Mixed Race Studies

American Son: A Novel

W. W. Norton & Company
May 2001
256 pages
5.6 × 8.3 in
Paperback ISBN 978-0-393-32154-8

Brian Ascalon Roley

A powerful novel about ethnically fluid California, and the corrosive relationship between two Filipino brothers.

Told with a hard-edged purity that brings to mind Cormac McCarthy and Denis Johnson, American Son is the story of two Filipino brothers adrift in contemporary California. The older brother, Tomas, fashions himself into a Mexican gangster and breeds pricey attack dogs, which he trains in German and sells to Hollywood celebrities. The narrator is younger brother Gabe, who tries to avoid the tar pit of Tomas’s waywardness, yet moves ever closer to embracing it. Their mother, who moved to America to escape the caste system of Manila and is now divorced from their American father, struggles to keep her sons in line while working two dead-end jobs. When Gabe runs away, he brings shame and unforeseen consequences to the family. Full of the ache of being caught in a violent and alienating world, American Son is a debut novel that captures the underbelly of the modern immigrant experience.

Enterprising Women: Gender, Race, and Power in the Revolutionary Atlantic

University of Georgia Press
2015-01-15
240 pages
Trim size: 6 x 9
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-8203-4455-3
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8203-5387-6

Kit Candlin, Lecturer
School of Humanities and Social Science
The University of Newcastle, Australia

Cassandra Pybus, Professor of History
University of Sydney

Recovered histories of entrepreneurial women of color from the Caribbean

In the Caribbean colony of Grenada in 1797, Dorothy Thomas signed the manumission documents for her elderly slave Betty. Thomas owned dozens of slaves and was well on her way to amassing the fortune that would make her the richest black resident in the nearby colony of Demerara. What made the transaction notable was that Betty was Dorothy Thomas’s mother and that fifteen years earlier Dorothy had purchased her own freedom and that of her children. Although she was just one remove from bondage, Dorothy Thomas managed to become so rich and powerful that she was known as the Queen of Demerara.

Dorothy Thomas’s story is but one of the remarkable acounts of pluck and courage recovered in Enterprising Women. As the microbiographies in this book reveal, free women of color in Britain’s Caribbean colonies were not merely the dependent concubines of the white male elite, as is commonly assumed. In the capricious world of the slave colonies during the age of revolutions, some of them were able to rise to dizzying heights of success. These highly entrepreneurial women exercised remarkable mobility and developed extensive commercial and kinship connections in the metropolitan heart of empire while raising well-educated children who were able to penetrate deep into British life.

Redrawing the Historical Past: History, Memory, and Multiethnic Graphic Novels

University of Georgia Press
2018-04-01
368 pages
79 b&w images
Trim size: 6 x 9
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-8203-5201-5
Ebook ISBN: 978-0-8203-5200-8

Edited by:

Martha J. Cutter, Professor of English and Africana Studies
University of Connecticut

Cathy J. Schlund-Vials, Professor of English and Asian American Studies
University of Connecticut

An innovative collection that explores how multiethnic graphic novels investigate and remake U.S. history

Redrawing the Historical Past examines how multiethnic graphic novels portray and revise U.S. history. This is the first collection to focus exclusively on the interplay of history and memory in multiethnic graphic novels. Such interplay enables a new understanding of the past. The twelve essays explore Mat Johnson and Warren Pleece’s Incognegro, Gene Luen Yang’s Boxers and Saints, GB Tran’s Vietnamerica, Scott McCloud’s The New Adventures of Abraham Lincoln, Art Spiegelman’s post-Maus work, and G. Neri and Randy DuBurke’s Yummy: The Last Days of a Southside Shorty, among many others.

The collection represents an original body of criticism about recently published works that have received scant scholarly attention. The chapters confront issues of history and memory in contemporary multiethnic graphic novels, employing diverse methodologies and approaches while adhering to three main guidelines. First, using a global lens, contributors reconsider the concept of history and how it is manifest in their chosen texts. Second, contributors consider the ways in which graphic novels, as a distinct genre, can formally renovate or intervene in notions of the historical past. Third, contributors take seriously the possibilities and limitations of these historical revisions with regard to envisioning new, different, or even more positive versions of both the present and future. As a whole, the volume demonstrates that graphic novelists use the open and flexible space of the graphic narrative page—in which readers can move not only forward but also backward, upward, downward, and in several other directions—to present history as an open realm of struggle that is continually being revised.

Contributors: Frederick Luis Aldama, Julie Buckner Armstrong, Katharine Capshaw, Monica Chiu, Jennifer Glaser, Taylor Hagood, Caroline Kyungah Hong, Angela Lafien, Catherine H. Nguyen, Jeffrey Santa Ana, and Jorge Santos.

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.

Richard Potter: America’s First Black Celebrity

University of Virginia Press
February 2018
352 pages
6.13 × 9.25 in
Cloth ISBN: 9780813941042
Ebook ISBN: 9780813941059

John A. Hodgson, Former Dean
Forbes College, Princeton University

Apart from a handful of exotic–and almost completely unreliable–tales surrounding his life, Richard Potter is almost unknown today. Two hundred years ago, however, he was the most popular entertainer in America–the first showman, in fact, to win truly nationwide fame. Working as a magician and ventriloquist, he personified for an entire generation what a popular performer was and made an invaluable contribution to establishing popular entertainment as a major part of American life. His story is all the more remarkable in that Richard Potter was also a black man.

This was an era when few African Americans became highly successful, much less famous. As the son of a slave, Potter was fortunate to have opportunities at all. At home in Boston, he was widely recognized as black, but elsewhere in America audiences entertained themselves with romantic speculations about his “Hindu” ancestry (a perception encouraged by his act and costumes).

Richard Potter’s performances were enjoyed by an enormous public, but his life off stage has always remained hidden and unknown. Now, for the first time, John A. Hodgson tells the remarkable, compelling–and ultimately heartbreaking–story of Potter’s life, a tale of professional success and celebrity counterbalanced by racial vulnerability in an increasingly hostile world. It is a story of race relations, too, and of remarkable, highly influential black gentlemanliness and respectability: as the unsung precursor of Frederick Douglass, Richard Potter demonstrated to an entire generation of Americans that a black man, no less than a white man, could exemplify the best qualities of humanity. The apparently trivial “popular entertainment” status of his work has long blinded historians to his significance and even to his presence. Now at last we can recognize him as a seminal figure in American history.

Slavery Unseen: Sex, Power, and Violence in Brazilian History

Duke University Press
2018-04-06
272 pages
9 illustrations
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8223-7116-8
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8223-7129-8

Lamonte Aidoo, Andrew W. Mellon Assistant Professor of Romance Studies
Duke University, Durham, North Carolina

In Slavery Unseen, Lamonte Aidoo upends the narrative of Brazil as a racial democracy, showing how the myth of racial democracy elides the history of sexual violence, patriarchal terror, and exploitation of slaves. Drawing on sources ranging from inquisition trial documents to travel accounts and literature, Aidoo demonstrates how interracial and same-sex sexual violence operated as a key mechanism of the production and perpetuation of slavery as well as racial and gender inequality. The myth of racial democracy, Aidoo contends, does not stem from or reflect racial progress; rather, it is an antiblack apparatus that upholds and protects the heteronormative white patriarchy throughout Brazil’s past and on into the present.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction. Secrets, Silences, and Sexual Erasures in Brazilian Slavery and History
• 1. The Racial and Sexual Paradoxes of Brazilian Slavery and National Identity
• 2. Illegible Violence: The Rape and Sexual Abuse of Male Slaves
• 3. The White Mistress and the Slave Woman: Seduction, Violence, and Exploitation
• 4. Social Whiteness: Black Intraracial Violence and the Boundaries of Black Freedom
• 5. O Diabo Preto (The Negro Devil): The Myth of the Black Homosexual Predator in the Age of Social Hygiene
• Afterword. Seeing the Unseen: The Life and Afterlives of Ch/Xica da Silva
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

26a

Vintage
2006-03-02
240 Pages
129mm x 198mm x 15mm
170g
Paperback ISBN: 9780099479048
eBook ISBN: 9781409079620

Diana Evans

• Winner of the Orange Award for New Writers
• Winner of the deciBel Writer of the Year Award
• Shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award
• Shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award
• Shortlisted for the Commonwealth Best First Book Award
• Shortlisted for the Times/Southbank Show Breakthrough Award
• Recipient of a Betty Trask Award
• Longlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award

Identical twins, Georgia and Bessi, live in the loft of 26 Waifer Avenue. It is a place of beanbags, nectarines and secrets, and visitors must always knock before entering. Down below there is not such harmony. Their Nigerian mother puts cayenne pepper on her Yorkshire pudding and has mysterious ways of dealing with homesickness; their father angrily roams the streets of Neasden, prey to the demons of his Derbyshire upbringing. Forced to create their own identities, the Hunter children build a separate universe. Older sister Bel discovers sex, high heels and organic hairdressing, the twins prepare for a flapjack empire, and baby sister Kemy learns to moonwalk for Michael Jackson. It is when the reality comes knocking that the fantasies of childhood start to give way. How will Georgia and Bessi cope in a world of separateness and solitude, and which of them will be stronger?

The Presidency of Barack Obama: A First Historical Assessment

Princeton University Press
2018-03-13
360 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 9780691160283
Paperback ISBN: 9780691182100
E-book ISBN: 9781400889556

Edited by:

Julian E. Zelizer, Malcolm Stevenson Forbes, Class of 1941 Professor of History and Public Affairs
Princeton University

An original and engaging account of the Obama years from a group of leading political historians

Barack Obama’s election as the first African American president seemed to usher in a new era, and he took office in 2009 with great expectations. But by his second term, Republicans controlled Congress, and, after the 2016 presidential election, Obama’s legacy and the health of the Democratic Party itself appeared in doubt. In The Presidency of Barack Obama, Julian Zelizer gathers leading American historians to put President Obama and his administration into political and historical context.

These writers offer strikingly original assessments of the big issues that shaped the Obama years, including the conservative backlash, race, the financial crisis, health care, crime, drugs, counterterrorism, Iraq and Afghanistan, the environment, immigration, education, gay rights, and urban policy. Together, these essays suggest that Obama’s central paradox is that, despite effective policymaking, he failed to receive credit for his many achievements and wasn’t a party builder. Provocatively, they ask why Obama didn’t unite Democrats and progressive activists to fight the conservative counter-tide as it grew stronger.

Engaging and deeply informed, The Presidency of Barack Obama is a must-read for anyone who wants to better understand Obama and the uncertain aftermath of his presidency.

Contributors include Sarah Coleman, Jacob Dlamini, Gary Gerstle, Risa Goluboff, Meg Jacobs, Peniel Joseph, Michael Kazin, Matthew Lassiter, Kathryn Olmsted, Eric Rauchway, Richard Schragger, Paul Starr, Timothy Stewart-Winter, Thomas Sugrue, Jeremi Suri, Julian Zelizer, and Jonathan Zimmerman.

Counting Americans: How the US Census Classified the Nation

Oxford University Press
2017-07-03
376 Pages
6-1/8 x 9-1/4 inches
Hardback ISBN: 9780199917853

Paul Schor, Associate Professor History
Université Paris Diderot, Paris, France

• Shows that U.S. census categories are more complex than previous histories of the census have shown, and directly contributed to the social construction of race.
• Demonstrates the fluidity of racial categories in the U.S. census between the nineteenth and twentieth century, and the social implications of that fluidity.
• Traces the visible and less known connections between categories such as slave, mulatto, mixed, “Mexican race,” and more current categories of the US census.
• Shows how the mobilization of individuals or groups over contested statistical categories occured in the first half of the twentieth century, much earlier than race-based affirmative action policies since the 1960’s.
• Draws on previously unused documents from the Census Bureau archive and other unpublished sources to explore the interactions between census officials and laypeople.

How could the same person be classified by the US census as black in 1900, mulatto in 1910, and white in 1920? The history of categories used by the US census reflects a country whose identity and self-understanding–particularly its social construction of race–is closely tied to the continuous polling on the composition of its population.

By tracing the evolution of the categories the United States used to count and classify its population from 1790 to 1940, Paul Schor shows that, far from being simply a reflection of society or a mere instrument of power, censuses are actually complex negotiations between the state, experts, and the population itself. The census is not an administrative or scientific act, but a political one. Counting Americans is a social history exploring the political stakes that pitted various interests and groups of people against each other as population categories were constantly redefined. Utilizing new archival material from the Census Bureau, this study pays needed attention to the long arc of contested changes in race and census-making. It traces changes in how race mattered in the United States during the era of legal slavery, through its fraught end, and then during (and past) the period of Jim Crow laws, which set different ethnic groups in conflict. And it shows how those developing policies also provided a template for classifying Asian groups and white ethnic immigrants from southern and eastern Europe–and how they continue to influence the newly complicated racial imaginings informing censuses in the second half of the twentieth century and beyond.

Focusing in detail on slaves and their descendants, on racialized groups and on immigrants, and on the troubled imposition of U.S. racial categories upon the populations of newly acquired territories, Counting Americans demonstrates that census-taking in the United States has been at its core a political undertaking shaped by racial ideologies that reflect its violent history of colonization, enslavement, segregation and discrimination.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Note on Illustrations and Tables
• Note on Terminology
• Introduction
• Part I: The Origins of the U.S. Census: From Enumeration of Voters and Taxpayers to “Social Statistics,” 1790-1840
  • Chapter 1: The Creation of the Federal Census by the Constitution of the United States: A Political Instrument
  • Chapter 2: The First Developments of the National Census (1800-1830)
  • Chapter 3: The Census of 1840: Science, Politics and “Insanity” of Free Blacks
• Part II: Slaves, Former Slaves, Blacks, and Mulattoes: Identification of the Individual and the Statistical Segregation of Populations (1850-1865)
  • Chapter 4: Whether to Name or Count Slaves: The Refusal of Identification
  • Chapter 5: Color, Race, and Origin of Slaves and Free Persons: “White,” “Black,” “Mulatto” in the Censuses of 1850 and 1860
  • Chapter 6: Color and Status of Slaves: Legal Definition and Census Practice
  • Chapter 7: Census Data for 1850 and 1860 and the Defeat of the South
• Part III: The Rise of Immigration and the Racialization of Society: The Adaptation of the Census to the Diversity of the American Population (1850-1900)
  • Chapter 8: Modernization, Standardization, and Internationalization: From the Censuses of J. C. G. Kennedy (1850 and 1860) to the First Census of Francis A. Walker (1870)
  • Chapter 9: From Slavery to Liberty: The Future of the Black Race or Racial Mixing as Degeneration
  • Chapter 10: From “Mulatto” to the “One Drop Rule” (1870-1900)
  • Chapter 11: The Slow Integration of Indians into U.S. Population Statistics in the Nineteenth Century
  • Chapter 12: The Chinese and Japanese in the Census: Nationalities That Are Also Races
  • Chapter 13: Immigration, Nativism, and Statistics (1850-1900)
• Part IV: Apogee and Decline of Ethnic Statistics (1900-1940)
  • Chapter 14: The Disappearance of the “Mulatto” as the End of Inquiry into the Composition of the Black Population of the United States
  • Chapter 15: The Question of Racial Mixing in the American Possessions: National Norm and Local Resistance
  • Chapter 16: New Asian Races, New Mixtures, and the “Mexican” Race: Interest in “Minor Races”
  • Chapter 17: From Statistics by Country of Birth to the System of National Origins
• Part V: The Population and the Census: Representation, Negotiation, and Segmentation (1900-1940)
  • Chapter 18: The Census and African Americans within and outside the Bureau
  • Chapter 19: Women as Census Workers and as Relays in the Field
  • Chapter 20: Ethnic Marketing of Population Statistics
• Epilogue: The Fortunes of Census Classifications (1940-2000)
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Abbreviations
• Sources and Bibliography
• Index

Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past

Pantheon
2018-03-27
368 Pages
Hardcover ISBN: 9781101870327
Ebook ISBN: 9781101870334

David Reich, Professor of Genetics
Harvard Medical School
also, Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute

David Reich describes how the revolution in the ability to sequence ancient DNA has changed our understanding of the deep human past. This book tells the emerging story of our often surprising ancestry – the extraordinary ancient migrations and mixtures of populations that have made us who we are.

• A gripping account, from the head of a world-leading lab, of the picture of human history and ancestry emerging from the revolution in the study of ancient DNA.
• Describes the evidence for ancient migrations and ghosts of long-lost populations, now revealed through comparing the genomes of ancient modern humans, archaic humans, and present-day populations.
• Considers what the latest research tells us about the often surprising ancestry of the people who now inhabit Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas.
• Shows how there are no ‘pure’ races: all modern human populations are mixtures of more ancient ones.
• Shares new insights into how human populations spread across the world, and makes a compelling argument that ancient DNA is fundamentally changing our picture of who we are.

Here is a groundbreaking book about how the extraction of ancient DNA from ancient bones has profoundly changed our understanding of human prehistory while resolving many long-standing controversies.

Massive technological innovations now allow scientists to extract and analyze ancient DNA as never before, and it has become clear—in part from David Reich’s own contributions to the field—that genomics is as important a means of understanding the human past as archeology, linguistics, and the written word. In Who We Are and How We Got Here, Reich describes with unprecedented clarity just how the human genome provides not only all the information that a fertilized human egg needs to develop but also contains within it the history of our species. He explains how the genomic revolution and ancient DNA are transforming our understanding of the lineage of modern humans and how DNA studies reveal the deep history of inequality—among different populations, between the sexes, and among individuals within a population. His book gives the lie to the orthodoxy that there are no meaningful biological differenced among human populations, and at the same time uses the definitive evidence provided by genomics to show that the differences that do exist are unlikely to conform to familiar stereotypes.

Table Of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I The Deep History of Our Species
  • 1 How the Genome Explains Who We Are
  • 2 Encounters with Neanderthals
  • 3 Ancient DNA Opens the Floodgates
• Part II How We Got to Where We Are Today
  • 4 Humanity’s Ghosts
  • 5 The Making of Modern Europe
  • 6 The Collision That Formed India
  • 7 In Search of Native American Ancestors
  • 8 The Genomic Origins of East Asians
  • 9 Rejoining Africa to the Human Story
• Part III The Disruptive Genome
  • 10 The Genomics of Inequality
  • 11 The Genomics of Race and Identity
  • 12 The Future of Ancient DNA
• Notes on the Illustrations
• Notes
• Index