Mixed Race Studies

VIS409 Mixed Race Women’s Memoirs

Antioch University, Midwest
Winter 2010

This course is designed as a multidisciplinary exploration of race, gender, and identity utilizing oral and written narratives of Black-white mixed race women from the mid-nineteenth century to the present as source material. Drawing from elements of cultural studies, African American studies, American studies, and women’s studies, students will construct critical and historical contexts for self-identity and perceptions of that identity in women of interracial descent.

Dangerous crossroads: Mestizaje in the U.S. Latino/a imaginary

Rice University
December 2007
197 pages
Publication ID: 3309864

John L. Escobedo, Assistant Professor of English
University of Colorado, Boulder

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree Doctor of Philosophy

My dissertation interrogates mestizaje and nationalism to rethink academic tendencies that construct resistant methodologies and singular national representations of hybrid theories and racial identities. To ground this argument, chapters one and two analyze how nationalism compromises current theoretical and feminist uses of mestizaje. The introductory chapter traces the influence of Latin American cultural theorists such as José Vasconcelos (1925) and Fernando Ortiz (1940) on contemporary U.S. Latino/a cultural critics. I argue that by selectively borrowing theoretical elements from Ortiz and Vasconcelos, U.S. Latino/a scholars unintentionally consolidate divergent Latino/a histories as well as ignore issues of nation building, class differences, and racial tensions to promote a unitary discourse of subversive mestizaje. Likewise, my analysis of Jovita González’s novel Caballero (1930) reveals how González’s feminist tactics counteract Mexico’s patriarchal oppression of women by going against traditional feminist themes esteemed in Chicano/a Studies. For González, nationalist tropes of indigenous curanderismo (spirituality) and magical realism insufficiently respond to the needs of oppressed Mexican American women.

The final two chapters evaluate the ramifications of constructing unitary racial identities of whiteness and blackness. My final investigation uncovers the existence of ethnicities within North American racial categorizations of whiteness and blackness that provide new insights to mestizaje’s disruption of ordered classifications of race in the United States. Chapter three argues that the southeastern European immigrant experience of racial inclusion and exclusion from Anglo Saxon whiteness allowed María Amparo Ruiz de Burton to play off of new conceptions of whiteness in an evolving imaginary of white U.S. mestizaje to write her novels The Squatter and the Don (1885) and Who Would Have Thought It? (1872). Chapter four examines the rise of the New Negro Movement during the Harlem Renaissance as a cultural event that required the erasure of individuals in the black community who did not mirror the collective identity of African Americans. This chapter specifically studies Puerto Rican archivist Arthur A. Schomburg as a figure who broadened the conception of the New Negro to recognize the intellectual participation and contribution of Afro Caribbeans to the Harlem Renaissance.

Read the entire dissertation here.

The Language of Ham and the Language of Cain: “Dialect” and Linguistic Hybridity in the Work of Adam Small

The Journal of Commonwealth Literature
Volume 45, Number 3 (September 2010)
pages 389-408
DOI: 10.1177/0021989410377550

Nicole Devarenne, Lecturer in English
University of Dundee, Scotland, United Kingdom

The “coloured” South African writer Adam Small has made an important and largely unrecognized contribution to anti-apartheid literature in Afrikaans. His pioneering use of “Kaaps” (a linguistic variety spoken by “coloured” Afrikaners at the Cape) in his poetry and plays complicated the racial designation of Afrikaans as a “white” language and challenged the dominance of the “white” Afrikaans literary tradition. In a literature where the variety used by the white nationalist government was also that used by (albeit some of them dissident) Afrikaans writers, he created an appetite and appreciation for vernacular language as a medium of resistance against white supremacy. His work has helped to make possible a continuing investment by Afrikaans writers (white as well as “coloured”) in non-standard language as resistance to cultural imperialism and nationalism. During apartheid, however, he faced considerable criticism for his use of what was seen as a degraded and degrading “dialect”, and for his ostensible complicity in apartheid as a self-avowed “brown Afrikaner”. This article examines some of the difficulties which faced “coloured”Afrikaans writers during apartheid, taking Small as a specific example of a writer whose career displays the impact of the collision between “coloured” separatism and a politically pragmatic universalism, and proposes a reconsideration of his work as a subversive, ironic and ground-breaking intervention in South African literature.

Read or purchase the article here.

Queering Mestizaje: Transculturation and Performance

University of Michigan Press
2006
256 pages
6 x 9. 29 illustrations
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-472-09955-9
Paper ISBN: 978-0-472-06955-2

Alicia Arrizón, Professor of Women’s Studies
University of California, Riverside

• Winner of the Outstanding Book Award for 2008 from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE)
• Co-winner of the 2007 Modern Language Association Prize in United States Latina and Latino and Chicana and Chicano Literary and Cultural Studies

Rethinking mestizaje and how it functions as an epistemology of colonialism in diverse sites from Aztlán to Manila, and across a range of cultural materials

Queering Mestizaje employs theories of postcolonial cultural studies (including performance studies, queer and feminist theory) to examine the notion of mestizaje—the mixing of races, and specifically indigenous peoples, with European colonizers—and how this phenomenon manifests itself in three geographically diverse spaces: the United States, Latin America, and the Philippines. Alicia Arrizón argues that, as an imaginary site for racialized, gendered, and sexualized identities, mestizaje raises questions about historical transformation and cultural memory across Spanish postcolonial sites.

Arrizón offers new, queer readings of the hybrid, the intercultural body, and the hyphenated self, building on the work of Gloria Anzaldúa, Antonio Benitez-Rojo, Walter Mignolo, and Vera Kutzinski, while challenging accepted discourses about the relationship between colonizer and colonized. Queering Mestizaje is unique in the connections it makes between the Spanish colonial legacy in the Philippines and in the Americas. An engagingly eclectic array of cultural materials—including examples from performance art, colonial literature, visual art, fashion, and consumer products—are discussed, and included in the book’s twenty-nine illustrations.

Race-ing Performativity through Transculturation, Taste and the Mulata Body

Theatre Research International
Volume 27, Number 2 (2002)
pages 136-152
DOI: 10.1017/S0307883302000226

Alicia Arrizón, Professor of Women’s Studies
University of California, Riverside

A Cuban cocktail called mulata inspires an examination of the mulata body. Beyond an analysis of the cocktail as a commercial commodity, the mulata body can be placed within an intercultural space shaped by the processes of colonization, slavery and race relations. By examining the grammars in the mulata cocktail, the discussion moves the subject through other texts and discourses in order to mediate the mulata’s embodied genealogy as a form of transculturation. As a hybrid body that inhabits a ‘racialized’ performativity, the mulata’s subaltern agency is imagined beyond the exoticism charged to its presence in the Latin American and Caribbean contexts. A closer look at the mulata body helps to trace not only the process of objecthood affected by masculinist power and desire, but also by the way the process of subjecthood is performatively achieved.

Read or purchase the article here.

Diverse Identities in Interracial Relationships: A Multiethnic Interpretation of “Mississippi Masala” and “The Wedding Banquet”

Xchanges
Volume 4, Number 1 (September 2004)

Lan Dong, Assistant Professor of English
University of Illinois, Springfield

In their introduction to the collection Multiculturalism, Postcoloniality, and Transnational Media, Ella Shohat and Robert Stam point out “much of the work on race within the United States has tended to emphasize a discussion of particular ethnicities. There has not been much engagement with the interrelations among such communities, nor with how the multicultural debates cross various national borders” (Shohat and Stam 3). In the past decade, nevertheless, discussions of ethnicity and identity among U.S. critics frequently note the prominent multiethnic and interethnic relations among racial groups [1].

In this paper, I build upon theories of multiethnicity and interethnicity in my examination of heterogeneity, hybridity, and multiplicity within the body we label “Asian diaspora.” In particular, my argument is focused on the realization and construction of the diverse identities of Asian diaspora living in contemporary America in the context of interracial relationships. I choose to analyze Mississippi Masala (1991) directed by Mira Nair and The Wedding Banquet 喜宴(1993) directed by Ang Lee since interracial romance in both films functions as the primary plot. The struggle for love and individuality is intertwined with the protagonists’ complicated identities by way of negotiation between personal, familial, communal, and social concerns. I use this film analysis to suggest the intersection of gender, class, ethnicity, and nationalism in Asian diaspora’s pursuit of their reconstructed, rather than prescribed, identities…

Read the entire article here.

“Being a Half-breed”: Discourses of Race and Cultural Syncreticity in the Works of Three Metis Women Writers

Canadian Literature
“Native, Individual, State”
Number 144, Spring, 1995
pages 82-96

Jodi Lundgren

In his introduction to All My Relations, Thomas King asserts that “being Native is a matter of race rather than something more transitory such as nationality”: “one is either born an Indian or one is not.” While King adds that there is no “racial denominator” among Natives and that it is important to “resist the temptation of trying to define a Native,” at least until the body of work by authors of Native ancestry reaches some sort of critical mass,” he contends that Indianness is an inborn genetic trait (x-xi). The danger of King’s position is elucidated by ethnohistorian James Clifton:

the uncritical use of Indian, White, and Black, and the associated ethnocentric assumptions about ancient differences in behaviour and potentialities, history, and culture effectively block analytic thinking. These historically derived, culturally patterned, institutionally reinforced convictions include such persistent ideas as being and becoming Indian is a matter largely of biological ancestry, that Indianness is fixed by blood. A related assumption is that the labels White and Indian mark sharply defined categories—culturally defined ways of sorting diverse people into a few classes. A further assumption is that these differences are primordial, inevitable, original, durable and natural. (23)

In other words, when race is considered anything more than an “accident of birth” (King xi), biological determinism soon follows and is inevitably used to justify and perpetuate the disempowerment of oppressed groups. Historically, as Noel Elizabeth Currie asserts, Europeans constructed the different “races’ they encountered in their colonialist and imperialist ventures as “inferior” and “savage’ in order to exploit them economically; contemporary Canadian society, internalized racism is a key element in Native people’s oppression. Beatrice Culleton’s novel April Raintree demonstrates the way in which a light-skinned Metis girl, for whom assimilation into white society appears a possibility, is convinced by her teachers, foster family, and social workers that Native people are responsible for their own disempowerment and that their social positioning is unalterable. Growing up isolated from any Metis community, April Raintree perceives her options as dichotomous: either become the drunken Indian Other or assimilate. In contrast, Maria Campbell’s autobiography Halfbreed illustrates the validating effects of having been raised in a family with a strong sense of Metis identity. Situating the Metis historically, Campbell characterizes their identity as a cultural construct; her emphasis is thus on ethnicity rather than race. In I Am Woman and Sojourner’s Truth, Lee Maracle too focusses not on race but on cultural heritage and political disempowerment as determinant of Metis experience. Hybrid by definition, Metis identity is predicated upon what is “an inescapable and characteristic feature of all post-colonial societies,” namely, cultural syncreticity (Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin 30). Thus, a positivist emphasis on race such as that put forth by Thomas King is peculiarly problematic for the Metis. That racial stereotyping has had a devastating impact on the Metis and other Native peoples is, however, undeniable. Its operation is thoroughly explored in April Raintree…

Read the entire article here.

Fire and Desire: Mixed-Race Movies in the Silent Era

University of Chicago Press
February 2001
352 pages
36 halftones  6 x 9
Cloth ISBN: 9780226278742
Paper ISBN: 9780226278759

Jane M. Gaines, Professor of Film Studies
Columbia University School of the Arts

Winner of the Katherine Singer Kovacs Award

In the silent era, American cinema was defined by two separate and parallel industries, with white and black companies producing films for their respective, segregated audiences. Jane Gaines’s highly anticipated new book reconsiders the race films of this era with an ambitious historical and theoretical agenda.

Fire and Desire offers a penetrating look at the black independent film movement during the silent period. Gaines traces the profound influence that D. W. Griffith’s racist epic The Birth of a Nation [(1915)] exerted on black filmmakers such as Oscar Micheaux, the director of the newly recovered Within Our Gates [(1920)]. Beginning with What Happened in the Tunnel [(1903)], a movie that played with race and sex taboos by featuring the first interracial kiss in film [View the short film (00:01:02) by Thomas Edison from 1903-11-06 here.], Gaines also explores the cinematic constitution of self and other through surprise encounters: James Baldwin sees himself in the face of Bette Davis, family resemblance is read in Richard S. Roberts’s portrait of an interracial family, and black film pioneer George P. Johnson looks back on Micheaux.

Given the impossibility of purity and the co-implication of white and black, Fire and Desire ultimately questions the category of “race movies” itself.

Table of Contents

• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Film Dates
• Introduction – The “Race” in Race Movies
• 1. “Green Like Me”
• 2. Desiring Others
• 3. Race Movies: All-Black Everything
• 4. World-Improving Desires
• 5. Fire and Desire
• 6. The Body’s Story
• 7. Race/Riot/Cinema
• Conclusion – Mixed-Race Movies
• Notes
• Index

Family Matters in the Fiction of Charles W. Chesnutt

The Southern Literary Journal
Volume 33, Number 2, Spring 2001
pages 30-43
E-ISSN: 1534-1461
Print ISSN: 0038-4291
DOI: 10.1353/slj.2001.0012

William M. Ramsey, Professor of English
Francis Marion University

Writing fiction one hundred years ago, Charles W. Chesnutt believed that America’s racial future was best embodied in himself, a mixed-race American. A light-skinned mulatto living on the color line, he argued that racial amalgamation, through passing and miscegenation, would slowly erode the rigid white-black dichotomy of America’s caste system. Eventually, he foresaw, America would become one race, as his stories of light-skinned protagonists on the color line seemed to predict. Unfortunately for his literary reputation, this racial prescription for a New America was premature. By the time of his death in 1932, the Harlem Renaissance had celebrated a New Negro who was no light-skinned assimilationist, but one who, like Langston Hughes, stood on the racial mountaintop of a proud, culturally distinct, dark-skinned self. It is now a century after Chesnutt’s first book publications, and America is changing. Racial amalgamation, according to federal statistics, occurs at a more rapid pace than ever before. From 1970 to 1990, marriages between blacks and whites rose from two percent of all marriages to six percent. The number jumped to over twelve percent by 1993 (“With This Ring”). Nearly ten percent of black men marry white women..

Read or purchase the article here.

The case of Ebony and Topaz: Racial and Sexual Hybridity in Harlem Renaissance Illustrations

American Periodicals: A Journal of History, Criticism, and Bibliography
Volume 15, Number 1, (2005)
pages 86-111
E-ISSN: 1548-4238
Print ISSN: 1054-7479
DOI: 10.1353/amp.2005.0006

Caroline Goeser, Assistant Professor of Art History
University of Houston

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University of Virginia

Ebony and Topaz was issued once in 1927 as a collection of essays, poetry, and illustrations edited by Charles S. Johnson, the African American editor of Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life. Though the volume has received little scholarly attention, it articulated the theme of racial hybridity that not only proved an integral component of Harlem Renaissance cultural production but marked the diversity of American modernism between the wars. Significantly, Johnson’s editorial method in Ebony and Topaz, which promised minimal interference and direction, allowed his contributors freedom to broach controversial subjects shunned by the more conservative African American editors of the period, such as W. E. B. DuBois. As a result, Johnson’s compendium resisted limitation to the facile theme of racial uplift and challenged restrictive classifications of racial identity. The most culturally subversive production came from two illustrators of Ebony and Topaz, Charles Cullen and Richard Bruce Nugent. Seemingly benign at first glance, their illustrations interrogated the…

[View some of Richard Bruce Nugent’s artwork here.]

Read or purchase the article here.