Mixed Race Studies

Racial Passing in America

Yale University Press Blog
2019-11-04

Adele Logan Alexander, Emeritus Professor of History
George Washington University, Washington, D.C.

Over the years, the practice of “passing” for white has variously been considered wicked, cowardly, deceptive, essential, all or none of the above by much of the African American community. Certainly, it was and is controversial.

In years, decades, and centuries past, a number of light-skinned African Americans “passed,” either briefly, permanently, or situationally. Their stories are legion. This certainly has been the case for several members of my own family…

…But there are alternative stories too. In the Jim Crow South, my light-skinned grandmother sometimes wore a raceless mask to attend “all-white” suffrage conferences in the pre-Nineteenth Amendment years. Then she brought the information she gleaned back to share with her African American friends and peers who hoped to acquire the vote for women. On occasion, she also manipulated the racial apartheid system to acquire the best possible medical care for herself and her children. Would anyone argue with her choices in those instances?…

Read the entire article here.

Halfbreed

McClelland & Stewart (an imprint of Penguin Random House Canada)
2019-11-05
224 pages
Paperback ISBN: 9780771024092
EBook ISBN: 9780771024108

Maria Campbell

A new, fully restored edition of the essential Canadian classic.

An unflinchingly honest memoir of her experience as a Métis woman in Canada, Maria Campbell’s Halfbreed depicts the realities that she endured and, above all, overcame. Maria was born in Northern Saskatchewan, her father the grandson of a Scottish businessman and Métis woman—a niece of Gabriel Dumont whose family fought alongside Riel and Dumont in the 1885 Rebellion; her mother the daughter of a Cree woman and French-American man. This extraordinary account, originally published in 1973, bravely explores the poverty, oppression, alcoholism, addiction, and tragedy Maria endured throughout her childhood and into her early adult life, underscored by living in the margins of a country pervaded by hatred, discrimination, and mistrust. Laced with spare moments of love and joy, this is a memoir of family ties and finding an identity in a heritage that is neither wholly Indigenous or Anglo; of strength and resilience; of indominatable spirit.

This edition of Halfbreed includes a new introduction written by Indigenous (Métis) scholar Dr. Kim Anderson detailing the extraordinary work that Maria has been doing since its original publication 46 years ago, and an afterword by the author looking at what has changed, and also what has not, for Indigenous people in Canada today. Restored are the recently discovered missing pages from the original text of this groundbreaking and significant work.

New Hampshire: Beyond Black & White

Black Heritage Trail of New Hampshire
2019-2020 Elinor Williams Hooker Expanded Tea Talk Series
Keene State College
Young Student Center
Mountain View Room
229 Main Street
Keene, New Hampshire 03435
Sunday, 2019-11-10, 14:00 EST

Contact information:
JerriAnne Boggis, Executive Director
603-570-8469

Panelists: David Watters, Darrell Hucks, & (TBA)
Moderator: Dottie Morris

Moving beyond rigid racial identities, this talk will explore the contemporary as well as historic intersection between Black and Indigenous communities, the presence of “passing” mixed race individuals, and the most recent immigrant experience within a New England context. These complex interactions, connections conflicts, experiences, and resistant efforts of Black, white and multi-racial citizens will be explored through scholarly research and an analysis of the film Lost Boundaries.

For more information, click here.

Interview 01: Charise Sowells

Caffeinated Cinema
2019-10-31

Charise Sowells is a biracial singer-songwriter, scriptwriter, and filmmaker. As a New York University graduate, she has found acclaim in all her fields. Her work has led her to be praised by names such as NPR, San Francisco Weekly, and many more. Sowells’ scripts have been put up for the screen and the stage. Most currently, her newest play An Ocean In My Soul sold out the Santa Monica Playhouse, and she is raising funds to support an extended run. Additionally, her production company, #UNABASHT, enables her to find her place as an artist in her multitudes of creative pursuits. She kindly accepted to be interviewed on her experiences as an artist.

Q. You’re quite the jack of all trades–– from music to film. You’re an acclaimed songwriter, playwright, and you’ve worked in both film and television. Have you decided to continue in just one field or are you upholding them all and why?

A. There was definitely a period where you really needed to put yourself in a box or other people would do it for you. Since I’ve never been one to limit myself that way personally, I struggled with it career wise too. And that was the impetus behind me starting my company ten years ago, Unabashed Productions. Our motto is, “Don’t just think outside the box. Live there.”

#UNABASHT functions as a record label, an online store, a production company, and a publisher which allows me to release all my projects independently and switch gears as the muse moves me, without any hiccups. As the years have gone on, more people seem to be open to the idea that things aren’t so inflexible. In fact, the more you do, the better in some circumstances. So I’ve been embracing all my passions and letting things flow freely.,,

…Q. What was the inspiration for An Ocean In My Soul?

A. It’s two fold – I’m mixed myself and after struggling with my identity throughout my youth, I joined a group in high school that traveled around the U.S. and Canada raising awareness about race as a social construct and the concepts of systemic racism and white privilege. When I decided to study playwriting at NYU, I had hopes of expanding people’s horizons about experiences and characters not typically seen onstage or screen through my work. To better inform myself, I took classes about the African Diaspora. One of those classes introduced me to the idea of the Black Atlantic, a graveyard of African souls who died while crossing over to the Americas against their will and in horrendously inhumane conditions. That was the seed for this play…

Read the entire interview here.

Meaning, Without the White Gaze

The Atlantic
2019-08-07

Rebecca Carroll, Host
WNYC Radio, New York, New York

Kate Martin / The Atlantic

I’m writing my memoir for the late, great Toni Morrison.

I had been writing it for her. For her, and for Pecola Breedlove. Perhaps too ambitious or presumptuous or high-minded, I had, until the announcement of her death this week, been writing my memoir, Surviving the White Gaze, for Toni Morrison and Pecola Breedlove. Because I survived the white gaze for Pecola, and Morrison taught me how.

I knew Pecola first. I lived inside her skin, her ache; felt sickened, ashamed, and unseen by that baby doll’s dead blue eyes on one of the book’s early covers. Page after page of The Bluest Eye, I felt Pecola’s mind curl into anguish and succumb to a delusion better than reality. Pecola lost her mind because she wanted the blue eyes set inside the ceaseless standard of white beauty—a gaze so narcotic that it ravaged her body from flesh to bone—and I almost did, too.

I say that I knew Pecola first because Morrison’s writing of her was so thorough and fully realized that in my initial reading of The Bluest Eye, the character loomed larger than the author. This is what will happen to me, I remember thinking. If I keep internalizing the white gaze and contorting my own reflection in response to it, I will spiral into madness and still be seen as ugly…

Read the entire article here.

The Life and Times of a Very British Man

Bloomsbury
2019-05-02
352 pages
Integrated B&W photographs
198 x 129 mm
Paperback ISBN: 9781408889244

Kamal Ahmed, Editorial Director
BBC News, London

Kamal Ahmed’s childhood was very ‘British’ in every way – except for the fact that he was brown. Half English, half Sudanese, he was raised at a time when being mixed-race meant being told to go home, even when you were born just down the road.

Latin Blackness in Parisian Visual Culture, 1852-1932

Bloomsbury
2019-02-21
232 pages
9 colour and 37 bw illus
229 x 152 mm
Hardback 9781501332357

Lyneise E. Williams, Associate Professor of Art History
University of North Carolina

Latin Blackness in Parisian Visual Culture, 1852-1932 examines an understudied visual language used to portray Latin Americans in mid-19th to early 20th-century Parisian popular visual media. The term ‘Latinize’ is introduced to connect France’s early 19th-century endeavors to create “Latin America,” an expansion of the French empire into the Latin-language based Spanish and Portuguese Americas, to its perception of this population.

Latin-American elites traveler to Paris in the 1840s from their newly independent nations were denigrated in representations rather than depicted as equals in a developing global economy. Darkened skin, etched onto images of Latin Americans of European descent mitigated their ability to claim the privileges of their ancestral heritage. Whitened skin, among other codes, imposed on turn-of-the-20th-century Black Latin Americans in Paris tempered their Blackness and rendered them relatively assimilatable compared to colonial Africans, Blacks from the Caribbean, and African Americans.

After identifying mid-to-late 19th-century Latinizing codes, the study focuses on shifts in latinizing visuality between 1890-1933 in three case studies: the depictions of popular Cuban circus entertainer Chocolat; representations of Panamanian World Bantamweight Champion boxer Alfonso Teofilo Brown; and paintings of Black Uruguayans executed by Pedro Figari, a Uruguayan artist, during his residence in Paris between 1925-1933.

Table of contents

• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
  • The Term “Latin American”
  • Why Paris?
  • Much More Than Primitivism
  • Reduced to Latin Americans
  • Parisian Figurations of Blackness from the Mid-Nineteenth to the Early Twentieth Century
  • Overview of the Study
• Chapter 1: Playing Up Blackness and Indianness; Downplaying Europeanness
  • Editing Francisco Laso: Racializing Spanish and Portuguese Americans
  • Performing Rastaquerismo
  • Justified by Anthropology: Quatrefages, Hamy, and the Casta Paintings
  • Latin American Self-Representation
  • The Shifting Rastaquouère
  • Maintaining Anthropological Interpretations in the Early Twentieth Century
  • Conclusion
• Chapter 2: Chocolat the Clown: Not Just Black
  • Chocolat and Footit: Partners in Contrast
  • The Auguste Chocolat
  • The Give and Take of Chocolat and Footit
  • Chocolat and Footit at the Nouveau Cirque
  • Chocolat as Brand Image
  • Beneath the Surface
  • Chocolat as Mixed Animal
  • Chocolat the Contaminant
  • Impure Chocolat(e)
  • Chocolat, That Special Ingredient: The Racially Mixed Object of Desire
  • Complicating Notions of Minstrelsy
  • Lip Interventions
  • Representations Through Clothing
  • Sexualizing Black Dandies
  • Assimilating the Latin
  • Beyond the Circus
  • Chocolat, Object of Gay Desire
  • Chocolat and the Elite and the Virile
  • Conclusion
• Chapter 3: Alfonso Teofilo Brown: Agency and Impositions of Blackness and Europeanness
  • Sport and the Imagined Ideal Male Body
  • Black Boxers in Turn-of-the-Century France
  • Gangly Brown
  • The Purity and Hybridity of Gangly Brown
  • Brown the Gentleman
  • Images of Black Difference
  • Brown the Philanthropist
  • Conclusion
• Chapter 4: Figari’s Blacks: Negotiating French and Southern Cone Blackness
  • Figari and Paris
  • Contested Whiteness and the Black Body
  • Conceptualizing Regional Identity
  • Through the Anthropological Gaze
  • Candombe as Framing Device
  • Gender and Race in Candombe
  • Objects as Markers
  • Figari as “Naïf” Painter
  • Increasing Latin American Presence in Paris
  • Perceptions of Black Uruguayans
  • Figari’s Evolution in Paris
  • Contradictions and Contrasts between Figari’s Paintings and Written Work
  • Conclusion
• Coda
• Select Bibliography

Seeking Participants for Studies on Stereotyping and Romantic Partner Choices

University of Massachusetts, Lowell
2019-11-03

Rianna M. Grissom, Ph.D. Candidate and Research Assistant
Applied Psychology and Prevention Science Program

Hello! I’m a researcher recruiting people for two different studies on intergroup relations. Study 1 examines modern racial stereotypes in the United States and Study 2 investigates personal and societal factors that influence our romantic choices.

Participating in both studies will take approximately 30 minutes, but is not required. You have the option of completing one study of your choice as well.

Anyone 18 years or older who is living in the U.S. can participate, regardless of race or relationship status. There is no compensation for participating in these studies. However, your contribution will help us better understand current race relations in the U.S., which includes the growing multiracial population.

To participate in the surveys, click here.

P.S. We are especially in need of more male and racial minority participants. Please consider sharing the link with your networks!

Mulata Nation: Visualizing Race and Gender in Cuba by Alison Fraunhar (review)

The Americas
Volume 76, Number 4, October 2019
pages 727-728

Mey-Yen Moriuchi, Assistant Professor of Art History
LaSalle University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Mulata Nation: Visualizing Race and Gender in Cuba. By Alison Fraunhar. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2018. Pp. 262. $70.00. Cloth.

Alison Fraunhar discerningly examines how the mulata has been represented and performed in Cuban visual culture from the nineteenth century to the present. She analyzes a variety of visual media, from prints and paintings to film and photography, to demonstrate how the identity and stereotypes of the mulata developed within popular culture and the national imagination.

Considered a bridge between European subject and African other, the mulata was “European enough to be visible and beautiful to the white male subject, and African enough to be typologized as sexual, primitive, desirable, and available” (4). Invoking Antonio Benítez-Rojo’s notion of “The Repeating Island,” Homi Bhabha’s concept of colonial mimicry, Stuart Hall’s model of identity based on ambivalence, and Judith Butler’s performativity of identity, along with the work of other theorists, Fraunhar investigates how performance and representation of the mulata and mulataje (performativity of the mulata) are intertwined. The study is not focused on actual life experiences of mulatas but rather their visual representation across media.

Fraunhar begins her analysis through the lens of costumbrismo, a literary and artistic movement popular in Spain and the Americas that represented scenes and types from everyday life. The figure of the desirable mulata, though in existence since the seventeenth century, was cemented during the nineteenth century with costumbrismo. An interesting manifestation of this occurs in marquillas cigarreras, small chromolithographed papers in which cigarettes for the Cuban domestic market were bundled. In this fascinating medium, Fraunhar shows how marquillas served as sites of cubanidad (Cuban identity). Fraunhar argues that the images of mulatas on marquillas demonstrate colonial anxiety and the inability to clearly define racial, social, and spatial boundaries. Unfortunately, the images presented in this chapter were all misnumbered, disrupting the fluidity of the text.

Chapter 2 focuses on the performance of the mulata on the stages, dances, and streets of nineteenth-century Cuba. In popular theater, like teatro bufo and zarzuela, the mulata was one of several principal stock characters performed, along with the negrito (black boy) and the gallego (Spaniard). During this time, the connection between prostitution and mulataje became explicit, thus producing tension between the mulata as a symbol of the nation and desire. Several Cuban actresses found success outside of Cuba in Mexican cabaretera films, performing cultural and racial passing.

Chapter 3 considers the mulata as a sign of femininity, cosmopolitanism, and modernity. Fraunhar examines how the mulata was variously depicted on magazine covers and in avant-garde paintings by early twentieth-century artists such as Jaime Valls, Mario Carreño, Carlos Enríquez, and José Hurtado de Mendoza. Although an icon of modernity, representations of the mulata were still rooted in past tropes of desire and availability. After the revolution of 1959, women’s roles in society were debated as leaders struggled to redefine the nation.

In Chapter 4, Fraunhar investigates how the revolution sought to reform the mulata as a revolutionary citizen. Several Cuban films produced in the 1960s and 1970s have mulata protagonists, presented to showcase how Cuban revolutionary society was constructed upon utopian ideas of equality and community. The mulata became the “new (wo)man” of the revolution (157).

After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 and the beginning of the Período Especial, cultural production was disrupted, and economic crisis ensued. Cuba now positioned itself to foreign visitors as an exotic, nostalgic, tropical tourist destination. Mulatas resumed the role of the sensual, the desirable, and available body of the nation. The rise of jineterismo (hustling) and prostitution associated with the mulata became ubiquitous in Cuba in the 1990s, as did the emergence of drag and cross-gender performativity.

In Chapter 5, Fraunhar discusses the work of several photographers who capture the plight and agency of these mulata jinetera, gay, and trans performers.

A strength of this study is the wide range of popular visual culture that is included, though at times this means less in-depth analysis of specific…

Read or purchase the article here.

Mexican Costumbrismo: Race, Society, and Identity in Nineteenth-Century Art

Pennsylvania State University Press
2018
180 pages
8″ × 10″
31 color/29 b&w illustrations
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-271-07907-3

Mey-Yen Moriuchi, Assistant Professor of Art History
LaSalle University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

The years following Mexican independence in 1821 were critical to the development of social, racial, and national identities. The visual arts played a decisive role in this process of self-definition. Mexican Costumbrismo reorients current understanding of this key period in the history of Mexican art by focusing on a distinctive genre of painting that emerged between 1821 and 1890: costumbrismo.

In contrast to the neoclassical work favored by the Mexican academy, costumbrista artists portrayed the quotidian lives of the lower to middle classes, their clothes, food, dwellings, and occupations. Based on observations of similitude and difference, costumbrista imagery constructed stereotypes of behavioral and biological traits associated with distinct racial and social classes. In doing so, Mey-Yen Moriuchi argues, these works engaged with notions of universality and difference, contributed to the documentation and reification of social and racial types, and transformed the way Mexicans saw themselves, as well as how other nations saw them, during a time of rapid change for all aspects of national identity.

Carefully researched and featuring more than thirty full-color exemplary reproductions of period work, Moriuchi’s study is a provocative art-historical examination of costumbrismo’s lasting impact on Mexican identity and history.

Contents

• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Racialized Social Spaces in Casta and Costumbrista Painting
• 2. Traveler-Artists’ Visions of Mexico
• 3. Literary Costumbrismo: Celebration and Satire of los tipos populares
• 4. Local Perspectives: Mexican Costumbrista Artists
• 5. Costumbrista Photography
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index