Mixed Race Studies

Scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience.

One thing I really stressed throughout the dissertation was focusing not so much on the forms of Blackness that can be accepted but focusing on the forms that can’t be accepted. For me that was a highly gendered and sexualized thing. So for example, the mulata can be accepted because she fits particular sexualized scripts that make her accessible to white men. And so that’s a way in which race intersects with gender – this racially mixed woman who is not white, but is not Black. She becomes aesthetically more beautiful yet still retains that hypersexual script. And so that’s another way of saying that Brazil is more benign because there are many interracial relationships and marriages and also [mixed race] children. Many people thought through interracial mixture, that Brazil could actually whiten itself within a hundred years. And it’s not just about women. Black men are expected to be able to have bodily mastery either in culture, such as music or dance, or athletics, such as capoeira or football, that can be consumed for national cultures and portray Brazil as more benign. As far as desire and attraction goes, Black men kind of take a back seat in the racial democracy discourses of miscegenation to white men. You see far less representations of Black men with white women in popular culture. The emphasis on interracial mixture is how non-Black men have access to Black women’s bodies, often without considering what her own desires are. And these really serve a heteropatriarchal and white supremacist desire to sexually and culturally consume Black bodies in various ways. And what is outside of what serves those interests is relegated to the realm of subalternity and deemed less worthy in Brazil. And so I wanted to emphasize that as the forms of Blackness that can’t be accepted in Brazil and using that as a site of critical inquiry. —Dr. Bryce Henson

Morten Stinus Kristensen, “Disrupting Racialized Knowledges: Blackness in Salvador da Bahia,” Friktion Magasin for Køn, Krop and Kultur, October 2016. http://friktionmagasin.dk/index.php/2016/10/01/disrupting-racialized-knowledges-blackness-in-salvador-da-bahia/

Association for Critical Race Art History: Building a Multiracial American Past

Posted in History, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Live Events, Media Archive, Native Americans/First Nation, United States on 2015-02-10 20:28Z by Steven

Association for Critical Race Art History: Building a Multiracial American Past

CAA 103rd Annual Conference
College Art Association
New York, New York
2015-02-11 through 2015-02-14

Session Location/Time:
New York Hilton Midtown
2nd Floor, Sutton Parlor Center
1335 Avenue of the Americas
New York, New York 10019
2015-02-11, 12:30-14:00 EST (Local Time)

Charles Paxson, Learning is Wealth. Wilson, Charley, Rebecca, and Rosa. Slaves from New Orleans, 1864

Free and open to the public.

Chair:

Susanna Gold, Assistant Professor of Art History
Tyler School of Art, Temple University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; New York Public Library, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture

Panelists:

“The Drop Sinister: Harry Watrous’s Visualization of the ‘One Drop Rule’”
Mey-Yen Moriuchi, Assistant Professor of Art History
La Salle University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

“You Are What You Eat: Racial Transformation and Miscegenation in Nineteenth-Century Representations of Food”
Shana Klein
Department of Art History
University of New Mexico

“‘Half-Breed’: Picturing Native American Identity in the Early Nineteenth Century”
Elizabeth W. Hutchinson, Associate Professor of Art History
Barnard College, Columbia University

For more information, click here.

Tags: CAA, CAA 103rd Annual Conference, College Art Association, Elizabeth Hutchinson, Elizabeth W. Hutchinson, Harry Watrous, Mey-Yen Moriuchi, Shana Klein, Susanna Gold

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Mixed Race Studies

Association for Critical Race Art History: Building a Multiracial American Past

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