies headliner in the late 1910s, she reveals how Rogers embodied the seemingly conflicting roles of cowboy and Indian, in effect enacting the blending of these identities in his art. Rogers’s work in the film industry also reflected complex notions of American Indian identity and history, as Ware demonstrates in her reading of the clearest examples, including Laughing Billy Hyde, in which Rogers, an Indian, portrayed a white prospector married to an Indian woman—who was played by a white actress.

In his work as a columnist for the New York Times, and in his radio performances, Ware continues to trace the Cherokee influence on Rogers’s material—and in turn its impact on his audiences. It is in these largely uncensored performances that we see another side of Rogers’ Cherokee persona—a tribal elitism that elevated the Cherokee above other Indian nations. Ware’s exploration of this distinction exposes still-common assumptions regarding Native authenticity in the history of American culture, even as her in-depth look at Will Rogers’s heritage and legacy reshapes our perspective on the Native presence in that history, and in the life and work of a true American icon.

Being Japanese American: A JA Sourcebook for Nikkei, Hapa . . . & Their Friends

Stone Bridge Press
2015-06-09
176 pages
7.50 x 9.25 inches
Trade Paper ISBN13: 9781611720228; ISBN10: 1611720222
Ebook ISBN13: 9781611725292; ISBN10: 1611725291

Gil Asakawa

A celebration of JA culture: facts, recipes, songs, words, and memories that every JA will want to share.

This entertaining compendium is a celebration of Japanese American history and heritage. While detailing favorite foods, customs, words, games, and holidays, it explores the painful history of immigration and WWII internment, with suggestions for connecting to your Japanese American community and passing on traditions across generations and into intermarried families. This revised edition has fresh interviews with Japanese Americans about their life experiences and explores contemporary Japanese pop culture like anime and J-pop, with information on traveling to visit your Japanese roots and lists of resources on the Web and social media.

Machado de Assis: A Literary Life

Yale University Press
2015-05-26
360 pages
6 1/8 x 9 1/4
2 b/w illus.
ISBN: 9780300180824

K. David Jackson, Professor of Portuguese and Director of Undergraduate Studies of Portuguese
Yale University

Novelist, poet, playwright, and short story writer Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839–1908) is widely regarded as Brazil’s greatest writer, although his work is still too little read outside his native country. In this first comprehensive English-language examination of Machado since Helen Caldwell’s seminal 1970 study, K. David Jackson reveals Machado de Assis as an important world author, one of the inventors of literary modernism whose writings profoundly influenced some of the most celebrated authors of the twentieth century, including José Saramago, Carlos Fuentes, and Donald Barthelme. Jackson introduces a hitherto unknown Machado de Assis to readers, illuminating the remarkable life, work, and legacy of the genius whom Susan Sontag called “the greatest writer ever produced in Latin America” and whom Allen Ginsberg hailed as “another Kafka.” Philip Roth has said of him that “like Beckett, he is ironic about suffering.” And Harold Bloom has remarked of Machado that “he’s funny as hell.”

J.R. Reynolds: Say it loud: He’s black and I’m proud

Battle Creek Enquirer
Battle Creek, Michigan
2015-12-07

J.R. Reynolds, Community Columnist

J.R. Reynolds

Until my 2-year-old son is old enough to self-identify racially, I’ve declared him black. I’m raising him African American. Socially and legally. This, despite him being half white. Why? It’s in his best interest. But it’s not without serious, sometimes deadly challenges.

Being black in America has a bad rap. This, according to media, history books, government policy and even statistics. We’re the collective punching bag of mainstream society.

It’s open season on black youth. It’s OK to shoot first and ask questions later. We’re guilty until proven innocent. We’re viewed as a physical threat if we raise our voices in anger. Or throw up our hands to surrender. There’s more…

…So why would a black father like me enthusiastically claim “African American” for his toddler —a moniker that’s historically stigmatized by so many? After all, my son’s mom is white so alternatives exist. Among them: “biracial,” “multiracial” and “other.”…

Read the entire article here.

Metis and the Medicine Line: Creating a Border and Dividing a People

University of North Carolina Press
April 2015
Approx. 352 pages
6.125 x 9.25
17 halftones, 3 maps, notes, bibl., index
Paper: ISBN 978-1-4696-2105-0

Michel Hogue, Assistant Professor of History
Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario, Canadas

Born of encounters between Indigenous women and Euro-American men in the first decades of the nineteenth century, the Plains Metis people occupied contentious geographic and cultural spaces. Living in a disputed area of the northern Plains inhabited by various Indigenous nations and claimed by both the United States and Great Britain, the Metis emerged as a people with distinctive styles of speech, dress, and religious practice, and occupational identities forged in the intense rivalries of the fur and provisions trade. Michel Hogue explores how, as fur trade societies waned and as state officials looked to establish clear lines separating the United States from Canada and Indians from non-Indians, these communities of mixed Indigenous and European ancestry were profoundly affected by the efforts of nation-states to divide and absorb the North American West.

Grounded in extensive research in U.S. and Canadian archives, Hogue’s account recenters historical discussions that have typically been confined within national boundaries and illuminates how Plains Indigenous peoples like the Metis were at the center of both the unexpected accommodations and the hidden history of violence that made the “world’s longest undefended border.”

Tropics of Haiti: Race and the Literary History of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, 1789-1865

Liverpool University Press
May 2015
848 pages
234 x 156mm
Hardback ISBN: 9781781381847
Paperback ISBN: 9781781381854

Marlene L. Daut, Assistant Professor of English and Cultural Studies
Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, California

The Haitian Revolution (1791-1804) was an event of monumental world-historical significance, and here, in the first systematic literary history of those events, Haiti’s war of independence is examined through the eyes of its actual and imagined participants, observers, survivors, and cultural descendants. The ‘transatlantic print culture of the Haitian Revolution’ that this literary history shows was created by novelists, poets, dramatists, memoirists, biographers, historians, journalists, and eye-witness observers, revealing enlightenment racial ‘science’ as the primary vehicle through which the Haitian Revolution was interpreted, historicized, memorialized, and fictionalized by nineteenth-century Haitians, Europeans, and U.S. Americans alike.

Through its author’s contention that the Haitian revolutionary wars were incessantly racialized by four constantly recurring racial tropes—the ‘monstrous hybrid’, the ‘tropical temptress’, the ‘tragic mulatto/a’, and the ‘mulatto legend of history’, Tropics of Haiti shows the ways in which the nineteenth-century tendency to understand Haiti’s revolution in primarily racial terms has affected present day demonizations of Haiti and Haitians. In the end, this new archive of Haitian revolutionary writing, much of which has until now remained unknown to the contemporary reading public, invites us to examine how nineteenth-century attempts to paint Haitian independence as the result of a racial revolution coincides with present-day desires to render insignificant and ‘unthinkable’ the second independent republic of the New World.

CONTENTS

• PRELUDE: On “Haitian Exceptionalism”
• INTRODUCTION: From Enlightenment Literacy to Mulatto/a Vengeance
• PART ONE: THE MONSTROUS HYBRIDITY OF MULATTO/A VENGEANCE
  • 1. Baron de Vastey, Colonial Discourse, and the Global “Scientific” Sphere
  • 2. Monstrous Testimony and Baron de Vastey in 19th-Century Historical Writing About Haiti
  • 3. Victor Hugo and the Rhetorical Possibilities of Monstrous Hybridity in Revolutionary Fiction
• PART TWO: TRANSGRESSING THE TROPE OF THE TROPICAL TEMPTRESS
  • 4. Moreau de Saint-Méry’s Daughter and La Mulâtre comme il y a beaucoup de blanches (1803)
  • 5. “Born to Command:” Leonora Sansay and the Paradoxes of Female Resistance in Zelica; the Creole
  • 6. Theresa to the Rescue!: African American Women’s Resistance and the Literary History of the Haitian Revolution
• PART THREE: THE TROPE OF THE TRAGIC MULATTO/A AND THE HAITIAN REVOLUTION
  • 7. “Sons of White Fathers”: The Tragic Mulatto/a and the Haitian Revolution in Victor Séjour’s “Le Mulâtre”
  • 8. Between the Family and the Nation: Toussaint L’Ouverture and The Interracial Family Romance of the Haitian Revolution
  • 9. Romance and the Republic: Eméric Bergeaud’s Ideal History of the Haitian Revolution
• PART FOUR: REQUIEM FOR THE “MULATTO LEGEND OF HISTORY”
  • 10. The Color of History: The Transatlantic Abolitionist Movement and William Wells Brown’s “Never-to-be-forgiven-course-of the-mulattoes”
  • 11. Victor Schoelcher, “L’Imagination Jaune,” and the Francophone Geneaology of the “Mulatto Legend of History”
  • 12. “Let us Be Humane after the Victory: Pierre Faubert’s New Humanism
• CODA : Today’s Haitian Exceptionalism
• Works Cited
• Index

Loving Day: A Novel

Spiegel & Grau
2015-05-26
304 Pages
6-1/8 x 9-1/4
Hardcover ISBN: 9780812993455
Ebook ISBN: 9780679645528

Mat Johnson

“In the ghetto there is a mansion, and it is my father’s house.”

Warren Duffy has returned to America for all the worst reasons: His marriage to a beautiful Welsh woman has come apart; his comics shop in Cardiff has failed; and his Irish American father has died, bequeathing to Warren his last possession, a roofless, half-renovated mansion in the heart of black Philadelphia. On his first night in his new home, Warren spies two figures outside in the grass. When he screws up the nerve to confront them, they disappear. The next day he encounters ghosts of a different kind: In the face of a teenage girl he meets at a comics convention he sees the mingled features of his white father and his black mother, both now dead. The girl, Tal, is his daughter, and she’s been raised to think she’s white.

Spinning from these revelations, Warren sets off to remake his life with a reluctant daughter he’s never known, in a haunted house with a history he knows too well. In their search for a new life, he and Tal struggle with ghosts, fall in with a utopian mixed-race cult, and ignite a riot on Loving Day, the unsung holiday for interracial lovers.

A frequently hilarious, surprisingly moving story about blacks and whites, fathers and daughters, the living and the dead, Loving Day celebrates the wonders of opposites bound in love.

Illicit Love: Interracial Sex and Marriage in the United States and Australia

University of Nebraska Press
2015-12-01
616 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-8032-3825-1
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-4962-0384-7

Ann McGrath, Professor of History, Director of the Australian Centre for Indigenous History
Australian National University, Canberra, Australian Capital Territory

Illicit Love is a history of love, sex, and marriage between Indigenous peoples and settler citizens at the heart of two settler colonial nations, the United States and Australia. Award-winning historian Ann McGrath illuminates interracial relationships from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century through stories of romance, courtship, and marriage between Indigenous peoples and colonizers in times of nation formation.

The romantic relationships of well-known and ordinary interracial couples provide the backdrop against which McGrath discloses the “marital middle ground” that emerged as a primary threat to European colonial and racial supremacy in the Atlantic and Pacific Worlds from the Age of Revolution to the Progressive Era. These relationships include the controversial courtship between white, Connecticut-born Harriett Gold and southern Cherokee Elias Boudinot; the Australian missionary Ernest Gribble and his efforts to socially segregate the settler and aboriginal population, only to be overcome by his romantic impulses for an aboriginal woman, Jeannie; the irony of Cherokee leader John Ross’s marriage to a white woman, Mary Brian Stapler, despite his opposition to interracial marriages in the Cherokee Nation; and the efforts among ordinary people in the imperial borderlands of both the United States and Australia to circumvent laws barring interracial love, sex, and marriage.

Illicit Love reveals how marriage itself was used by disparate parties for both empowerment and disempowerment and came to embody the contradictions of imperialism. A tour de force of settler colonial history, McGrath’s study demonstrates vividly how interracial relationships between Indigenous and colonizing peoples were more frequent and threatening to nation-states in the Atlantic and Pacific worlds than historians have previously acknowledged.

She Is Cuba: A Genealogy of the Mulata Body

Oxford University Press
2015-12-01
240 Pages
53 images
6-1/8 x 9-1/4 inches
Hardcover ISBN: 9780199968169
Paperback ISBN: 9780199968176

Melissa Blanco Borelli, Senior Lecturer in Dance
Royal Holloway University of London

• Weaves together historical method, auto-ethnographic, and performative writing
• Sits at the precipice of scholarly and public interest in Cuban cultural history

She is Cuba: A Genealogy of the Mulata Body traces the history of the Cuban mulata and her association with hips, sensuality and popular dance. It examines how the mulata choreographs her racialised identity through her hips and enacts an embodied theory called hip(g)nosis. By focusing on her living and dancing body in order to flesh out the process of identity formation, this book makes a claim for how subaltern bodies negotiate a cultural identity that continues to mark their bodies on a daily basis. Combining literary and personal narratives with historical and theoretical accounts of Cuban popular dance history, religiosity and culture, this work investigates the power of embodied exchanges: bodies watching, looking, touching and dancing with one another. It sets up a genealogy of how the representations and venerations of the dancing mulata continue to circulate and participate in the volatile political and social economy of contemporary Cuba.

Table of Contents

• Prologue, Entre Familia/Between Family
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Historicizing Hip(g)nosis
• Interlude 1: Echando Cuentos/Telling Stories
• Chapter 2: Hip(g)nosis at Work: Rumors, Social Dance and Cuba’s Academias de Baile
• Interlude 2: A Marriage Proposal
• Chapter 3: Hip(g)nosis as Pleasure: The Mulata in Film
• Interlude 3: Lost Baggage
• Chapter 4: Hip(g)nosis as Brand: Despelote, Tourism and Mulata Citizenship
• Conclusion or Rear Endings
• Index

They Called Me ‘Coffee with Milk’ as a Kid

Zócalo Public Square
2015-11-19

Maya Soetoro-Ng (Photo by Kenna Reed)

Peace Educator Maya Soetoro-Ng Wants America to Make Room for Complexity

Maya Soetoro-Ng is the director of community outreach and global learning for the Matsunaga Institute for Peace and Conflict Resolution at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. For many years, she taught high school classes in social studies and English and undergraduate and graduate courses in multicultural education, social studies methods, and peace education. She is also the half-sister of President Barack Obama. Before participating in a discussion on what Hawaii can teach America about race, she talked about sharing the Nuyorican poets with her students, her pet peeve, and the hardest part of peace to practice…

Read the interview here.