Mixed Race Studies

Making Race Count in the Census

New York University
King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center
53 Washington Square South
New York, New York 10012
Wednesday, 2014-09-17, 18:30-21:00 EDT (Local Time)

Are Hispanics becoming white? Are Latin@s a race? How can we account for race and ethnicity in ways that best represent our interests? Can a Census form really capture our social realities?

Join a distinguished panel of experts for a dialogue on race, Latin@s, and the U.S. Census.

• Angelo Falcón is president of the National Institute for Latino Policy (NiLP) and editor of its Network on Latino Issues.
• Zaire Zenit Dinzey-Flores is associate professor of sociology at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.
• Nicholas Jones is the Director of Race & Ethnic Research and Outreach of the Population Division at the U.S. Census Bureau.
• Nancy López is associate professor of sociology and director and co-founder of the Institute for the Study of “Race” and Social Justice at the University of New Mexico.
• Edward E. Telles teaches courses in race, ethnicity and immigration, with a special emphasis on Latin America and Latinos, at Princeton University.

“Making Race Count in the Census,” is part of the public programming leading up to our second transnational conference Afro-Latin@s Now: Race Counts! to be held in New York City on October 23-25, 2014.

To RSVP, click here.

Multiple (Eye)dentity Series: (1)ne Drop Rule w/ Yaba Blay

New York University
Kimmel Center for University Life
60 Washington Square Sout
Room 802
New York, New York 10012
Thursday, 2014-02-27, 17:00-21:00 EST (Local Time)

The Multiple (Eye)dentity Series is comprised of films, performances and speakers that showcase the ways in which art and media are platforms for creating dialogue, sharing personal narratives, exploring issues of identity and diversity, and encouraging activism and social change.

This session features Dr. Yaba Blay, creator of the (1)ne Drop Rule Project. Through this project, Dr. Blay, seeks to challenge narrow perceptions of Blackness as both an identity and lived reality. Featuring the perspectives of 58 contributors representing 25 different countries and countries of origin, and combining candid memoirs with simple, yet striking, portraiture, this multi-platform project provides living testimony to the diversity of Blackness. Although contributors use varying terms to self-identify, they all see themselves as part of the larger racial, cultural, and social group generally referred to and known as “Black.” They all have experienced having their identity called into question simply because they don’t fit neatly into the stereotypical “Black box” — dark skin, “kinky” hair, broad nose, full lips, etc. – and most have been asked “What are you?” or the more politically correct, “Where are you from?” numerous times by various people throughout their lives. It is through contributors’ lived experiences with and lived imaginings of Black identity that we are able to visualize multiple possibilities for Blackness above and beyond appearances.

Please stop by the 8th floor of the Kimmel Center to see a portion of the exhibit until mid March!

For more information, click here.

Race Based Medication BiDil and African Americans

New York University
2009-10-16

Ann Morning, Associate Professor of Sociology
New York University

Ann Morning, Assistant Professor of Sociology, discusses race-based medications.

Barack Obama and the Contest for Identity through Self-Representation: HIST-UA 413

New York University
Spring 2013

Jeffrey Sammons, Professor of History

This course will explore the life and career path of the nation’s first “black” president through a focus on his two autobiographies, which will be studied for their content, style, and grounding in the genre and relationship to select canonical texts of the more distant as well as recent past. The course also will pay close attention to representations by others of Obama by critics, supporters, and neutral commentators through a variety of media from books to film to television and radio to social media. As important as Obama is for his unprecendented political achievements, his multi-racial, multi-cultural, multi-national and multi-religious background and experience make him an ideal subject for exploring personal and group identity in a time of apparently increasing concern with Otherness.

Performance Studies: Interracialism: Performing Mixed Race (H42.2090)

New York University
Department of Social & Cultural Analysis: American Studies

This course will survey the emergent field of  ‘critical mixed race studies’ with a particular emphasis on the black experience in the Americas. How have people of African descent been alternately excluded from and incorporated into discourses of miscegenation and mestizaje? What role has performance played in the construction of racial categories like ‘the mulatto‘ and ‘the one-drop rule‘? How have black people sought to alternately challenge and exploit those constructions? Has the trope of ‘passing‘ helped preserve an essentialist concept of race amidst widespread racial mixing? Do recent developments around the performance of identity point toward a moment in black cultural politics that is leading us ‘beyond passing’? We will read broadly and interdisciplinarily, examining the law, politics, performance, visual culture, literature, critical theory, statistics, sociology, philosophy and anthropology as various sites in which interracialism has historically been staged.

IRISH-GA 1085: Black Irish Writing

Gluckman Ireland House
New York University
Spring 2010

This course examines the textual force-fields of similarity and difference in the writing of racial and ethnic identities in the Atlantic World.  It begins by considering works of Irish writers who engaged with Atlantic slavery and the sympathetic and testamentary discourses within abolitionism in the late 18th century; authors discussed include Hugh Mulligan, Mary Ledbetter, Edmund Burke, Thomas Brannigan, and Denis Driscoll.  The course then examines the over-lapping traces of radical and revolutionary memory in American slavery and in Irish politics, concentrating on the roles of Irish figures in the writings of Frederick Douglass and Black figures in the writings and speeches of Daniel O’Connell.  The mid-19th century explosion of writing about race and ethnicity following the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin will be explored in relation to the many imitations of Stowe’s novel that sought to explain post-famine Ireland.  The course then considers the proliferation of texts that sought to understand the antinomies of desire and prohibition surrounding persons of mixed race, reading works by Mayne Reid, Dion Boucicault, and Charles Chesnutt. Texts that convey the fusion of African-American and Irish cultural forms will be discussed, including Blackface, Minstrelsy, and Dance.  After consideration of the use of race in the development of anti-Irish caricature (via readings of English (Punch) and American (Thomas Nast and the Nativists) cartoonists), the course will conclude by looking at shared and divergent textual and political strategies in writers of the Irish and Harlem Renaissances, concentrating on the ambivalence of dialect writing (Finley Peter Dunne, John Synge, Paul Laurence Dunbar and Claude McKay), and the limits of modernist primitivism (Eugene O’Neill’s “The Emperor Jones”).  The course will conclude with a discussion of the politics of memory along and across the color line in contemporary Irish and American public life.  Primary readings will be supplemented by theoretical and critical texts, including works by Paul Gilroy, Ian Baucom, Eric Lott, Robert Young, Perry Curtis, Marx, Freud, and Foucault.

LATC-GA 2145 – Semester in Latin America: Brazilian Racial Democracy

New York University
Spring 2012

Sarah Sarzynski, Assistant Professor/Faculty Fellow of Latin American and Caribbean Studies

Racial democracy, or the myth of racial democracy, has been a dominant national narrative in Brazil throughout the twentieth century. Gilberto Freyre’s The Masters and the Slaves (1933) is often associated as the first articulation of “racial democracy.” Freyre argues that the benevolent nature of Brazilian slavery allowed for a racial democracy—that is, a society not based on racial divisions—to emerge through miscegenation. From the start, the national narrative of racial democracy drew comparisons between the Brazilian “racial paradise” and the segregated United States. The well-developed historiography on Brazilian racial democracy refutes Freyre’s arguments about the benevolent nature of Brazilian slavery and demonstrates how the narrative of racial democracy masks discrimination and racial inequality in Brazil. Yet, ideas attached to racial democracy have a remarkable persistence in Brazil even today, hindering the implementation of affirmative action policies and the recognition of indigenous peoples as national citizens.

The first part of this course focuses on contextualizing the development of racial democracy as a Brazilian national narrative. We examine the dominant racial ideologies and practices that preceded the idea of Brazil as a racial democracy during the Old Republic (1889-1930). Then, we turn to evaluating Freyre’s seminal work The Masters and the Slaves and how it turned into a political project of the Vargas Era (1930-45). We also analyze the challenges to racial democracy during this period by reading about black social movements and intellectuals, and resistance to national indigenous policies. Course readings include theoretical texts on democracy to position various meanings of racial democracy. The second part of the course traces developments and challenges to Brazilian racial democracy from 1945-1985. Themes include how racial democracy intersects with gender/ sexuality, modernization policies, groups excluded from the national mixed-race type, authoritarian rule, and mass culture/popular culture. The final section of the course shifts to contemporary issues of affirmative action and other racially based policies and resistance in popular culture. We focus on the persistence of notions attached to racial democracy and question how the national narrative has changed over time.

The course draws from interdisciplinary texts and sources including scholarly analyses in literary criticism, history and anthropology; archival documents such as Brazilian and US newspapers; film and popular culture; and, novels. Portuguese is not required.

Colloquium – Mónica Moreno Figueroa on “Naming Ourselves: Recognising Racism and Mestizaje in Mexico”

Auditorium of King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center
New York University
53 Washington Square South
New York, New York
Monday, 2011-09-12, 18:00-20:00 EDT (Local Time)

Mónica Moreno Figueroa, Lecturer in Sociology
Newcastle University

Discussant: Frances Negrón-Muntaner

Hosted by the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CLACS) at NYU

Mónica Moreno Figueroa is a Lecturer in Sociology at Newcastle University, UK in the School of Geography, Politics and Sociology. Her research is concerned with the contemporary practices of racism in relation to discourses of mixed-race identities, feminist theory and emotions, with a specific focus on Mexico. In particular, she is interested in the qualities of the lived experience of racism; the significance of racial ideologies and notions of race and nation; and the experience of racism analysed from the particular perspective of the visible, specifically the relationship between visual representations of identities, embodiment and racist practices. She teaches extensively on these topics. Mónica has published in Ethnicities, History of the Human Sciences, Journal of Intercultural Studies and the Journal for Cultural Research as well as in the edited collections Raza, Etnicidad y Sexualidades (Universidad Nacional de Colombia), Porn.Com (Peter Lang Publishing Group) and Mestizaje, Diferencia y Nación (INAH, UNAM, CEMCA and IRD), and has two forthcoming chapters in Contesting Recognition (Palgrave) and Cultures of Colour (Berghahn Books).

Drawing from empirical research on contemporary practices of racism and understandings of the discourse of mestizaje, this paper presents an examination of the ambiguities of Mestiza identity as an unproblematised but racialised identity. Mestiza is a racial category that emerges as a key component of the ideological myth of formation of the Mexican nation, namely mestizaje, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In such a project of state formation Mexican is equivalent to Mestiza. Mestiza refers to those who represent Mexicaness and, therefore, those who are closer to the model of the ideal subjects of the Mexican Mestiza nation. Mestizaje, as this ideological framework, boosts an implied rhetoric of inclusiveness while concealing processes of exclusion and racism. Mestiza is then seen as term both relatively ‘neutral’ (i.e. all Mexicans are Mestizas/os) but also as highly ‘loaded’ (implies possibilities of inclusion and exclusion to the national myth). This analysis considers the limits of racial recognition in what could be considered a raceless (Goldberg 2002) context. Such setting has given way to a process of racial and racist normalization that allows Mexican people to express and be convinced by the commonly spread idea that in Mexico there is no racism because we are all ‘mixed’. Mexicans do not recognise themselves as racial subjects, but as national subjects and citizens. In this scenario, recognition of racism is not preceded by the explicit claim of belonging to the specific Mestiza racial identity but a citizenship status.

The title for the CLACS Fall 2011 Colloquium Series is Contemporary Racisms in the Americas. This colloquium will explore emergent racisms in the Americas as integral to the multicultural and what some have called “post racial” present defined within larger processes of economic and cultural globalization and transnational migration. It will also deepen the understanding of different theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of contemporary forms of racism as major obstacles to the construction of intercultural relations, racial and economic justice, and democracy. In this way, it will complement the themes covered by the seminar on Racisms and anti-racist strategies in the Americas. It will become an opportunity for students to benefit from latest contributions to the analysis of racism in the hemisphere and develop a thematic and methodological comparative perspective. It will also become an opportunity for a larger audience to benefit from the information and analysis of cutting-edge scholarship which is also preoccupied with the construction of anti-racist strategies.

For more information, click here.

From the “half-breed” to the “tragic mulatto”: The race integration film in the fifties and the struggle for social equality

New York University
May 2007
435 pages
Publication Number: AAT 3269779
ISBN: 9780549099536

Ryan Daniel DeRosa, Assistant Professor of Film Studies
Ohio University

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Cinema Studies New York University

This dissertation connects Hollywood “integration films” of the 1950s to the modern civil rights movement and to “liberal” racial ideologies. We use the historiography of Foucault to exhume correspondences between political and popular representations of racial-national identity and of integration, following changes in the formation of ideas empowering racial liberalism. We place film interactively alongside Supreme Court rulings and Congressional debates around race integration, contemporaneously published works of history and sociology, and the “memory” of slavery and Reconstruction as displayed in the wider culture.

In films centering a protagonist who is racially or culturally “mixed,” we examine a change in discourse surrounding racial integration. In the early fifties—from the social problem film such as No Way Out (1950) to the pro-Indian western such as Broken Arrow (1950) and Broken Lance (1954)—motion pictures employ a framework of the melting pot, or cultural assimilation, to represent integration. This signifies national support for racial progress yet also, by using terms of “culture” to repress terms of “class,” suggests widespread resistance to imagining and ensuring needed change in the racial-social structure of society. In the later fifties, a different logic–based on cultural pluralism—represents integration, often in films making miscegenation or racial mixing problematic. Movies such as The Searchers (1956) and Imitation of Life (1959) construct an imagined “right” to protect white status as a “culture,” or “racial cultural” boundaries that would oppose our political knowledge of race and class struggle.

Further, we connect seminal liberal representations of race in the fifties to ideological positions today that efface the persistence of segregation—or that would represent poverty but do not advance a social remedy for it. This dissertation would challenge liberalism to speak not just for passive racial “progress,” for “rationalism” and for the individual, but moreover for the rights of the poor and working class to equal social resources, rights that interact with and would advance racial equality.

Table of Contents

• DEDICATION
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• ABSTRACT
• INTRODUCTION The Fifties Integration Film and the Limits of Racial Liberalism
  • 1. The Integration Film and the Melting Pot
  • 2. The Fifties Western and Historiography
  • 3. Gunnar Myrdal and Racial Liberalism
• CHAPTER I “I Thought You Were Worried about Being an Indian”: Broken Lance, Brown v. Board of Ed, and Integration Discourse
  • 1. Discourses of Psychology, Integration, and Culture
  • 2. Integration Discourse
  • 1. Discourses of Psychology, Integration, and Culture
  • 2. Integration Discourse
  • 3. Oscar Handlin and the Melting Pot
  • 4. Broken Lance, Integration, and the Status of White Patriarchy
  • 5. Conclusion: Brown’s Lost Justification
• CHAPTER II From Social Problems to Cultural Relations: No Way Out, Broken Arrow, and “Melting Pot” Liberalism
  • 1. The Melting Pot and the Pro-Indian Western
  • 2. To Discover and Unite America: The Sociology of the Melting Pot
  • 3. Reading Culture in Broken Arrow
  • 4. Segregation with Assimilation: Pinky
  • 5. No Way Out and the Return of Class Conflict
  • 6. The Radical Sociology of Oliver C. Cox
  • 7. Conclusion: Ideological Opportunities for Integration
• CHAPTER III The Searchers, the Civil Rights Act of 1957, and the Ideology of Cultural Rights
  • 1. Cultural Rights and Debbie’s Choice
  • 2. The Searchers, Ambiguity and Historical Investigation
  • 3. Relations in the Film
  • 4. American Judaism and Integration Fears
  • 5. The Searchers and the Civil Rights Act of 1957
  • 6. Conclusion: Cultural Rights and History
• CHAPTER IV “You Weren’t Being Colored”: Imitation of Life, Cultural Pluralism, and the Struggle for Social Equality
  • 1. Introduction: “Radical Ambiguity” and Imitation of Life
  • 2. Melodrama and Changing Gender Relations
  • 3. Melodrama, Realism, and Race
  • 4 Imitation in the 1930s: “Mammy” and the New Deal
  • 5. Imitation and Slavery
  • 6. “Mammy” and Melodrama
  • 7. Elkins and a New Pluralism
  • 8. Imitation’s Dual/Dueling Aesthetics
  • 9. Conclusion: “The Other Nation”
• CONCLUSION The Representation of Poverty and the Veil over Culture
  • 1. Looking Forward
  • 2. The “Tragic Mulatto” in the Western, 1960
  • 3. Affirmative Action and Struggle over Diversity
  • 4. The Representation of Poverty
  • 5. Culture as Social Struggle
• BIBLIOGRAPHY

Order the dissertation here.