Mixed Race Studies

What Race-Mixture in Colonial Latin American Literature Can Teach Us About Mixed-Race Identity in the United States and the Fantasy of White Supremacy

Critical Ethnic Studies
Published by University of Minnesota Press
2018-06-29

Monica Styles

There is a tendency in the United States to believe mixed-race experiences are exceptional or out of the ordinary because we live in a society that historically silences racial mixture. A recent exhibit at Monticello that highlights the denial of Jefferson’s affair with Sally Hemings is just one high profile example. Contrasting colonial Latin American racial discourses with our own provides a blueprint for understanding erasure of multiracial experiences and white racial anxiety.

Mixture produces people who inhabit what Zadie Smith defines as the “Dream City [or] a place of many voices, where the unified singular self is an illusion. Naturally, Obama was born there. So was I. When your personal multiplicity is printed on your face, in an almost too obviously thematic manner, in your DNA, in your hair and in the neither this nor that beige of your skin -well, anyone can see you come from Dream City.” As a Black biracial woman, I am confronted with frustration from people who struggle with my mixed identity…

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If I Could Write This in Fire

University of Minnesota Press
2008
104 pages
5 1/2 x 8 1/2
Cloth/jacket ISBN: 978-0-8166-5474-1

Michelle Cliff (1942-2016)

A deeply personal meditation on history and memory, place and displacement by a major writer

Born in a Jamaica still under British rule, the acclaimed and influential writer Michelle Cliff embraced her many identities, shaped by her experiences with the forces of colonialism and oppression: a light-skinned Creole, a lesbian, an immigrant in both England and the United States. In her celebrated novels and short stories, she has probed the intersection of prejudice and oppression with a rare and striking lyricism.

In her first book-length collection of nonfiction, Cliff displays the same poetic intensity, interweaving reflections on her life in Jamaica, England, and the United States with a powerful and sustained critique of racism, homophobia, and social injustice. If I Could Write This in Fire begins by tracing her transatlantic journey from Jamaica to England, coalescing around a graceful, elliptical account of her childhood friendship with Zoe, who is dark-skinned and from an impoverished, rural background; the divergent life courses that each is forced to take; and the class and color tensions that shape their lives as adults. The personal is interspersed with fragments of Jamaica’s history and the plight of people of color living both under imperial rule and in contemporary Britain. In other essays and poems, Cliff writes about the discovery of her distinctive, diasporic literary voice, recalls her wild colonial girlhood and sexual awakening, and recounts traveling through an American landscape of racism, colonialism, and genocide—a history of violence embodied in seemingly innocuous souvenirs and tourist sites.

A profound meditation on place and displacement, If I Could Write This in Fire explores the complexities of identity as they meet with race, gender, sexuality, nationality, and the legacies of the Middle Passage and European imperialism.

The Anti-Black City: Police Terror and Black Urban Life in Brazil

University of Minnesota Press
2018-02-13
320 pages
9 b&w photos
5 1/2 x 8 1/2
Paper ISBN: 978-1-5179-0156-1
Cloth ISBN: 978-1-5179-0155-4

Jaime Amparo Alves, Assistant Professor of Sociology and Anthropology
College of Staten Island of the City University of New York
also: Associate Researcher
Centro de Estudios Afrodiaspóricos of Universidad Icesi/Colombia

An important new ethnographic study of São Paulo’s favelas reveals the widespread use of race-based police repression in Brazil

While Black Lives Matter still resonates in the United States, the movement has also become a potent rallying call worldwide, with harsh police tactics and repressive state policies often breaking racial lines. In The Anti-Black City, Jaime Amparo Alves delves into the dynamics of racial violence in Brazil, where poverty, unemployment, residential segregation, and a biased criminal justice system create urban conditions of racial precarity.

The Anti-Black City provocatively offers race as a vital new lens through which to view violence and marginalization in the supposedly “raceless” São Paulo. Ironically, in a context in which racial ambiguity makes it difficult to identify who is black and who is white, racialized access to opportunities and violent police tactics establish hard racial boundaries through subjugation and death. Drawing on two years of ethnographic research in prisons and neighborhoods on the periphery of this mega-city, Alves documents the brutality of police tactics and the complexity of responses deployed by black residents, including self-help initiatives, public campaigns against police violence, ruthless gangs, and self-policing of communities.

The Anti-Black City reveals the violent and racist ideologies that underlie state fantasies of order and urban peace in modern Brazil. Illustrating how “governing through death” has become the dominant means for managing and controlling ethnic populations in the neoliberal state, Alves shows that these tactics only lead to more marginalization, criminality, and violence. Ultimately, Alves’s work points to a need for a new approach to an intractable problem: how to govern populations and territories historically seen as “ungovernable.”

Table of Contents

• Introduction: On Our Own Terms
• 1. Macabre Spatialities
• 2. “Police, Get off My Back!”
• 3. The Favela-Prison Pipeline
• 4. Sticking Up!
• 5. Bringing Back the Dead
• Conclusion: Blackpolis
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index

Cinematic Identity: Anatomy of a Problem Film

University of Minnesota Press
2007
200 pages
24 b&w photos, 5 1/2 x 8 1/2
Paper ISBN 978-0-8166-3412-5
Cloth ISBN 978-0-8166-3411-8

Cindy Patton, Canada Research Chair in Community Culture and Health
Simon Fraser University, British Columbia, Canada

Though largely forgotten today, the 1949 film Pinky had a significant impact on the world of cinema. Directed by Elia Kazan, the film was a box office success despite dealing with the era’s most taboo subjects—miscegenation and racial passing—and garnered an Academy Award nomination for its African American star, Ethel Waters. It was also historically important: when a Texas movie theater owner showing the film was arrested for violating local censorship laws, his case went to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled the censorship ordinance unconstitutional.

In Cinematic Identity, Cindy Patton takes Pinky as a starting point to meditate on the critical reception of this and other “problem films” of the period and to explore the larger issues they raise about race, gender, and sexuality. Films like Pinky, Patton contends, helped lay the groundwork for a shift in popular understanding of social identity that was essential to white America’s ability to accept the legitimacy of the civil rights movement.

The production of these films, beginning with Gentleman’s Agreement in 1947, coincided with the arrival of the Method school of acting in Hollywood, which demanded that performers inhabit their characters’ lives. Patton historicizes these twin developments, demonstrating how they paralleled, reflected, and helped popularize the emerging concept of the liberal citizen in postwar America, and in doing so illustrates how the reception of projected identities offers new perspectives on contemporary identity politics, from feminism to the gay rights movement.

Measuring Manhood: Race and the Science of Masculinity, 1830–1934

University of Minnesota Press
September 2015
368 pages
32 b&w photos
5 1/2 x 8 1/2
Paper ISBN 978-0-8166-7303-2
Cloth ISBN 978-0-8166-7302-5

Melissa N. Stein, Assistant Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies
University of Kentucky

From the “gay gene” to the “female brain” and African American students’ insufficient “hereditary background” for higher education, arguments about a biological basis for human difference have reemerged in the twenty-first century. Measuring Manhood shows where they got their start.

Melissa N. Stein analyzes how race became the purview of science in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America and how it was constructed as a biological phenomenon with far-reaching social, cultural, and political resonances. She tells of scientific “experts” who advised the nation on its most pressing issues and exposes their use of gender and sex differences to conceptualize or buttress their claims about racial difference. Stein examines the works of scientists and scholars from medicine, biology, ethnology, and other fields to trace how their conclusions about human difference did no less than to legitimize sociopolitical hierarchy in the United States.

Covering a wide range of historical actors from Samuel Morton, the infamous collector and measurer of skulls in the 1830s, to NAACP leader and antilynching activist Walter White in the 1930s, this book reveals the role of gender, sex, and sexuality in the scientific making⎯and unmaking⎯of race.

European Others: Queering Ethnicity in Postnational Europe

University of Minnesota Press
2011
304 pages
6 b&w photos
5 1/2 x 8 1/2
Paper ISBN 978-0-8166-7016-1
Cloth ISBN 978-0-8166-7015-4

Fatima El-Tayeb, Professor of African-American Literature and Culture
University of California, San Diego

European Others offers an interrogation into the position of racialized communities in the European Union, arguing that the tension between a growing nonwhite, non-Christian population and insistent essentialist definitions of Europeanness produces new forms of identity and activism. Moving beyond disciplinary and national limits, Fatima El-Tayeb explores structures of resistance, tracing a Europeanization from below in which migrant and minority communities challenge the ideology of racelessness that places them firmly outside the community of citizens.

Using a notable variety of sources, from drag performances to feminist Muslim activism and Euro hip-hop, El-Tayeb draws on the largely ignored archive of vernacular culture central to resistance by minority youths to the exclusionary nationalism that casts them as threatening outcasts. At the same time, she reveals the continued effect of Europe’s suppressed colonial history on the representation of Muslim minorities as the illiberal Other of progressive Europe.

Presenting a sharp analysis of the challenges facing a united Europe seen by many as a model for twenty-first-century postnational societies, El-Tayeb combines theoretical influences from both sides of the Atlantic to lay bare how Europeans of color are integral to the continent’s past, present, and, inevitably, its future.

Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Theorizing Urban Minority Communities in Postnational Europe
• 1. “Stranger in My Own Country”: European Identities, Migration, and Diasporic Soundscapes
• 2. Dimensions of Diaspora: Women of Color Feminism, Black Europe, and Queer Memory Discourses
• 3. Secular Submissions: Muslim Europeans, Female Bodies, and Performative Politics
• 4. “Because It Is Our Stepfatherland”: Queering European Public Spaces
• Conclusion: “An Infinite and Undefinable Movement”
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology

University of Minnesota Press
February 2015
240 pages
5 1/2 x 8 1/2
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8166-8730-5
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8166-8726-8

Michelle M. Wright, Associate Professor of Black European and African Diaspora Studies
Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois

What does it mean to be Black? If Blackness is not biological in origin but socially and discursively constructed, does the meaning of Blackness change over time and space? In Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology, Michelle M. Wright argues that although we often explicitly define Blackness as a “what,” it in fact always operates as a “when” and a “where.”

By putting lay discourses on spacetime from physics into conversation with works on identity from the African Diaspora, Physics of Blackness explores how Middle Passage epistemology subverts racist assumptions about Blackness, yet its linear structure inhibits the kind of inclusive epistemology of Blackness needed in the twenty-first century. Wright then engages with bodies frequently excluded from contemporary mainstream consideration: Black feminists, Black queers, recent Black African immigrants to the West, and Blacks whose histories may weave in and out of the Middle Passage epistemology but do not cohere to it.

Physics of Blackness takes the reader on a journey both known and unfamiliar—from Isaac Newton’s laws of motion and gravity to the contemporary politics of diasporic Blackness in the academy, from James Baldwin’s postwar trope of the Eiffel Tower as the site for diasporic encounters to theoretical particle physics’ theory of multiverses and superpositioning, to the almost erased lives of Black African women during World War II. Accessible in its style, global in its perspective, and rigorous in its logic, Physics of Blackness will change the way you look at Blackness.

Contents

• Introduction. Many Thousands Still Coming: Theorizing Blackness in the Postwar Moment
• 1. The Middle Passage Epistemology
• 2. The Problem of Return in the African Diaspora
• 3. Quantum Baldwin and the Multidimensionality of Blackness
• 4. Axes of Asymmetry
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

Breathing Race into the Machine: The Surprising Career of the Spirometer from Plantation to Genetics

University of Minnesota Press
February 2014
304 pages
29 b&w photos
6 x 9
Cloth/jacket ISBN: 978-0-8166-8357-4

Lundy Braun, Royce Family Professor in Teaching Excellence and Professor of Medical Science and Africana Studies
Brown University

In the antebellum South, plantation physicians used a new medical device—the spirometer—to show that lung volume and therefore vital capacity were supposedly less in black slaves than in white citizens. At the end of the Civil War, a large study of racial difference employing the spirometer appeared to confirm the finding, which was then applied to argue that slaves were unfit for freedom. What is astonishing is that this example of racial thinking is anything but a historical relic.

In Breathing Race into the Machine, science studies scholar Lundy Braun traces the little-known history of the spirometer to reveal the social and scientific processes by which medical instruments have worked to naturalize racial and ethnic differences, from Victorian Britain to today. Routinely a factor in in clinical diagnoses, preemployment physicals, and disability estimates, spirometers are often “race corrected,” typically reducing normal values for African Americans by 15 percent.

An unsettling account of the pernicious effects of racial thinking that divides people along genetic lines, Breathing Race into the Machine helps us understand how race enters into science and shapes medical research and practice.

Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Measuring Vital Capacity
• 1. “Inventing” the Spirometer: Working-Class Bodies in Victorian England
• 2. Black Lungs and White Lungs: The Science of White Supremacy in the Nineteenth-Century United States
• 3. Filling the Lungs with Air: The Rise of Physical Culture in America
• 4. Progress and Race: Vitality in Turn-of-the-Century Britain
• 5. Globalizing Spirometry: The “Racial Factor” in Scientific Medicine
• 6. Adjudicating Disability in the Industrial Worker
• 7. Diagnosing Silicosis: Physiological Testing in South African Gold Mines
• Epilogue: How Race Takes Root
• Notes
• Index

Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science

University of Minnesota Press
September 2013
256 pages
5 1/2 x 8 1/2
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8166-6586-0
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8166-6585-3

Kim TallBear, Associate Professor of Anthropology
University of Texas, Austin

Who is a Native American? And who gets to decide? From genealogists searching online for their ancestors to fortune hunters hoping for a slice of casino profits from wealthy tribes, the answers to these seemingly straightforward questions have profound ramifications. The rise of DNA testing has further complicated the issues and raised the stakes.

In Native American DNA, Kim TallBear shows how DNA testing is a powerful—and problematic—scientific process that is useful in determining close biological relatives. But tribal membership is a legal category that has developed in dependence on certain social understandings and historical contexts, a set of concepts that entangles genetic information in a web of family relations, reservation histories, tribal rules, and government regulations. At a larger level, TallBear asserts, the “markers” that are identified and applied to specific groups such as Native American tribes bear the imprints of the cultural, racial, ethnic, national, and even tribal misinterpretations of the humans who study them.

TallBear notes that ideas about racial science, which informed white definitions of tribes in the nineteenth century, are unfortunately being revived in twenty-first-century laboratories. Because today’s science seems so compelling, increasing numbers of Native Americans have begun to believe their own metaphors: “in our blood” is giving way to “in our DNA.” This rhetorical drift, she argues, has significant consequences, and ultimately she shows how Native American claims to land, resources, and sovereignty that have taken generations to ratify may be seriously—and permanently—undermined.

Table of Contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: An Indigenous, Feminist Approach to DNA Politics
• 1. Racial Science, Blood, and DNA
• 2. The DNA Dot-com: Selling Ancestry
• 3. Genetic Genealogy Online
• 4. The Genographic Project: The Business of Research and Representation
• Conclusion: Indigenous and Genetic Governance and Knowledge
• Notes
• Index

The Mestizo State: Reading Race in Modern Mexico

University of Minnesota Press
June 2012
248 pages
5 1/2 x 8 1/2
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8166-5637-0
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8166-5636-3

Joshua Lund, Associate Professor of Spanish
University of Pittsburgh

The Mestizo State examines how the ideas, images, and public discourse around race, nation, and citizen formation have been transformed in Mexico from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Starting with the Porfiriato, Joshua Lund investigates the rise of a racialized “mestizo state,” its reinvention after the Mexican Revolution, and its mobilization as a critical lever that would act both on behalf of and against mainstream Mexican political culture during the long hegemony of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional.

Lund takes race as his object of critical reflection in the context of modern Mexico. An analysis that does not confuse race with mestizaje, indigeneity, African identity, or whiteness, the book sheds light on the history of the materialism of race as it unfolds within the cultural production of modern Mexico, grounded on close readings of four writers whose work explicitly challenged the politics of race in Mexico: Luis Alva, Ignacio Manuel Altamirano, Rosario Castellanos, and Elena Garro.

In seeking to address race as a cultural-political problematic, Lund considers race as integral to the production of the materiality of Mexican national history: constitutive of the nation form, a mediator of capitalist accumulation, and a central actor in the rise of modernity.

Contents

• Introduction: The Mestizo State
• 1. Colonization and Indianization in Liberal Mexico: The Case of Luis Alva
• 2. Altamirano’s Burden
• 3. Misplaced Revolution: Rosario Castellanos and the Race War
• 4. Elena Garro and the Failure of Alliance
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index