Mixed Race Studies

The Forgotten People: Cane River’s Creoles of Color (revised edition)

Louisiana State University Press
November 2013 (First published in 1977)
480 pages
6.00 x 9.00 inches
25 halftones, 3 maps, 3 charts
Paperback ISBN: 9780807137130

Gary B. Mills (1944–2002), Professor of History
University of Alabama

Revised by:

Elizabeth Shown Mills

Foreword by:

H. Sophie Burton

Out of colonial Natchitoches, in northwestern Louisiana, emerged a sophisticated and affluent community founded by a family of freed slaves. Their plantations eventually encompassed 18,000 fertile acres, which they tilled alongside hundreds of their own bondsmen. Furnishings of quality and taste graced their homes, and private tutors educated their children. Cultured, deeply religious, and highly capable, Cane River’s Creoles of color enjoyed economic privileges but led politically constricted lives. Like their white neighbors, they publicly supported the Confederacy and suffered the same depredations of war and political and social uncertainties of Reconstruction. Unlike white Creoles, however, they did not recover amid cycles of Redeemer and Jim Crow politics.

First published in 1977, The Forgotten People offers a socioeconomic history of this widely publicized but also highly romanticized community—a minority group that fit no stereotypes, refused all outside labels, and still struggles to explain its identity in a world mystified by Creolism.

Now revised and significantly expanded, this time-honored work revisits Cane River’s “forgotten people” and incorporates new findings and insight gleaned across thirty-five years of further research. This new edition provides a nuanced portrayal of the lives of Creole slaves and the roles allowed to freed people of color, tackling issues of race, gender, and slave holding by former slaves. The Forgotten People corrects misassumptions about the origin of key properties in the Cane River National Heritage Area and demonstrates how historians reconstruct the lives of the enslaved, the impoverished, and the disenfranchised.

Pauline Johnson: Selected Poetry and Prose

Dundurn Press
June 2013
240 pages
5.5 in x 8.5 in
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-45970-426-8
eBook ISBN: 978-1-45970-428-2

Pauline Johnson (1861-1913)

Compiled and Introduced by:

Michael Gnarowski

Pauline Johnson was an unusual and unique presence on the literary scene during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Part Mohawk and part European, she was a compelling female voice in the midst of an almost entirely male writing community. Having discovered her talent for public recitation of poetry, Johnson relied on her ancestry and gender to establish an international reputation for her stage performances, during which she appeared in European and native costume. These poems were later collected under the title of Flint and Feather (1912) and form the source of the selections appearing in this volume.

Later, suffering from ill health, Pauline Johnson retired from the stage and devoted herself to the writing of prose, collected in Legends of Vancouver, The Moccasin Maker (1913), and The Shagganappi (1913), gleanings from which form part of this collection.

Master of None: How a Hong Kong high-flyer overcame the devastating experience of imprisonment

Blacksmith Books
October 2011
312 pages
colour photo section
Size: 14.6 x 21.6 cm
Hardback ISBN: ISBN: 978-988-19002-7-2

John Hung

Does a man need a stint in jail to complete his life experiences?

From Stanley Prison, corporate high-flyer John T. Hung recounts his life in a sweep of Hong Kong history over five generations – from his family roots in the 19th century through World War II to the present.

The story tracks the richness of his mixed heritage and upbringing, his steady rise and precipitous fall from the pinnacles of corporate Hong Kong to the life-destroying court case and heartbreaking incarceration.

With wry and subtle humour, Hung describes his colourful yet volatile life, interwoven into the social, commercial, political and sporting tapestry of Hong Kong and South East Asia.

Master of None is a soulful exploration of human achievements, frailties, resilience in the face of adversity, and above all, the importance of family support in overcoming whatever fate may deal us.

The New New Thing, Again

MPG: unofficial thoughts, whimsical critiques, and occasional cultural commentary
2013-02-08

Matthew Pratt Guterl, Professor of Africana studies and American studies
Brown University

Someone referred to mixed race children as particularly “beautiful” the other day, and it made me think of this:

In 1993, the cover of Time magazine featured a fresh-faced young woman, designated the “New Face of America.” For twenty years, this image has circulated as a referent for the new, new thing, for the mixed-race future gestating in a womb somewhere in the U.S.  Often, it is embraced enthusiastically, and “she” is offered up as an icon for a pretty and happy future.  Sometimes, the image is described as a way-too-seductive advertisement for race-suicide. (That last link is NSFW and, really, not safe for any decent human being).

“Take a good look at this woman,” the scrawl read, encouraging a close reading of her face.  “She was created by a computer.”  In truth, though, she wasn’t.  With brown eyes and light brown skin, she was imagined by renowned graphic artist Milton Glaser, conceived through software created by engineer Kim Wah Lam, a composite of hundreds of photographs taken by Ted Thai. A chorus line of willing employees in the Time Life building provided the visual DNA. The design team selected a handful of idealized “types,” borrowed features from them, and assembled the image by cutting the features out and stitching them together. The near future in digital flesh, “she” stood without clothes, with a slight smile and a direct gaze, and looked right into the eyes of the present tense.

Tellingly, every student sees “her” as “Mexican,” as if that national category were itself a precise synonym for mixture…

Read the entire article here.

Race and Justice in Transnational Perspective: “Race in Motion: Traversing the Transnational Emotionscape of White Beauty in Indonesia”

Seminar Series: Race and Justice in Transnational Perspective
University of California, Merced
California Room
5200 North Lake Rd.
Merced, California 95343
2013-10-31, 10:30 PDT (Local Time)

L. Ayu Saraswati, Assistant Professor of Women’s Studies
University of Hawai‘i, Manoa

In this talk, Saraswati explores how feelings and emotions—Western constructs as well as Indian, Javanese, and Indonesian notions such as rasa and malu—contribute to and are constitutive of transnational and gendered processes of racialization. Employing “affect” theories and feminist cultural studies as a lens through which to analyze a vast range of materials, including the Old Javanese epic poem Ramayana, archival materials, magazine advertisements, commercial products, and numerous interviews with Indonesian women, she argues that it is how emotions come to be attached to certain objects and how they circulate that shape the “emotionscape” of white beauty in Indonesia.

The seminar series “Race and Justice in Transnational Perspective” is organized by Tanya Golash-Boza, Nigel Hatton, and David Torres-Rouff. The event is co-sponsored by the UC Center for New Racial Studies, Sociology, and SSHA.

For more information, click here.

Race and Justice in Transnational Perspective: “The Return of Pseudoscientific Racism? DNA Ancestry Testing, Race, and the New Eugenics Movement”

Seminar Series: Race and Justice in Transnational Perspective
University of California, Merced
California Room
5200 North Lake Rd.
Merced, California 95343
2013-10-17, 10:30 PDT (Local Time)

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

Ancestry.com wants you to swab your cheek and send them a DNA sample and a check.  In return, they promise to tell you who your remote ancestors were.  Eminent literary scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr., performs the same miracle on national TV.  Modern genetic technology, they promise, can tell you intimate details about your family’s past.  Professor Spickard’s lecture examines the claims of the DNA ancestry testing industry, compares them to the assumptions and claims of the racialist pseudoscience of the late 19th and early 20th century, evaluates their validity, and suggests what may really be going on with this ancestry testing business.

Paul Spickard is Professor of History and Affiliate Professor of Black Studies, Asian American Studies, East Asian Studies, Religious Studies, and the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.  He is author or editor of eighteen books and seventy-odd articles on race, migration, and related topics in the United States, the Pacific, Northeast Asia, and Europe, including:

• Global Mixed Race (in press, due 2014)
• Multiple Identities: Migrants, Ethnicity, and Membership (2013)
• Almost All Aliens: Immigration, Race and Colonialism in American History and Identity (2007)
• Is Lighter Better? Skin-Tone Discrimination among Asian Americans (with Joanne Rondilla, 2007)
• Race and Nation: Ethnic Systems in the Modern World (2005)
• Racial Thinking in the United States: Uncompleted Independence (with G. Reginald Daniel, 2004)
• Mixed Blood: Intermarriage and Ethnic Identity in 20th-Century America (1989)

The seminar series “Race and Justice in Transnational Perspective” is organized by Tanya Golash-Boza, Nigel Hatton, and David Torres-Rouff. The event is co-sponsored by the UC Center for New Racial Studies, Sociology, and SSHA.

For more information, click here.

The Color of Color-Blindness: Whites’ Race Talk in ‘Post-Racial’ America

Reitman/DeGrange Memorial Lecture Series
Dartmouth College
Hanover, New Hampshire
Haldeman 41 (Kreindler Conference Hall)
Thursday, 2013-09-26, 16:00-17:30 EDT (Local Time)

Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Professor of Sociology
Duke University

Professor Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Sociology Deptartment Chair at Duke University, will deconstruct whites’ post-racial or color-blind talk & suggest this is the new, dominant prejudice in the U.S.

Post-racial arguments did not emerge in 2008 with the election of President Obama. White America has believed a version of post-racialism since the early 1980s. In this talk, Professor Bonilla-Silva will address three things related to this subject. First, to be able to clearly discuss racial matters, he will begin by defining what racism is all about. Second, he will be devote some time to characterizing the nature of and describing the practices associated with the racial regime of Post-Civil  Rights America. Third, the bulk of the talk will revolve around the examination of “color-blind racism” or whites’ race talk in the contemporary period. He will conclude his talk with suggestions of what is to be done to prevent color-blindness from sealing the (white racial) deal in America.

Co-Sponsored by the African and African-American Studies Program, and the Latin American, Latino and Caribbean Studies Program.  

For more information, click here.

Race and Narrative in Italian Women’s Writing Since Unification

Fairleigh Dickinson University Press
July 2013
127 pages
ISBN: 9781611475999

Melissa Coburn, Assistant Professor of Italian and Italian Program Director
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

Race and Narrative in Italian Women’s Writing Since Unification explores racist ideas and critiques of racism in four long narratives by female authors Grazia Deledda, Matilde Serao, Natalia Ginzburg, and Gabriella Ghermandi, who wrote in Italy after national unification. Starting from the premise that race is a political and sociohistorical construction, Melissa Coburn makes the argument that race is also a narrative construction. This is true in that many narratives have contributed to the historical construction of the idea of race; it is also true in that the concept of race metaphorically reflects certain formal qualities of narration. Coburn demonstrates that at least four sets of qualities are common among narratives and also central to the development of race discourse: intertextuality; the processes of characterization, plot, and tropes; the tension between the projections of individual, group, and universal identities; and the processes of identification and otherness. These four sets of qualities become the organizing principles of the four sequential chapters, paralleling a sequential focus on the four different narrative authors. The juxtaposition of these close, contextualized readings demonstrates salient continuities and discontinuities within race discourse over the period examined, revealing subtleties in the historical record overlooked by previous studies.

Walking While Black in the ‘White Gaze’

The New York Times
2013-09-01

George Yancy, Professor of Philosophy
Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

“Man, I almost blew you away!”

Those were the terrifying words of a white police officer — one of those who policed black bodies in low income areas in North Philadelphia in the late 1970s — who caught sight of me carrying the new telescope my mother had just purchased for me.

“I thought you had a weapon,” he said.

The words made me tremble and pause; I felt the sort of bodily stress and deep existential anguish that no teenager should have to endure.

This officer had already inherited those poisonous assumptions and bodily perceptual practices that make up what I call the “white gaze.” He had already come to “see” the black male body as different, deviant, ersatz. He failed to conceive, or perhaps could not conceive, that a black teenage boy living in the Richard Allen Project Homes for very low income families would own a telescope and enjoyed looking at the moons of Jupiter and the rings of Saturn.

A black boy carrying a telescope wasn’t conceivable — unless he had stolen it — given the white racist horizons within which my black body was policed as dangerous. To the officer, I was something (not someone) patently foolish, perhaps monstrous or even fictional. My telescope, for him, was a weapon.

In retrospect, I can see the headlines: “Black Boy Shot and Killed While Searching the Cosmos.”

That was more than 30 years ago. Only last week, our actual headlines were full of reflections on the 1963 March on Washington, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, and President Obama’s own speech at the steps of the Lincoln Memorial to commemorate it 50 years on. As the many accounts from that long ago day will tell you, much has changed for the better. But some things — those perhaps more deeply embedded in the American psyche — haven’t. In fact, we should recall a speech given by Malcolm X in 1964 in which he said, “For the 20 million of us in America who are of African descent, it is not an American dream; it’s an American nightmare.”…

…The president’s words, perhaps consigned to a long-ago news cycle now, remain powerful: they validate experiences that blacks have undergone in their everyday lives. Obama’s voice resonates with those philosophical voices (Frantz Fanon, for example) that have long attempted to describe the lived interiority of racial experiences. He has also deployed the power of narrative autobiography, which is a significant conceptual tool used insightfully by critical race theorists to discern the clarity and existential and social gravity of what it means to experience white racism. As a black president, he has given voice to the epistemic violence that blacks often face as they are stereotyped and profiled within the context of quotidian social spaces…

Read the entire opinion piece here.

Let’s Learn From the Past: Cumberland Posey Jr.

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
2013-08-29

Michele Sneddon, History Center Communications Assistant

As a standout player, manager and owner, Cumberland Willis Posey Jr. built the Homestead Grays into one of the most successful franchises in Negro League baseball history.

Born on June 20, 1890, Posey grew up in a wealthy African-American household in Homestead. His father, Cumberland “Cap” Posey Sr., was general manager for the Delta Coal Co., president of Diamond Coal and Coke, and president of the Pittsburgh Courier Publishing Co., which became one of the nation’s most influential African-American newspapers.

At Homestead High School, Posey starred as a power-hitting right fielder on the baseball diamond, a fullback on the football field and a dominant guard on the basketball court. Posey attended Penn State University and then the University of Pittsburgh before landing at the Pittsburgh Catholic College of the Holy Ghost, now Duquesne University. He played basketball there and led his team in scoring for three years as “Charles Cumbert,” a fake name used to gain eligibility as a “white” player. While Posey never graduated from college, he established a reputation as one of the region’s top athletes…

Read the entire article here.