Mixed Race Studies

Radical Love: A Transatlantic Dialogue about Race and Mixed Race

Asian American Literary Review
Volume 4, Issue 2, Pandora’s Box (2013)
pages 15-26

Daniel McNeil, Ida B. Wells-Barnett Professor of African and Black Diaspora Studies
DePaul University, Chicago, Illinois

Leanne Taylor, Assistant Professor of Education
Brock University, St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada

Boy meets girl. Boy makes the girl laugh with some playful jibes about his English accent and her “cynical Canadian” response to a talk about radical love in America. Girl gives boy a lingering, flirtatious handshake. Boy resists the urge to say, “this could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”

This is a transatlantic love story informed by the neurotic heroes of the Facebook era as much as the stoic men of 1940s Hollywood or the stubborn women of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. The boy displays similar levels of social awkwardness and ambition to the character of Marc Zuckerberg, one of the founders of Facebook, in The Social Network. Yet he has a modicum of charm and is able to craft some touching emails to the girl when he returns to England. The girl is far more interesting than any of the female characters in The Social Network and sparks back some funny Facebook messages from Canada. After reconnecting in Toronto in January 2011, they start to communicate via Blackberry instant messenger and send each other letters, books and poetry. Their conversations provide a revealing glimpse into the politics and poetics of mixed race relationships. For whereas the transracial, transdisciplinary and transnational field of mixed race studies tends to focus on the love between “interracial couples” and their children, their romantic back and forth offers a revealing glimpse into the love between two people defined as mixed race.

Read the entire article here.

Obama and the Oscars: Lights, Camera, Nationalism! A Symposium About The “Obama Effect” On Film Culture

DePaul University
Richardson Library
Rosati Room 300
2350 North Kenmore Avenue
Chicago, Illinois
Friday, 2014-02-28, 16:00-19:00 CST (Local Time)

Moderated by:

Daniel McNeil, Ida B. Wells-Barnett Professor of African and Black Diaspora Studies
DePaul University

Speakers:

George Elliott Clarke, Associate Professor of English
University of Toronto and Harvard University

Jasmine Nichole Cobb, Assistant Professor of Communication Studies
Northwestern University

Charles Coleman, Film Programmer
Facets Cinémathèque, Chicago, Illinois

Armond White, Editor and Film Critic
City Arts, New York, New York

During the run up to the 2014 Oscars, film producers and executives have claimed that the election and re-election of President Barack Obama has erased racial lines and created a better country. They have also linked the ‘Obama effect’ to a spate of daring films about slavery and racial discrimination in the American past. This symposium brings together leading academics, critics, and film programmers to discuss the production, distribution and marketing of films in the age of Obama, as well as the ways in which Oscar-nominated films address the history of America and the Atlantic world.

Free and open to the public.

The JCMRS inaugural issue will be released on Summer, 2013

Journal of Critical Mixed Race Studies
c/o Department of Sociology
SSMS Room 3005
University of California, Santa Barbara
Santa Barbara, California  93106-9430
E-Mail: socjcmrs@soc.ucsb.edu
2012-10-10

The Journal of Critical Mixed Race Studies (JCMRS) is a peer-reviewed online journal dedicated to developing the field of Critical Mixed Race Studies (CMRS) through rigorous scholarship. Launched in 2011, it is the first academic journal explicitly focused on Critical Mixed Race Studies.

JCMRS is transracial, transdisciplinary, and transnational in focus and emphasizes the critical analysis of the institutionalization of social, cultural, and political orders based on dominant conceptions and constructions of ‘race.’ JCMRS emphasizes the constructed nature and thus mutability of race and the porosity of racial boundaries in order to critique processes of racialization and social stratification based on race. JCMRS addresses local and global systemic injustices rooted in systems of racialization.

Sponsored by University of California, Santa Barbara’s Sociology Department, JCMRS is hosted on the eScholarship Repository, which is part of the eScholarship initiative of the California Digital Library. JCMRS functions as an open-access forum for critical mixed race studies scholars and will be available without cost to anyone with access to the Internet.

Volume 1, Issue 1, Spring 2013 will include:

• “Editor’s Note”—G. Reginald Daniel
• “Emerging Paradigms in Critical Mixed Race Studies”—Laura Kina, Wei Ming Dariotis, G. Reginald Daniel, and Camilla Fojas

Articles

1. “Historical Origins of the One-Drop Racial Rule in the United States”—Winthrop Jordan edited by Paul Spickard
2. “Retheorizing the Relationship Between New Mestizaje and New Multiraciality as Mixed Race Identity Models”—Jessie Turner
3. “Critical Mixed Race Studies: New Directions in the Politics of Race and Representation,” Keynote Address presented at the Critical Mixed Race Studies Conference, November 5, 2010, DePaul University—Andrew Jolivétte
4. “Only the News We Want to Print”—Rainier Spencer
5. “The Current State of Multiracial Discourse”—Molly McKibbin
6. “Slimy Subjects and Neoliberal Goods”—Daniel McNeil

Editorial Board

Founding Editors: G. Reginald Daniel, Wei Ming Dariotis, Laura Kina, Maria P. P. Root, and Paul Spickard

Editor-in-Chief: G. Reginald Daniel

Managing Editors: Wei Ming Dariotis and Laura Kina

Editorial Review Board: Stanley R. Bailey, Mary C. Beltrán, David Brunsma, Greg Carter, Kimberly McClain DaCosta, Michele Elam, Camilla Fojas, Peter Fry, Kip Fulbeck, Rudy Guevarra, Velina Hasu Houston, Kevin R. Johnson, Andrew Jolivette, Rebecca Chiyoko King-O’Riain, Laura A. Lewis, Kristen A. Renn, Maria P. P. Root, Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu, Gary B. Nash, Kent A. Ono, Rita Simon, Miri Song, Rainier Spencer, Michael Thornton, Peter Wade, France Winddance Twine, Teresa Williams-León, and Naomi Zack

For more information, click here.

While Goldberg and Gilroy have alluded to mixed-race metaphors in their recent work, Lewis Gordon has written more extensively about the attempts to establish ‘critical’ mixed-race studies. Reflecting on the historical discrimination and colourism in an anti-black world, Gordon has argued that it is understandable – if not morally justifiable – for working-class individuals and darker-skinned individuals to be distrustful of middle-class individuals and lighter-skinned individuals who claim to be progressive. Gordon’s use of slime to describe the aims of a wide variety of mixed-race activists and ‘sensitive’ scholars – who talk politely about racial transcendence while denying the facticity of their privileged position in an anti-black world – is a particularly interesting term since it evokes animalistic behaviour, infantile play, salesmen pitching new, hip commodities for a polyethnic culture. It also offers a transracial, transdisciplinary and transnational engagement with Francophone theory. Aside from adapting Fanon’s critique of European man, Gordon’s analysis of multiracial celebration draws on Sartre’s ontology of slime (a sticky, viscoelastic material that resists shear flow and strain linearly with time when a stress is applied,) and reminds us of Barthes’s famous description of neither-norism (a ‘mythological figure which consists in stating two opposites and balancing the one by the other so as to reject them both… It is on the whole a bourgeois figure, for it relates to a modern form of liberalism… one flees from intolerable reality … one no longer needs to choose, but only to endorse.’)

Daniel McNeil, “‘Mixture is a Neoliberal Good’: Mixed-Race Metaphors and Post-Racial Masks,” Darkmatter, Volume 9, Issue 1, (Post-Racial Imaginaries), July 2, 2012. http://www.darkmatter101.org/site/2012/07/02/mixture-is-a-neoliberal-good-mixed-race-metaphors-and-post-racial-masks/

‘Mixture is a Neoliberal Good’: Mixed-Race Metaphors and Post-Racial Masks

darkmatter: in the ruins of imperial culture
ISSN 2041-3254
Post-Racial Imaginaries [9.1] (2012-07-02)

Daniel McNeil, Associate Professor of History, Migration and Diaspora Studies
Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada

This fight for democracy against the oppression of mankind will slowly leave the confusion of neo-liberal universalism to emerge, sometimes laboriously, as a claim to nationhood. It so happens that the unpreparedness of the educated classes, the lack of practical links between them and the mass of the people, their laziness, and let it be said, their cowardice at the decisive moment of the struggle will give rise to tragic mishaps.

—Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

Many conservative commentators reacted to the terrorist attacks on September 11th 2001 with platitudes about the clash of civilizations. Robert Fulford, a prominent cultural critic for the Canadian National Post, was one of the few to tie a post-9/11 context to the fortieth anniversary of Frantz Fanon’s death. In an article strategically published at the beginning of Black History Month, Fulford claimed that Fanon’s classic texts were invoked and not read, as if The Wretched of the Earth was just another ironic commodity for consumers full of sound and fury who wear images of Malcolm X and Che Guevara without knowing anything about their commitment to human rights. To go further, he maintained that Fanon should be remembered as a ‘poisonous thinker’ who helped usher in a culture of violence and victimization in the West.

Providing a critical alternative to Fulford, activists and scholars marked the fiftieth anniversary of Fanon’s passing with extensive discussions of his impact on social justice movements and intellectual debates about existentialism, phenomenology and psychoanalysis. This short article takes a rather circuitous route to their commentaries on the legacy of Fanon’s explorative, suggestive and provocative work. It argues that the loaded metaphors Fanon used to target ‘half-breed’ translators in the 1950s and 60s have been creatively adapted by transnational intellectuals in their critique of forms of neoliberal multiculturalism that privilege the multiracial American citizen as a subject more universal and legitimate than even the multicultural world citizen.

The article revolves around three sections and three conceptual metaphors in its attempts to address an oft-repeated element of Fanon’s work that has rarely been the subject of extended analysis or critical inquiry. The first section introduces three popular metaphors about mixed-race objects and ‘racial bridges’ that Fanon used to invoke the threat of bestial, immature and consumerist Others – metaphors that were not swept away by the winds of change in the 1960s, or the decline and fall of Black internationalist movements in the 1970s. It contends that similar metaphors and similes continue to frame representations of mixed-race individuals that emerged after the neoliberal revolution of the 1970s and 80s called for ‘new’ multicultural identities to replace ‘old-fashioned’ notions of racial essences. The second section documents how intellectuals such as David Theo Goldberg, Paul Gilroy and Lewis Gordon have engaged with Fanon and mixed-race metaphors in order to critique the slyness of neoliberal agents in the age of Obama. The third and final section also addresses three writers – Jared Sexton, Paul Spickard and Mark Anthony Neal – who have developed work on multiracial national subjects in the United States. The short conclusion contends that Sexton’s Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism avoids some of the pitfalls of national consciousness evident in the work of Spickard and Neal – and engages with the diasporic work of Fanon and ‘Fanon’s children’ in order to challenge multiracial, and post-racial, environments that deny the legitimacy of African American anger. In short, it uses Sexton’s vision of a global African American studies to illuminate some of the discordant affinities between more insular visions of ethnic American studies and the cultural project of neoliberal multiculturalism in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries…

Read the entire article here.

“The devil made the mulatto”: Race, religion and respectability in a Black Atlantic, 1931-2005

University of Toronto
2007
312 pages
Publication Number: AAT NR39517
ISBN: 9780494395172

Daniel R. McNeil, Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies
Newcastle University, United Kingdom

According to The Historical Journal there has only been one scholarly study of mixed- race history. This text—New People: Mulattoes and Miscegenation in the United States—fails to address events after 1930 in any detail, and ends its historical analysis with a discussion of the mixed-race people who committed themselves to a “New Negro” group. In an attempt to cover this gap in the academic literature, my dissertation analyses the creative artistry of individuals who were born after 1930 and were told, by governmental agencies in the US, UK and Canada, that they had a Black father and a white mother. My first case study looks at Philippa Schuyler, the daughter of George Schuyler, the most prominent African American journalist of the early twentieth century. I acknowledge that George Schuyler’s journalistic peers marketed his daughter as a “Negro” child prodigy during the 1930s and 1940s, but I also document how she fashioned herself as a “mulatto” writer or a vaguely aristocratic “off-white” femme fatale during the 1950s and 1960s. My second case study looks at Lawrence Hill, a writer who grew up in the suburbs of Toronto during the 1950s and 1960s and has achieved a degree of prominence in Canada by casting himself as a middle-class Black “race man” like his African American father, the first director of the Ontario Human Rights Agency. Subsequent case studies investigate the legacy of the “Black is beautiful” movements of the 1960s on a wider variety of individuals—from working-class folks in Nova Scotia and Merseyside to American idols—and provide further evidence for my argument that a Black identity has been masculinized in opposition to the stigma attached to a “mulatto” identity associated with young “brown girls”. In doing so, I draw heavily on the work of Otto Rank, W.E.B Du Bois and Frantz Fanon. In particular, I link Rank’s ideas about creative artistry – that it was a masculine attempt to give birth to a new self, community or nation—to the theories of Du Bois and Fanon that defined “honest intellectuals” in a Black Atlantic against mixed-race women and children.

Purchase the dissertation here.