Mixed Race Studies

Image Matters: Archive, Photography, and the Making of the African Diaspora in Europe by Tina M. Campt (review)

Callaloo
Volume 37, Number 1, Winter 2014
pages 169-171
DOI: 10.1353/cal.2014.0006

Nicosia Shakes
Brown University

Campt, Tina M., Image Matters: Archive, Photography, and the African Diaspora in Europe (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012)

In Image Matters, Tina Campt uses a remarkable archive of vernacular photography to analyze processes of black subjectivity in early-twentieth-century Europe. Defined by the author as a genre of “everyday image-making” (7), vernacular photography is considered an important archival resource for understanding how blacks have historically constructed self-images that affirm their worth in societies that devalue their humanity (see also Brian Wallis and Deborah Willis, African American Vernacular Photography 2006). Campt’s reading of the photographs centers on three main registers through which they interact with the viewer: the visual, the haptic, and the sonic. Blending her analysis of these registers with historical research and the findings from her fieldwork in Germany and England, Campt treats these images as more than historical objects. They are “statements that express how ordinary individuals envisioned their sense of self, their subjectivity, and their social status” (7).

Campt engages mainly with the field of Black/African Diaspora Studies in three ways. Firstly, she departs from the prevailing “roots versus routes” conceptualizations that tend to focus on dispersion from a homeland and transnational interactions. Instead, she emphasizes black people’s inscription of themselves into their adopted countries. Secondly, by focusing on Afro-Germans and Afro-Caribbean British immigrants—two very distinct groups—Campt underscores the importance of viewing the African Diaspora as diverse, rather than as a homogenous group. Thirdly, she engages with the question of how the construction of the archives affects the conceptualization of the Diaspora. Here, the work of Michel-Rolph Trouillot, who Campt references, is very relevant. In his influential text Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (1995), Trouillot discusses the omissions that occur in various stages of archive construction, which ultimately affect how history is written. Campt infers that the history of the African Diaspora has been affected by silences within the visual archives. As such, the existence of certain diasporic groups such as Afro-Germans appears as an interruption in the mainstream narrative.

The book is divided into two sections, with three chapters bridged by two “interstitial” essays. Part 1, “Family Matters: Sight, Sense, Touch,” focuses on the biracial offspring of African men and German women, and builds on the research in Campt’s previous book, Other Germans: Black Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender, and Memory in the Third Reich (2005). The first chapter, “Family Touches” focuses primarily on Hans Hauck and to a lesser extent, the brothers, Mandenga, Manga, and Ekwin Ngando. There are multiple photographs of Hauck posing with his white German family as a child, and many of him as a soldier in the German army. These are juxtaposed with similar images of the Ngando brothers. The military images are shocking considering the popular conceptualization of the Third Reich military as an Aryan space commensurate with the doctrine of Aryan superiority. The fact that non-Aryans participated in the army speaks volumes about the nuances in the German state’s performance of Aryan superiority, even while subjecting non-Aryans to violent repression (see also Bryan Mark Rigg, Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers 2002). Hauck was sterilized as a child along with many other non-Aryans in a secret campaign carried out by the Gestapo; yet, he was allowed to join the Hitler Youth as a boy and later, the army. Like the Ngandos, he was denied full citizenship rights even while being required to perform military responsibilities for the state. Campt highlights an important point regarding the tension between how the images register and divergent historical facts. For example, the fact that Hauck’s grandmother was the one who gave the Gestapo permission to sterilize him troubles our reading of the image depicting loving family embraces between the two. Also, though the experiences of the Ngando brothers were similar to Hauck’s, the specificities of their lives cautions against a general narrative of black penalization in Germany. For example, Manga had a child with a white woman, Hertha Pilisch, in 1943, and later married her after the fall of the Nazi regime. Thus, unlike Hauck, Manga was not sterilized, and violated one of the fundamental rules of Nazism without detection for several years.

Hans Hauck will probably stand…

We Are all Mutants: Uncovering humanity’s vast diversity

The Chronicle Review
The Chronicle of Higher Education
2014-03-24

Paul Voosen, Senior Reporter

On the hunt for disease genes, researchers uncover humanity’s vast diversity

The first people to set foot on Barbados, a wind-battered eastern spur of the Caribbean’s Lesser Antilles, came from the south, and relatively recently, no more than 1,700 years ago. Little remains of them: enough to know they were skilled farmers from the Orinoco Basin, in modern Venezuela. And like those of all humanity, their journey had started far earlier, when their ancestors, tens of thousands of years before, ventured out of Africa, across Asia, and into the Americas.

More people rolled in: The Lokano, clustered in scattered villages, hauling whelk and conch from the sea; and, in the 13th century, the Kalinagos, slipping on to the horizon in 50-foot-long dugout canoes. The Kalinagos reigned until the conquistadors. Hounded by European slavers, they fled windward to better defenses. By 1536, a Portuguese explorer could report Barbados as “uninhabited.”

It didn’t last. The English landed a century later and soon began importing slaves, ripped from their Ga, Igbo, and Ashanti communities in West Africa. By 1700, some 134,500 Africans lived in Barbados, in bondage; soon enough, 90 percent of Barbados’s population could claim African heritage, a percentage that holds true today.

A couple of decades ago, there was one more arrival: Kathleen C. Barnes, a graduate student and biological anthropologist from the University of Florida, who one day in 1991 walked into the emergency room of Barbados’s main hospital, the Queen Elizabeth. Throughout its human history, the island had had its share of plagues and troubles. Now Barnes was there to study a modern, quiet epidemic.

In a dedicated bay, child after child sat listless, worried mothers by their sides. The children were masked, inhaling medication for their wheezing, swollen airways. The machines hissed. Nearly one-fifth of Barbadians had asthma, far above the global average. Barnes wanted to find out why.

A native of a Virginia tobacco town known for housing the “Last Capitol of the Confederacy,” Barnes, who is white, grew up a witness to the civil-rights movement; in second grade, her school was forcibly desegregated. Trained initially as a nurse, she was troubled by the health disparities she saw in the United States. For example, African-Americans suffered from asthma far more than white populations did. There were many possible socioeconomic reasons. But Barnes thought it was mostly about pests.

Past research had tied some of the asthma rate in African-Americans to dust mites and cockroach feces, exposures that are more likely in poor communities. Barnes saw many similarities between African-Americans and the Afro-Caribbeans of Barbados, with one important caveat: Unlike residents of Baltimore, where she would go to work for decades as a professor at the Johns Hopkins University, the Barbadians had only just begun to live in homes conducive to household pests. A natural experiment had begun.

Barnes lived in Barbados for a year, running a lab across the street from the Queen Elizabeth, visiting homes to gauge their exposures. At the time, many Barbadians lived in chattel houses, movable wooden homes to which many residents had added bit by bit, enclosing them in concrete structures, with indoor plumbing. Dust mites loved the enclosed homes: Some of the levels Barnes measured were the highest ever recorded, she says. Surely that had to explain some of the asthma rate.

It probably did, as did other factors in a rapidly modernizing country: shifting diet and microbiome, rising obesity, wealth—the type of influences that are often lumped together as “environment.” But controlling for those, Barnes saw that a disparity still remained between people descended directly from Africa and those who came through Europe. Something more fundamental was at play, she realized. Something that would shape the next 20 years of her work.

“It seemed like the missing piece,” she said, “was understanding the genetic basis for these complex diseases.”…

…Let’s stop here to note: If you took any section of a person’s DNA and compared it with a stranger’s, no matter their ethnic background, odds are high they’d be identical. This is not platitude: These odds guide large-scale genome sequencing. They are fundamental. Humanity is deeply shared. It just happened that when it comes to asthma, for this one gene variant, people of European and African descent are distinct. At some point, after they diverged in ancient times, a mutation had taken hold. It wasn’t about race. It was about contingency. History.

“One thing we can’t do is use race as a proxy,” says Carlos D. Bustamante, a genetics professor at Stanford University and a Barnes collaborator. “It’s a very blunt tool. But we also can’t say there are no genetic differences across populations. Because it’s just not true.”…

Read the entire article here.

Bi-racial Africans: “diluted” Africans?

This is Africa
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
2014-03-22

Melinda Ozongwu, Writer Urban Culture

One’s nationality can be determined by where you were born, where your parents are from, where you hold citizenship – politics, geography, circumstance and even choice. There is nothing complicated about where I am from, until I’m challenged to prove it.

As a bi-racial African, defining and proving how Ugandan I am is something I am faced with quite often.

I’ve just become more tolerant of other people’s opinions of my identity
In the past when confronted with such a challenge, my sensitivity and emotions would affect my participation in the conversation. I would either defend myself by launching into a soliloquy in my mother tongue to prove that I belonged or, more often, I would simply remove myself from the conversation for fear of landing myself with a charge of aggravated assault. I have since matured, or maybe I’ve just become more tolerant of other people’s opinions of my identity. At any rate, I no longer feel the need to prove myself to anyone, so the most recent dispute of my Ugandan-ness couldn’t have come at a better time…

…This isn’t a woe-is-me story, I don’t feel hindered by the diversity in my heritage, but I do feel that not acknowledging challenges and obstacles faced by bi-racial Africans implies that there are none, or that all Africans are equally accepted, no matter how they look or sound. On many levels, the definition of “African” has ample space to be broadened, and somewhere within that definition one should find bi-racial Africans too, because there is a tendency to cast us aside when we’re not being put on a pedestal…

Read the entire article here.

Toni Morrison and the Burden of the Passing Narrative

African American Review
Volume 35, Number 2 (Summer, 2001)
pages 205-217

Juda Bennett, Associate Professor of English
The College of New Jersey

Passing for white, a phenomenon that once captivated writers as diverse as Charles Chesnutt, Sinclair Lewis, Nella Larsen, and Mark Twain, no longer seems to engage contemporary novelists. The long list of authors from the first half of the twentieth century, which includes canonical writers like William Faulkner and forgotten stars like Edna Ferber, is hardly balanced by the short list of contemporary writers who have addressed this figure of racial ambiguity. In considering the relative disappearance of the passing figure from contemporary literature, this essay begins with neither a clear and substantial presence nor a complete absence of passing in the work of one of our most important novelists, Toni Morrison.

In each of her seven novels and in her sole short story, Toni Morrison invokes the passing myth, sometimes in only one or two paragraphs and often with indirection. The Bluest Eye, for example, features a dark-skinned child who cannot possibly pass for white, yet Pecola ignores biology and becomes (if only to herself) a blue-eyed Shirley Temple. Although some might consider Pecola’s delusion a weak or perhaps specious representation of passing for white, The Bluest Eye artfully reinforces its interest in racial passing by alluding to Peola, the passing figure in Imitation of Life. This intertextual play effectively evokes the myth without actually representing the phenomenon of passing, and in this way
Morrison decenters and deforms the traditional passing figure. Why?

It is my hope that this overview, although focused on Morrison, will be suggestive of larger shifts in culture, politics, and aesthetics. Why, for example, has the passing figure, after holding a central place in the imaginations of early-twentieth-century writers, been consigned to the margins of late-twentieth-century novels concerned with race? Why did Nella Larsen and Langston Hughes address the subject directly, even entitling works Passing and “Who’s Passing for Who?” while Morrison approaches the subject indirectly and often in a subplot or through an allusion? Are there certain stories that are considered embarrassing, passe, or even dangerous? Are there stories, furthermore, that simply cannot be told or, rather, cannot be told simply?…

Read the entire article here.

‘Stretching out the categories’: Chinese/European narratives of mixedness, belonging and home in Singapore

Ethnicities
Volume 14, Number 2 (April 2014)
pages 279-302
DOI: 10.1177/1468796813505554

Zarine L. Rocha, Research Scholar
Department of Sociology
National University of Singapore

Racial categorization is important in everyday interactions and state organization in Singapore. Increasingly, the idea of ‘mixed race’ and new conceptions of mixedness are challenging such classification along racial lines. Although contemporary Singapore is extremely diverse, the underlying ideology of multiracialism remains grounded in distinctly racialized groups, leaving little space for more complex individual identities. This paper explores the identifications of individuals of mixed Chinese and European descent in the Singaporean context, looking at how complexity is lived within firmly racialized structures. Drawing on a series of 20 narrative interviews, this research examines the relationship between categorization and identity, focusing on the identities of individuals with multiple national, cultural and ethnic ties. The practical impacts of racial categorization shape many aspects of life in Singapore, and individuals of mixed descent illustrated a constant tension between official categorization and personal mixedness, seen in the frustrations experienced and strategies developed by individuals around race and belonging. Individuals negotiated their connections around race and nationality both in practical terms around language, social policies and culture, and personally in terms of symbolic feelings of connection.

Read or purchase the article here.

U.S. Census looking at big changes in how it asks about race and ethnicity

Pew Research Center
2014-03-14

Jens Manuel Krogstad, Writer/Editor at the Pew Research Center’s Hispanic Trends Project

D’Vera Cohn, Senior Writer at the Pew Research Center’s Social & Demographic Trends Project

The Census Bureau has embarked on a years-long research project intended to improve the accuracy and reliability of its race and ethnicity data. A problem is that a growing percentage of Americans don’t select a race category provided on the form: As many as 6.2% of census respondents selected only “some other race” in the 2010 census, the vast majority of whom were Hispanic.

Six percent may seem small, but for an agency trying to capture the entire U.S. population (nearly 309 million in 2010) every 10 years, that number results in millions of people unaccounted for. This pattern of response led to the bureau’s “most comprehensive effort in history to study race and ethnic categories,” according to Census officials Nicholas Jones and Roberto Ramirez. “Increasingly, Americans are saying they cannot find themselves” on census forms, Jones said.

Many communities, including Hispanics, Arabs and people of mixed race, have said they’re unsure of how to identify themselves on census forms…

Read the entire article here.

The Strange History of the American Quadroon: Free Women of Color in the Revolutionary Atlantic World by Emily Clark (review) [Wright]

Early American Literature
Volume 49, Number 1, 2014
page 257-262
DOI: 10.1353/eal.2014.0015

Nazera Sadiq Wright, Assistant Professor of English
University of Kentucky

The Strange History of the American Quadroon: Free Women of Color in the Revolutionary Atlantic World unveils the historical genealogy of the American quadroon from its invention as a by-product of the Haitian Revolution and evolution as an alluring figure of sexual desire in New Orleans to its contemporary representation in film and media. Emily Clark tells a masterful story of the quadroon’s migration from the Caribbean to the United States, surfacing in Philadelphia, and settling in New Orleans. She begins with the revolution in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, a revolt that resulted in the establishment of Haiti in 1804. The American quadroon was a socially constructed formula created after the Haitian Revolution to reduce anxiety over race revolts in the Caribbean that threatened to reach American soil. The fictional quadroon, argues Clark, aided in the imaginative construction of New Orleans as a foreign city apart from the American polity. As with Sally Hemings, Thomas Jefferson’s black, female mistress kept hidden away like a secret, so too did Americans create “a complex symbolic strategy that kept the quadroon at an imaginative distance from the nation’s heart and heartland” (6). Clark insists that scholars consider New Orleans as a foundational scene of American history, arguing that “the presumption that the history of New Orleans and its quadroons is unique diverts the gaze of the rest of the nation away from its own unattractive Atlantic past, allowing it to remain firmly fixed on less-troubling founding scenes played out on the Mayflower and in Independence Hall” (9). The Strange History of the American Quadroon corrects this sanitization by examining the “intertwined stories” of the quadroon’s evolution as a cultural symbol, the actual people whom this racial classification represents, and the myth that New Orleans is the only home of the quadroon (10).

Using a dazzling array of materials carefully gleaned from archives and historical repositories, including collections at the Latin American Library at Tulane University, the Templeman Library at the University of Kent, and the Office of Archives and Records from the Archdiocese of New Orleans, Clark restores the quadroon to US cultural memory. The first chapter situates the quadroon in the American popular and political imagination through her appearance in the Philadelphia press in 1807. With Haitian refugees migrating to Philadelphia and other US cities after the Haitian Revolution, the image of the quadroon articulated white Philadelphians’ fear of a black republic as well as more generalized anxiety regarding the tenuous political landscape of a newly formed nation. The chapter begins with a detailed account of Haiti’s involvement in the quadroon’s migration to America and her embattled appearance in Philadelphia politics and print culture, arguing that the figure of the black woman “emerged as a charged rhetorical device” in the Philadelphia newspapers to represent the animosity between radical and conservative Democratic Republicans (35). This animosity resulted in the quadroon press war of 1807, which recounted Philadelphia’s unstable relationship with Saint Domingue as a conflict among political parties. The richness of this chapter rests in the way Clark synthesizes the history of the Haitian Revolution and its impact on Philadelphia commerce to demonstrate how this duality “conjured the quadroon as a political trope” (37). This chapter will be especially helpful to scholars invested in studying Haiti through the lens of early Philadelphian print culture.

In chapter 2, Clark reveals how American consciousness came to terms with the Haitian Revolution by displacing fear onto the body of the “menagere,” which Clark defines as a free black woman of color who engaged in sexual partnership with white men in New Orleans. This individual wielded significant economic influence, while being demonized as “an insatiable consumer who seduced white men, including American white men, tempting them away from their proper roles as faithful husbands and fathers” (53-54). In that the “menagere” was viewed as a dangerous, sexually irresistible figure who disrupted men’s natural attachments to white women, the free black woman of color threatened national consciousness as a “usurper of patriotic filiation” (54). Quadroon balls emerged in the context of this perceived threat. In these ballrooms, “men could take in the spectacle of quadroon…

Being “Nesian”: Pacific Islander Identity in Australia

The Contemporary Pacific
Volume 26, Number 1, 2014
pages 126-154
DOI: 10.1353/cp.2014.0013

Kirsten McGavin, Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Anthropology
University of Queensland, Australia

Pacific Islanders in Australia use the terms “Islander” and “Pacific Islander” in many ways and in different circumstances to define themselves and others. Through invoking discourses including these terms, Pacific Islanders both consciously draw on “panethnicity” and subconsciously strengthen and support their localized identities. In this way, Pacific Islanders blur the ethno-cultural and sociopolitical boundaries that traditionally separate groups with connections across a diverse range of countries. Indeed, diasporic settings give rise to transnationalist sentiment and actions and serve to strengthen panethnic identity. Using insider and auto-anthropology and ethnographic research techniques, I draw on my experiences as an Australian of Pacific Islander descent and use examples drawn from my involvement in formalized community groups, cultural events, and social functions. In doing so, I argue that the expression of Islander and Pacific Islander identity is entwined with ideas about “race,” place, stereotypes, and behavior that highlight the dynamic ethnogenesis of this group.

Discovery Leads Yale to Revise a Chapter of Its Black History

The New York Times
2014-03-28

Ariel Kaminer

On the campus of Yale University, Edward Bouchet has long been a venerated name. Hailed as the first African-American to graduate from Yale College, in 1874, he went on to be the first African-American to earn a Ph.D. (and only the sixth person nationwide to earn one in physics).

In recognition of the path he forged, Yale has convened seminars and lecture series in his name, bestowed the Bouchet Leadership Awards in Minority Graduate Education and hung an oil painting of him — a young man in formal attire, looking off with an expression of dignified purpose — in a prominent spot at the main library.

Mr. Bouchet’s accomplishments still inspire many young students. But it seems one of his distinctions actually belongs to someone else.

Newly uncovered records suggest that Yale awarded a bachelor’s degree to another African-American man almost two decades before Mr. Bouchet received his diploma.

That man, according to an article being published on Saturday by the Yale Alumni Magazine, was Richard Henry Green. Born in 1833 to a local bootmaker who helped found St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in New Haven, he sat for the entrance examination and was admitted in 1853. Undergraduates did not have majors in those days, so Mr. Green, along with his 100 or so classmates (in what was at the time America’s largest college), read history, philosophy, literature and the like. He lived at his family’s home but he appears to have been active in campus life, joining the literary society Brothers in Unity as well as the fraternity Sigma Delta…

…Edward Bouchet, who graduated summa cum laude and was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa, was celebrated in his day as a pioneer. According to Judith Schiff, Yale’s chief research archivist, “a campus periodical at the time talks about him coming as the first — isn’t it wonderful that he’s here and we hope he can make a good record for his race.”

Far less, if anything, is known about how Mr. Green was viewed, or even how he viewed himself. “He certainly didn’t stand out as a landmark person,” Ms. Schiff said.

His school records make no note of his race. In the 1850 census, he is listed as “mulatto”; 10 years later, the census recorded him as black. His wife’s family was white, and that is how the 1870 census categorized him and his daughter…

Read the entire article here.

New Contenders Emerge in Quest to Identify Yale’s First African-American Graduate

The New York Times
2014-03-16

Ariel Kaminer

For Richard Henry Green, recently declared to have been Yale College’s first known African-American graduate, fame, or at least the certainty of his claim on history, was fleeting.

Just last month, an Americana specialist at the Swann Auction Galleries made public the discovery that Mr. Green, the son of a New Haven bootmaker, had attended Yale 17 years before Edward Bouchet, an 1874 graduate previously thought to have broken its color barrier. But while Mr. Bouchet spent a century and a half on that pedestal, his accomplishments praised with every honor, from academic symposiums to undergraduate fellowships to a portrait in Yale’s main library, the scant weeks since Mr. Green unseated him have brought nothing but new challengers.

According to an article in the journal Afro-Americans in New York Life and History, a man named Moses Simons may in fact have been the first undergraduate to break Yale’s color barrier. This possibility is remarkable not just because Mr. Simons graduated long before either of the two previous contenders — all the way back in 1809, when Thomas Jefferson was president — but because Mr. Simons is already celebrated for breaking an entirely different sort of barrier…

…The record of Mr. Simons’s trial includes references to him as “coloured,” and to the discomfort that he aroused in some “Southern gentlemen.” And the author of that trial record ended his account with a rant about keeping America free of “the African tinge.”

What’s more, a number of men in the Jewish, slave-owning Simons family of Charleston, S.C., were known to have fathered children of mixed race.

But as strongly as the trial record implies African ancestry, Dale Rosengarten, founding director of the Jewish Heritage Collection at the College of Charleston, cautioned that “unless you can actually know who the parents were, you don’t actually know.” She added: “If this man did have a dark complexion, darker than the average Caucasian, it’s possible that he had other admixtures.”…

Read the entire article here.