Mixed Race Studies

A Romance of (Miscege)Nations: Ann Sophia Stephens’ Malaeska: The Indian Wife of the White Hunter (1839, 1860)

Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory
Volume 63, Number 1, Spring 2007
pages 1-25
DOI: 10.1353/arq.2007.0000

Yu-Fang Cho, Associate Professor of English; Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Miami University, Oxford, Ohio

First serialized in The Ladies’ Companion in 1839 and later reprinted in 1860, Ann Sophia Stephens’ Malaeska narrates the tragic interracial union of an Indian princess and a white hunter in northeastern United States during the colonial period. By rewriting the Pocahontas legend, Malaeska allegorizes the dispossession of Native Americans at two significant historical moments in U.S. nation building: the enforcement of the Removal Act throughout the 1830s and westward expansion in the 1850s after the U.S.-Mexican War. The first version of Malaeska was serialized in a women’s magazine tailored specifically for middle- and upper-class female readers, a site of production and reception often characterized as part of the “culture of sentiment.” The second version was the first of the Beadle and Adams’s dime novel series, which often made sensational appeals to audiences across class, gender, age, profession, and ethnicity. Simultaneously inhabiting cultural spaces defined in contemporary analytical terms as mutually exclusive, Malaeska unsettles binary constructions in the study of nineteenth-century U.S. literature and culture. This novel thereby enables an understanding of intersecting racial, gender, class, and cultural formations in relation to U.S. nation building.

Until recently, Malaeska has been dismissed as formulaic, superficial, conservative, and therefore unworthy of scholarly attention. In her important critical re-assessment of Stephens’ Indian tales, Paola Gemme offers an insightful overview of the relationship between the increasingly essentialist dominant racial ideologies from the 1830s to the 1860s and the growing pessimism in depictions of Native American “extinction” in Stephens’ stories. Building on the historical framework in Gemme’s overview (“Rewriting”), this essay examines the ways in which the representation of Indian-white miscegenation in Stephens’ Malaeska simultaneously engages racial ideologies, gender politics, and class formations in cross-fertilized cultural forms. By considering the differences between the 1839 version and the 1860 version, the two contexts of production and reception, and narrative elements beyond the plot, this essay suggests that Malaeska does not necessarily endorse the inevitability of Native American extinction. Rather, Malaeska mobilizes “the Indian question” to critique white supremacy and patriarchy simultaneously: it appeals to women’s shared predicaments as wives, daughters, and mothers to expose the violence of white dominance and its destructive impact on both Native Americans and whites. At the same time, this double critique is limited by its displacement of racial issues onto gender concerns as the text foregrounds women’s alliances across racial and class lines and defines womanhood in terms of the emerging white middle class. The contradiction between the dramatization of racial tensions and their ultimate displacement onto gender issues, this essay suggests, registers an articulation of normative, invisible middle-class white womanhood in the broader context of the emergence of (de)racialized women’s middle-class culture. The term “(de)racialized” highlights the ways in which normative “whiteness” operates as an invisible, “unraced,” universal construction against which all other “races” are defined and thereby racialized. The naturalization and (de)racialization of women’s middle-class culture, this essay suggests, relies on its claim to moral authority and its antithetical relationship to other cultural spheres, such as the heterogeneous cultural spaces where dime novels circulated.

The Elegy of the Vanishing American: Removal, Western Expansion, and the Consequences of the Failed Contract across Racial Lines

From the 1830s to the 1860s, conflicts between whites and Indians were a recurrent theme in cultural representations. As the enforcement of the 1830 Removal Act took place in the late 1830s, Indian tales and poems lamenting the predicament of the “vanishing American” appeared frequently in popular magazines. A generation later many Beadle and Adams dime novels also featured violent encounters between whites and Indians as the clash between white settlers and Indians continued to intensify after the removal era due to westward expansion after the U.S.-Mexican War. While the figuration of different racial others in relation to U.S. national identity varies in different periods, the Indian was particularly important in shaping the emergence of U.S. national identity, most notably perhaps in the republican era when the U.S. struggled to define itself and expanded its territory (Rogin 4). During this period, the Indian functioned as an important icon…

Read or purchase the article here.

The enduring function of caste: colonial and modern Haiti, Jamaica, and Brazil The economy of race, the social organization of caste, and the formulation of racial societies

Comparative American Studies
Volume 2, Issue 1 (01 March 2004)
pages 61-73
DOI: 10.1177/1477570004041288

Tekla Ali Johnson, Professional Public Historian
Southern Preservation Center in Charlotte, North Carolina

Modern day social hierarchies in Jamaica, Brazil and, to a degree, Haiti find their roots in the colonial context, where planters stratified laborers in order to maximize control. During slavery planters found artificial ways of influencing African identity, dividing enslaved Africans by their occupations and by skin color. These distinctions created divisions among workers and color proved a singularly powerful and enduring symbol of social and economic mobility. The American propensity for creating racial classifications for Africans and further divisions for ‘mixed-race’ offspring traditionally served economic interests. Their perpetuation into the present may signal the continued utility of dividing Africans into subgroups as a means of maintaining control of racial politics in the Americas.

Read or purchase the article here.

Mixed but not matched: Being mixed-race in America

The Daily Evergreen
Washington State University
Pullman, Washington
2016-01-21

Sophia Stephens, Evergreen columnist

The experience of being a mixed-race person in America can be described in one word – mixed.

Depending on how a mixed-race person looks and is perceived, the experience of being an ethnic or racially mixed person can vary the scope of a sociopolitical spectrum as broadly as one who identifies and is perceived as being mono-racial.

Race is a biological fantasy, but a social reality that affects the life experiences of millions of people every day in varying ways. There are some voices that dominate the conversation, some others that are beginning to gain traction, and others that are barely being heard at all or are being denied the opportunity to speak on their experiences…

…”For a long time I struggled with the fact that I wasn’t just one race,” said WSU junior Victoria-Pearl Young. “(I am) Native American (Choctaw and Comanche Nations), Chinese, French and black. This is incredibly difficult because my cultural experience as an Afro-Latina, specifically Afro-Boricua, living in America gets discredited simply because I don’t look like what people expect. I constantly have to prove myself racially and culturally. Here at WSU, most of my peers just assumed I was completely Black simply because of my appearance, and that really used to bother me until I learned more about my history as a black individual.”…

Read the entire article here.

Trans-racial Mothering: Double-Edged Privilege

Journal of Social Distress and the Homeless
Volume 17, Issue 1-2 (01 February 2008)
pages 8-36
DOI: 10.1179/sdh.2008.17.1-2.8

Martha Satz, Assistant Professor of English
Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas

In this essay, the white adoptive mother of two bi-racial children reflects upon her thirty year experience of parenting to make several philosophical claims. She argues that through the unique mother-child bond, trans-racial mothering may produce knowledge of others’ experience that crosses the racial divide. She claims that in this way trans-racial mothering produces epistemic and ethical privileges that may give the mother an advantaged position in public dialogue. Yet, paradoxically, in light of this epistemological transformation, highlighting the works of Black legal scholars and theoreticians, she argues against the general practice of trans-racial adoption of which she is the beneficiary.

Read or purchase the article here.

Jeff Chang in conversation with Adam Mansbach

Kepler’s Books
1010 El Camino Real
Menlo Park, California 94025-4349
Tuesday, 2015-01-26, 19:30 PST (Local Time)

It’s hard to express just how cool and important Who We Be is with words alone. Jeff seems to share this sentiment when it comes to a cultural history of the idea of racial progress because Who We Be remixes comic strips and contemporary art, campus protests and corporate marketing campaigns, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Trayvon Martin.

Now you can join the conversation too: How do Americans see race now? How has that changed – and not changed – over the half-century? After eras framed by words like “multicultural” and “post-racial,” do we see each other anymore clearly? Join us for a timely discussion with journalist, music critic, and Executive Director of the Institute for Diversity in the Arts at Stanford University, Jeff Chang. He will be interviewed by the author of Go the F**k to Sleep, Adam Mansbach, to celebrate the paperback release of Who We Be.

Jeff Chang co-founded and ran the indie hip hop label, then known as SoleSides, but now known as Quannum Projects, and helped launch the careers of DJ Shadow, Blackalicious, Lyrics Born, and Lateef the Truth Speaker. The anti-apartheid and the anti-racist movement at UC Berkeley politicized Chang and he worked as a community laborer and student organizer; Chang was an organizer of the inaugural National Hip-Hop Political Convention. In 2007 Chang interviewed Barack Obama, for the cover of Vibe Magazine. He’s the author of Can’t Stop Won’t Stop and has written for The Nation, the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, The Believer, Foreign Policy, Salon, Slate, and Buzzfeed, among others.

Adam Mansbach is the author of Angry Black White Boy, a San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of 2005 and The End of the Jews (for which he won the California Book Award for fiction in 2008). Mansbach was the founding editor of the 1990s hip-hop journal Elementary. He lives in Berkeley and co-hosts a radio show, “Father Figures.”…

For more information and to RSVP, click here.

What is the Defining Divide? False Post-Racial Dogmas and the Biblical Affirmation of “Race”

Black Theology
Volume 13, Issue 2 (August, 2015)
pages 166-188
DOI: 10.1179/1476994815Z.00000000054

Kumar Rajagopalan
London Baptist Association, London, United Kingdom

This essay offers a critical reflection on the challenges of addressing the concept of “race,” and whether there is a post-racial era in which we are presently living. The essay demonstrates the interconnected nature of “race,” as forming the destructive underpinning for the oppressive frameworks that have given rise to slavery, colonialism, caste discrimination, and economic exploitation. The essay proposes an interdisciplinary, practical theological approach to uncovering the often concealed ways in which racism and White privilege function in many Western democratic societies and within the Church.

Read or purchase the article here.

Obama as Text: The Crisis of Double-Consciousness

Comparative American Studies
Volume 10, Issue 2/3 (August 2012)
pages 211-225
DOI: 10.1179/1477570012Z.00000000016

Simon Gikandi, Robert Schirmer Professor of English
Princeton University

The argument of this essay is that given the unique circumstances of his life, including his location in multiple spaces of cultural identity, Obama is an indeterminate signifier. To textualize Obama, we must account for how the narrative of his life is structured by need and demand as he tries to comprehend his own location and dislocation in American culture and to give meaning to the gap between the idea of what he is and what others assume him to be. In this regard, Obama is probably the quintessential subject of what W. E. B. Du Bois famously described as ‘double-consciousness’.

Read or purchase the article here.

Shapes & Disfigurements of Ramond Antrobus

Burning Eye Books
2013-11-03
36 pages
12.9 x 0.3 x 19.8 cm
Paperback ISBN: 978-1909136076

Raymond Antrobus

This third book in the Burning Eye pamphlet series (following Sally Jenkinson’s Sweat-borne Secrets and Mairi Campbell-Jack’s This Is A Poem…) presents Raymond Antrobus, a poet from Hackney with a talent for plucking poetry from the mouths of ordinary people. Whether a strawberry seller in Sweden, a homeless man on a London street or a taxi driver in South Africa, Raymond channels their voices through his own. This is the work of a confident young poet with an exceptional ear for language.