Mixed Race Studies

“Redemption for Our Anguished Racial History”: Race and the National Narrative in Commemorative Journalism About Barack Obama

Journal of Communication Inquiry
Volume 35, Number 2 (April 2011)
pages 115-133
DOI: 10.1177/0196859911404604

Siobahn Stiles
Temple University

Carolyn Kitch, Professor of Journalism
Temple University, Philadelphia

This article considers how race was discussed in commemorative journalism produced after Barack Obama’s election and inauguration by major American newspapers, magazines, and television news. A discourse analysis of these commemorative media texts reveals competing—though often overlapping—narratives. Some celebrated Obama’s victory as a racial milestone, claiming it for African Americans past and present, yet another hurdle crossed in the continuing struggle for equality. Other commemorative texts either elided or marginalized racial issues, instead emphasizing diversity and democracy in a narrative of generalized American “freedom” and unity. The narrative in each text, however, was ultimately a tale imbued with nationalist ideology, emphasizing unity and progress at the expense of discussing issues related to contemporary racial inequality in America. Overall, although the coverage of this election demonstrated some change in racial representation, the overall discourse on race in America—and journalists’ thematic avoidance of racial issues—did not.

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School of Cultural Inquiry Seminar Series – Narrating the Nowhere People: FB Vickers’ The Mirage and “Half-Caste” Aboriginals

Australian National University
A. D. Hope Conference Room (Building 14)
2011-06-06, 16:16-17:30 (Local TIme)

Rich Pascal, Visiting Fellow
School of Cultural Inquiry
Australian National University

By the turn of the Twentieth Century, and increasingly in the decades that followed, areas located literally on the fringes of many Australian towns were populated by people consigned figuratively to a conceptual limbo.  Australians who were mostly of mixed Aboriginal and European ancestry congregated in slumlike camps and reserves.  As the century wore on, the mainstream society’s widespread belief that the so-called “tribal” Aboriginals were passing into extinction had come to be shadowed by a perception that these so-called “half-castes” and “fringe dwellers” were now the dark Others whose endurance threatened the dream of an all-white Australia.  They were, to borrow Henry Reynolds’ apt phrase, Australia’s “nowhere people.” 
 
Mostly unsighted, they were in the literal sense commonly unremarked by mainstream Australians.  And the society’s chronic inclination to render the marginalised social group translucent was nowhere more apparent than in the sphere of literary and popular narratives.  In the novels, stories, and memoirs of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries their near invisibility registers as an almost total absence.  It wasn’t until the two decades following the end of the Second World War that some memoirs, novels and stories that featured them prominently were presented to the reading public.  The first book length narrative to set itself the challenge of subjectively rendering the experience of Indigenous nowhereness was FB Vickers’ The Mirage (1955), a novel that has not been well remembered.  Although well received by reviewers of the time, it was not a popular success and it was rarely mentioned in later histories of Australian literature; it has never been studied in any depth or detail.  This discussion constitutes an effort to redress the latter omission, and advances as well an argument for the book’s sociocultural importance with regard to subsequent efforts, literary and otherwise, to include the nowhere people within the national identity.

Turning Dreams to Chaos: Multiplicity and the Construction of Identity

Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, California
2003
249 pages
ISBN (eBook): 978-3-638-68960-1
Archive No.: V7499
DOI: 10.3239/9783638689601

Tamara Hollins

A Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Claremont Graduate University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate Field of English

This work will reflect on the mutability of meaning in the female mulatto body as well as on the mutability of perception by acknowledging the erroneous nature of race and its concrete results, by examining the valorization and undermining of racial essentialism and heterogeneity, and by revealing passing as bound by the social and legal restraints related to the physical body even as it interrogates racial classifications. Specifically, this study will explore how some nineteenth century, modern, and postmodern American narratives containing mulattoes and passing personas produce a resolution reiterating the structure of race or new subjectivities within or possibly without the color line. Through this exploration, the war between the homogenous Self and the different Other will play out. In an effort to unite a divided personality, the Other will counter attempts by the Self to maintain essentialism. The success lies not in the final outcome but in recognizing the subversive acts of the Other and the irrational tactics of the Self as continuously revealing the subjects as always already married and as surpassing mere essentialism into the multitudinous, heterogeneous One. Still, this work realizes that essentialism has a place in heterogeneity, even if essentialism is a logical error. Duality and conflict are inherent in heterogeneity, or the multitudinous One. The key is not to eradicate, in an essentialist manner, one and not the other, but to live in a state of awareness, respecting and accepting those who knowingly choose to construct identities within or without the color line.

Table of Contents

• Introduction: Reading Meaning in the Mixed Body
• Chapter One: Assimilating into What?: Stereotypes, Appearances, and Behavior
• Chapter Two: Eliminating the Tragic: Intersections of Christianity, Racial Uplift, and True Womanhood
• Chapter Three: Passing as Subversion and Reification
• Chapter Four: The Journey Home: Replacing Tragedy with Authority
• Chapter Five: Looking Within and Beyond Race with Irene, Clare, and Angela
• Chapter Six: From the Passing Mulatto to the Biracial Character: Race, Class, Gender, and Family
• Conclusion: The Community of Multiplicity

Purchase the dissertation here.

(In) between identities: Representations of the island and the mulatto in nineteenth-century French fiction

University of Wisconsin, Madison
2005
205 pages
Publication Number: AAT 3186126
ISBN: 9780542274718

Molly Krueger Enz, Assistant Professor of French
South Dakota State University

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (French)

This dissertation explores how five nineteenth-century authors depict the tension surrounding racial (in)equality in France’s island colonies through the creation of mulatto characters who are portrayed as “in-between” characters in exile. The thesis is divided into two sections, each based on a common a theme. The first part treats two novels containing mixed-race characters who criticize racial prejudice and the hypocrisy of metropolitan and colonial societies. In my first chapter, I examine how the protagonist of Dumas’s Georges devotes his life to ending racial discrimination against mulattoes on the Île de France and show that the figures of the island and mulatto are structured around similar tensions of isolation and self-sufficiency. My second chapter explores how mixed-race characters in Hugo’s Bug-Jargal refuse to be classified racially. I argue that race is changeable and reflects the unstable history of the island of Saint-Domingue. The second section of this study considers the themes of female heroism and oppression through the figures of the revolutionary, the “tragic mulatta,” and the épave. In the third chapter, I contend that the central mulatta character in Lamartine’s Toussaint Louverture, the product of her black mother’s rape by a white colonist, is depicted as a revolutionary heroine who symbolizes the political power struggle between France and Saint-Domingue. My fourth chapter claims that the “tragic mulatto” stereotype, previously studied in relation to American literature, can be applied to Sand’s eponymous white heroine in Indiana. In my fifth chapter on Madame Charles Reybaud’s “Les Éépaves” and Madame de Rieux, I argue that white female characters usurp traditional white male roles when they enter relationships with men of color. Furthermore, I analyze the figure of the “épave,” neither free nor slave, which I feel best represents the “in-between” nature of the mulatto. This dissertation analyzes geographic, racial, and gendered “in-between” spaces in French Romantic literature on colonialism to further develop an understanding of how marginalized identities were formed in the first half of the nineteenth century and how these identities in turn shaped Romanticism.

Table of Contents

• Abstract
• Introduction: Margins and Mixings
• I. Prejudice and Hypocrisy: Criticisms of Metropolitan and Colonial Societies
  • CHAPTER ONE: The Mulatto as Island and the Island as Mulatto in Alexandre Dumas’s Georges
  • CHAPTER TWO: Mirroring, Monstrosity, and Métissage: Victor Hugo’s Bug-Jargal
• II. Heroism and Oppression: The Revolutionary, the Tragic Mulatta, and the Épave
  • CHAPTER THREE: Female Revolutionary Heroism in Alphonse de Lamartine’s Toussaint Louverture
  • CHAPTER FOUR: Slavery and the Tragic Mulatto Stereotype in George Sand’s Indiana
  • CHAPTER FIVE: Who “Belongs” to Whom?: Sexual Politics in Two Works by Madame Charles Reybaud
• Conclusion
• Appendix
• Works Cited
• Works Consulted

Purchase the dissertation here.

The Military Camptown in Retrospect: Multiracial Korean American Subject Formation Along the Black-White Binary

Bowling Green State University
December 2007
116 pages

Perry Dal-nim Miller

Submitted to the Graduate College of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts

This thesis applies theoretical approaches from the sociology of literature and Asian Americanist critique to a study of two novels by multiracial Korean American authors. I investigate themes of multiracial identity and consumption in Heinz Insu Fenkl’s Memories of My Ghost Brother and Nora Okja Keller’s Fox Girl, both set in the 1960’s and 1970’s gijichon or military camptown geography, recreational institutions established around U.S. military installations in the Republic of Korea. I trace the literary production of Korean American subjectivity along a socially constructed dichotomy of blackness and whiteness, examining the novels’ representations of cross-racial interactions in a camptown economy based on the militarized sexual labor of working-class Korean women. I conclude that Black-White binarisms are reproduced in the gijichon through the consumption practices of both American military personnel and Korean gijichon workers, and that retrospective fictional accounts of gijichon multiraciality signal a shift in artistic, scholarly, and popular conceptualizations of Korean American and Asian American group identities.

Table of Contents

• CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION
• CHAPTER II. SOCIOLOGY OF ASIAN AMERICAN LITERATURE
• CHAPTER III. WRITING THE MULTIRACIAL SELF: FENKL’S MEMORIES OF MY GHOST BROTHER
• CHAPTER IV. HISTORICAL FICTIONALIZATIONS OF THE GIJICHON: KELLER’S FOX GIRL
• CHAPTER V. CONCLUSION
• WORKS CITED
• APPENDIX A. CHAPTER SYNOPSES OF MEMORIES
• APPENDIX B. CHAPTER SYNOPSES OF FOX GIRL

W.E.B. Du Bois’ oft-quoted problem for the twentieth-century was that of the color line: of racial classification and stratification policed and reproduced by the nation-state, cultural institutions, and hegemonized subjects within these institutions.1 The 2000 U.S. Census form revised racial demarcations to accommodate multiracial self-identification. By offering respondents the option of multiple selections from the categories “White, Black, Asian, some other race, American Indian, and Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander,” the form allowed 6.8 million of 281.4 million respondents to identify themselves as multiracial. Though multiraciality is now institutionally recognized, the individual must still choose from finite combinations of racial categories determined by the state. Given the centuries-old problem of the color line in the United States, what are the implications of the increased public presence of multiracial subjectivity? In contemporaneous fictional works by and about multiracial subjects, what correspondences exist to the state’s regulation of race and multi-race?

In the twenty-first century, the racialization of subjects in and beyond the United States continues to form the basis for structures of social and economic inequality. Omi and Winant define race as “a concept which signifies and symbolizes social conflicts and interests by referring to different types of human bodies” and racial formation as “the sociohistorical process by which racial categories are created, inhabited, transformed, and destroyed.” The significant body of scholarship on the social fallout of racial hierarchy continues to focus primarily on the socio-political binary constructions of blackness and whiteness. This binary is key to understanding the existing historical context for racialized cross-group interaction in the U.S. However, the centrality of the Black-White binary in academic discourses also has the unfortunate consequence of marginalizing other racial groups and actors in the present racial state. Paradigms of race that fail to consider interstices beyond this primary binary thereby compromise the underlying anti-racist project of race scholarship itself. The anti-racist project is rendered incapable of addressing the fault lines and politics of division formed among non-white ethnic groups in the United States. In addition, multiculturalist discourses tend toward triumphalist celebrations of cultural diversity in a Post Civil-Rights Era and ignore the structural and institutional-level consequences of racial difference. The elision of inter- and intra-group relations beyond Black-White functions to conserve discourses, cultural practices, and social and economic processes that maintain the centrality and dominance of whiteness. As Omi and  Winant point out,

As much as the politicians or mainstream media, academic analyses reproduce this distorted model of race [racial dichotomizing] as a largely black-white dichotomy… Too often, today as in the past, when scholars and journalists talk about race relations, they mean relations between African Americans and whites.

The 1990s witnessed increased media and academic attention to the positioning of other ethnic groups in the American racial construct. Omi and Winant suggest a new scenario of racial actors coming into prominence nationally in the 1992 Los Angeles uprising, where “Koreans, African Americans, and Chicanos [were both] victims and victimizers.” In discourses on race in the United States, the model minority is that group poised (or posed) at the threshold separating racial otherness from whiteness. Touted as the apex of economic and assimilationist success to which other minoritized groups could and should aspire, the model minority figure is ostensible evidence of an egalitarian, equal-opportunity society. At the same time, it diverts awareness from the actuality of race-class articulated stratifications that restrict opportunity to those already privileged by class and whiteness. Today Asians in the United States are positioned in that discursive liminality, i.e. the model minority position.

Complex negotiations occur among racialization, systemic, overt, and covert racial discrimination, sedimented prejudice, and conflicting tides of assimilation and the perpetuation of Asian ethnic identities. This thesis analyzes the fiction of two multiracial Korean American writers who explore cross-racial dynamics while departing from model minoritization mythologies. My primary question is how this particular construction of Asian American ethnic subjectivity, that is, the multiracial Korean American, perpetuates Black-White binarisms. In this section, I review pertinent literatures—the historical and social contexts of Asian American literature and of multiracial identity. In both Heinz Insu Fenkl’s Memories of My Ghost Brother and Nora Okja Keller’s Fox Girl, the Black-White binary is manifest in multiracial spaces and bodies and consumption practices. Drawing on the established significance of biography in delineating Asian American social margins, I present one understanding of the Black-White binary as a factor in multiracial Asian American subjectivity. Fenkl and Keller’s novels are fictionalized retrospective accounts of life in recreational districts or gijichon (military camptowns) around U.S. military installations in Korea during the 1960’s and 1970’s. As such, these novels demonstrate the significance of Yellow-Black-White transracial interaction and consumption in national hegemonies.

I will first explain some of the discourse around Asian American as a signifier and panethnic rubric. Espiritu characterizes Asian American panethnicity as an entity coalescing in terms of social movements and political initiatives during and after the 1960’s in an “organizational dimension;” that is, the political and social structures through which Asian American-ness itself is manifested. Historically, the panethnic Asian American movement has fallen far short of encompassing all ethnicities and class backgrounds within the Asian rubric; in addition, the movement has tended to replicate patriarchal structures extant in the larger American culture. According to Yen Le Espiritu, the rubric of “Asian American” not only encompasses a multiplicity of ethnicities, but describes “a highly contested terrain on which Asian American of different racial, cultural, and class backgrounds merge and clash over terms of inclusion.” My thesis locates the works of Fenkl and Keller, and the racially hybridized subjectivities they depict, along this terrain of contestation. Through the implication of the Black-White binary in constructions of multiracial Korean American identity, it is possible to understand the significance of existing race hierarchies on the politics of inclusion and exclusion in Asian American collective and group identities…

Read the entire thesis here.

Drôle de Félix : A Search for Cultural Identity on the Road

Wide Screen
Volume 3, Number 1 (2011)
ISSN: 1757-3920

Zélie Asava

With the emergence of la culture beur in the 1980s—and the birth of a new type of filmmaking influenced by postcolonial politics, world cinema, the new hood films of the African-American community and its hip hop culture—questions of identity, multiculturalism and being mixed-race came to the fore.  Since then, many films have tackled the representation of France’s ethnic minorities onscreen and attempted to  move towards representing the dream 2007 presidential candidate Ségolène Royal expressed of a ‘Mixed-Race France’. This article will explore representations of ethnicity, gender and sexuality in Drôle de Félix/The Adventures of Felix (1999), through the figure of Félix, a homosexual, mixed-race (French-North African) man searching for his absent father and his ‘true’ identity.  The film focuses on the demystification of imperialist absolutes and divisions to reveal what lies between, in the interstices. Through its focus on transgressive identity it transforms traditional representations to explore what lies beyond.  This article interrogates the representational schema of Drôle de Félix, by exploring the cinematic stereotypes and taboos challenged and maintained in the film in comparison to traditional beur cinema and established ideas of Maghrebi-French characters in French cinema.

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Racial mixture, racial passing, and white subjectivity in Absalom, Absalom!

The Faulkner Journal
Volume 23, Issue 2 (Spring 2008)
pages 3-22

Masami Sugimori, Instructor of English
University of South Alabama

In his 1987 study of the critical reception of Absalom, Absalom! Bernd Engler points out that “since the mid-Seventies the only interpretations to gain favour have been those which, at least partly, regard Absalom, Absalom! as the conscious realization of an open work of art” (246). Somewhat testifying to how the text’s indeterminacy specifically concerns the interconnection of race and narrative, Engler’s survey also shows that noteworthy monographs from the decade include those concerning “Faulkner’s attitude towards racial questions” (252) as well as “the novel as a study in narratology and/or epistemology” (256). Indeed, even as Quentin and Shreve finalize their reconstruction of the endlessly uncertain past by reading Charles Bon’s white-looking body as “passing white,” Faulkner does not supply any evidence for Bon’s racial mixture outside the white character-narrators’ invention.

Engler is quick to note, however, that most race-related scholarship does not fully attend to the novel’s open-endedness, as exemplified by four studies from 1983: “Walter Taylor,  Eric J. Sundquist, Thadious M. Davis, and Erskine Peters begin, as do most others, with the dubious assumption that Bon’s identity as Sutpen’s part-negro son has been clearly established in the text” (253). And it seems that this problem is still compromising the Absalom, Absalom! scholarship. (1) For example, while critiquing the discursive domination of “‘legitimate’ white caretakers of history,” Maritza Stanchich bases her postcolonial reading upon the same white “legitimacy” and uncritically follows Quentin and Shreve’s re-creation of Bon as “a free mulatto who can ‘pass’ as white”: “When the narrators of different generations are faced with Bon, a free mulatto who can ‘pass’ as white and threatens to upset the South’s rigid race caste, their pre-Civil War and post-Civil War fears overlap and intermingle… The strategy of the narrative seeks to uphold white domination by representing all characters of color through Rosa, Quentin, General Compson and Shreve, the ‘legitimate’ white caretakers of history” (608)…

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Shades of gray: Black-white multiracialism in contemporary American literature

York University (Canada)
2011
294 pages
Publication Number: AAT NR71345
ISBN: 9780494713457

Molly Littlewood McKibbin

A Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies in English in partial fulfillment of the requirments for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Table of Contents

• Introduction: Black and White in the United States
• Chapter One: “What are you, anyway?”: Mixture, Identity Formation, and the Social Context of Race Classification
• Chapter Two: Racializin’ and Diversifyin’: Negotiating Whiteness
• Chapter Three: “Black Like Me”: Negotiating Blackness
• Conclusion: The (Continuing) Work of Multiracial Literature
• Bibliography

Purchase the dissertation here.

The one-drop aesthetic: How literary formalism reinvented race in the United States

Harvard University
2009
233 pages
Publication Number: AAT 3365201
ISBN: 9781109254617

Kevin Brian Birmingham

A dissertation presented by Kevin Brian Birmingham to The Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the subject of English.

The One-Drop Aesthetic argues that late twentieth-century theories of race and identity are translations of the early twentieth century’s aesthetic formalism, the New Criticism. The first cohesive formalism in the United States was an aesthetic ideology shaped by the imperfections of the South, which the southern New Critics took as a social model for their aesthetic ideals. They imagined literature not as a solid structure or an organic wholeness but as a welter of contingencies—a terrain that, like the South, was besieged by science and industry and whose beauty resided in fragments and ashes. The New Criticism was largely a dialogue between Allen Tate’s faith in transcendent wholeness and Ransom’s attention to art’s “infinite residue.”

Re-articulating the New Mestiza

Journal of International Women’s Studies
Vol 12, #2 (March 2011)
Special Issue: Winning and Short-listed Entries from the 2009 Feminist and Women’s Studies Association Annual Student Essay Competition
pages 61-74

Zalfa Feghali
University of Nottingham

This essay provides an overview, critique, and the beginning of a refiguration of Gloria Anzaldúa’s theorization of the new mestiza as set out in her seminal 1987 book Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. By examining both Anzaldúa’s precursors and the articulations of hybrid identities of her contemporaries, this essay depicts the complex dynamic that characterizes the mestiza’s need to develop, beyond borders and attempts to fashion a more contemporary, transnational mestiza. Using the writing and criticism of Françoise Lionnet alongside Anzaldúa’s and other critics, and utilizing postcolonial and feminist theories, this essay hopes to provide an alternative articulation to conventional understandings of hybridity and mestizaje in contemporary thought.

Introduction

The purpose of this essay is to provide an overview, a critique, and the beginning of a refiguration of Gloria Anzaldúa’s theorization of the new mestiza. Anzaldúa’s mestiza exists in borderlands, and is “neither hispana india negra española / ni gabacha;”1 rather, she is “mestiza, mulata, half-breed / caught in the crossfire between camps / while carrying all five races on [her] back / not knowing which side to turn to, run from” (Borderlands/La Frontera 216). However, according to Anzaldúa, and despite the difficulties engendered by her very existence, the mestiza is also a figure of enormous potential, as her multiplicity allows a new kind of consciousness to emerge. This mestiza consciousness moves beyond the binary relationships and dichotomies that characterize traditional modes of thought, and seeks to build bridges between all minority communities in order to achieve social and political change. Anzaldúa locates the new mestiza consciousness at a site that, as Françoise Lionnet suggests, “is not a territory staked out by exclusionary practices” (“The Politics and Aesthetics of Métissage” 5).

Although there are clear precursors to Anzaldúa’s work, one of which I discuss at length below, many critics and thinkers choose her work to engage with. This has to do with her unique place in the “canon” of Chicana/Mexican American writing—what she calls the “Moveimento Macha.” Writing from the position(s) of queer Chicana womanhood, code-switching between English and Spanish, and mixing poetry and prose, Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera, at the time of publication in 1987, represented an important break from the mainly male-dominated pool of “traditional” Chicano writers and inspired a generation of women, Chicana and non-Chicana alike, to write about their experiences as border-crossers with hybrid identities. Anzaldúa’s work remains popular because it retains much of its original subversive potential, its cross-disciplinarity providing new and varied methodologies to analyze borders. In many ways, it has also played an important role in refocusing American studies as a transnational discipline. In her presidential address to the American Studies Association in 2004, Shelley Fisher Fishkin identified Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera as epitomizing the transnational nature of American studies, and credited her work for opening up a space for “American studies scholars [to] increasingly recognize that understanding requires looking beyond the nation‟s borders, and understanding how the nation is seen from vantage points beyond its borders” (“Crossroads of Cultures” 20)…

…A “Cosmic Race”

In his original essay of 1925, Vasconcelos lauds the people inhabiting the area of Mexico for their mestizo/a culture, which, as Rafael Pérez-Torres has put it, “locates itself within a complex third space neither Mexican nor American but in a transnational space of both potential and restraint” (“Alternate Geographies and the Melancholy of Mestizaje” 322). In its traditional meaning, mestizaje “reflects a simultaneously racial, sexual, and national memory, an embodiment of colonization and conquest” (Bost, Mulattas and Mestizas 9). In fact, one of the reasons that Jose Vasconcelos won popular acclaim for his theories was the attractiveness of the idea that an entire population, which literally embodies a history of violence, can forge an identity that moved beyond such a violent history—and flourish. Anzaldúa herself refers to this very specific history in her hope that the emergence of the new mestiza will bring an end to rape, violence, and war.

For the purposes of his essay, Vasconcelos sees this group as the first stage in the creation of a new, cosmic race that will eventually take on characteristics and subsume genetic streams from all the races on earth. This cosmic race will take on the best or most desirable traits from each respective race. Eventually, according to Vasconcelos, the lines between the “original” races will blur to the point that any one individual’s “racial heritage” would be completely indistinguishable from another‟s, thus becoming the ultimate mestizo/a (something akin what critics would now call a “post-ethnic” or “post-racial” world). This emphasis on the special character and potential of the mestiza/o Mexican subject has made Vasconcelos‟ theory very attractive to Mexican and Chicano/a activists, particularly nationalists. As many Chicano/a activists have done, Anzaldúa uses a narrow interpretation of Vasconcelos’ essay in the hope of finding a solid theoretical grounding for her own project. However, this has brought her much criticism, as Vasconcelos’ theory has been rigorously undermined. As Didier Jaén puts it:

It is true that mestizaje is one of the central concepts of the Vasconcelos essay, but of course, it is also clear that the racial mixture Vasconcelos refers to is much wider, much more encompassing, than what can be understood by the mestizaje of the Mexican or Chicano…But even if we expand the concept of mestizaje to include all other races, this biological mixture would not fulfill what Vasconcelos expresses with the idea of the Cosmic race (“Introduction” xvi).

Clearly, Vasconcelos’ utopian vision of mestizaje leading to a new, privileged subject that lives in a race-less world does not hold up theoretically or pragmatically. For example, he clearly delineates the “four major races of the world” before envisioning a fifth, cosmic race which embraces the four “original” races of the world. Despite the fact that the original text was written in 1925 and must be read with one eye trained on that time’s theoretical and scientific reach, it is problematic in the way it combines scientific language and terms with a more mystical outlook (something that is echoed in Anzaldúa‟s work, albeit for a different purpose). It thus presents itself as scientific fact and knowledge while in fact holding little or no solid scientific basis.

My main objection to Vasconcelos’ analysis comes from the implications of his own underlying premise, namely, that there are four races of humans: the Black, the Indian (as in American native), the Mongol, and the White. Out of these four races, Vasconcelos imagines that the fifth, mestizo, cosmic race will resemble a symphony:

Voices that bring accents from Atlantis; depths contained in the pupil of the red man, who knew so much, so many thousand years ago, but now seems to have forgotten everything. His soul resembles the old Mayan cenote of green waters, laying deep and still…This infinite quietude is stirred with the drop put in our blood by the Black, eager for sensual joy, intoxicated with dances and unbridled lust…There also appears the Mongol, with the mystery of his slanted eyes that see everything according to a strange angle…The clear mind of the White, that resembles his skin and his dreams, also intervenes…

Clearly Vasconcelos’ theory is based on fundamental racism on his part. Yet despite having borne heavy criticism for his theory, Vasconcelos’ essay was reprinted in 1948 and became a rallying point for Chicano activist and Mexican nationalist movements. In addition to Vasconcelos’ popularity as an alternative Mexican historian, this is most likely why Anzaldúa espouses his theory. However, as I plan to show, Anzaldúa’s work also falls into many of the same traps as Vasconcelos’. It has been important to look at Vasconcelos’ work in such depth as I will show that Anzaldúa’s work, while in many ways vastly different, may have the effect of re-inscribing Vasconcelos’ racism…

Read the entire article here.