Mixed Race Studies

Race and Sex in Latin America

Pluto Press
2009-09-07
320 pages
Size: 215mm x 135mm
Illustrations: 1 map, 3 figures
ISBN: 9780745329499

Peter Wade, Professor of Social Anthropology
University of Manchester

The intersection of race and sex in Latin America is a subject touched upon by many disciplines but this is the first book to deal solely with these issues.

Interracial sexual relations are often a key mythic basis for Latin American national identities, but the importance of this has been underexplored. Peter Wade provides a pioneering overview of the growing literature on race and sex in the region, covering historical aspects and contemporary debates. He includes both black and indigenous people in the frame, as well as mixed and white people, avoiding the implication that “race” means “black-white” relations.

Challenging but accessible, this book will appeal across the humanities and social sciences, particularly to students of anthropology, gender studies, history and Latin American studies.

Table of Contents

• 1. Introduction: defining race and sex
• 2. Explaining the articulation of race and sex
• 3. Race and sex in colonial Latin America
• 4. Making nations through race and sex
• 5. The political economy of race and sex in contemporary Latin America
• 6. Race, sex and the politics of identity and citizenship
• 7. Conclusion
• References
• Index

White Identities: A Critical Sociological Approach

Pluto Press
2009-11-06
240 pages
Size: 215mm x 135mm
ISBN: 9780745327488

Steve Garner, Lecturer in Sociology
Aston University

Simon Clarke, Director
Centre for Psycho-Social Studies
University of the West of England

The study of white ethnicities is becoming increasingly important in the social sciences. This book provides a critical introduction to the topic.

Whiteness has traditionally been seen as “ethnically transparent” – the marker against which other ethnicities are measured. This analysis is clearly incorrect, but only recently have many race and ethnicity scholars moved away from focusing on ethnic minorities and instead oriented their studies around the construction of white identities. Simon Clarke and Steve Garner’s book is designed to guide students as they explore how white identities are forged using both sociological and psycho-social ideas.

Including an excellent survey of the existing literature and original research from the UK, this book will be an invaluable guide for sociology students taking modules in race and ethnicity.

Contents

• 1. Researching ‘Whiteness’: An Introduction
• 2. Whiteness Studies in the Context of the USA
• 3. Empirical research into white racialised identities in Britain
• 4. Britishness
• 5. Whiteness and Post-Imperial Britain
• 6. Psycho-Social Interpretations of Cultural Identity: constructing the white ‘we’
• 7. Media Representations: constructing the ‘not white’ Other
• 8. Whiteness, Home and Community
• 9. Researching Whiteness: Psycho-Social Methodologies
• 10. Conclusions
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

Raiding The Gene Pool: The Social Construction of Mixed Race

Pluto Press an imprint of MacMillan Publishing
February 2002
ISBN: 978-0-7453-1764-9
ISBN10: 0-7453-1764-2
5.5 x 8.25 inches
224 pages

Jill Olumide, Researcher
Swansea University, School of Health Science

High profile ‘mixed race’ stars like Tiger Woods have brought the politics of identity into the mainstream. Jill Olumide argues that we must examine the contradictions inherent in the term “mixed race” in order to reach a fuller understanding of the variety in human experience and identity. Olumide demonstrates that there are distinctive features of mixed race experience that span time and place. By comparing contemporary experiences of mixed race, collected through interviews and workshops, with those of past populations in different parts of the world, she explains how its meaning alters with national boundary, historical context, class, gender and ethnicity. Showing how different communities are linked by social ambiguity, dependency and the denial of social space, she reveals that the underlying ideology is transformed by social, economic and political change. As mixed race groups across the world call for the right of self-definition, this book reveals that it is through understanding the plurality of the category of mixed race that we are best able to transcend the idea of ‘race’ and challenge the racial axes of social division. The book includes an examination of the folklore around racism and anti-racism, and the agencies through which ideologies of race are propagated, including social welfare groups, religious groups, scientific texts, and the family.

Table of Contents

• Preface
• 1. A Spell to Make Them Balance: Introduction
  • Dangerous Knowledge
  • Importance of Studying Mixed Race
  • Divisions
  • The Mixed race Condition
  • Group Identity
  • A Theory of Lived Experience
  • Social Construction: Passing and Being Passed
  • Passing As…
  • Structure of the book
• 2. The Hall of Mirrors: Structures of Power
  • The Babalawo and the Sociologist
  • Ideology and State
  • Ideology For What?
  • Race and its Provenance
  • Religion and Race
  • Ethnocentricism
  • European Roots of Race Thinking
  • Spain
  • Classification and Race
  • The Ground of Racialisation in the Capitalist Era
  • A Missing Link: Whiteness as a Racial Category
  • Ethnicity
  • Women and the Racial Order
  • Endpiece
• 3. Parallel Fictions: Writing About Mixed Race
  • ‘Natural’ Science.
  • Politics of Biology
  • Eugenics
  • UNESCO and Race
  • Stonequist and the Psychologising Tendency
  • Marginal Man Goes East
  • Mixed Race and the Question ofIdentity
  • Fostering Mixed Race
  • Proving that Mixed Race Works
  • The Mothers of Mixed Race Children
  • Counting Mixed Race
  • Multiracial People
  • Biographical and Autobiographical Writing
• 4. Changing Illusions: Some Excerpts From the History of Mixed race
  • Patterns in the Career of mixed Race
  • Heredity
  • Division and Exploitation:Slavocracy Style
  • White Women and Black Women
  • Losing Caste
  • Group Consciousness
  • Metissage
  • Divide and Rule
  • The Mixed Race Condition and Genocide
  • The Purposeful Concept of Mixed Race
• 5. Behind the Facade: Race Mixing
  • Background to the Research Population
  • Access and Understanding
  • Difference as Liberation
  • Bridging
  • No Positive Images
  • Parents Must Prepare
  • Knowledge is Power
  • The Wrong Parents
  • Set Up to Fail
  • Terminology
  • Not White/Black Enough
  • Siblings and step-Families
  • Conclusion
• 6. The Balancing Act: Race Separating
  • Sanctions
  • Rejection
  • ‘Looks’
  • Abuse
  • Reputation
  • Pigeonholing
  • Repatriation
  • Suspicion of Unsuitable Combinations
  • Strategies
  • Hold Hands and Stick Together
  • Challenge-Cure Ignorance
  • Hard Work and Rightful Expectations
  • The Goodness of Mixture
  • Pass Amongst
  • Imaginary Homelands
  • Keep Your Distance
  • Humour
• 7. The Very Foundation of Order: Social Origins of Mixed Race
  • Theorising Mixed race
  • Ethnic Leakage
  • The Slimy Category
  • Mixed race Undermines Black and White
  • Women and the Reproduction of Own-Kind
  • Family
  • Religion
  • Professionals
  • Welfare Professionals in Particular
  • Race Does Not Always Over-Determine Class
  • and Gender
  • The Need to Talk
• 8. Communities to Conjure With: Concluding Remarks
  • Five Features of Mixed Race Ideology
  • An Ambiguous Social Location
  • A Contested Site
  • A Measure of Induced Dependency is Inolved
  • It is a Conditional State
  • It is a Point of Articulation in the Ordering of Race Gender and Other Divisions
  • Emotional Subjects
  • Giving Voice to Mixed Race
• Notes
• Index

Rethinking ‘Mixed Race’

Pluto Press an imprint of MacMillan
May 2001
5.5 x 8.25 inches, 208 pages, 4 figures
ISBN: 978-0-7453-1567-6
ISBN10: 0-7453-1567-4

Edited by

David Parker, Lecturer and Faculty of Social Sciences
School of Sociology and Social Policy
University of Nottingham

Miri Song, Professor of Sociology
University of Kent

One of the fastest growing ethnic populations in many Western societies is that of people of mixed descent. However, when talking about multicultural societies or ‘mixed race’, the discussion usually focuses on people of black and white heritage. The contributors to this collection rectify this with a broad and pluralistic approach to the experiences of ‘mixed race’ people in Britain and the USA. The contributors argue that people of mixed descent reveal the arbitrary and contested logic of categorisation underpinning racial divisions. Falling outside the prevailing definitions of racialised identities, their histories and experiences illuminate the complexities of identity formation in the contemporary multicultural context.  The authors examine a range of issues.  These include gender; transracial and intercountry adoptions in Britain and the US; interracial partnering and marriage; ‘mixed race’ and family in the English-African diaspora; theorising of ‘mixed race’ that transcends the black/white binary and includes explorations of ‘mixtures’ among non-white minority groups; and the social and political evolution of multiracial panethnicity.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Rethinking ‘Mixed Race’ David Parker and Miri Song
1.  How Sociology Imagined Mixed Race—Frank Furedi
2.  Re-Membering ‘Race’: On Gender, ‘Mixed Race’, and Family in the English-African Diaspora—Jayne O. Ifekwunigwe
3.  Same Difference: Towards a More Unified Discourse in Mixed Race Theory—Minelle Mahtani and April Moreno
4.  The Subject is Mixed Race: The Boom in Biracial Biography—Paul Spickard
5.  Triples: The Social Evolution of a Multiracial Panethnicity: An Asian American Perspective