Mixed Race Studies

The Octoroon

Broadview Press
2014-05-16 (orignially published in 1859)
136 pages
Paperback / PDF / ePub
ISBN: 9781554812110 / 1554812119

Dion Boucicault

Edited by:

Sarika Bose, Lecturer of English
University of British Columbia

Joseph Black, Professor of English
University of Massachusetts, Amherst

et al.

Regarded by Bernard Shaw as a master of the theatre, Dion Boucicault was arguably the most important figure in drama in North America and in Britain during the second half of the nineteenth century. He was largely forgotten during the twentieth century—though he continued to influence popular culture (the iconic image of a woman tied to railway tracks as a train rushes towards her, for example, originates in a Boucicault melodrama). In the twenty-first century the gripping nature of his plays is being discovered afresh; when The Octoroon was produced as a BBC Radio play in 2012, director and playwright Mark Ravenhill described Boucicault’s dramas as “the precursors to Hollywood cinema.”

In The Octoroon—the most controversial play of his career—Boucicault addresses the sensitive topic of race and slavery. George Peyton inherits a plantation, and falls in love with an octoroon—a person one-eighth African American, and thus, in 1859 Louisiana, legally a slave. The Octoroon opened in 1859 in New York City, just two years prior to the American Civil War, and created a sensation—as it did in its subsequent British production.

This new edition includes a wide range of background contextual materials, an informative introduction, and extensive annotation.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• A Note on the Text
• The Octoroon; or, Life in Louisiana
• Appendix A: American Reviews
  • 1. “‘The Octoroon.’ A Disgrace to the North, a Libel on the South,” Spirit of the Times; A Chronicle of the Turf, Agriculture, Field Sports, Literature and the Stage (17 December 1859)
  • 2. From “The Octoroon,” The Charleston Courier, Tri-Weekly (22 December 1859)
  • 3. From “Winter Garden–First Night of ‘The Octoroon,'” The New York Herald (7 December 1859)
• Appendix B: English Reviews
  • 1. “Saving the Octoroon,” Punch (21 December 1861)
  • 2. From “Theatres and Music,” John Bull (Saturday, 23 November 1861)
  • 3. From “Adelphi” (Review of The Octoroon), The Athenaeum (23 November 1861)
  • 4. “Pan at the Play,” Fun (Saturday, 30 November 1861)
  • 5. “Adelphi Theatre” (Review of Revised Play), The Times [London] (12 December 1861)
• Appendix C: Letters to Editors Concerning the Lawsuit
  • 1. “The Octoroon Conflict: Financial and Political View of the Case–Letter from Mrs. Agnes Robertson Boucicault,” The New York Herald (Friday, 16 December 1859)
• Appendix D: A Selection of Letters from Boucicault Defending the Content of The Octoroon
  • 1. “Letter from the Author of the ‘Octoroon,'” The New York Herald (7 December 1859)
  • 2. “The Octoroon Gone Home,” New York Times (9 February 1860)
  • 3. “‘The Octoroon’: To the Editor of the Times,” The Times [London] (Wednesday, 20 November 1861)
• Appendix E: Boucicault on Acting
  • 1. From Dion Boucicault, “The Art of Acting” (1882)
• Appendix F: Alternative Endings
  • 1. The Illustrated London News (14 December 1882)
  • 2. “Music and the Drama,” Bell’s Life in London and Sporting Chronicle (Sunday, 15 December 1861)
  • 3. From The Octoroon: Founded on Dion Boucicault’s Celebrated and Original Melodrama (1897)
  • 4. From Dion Boucicault, The Octoroon, Lacy’s Acting Edition, No. 963 (c. 1861)
  • 5. From Dion Boucicault, The Octoroon: A Drama in Three Acts (26 October 1861)
• Appendix G: On Slavery
  • 1. From Dion Boucicault, unpublished note, Theatre Museum, London (1861)
  • 2. From Fredrika Bremer, “Fredrika Bremer Sees the New Orleans Slave Market” (1853)
  • 3. From Civil Code of the State of Louisiana
• Appendix H: Illustrations
  • 1. From The Illustrated London News (30 November 1861)
  • 2. Cover, Reynolds Miscellany (4 January 1862)
  • 3. Cover, The Octoroon (Dick’s Standard Plays)
• Permissions Acknowledgments

First Métis Families of Quebec, 1622-1748. Volume 1: Fifty-Six Families

Genealogical Publishing Company
2012
226 pages
8½” x 11”
Paperback ISBN: 9780806355610

Gail Morin

The term Métis originally referred to the offspring produced from the intermarriage of early French fur traders with Canadian Native Americans. Later, there were also Anglo Métis (known as “Countryborn”)–children of Scottish, English, and other European fathers and indigenous mothers. The Métis were also formerly known as half-breeds or mixed-bloods. Today, the French and Anglo Métis cultures have essentially merged into a distinct group with official recognition as one of the three Aboriginal Peoples of Canada.

The first Frenchman known to have Métis offspring was Jean Nicolet de Belleborne. He arrived in Quebec in 1618 and was employed as a clerk and trained as an interpreter by the Company of Merchants, the fur-trading monopoly owned by French noblemen. He ran a Hudson Bay Company store and traded with the Lake Nipissing (Ontario) people for several years. His informal or country marriage to a Nipissing woman resulted in the birth in 1628 of a daughter, Madeleine or Euphrosine Nicolet. Jean Nicolet returned to the Company in Quebec in 1633 with Madeleine. Madeleine married Jean Leblanc in 1643 and Elie Dussault dit Lafleur in 1663. Both marriages resulted in generations of descendants in Canada and the United States that continue today.

Many in the fur trade followed Jean Nicolet’s lead, first marrying a Native American for safety and convenience, and later marrying a settler’s daughter. For example, Martin Prevost or Provost arrived in Quebec before 1639. He was a settler and farmed near Beauport, Quebec. On 3 November 1644 Prevost married Marie-Olivier, the daughter of Roch Manithabewich, a Huron Indian, and the adopted daughter of Olivier Letardif. Together they had eight children whose descendants continue to the 21st century.

In the 100 years following Martin Prevost and Marie Olivier’s marriage in 1644, only 56 Métis marriages were officially recorded. In some cases they were the second or third marriage for the bride or groom and resulted in no descendants. There are probably many unrecorded Métis or mixed blood families who are lost for now.

This new work, the first in a purported six-volume series, traces the descendants of the 56 original Métis families for up to three generations. Richly detailed, fully sourced, and indexed, this work must be regarded as the starting point for Métis genealogy. Future volumes will concentrate on subsequent generations of those Métis families whose progeny settled in western North America in the 20th century, namely, the families of Jean Nicolet, Martin Prevost, Pierre Couc dit Lafleur (later called Montour), Jean Durand, Pierre Lamoureux, and Daniel-Joseph Amiot.

See also the other volumes in this series:

• First Métis Families of Quebec, 1622-1748. Volume 2: Jean Nicolet and a Nipissing Woman
• First Métis Families of Quebec, 1622-1748. Volume 3: Martin Prevost and Marie Olivier Sylvestre Manitouabeouich

Now We Will Be Happy

University of Nebraska Press
September 2014
140 pages
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8032-5539-5

Amina Gautier
Department of English
University of Miami

Winner of the 2013 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction

Now We Will Be Happy is a prize-winning collection of stories about Afro-Puerto Ricans, U.S.-mainland-born Puerto Ricans, and displaced native Puerto Ricans who are living between spaces while attempting to navigate the unique culture that defines Puerto Rican identity. Amina Gautier’s characters deal with the difficulties of bicultural identities in a world that wants them to choose only one.

The characters in Now We Will Be Happy are as unpredictable as they are human. A teenage boy leaves home in search of the mother he hasn’t seen since childhood; a granddaughter is sent across the ocean to broker peace between her relatives; a widow seeks to die by hurricane; a married woman takes a bathtub voyage with her lover; a proprietress who is the glue that binds her neighborhood cannot hold on to her own son; a displaced wife develops a strange addiction to candles.

Crossing boundaries of comfort, culture, language, race, and tradition in unexpected ways, these characters struggle valiantly and doggedly to reconcile their fantasies of happiness with the realities of their existence.

Read an excerpt here.

Everything I Never Told You: A Novel

Penguin Press
2014-06-26
304 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 9781594205712

Celeste Ng

Lydia is dead. But they don’t know this yet . . . So begins the story of this exquisite debut novel, about a Chinese American family living in 1970s small-town Ohio. Lydia is the favorite child of Marilyn and James Lee; their middle daughter, a girl who inherited her mother’s bright blue eyes and her father’s jet-black hair. Her parents are determined that Lydia will fulfill the dreams they were unable to pursue—in Marilyn’s case that her daughter become a doctor rather than a homemaker, in James’s case that Lydia be popular at school, a girl with a busy social life and the center of every party.

When Lydia’s body is found in the local lake, the delicate balancing act that has been keeping the Lee family together tumbles into chaos, forcing them to confront the long-kept secrets that have been slowly pulling them apart. James, consumed by guilt, sets out on a reckless path that may destroy his marriage. Marilyn, devastated and vengeful, is determined to find a responsible party, no matter what the cost. Lydia’s older brother, Nathan, is certain that the neighborhood bad boy Jack is somehow involved. But it’s the youngest of the family—Hannah—who observes far more than anyone realizes and who may be the only one who knows the truth about what happened.

A profoundly moving story of family, history, and the meaning of home, Everything I Never Told You is both a gripping page-turner and a sensitive family portrait, exploring the divisions between cultures and the rifts within a family, and uncovering the ways in which mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, and husbands and wives struggle, all their lives, to understand one another.

Mexican WhiteBoy

Random House Kids
2008-08-12
256 pages
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-385-73310-6
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-440-23938-3

Matt de la Peña

• WINNER – LatinoStories.com Top Ten New Latino Authors to Watch (and Read) (2009)
• WINNER – Bulletin Blue Ribbon Book (2008)
• WINNER – ALA Best Books for Young Adults
• NOMINEE – Arizona Young Readers Award
• NOMINEE – New Jersey Garden State Teen Book Award

Danny’s tall and skinny. Even though he’s not built, his arms are long enough to give his pitch a power so fierce any college scout would sign him on the spot. Ninety-five mile an hour fastball, but the boy’s not even on a team. Every time he gets up on the mound he loses it.

But at his private school, they don’t expect much else from him. Danny’ s brown. Half-Mexican brown. And growing up in San Diego that close to the border means everyone else knows exactly who he is before he even opens his mouth. Before they find out he can’t speak Spanish, and before they realize his mom has blond hair and blue eyes, they’ve got him pegged. But it works the other way too. And Danny’s convinced it’s his whiteness that sent his father back to Mexico.

That’s why he’s spending the summer with his dad’s family. Only, to find himself, he may just have to face the demons he refuses to see–the demons that are right in front of his face. And open up to a friendship he never saw coming.

Set in the alleys and on the ball fields of San Diego County, Mexican Whiteboy is a story of friendship, acceptance, and the struggle to find your identity in a world of definitions.

Race and the Obama Phenomenon: The Vision of a More Perfect Multiracial Union

University Press of Mississippi
2014-07-17
432 pages
6 X 9 inches
3 B&W photographs
Hardcover ISBN: 9781628460216

Edited by:

G. Reginald Daniel, Professor of Sociology
University of California, Santa Barbara

Hettie V. Williams, Lecturer of African American History
Monmouth University, West Long Branch, New Jersey

Essays that explore how the first black president connects to the past and reimagines national racial and political horizons

The concept of a more perfect union remains a constant theme in the political rhetoric of Barack Obama. From his now historic race speech to his second victory speech delivered on November 7, 2012, that striving is evident. “Tonight, more than two hundred years after a former colony won the right to determine its own destiny, the task of perfecting our union moves forward,” stated the forty-fourth president of the United States upon securing a second term in office after a hard fought political contest. Obama borrows this rhetoric from the founding documents of the United States set forth in the U.S. Constitution and in Abraham Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address.”

How naive or realistic is Obama’s vision of a more perfect American union that brings together people across racial, class, and political lines? How can this vision of a more inclusive America be realized in a society that remains racist at its core? These essays seek answers to these complicated questions by examining the 2008 and 2012 elections as well as the events of President Obama’s first term. Written by preeminent race scholars from multiple disciplines, the volume brings together competing perspectives on race, gender, and the historic significance of Obama’s election and reelection. The president heralded in his November, 2012, acceptance speech, “The idea that if you’re willing to work hard, it doesn’t matter who you are, or where you come from, or what you look like . . . . whether you’re black or white, Hispanic or Asian or Native American.” These essayists argue the truth of that statement and assess whether America has made any progress toward that vision.

Contributions by Lisa Anderson-Levy, Heidi Ardizzone, Karanja Keita Carroll, Greg Carter, Frank Rudy Cooper, Marhsa J. Tyson Darling, Tessa Ditonto, David Frank, Amy L. Heyse, David A. Hollinger, George Lipsitz, Mark McPhail, Tavia Nyong’o, David Roediger, Paul Spickard, Janet Mendoza Stickman, Paul Street, Ebony Utley, Ronald Waters

Contents

• Preface / Hettie V. Williams and G. Reginald Daniel
• Foreword: Race Will Survive the Obama Phenomenon / David Roediger
• Introduction: Understanding Obama and Ourselves / George Lipsitz
• Part I: Race, Obama, and Multiraciality
  • 1. Race and Multiraciality: From Barack Obama to Trayvon Martin / G. Reginald Daniel
  • 2. By Casta, Color Wheel, and Computer Graphics: Visual Representations of Racially Mixed People / Greg Carter
  • 3. Barack Obama: Embracing Multiplicity—Being a Catalyst for Change / Janet Mendoza Stickmon
  • 4. In Pursuit of Self: The Identity of an American President and Cosmopolitanism / Hettie V. Williams
• Part II: Obama, Blackness, and the “Post-Racial Idea”
  • 5. Barack Hussein Obama, or, the Name of the Father / Tavia Nyong’o
  • 6. The End(s) of Difference? Towards an Understanding of the “Post” in Post-Racial / Lisa Anderson-Levy
  • 7. On the Impossibilities of a Post-Racist America in the Obama Era / Karanja Keita Carroll
  • 8. Obama, the Instability of Color Lines, and the Promise of a Postethnic Future / David A. Hollinger
• Part III: Race, Gender, and the Obama Phenomenon
  • 9. From Chattel to First Lady: Black Women Moving from the Margins / Marsha J. Tyson Darling
  • 10. The “Outsider” and the Presidency: Mediated Representations of Race and Gender in the 2008 Presidential Primaries / Tessa Ditonto
  • 11. Obama’s “Unisex” Campaign: Critical Race Theory Meets Masculinities Studies / Frank Rudy Cooper
  • 12. “Everything His Father Was Not”: Fatherhood and Father Figures in Barack Obama’s First Term / Heidi Ardizzone
• Part IV: Race, Politics, and the Obama Phenomenon
  • 13. Barack Obama’s Address to the 2004 Democratic Convention: Trauma, Compromise, Consilience and the (Im)Possibility of Racial Reconciliation / David Frank and Mark Lawrence McPhail
  • 14. Barack Obama and the Politics of Blackness / Ronald W. Walters
  • 15. Barack Obama’s White Appeal and the Perverse Racial Politics of the Post-Civil Rights Era / Paul Street
  • 16. Barack Obama’s (Im)Perfect Union: An Analysis of the Strategic Successes and Failures in His Speech on Race / Ebony Utley and Amy L. Heyse
• Epilogue: Obama, Race, and the 2012 Presidential Election / Paul Spickard

Not So Black and White

Tree Spirit Publishing
2012
210 pages
9 x 6 x 0.5 inches
Paperback ISBN: 978-0615568249

Alexis Wilson

Mixed marriage, abandonment, a mother’s secret, same sex parents, Broadway, the Ballet, and AIDS all make up a multi-colored tapestry of this author’s valiant journey towards a strong and clear passage; leaving the reader uplifted and wanting more.

It is the early 60’s in Europe, when a breathtakingly beautiful interracial couple dance great ballets together and fall passionately in love.  She is a Dutch ballerina and he is an African-American international ballet star.  They come to America and create a family and a new life.  While their daughter Alexis grows up dancing before she can walk, the marriage grows angrily apart.  Her father soon becomes one of the few celebrated black choreographers on Broadway, while her mother turns toward a shockingly desperate existence of survival.

At age eleven, Alexis’s world comes crashing.  Her mother abandons her and her brother and they are shuttled off to New York City to live with their adoring larger-than-life father, the footlights that beam on the likes of Sammy Davis Jr., Chita Rivera, and the other man in her father’s life.

Infectious Fear: Politics, Disease, and the Health Effects of Segregation

University of North Carolina Press
May 2009
328 pages
36 illus., 5 tables, notes, bibl., index
6.125 x 9.25
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8078-5934-6

Samuel Kelton Roberts Jr., Associate Professor of History; Assistant Professor of Sociomedical Sciences
Columbia University, New York

For most of the first half of the twentieth century, tuberculosis ranked among the top three causes of mortality among urban African Americans. Often afflicting an entire family or large segments of a neighborhood, the plague of TB was as mysterious as it was fatal. Samuel Kelton Roberts Jr. examines how individuals and institutions—black and white, public and private—responded to the challenges of tuberculosis in a segregated society.

Reactionary white politicians and health officials promoted “racial hygiene” and sought to control TB through Jim Crow quarantines, Roberts explains. African Americans, in turn, protested the segregated, overcrowded housing that was the true root of the tuberculosis problem. Moderate white and black political leadership reconfigured definitions of health and citizenship, extending some rights while constraining others. Meanwhile, those who suffered with the disease—as its victims or as family and neighbors—made the daily adjustments required by the devastating effects of the “white plague.”

Exploring the politics of race, reform, and public health, Infectious Fear uses the tuberculosis crisis to illuminate the limits of racialized medicine and the roots of modern health disparities. Ultimately, it reveals a disturbing picture of the United States’ health history while offering a vision of a more democratic future.

Undercover Asian: Multiracial Asian Americans in Visual Culture

University of Illinois Press
January 2014
264 pages
6 x 9 in.
15 black & white photographs
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-252-03807-5
Paper ISBN: 978-0-252-07956-6

Leilani Nishime, Assistant Professor of Communication
University of Washington, Seattle

Representations of mixed race Asian Americans in popular culture

In this first book-length study of media images of multiracial Asian Americans, Leilani Nishime traces the codes that alternatively enable and prevent audiences from recognizing the multiracial status of Asian Americans. Nishime’s perceptive readings of popular media–movies, television shows, magazine articles, and artwork–indicate how and why the viewing public often fails to identify multiracial Asian Americans. Using actor Keanu Reeves, golfer Tiger Woods, and the television show Battlestar Galactica as examples, Nishime suggests that this failure is tied to gender, sexuality, and post-racial politics. In contrast to these representations, Nishime provides a set of alternative moments when audiences can view multiracial Asians as multiracial. Through a consideration of the Matrix trilogy, reality TV star Kimora Lee Simmons, and the artwork of Kip Fulbeck, these examples highlight both the perils and benefits of racial visibility, uncovering our society’s ways of constructing racial categories. Throughout this incisive study, Nishime offers nuanced interpretations that open the door to a new and productive understanding of race in America.

Still Jewish: A History of Women and Intermarriage in America

New York University Press
February 2009
325 pages
Cloth ISBN: 9780814757307
Paper ISBN: 9780814764343

Keren R. McGinity, Author-Educator
Love & Tradition: intermarriage insights for a Jewish future

Over the last century, American Jews married outside their religion at increasing rates. By closely examining the intersection of intermarriage and gender across the twentieth century, Keren R. McGinity describes the lives of Jewish women who intermarried while placing their decisions in historical context. The first comprehensive history of these intermarried women, Still Jewish is a multigenerational study combining in-depth personal interviews and an astute analysis of how interfaith relationships and intermarriage were portrayed in the mass media, advice manuals, and religious community-generated literature.

Still Jewish dismantles assumptions that once a Jew intermarries, she becomes fully assimilated into the majority Christian population, religion, and culture. Rather than becoming “lost” to the Jewish community, women who intermarried later in the century were more likely to raise their children with strong ties to Judaism than women who intermarried earlier in the century. Bringing perennially controversial questions of Jewish identity, continuity, and survival to the forefront of the discussion, Still Jewish addresses topics of great resonance in a diverse America.