Mixed Race Studies

Belonging to Britain

The Munk Centre for International Studies
University of Toronto
2008-11-14
Video Length: 00:46:36

Hazel V. Carby, Charles C. and Dorathea S. Dilley Professor of African American Studies
Yale University

In her lecture, “Belonging to Britain”, Hazel Carby looks at the historic relationship between England and Jamaica, including the history of the slave trade in Bristol and the complex question of identity for those of mixed British and West Indian heritage. Carby is a professor of African American Studies and American Studies at Yale University.

View the video here.

The Woman of Colour

Broadview Press
2007-01-01
268 pages
Paperback ISBN: 9781551111766 / 1551111764

Written by: Anonymous

Edited by:

Lyndon J. Dominique, Assistant Professor of English
Lehigh University, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania

The Woman of Colour is a unique literary account of a black heiress’ life immediately after the abolition of the British slave trade. Olivia Fairfield, the biracial heroine and orphaned daughter of a slaveholder, must travel from Jamaica to England, and as a condition of her father’s will either marry her Caucasian first cousin or become dependent on his mercenary elder brother and sister-in-law. As Olivia decides between these two conflicting possibilities, her letters recount her impressions of Britain and its inhabitants as only a black woman could record them. She gives scathing descriptions of London, Bristol, and the British, as well as progressive critiques of race, racism, and slavery. The narrative follows her life from the heights of her arranged marriage to its swift descent into annulment and destitution, only to culminate in her resurrection as a self-proclaimed “widow” who flouts the conventional marriage plot.

The appendices, which include contemporary reviews of the novel, historical documents on race and inheritance in Jamaica, and examples of other women of colour in early British prose fiction, will further inspire readers to rethink issues of race, gender, class, and empire from an African woman’s perspective.

Table of Contents:

Acknowledgements

Introduction

A Chronology of Women of Color in Drama and Long Prose Fiction

A Note on the Text

The Woman of Colour, A Tale

Appendix A: Lucy Peacock, “The Creole” (1786)

Appendix B: Anonymous Poem “written by a Mulatto Woman” (1794)

Appendix C: Minor Heiresses of Color in British Long Prose Fiction

1. From Agnes Musgrave, Solemn Injunction (1798)
2. From Jane Austen, Fragment of a Novel (1817)
3. From Edmund Marshall, Edmund and Eleonora: or Memoirs of the Houses of Summerfield and Gretton (1797)
4. From Robert Bissett, Douglas; or, The Highlander (1800)
5. From Mrs. Charles Mathews, Memoirs of a Scots Heiress (1791)

Appendix D: Historical and Social Accounts of People of Color in Jamaica

1. From Bryan Edwards, The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies (1799)
2. From Edward Long, The History of Jamaica (1774)
3. From J.B. Moreton, West India Customs and Manners (1793)

Appendix E: People of Color in British Epistolary Narratives

1. From Richard Griffith, The Gordian Knot (1769)
2. From Hester Thrale, “Letter to Mrs. Pennington” (1802)
3. From Clara Reeve, Plans of Education (1792)
4. John Wesley, “Letter to William Wilberforce” (1791)

Appendix F: The Woman of Colour: Contemporary Reviews

1. The British Critic (March 1810)
2. The Critical Review (May 1810)
3. The Monthly Review (June 1810)

Appendix G: Jamaican Petitions, Votes of the Assembly, and an Englishman’s Will

1. From Votes of the Honourable House of Assembly of Jamaica (1792)
2. From Andrew Wright’s “Last Will and Testament” (1806)

Racial Thinking in the United States: Uncompleted Independence

University of Notre Dame Press
2004
376 pages
Cloth ISBN 10: 0-268-04103-2
Cloth ISBN 13: 978-0-268-04103-8
Paper ISBN 10: 0-268-04104-0
Paper ISBN 13: 978-0-268-04104-5

Edited by:

Paul Spickard, Professor of 20th Century U.S. Social and Cultural History
University of California, Santa Barbara

G. Reginald Daniel, Professor of Sociology
University of California at Santa Barbara

Racial Thinking in the United States is a comprehensive reassessment of the ideas that Americans have had about race. This useful book draws on the skills and perspectives of nine scholars from the fields of history, sociology, theology, American studies, and ethnic studies. In thirteen carefully crafted essays they tell the history of the American system of racial domination and of twentieth-century challenges to that racial hierarchy, from monoracial movements to the multiracial movement.

The collection begins with an introduction to how Americans have thought about race, ethnicity, and colonialism. The first section of the book describes the founding of racial thinking in the United States along the racial binary of Black and White, and compares that system to the quite different system that developed in Jamaica. Section two describes anomalies in the racial binary, such as the experiences of people of mixed race, and of states such as Texas, California, and Hawai`i, where large groups of non-Black and White racial groups co-exist. Part three analyzes five monoracial challenges to racial hierarchy: the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, the Chicana/o movement, the Asian American movement, Afrocentricity, and the White studies movement. Part four explores the multiracial movement which developed in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, and assesses whether it constitutes a successful challenge to racial hierarchy and binary racial thinking.

Racial Thinking in the United States provides excellent summaries of historical events and cultural movements, as well as analysis and criticism. It will be a welcome text for undergraduate courses in ethnic studies and American history.

Contributors: Paul Spickard, G. Reginald Daniel, Stephen A. Small, Hanna Wallinger, Lori Anne Pierce, Ralph Armbruster-Sandoval, William Wei, Michael C. Thornton, and Zipporah G. Glass.