Mixed Race Studies

The Sorcery of Color: Identity, Race, and Gender in Brazil

Temple University Press
November 2006
336 pages
6×9
6 tables
Paper EAN: 978-1-59213-351-2; ISBN: 1-59213-351-7
Cloth EAN: 978-1-59213-350-5; ISBN: 1-59213-350-9
Electronic Book EAN: 978-1-59213-352-9

Elisa Larkin Nascimento, Director
IPEAFRO Afro-Brazilian Studies and Research Institute, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Originally published in 2003 in Portuguese, The Sorcery of Color argues that there are longstanding and deeply-rooted relationships between racial and gender inequalities in Brazil. In this pioneering book, Elisa Larkin Nascimento examines the social and cultural movements that have attempted, since the early twentieth century, to challenge and eradicate these conjoined inequalities.

The book’s title describes the social sleight-of-hand that disguises the realities of Brazilian racial inequity. According to Nascimento, anyone who speaks of racism—or merely refers to another person as black—traditionally is seen as racist. The only acceptably non-racist attitude is silence. At the same time, Afro-Brazilian culture and history have been so overshadowed by the idea of a general “Brazilian identity” that to call attention to them is also to risk being labeled racist.

Incorporating leading international scholarship on Pan Africanism and Afrocentric philosophy with the writing of Brazilian scholars, Nascimento presents a compelling feminist argument against the prevailing policy that denies the importance of race in favor of a purposefully vague concept of ethnicity confused with color.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• List of Tables
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction to the English Edition
• Preface – Kabengele Munanga
• Introduction
• 1. Identity, Race, and Gender
• 2. Brazil and the Making of “Virtual Whiteness”
• 3. Constructing and Desconstructing the “Crazy Creole”
• 4. Another History: Afro-Brazilian Agency (São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, 1914-1960)
• 5. The Black Experimental Theater: Plots, Texts, and Actors
• Glossary of Brazilian Words
• Bibliographical References

…The second obstacle to the discussion of race in Brazil is resistance to the idea that African populations in different parts of the world share a common experience. The presumption is that blacks in Brazil are in a unique situation determined solely by the circumstances of their society and have little or nothing in common with black populations in other parts of the world. Critics have frequently accused the black social movement in Brazil of attempting to import foreign standards and raising a problem that has never existed before. On the other hand, the concerns of the black movement often revolve around issues specific to Brazil rather than racism as a world phenomenon.

But racist domination is worldwide in scope. It derives from the historical imposition of Western hegemony over non-Western peoples and its essence is expressed in the ideology of white supremacy. The standard of whiteness affects the identity constructs of all dominated peoples, making the issue of identity crucial, but oftentimes, it is expressed in specific local terms. In Brazil, the sorcery of color transforms mixed-race identity into a permanent search for the simulation of whiteness…

Kilombismo, Virtual Whiteness, and the Sorcery of Color

Journal of Black Studies
Volume 34, Number 6 (2004)
pages 861-880
DOI: 10.1177/0021934704264009

Elisa Larkin Nascimento
Afro-Brazilian Studies and Research Institute

This article explores the legacy and current presence of racism in Brazil, particularly their unique expression in the juxtaposition of the miscegenation ideology of nonracism with the living legacy of Lombrosian criminology. The author proposes the Sorcery of Color as a metaphor for the Brazilian standard of race relations, which transforms a perverse system of racial domination into a pretense of antiracist ideals and establishes what the author describes as the category of virtual whiteness, a fulcrum of identity intrinsically intermeshed with issues of gender and patriarchy. The groundings of Afrocentric thought can be found in the writings and actions of African Brazilian intellectuals of the 20th century, and its most articulated expression is the thesis of Kilombismo, developed by Abdias do Nascimento in the context of his work in Pan-African affairs in the 1970s and 1980s.

Read or purchase the article here.

Passing in the Works of Charles W. Chesnutt

University Press of Mississippi
March 2010
160 pages (approx.)
6 x 9 inches, introduction, index
Printed casebinding: 978-1-60473-416-4
Ebook: 978-1-60473-418-8

Edited by:

Susan Prothro Wright, Associate Professor of American and British Literature
Clark Atlanta University, Atlanta, Georgia

Ernestine Pickens Glass, Professor Emerita of English
Clark Atlanta University, Atlanta, Georgia

An exploration of a great American writer’s abiding concern with the color line

Essays by Margaret D. Bauer, Keith Byerman, Martha J. Cutter, SallyAnn H. Ferguson, Donald B. Gibson, Scott Thomas Gibson, Aaron Ritzenberg,Werner Sollors, and Susan Prothro Wright.

Passing in the Works of Charles W. Chesnutt is a collection that reevaluates Chesnutt‘s deft manipulation of the “passing” theme to expand understanding of the author’s fiction and nonfiction. Nine contributors apply a variety of theories–including intertextual, signifying/discourse analysis, narratological, formal, psychoanalytical, new historical, reader response, and performative frameworks–to add richness to readings of Chesnutt’s works. Together the essays provide convincing evidence that “passing” is an intricate, essential part of Chesnutt’s writing, and that it appears in all the genres he wielded: journal entries, speeches, essays, and short and long fiction.

The essays engage with each other to display the continuum in Chesnutt’s thinking as he began his writing career and established his sense of social activism, as evidenced in his early journal entries. Collectively, the essays follow Chesnutt’s works as he proceeded through the Jim Crow era, honing his ability to manipulate his mostly white audience through the astute, though apparently self-effacing, narrator, Uncle Julius, of his popular conjure tales. Chesnutt’s ability to subvert audience expectations is equally noticeable in the subtle irony of his short stories. Several of the collection’s essays address Chesnutt’s novels, including Paul Marchand, F.M.C., Mandy Oxendine, The House Behind the Cedars, and Evelyn’s Husband. The volume opens up new paths of inquiry into a major African American writer’s oeuvre.

The erasure of the Afro element of mestizaje in modern Mexico: the coding of visibly black mestizos according to a white aesthetic in and through the discourse on nation during the cultural phase of the Mexican Revolution, 1920-1968

University of British Columbia
September 2001
166 pages

Marco Polo Hernández Cuevas, Associate Professor of Spanish
North Carolina Central University

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Faculty of Graduate Studies.

“The Erasure of the Essential Afro Element of Mestizaje in Modern Mexico: The Coding of Visibly Black Mestizos According to a White Aesthetic In and Through the Discourse on Nation During the Cultural Phase of the Mexican Revolution, 1920-1968″ examines how the Afro elements of Mexican mestizaje were erased from the ideal image of the Mexican mestizo and how the Afro ethnic contributions were plagiarized in modern Mexico. It explores part of the discourse on nation in the narrative produced by authors who subscribed to the belief that only white was beautiful, between 1920 and 1968, during a period herein identified as the “cultural phase of the Mexican Revolution.” It looks at the coding and distortion of the image of visibly black Mexicans in and through literature and film, and unveils how the Afro element “disappeared” from some of the most popular images, tastes in music, dance, song, food, and speech forms viewed as cultural texts that, by way of official intervention, were made “badges” of Mexican national identity.

The premise of this study is that the criollo elite and their allies, through government, disenfranchised Mexicans as a whole by institutionalizing a magic mirror—materialized in the narrative of nation—where mestizos can “see” only a partial reflection of themselves. The black African characteristics of Mexican mestizaje were totally removed from the ideal image of “Mexican-ness” disseminated in and out of the country. During this period, and in the material selected for study, wherever Afro-Mexicans—visibly Afro or not—are mentioned, they appear as “mestizos” oblivious of their African heritage and willingly moving toward becoming white.

The analysis adopts as critical foundation two essays: “Black Phobia and the White Aesthetic in Spanish American Literature,” by Richard L. Jackson; and “Mass Visual Productions,” by James Snead. In “Black Phobia…” Jackson explains that, to define “superior and inferior as well as the concept of beauty” according to how white a person is perceived to be, is a “tradition dramatized in Hispanic Literature from Lope de Rueda’s Eufemia (1576) to the present” (467). For Snead, “the coding of blacks in film, as in the wider society, involves a history of images and signs associating black skin color with servile behavior and marginal status” (142).

Read the entire thesis here.

Living, writing and staging racial hybridity

University of British Columbia
January 2006
380 pages
37 photographs/illustrations

Lisa Michelle La Flamme

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Faculty of Graduate Studies.

Contemporary Canadian literature and drama that features racial hybridity represents the racially hybrid soma text as a unique form of embodiment and pays particular attention to the power of the racialized gaze. The soma text is the central concept I have developed in order to identify, address, and interrogate the signifying qualities of the racially hybrid body. Throughout my dissertation, I use the concept of the body as a text in order to draw attention to the different visual “readings” that are stimulated by this form of embodiment. In each chapter, I identify the centrality of racially hybrid embodiment and investigate the power of the racialized gaze involved in the interpellation of these racially hybrid bodies.

I have chosen to divide my study into discrete chapters and to use specific texts to illuminate my central concepts and to identify the strategies that can be used to express agency over the process of interpellation. In Chapter One I explain my methodology, define the terminology and outline the theories that are central to my analysis. In Chapter Two, I consider the experiences of mixed race people expressing agency by self-defining in the genre of autobiography. In Chapter Three, I explore the notion of racial drag as represented in fiction. In Chapter Four, I consider the ways in which the performative aspects of racial hybridity are represented by theatrical means and through performance.

My analysis of the soma text and racialized gaze in these three genres offers critical terms that can be used to analyze representations of racial hybridity. By framing my analysis by way of the construction of the autobiographical voice I suggest that insight into the narrative uses of racial hybridity can be deepened and informed by a thorough analysis of the representation of the lived experience of racial hybridity in a given context. My crossgeneric and crossracial methodology implicitly asserts the importance of the inclusion of different types of racial hybridity in order to understand the power of the racially hybrid body as a signifier in contemporary Canadian literature and drama.

Read the entire dissertation here.

Unnatural Selections: Eugenics in American Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance

University of North Carolina Press
April 2004
288 pages
6.125 x 9.25, 19 illus., 2 charts, notes, bibl., index
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8078-2868-7
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8078-5531-7

Daylanne K. English, Associate Professor of English & Chair
Macalester College

Challenging conventional constructions of the Harlem Renaissance and American modernism, Daylanne English links writers from both movements to debates about eugenics in the Progressive Era. She argues that, in the 1920s, the form and content of writings by figures as disparate as W. E. B. Du Bois, T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, and Nella Larsen were shaped by anxieties regarding immigration, migration, and intraracial breeding.

English’s interdisciplinary approach brings together the work of those canonical writers with relatively neglected literary, social scientific, and visual texts. She examines antilynching plays by Angelina Weld Grimké as well as the provocative writings of white female eugenics field workers. English also analyzes the Crisis magazine as a family album filtering uplift through eugenics by means of photographic documentation of an ever-improving black race.

English suggests that current scholarship often misreads early-twentieth-century visual, literary, and political culture by applying contemporary social and moral standards to the past. Du Bois, she argues, was actually more of a eugenicist than Eliot. Through such reconfiguration of the modern period, English creates an allegory for the American present: because eugenics was, in its time, widely accepted as a reasonable, progressive ideology, we need to consider the long-term implications of contemporary genetic engineering, fertility enhancement and control, and legislation promoting or discouraging family growth.

Jean Toomer and Cane: “Mixed-Blood” Impossibilities

Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory
Volume 64, Number 4, Winter 2008
E-ISSN: 1558-9595, Print ISSN: 0004-1610
DOI: 10.1353/arq.0.0025

Gino Michael Pellegrini, Adjunct Assistant Professor of English
Pierce College, Woodland Hills, California

Even though Jean Toomer was black and white, his fascination with miscegenation in his hybrid short-story cycle Cane (1923) was puzzling and untimely. Joel Williamson writes that by 1915 the one-drop rule had been accepted by both blacks and whites in the North and South (109). Hence, mixed bloods with visible traces of blackness, including members of the former mulatto elite, would be judged as black by both blacks and whites. At best, they could be “in some way, satisfyingly black”. In this article, I put forward a reading of Toomer and Cane that explains his fascination with miscegenation in terms of his hope for what was possible in America. Specifically, his unique and solitary position vis-à-vis the New Negro in Black Washington and the Young American in White Manhattan provided him with the reasons, models, and ideals to believe that, in Cane, he could effectively voice and sketch out a mixed race sensibility and community that would be grasped and appreciated by the American public. However, in the process of writing Cane, he came face to face with the rigid categories and limits of the black-white color line in the Jim Crow era, which rendered unintelligible and unsustainable in the culture at large the mixed race sensibility and community he sought to express and develop. In other words, we see in Cane the ultimately futile clash of Toomer’s Young American ideals with the socio-political realities of the black-white color line. Cane reveals the pain and frustration of this clash through muffled and ambivalent narrative voices, and through sketches of unacknowledged, crippled, misunderstood, and lost mixed race protagonists…

Read or purchase the article here.

The Impure Imagination: Toward a Critical Hybridity in Latin American Writing

University of Minnesota Press
2006
288 pages
5 7⁄8 x 9
Paper ISBN: 0-8166-4786-0; ISBN-13: 978-0-8166-4786-6
Cloth ISBN: 0-8166-4785-2; ISBN-13: 978-0-8166-4785-9

Joshua Lund, Associate Professor of Hispanic Languages and Literature
University of Pittsburgh

Challenges conventional thinking about the widely accepted concept of cultural hybridity.

“Hybridity” is a term that has been applied to Latin American politics, literature, and intellectual life for more than a century. During the past two decades, it has figured in—and been transfigured by—the work of prominent postcolonialist writers and thinkers throughout the Americas.

In this pathbreaking work, Joshua Lund offers a thoughtful critique of hybridity by reading contemporary theories of cultural mixing against their historical precursors. The Impure Imagination is the first book to systematically analyze today’s dominant theories in relation to earlier, narrative manifestations of hybridity in Latin American writing, with a particular focus on Mexico and Brazil.

Generally understood as the impurification of standard or canonized forms, hybridity has historically been embraced as a basic marker of Latin American regional identity and as a strategy of resistance to cultural imperialism. Lund contends that Latin American theories and narratives of hybridity have been, and continue to be, underwritten by a structure of colonial power. Here he provides an informed critique and cogent investigation of this connection, its cultural effects, and its political implications. Using the emergence of hybridity as an analytical frame for thinking about culture in the Americas, Lund examines the contributions of influential thinkers, including Néstor García Canclini, Homi Bhabha, Jacques Derrida, Giorgio Agamben, Jorge Luis Borges, Antonio Candido, and many others.

Distinguished by its philosophical grounding and underpinned with case studies, The Impure Imagination employs postcolonial theory and theories of race as it explores Latin American history and culture. The result is an original and interrogative study of hybridity that exposes surprising—and unsettling—similarities with nationalistic discourses.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Stakes of Hybridity
• Part I: Theorizing Hybridity Today
  • 1. Genres Are Not to Be Mixed
  • 2. Erasing Race and the Persistence of Teleology
  • 3. The Ambivalence of Theorizing Hybridity: Coloniality and Anthropology
• Part II: Mexico
  • 4. New Cultural History and the Rise of Mediation
  • 5. Back Toward a Positive Mestizaje
  • 6. They Were Not a Barbarous Tribe
  • 7. Mestizaje and Post-Revolutionary Malaise: Vasconcelos and Azuela
• Part III: Brazil
  • 8. The Brazilian Family
  • 9. On the Myth of Racial Democracy
  • 10. The Iracema-effect in Casa-grande e Senzala
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

‘Whose colour was no black nor white nor grey, But an extraneous mixture, which no pen Can trace, although perhaps the pencil may’: Aspasie and Delacroix’s “Massacres of Chios”

Art History
Volume 22, Issue 5 (December 1999)
Pages 676-704
DOI: 10.1111/1467-8365.00182

Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, Professor of Art History
The University of California, Berkeley

While painting Massacres of Chios in 1824, Eugène Delacroix wrote in his journal that ‘The mulatto will do very well.’  This paper asks why a ‘mixed-blood’ would figure in a picture painted on behalf of the Greek War of Independence and argues that Chios must be understood as material evidence of the history of France’s imperial aspirations, as a vestige of its confusions as well as its experiments. To broaden the geopolitical horizon of interpretation of Chios is to appreciate the extent to which global politics were performed and remembered in the studio space of an ambitious, insecure and sexually preoccupied young French male painter.

Read or purchase the article here.

The mulatta emerged as a dominant fictional character and as a frequent subject for painters, photographers, and filmmakers not simply because she was as Hazel Carby deems her, “a narrative device of mediation”.  Far from resolving issues of race, class, and gender, the ambivalence of the mulatta figure fascinated writers and readers, artists and audiences.  The mulatta as icon, then became a representative of unspeakable subjugation and erotic desire, both inter- and intraracial.  Styled as the ideal template for measuring black femininity, she was, by turns, a constrained symbol of Victorian womanhood, a seductive temptress, and a deceptive, independent, modern woman.  Visual and fictional portraits of the mulatta attempted to balance and conjure these interpretations simultaneously, but only by tracing the dialogue between visual and fictional renderings can we comprehend the collaborative and experimental nature of these artistic endeavors.

Cherene Sherrard-Johnson. Portraits of the New Negro Woman: Visual and Literary Culture in the Harlem Renaissance.  New Jersey: Rutgers University Press. 2006. Pages xix-xx.