Mixed Race Studies

Transatlantic Obligations: Creating the Bonds of Family in Conquest-Era Peru and Spain

Oxford University Press
2015-12-31
264 Pages
9 illus.
6-1/8 x 9-1/4 inches
Hardcover ISBN: 9780199768578
Paperback ISBN: 9780199768585

Jane E. Mangan, Professor of History and Latin American Studies
Davidson College, Davidson, North Carolina

• The first systematic study of families in sixteenth century Peru with a transatlantic focus
• Traces family obligations connecting Peru and Spain through dowries, bequests, legal powers, and letters

The sixteenth-century changes wrought by expansion of Spanish empire into Peru shaped the ways of being a family in colonial Peru. Even as migration, race mixture, and transculturation took place, family members fulfilled obligations to one another by adapting custom to a changing world. Family began to shift when, from the moment of their arrival in 1532, Spaniards were joined with elite indigenous women in political marriage-like alliances. Almost immediately, a generation of mestizos was born that challenged the hierarchies of colonial society. In response, the Spanish Crown began to promote the marriage of these men and the travel of Spanish women to Peru to promote good customs and even serve as surrogate parents. Other reactions came from wives in Spain who, abandoned by husbands, sought assistance to fulfill family duties. For indigenous families, the pressures of colonialism prompted migration to cities. By mid-century, the increase of Spanish migration to Peru changed the social landscape, but did not halt mixed-race marriages. The book posits that late sixteenth-century cities, specifically Lima and Arequipa, were host to indigenous and Spanish families but also to numerous ‘blended’ families borne of a process of mestizaje. In its final chapter, the legacies for the next generation reveal how Spanish fathers sometimes challenged law with custom and sentiment to establish inheritance plans for their children. By tracing family obligations connecting Peru and Spain through dowries, bequests, legal powers, and letters, Transatlantic Obligations presents a powerful call to rethink sixteenth-century definitions of family.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Matchmaking: Law, Language, and the Conquest-Era Family Tree
• Chapter 2: Removal: For the Love and Labor of Mixed-Race Children
• Chapter 3: Marriage: Vida Maridable in a Transatlantic Context
• Chapter 4: Journey: Family Strategies and the Transatlantic Voyage
• Chapter 5: Adaptation: Creating Custom in the Colonial Family
• Chapter 6: Legacy: Recognition, Inheritance, and Law on the Transatlantic Family Tree
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave: Written by Himself, Critical Edition

Yale University Press
2016-10-25
264 pages, 5 1/2 x 8 1/4
7 b/w illustrations
Paperback ISBN: 9780300204711

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895)

Edited by:

John R. McKivigan, Mary O’Brien Gibson Professor of History
Indiana University–Purdue University, Indianapolis

Peter P. Hinks

Heather L. Kaufman, Research Associate
The Douglass Papers

A new edition of one of the most influential literary documents in American and African American history

Ideal for coursework in American and African American history, this revised edition of Frederick Douglass’s memoir of his life as a slave in pre-Civil War Maryland incorporates a wide range of supplemental materials to enhance students’ understanding of slavery, abolitionism, and the role of race in American society. Offering readers a new appreciation of Douglass’s world, it includes documents relating to the slave narrative genre and to the later career of an essential figure in the nineteenth-century abolition movement.

It is probably doing a disservice to ourselves as Americans to oversimplify issues that cannot, by their very nature, be simple. I have shared examples of passing in America that demonstrate that this behavior is neither new nor unusual. Yes, the image of Rachel Dolezal has meaning. She is consciously constructing blackness with, I believe, integrity and good intentions. If images produce an impact, I believe that the center of all this spectacle around a young academic is the two white parents, estranged from their grown daughter, who publicly “outed” her.

Judy Phagan, “Passing in the Age of Rachel Dolezal, or Is Everyone Catfishing?,” Response: The Digital Journal of Popular Culture Scholarship, (November 2016). https://responsejournal.net/issue/article/passing-age-rachel-dolezal-or-everyone-catfishing.

Passing in the Age of Rachel Dolezal, or Is Everyone Catfishing?

Response: The Digital Journal of Popular Culture Scholarship
Issue One (November 2016)

Judy Phagan, Associate Professor of English
St. Joseph’s College, New York

Rachel Doležal

It was revealed in the New York Times and on national television in the summer of 2015 that Africana Studies professor and N.A.A.C.P. director of the Spokane chapter, Rachel Dolezal, had possibly falsified her ethnicity. She was subjected to national scrutiny and ridicule after it appeared she fabricated her own racial background. The Times also wondered if Rachel Dolezal would give up her “part-time teaching position in African American Studies at Eastern Washington University.” She did. It is fascinating to me that this little story garnered so much national attention. What ensued was a Swiftian tempest in a teapot in which pundits labeled Dolezal a “liar.” She was living as a black woman while her parents outed her as white. They even went on national television to show Rachel Dolezal’s baby pictures. The combination of white parents and a white little girl added up to one conclusion—that Dolezal was indeed white. It felt like everyone I knew that summer was angry at Dolezal. She seemed to be a white woman “passing” as an African American. Historically, passing was usually performed by African Americans light-skinned enough, often of mixed racial background, to “pass” as white. There are dozens of books on the topic by sociologists, psychologists, and historians. Passing is anything but new, as this paper will discuss. Passing, as a sociological phenomenon, is generally studied in terms of race, class, gender, sexual orientation and/or (dis)ability. Add the 21st century concern for our personal image (think Facebook) and the issue gets even muddier. We see reflected in television and film, Youtube, the blogosphere and the Twitterverse discussions of passing, although we may not immediately recognize it as such. This is no doubt a reflection of our American obsession with race, which has again hit the media (and our hearts) this summer of 2016. This paper will explore many facets of passing as the term is used in 2016 and demonstrate that passing is merely a part of one’s identity formation; it is not a crime…

Read the entire article here.