Mixed Race Studies

Black on the Rainbow

Pageant Press
1952
254 pages

Dorothy Lee Dickens

This book tells the story of Hilda, a lovely Negro girl, who is given a choice of “passing” as white or remaining loyal to her race.

Read the entire book here.

México’s Nobodies: The Cultural Legacy of the Soldadera and Afro-Mexican Women

State University of New York Press
February 2017
350 pages
Hardcover ISBN13: 978-1-4384-6357-5

B. Christine Arce, Assistant Professor of Latin American Literature and Culture
University of Miami, Miami, Florida

2016 Victoria Urbano Critical Monograph Book Prize, presented by the International Association of Hispanic Feminine Literature and Culture

Analyzes cultural materials that grapple with gender and blackness to revise traditional interpretations of Mexicanness.

México’s Nobodies examines two key figures in Mexican history that have remained anonymous despite their proliferation in the arts: the soldadera and the figure of the mulata. B. Christine Arce unravels the stunning paradox evident in the simultaneous erasure (in official circles) and ongoing fascination (in the popular imagination) with the nameless people who both define and fall outside of traditional norms of national identity. The book traces the legacy of these extraordinary figures in popular histories and legends, the Inquisition, ballads such as “La Adelita” and “La Cucaracha,” iconic performers like Toña la Negra, and musical genres such as the son jarocho and danzón. This study is the first of its kind to draw attention to art’s crucial role in bearing witness to the rich heritage of blacks and women in contemporary México.

Table of Contents

• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Paradox of Invisibility
• Part I: Entre Adelitas y Cucarachas: The Soldadera as Trope in the Mexican Revolution
  • 1. Soldaderas and the Making of Revolutionary Spaces
  • 2. The Many Faces of the Soldadera and the Adelita Complex
  • 3. Beyond the “Custom of Her Sex and Country”
• Part II: The Blacks in the Closet
  • 4. Black Magic and the Inquisition: The Legend of La Mulata de Córdoba and the Case of Antonia de Soto
  • 5. “Dios pinta como quiere”: Blackness and Redress in Mexican Golden Age Film
  • 6. The Music of the Afro-Mexican Universe and the Dialectics of Son
• Conclusion: To Be Expressed Otherwise
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

Hybridity and Miscegenation

Chapter in The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Gender and Sexuality Studies
Online ISBN: 9781118663219
Published Online: 2016-04-21
2 pages
DOI: 10.1002/9781118663219.wbegss321

Leigh H. Edwards, Associate Professor of English
Florida State University

Hybridity and miscegenation refer to race mixing. Both terms came into popular usage during the nineteenth century in the United States in the context of race slavery and scientific racism. Since the 1980s, hybridity has been used more broadly in postcolonial theory to refer to cultural mixture that can critique colonization.

Read or purchase the chapter here.

Anti-Miscegenation Laws

Chapter in The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Gender and Sexuality Studies
Online ISBN: 9781118663219
Published Online: 2016-04-21
5 pages
DOI: 10.1002/9781118663219.wbegss617

Sally L. Kitch, Regents’ Professor, Women and Gender Studies
Arizona State University

Anti-miscegenation (racial mixing) laws have been enacted around the world throughout history. In mainland British colonies and the United States such laws regulated marriages between persons of different races, primarily between blacks and whites, from 1634 to 1967, when the Supreme Court declared them an unconstitutional mechanism for maintaining white supremacy in Loving v. Virginia. That decision exposed the faulty legal reasoning that exempted interracial marriages from the usual protections provided to marriage and citizenship on the grounds that miscegenation was illicit. British New World island colonies did not enact anti-miscegenation laws, but they did regulate the rights of mixed-race progeny. Often overlooked in discussions of these and other anti-miscegenation laws and policies are their inherent gender biases and their protection of white male prerogatives as a keystone of the doctrine of white supremacy.

Read or purchase the chapter here.

Protection Spell

University of Arkansas Press
2017-03-01
102 pages
5 ½ × 8 ½
Paper ISBN: 978-1-68226-028-9

Jennifer Givhan, Poet & Novelist

In Protection Spell Jennifer Givhan explores the guilt, sadness, and freedom of relationships: the sticky love that keeps us hanging on for no reason other than love, the inky place that asks us to continue revising and reimagining, tying ourselves to this life and to each other despite the pain (or perhaps because of it). These poems reassemble safe spaces from the fissures cleaving the speaker’s own biracial home and act as witnesses speaking to the racial iniquity of our broader social landscape as well as to the precarious standpoint of a mother-woman of color whose body lies vulnerable to trauma and abuse. From insistent moments of bravery, a collection of poems arises that asks the impossible, like the childhood chant that palliates suffering by demanding nothing less than magical healing: sana sana colita de rana, si no sanas hoy, sanas mañana (the frog who loses his tail is commanded to grow another). In the end, Givhan’s verse offers a place where healing may begin.

All Day, Talking

dancing girl press
2014

Sarah A. Chavez

Sarah A. Chavez is a mestiza born and raised in the California Central Valley where she worked every job from farm laborer, to janitor and maintenance, to barista, to waitress, house-sitter, web editor, tutor, and finally administrative assistant for a Native American drug and alcohol recovery home before going back to school to pursue writing and teaching. She earned a PhD in English with a focus in Creative Writing (poetry) and an interdisciplinary specialization in Ethnic Studies, with a focus on Chican@/Latin@ & Native American literature and culture, from the University of Nebraska – Lincoln.

During her academic career her work has been the recipient of the Fredrick A. and Minnie J.M. Stuff Memorial Placement Fellowship (2014), the Quercus Press Review, Fall Poetry Book Award, Honorable Mention (2013), Stuff Dissertation Fellowship (2013), the Susan Atefat Peckham Fellowship, Literary Contest (2013), the Arts & Letters/ Rumi Prize for Poetry, finalist (2012), the Ford Foundation Predoctoral Competition, Honorable Mention (2012), the Vreeland Award (2011), Chancellor’s Doctoral Fellowship (2009 – 2011), and the Excellence in Education, 2007 – 2008 teaching award from Ball State University’s Correctional Education Program.

The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013

Farrar, Straus and Giroux
2014-01-21
640 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 9780374125615

Derek Walcott (1930-2017)

Selected by Glyn Maxwell

A collection spanning the whole of Derek Walcott’s celebrated, inimitable, essential career

“He gives us more than himself or ‘a world’; he gives us a sense of infinity embodied in the language.” Alongside Joseph Brodsky’s words of praise one might mention the more concrete honors that the renowned poet Derek Walcott has received: a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship; the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry; the Nobel Prize in Literature.

The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948–2013 draws from every stage of the poet’s storied career. Here are examples of his very earliest work, like “In My Eighteenth Year,” published when the poet himself was still a teenager; his first widely celebrated verse, like “A Far Cry from Africa,” which speaks of violence, of loyalties divided in one’s very blood; his mature work, like “The Schooner Flight” from The Star-Apple Kingdom; and his late masterpieces, like the tender “Sixty Years After,” from the 2010 collection White Egrets.

Across sixty-five years, Walcott grapples with the themes that have defined his work as they have defined his life: the unsolvable riddle of identity; the painful legacy of colonialism on his native Caribbean island of St. Lucia; the mysteries of faith and love and the natural world; the Western canon, celebrated and problematic; the trauma of growing old, of losing friends, family, one’s own memory. This collection, selected by Walcott’s friend the English poet Glyn Maxwell, will prove as enduring as the questions, the passions, that have driven Walcott to write for more than half a century.

How the Irish Became White

Routledge
2009 (Originally published in 1995)
276 pages
6 B/W Illustrations
Paperback ISBN: 9780415963091
Hardback ISBN: 9781138127777
eBook ISBN: 9780203473009

Noel Ignatiev

The Irish came to America in the eighteenth century, fleeing a homeland under foreign occupation and a caste system that regarded them as the lowest form of humanity. In the new country – a land of opportunity – they found a very different form of social hierarchy, one that was based on the color of a person’s skin. Noel Ignatiev’s 1995 book – the first published work of one of America’s leading and most controversial historians – tells the story of how the oppressed became the oppressors; how the new Irish immigrants achieved acceptance among an initially hostile population only by proving that they could be more brutal in their oppression of African Americans than the nativists. This is the story of How the Irish Became White.

Table of Contents

• Introduction to the Routledge Classics Edition
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part 1: Something in the Air
• Part 2: White Negroes and Smoked Irish
• Part 3: The Transubstantiation of an Irish Revolutionary
• Part 4: They Swung their Picks
• Part 5: The Tumultuous Republic
• Part 6: From Protestant Ascendancy to White Republic

Obama on Our Minds: The Impact of Obama on the Psyche of America

Oxford University Press
2016-09-01
312 Pages
6-1/8 x 9-1/4 inches
Hardcover ISBN: 9780199390618

Edited by:

Lori A. Barker, Professor
Department Psychology and Sociology Department
California State Polytechnic University, Pomona

• Examines the true psychological impact of Obama’s presidency on the nation’s collective psyche
• Connects well-known psychological theories with contemporary issues, such as racism, ethnic identity, and stereotyping, and applies them to the historic election of President Obama
• Offers expert critical approaches to widely disseminated rhetoric from political pundits, i.e.

On the evening of November 4, 2008, as news of Barack Obama’s presidential victory spread, television footage depicted the emotional reactions of people across the country and the globe. As Obama gave his acceptance speech in Grant Park that night, the camera focused on those in the audience who were overjoyed, tears streaming down their faces. People cheered. Spontaneous and joyful celebrations broke out in the streets. Change had finally come.

Analysts describe Barack Obama’s success as “unheard of”–a meteoric rise–leaving many in the elite political circles astonished at what he had accomplished in his campaign. With his success, many questions arose: How was a junior senator from Chicago able to do this? Why does he evoke such strong reactions? What cultural shifts took place in American society for this to happen? Do we now live in a post-racial society, and what will this mean for the next generation?

In Obama on Our Minds, Lori A. Barker leads a team of expert multicultural theorists and researchers studying racism, ethnic identity, sexual orientation, and immigration to answer these questions and analyze the enormous impact of this groundbreaking event in our nation’s history.

Table of Contents

• Preface
• Section I: Obama and Key Concepts in Multicultural Psychology
  • Chapter 1: Presidents, Prototypes, and Stereotypes, Oh My! Understanding the Psychological Impact of Obama / Lori A. Barker
  • Chapter 2: The Struggle for Identity Congruence in an Obama White House / Thomas A. Parham
  • Chapter 3: Academic Success of Black Americans: Stereotype Threat in the Era of Obama / Brian E. Armenta and Carey S. Ryan
  • Chapter 4: Teaching for Change: Post-racial or a Different Kind of Racism? / Jeffrey Scott Mio
  • Chapter 5: Changing the Course of Race Relations in America: From Prevention of Discrimination to Promotion of Racial Equality / John F. Dovidio
  • Chapter 6: The Obama Effect on Racial Attitudes: A Review of the Research / Curtis A. Thompson and Lori A. Barker
• Section II: Obama’s Impact on Diverse Populations
  • Chapter 7: (Mixed) Race to the White House / Christine C. Iijima Hall
  • Chapter 8: Race, Masculinity, and Gendered Racism: President Obama’s Influence on Black Men / Christopher T.H. Liang, Carin Molenaar, and Shalena Heard
  • Chapter 9: Barack Obama and the LGBT Community: A Rocky Path to Real Progress and Ongoing Hopes for the Future / Laurie A. Roades
  • Chapter 10: New Hope for Immigrants in the Obama Era / Patricia Arredondo
  • Chapter 11: Has Change Come to America? College Student Attitudes Toward Obama’s Presidency / Andrea Aoun, Blake D. Daryaie, and Lori A. Barker
  • Chapter 12: The Obama Marriage: A Model for Moving Forward the ‘Stalled Revolution’ / Donna L. Franklin

Solecism

Virtual Artist Collective
2013-02-28
80 pages
Paperback ISBN: 9780944048504

Rosebud Ben-Oni

“Think the pinched aren’t polysyllabic?” You’ve never heard from Mexico in this register. Nor moved through the East Village and Jerusalem, Syria and Lebanon, with a guide who spies “what grows in broken concrete.” Ben-Oni takes us along borderlands and scenes we rarely hear of in the news – to the very fringes of places like Sal Si Puedes (“Leave if you can”) with its sandals, jellyfish, beer bottles and narcotic wires, then into the marketplaces of melons and catcalls, with the tongue of a Gypsy “incapable of candor.”  This is exploration and revelation via the road less traveled. A slice of poem glimpses girls howling against silence slammed against them, laughing through weeds overtaking ranches, and the child-guide, a Jewish-Mexican who doesn’t fit, is also a sparrow walking her wings through the ruins, choosing mosquitoes over worms, baring all to possibly “disappear / into overflowing ashtrays and / stryofoam pyramids / in ten-peso shops.”  Where she finally lands pales beside how she sees the world through her tongue.  The journey is all. As always, we too think we know things, and we do, but it is Ben-Oni’s insider-outsider grasp that dons another legitimacy, one that does not go on validation, one that can intensify our own: simply listening is enough to propel her, and us, to “Know those incurable Depths.” And if you find yourself “unborn again… twitching in sin” or ‘tasting toadstools’ and singing the ‘discordant dark’, then you too may revel in that forbidden space of Solecism, reaping poetry from “what remains of the unruly wilds.”

–Amy King, Author of I Want to Make You Safe and I’m the Man Who Loves You