Mixed Race Studies

The enduring function of caste: colonial and modern Haiti, Jamaica, and Brazil The economy of race, the social organization of caste, and the formulation of racial societies

Comparative American Studies
Volume 2, Issue 1 (01 March 2004)
pages 61-73
DOI: 10.1177/1477570004041288

Tekla Ali Johnson, Professional Public Historian
Southern Preservation Center in Charlotte, North Carolina

Modern day social hierarchies in Jamaica, Brazil and, to a degree, Haiti find their roots in the colonial context, where planters stratified laborers in order to maximize control. During slavery planters found artificial ways of influencing African identity, dividing enslaved Africans by their occupations and by skin color. These distinctions created divisions among workers and color proved a singularly powerful and enduring symbol of social and economic mobility. The American propensity for creating racial classifications for Africans and further divisions for ‘mixed-race’ offspring traditionally served economic interests. Their perpetuation into the present may signal the continued utility of dividing Africans into subgroups as a means of maintaining control of racial politics in the Americas.

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Obama as Text: The Crisis of Double-Consciousness

Comparative American Studies
Volume 10, Issue 2/3 (August 2012)
pages 211-225
DOI: 10.1179/1477570012Z.00000000016

Simon Gikandi, Robert Schirmer Professor of English
Princeton University

The argument of this essay is that given the unique circumstances of his life, including his location in multiple spaces of cultural identity, Obama is an indeterminate signifier. To textualize Obama, we must account for how the narrative of his life is structured by need and demand as he tries to comprehend his own location and dislocation in American culture and to give meaning to the gap between the idea of what he is and what others assume him to be. In this regard, Obama is probably the quintessential subject of what W. E. B. Du Bois famously described as ‘double-consciousness’.

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North of America: Racial hybridity and Canada’s (non)place in inter-American discourse

Comparative American Studies: An International Journal
Volume 3, Number 1 (March 2005)
pages 79-88
DOI: 10.1177/1477570005050951

Albert Braz, Associate Professor of English
University of Alberta, Canada

Canada is one of the largest countries in the Americas, indeed the world. Yet, for such a territorial behemoth, it is barely acknowledged in inter-American discourse. There are two main explanations for this peculiar state of affairs. First, Canada remains extremely ambivalent about its spatial location. Second, hemispheric studies have become increasingly oriented along a US/Hispanic America axis. Even more than Brazil, the other forgotten giant, Canada is seldom considered in continental dialogues, whether they originate in the USA or in Spanish America. This general elision is regrettable for a series of reasons, notably the fact that the Canadian experience can complicate some of the verities about (inter) American life and culture, as is illustrated by racial hybridity.

Canada! . . . Canada is so far away, it almost doesn’t exist.
—Jorge Luis Borges

I don’t even know what street Canada is on.
—Al Capone

Canada is one of the largest countries in the Americas, indeed the world; or, as Richard Rodriguez jokes, at least for the people of the USA, it is ‘the largest country in the world that doesn’t exist’ (Rodriguez, 2002: 161). In any case, for such a territorial colossus, Canada is barely acknowledged in inter-American discourse. There are two main explanations for this peculiar state of affairs. First, Canada remains extremely ambivalent about its spatial location. Second, hemispheric studies have become increasingly oriented along a US/Hispanic America axis. Thus, even more so than Brazil, the other forgotten giant, Canada is seldom considered in continental dialogues, whether they originate in the USA or in Spanish America. This general elision of Canada, I will argue in my article, is regrettable for several reasons. To begin with, you can hardly attain a real understanding of the continent if you exclude such a large portion of its landmass. No less significant, the Canadian experience can complicate some of the verities about (inter) American life and culture. This is particularly true of racial hybridity. For such prominent figures as Símon Bolívar, José Martí, José Vasconcelos and Roberto Fernández Retamar, racial crossing is one of the key elements that differentiates ‘Nuestra America’ from Anglo-America, the USA. However, what they do not seem to realize is that two racially-mixed communities or nations, the Métis and the Halfbreeds, blossomed in the so-called Great White North. Moreover, the leader of one of those groups, Louis Riel, became one of the great exponents of racial hybridity and continental identity in the Americas. Indeed, as I will try to demonstrate, Riel’s writings underscore the urgency of placing inter-American studies in a truly continental context; that is, of bringing the north of America into America…

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