Mixed Race Studies

Between Arab and White: Race and Ethnicity in the Early Syrian American Diaspora

University of California Press
May 2009
296 pages
Paperback ISBN: 9780520255340
Hardcover ISBN: 9780520255326
PDF E-Book ISBN: ISBN: 9780520943469

Sarah Gualtieri, Associate Professor of History and American Studies and Ethnicity
University of Southern California

This multifaceted study of Syrian immigration to the United States places Syrians—and Arabs more generally—at the center of discussions about race and racial formation from which they have long been marginalized. Between Arab and White focuses on the first wave of Arab immigration and settlement in the United States in the years before World War II, but also continues the story up to the present. It presents an original analysis of the ways in which people mainly from current day Lebanon and Syria—the largest group of Arabic-speaking immigrants before World War II—came to view themselves in racial terms and position themselves within racial hierarchies as part of a broader process of ethnic identity formation.

Contents

• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Terms and Transliterations
• Introduction
• 1. From Internal to International Migration
• 2. Claiming Whiteness: Syrians and Naturalization Law
• 3. Nation and Migration: Emergent Arabism and Diasporic Nationalism
• 4. The Lynching of Nola Romey: Syrian Racial Inbetweenness in the Jim Crow South
• 5. Marriage and Respectability in the Era of Immigration Restriction
• Conclusion
• Epilogue: Becoming Arab American
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

Playing for Malaya: A Eurasian Family and the Pacific War

University of Hawai‘i Press (Distributed for the National University of Singapore Press)
2011
208 pages
Paper ISBN: 978-9971-69-573-6

Rebecca Kenneison

Reggie, according to his niece Wendy, ‘only told what Reggie wanted you to know.’ Reggie was my father. He had honed the technique of talking with apparent openness and using that talk as a decoy duck: while you were listening to it quack around the pond, you weren’t noticing all the others hiding in the reeds. What follows includes tales that Reggie told repeatedly but, on the whole, it’s about what Reggie didn’t tell me.

So begins a stunning personal account of a Eurasian family living in Malaya. Reggie was the author’s father, and one of the many gaps in his account of his family was that his mother was Eurasian. When Rebecca Kenneison discovered this omission after his death, she set out to learn more about her extended family on the other side of the world.

Set in the 1930s and 1940s, this book recounts the experiences of an extended Eurasian family during the invasion and occupation of Malaya by the Japanese. Colonial society considered Eurasians insufficiently European to be treated as British, but during the Pacific War they seemed all too European to the Japanese, who subjected the Eurasian community to discrimination and worse. Because many Eurasians, including members of the Kenneison family, supported the Allied cause, their wartime experiences are an extraordinary account of tragedy, heroism and endurance, presented here with great eloquence and clarity.

That’s How It Goes: Autobiography Of A Singapore Eurasian

Select Books
2008
235 pages
Paperback ISBN: 9789814022392

F. A. C. “Jock” Oehlers

These memoirs by a member of one of Singapore’s leading Eurasian families offers many sidelights onto Singapore’s life in the mid-20th century. The author, then a dental student, tells of the hardships of his life with a young family at the Japanese-enforced agricultural settlement for Eurasians at Bahau, Negri Sembilan. He tells of his career as an oral surgeon at the University and in private practice, his involvement with the development of the Singapore Kennel Club until his 1990 retirement to Perth, West Australia. With black-and-white photographs.

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.

Obama’s America: A Transformative Vision of Our National Identity

Potomac Books
July 2012
270 pages
6″ x 9″; Notes; Bibliography; Index
Clothbound ISBN: 978-1-61234-472-0

Ian Reifowitz, Associate Professor of History
Empire State College of the State University of New York

What it means to be an American today

Our national identity is defined by what it means to be an American and whom we include and why when we talk about “the American people.” A country’s national identity is fluid, and Ian Reifowitz argues that President Barack Obama, by emphasizing the ideals Americans hold dear, hopes to redefine ours in a fundamental way. Obama’s conception of America emphasizes two principles of national unity: First, all Americans, regardless of their heritage and cultural traditions, should identify with America as their country, based upon shared democratic values, a shared history, and a shared fate. Second, America should embrace all its citizens as active participants in one “family.” Reifowitz explores Obama’s belief that strengthening our common bonds will encourage Americans to rectify the injustices and heal the racial divisions that still plague our country.

We have the opportunity to demonstrate to the world that a society of many races and cultures can truly become one people. In facing terrorism, violent fundamentalism, and other security issues, Obama’s response centers on a powerful, inspiring, and truly inclusive American narrative. By bolstering America’s identity as diverse yet unified, he aims both to counter the anxieties and fears that radicalism stokes and give proponents of religious and political freedom a model they can defend. The stakes couldn’t be any higher in determining America’s future.

Table of Contents

• Foreword by Ellis Cose
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. American National Identity: From the Revolution through the 1960s
• 2. Since the 1960s: Radical Multiculturalism, Its Critics, and How Obama Fits In
• 3. Obama’s Search for His Own Identity
• 4. Obama on Racial Discrimination: Causes, Effects, and Policies to Combat It
• 5. Candidate and President Obama’s Broader Rhetoric on Race
• 6. Obama’s Vision of National Identity and National Unity
• 7. Obama’s Narrative of American History and Our Place in the World
• 8. Rejecting Obama’s America: Right-Wing Exclusionists and Left-Wing Race Critics
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author

The Cayton Legacy: An African American Family

Washington State University Press
2002
272 pages
6″ x 9″
Photographs, notes, bibliography, index
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-87422-251-7

Richard S. Hobbs

The evolution of a remarkable African American family—the Caytons—is a brilliantly told tale set primarily in Seattle and Chicago. The Caytons lived a true American saga, illuminating the black and white experience in the United States and the troubled, tortuous course of race relations.

Several generations of the Horace and Susie Cayton family spanned the period from the Civil War to the present. They were a distinguished family, conscious of their historical heritage and distinct identity. The Caytons sought to define themselves in relation to their family traditions and to society as a whole. In the process, they attained financial success and influence both nationally and regionally. They published newspapers, authored books and articles, held public office, worked for civil and human rights, and established relationships with major black and white community and cultural leaders in America.

They also faced racial discrimination and duress, business and professional failures, and even poverty. And, some struggled against the personal challenges of alcoholism, depression, and drug addiction. Yet the force of the family legacy—of being “a Cayton”— impelled most of them to make significant contributions.

They speak to us with deep insight about our society—sharpening our understanding of the past, and enhancing our sense of individual and collective identity in the modern age.

Still a House Divided: Race and Politics in Obama’s America

Princeton University Press
2011
320 pages
6 x 9; 5 halftones; 36 tables
Cloth ISBN: 9780691142630
eBook ISBN: 9781400839766

Desmond S. King, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of American Government
University of Oxford

Rogers M. Smith, Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Political Science
University of Pennsylvania

Why have American policies failed to reduce the racial inequalities still pervasive throughout the nation? Has President Barack Obama defined new political approaches to race that might spur unity and progress? Still a House Divided examines the enduring divisions of American racial politics and how these conflicts have been shaped by distinct political alliances and their competing race policies. Combining deep historical knowledge with a detailed exploration of such issues as housing, employment, criminal justice, multiracial census categories, immigration, voting in majority-minority districts, and school vouchers, Desmond King and Rogers Smith assess the significance of President Obama’s election to the White House and the prospects for achieving constructive racial policies for America’s future.

Offering a fresh perspective on the networks of governing institutions, political groups, and political actors that influence the structure of American racial politics, King and Smith identify three distinct periods of opposing racial policy coalitions in American history. The authors investigate how today’s alliances pit color-blind and race-conscious approaches against one another, contributing to political polarization and distorted policymaking. Contending that President Obama has so far inadequately confronted partisan divisions over race, the authors call for all sides to recognize the need for a balance of policy measures if America is to ever cease being a nation divided.

Presenting a powerful account of American political alliances and their contending racial agendas, Still a House Divided sheds light on a policy path vital to the country’s future.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgments
• PART ONE: Obama’s Inheritance
  • CHAPTER 1 “That They May All Be One America”: as a House Divided
• PART TWO: The Making and Unmaking of Racial Hierarchies
  • CHAPTER 2 “That is the last speech he will ever make”: The Antebellum Racial Alliances
  • CHAPTER 3 “We of the North were thoroughly wrong”: How Racial Alliances Mobilized Ideas and Law
• PART THREE: The Trajectory of Racial Alliances
  • CHAPTER 4 “This backdrop of entrenched inequality”: Affirmative Action in Work
  • CHAPTER 5 To “affi rmatively further fair housing”: Enduring Racial Inequalities in American Homes and Mortgages
  • CHAPTER 6 “To Elect One of Their Own”: Racial Alliances and Majority-Minority Districts
  • CHAPTER 7 “Our goal is to have one classification-American” Vouchers for Schools and the Multiracial Census
  • CHAPTER 8 “We can take the people out of the slums, but we cannot take the slums out of the people”: How Today’s Racial Alliances Shape Laws on Crime and Immigration
• PART FOUR: America’s Inheritance
  • CHAPTER 9 Prospects of the House Divided
• Notes
• Index

From Slave Ship to Harvard: Yarrow Mamout and the History of an African American Family

Fordham University Press
May 2012
310 pages
6 x 9
25 Black and White Illustrations
Hardcover ISBN: 9780823239504

James H. Johnston, Lawyer and Writer
Washington, D.C.

From Slave Ship to Harvard is the true story of an African American family in Maryland over six generations. The author has reconstructed a unique narrative of black struggle and achievement from paintings, photographs, books, diaries, court records, legal documents, and oral histories. From Slave Ship to Harvard traces the family from the colonial period and the American Revolution through the Civil War to Harvard and finally today.

Yarrow Mamout, the first of the family in America, was an educated Muslim from Guinea. He was brought to Maryland on the slave ship Elijah and gained his freedom forty-four years later. By then, Yarrow had become so well known in the Georgetown section of Washington, D.C., that he attracted the attention of the eminent American portrait painter Charles Willson Peale, who captured Yarrow’s visage in the painting that appears on the cover of this book. The author here reveals that Yarrow’s immediate relatives—his sister, niece, wife, and son—were notable in their own right. His son married into the neighboring Turner family, and the farm community in western Maryland called Yarrowsburg was named for Yarrow Mamout’s daughter-in-law, Mary “Polly” Turner Yarrow. The Turner line ultimately produced Robert Turner Ford, who graduated from Harvard University in 1927.

Just as Peale painted the portrait of Yarrow, James H. Johnston’s new book puts a face on slavery and paints the history of race in Maryland. It is a different picture from what most of us imagine. Relationships between blacks and whites were far more complex, and the races more dependent on each other. Fortunately, as this one family’s experience shows, individuals of both races repeatedly stepped forward to lessen divisions and to move America toward the diverse society of today.

Contents

• Introduction
• 1. Yarrow Mamout. a West African Muslim Slave
• 2. Tobacco and the Importation of a Labor Force
• 3. Welcome to America
• 4. Slavery and Revolution
• 5. Yarrow of Georgetown
• 6. The Portraits: Peale, Yarrow, and Simpson
• 7. Free Hannah, Yarrow’s sister
• 8. Nancy Hillman, Yarrow’s Niece
• 9. Aquilla Yarrow
• 10. Mary “Polly” Turner Yarrow
• 11 Aquilla and Polly in Pleasant Valley
• 12. Traces of Yarrow
• 13. Unpleasant Valley
• 14. Freedom
• 15. From Harvard to Today
• Epilogue: Guide to the Yarrows’ and Turners’ World Today
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgments
• Index

A Home Elsewhere: Reading African American Classics in the Age of Obama

Harvard University Press
May 2010
192 pages
5-1/2 x 8-1/4 inches
no illustrations
Hardcover ISBN: 9780674050969

Robert B. Stepto, Professor of English, African American Studies, and American Studies
Yale University

In this series of interlocking essays, which had their start as lectures inspired by the presidency of Barack Obama, Robert Burns Stepto sets canonical works of African American literature in conversation with Obama’s Dreams from My Father. The elegant readings that result shed surprising light on unexamined angles of works ranging from Frederick Douglass’s Narrative to W.E.B. Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folk to Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon.

Stepto draws our attention to the concerns that recur in the books he takes up: how protagonists raise themselves, often without one or both parents; how black boys invent black manhood, often with no models before them; how protagonists seek and find a home elsewhere; and how they create personalities that can deal with the pain of abandonment. These are age-old themes in African American literature that, Stepto shows, gain a special poignancy and importance because our president has lived through these situations and circumstances and has written about them in a way that refreshes our understanding of the whole of African American literature.

Stepto amplifies these themes in four additional essays, which investigate Douglass’s correspondence with Harriet Beecher Stowe; Willard Savoy’s novel Alien Land and its interracial protagonist; the writer’s understanding of the reader in African American literature; and Stepto’s account of his own schoolhouse lessons, with their echoes of Douglass’ and Obama’s experiences.

Table of Contents

• Part One: The W.E.B. Du Bois Lectures
  • Introduction
  • 1. Frederick Douglass, Barack Obama, and the Search for Patrimony
  • 2. W.E.B. Du Bois, Barack Obama, and the Search for Race: School House Blues
  • 3. Toni Morrison, Barack Obama, and Difference
• Part Two
  • Introduction
  • 4. A Greyhound Kind of Mood
  • 5. Sharing the Thunder: The Literary Exchanges of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry Bibb, and Frederick Douglass
  • 6. Willard Savoy’s Alien Land: Biracial Identity in a Novel of the 1940s
  • Afterword: Distrust of the Reader in Afro-American Narratives
• Notes
• Index

Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America

Harvard University Press
2012-11-19
320 pages
6-1/8 x 9-1/4 inches
15 halftones, 2 maps, 4 tables
Hardcover ISBN: 9780674066663

Vivek Bald, Assistant Professor of Writing and Digital Media
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

In the final years of the nineteenth century, small groups of Muslim peddlers arrived at Ellis Island every summer, bags heavy with embroidered silks from their home villages in Bengal. The American demand for “Oriental goods” took these migrants on a curious path, from New Jersey’s beach boardwalks into the heart of the segregated South. Two decades later, hundreds of Indian Muslim seamen began jumping ship in New York and Baltimore, escaping the engine rooms of British steamers to find less brutal work onshore. As factory owners sought their labor and anti-Asian immigration laws closed in around them, these men built clandestine networks that stretched from the northeastern waterfront across the industrial Midwest.

The stories of these early working-class migrants vividly contrast with our typical understanding of immigration. Vivek Bald’s meticulous reconstruction reveals a lost history of South Asian sojourning and life-making in the United States. At a time when Asian immigrants were vilified and criminalized, Bengali Muslims quietly became part of some of America’s most iconic neighborhoods of color, from Tremé in New Orleans to Detroit’s Black Bottom, from West Baltimore to Harlem. Many started families with Creole, Puerto Rican, and African American women.

As steel and auto workers in the Midwest, as traders in the South, and as halal hot dog vendors on 125th Street, these immigrants created lives as remarkable as they are unknown. Their stories of ingenuity and intermixture challenge assumptions about assimilation and reveal cross-racial affinities beneath the surface of early twentieth-century America.

For more information, visit the Bengali Harlem website here.

Table of Contents

• Author’s Note
• Introduction: Lost in Migration
• 1. Out of the East and into the South
• 2. Between Hindoo and Negro
• 3. From Ships’ Holds to Factory Floors
• 4. The Travels and Transformations of Amir Haider Khan
• 5. Bengali Harlem
• 6. The Life and Times of a Multiracial Community
• Conclusion: Lost Futures
• List of Abbreviations
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index