Mixed Race Studies

From Invisible Man to “New People”: The Recent Discovery of American Mulattoes

Phylon (1960-)
Volume 46, Number 2 (2nd Quarter, 1985)
pages 106-122

Patricia Morton

It might well seem obvious what the following persons have in common: Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. DuBois, Walter White, Horace Mann Bond, Julian Bond, Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, James Weldon Johnson, Charles Chesnutt, and Langston Hughes.

Although such a list could be expanded indefinitely, the point is that most of these are familiar enough names that they will readily be identified as Afro-Americans who have acted in some capacity as spokespeople for black Americans. Therefore, the obvious answer to the question suggested above is that these persons share their racial identity, as black American people. It might also be recognized, however, that this answer is based upon a distinctive North American perspective. In Latin American societies, for example, they would be identified instead as “mulattoes,” and in several cases, on the basis of physical appearance and status, as “white.”

It is essentially only during the last decade that this kind of distinction has been explicitly recognized in the publication of a number of studies which explore the historical experience of Americans of mixed black and white ancestry. It was observed recently that “As a field of enquiry with its own conceptual and methodological concerns, Afro-American history came of age during the past two decades.” In one sense these mulatto studies might be seen as part of that coming of age; however, in another sense they hearken back to what Black History has attempted to do for black Americans until recently, namely, to write the mulatto into American history. What does seem clear is that such studies represent a new direction in American historiography, and that the scholars engaged in this field are far from arriving at any consensus regarding their conceptual and methodological concerns. Indeed, they have remained largely unaware of one another’s work, and have arrived largely independently at conclusions which are sometimes complementary and sometimes contradictory. It may be useful at this point, therefore, to compare and contrast their accounts, to offer some tentative suggestions as to their strengths and weaknesses, and where possible, to integrate their conclusions. In addition, this recent upsurge of scholarly interest in Americans of mixed black and white ancestry is a striking phenomenon in itself, which deserves some comment in the context of modern North American attitudes to race and race relations…

…Both miscegenation and mulatto are emotion-charged and value-laden terms, and both have been employed by North American whites in a variety of ways in accordance with their views on race. However, the mulatto figure has also been employed by Afro-Americans as a defense against white racism. Certainly Berzon demonstrates that during the Jim Crow era, Afro-American writers revived the “superior mulatto” for this purpose, consistently and repeatedly portraying the respectable and virtuous character of the person of mixed ancestry to counter the image of Negro degradation. These novels depict exemplary “Victorian” mulatto women, and equally bourgeois mulatto men who are also educated, refined, patriarchal, self-reliant, and devoted to acquiring all the marks of middle-class status. They are race leaders and role models who are both distinct from and an inspiration to the black masses, and particularly during the turn-of-the-century years, Afro-Americans themselves emphasized mulatto distinctiveness, John Mencke’s thesis notwithstanding….

Login to read the entire article here.

The Politics of Multiracialism with Dr. Ralina Joseph

Voxunion
2010-03-23

Jared A. Ball, Host and Associate Professor of Communication Studies
Morgan State University, Baltimore, Maryland

Ralina L. Joseph, Associate Professor of Communications
University of Washington

The struggles surrounding the politics of identity seem at new heights these days and to help bring some historical context we spoke with Dr. Ralina Joseph who joined us for a discussion of her recent article for Black Scholar, “Performing the Twenty-first Century Tragic Mulatto: Black, White, And Jewish: Autobiography of a Shifting Self, by Rebecca Walker.” We also discussed the politics of multiracial identity in terms of the history of the “tragic mulatto,” the upcoming census and Barack Obama.

Listen to the interview here (00:32:44).

Mixed Messages: Barack Obama and Post-Racial Politics

Spectator (Journal of the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematics Arts)
Volume 30, Number 2 (Fall 2010)
pages 9-17

Marcia Alesan Dawkins, Visiting Scholar
Brown University

The election of President Barack Hussein Obama marks an important milestone in United States racial politics. Many cultural critics and opinion leaders argue that Obama’s popularity and position represent post-racial accomplishments for the nation.

In this article I argue that post-racial politics, the ideology that race and/or racism is dead, ignores the salient fact that we continue to live in a society deeply influenced by race, with material consequences that affect life chances. I support this argument through an examination of Obama’s racial rhetoric in the address of March 18, 2008 “A More Perfect Union.” Through Obama’s uses of mixed race identity, the speech acknowledges the actual history of racial injustice and the ideal future of racial reconciliation through frank deliberation and political intervention, and thus serves as a prologue to racial dialogue rather than a post-racial epilogue or monologue.

The 21st century has ushered in a set of paradigm shifts that are responding to changes in technology, economics, politics, cultural flows, and narratives of identification. From the advent of social media, to the Great Recession, to health care reform, to the revised racial categories on the U.S. Census, American lives are faced with increasing tensions and ambiguities. No single icon reflects these tensions and ambiguities, and the paradigm shifts they are inspiring, more cohesively than President Barack Obama.

Some critics argue that Obamas election to the Presidency and status as global “supercelebrity” are signs that we have entered a post-racial moment in which everyone and everything is mixed. “Watching Obama campaign with his African American wife, his Indonesian-Caucasian half-sister, his Chinese-Canadian brother-in-law…all of their children,” not to mention the memories of his Kenyan father and white American mother and grandparents from Kansas, is evidence of this mixed, and ultimately post-, racial moment. Census statistics support this view, revealing that the population of multiracial children in the United States has soared from approximately 500,000 in 1970 to more than 6.8 million in 2000, and that they are happier than their mono-racial counterparts.

As a result of this mixing, many now question the existence of racial prejudice and discrimination writ large. In a recent interview with CNNs John King, President Obama was asked about the role he thinks race and racism play in his political reception. The President suggested that while racism exists, it lives more so in our imaginations than our intentions. If post-racial proponents are interpreting Obamas words and images correctly, then we may be on the verge of entering an era in which discriminatory racial barriers, partisan emotions and divisiveness have been dismantled. Put bluntly, in post-racial America, racism will be dead. If post-racial proponents are incorrect, then our dream of a post-racial America is a myth that both constrains and contains an ongoing drama concerning multiracialism, identity, and Obamas ability to change national public policy. In either case Obama is, as Peggy Orenstein claims, our emblematic “mixed messenger.” In the pages that follow I will engage post-racial politics by asking and answering three questions: What does post-race mean? How does Obamas racial rhetoric address a post-race perspective? And, what are the implications of Obama’s iconic racial status for U.S. racial politics?…

…In this article I argue that post-racial politics, the ideology that race and/or racism is dead, ignores the salient fact that we continue to live in a society deeply influenced by race, with material consequences that affect life chances. I support this argument through an examination of Barack Obamas racial rhetoric in his address of March 18, 2008—”A More Perfect Union”—perhaps the most climactic moment of his first Presidential campaign…

…In addition, those of African ancestry were the subjects of pseudo-scientific racist studies concluding they were soulless beasts, a threat to civilization itself, a drain on the economy, and a generally cursed people. These sinister images became the basis for a biological theory known as “hybrid degeneracy,” which claimed that mixed race people were emotionally unstable, irrational, recalcitrant, and sterile. According to Robyn Wiegman, this theory became a biological fact in Western discourse based on pseudo-scientific observation and comparative anatomy, especially of the brain, skull, and reproductive organs. As a result of these sociological and pseudo-scientific findings, white/European Americans were instructed to dissociate from African Americans in social life in order to maintain their purity. It is therefore unsurprising that blacks and whites who dared to cross the color line in any way, whether to attend school, vote, or mix with one another romantically, were the subjects of torture and abuse. Such physical and juridical policing of the color line is why the study of mixed race identification remains important to any discussion of racial and post-racial politics. Moreover, those of mixed race who passed as either white or black demonstrated that the color line promoted suffering on both sides and in the spaces in-between, making it at the same time all too real and extremely unstable…

Read the entire article here.

The historical politics of the New Zealand half-caste

MAI Review
Issue 3 (2008)
Article 7
ISSN 1177-5904
11 pages

Gina M. Colvin-McCluskey

The archives of settler journalism provides us with a rich resource for engaging with some of the ‘raced’ discourses in circulation at the commencement of Britain’s colonial project in Āotearoa/New Zealand. From these early literary resources we find chronicled in the settler press evidence of a complex, contradictory and largely imagined relationship with the ‘Natives’. As the colonist confronted the ‘Native’ and authored the encounter in the settler media, he was at the same time working through social hierarchies, resource entitlements, political institutions and the face of a burgeoning indigenous contest.

The Euronesians is a single newspaper article which appeared in 1843 in an Auckland newspaper, The Daily Southern Cross, established in the same year. This article has been analysed using a critical discourse methodology in order to understand the way in which seemingly munificent articles, that appear superficially, at least, to demonstrate a generous disposition toward the ‘Native’, are at the same time wedded to Britain’s colonising project, and work to justify, excuse, and accommodate a hegemonic white presence. At the core of critical discourse methodologies therefore is a desire to understand how language works to normalise social, economic and political domination. The discourse analyst’s methodological tool kit is therefore a set of key questions that are asked of the text. What is the background to the text? What does it say at its surface? What patterns of meaning do we find and what political work is the text doing? What is silenced? Are the patterns of meaning consistent over time? This paper addresses these questions.

An analysis of the text demonstrates that the apparent display of generosity toward those children of mixed racial parentage (Pākehā and Māori) is in fact demonstrative of a complex relationship between the seemingly contradictory discourses of cultural benevolence and appropriation. As will be demonstrated, the appearance of goodwill and concern for the ‘half-caste’, in this article, retreats into a rationale for demonstrating the untenable nature of certain obligations, protection and rights afforded to the Treaty of Waitangi signatories, which effectively precluded the colonist from the purchase of Native lands. The article ‘The Euronesians” is partially reproduced along with the punctuation and editing used in the original publication. The use of ‘native’ using the lower case was standard form of the day.

THE EURONESIANS, Or the Children of European and Native Parents.
Daily Southern Cross
Volume I, Issue 23, (23 September 1843)
Page 2

We have advocated the rights of the European and Native, frequently and fully. We have treated of the effects of British Government, as far as the present and prospective circumstances of both are concerned, but there is another, and a very important portion of our community whose interests we have always had in view, although we have not had an opportunity until now of bringing their case prominently before the public. A class of persons, who appear to have been entirely subjects of treaties and of laws; the privileges of the former have been attempted to be limited and prescribed, and the rights of the latter have been usurped and violated, but there is a class of persons who cannot be affected in their rights, either by the treaty of Waitangi, or the Land Claims Bill. We allude to the descendants of European fathers, and Maorie mothers, commonly called “half casts.” These persons are in many instances, the children of misfortune, and as such, are too often neglected and despised; but they are still our, fellow-creatures, and entitled, under the laws and dispensations of the God of nature, to an equal interest, and an equal participation in the soil on which he has planted them…

Read the entire article here.

Sex, Blood, and Hybridity: The Discourse of Racial Anxiety in Antebellum Writing

Northeast Modern Language Association
NeMLA 2012 Convention
Rochester, New York
2012-03-15 through 2012-03-18

This panel seeks to investigate how antebellum literary texts worked dialectically with the new racial science of ethnology to respond to the dominant racial ideologies of the day. Topics and/or critical paradigms can include, but are certainly not limited to: miscegenation, disease, politics, erotics, gender, feminism, science, politics, class, trauma, critical race/queer theory, reception theory, and reader-response.

In antebellum America, the notion of ‘blood’ as ‘race’ maintained a strong hold over the 19th century literary imagination. This panel will examine how antebellum literary texts worked dialectically with the new racial science of ethnology to respond to the dominant racial ideologies of the day. Mid-century works by authors as varied as Frederick Douglass, Louisa May Alcott, Herman Melville, Lydia Maria Child, and Frances E. W. Harper illustrated very clearly the instability of racial classification and its resultant sexual anxieties. Rather than phenotype, references to ‘white’ blood and ‘black’ blood came to be regarded as the primary signifiers of racial traits. The enduring fascination of white Americans with the mathematical fractionalization of blood was evident in the creation and use of words such as octoroon, quadroon, and mulatto in the titles of magazine articles, books, and pamphlets while, at the same time, actual skin color would become an increasingly invisible signifier of race. Among the anthropologists, anatomists, ethnologists, and naturalists who led the drive for racial classification in the mid-19th century were polygenists such as Josiah C. Nott, Samuel Cartwright, George Glidden, and others. Alabama physician Nott’s 1844 Two Lectures on the Natural History of the Caucasian and Negro Races and 1854 Types of Mankind cut to the heart of race-based ‘scientific’ writing during the19th century. Nott’s hypothesis that mulattoes, as the offspring of interracial sexual couplings—termed ‘faulty stock’—could not be self-sustaining was never scientifically tested. In addition, the continued emphasis on the supposed degeneracy and diseased blood caused by race-mixing betrayed a degree of hysteria disproportionate to the actual numbers of the unions. This panel is significant in that it seeks a fresh investigation of paradigms through which antebellum literary texts can be read as directly responding to the new science and ideology of ethnology. Topics and/or critical paradigms can include, but are certainly not limited to: miscegenation, disease, politics, erotics, gender, feminism, science, politics, class, trauma, critical race/queer theory, reception theory, and reader-response. Send 1-page abstract and brief bio as Word attachment to Rebecca Williams, rebelwill7@gmail.com, with ‘NEMLA’ in subject line.

For more information, click here.

“My Daughter Married a Negro”: Interracial Relationships in the United States as Portrayed in Popular Media, 1950-1975

Journal of Undergraduate Research
University of Wisconsin, La Crosse
Volume VIII (2005)
13 pages

Melissa Magnuson-Cannady

Between 1948 and 1967, thirty states either repealed their anti-miscegenation laws or the states’ laws themselves were struck down as unconstitutional by the 1967 Loving v. Virginia Supreme Court decision. Although these laws were slowly being annulled, interracial relationships, especially Black-White relationships, were still considered taboo in much of the country. This research project critically examines how mainstream America thought about interracial relationships during and after those years as portrayed in popular culture media outlets such as popular magazines and periodicals, newspapers, and one major film. The articles and productions reveal both continuity and change over time and that many of those articles and productions were reactions to national events and court cases. After examining various articles it becomes clear that as more states repealed laws banning interracial relationships, more people accepted interracial relationships as long as interracial couples did not move into their neighborhoods, or involve their children. Currently, while there is an ever-increasing population of people involved in interracial relationships, this fact is not widely depicted in advertisements, on television, or in movies, revealing vestiges of an out-dated taboo.

INTRODUCTION

The author of “My Daughter Married a Negro” chose not to reveal his identity when he wrote this story detailing his family’s ordeal with their daughter marrying across the color line.1 But his story reveals that he and the rest of his family and their friends and neighbors did indeed have issues with the marriage. In fact, with the many references to the Second World War and to war in general, it seems as though he feels that he is fighting a war against the interracial union. This article was one of many articles published between 1950 and 1975 that portrayed both a reluctance to allow such relationships and a slow eventual acceptance of interracial relationships. Even the fact that he chose to remain anonymous and hide the fact that his daughter was marrying a black man from his co-workers speaks volumes about the general thoughts and notions about interracial marriages during the early 1950s. In fact, at the time this article was published and for years after, antimiscegenation laws were still widely practiced and enforced in the majority of the states in the South and the West of the United States. These laws were used to prohibit racial mixing, or amalgamation so to ensure the superiority and purity of the white race, to maintain the hierarchy of slave or free during the centuries of slavery, and to regulate property transmission. Such antimiscegenation laws predated the United States of America and continued to regulate relationships, race, and property transmission for a long time—less than forty years ago many states still had laws that banned the marriage of a white person to a person of any other race. Many of these laws were in place for decades, or even centuries, while other states had more recently passed their laws during the twentieth century…

Racial equality leading to mixed marriages and then to children of mixed racial descent was one of the driving forces behind preventing school integration. The September 19, 1958 issue of U.S. News & World Report published as its cover story “What South Really Fears about Mixed Schools: Leading Sociologists Discuss Sex Fears and Integration.” This article, along with the “Mixed Schools and Mixed Blood” article blatantly reveal the South’s real fear about integration. The sociologists’ views varied greatly. One stated, “…about the last person in the world that the average white kid would really seriously get interested in would be a Negro.” Another stated that although school integration may not directly lead to intermarriage, it will definitely lower the barriers to such relationships.51 Another leading sociologist argued that interracial relationships and sex are used to oppose integration, but that it “may not be the real reason but merely one that is easily understood and useful for the opposition. He then argued that the real reasons may have to do with social and political mobility of Negroes—that better educated Negroes would rock the world of politics in the South and that would eventually lead to whites loosing status and privilege in society. Still another sociologist, when answering the question, “Do you think that white parents are afraid their daughters may become interested in Negro boys, or their sons might become involved with Negro girls?” responded with,

Their sons have clandestinely been involved with Negro girls and women for over 200 years, and the evidence can be seen in the form of light mulattoes in almost every Southern and Northern City.

Public opinion accepts this fact, however, as not endangering the purity of the white race so long as the mixing does not involve the incorporation of the mixed-blood children in the father’s group. Of course, legal marriage with colored women would violate this principle, and this is why it is forbidden by law in every Southern State and in many non-Southern States.

With the daughters of white parents, it is a very different matter. Motherhood is concealed only with great difficulty. An old saying of the frontier has it that motherhood is a matter of fact but fatherhood is a matter of opinion. Hence it is through the woman that the white group lays down its rules of race membership.

This statement, very similar in many ways to Peggy Pascoe’s explanation of interracial relationships, shows why interracial marriage, but not interracial sex, is banned by law in many states, and how race and sex compound to further subjugate black women of the South. This statement reveals the sick truth that while white male slave owners had supreme control over his slaves, and later sharecroppers, and women in general in the South, black men had almost no power—not even to protect their female family and friends from the possible horrors of the white man. And, while not all of the relationships resulting in mixed children were based on this imbalance of power that resulted in rape, many surely were purely by the definition of rape itself. This statement reveals the ugly, horrible truth about one aspect of race relations in the South…

Read the entire article here.

Nation, miscegenation, and the myth of the mulatta/o monster 1859-1886

Universite de Montreal (Canada)
2009
261 pages
Publication Number: AAT NR60321
ISBN: 9780494603215

Jessica Alexandra Maeve Murphy

These presentee a la Faculte des etudes superieures En vue de l’obtention du grade de Philosophiae Doctor (Ph.D.) en etudes anglaises

“Nation, Miscegenation, and The Myth of the Mulatta/o Monster, 1859-1886” examines how Harriet Wilson, Harriet Jacobs, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and Robert Louis Stevenson use the trope of the mulatta/o monster only to subvert it by showing readers that the real monster is white, hegemonic culture. More specifically, it deals with how Our Nig, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, The Octoroon, and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde depict the interracial body as a gothic house, one which is a microcosm for an increasingly hybrid and un-homely nation. The four texts under consideration in my thesis all explore what it means to be black and female (or dark and feminized) in the United States and Britain where to be white, male, and affluent is to have virtually limitless power over the bodies of women, particularly black ones.

Drawing upon Nancy Stepan’s notion of “proper places,” this dissertation looks at how interracial individuals challenged existing hierarchies in the mid-to-late nineteenth century by defying racial, gender, and class norms nationally and transatlantically. While many scientists of the period believed that mixed-race people were infertile and headed for extinction, the proliferation of such individuals attests to the fact that the number of racially hybrid people was increasing, not decreasing. For many Victorians and their American counterparts, the rise in this population as well as the shifting roles of black and white women, black men, and the working class compelled them to label these groups. It also heightened their concern with degeneration and their need to polarize black/white, female/male, and rich/poor. Yet, as this project shows, while such binaries are necessarily porous, England and the United States both made use of them to establish and define their national identities vis-à-vis one another. Whereas American writers like Jacobs and Wilson relied on such constructs to shame their country and to shape its future, British ones like Braddon used them to allege national superiority or, like Robert Louis Stevenson, later on in the nineteenth century, to reveal the changing face of the nation.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Making and Unmaking Monsters in Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig
• Chapter 2: Sexual Propriety and Racial Transgression in Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
• Chapter 3: The Transatlantic Gaze in M. E. Braddon’s The Octoroon
• Chapter 4: Mr. Hyde as Hybrid in Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekvll and Mr. Hyde
• Notes
• Works Cited

Purchase the dissertation here.

Life on the boundary: “Passing” and the limits of self-definition

Rutgers University, Camden
May 2011
46 pages

Raven Marlenia Moses

A thesis submitted to the Graduate School-Camden Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Graduate Program in English

With the advent of various state laws that classified as black any individual with at least “one-drop” of African blood and the legalization of racial segregation enacted by the Plessy vs. Ferguson Supreme Court decision, the American post-Reconstruction era was a period in which the line separating races became more and more distinct. However, as the legal definitions and hierarchical categorizations of racial difference became more discrete, the physical basis of racial distinction became increasingly destabilized. Nella Larsen’s Passing and James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man are novels from this period that depict the struggles of characters who suffer because of the social and legal distinction between “black” and “white.” Because of the social imperative that these characters be black even though they have visibly white skin, the distinction between “black” and “white” actually becomes an arbitrary distinction between “white” and “not-white.” The protagonists of both novels—Clare Kendry, Irene Redfield, and the unnamed Ex-Colored Man—all seek stable self-definitions that successfully integrate both their personal and social identities. However, because of their inability to resolve the paradox created by their visible “whiteness” and legal classification as “black,” none of the protagonists are able to successfully negotiate the threats posed by their racially and socioeconomically oppressive environment while keeping their personal identities continuously intact. Unable to form stable, coherent identities through the blending of mutually agreeable public and private “selves,” Clare, Irene, and the Ex-Colored Man remain in irresolvable positions with identities that are permanently indeterminate.

Read the entire dissertation here.

Racial Taxonomy in Genomics

Social Science & Medicine
Volume 73, Issue 7, October 2011
pages 1019–1027
DOI: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2011.07.003

Catherine Bliss, Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, Race and Science Studies
Department of Africana Studies
Brown University

This article examines the reflexive, biosocial nature of genomic meaning making around race, drawing on discourse analysis of 732 articles on genomics and race published from the years 1986 to 2010, in-depth interviews with 36 of the world’s most elite genomics researchers, interviews with 15 critics, policymakers, and trainees involved in debates over race, and participant observation at a core genotyping facility that specializes in ancestry estimation. I reveal how biomedical researchers identify with, value, and make sense of the taxonomies they construct. My analysis goes beyond a consideration of instrumental rationales to analyze the experiential and political motivations that shape how researchers get involved in racial ethical dilemmas. I theorize taxonomic practice as a reflexive form of biosociality, a conscious shaping of social notions about biology and race to produce a future that researchers themselves want to live in. I demonstrate how reflexive biosociality paradoxically leads researchers to advance social explanations for race while investing in genomics as a solution to racial quandaries.

Read or purchase the article here.

Performative Aspects of Brazilian Music as a Means of Creating Identity in Rio de Janeiro

Universität Wien
October 2008
215 pages

Adriana Ribeiro-Mayer

In Rio de Janeiro’s multi-ethnic society with its colonial and slave-based past creating a common identity is a major problem. Standard Portuguese, as opposed to spoken “Brazilian”, is remote to many Brazilians. Therefore, music and dance, the Carnival events and Baile Funk, substitute for language-based common performances. They have become extraordinarily big events based on a “sincretized” rhythm, on the body and mostly Afro-Brazilian body movements.

With the help of “participant observation” and “ero-epic conversation” I tried to participate as closely as possible in numerous events and describe them in performance protocols. These I analyzed according to the concepts of performance theory.

Richard Schechner’s emphasis on deep structures (such as the escola rehearsals) and rules; Victor Turners shift from play to ritual; Nicholas Cook’s “process-“ rather than “product-character” of performances and the musical work, e.g. a samba-enredo, as giving performers something to perform; Erika Fischer-Lichte’s emphasis on co-presence, interaction and feed-back as well as the body and its expressions; and finally Johan Huizinga’s prediction of a shift in social play, trough rules, competition and the audience to more seriousness. All these concepts of performance theory both proved useful tools, and at the same time were put to an interesting re-evaluation when applied to these mostly Afro-Brazilian events.

Rio’s Carnival’s counter-world has to fulfill so important and different needs in a divided society that it split to be able to present opportunities for spontaneous play of the individual, e.g. in the street blocos and the Intendente Magalhães parades, and to present a choreographed show of unity and common identity, in the main sambodrome parades. Baile Funk has so far catered for the first needs, i.e. entertainment and individual expression, as it has not involved all layers of carioca society through city-wide events.

Table of Contents

• 1. Introduction
• 2. Rio de Janeiro Society and the African Influence
  • 2.1 The African Population in Brazil
  • 2.2 The African Population in Rio de Janeiro
  • 2.3 Abolition of Slavery
  • 2.4 African Cultural Heritage
• 3. Identity in a mixed Society
  • 3.1 The Situation of Afro-Brazilians today
  • 3.2 Affirmative Action? Quotas for “Black” Students
• 4. Concepts of Performance
• 5. The Method of “Participant Observation” and “Ero-Epic Conversation”
  • 5.1 Questions of Presentation
  • 5.2 Research Trips
• 6. Hypothesis
• 7. Carnival and Samba in Rio
  • 7.1 Origins of Samba and Carnival in Rio
    • 7.1.1 Samba
    • 7.1.2 Carnival
  • 7.2 The Escolas de samba
    • 7.2.1 Origins and Evolution of the Escolas de Samba
    • 7.2.2 The Special Group Escolas de Samba
    • 7.2.3 Case study “Madureira”
    • 7.2.3.1 Escolas de Samba from Madureira
    • 7.2.4 Preparation of the Parades
    • 7.2.4.1 Cidade do Samba – Samba City
    • 7.2.5 The Sambodrome
    • 7.2.6 The Competition “The Best Escola de Samba of the Year”
  • 7.3 Performative Aspects of Samba and the Escolas’ Parades
    • 7.3.1 Dramaturgy of the Parades
    • 7.3.1.1 Example: Sequence of the 2008 Portela parade
    • 7.3.1.2 Performance Protocol of the Escolas’ parade
      • 7.3.1.2.1 Preparation Events
      • 7.3.1.2.2 Rehearsals in the Quadras
      • 7.3.1.2.3 Street Rehearsals
      • 7.3.1.2.4 Portela Rehearsal in the Sambodrome
      • 7.3.1.2.5 Group A parade – Formation and Dissolution
  • 7.4 Social and Economic Aspects of the Escolas de Samba for Rio
• 8. Funk Carioca
  • 8.1 Origins
  • 8.2 Funk Carioca music
    • 8.2.1 Charme
    • 8.2.2 Proibidão
    • 8.2.3 Erotic funk
  • 8.3 Performative Aspects of Baile Funk
    • 8.3.1 The Dramaturgy of Baile Funk
    • 8.3.2 Performance Protocol Baile Funk
      • 8.3.2.1 Baile Funk in a Suburb
      • 8.3.2.2 Baile Funk in Rio downtown
  • 8.4 The Rio Hip Hop Movement
  • 8.5 Baile Funk vs. Samba Parades and Rehearsals
  • 8.6 The Social and Economic Aspects of Baile Funk
• 9. Interpretation
  • 9.1 Performance Theory applied to Samba and Funk Performances
    • 9.1.1 The Parade of Império Serrano in the Sambodrome
    • 9.1.2 Rehearsals
    • 9.1.3 Traditional parades on Intendente Magalhaes Avenue
    • 9.1.4 Baile Funk
  • 9.2 Samba and Funk’s Contribution to Rio’s Cultural Identity
  • 9.3 Examples of Samba-Enredo and Funk Carioca Lyrics
    • 9.3.1 “Bum, Bum, Paticumbum” – Samba-enredo
    • 9.3.2 “Guerreiros da Paz” – Funk Carioca
• 10. Conclusions
• 11. Zusammenfassung
• 12. Resumo
• 13. Bibliography
• 14. Glossary
• 15. Abstract in English
• 16. Abstract auf Deutsch
• Appendix

Read the entire dissertation here.