Mixed Race Studies

Seams of Empire: Race and Radicalism in Puerto Rico and the United States

University Press of Florida
2016-05-10
232 pages
6×9
Hardcover ISBN 13: 978-0-8130-6256-3

Carlos Alamo-Pastrana, Associate Professor of Sociology and Latin American and Latina/o Studies
Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York

Puerto Rico’s colonial relationship with the United States and its history of intermixture of native, African, and Spanish inhabitants has prompted inconsistent narratives about race and power in the colonial territory. Departing from these accounts, early twentieth-century writers, journalists, and activists scrutinized both Puerto Rico’s and the United States’s institutionalized racism and colonialism in an attempt to spur reform, leaving an archive of oft-overlooked political writings.

In Seams of Empire, Carlos Alamo-Pastrana uses racial imbrication as a framework for reading this archive of little-known Puerto Rican, African American, and white American radicals and progressives, both on the island and the continental United States. By addressing the concealed power relations responsible for national, gendered, and class differences, this method of textual analysis reveals key symbolic and material connections between marginalized groups in both national spaces and traces the complexity of race, racism, and conflict on the edges of empire.

Contents

• List of Figures
• List of Abbreviations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. The Puerto Rican Blueprint
• 2. Dispatches from the Colonial Outpost
• 3. The Living Negro in Latin America
• 4. The Republic of the Penniless
• 5. You Are Here to Listen
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

Mothers’ Darlings of the South Pacific: The Children of Indigenous Women and U.S. Servicemen, World War II

University Of Hawai’i Press
April 2016
424 pages
95 b&w illustrations
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8248-5152-1

Edited by:

Judith A. Bennett, Professor of History
University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand

Angela Wanhalla, Associate Professor of History
University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand

Like a human tsunami, World War II brought two million American servicemen to the South Pacific where they left a human legacy of some thousands of children. Mothers’ Darlings of the South Pacific traces the intimate relationships that existed in the wartime South Pacific between U.S. servicemen and Indigenous women, and considers the fate of the resulting children. The American military command carefully managed intimate relationships in the Pacific Theater, applying U.S. immigration law based on race on Pacific peoples of color to prevent marriage “across the color line.” For Indigenous women and their American servicemen sweethearts, legal marriage was impossible, giving rise to a generation of children known as “G.I. Babies.” Among these Pacific war children, one thing common to almost all is the longing to know more about their American father. Mothers’ Darlings of the South Pacific traces these children’s stories of loss, emotion, longing, and identity, and of lives lived in the shadow of global war.

This book considers the way these relationships developed in the major U.S. bases of the South Pacific Command from Bora Bora in the east across to Solomon Islands in the west, and from the Gilbert Islands in the north to New Zealand, in the southernmost region of the Pacific. Some chapters consider in-depth case studies of the life trajectories of one or two people; others are more of a group portrait. Each discusses the context of the particular island societies and how this often determined the way such intimate relationships developed and were accommodated during the war years and beyond.

The writers interviewed many of the children of the Americans and some of the few surviving mothers as well as others who recalled the wartime presence in their islands. Oral histories reveal what the records of colonial governments and the military largely have ignored, providing a perspective on the effects of the U.S. occupation that until now has been disregarded by historians of the Pacific war. The richness of this book should appeal to those interested the Pacific, World War II, as well as intimacy, family, race relations, colonialism, identity, and the legal structures of U.S. immigration.

The Senator and the Socialite: The True Story of America’s First Black Dynasty

HarperCollins
2006-06-27
512 pages
5.313 in (w) x 8 in (h) x 0.821 in (d)
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0060184124
Paperback ISBN: 9780060985134
eBook ISBN: 9780061873911

Lawrence Otis Graham

Blanche Kelso Bruce was born a slave in 1841, yet, remarkably, amassed a real-estate fortune and became the first black man to serve a full term in the U.S. Senate. He married Josephine Willson—the daughter of a wealthy black Philadelphia doctor—and together they broke down racial barriers in 1880s Washington, D.C., numbering President Ulysses S. Grant among their influential friends. The Bruce family achieved a level of wealth and power unheard of for people of color in nineteenth-century America. Yet later generations would stray from the proud Bruce legacy, stumbling into scandal and tragedy.

Drawing on Senate records, historical documents, and personal letters, author Lawrence Otis Graham weaves a riveting social history that offers a fascinating look at race, politics, and class in America.

Intimate Bonds: Family and Slavery in the French Atlantic

University of Pennsylvania Press
August 2016
304 pages
6 x 9
6 illus.
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8122-4840-1
Ebook ISBN: 978-0-8122-9306-7

Jennifer L. Palmer, Assistant Professor of History
University of Georgia

Following the stories of families who built their lives and fortunes across the Atlantic Ocean, Intimate Bonds explores how households anchored the French empire and shaped the meanings of race, slavery, and gender in the early modern period. As race-based slavery became entrenched in French laws, all household members in the French Atlantic world —regardless of their status, gender, or race—negotiated increasingly stratified legal understandings of race and gender.

Through her focus on household relationships, Jennifer L. Palmer reveals how intimacy not only led to the seemingly immutable hierarchies of the plantation system but also caused these hierarchies to collapse even before the age of Atlantic revolutions. Placing families at the center of the French Atlantic world, Palmer uses the concept of intimacy to illustrate how race, gender, and the law intersected to form a new worldview. Through analysis of personal, mercantile, and legal relationships, Intimate Bonds demonstrates that even in an era of intensifying racial stratification, slave owners and slaves, whites and people of color, men and women all adapted creatively to growing barriers, thus challenging the emerging paradigm of the nuclear family. This engagingly written history reveals that personal choices and family strategies shaped larger cultural and legal shifts in the meanings of race, slavery, family, patriarchy, and colonialism itself.

Recognizing Race and Ethnicity: Power, Privilege, and Inequality

Westview Press
2014-03-11
552 pages
Print ISBN: 9780813349305
Ebook ISBN: 9780813349312

Kathleen J. Fitzgerald, Professor of Sociology
University of New Orleans, New Orleans, Louisiana

Despite radical changes over the last century, race remains a central organizing principle in U.S. society, a key arena of inequality, and the subject of ongoing conflict and debate. In a refreshing new introduction to the sociology of race, Recognizing Race and Ethnicity encourages students to think differently by challenging the notion that we are, or should even aspire to be, color-blind.

In this text, Kathleen Fitzgerald considers how the continuing significance of race manifests in both significant and obscure ways by looking across all racial/ethnic groups within the socio-historical context of institutions and arenas, rather than discussing each group by group. Incorporating recent research and contemporary theoretical perspectives, she guides students to examine racial ideologies and identities as well as structural racism; at the same time, she covers topics like popular culture, sports, and interracial relationships that will keep students engaged. Recognizing Race and Ethnicity provides unparalleled coverage of white privilege while remaining careful to not treat “white” as the norm against which all other groups are defined.

Recognizing Race and Ethnicity makes it clear that, in a time when race and racism are constantly evolving in response to varied social contexts, societal demands, and political climates, we all must learn to recognize race if we are to get beyond it.

Table of Contents

• Part 1: Thinking About Race
  • 1. Taking Account of Race and Privilege
  • 2. White Privilege: The Other Side of Racism
  • 3. Science and the Sociology of Race
• Part 2: A Sociological History of US Race Relations
  • 4. Emergence of the US Racial Hierarchy
  • 5. Race Relations in the 19th and 20th Centuries
  • 6. Race Relations in Flux: Post-World War II Activism
• Part 3: Institutional Inequalities
  • 7. Education
  • 8. Economic Inequality and the Role of the State
  • 9. Crime and Criminal Justice
  • 10. Race in the Cultural Imagination
• Part 4: Contemporary Issues in Race/Ethnicity
  • 11. Arenas of Racial Integration: Interracial Relationships, Multiracial Families, Biracial/Multiracial Identities, Sports, and the Military
  • 12. A Post-Racial Society?

On Race and Medicine: Insider Perspectives

Rowman & Littefield
April 2015
178 pages
6 1/2 x 9 1/4
Hardback ISBN: 978-1-4422-4835-9
eBook ISBN: 978-1-4422-4836-6

Edited by:

Richard Garcia, M.D.

Health disparities exist between races in America. These inequalities are cataloged in numerous studies, reports, conferences, articles, seminars, and keynote speeches. Various studies include reports on income, health insurance, cultural differences between patients and their physicians, language barriers, and biological “racial” differences in the discourse of health disparities.

On Race and Medicine: Insider Perspectives is a collection of enlightening personal essays written by an interdisciplinary group of scholars, physicians, and medical school deans. They invite readers to evaluate disparities differently when considering race in American healthcare. They address the very real, everyday circumstances of healthcare differences where race is concerned, and shine light on the realities of race itself, inequalities in healthcare, and on the very way these American complexities can be discussed and considered.

This is not another chronicle of studies cataloging differences in health care based on race. The essays are narrated from practical and personal stances examining disparate health between the races. Decreasing inequalities in health for racial minorities, who are sicker in so many areas—diabetes, heart disease, stage of cancer, etc.—is financially good for everyone. But understanding health inequalities in race is of even greater human importance. How race intersects with medicine is striking given the existence of racial issues throughout the rest of American history. These authors attempt to explain and explore the truth about health disparities, which is necessary before we can turn our national attention toward eliminating differences in health based on race.

The Leopard Boy, A Novel

University of Virginia Press
January 2016 (Originally published in 1999 as L’Enfant Léopard)
304 pages
Paper ISBN: 9780813937908
Cloth ISBN: 9780813937892
Ebook ISBN: 9780813937915

Daniel Picouly

Translated and Afterword by:

Jeanne M. Garane, Professor of French and Comparative Literature
University of South Carolina

October 15, 1793: the eve of Marie-Antoinette’s execution. The Reign of Terror has descended upon revolutionary France, and thousands are beheaded daily under the guillotine. Edmond Coffin and Jonathan Gravedigger, two former soldiers now employed in disposing of the dead, are hired to search the Parisian neighborhood of Haarlem for a mysterious mixed-race “leopard boy,” whose nickname derives from his mottled black-and-white skin. Some would like to see the elusive leopard boy dead, while others wish to save him. Why so much interest in this child? He is rumored to be the son of Marie-Antoinette and a man of color–the Chevalier de Saint-George, perhaps, or possibly Zamor, the slave of Madame du Barry, mistress of Louis XV.

This wildly imaginative and culturally resonant tale by Daniel Picouly audaciously places black and mixed-race characters–including King Mac, creator of the first hamburger, who hands out figures of Voltaire and Rousseau with his happy meals, and the megalomaniac Black Delorme, creator of a slavery theme park–at the forefront of its Revolution-era story. Winner of the Prix Renaudot, one of France’s most prestigious literary awards, this book envisions a “Black France” two hundred years before the term came to describe a nation transformed through its postcolonial immigrant population.

Black Lotus: A Woman’s Search for Racial Identity

Gallery Books (an Imprint of Simon & Schuster)
August 2016
368 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 9781451688467
eBook ISBN: 9781451688481

Sil Lai Abrams

The unique and beautifully written story of one multiracial woman’s journey of acceptance and identity that tackles the fraught topic of race in America.

Sil Lai Abrams always knew she was different, with darker skin and curlier hair than her siblings. But when the man who she thought was her dad told her the truth—that her father was actually black—her whole world was turned upside down.

Raised primarily in the Caucasian community of Winter Park, Florida, Abrams was forced to re-examine who she really was and struggle with her Caucasian, African American, and Chinese identities. In her remarkable memoir, she shares this journey and how it speaks to a larger question: Why does race matter?

Black Lotus is a story of acceptance and identity but it is also a dialogue on the complex topic of race in this country by an award-winning writer and inspirational speaker.

A Biography Of E. Azalia Smith Hackley (1867-1922), African-american Singer And Social Activist

Edwin Mellen Press
2001
436 pages
ISBN: 978-0-7734-7575-5

Lisa Pertillar Brevard, Core Faculty and Academic Coordinator of Humanities
Walden University

Madame E. Azalia Hackley was an African American classical singer, social worker, writer, philanthropist, and activist who championed the use of African-American spirituals among the African-American people as a tool for social change. Her efforts laid the groundwork for the use of spirituals as freedom songs during the Civil Rights Movement. This work used newspaper accounts and archive studies documenting Madame Hackley’s tours cross-country and abroad to raise funds for African-American classical musicians. It show Hackley’s intense devotion to her African-American roots, as she easily could have passed for white. Nevertheless, she traveled throughout the South in ‘Jim Crow’ railway cars by choice. This work also recovers several of her influential published works, including A Guide to Voice Culture (1909); The Colored Girl Beautiful (1916), an etiquette book for African-American women desiring professional jobs; and “Hints to Young Colored Artists”, a series of articles designed to help young African-American classical musicians succeed. Includes illustrations.

Table of Contents

• Foreword by Richard A. Long
• Introduction
• Part I: Madame Emma Azalia Smith Hackley: The Lady and Her Legacy
  • 1. Azalia’s Early Years (1867-1894)
  • 2. Denver (1894-1900)
  • 3. Philadelphia and The Washington Conservatory of Music (1900-1915)
  • 4. Jim Crow Cars and Beyond – Paris, London, Tokyo (1916-1920)
  • 5. Madame Hackley’s Last Days (1920-1922)
• Part II: The Soul and Grit of a Colored Prima Donna: Madame E. Azalia Hackley as Journalist
  • “Hints to Young Colored Artists” (1914-15) by E. Azalia Hackley
• Part III: Lessons Before Dying: Madame Hackley’s The Colored Girl Beautiful
• Part IV: A Scrapbook of Madame E. Azalia Hackley
  • Photographs
  • “Report on Scholarship for 1908” by E. Azalia Hackley
  • Correspondence Between E. Azalia Hackley and James Weldon Johnson
  • Advertisements
  • The New York Age Salutes Madame Hackley (Obituary by Lucien H. White, 1922)
• Chronology
• Appendix: A Guide in Voice Culture (1909) by E. Azalia Hackley
• Sheet Music: “Carola, A Serenade” (1918) by E. Azalia Hackley
• Bibliography
• Index

Photograph by Julius Taylor

Born a Slave: Rediscovering Arthur Jackson’s African American Heritage

The Orderly Pack Rat
2015-04-25
328 pages
6 x 0.7 x 9 inches
Paperback ISBN: 978-0970430816

David W. Jackson

By the close of the Civil War in 1865 all American slaves became free citizens. Suddenly a new life dawned for them and their descendants.

Arthur Jackson, a slave born in 1856 in Kanawha County, Virginia, was nine-years-old when he and his family were emancipated in Franklin County, Misouri. He took the surname of his master, Richard Ludlow Jackson, Sr., within whose household he was born and lived intermittently until adulthood.

Eventually Arthur met Ida May Anderson, a white woman, and they raised a family together. Their six children passed for white and Arthur’s African American heritage became a family secret and was eventually forgotten. During the following century, five generations of Arthur and Ida’s descendants lived as white Americans.

Thirty years of genealogical research by one of their great-great-grandsons, the author, revealed the secret that Arthur was born a slave, that he and Ida were a biracial couple, and that their children were of mixed racial heritage.

Born a Slave: Rediscovering Arthur Jackson’s African American Heritage explores this man’s birth, childhood, life as a freedman, his ancestry, and his master’s family. It also calls all Americans—regardless of apparent race or ethnicity—to abandon preconceptions and explore their every ancestor objectively and with an open mind… especially if they may have been a slaveholder, or if they were born a slave.