Mixed Race Studies

Why Can’t It Be Tenderness

University of Wisconsin Press
November 2018
104 pages
6 x 9
Paper ISBN: 9780299319946

Michelle Brittan Rosado

• Winner of the Felix Pollak Poetry Prize

Charting a journey through schoolyards and laundromats, suburban gardens and rice paddies, yoga studios and rural highways, Michelle Brittan Rosado crafts poems that blend elegy and praise. In settings from California to Malaysian Borneo, and the wide Pacific between them, she explores themes of coming-of-age, mixed-race identity, diaspora, and cultural inheritance. With empathy for the generations past, she questions how we might navigate our history to find a way through it, still holding on to the ones we love. Like an ocean wave, these poems recede and return, with gratitude for the quotidian and for beauty found even in fragments.

The Social World of Batavia: Europeans and Eurasians in Colonial Indonesia (Second Edition)

University of Wisconsin Press
April 2009 (First Published in 1983)
312 pages
6 x 9  
14 b/w illustrations

Jean Gelman Taylor, Associate Professor of History
University of New South Wales

In the seventeenth century, the Dutch established a trading base at the Indonesian site of Jacarta. What began as a minor colonial outpost under the name Batavia would become, over the next three centuries, the flourishing economic and political nucleus of the Dutch Asian Empire. In this pioneering study, Jean Gelman Taylor offers a comprehensive analysis of Batavia’s extraordinary social world—its marriage patterns, religious and social organizations, economic interests, and sexual roles. With an emphasis on the urban ruling elite, she argues that Europeans and Asians alike were profoundly altered by their merging, resulting in a distinctive hybrid, Indo-Dutch culture.

Original in its focus on gender and use of varied sources—travelers’ accounts, newspapers, legal codes, genealogical data, photograph albums, paintings, and ceramics—The Social World of Batavia, first published in 1983, forged new paths in the study of colonial society. In this second edition, Gelman offers a new preface as well as an additional chapter tracing the development of these themes by a new generation of scholars.

Blacks and Whites in São Paulo, Brazil 1888–1988

University of Wisconsin Press
November 1991
376 pages
6 x 9; 1 map
Paper ISBN: 978-0-299-13104-3

George Reid Andrews, Distinguished Professor of History
University of Pittsburgh

Winner of the 1993 Arthur P. Whitaker Prize

For much of the twentieth century Brazil enjoyed an international reputation as a “racial democracy,” but that image has been largely undermined in recent decades by research suggesting the existence of widespread racial inequality. George Reid Andrews provides the first thoroughly documented history of Brazilian racial inequality from the abolition of slavery in 1888 up to the late 1980s, showing how economic, social, and political changes in Brazil during the last one hundred years have shaped race relations.

No laws of segregation or apartheid exist in Brazil, but by looking carefully at government policies, data on employment, mainstream and Afro-Brazilian newspapers, and a variety of other sources, Andrews traces pervasive discrimination against Afro-Brazilians over time. He draws his evidence from the country’s largest and most economically important state, São Paulo, showing how race relations were affected by its transformation from a plantation-based economy to South America’s most urban, industrialized society.

The book focuses first on Afro-Brazilians’ entry into the agricultural and urban working class after the abolition of slavery. This transition, Andrews argues, was seriously hampered by state policies giving the many European immigrants of the period preference over black workers. As immigration declined and these policies were overturned in the late 1920s, black laborers began to be employed in agriculture and industry on nearly equal terms with whites. Andrews then surveys efforts of blacks to move into the middle class during the 1900s. He finds that informal racial solidarity among middle-class whites has tended to exclude Afro-Brazilians from the professions and other white-collar jobs.

Andrews traces how discrimination throughout the century led Afro-Brazilians to mobilize, first through the antislavery movement of the 1880s, then through such social and political organizations of the 1920s and 1930s as the Brazilian Black Front, and finally through the anti-racism movements of the 1970s and 1980s. These recent movements have provoked much debate among Brazilians over their national image as a racial democracy. It remains to be seen, Andrews concludes, whether that debate will result in increased opportunities for black Brazilians.

Contents

• Lists of Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1. Introduction
• Part 1. Workers
  • Chapter 2. Slavery and Emancipation, 1800-1890
  • Chapter 3. Immigration, 1890-1930
  • Chapter 4. Working, 1920-1960
• Part 2. The Middle Class
  • Chapter 5. Living in a Racial Democracy, 1900-1940
  • Chapter 6. Blacks Ascending, 1940-1988
  • Chapter 7. Organizing, 1945-1988
• Part 3. Past, Present, Future
  • Chapter 8. One Hundred Years of Freedom: May 13, 1988
  • Chapter 9. Looking Back, Looking Forward
• Appendix A. Population of Sao Paulo State, 1800-1980
• Appendix B. Brazilian Racial Terminology
• Appendix C. Personnel Records at the Jafet and São Paulo Tramway, Light, and Power Companies
• Glossary
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index

The Afro-Argentines of Buenos Aires, 1800–1900

University of Wisconsin Press
November 1980
308 pages
6 x 9, 15 illus. or photos, several tables
ISBN-10: 0299082903
ISBN-13: 978-0299082901

George Reid Andrews, Distinguished Professor of History
University of Pittsburgh

George Reid Andrews has given us a major revision and reconstruction of black history in Argentina since the time of independence, making an exciting and important contribution to both Latin American and Afro-American history. Along the way, he explodes long-held myths, solves a major historical mystery, and documents contributions of blacks to a society that has, in its pursuit of “whiteness,” virtually denied their existence.

While historians have devoted much attention to Afro-Latin American slavery of the colonial period, Andrews is among the first to examine the history of the post-abolition period. He illuminates the social, economic, and political roles of black people in the evolving societies of the national period, effectively destroying the myths that the Afro-Argentines virtually disappeared over the course of a century, that they played no significant role in Argentine history after the independence, and that they were quietly and peacefully integrated into the larger society. While similar studies have been carried out for the black experience in the United States, this is the first such attempt for any Spanish American country.

Neither Black Nor White: Slavery and Race Relations in Brazil and the United States

University of Wisconsin Press
July 1986
328 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-299-10914-1

Carl N. Degler (1921-2015), Margaret Byrne Professor of American History Emeritus
Stanford University

Carl Degler’s 1971 Pulitzer-Prize-winning study of comparative slavery in Brazil and the United States is reissued in the Wisconsin paperback edition, making it accessible for all students of American and Latin American history and sociology.

Until Degler’s groundbreaking work, scholars were puzzled by the differing courses of slavery and race relations in the two countries. Brazil never developed a system of rigid segregation, such as appeared in the United States, and blacks in Brazil were able to gain economically and retain far more of their African culture. Rejecting the theory of Gilberto Freyre and Frank Tannenbaum that Brazilian slavery was more humane, Degler instead points to a combination of demographic, economic, and cultural factors as the real reason for the differences.

Table of Contents

• Preface
• I. The Challenge of the Contrast
  • Contrast in History
  • Contrast in Cultural Response
  • Contrast Acknowledged
  • An Explanation Advanced
• II. Slavery Compared
  • Who Protects the Slave’s Humanity?
  • Manumission: How Easy, How Common?
  • Rebellions and Runaways
  • The International Slave Trade As Cause
  • Slave Rearing As Consequence
  • A Harsher Slavery
  • To Arm a Black Slave
  • Who Identifies with Negroes?
  • The Hidden Difference
• III. The Outer Burdens of Color
  • The Geography of Color Prejudice
  • Who Is a Negro?
  • Permutations of Prejudice
  • Measures of Discrimination
• IV. The Inner Burdens of Color
  • Negroes Alone Feel the the Weight
  • Eventually the Veil Falls
  • The Flight from Blackness
  • The Black Mother on Two Continents
  • Black Panthers Not Allowed
  • Sex, but Not Marriage
  • “A Negro with a White Soul”
  • The Heart of the Matter
• V. The Roots of Difference
  • Consciousness of Color
  • The Historical Dimension
  • The Mulatto Is the Key
  • The Beginnings of the Mulatto Escape Hatch
  • White Wife Against White Man
  • A Path Not Taken
  • Cultural and Social Values Make a Differance
  • Democracy’s Contribution
  • The Differences As National Ideologies
• VI. A Contrast in the Future?
  • The Gap Narrows
  • Negroes See a New Contrast
  • A Brazilian Dilemma
  • Always That
  • Indelible Color
• Index

Mixed Blood: Intermarriage and Ethnic Identity in Twentieth-Century America

University of Wisconsin Press
December 1989
544 pages
6 x 9, 4 tables
Paperback ISBN-10: 0-299-12114-3
Paperback ISBN-13: 978-0-299-12114-3

Paul R. Spickard, Professor of History
University of California, Santa Barbara

Named an “Outstanding Book on Human Rights in the United States” by the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Human Rights.