Mixed Race Studies

Racial Classification and History

Routledge
1997-02-01
376 pages
Hardback ISBN: 978-0-8153-2602-1

Edited by

E. Nathaniel Gates (1955-2006)
Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law
Yeshiva University

Explores the concept of “race”

The term “race,” which originally denoted genealogical or class identity, has in the comparatively brief span of 300 years taken on an entirely new meaning. In the wake of the Enlightenment it came to be applied to social groups. This ideological transformation coupled with a dogmatic insistence that the groups so designated were natural, and not socially created, gave birth to the modern notion of “races” as genetically distinct entities. The results of this view were the encoding of “race” and “racial” hierarchies in law, literature, and culture.

How “racial” categories facilitate social control

The articles in the series demonstrate that the classification of humans according to selected physical characteristics was an arbitrary decision that was not based on valid scientific method. They also examine the impact of colonialism on the propagation of the concept and note that “racial” categorization is a powerful social force that is often used to promote the interests of dominant social groups. Finally, the collection surveys how laws based on “race” have been enacted around the world to deny power to minority groups.

A multidisciplinary resource

This collection of outstanding articles brings multiple perspectives to bear on race theory and draws on a wider ranger of periodicals than even the largest library usually holds. Even if all the articles were available on campus, chances are that a student would have to track them down in several libraries and microfilm collections. Providing, of course, that no journals were reserved for graduate students, out for binding, or simply missing. This convenient set saves students substantial time and effort by making available all the key articles in one reliable source.

Table of Contents

• Volume Introduction
• The Crime of Color—Paul Finkelman
• Reflections on the Comparative History and Sociology of Racism—George M. Fredrickson
• The Italian, a Hindrance to White Solidarity in Louisiana, 1890-1898—George E. Cunningham
• Cornerstone and Stumbling Block: Racial Classification and the Late Colonial State in Indonesia—C. Fasseur
• Racial Restrictions in the Law of Citizenship—Ian Haney Lopez
• The Prerequisite Cases—Ian Haney Lopez
• Blackface Minstrelsy and Jacksonian Ideology—Alexander Saxton
• Introduction: Historical Explanations of Racial Inequality—Alexander Saxton
• Sexual Affronts and Racial Frontiers: European Identities and the Cultural Politics of Exclusion in Colonial Southeast Asia—Ann Stoler
• Irish-American Workers and White Racial Formation in the Antebellum United States—David R. Roediger
• The Race Question and Liberalism: Casuistries in American Constitutional Law—Stanford M. Lyman
• Introduction: From the Social Construction of Race to the Abolition of Whiteness—David R. Roediger
• Acknowledgments

Rethinking inclusion and exclusion: the question of mixed-race presence in late colonial India

University of Sussex Journal of Contemporary History
Issue Five
2002
pp. 1-22

Satoshi Mizutani

This article examines the ambivalent meanings of mixed-race presence in late colonial India (from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries). In doing so it contributes insights for pursuing the theme of inclusion and exclusion in the historiography of imperialism and colonialism. Studies on the imperial politics of inclusion and exclusion have not fully explicated the complex intersections between colonial exclusion and the metropolitan bourgeois hierarchy. We still tend, rather habitually, to mould our analytic categories, according to the coloniser/colonised dichotomy. This is not at all to imply that the analytic and empirical weight of this dichotomy should be downplayed: rather, it means that the coloniser/colonised axis itself stands in need of being re-considered.

The post-Independent historiography of colonial India has attended to the internal ordering of the colonised society, so as to evaluate the correlation between colonialist exclusion and nationalist inclusion, and to research the multiplicities of racial, class, gender and caste subordination under imperialism. In contrast, less attention has been paid to the internal configuration of the coloniser’s society. As Ann Stoler has pointed out, studies of colonial societies have long tended to assume white communities and colonisers as an abstract force, comprising a seamless homogeneity of bureaucratic and commercial agents. But it is possible, as this paper will show, to challenge this conventional view in ways that address the important imbrications of ‘racial’, class and gender identities.

This paper assesses the imperial significance of mixed-race identity in order to show that the imperial formation of ‘whiteness’ was predicated on the metropolitan order of class as well as the bipolar conceptualisation of racial difference. It will seek to demonstrate how the heterogeneous subjects of British society (men, women, middle or working classes, children, as well as ‘mixed bloods’) were differentially included in, or excluded from, the imperial body politic. Pointing to this internal differentiation, however, should not be taken as an end in itself.  Rather, it should be done as a step to show how the internal hierarchies of British society had repercussions on external relations with the colonised. In other words, the analysis of the internal composition of the coloniser’s society in this paper will not be intended as a way of replacing the coloniser/colonised dichotomy, but, on the contrary, will be meant as a means precisely to re-consider it from another vantage point…

Read the entire article here.

Situating “Race” And Racisms In Space, Time, And Theory: Critical Essays for Activists and Scholars

McGill-Queen’s University Press
2005-04-27
256 pages
6 x 9
Paper: (0773528873) 9780773528871
Cloth: (0773528865) 9780773528864

Edited by

Jo-Anne Lee, Associate Professor of Women’s Studies
University of Victoria

John Sutton Lutz, Associate Professor of History
University of Victoria

A resource for anti-racist scholars and activists.

Grounded in real life and theoretically charged, the nine essays in this interdisciplinary collection explore how race, racisms, and racialization are changing and suggest strategies for reading their emerging forms and discourses. Race has historically been defined by visible difference, but the slippery nature and malleability of racisms and racialising processes challenge scholars and activists to remain vigilant, responsive, and critical in their analyses and actions.

This collection explores the strengths and weaknesses of postmodern social theory in the struggle against racism. Recognizing diversity as a conduit for resilience, endurance, and strength, the editors have tried to encourage coalition building by bringing together historians, sociologists, cultural theorists, and literary scholars in dialogue with artists and activists. Topics considered include nation formation, racialized states, cultural racism, multiculturalism, hyphenated and mixed-race identities, media and representation, and shifting identities.

Contributors include Jeannette Armstrong, director of the En’owkin International School of Writing in Penticton, Canada; Frances Henry, professor emirita at York University; Yasmin Jiwani, assistant professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Concordia University; Paul Maylam, chair of the Department of History at Rhodes University, South Africa; Minelle Mahtani, assistant professor in the Department of Geography and Planning, and the Program in Journalism, University of Toronto; Roy Miki, professor of contemporary literature in the English Department at Simon Fraser University; Roxana Ng, professor in the Department of Adult Education, Community Development and Counselling Psychology at the Ontario Institute of Secondary Education/University of Toronto; Ali Rattansi, retired professor of sociology at City University London; Ann Stoler, distinguished professor and chair, Department of Anthropology, New School University in New York; and Carol Tator, course coordinator in the Department of Anthropology, York University.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Preface

Introduction: Toward a Critical Literacy of Racisms, Anti-Racisms?
and Racialization
Jo-Anne Lee and John Lutz

Deconstructing Race? Deconstructing Racism (with Postscript 2004)
A Conversation Between Jeannette Armstrong and Roxana Ng

On Being and not Being Brown/Black-British: Racism, Class, Sexuality?
and Ethnicity in Post-Imperial Britain (with Postscript 2004: The Politics of Longing and (Un)Belonging, Fear? and Loathing)
Ali Rattansi

Mixed Metaphors: Positioning ?Mixed Race? Identity
Minelle Mahtani

Turning In, Turning Out: The Shifting Formations of ?Japanese Canadian? from Uprooting to Redress
Roy Miki

Racist Visions for the Twenty-First Century: On the Banal Force of the French Radical Right
Ann Laura Stoler

Unravelling South Africa?s Racial Order: The Historiography of Racism, Segregation? and Apartheid
Paul Maylam

A Critical Discourse Analysis of the Globe and Mail Editorials on Employment Equity
Frances Henry and Carol Tator

Orientalizing ?War Talk?: Representations of the Gendered Muslim Body Post-9/11 in The Montreal Gazette
Yasmin Jiwani

Contributors
Index