Mixed Race Studies

The Masters and the Slaves: Plantation Relations and Mestizaje in American Imaginaries

Palgrave Macmillan
January 2005
176 pages
Size 5 1/2 x 8 1/4
Paperback ISBN: 1-4039-6708-3
Hardcover ISBN: 1-4039-6563-3

Edited by:

Alexandra Isfahani-Hammond, Assistant Professor of Luso-Brazilian Literature
University of California, San Diego

The Masters and the Slaves theorizes the interface of plantation relations with nationalist projects throughout the Americas. In readings that cover a wide range of genres–from essays and scientific writing to poetry, memoirs and the visual arts–this work investigates the post-slavery discourses of Brazil, the United States, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Haiti and Martinique. Indebted to Orlando Patterson‘s Slavery and Social Death (1982) and Paul Gilroy‘s The Black Atlantic (1993), these essays fill a void in studies of plantation power relations for their comparative, interdisciplinary approach and their investment in reading slavery through the gaze of contemporary theory, with particularly strong ties to psychoanalytic and gender studies interrogations of desire and performativity.

Table of contents

• Introduction
• The Sugar Daddy: Gilberto Freyre and the White Man’s Love for Blacks—César Braga-Pinto
• Writing Brazilian Culture—Alexandra Isfahani-Hammond
• Authority’s Double Shadow: Thomas Jefferson and the Architecture of Illegitimacy—Helena Holgersson
• Fixing History: Race, Nation, and the Symbolics of Servitude in Haitian Noirisme —Valerie Kaussen
• Fanon as ‘Metrocolonial’ Flaneur in the Caribbean Post-Plantation/Algerian Colonial City—Nalini Natarajan
• From the Tropics: Cultural Subjectivity and Politics in Gilberto Freyre—Jossiana Arroyo
• Hybridity and Mestizaje: Syncretism or Subversive Complicity—Ramón Grosfoguel
• Giants of Three Colors: A Writer and an Artist Imagine Racial Mixture in 1940s Brazil—Luiza Franco Moreira
• Messianic Melancholic Imagination: Imagine Community with the Dead—Shreerekha Subramanian

White Negritude: Race, Writing, and Brazilian Cultural Identity

Palgrave Macmillan
December 2007
208 pages
Size 5 1/2 x 8 1/4
Hardcover ISBN: 1-4039-7595-7

Alexandra Isfahani-Hammond, Associate Professor of Luso-Brazilian Literature
University of California, San Diego

White Negritude analyzes the discourse of mestiçagem (mestizaje, métissage, or “mixing”) in Brazil. Focused on Gilberto Freyre‘s sociology of plantation relations, it interrogates the relation of power to writing and canon formation, and the emergence of an exclusionary, ethnographic discourse that situates itself as the gatekeeper of African “survivals” in decline. Taking Freyre’s master/slave paradigm as a point of departure for theorizing a particular form of racial and authorial impostery, this book analyzes the construction of race and raced writing in Brazil in relation to U.S. identity politics and Caribbean “mestizo projects.”

Table of Contents

• Vanishing Primitives: An Introduction
• Poetry and the Plantation: Jorge de Lima‘s White Authorship in a Caribbean Perspective
• White Man in the Tropics: Authorship and Atmospheric Blackness in Gilberto Freyre
• Joaquim Nabuco: Abolitionism and Erasure in the Americas
• From the Plantation Manor to the Sociologist’s Study: Democracy, Lusotropicalism, and the Scene of Writing

Uma Mulata, Sim!: Araci Cortes, ‘the mulatta’ of the Teatro de Revista

Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory
Volume 16, Issue 1 (March 2006)
pages 7-26
DOI: 10.1080/07407700500514996

Judith Michelle Williams, Professor of African and African-American Studies
University of Kansas

Araci Cortes, a mulata assumida, rose to be one of the most successful performers in Rio de Janeiro‘s teatro de revista (revue theatre) during the 1920s and 1930s. In this essay I place her career in the context of the Afro-Brazilian artists of her generation and evaluate how her embodiment of the Brazilian mulata on and off the stage interacted with the emerging discourse of Brazil as a mulatto nation. Lauded for her distinct Brazilianness and criticized for her petulant and uncompromising personality, Cortes excelled as a singer, dancer and comic actress, most often portraying the mulatta roles that before her fame were enacted by white actresses. Cortes is a complicated figure who was able to exploit the narratives and stereotypes that surrounded her mixed-race body and gain, fame, fortune and success. Although rather than leave behind her Afro-Brazilian connections she maintained relationships with even the most militant of Brazilian blacks she spoke about race only in the vague terms of her era. Yet through her emblematic performances she reconfigured ideas of gender and race in Brazil. She provides an example of how Afro-Brazilians have used performance to create an alternative discourse of race in Brazil.

Read or purchase the article here.

Indians and Mestizos: Identity and Urban Popular Culture in Andean Peru

Journal of Southern African Studies
Volume 26, Issue 2 (June 2000)
pages 239 – 253
DOI: 10.1080/03057070050010093

Fiona Wilson

The article begins with a discussion of the chronology of conquest and liberation in Peru and reflects on the changing meanings given to the racial categories of Indian and mestizo (half-caste) in colonial and post-colonial periods. Using popular culture as a lens, the transformations taking place in images of race and urban social identities are analysed, using as a case study a provincial town in the Andean highlands in the course of the twentieth century. Through changing forms of street theatre urban groups worked out new identities by weaving together, juxtaposing and contesting different cultural forms. The article explores in detail two manifestations of street theatre that predominated. These are the Dance of the Inca in the 1900s that addressed Indian/white relations, and carnaval where relations between mestizo and white were played out for much of the twentieth century.

Read or purchase the article here.

Biracial (Black/White) Women: A Qualitative Study of Racial Attitudes and Beliefs and Their Implications for Therapy

Women & Therapy
Volume 27, Issue 1 & 2 (January 2004)
pages 45 – 64
DOI: 10.1300/J015v27n01_04

Tamara R. Buckley, Associate Professor of Counseling
Hunter College, City University of New York

Carter T. Robert, Professor of Psychology and Education
Department of Counseling and Clinical Psychology
Teachers College, Columbia University

This study examined racial attitudes and beliefs in five biracial (Black/White) women. Participants completed three one-hour semistructured interviews designed to explore the impact of race on psychosocial development and psychological functioning from early childhood through the adult years. Results of thematic analyses and implications for clinical practice are presented.

Read or purchase the article here.

Slave Mothers and White Fathers: Defining Family and Status in Late Colonial Cuba

Slavery & Abolition
Volume 31, Issue 1 (March 2010)
pages 29-55
DOI: 10.1080/01440390903481647

Karen Y. Morrison, Assistant Professor of Afro-American Studies
University of Massachusetts, Amherst

This paper outlines the mechanisms used to position the offspring of slave women and white men at various points within late nineteenth-century Cuba’s racial hierarchy. The reproductive choices available to these parents allowed for small, but significant, transformations to the existing patterns of race and challenged the social separation that typically under girded African slavery in the Americas. As white men mated with black and mulatta women, they were critical agents in the initial determination of their children’s status-as slave, free, mulatto, or even white. This definitional flexibility fostered an unintended corruption of the very meaning of whiteness. Similarly, through mating with white men, enslaved women exercised a degree of procreative choice, despite their subjugated condition. In acknowledging the range of rape, concubinage, and marriage exercised between slave women and white men, this paper highlights the important links between reproductive practices and the social construction of race.

Read or purchase the article here.

The Pacific Sociological Association Annual Meeting 2010

81st Annual PSA Meeting
2010-04-08 through 2010-04-11
Marriott Oakland City Center
Oakland, California

Theme: Revitalizing the Sociological Imagination: Individual Troubles & Social Issues in a Turbulent World

Selected programs from the Preliminary Program Guide include:

Friday, 2010-04-09, 12:00-13:10 PDT (Local Time)

86) Roundtables

Table 3: Mixed Race & Identity: The Social Construction of Race
Organizers: Michael McKail & Joanna Norton, UCR [University of California, Riverside]
Krystale Littlejohn, Stanford Univ.: Interracial Dating & Endogamy among Mixed race Youth in the U.S.
Charlene Johnson, Univ. of New Mexico: “Brokers” of Culture: Hearing Children of Deaf Adults at the Interchange of Ethnic Identity

Saturday, 2010-04-10, 15:30-17:00 PDT (Local Time)

192) Multi-Racial & Multi-Ethnic Identity: Contemporary Trends in Research
Organizer: Shigueru Tshua, UCR & Reginald Daniel, UCSB
Adam Louis Horowitz, Stanford Univ.: Don’t Hate on the Halfies: Religious Identity Formation Among Children of Inter-Religious Couples
Shigueru, Tshua, UCR: The Stacked Bar Model of Ethnic Identity: Peruvian Nikkei’s Shifting Identities from Peru to California
Rebecca Romo, UCSB: Between Black & Brown: Blaxican Identity in the United States
Reginald Daniel, UCSB: Hypocritical Hybridity & the Critical Difference: Postraciality in the Age of Obama

Sunday, 2010-04-11, 11:15-11:45 PDT (Local Time)

220) Minority Experiences
Organizer: Aya Kimura Ida, CSU Sacramento
Sabeen Sandhu, Santa Clara Univ.: Migration & Medical Degrees: U.S. Born Foreign Medical Graduates
Sarah Schlabach, UCLA: Family, Race & Gender: What Does It Mean To Be Multiracial?
Aya Kimura Ida, CSU Sacramento: Coping with Discrimination: Role of Self-Esteem for African Americans, Caribbean Americans & European Americans

For more information, click here.

Census Chief Apologizes for ‘Negro’ Category

The New York Times
2010-03-26

Kate Phillips

When Robert Groves, the director of the Census Bureau, appeared on C-Span’s “Washington Journal” program Friday morning, he found himself having to defend the racial designations on the census form…

Read the entire article here.

The Meaning of Style: Black British Style, and the underlying political and social environment

New Art Exchange
Nottingham, England
2010-01-16 through 2010-04-10
Monday to Friday 10:00-19:00 BT; Saturday 10:00-17:00 BT
Admission:  Free

Artists:

Vanley Burke (Photography)
Clement Cooper (Photography) [Includes a selection of prints from the DEEP Project]
Michael Forbes (Photography)
Gerard Hanson (Painting / Photography)
Barbara Walker (Painting / Drawing)
 
Curated By:

David Schischka Thomas

New Art Exchange presents an exhibition exploring the presence of young African Caribbean men in Britain over the last 40 years, and how Black music, fashion and culture have influenced mainstream society.

Young African Caribbean men have often been portrayed as low achievers and perpetrators of crime in British society. But now, with Barack Obama winning the presidency of the biggest superpower in the world, will we see these same young men portrayed in a different light; as a source of huge potential for the future? Will the achievement of black youth in Britain over the last 40 years be recognised and honoured?

Read the complete description here.

Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS)

The Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) consists of fifty-nine high-precision samples of the American population drawn from fifteen federal censuses, from the American Community Surveys of 2000-2007, and from the Puerto Rican Community Surveys of 2005-2007. Some of these samples have existed for years, and others were created specifically for this database. These samples collectively constitute our richest source of quantitative information on long-term changes in the American population. However, because different investigators created these samples at different times, they employed a wide variety of record layouts, coding schemes, and documentation. This has complicated efforts to use them to study change over time. The IPUMS assigns uniform codes across all the samples and brings relevant documentation into a coherent form to facilitate analysis of social and economic change.

For more information, click here.