Mixed Race Studies

Gabriela Meets Olodum: Paradoxes of Hybridity, Racial Identity, and Black Consciousness in Contemporary Brazil

Research in African Literatures
Volume 38, Number 1 (Spring 2007)
pages 181-193
E-ISSN: 1527-2044
Print ISSN: 0034-5210
DOI: 10.1353/ral.2007.0007

Russell G. Hamilton, Emeritus Professor of Portuguese, Brazilian and Lusophone African Literatures
Vanderbilt University

With respect to the first part of this article’s title, Gabriela is the formidable female protagonist of Jorge Amado’s celebrated novel Gabriela, Cravo e Canela. This novel, first published in 1958, has been translated into more than fifteen languages, and its English-language version, Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon, made the New York Times best-seller list for nearly a year. Moreover, the novel was adapted to the small screen as a TV series, as well as to the silver screen. In the role of Gabriela, Sônia Braga, a prototypical Brazilian morena, a term used to designate a mixed-race woman, became a sensation in the 1975 telenovela (soap opera). Braga later received international acclaim when she starred opposite Marcello Mastroianni in the 1985 film adaptation of the novel.

When Amado’s novel first appeared in print, Gabriela became the latest in a long line of enchanting female mulatto characters in Brazilian literature. To a greater or lesser degree, all of these fictional females, the mixed-race offspring of African and European or of Brazilian Indian and Caucasian parentage, are most often depicted as physically and otherwise appealing literary characters. Whether in literature and other modes of cultural expression, or in real and imagined social existence, exotic, mysterious, coquettish, and sensual women of color, most especially mulatas (mulatto women), constitute both the subjects and objects of a nativistic and, indeed, pan-Luso-Brazilian cult. This cult of the mulataencantada (enchanted mulatto woman) has been codified as a romanticized component of Brazil’s national identity and popular culture. Although less likely to occur as blatantly today, in this era of increased black consciousness, the cult of the enchanted mulatto, and mulatto enchantress, has manifested itself in the popular press…

Read or purchase the article here.

Claiming the (n)either/(n)or of ‘third space’: (re)presenting hybrid identity and the embodiment of mixed race

Journal of Intercultural Studies
Volume 25, Issue 1 (April 2004)
pages 75 – 85
DOI: 10.1080/07256860410001687036

Torika Bolatagici, Associate Lecturer
School of Communication & Creative Arts
Deakin University, Melbourne, Austrailia

As a multiracial artist, I am interested in how people of mixed race have been represented in popular culture and how mixed race image-makers can redress popular representation and facilitate a movement beyond the dichotomy, which seeks to reduce us to the sum of our parts. In the footsteps of Evelyn Alsultany I advocate the creation of a new cartography—a space that is inclusive and beyond existing notions of race. To this end I embarked on a project of exploration of the representation of multiracial identity, drawing from Homi K. Bhabha’s notion of Third Space.

Read or purchase the article here.

ENGLISH 261E: Mixed Race Literature in the U.S. and South Africa (seminar)

Stanford University
Department of English
Winter Quarter, 2010-2011

Michele Elam, Martin Luther King, Jr. Centennial Professor of English and Olivier Nomellini Family University Fellow in Undergraduate Education

Grant Parker, Associate Professor of Classics
Stanford Univeristy

As scholar Werner Sollors recently suggested, novels, poems, stories about interracial contacts and mixed race constitute “an orphan literature belonging to no clear ethnic or national tradition.” Yet the theme of mixed race is at the center of many national self-definitions, even in our U.S. post-Civil Rights and South Africa’s post-Apartheid era. This course examines aesthetic engagements with mixed race politics in these trans- and post-national dialogues, beginning in the 1700s and focusing on the 20th and 21st centuries.

Not So Plain as Black and White: Afro-German Culture & History, 1890-2000

University of Rochester Press
2005-03-01
266 pages
Pages: 266
Size: 9 x 6
Hardback 13 Digit ISBN: 9781580461832
Imprint: University of Rochester Press

Edited by

Patricia M. Mazón, Associate Professor of History
State University of New York, Buffalo

Reinhild Steingröver, Assistant Professor of German
University of Rochester, Eastman School of Music

Since the Middle Ages, Africans have lived in Germany as slaves and scholars, guest workers and refugees. After Germany became a unified nation in 1871, it acquired several African colonies but lost them after World War I. Children born of German mothers and African fathers during the French occupation of Germany were persecuted by the Nazis. After World War II, many children were born to African American GIs stationed in Germany and German mothers. Today there are 500,000 Afro-Germans in Germany out of a population of 80 million. Nevertheless, German society still sees them as “foreigners,” assuming they are either African or African American but never German.

In recent years, the subject of Afro-Germans has captured the interest of scholars across the humanities for several reasons. Looking at Afro-Germans allows us to see another dimension of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century ideas of race that led to the Holocaust. Furthermore, the experience of Afro-Germans provides insight into contemporary Germany’s transformation, willing or not, into a multicultural society. The volume breaks new ground not only by addressing the topic of Afro-Germans but also by combining scholars from many disciplines.

Table of Contents

1. Dangerous Liaisons: Race, Nation, and German Identity
2. The First Besatzungskinder: Afro-German Children, Colonial Childrearing Practices, and Racial Policy in German Southwest Africa, 1890-1914
3. Converging Specters of an Other Within: Race and Gender in Pre- 1945 Afro-German History
4. Louis Brody and the Black Presence in German Film Before 1945
5. Narrating “Race” in 1950s’ West Germany: The Phenomenon of the Toxi Films
6. Will Everything Be Fine? Anti-Racist Practice in Recent German Cinema
7. Writing Diasporic Identity: Afro-German Literature since 1985
8. The Souls of Black Volk: Contradiction? Oxymoron?

Blackness, Hypodescent, and Essentialism: Commentary on McPherson and Shelby’s “Blackness and Blood”

Symposia on Gender, Race and Philosophy
Volume 1, Number 1, May 2005

Gregory Velazco y Trianosky, Professor of Philosopy
California State University, Northridge

In their fascinating and thoughtful paper, McPherson and Shelby seek to defend everyday African American understandings of their own identity against the critique launched by Anthony Appiah in his Tanner lectures. I have no deep disagreements with their defense. Instead I will propose what I hope are useful clarifications of some of the key claims in that defense, and perhaps some further contribution to the discussion they have begun.

1. Roughly speaking, Appiah argues as follows: (1) African Americans typically adhere to the rule of hypodescent, understood as a criterion for membership in the group of black people. However, says Appiah, in conjunction with (2) the nationalist belief that black people owe special obligations of support or group solidarity to other black people, this adherence is problematic. For the truth is that (3) many phenotypically white people in the United States in fact have black ancestors and thus, by a strict application of the rule of hypodescent, are black rather than white, regardless of appearance. Given this fact, (4) adherence to the rule of hypodescent requires black people (insofar as they are nationalists) to extend to many phenotypically white people the same kind of support they believe they owe to all black people. But this means (5) that the actions of black nationalists will, insofar as they are based on the facts, undermine the very project of black nationalism. Appiah goes on to argue that in cases where a group’s beliefs about its identity undermine its own political and social projects, the liberal state should intervene to “soul-make,” that is, to reshape the understanding that group has of itself…

Read the entire commentary here.

Partly Colored: Asian Americans and Racial Anomaly in the Segregated South

New York University Press
2010-04-23
304 pages
13 illustrations
Cloth ISBN: 9780814791325
Paperback ISBN: 9780814791332

Leslie Bow, Professor of English and Asian American Studies
University of Wisconsin, Madison

Arkansas, 1943. The Deep South during the heart of Jim Crow-era segregation. A Japanese-American person boards a bus, and immediately is faced with a dilemma. Not white. Not black. Where to sit?

By elucidating the experience of interstitial ethnic groups such as Mexican, Asian, and Native Americans—groups that are held to be neither black nor white—Leslie Bow explores how the color line accommodated—or refused to accommodate—“other” ethnicities within a binary racial system. Analyzing pre- and post-1954 American literature, film, autobiography, government documents, ethnography, photographs, and popular culture, Bow investigates the ways in which racially “in-between” people and communities were brought to heel within the South’s prevailing cultural logic, while locating the interstitial as a site of cultural anxiety and negotiation.

Spanning the pre- to the post- segregation eras, Partly Colored traces the compelling history of “third race” individuals in the U.S. South, and in the process forces us to contend with the multiracial panorama that constitutes American culture and history.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction: Thinking Interstitially

1. Coloring between the Lines: Historiographies of Southern Anomaly
2. The Interstitial Indian: The Lumbee and Segregation’s Middle Caste
3. White Is and White Ain’t: Failed Approximation and Eruptions of Funk in Representations of the Chinese in the South
4. Anxieties of the ‘Partly Colored’
5. Productive Estrangement: Racial-Sexual Continuums in Asian American as Southern Literature
6. Transracial/Transgender: Analogies of Difference in Mai’s America

Afterword: Continuums, Mobility, Places on the Train
Notes
Works Cited
Index
About the Author

Read the introduction here.

Searching for Mr. Chin: Constructions of Nation and the Chinese in West Indian Literature

Temple University Press
May 2010
192 pages
5.5×8.25
Cloth EAN: 978-1-43990-130-4; ISBN: 1-4399-0130-9
Electronic Book: EAN: 978-1-43990-132-8

Anne-Marie Lee-Loy, Assistant Professor of English
Ryerson University, Toronto, Canada

West Indian literary representations of local Chinese populations illuminate concepts of national belonging

What do twentieth-century fictional images of the Chinese reveal about the construction of nationhood in the former West Indian colonies? In her groundbreaking interdisciplinary work, Searching for Mr. Chin, Anne-Marie Lee-Loy seeks to map and understand a cultural process of identity formation: “Chineseness” in the West Indies. Reading behind the stereotypical image of the Chinese in the West Indies, she compares fictional representations of Chinese characters in Jamaica, Trinidad, and Guyana to reveal the social and racial hierarchies present in literature by popular authors such as V.S. Naipaul and Samuel Selvon, as well as lesser known writers and hard to access literary texts.

Using historical, discursive, and theoretical frameworks for her literary analysis, Lee-Loy shows how the unstable and ambiguous “belonging” afforded to this “middleman minority” speaks to the ways in which narrative boundaries of the nation are established. In addition to looking at how Chinese have been viewed as “others,” Lee-Loy examines self-representations of “Chineseness” and how they complicate national narratives of belonging.

Ethics of Racial Identity

Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association
108th Annual Conference
2010-11-13 through 2010-11-14
Chaminade University, Honolulu, Hawaii

Presiding Officer: Adebe DeRango-Adem, York University

Barack Obama benefited from the spirit of tolerance that defined Hawaii’s racial climate. This special session envisions a mixed-race literature in the age of Obama that forwards not solely theorizations of what mixed race identities are, but an ethics for treating mixed race identification in literature. It is designed to re-situate mixedness/interraciality within the field of literary inquiry as a question of the ethical treatment of racialized figures.

American demands, African treasures, Mixed possibilities

The African Diaspora Archaeology Network
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
December 2006 Newsletter
ISSN: 1933-8651
16 pages

Daniel R. McNeil, Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies
Newcastle University, United Kingdom

In the 1990s, many Americans sought to cast themselves as heroic defenders of the liberal arts by condemning Afrocentricity. This paper reveals how many such profiteers and schemers were invested in Eurocentricity, but it also critiques Molefi Asante – the man who coined the phrase “Afrocentricity” – and points out his reliance on AfroAmericocentric norms.

…Television history, employed by Gates in his PBS documentary, Wonders of the Ancient World, “while unquestionably powerful . . . is of necessity superficial . . . programmes have to be fast-moving if they are to retain their viewers” (Kershaw 16). Producers often assume that their history programs require a respected narrator and perhaps a charismatic interviewer, as “problems of interpretation tend to muddy the waters, and to leave the viewer confused, baffled or at least unable to decide which of variant interpretations is the most valid” (ibid.). According to cultural critic John Fiske, lumpers (broad synthesizers favoured by lay opinion) are preferred to splitters (narrow specialists favoured by professionals) because television history, like soap opera and sport, should be open and full of contradictions so that it invites “viewer engagement, disagreement, and thus popular productivity” (191). Perhaps ignoring the need to challenge the continuing deference to professors, such as Reisner, who considered Black Africa to be without history, Fiske also thought that televised history “must not preach or teach” (emphasis added; ibid. 196). Yet his comments remain important if curators and “public intellectuals” are to be encouraged to present themselves as possessors of technical competence whose function is to assist subordinate groups to use elite resources in order to make authored statements within the public sphere (Bennett 104). In this fashion, one can applaud Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s attempts to use his position as director of the Du Bois institute at Harvard to encourage to African Americans to enter Ivy League universities, even if one doesn’t support his desire to question Blacks of mixed parentage and/or Caribbean descent that “beat out” Black indigenous middle-class kids on the front page of The New York Times (Rimer and Anderson)…

Read the entire article here.

Women-Loving Women: Queering Black Urban Space during the Harlem Renaissance

Women’s Studies 197: Senior Seminar
2010-06-07
Professor Lilith Mahmud

Samantha Tenorio

The experience of black “women-loving-women” during the Harlem Renaissance is directly influenced by what Kimberlé Crenshaw terms intersectional identity, or their positioning in the social hierarchies of race, gender, class, and sexual orientation that are simultaneously intertwined. Considering contemporary terms like lesbian and bisexual, it is difficult to define the sexual identity of many famous black women of the early 20th century, such as Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Bessie Jackson to name a few. However, their work both on and off the stage contributes to the construction of identities during the Harlem Renaissance that transgress both racial and sexual conventions. Although these social identities emerged from a long history of slavery and sexual oppression, they nonetheless produced a seemingly free space for the expression of lesbian sensibilities in the black community during the Harlem Renaissance. At a time of racial segregation in America, but also of ideologies of uplift within the black community, social spaces existed in Harlem where sexual “deviance” and race-mixing could be articulated and seen explicitly. Using song lyrics, literature, and scholarly work on social and cultural spaces of the time period between 1919 and 1939, this paper analyzes how certain forms and sites of cultural production, specifically the blues, the cabaret, and literature helped to construct these transgressive identities.

…Relating Racial Movement to a Queer Politics

Similarly, but not at all equivalent, racial passing implies a more fluid movement between the worlds of black and white. Both Irene and Clare partake in passing for their own gain, though doing so in differing degrees. Their movement between the worlds of black and white represent a fluidity that speaks to a queer reading of Passing and can be read as representing sexual mobility insomuch as segregation was established in order to protect the purity of the white race. This protection is what makes Clare‘s passing, and marriage to a white man, that much more compelling. Here her passing is in direct opposition to segregation and the fear of miscegenation, which are based on the sexual reproduction of a pure white race. Thus, I understand Clare and her passing to be a symbol for the transgression of both racial and sexual boundaries. Her racial fluidity as well as her transgression both speak to a queer reading of Larsen‘s fiction…

Though an act of agency, the movement employed by Larsen can also be read as relating to the theme of mobility and fluidity that is present within queer politics. The figure of the “tragic mulatta” employed by [Nella] Larsen in Quicksand illustrates a point of mediation, or a movement between two worlds, one who is constantly taking part in criminal intimacies. Helga is eternally caught between two worlds, yet being a victim of the “one-drop rule” she is always marked as ultimately belonging to the black race.  Here, though she is of mixed-race, her character illustrates that the bi-racial character cannot exist, she must always be defined as ultimately belonging to one race, and when this individual‘s races include black, she is always labeled as such. This marks the limitations of the tragic mulatta’s movement, but still speaks to a movement that is constantly a theme of queer politics.

Read the entire paper here.