Mixed Race Studies

The New Black

The National Post
Toronto, Canada
The Afterword: Postings from the literary world
2012-02-03

Donna Bailey Nurse

The day after the Giller Awards I had breakfast with a friend at the Four Seasons Hotel in Toronto. The ceremony had been held there the night before and as I savoured my bagel and lox we discussed Esi Edugyan’s thrilling win for Half-Blood Blues.
 
“She seemed genuinely surprised,” said my friend, who was describing the event, for she had attended the gala and I had not. “She looked gorgeous. Her dress was amazing. Oh look,” she broke off, “there she is!”
 
I turned in my chair to see Edugyan and her husband, Steven Price, being seated at the table behind me. What good luck. I had been hoping to catch up with her at some point to congratulate her in person. Happily, here she was…

…Half-Blood Blues, like Lawrence Hill’s The Book of Negroes, has become a bestseller. Some critics are surprised by the wide appeal of these two books, but it makes sense to me. Black stories are popular because they touch on two concerns close to every human heart: the desire for acceptance, to feel as though we belong; and the desire to be free to be who we are meant to be. Black Canadian stories feel quintessentially Canadian. The early novels of Austin Clarke, for example, started a vigorous discussion of hyphenated identities — the idea that we are either Irish-Canadian or Italian-Canadian or black-Canadian or Asian-Canadian, and that being Canadian means being two things (at least) at once.
 
As a literature of the diaspora, black Canadian novels are destined to make their mark: They articulate a language for black experience in an ostensibly post-racial world. Currently, African-American writers and black British writers — and black writers practically everywhere — are attempting to express what it means to be black in a world that claims race doesn’t matter. In this, black Canadian writers have been given a huge head start: Canada has always professed colour blindness…

…Bi-racial heritage is emerging as this literature’s dominant theme. Half-Blood Blues, Lawrence Hill’s Any Known Blood and Kameleon Man are all titles that allude to its significance. Even The Polished Hoe concerns a heroine that is black but looks white. Nearly every major character in Half-Blood Blues is mixed race; not only Afro-German Heiro, but also Sid, who is undoubtedly descended from a slave woman and her master. Chip, as it turns out, may possess Native-American blood.
 
Mixed heritage proves a wonderfully fruitful symbol. It is sometimes used to scrutinize the bi-racial dilemma of being caught between duelling cultures. Or it may address the anxiety fair-skinned blacks may feel about whether or not to pass for white. It can symbolize the struggle of black Canadians to reconcile the African and European aspects of their culture. A turbulent interracial romance may represent the overall challenges of race relations. Bi-racial anxiety and alienation lie at the heart of Half-Blood Blues. Altogether,  the title refers to a song the band records, the characters themselves, and a world where few accept that we are all at least two things at once…

Read the entire article here.

The Birth of Physical Anthropology in Late Imperial Portugal

Current Anthropology
Volume 53, Number S5, April 2012
13 pages

Gonçalo Santos, Senior Research Fellow
Max-Planck-Institut für Ethnologische Forschung

In this article I analyze the emergence of the field of physical anthropology in the metropolitan academic sphere of the Portuguese Empire during the late nineteenth century. I suggest that Portugal’s relatively peripheral position combined with a complex internal conjuncture of political instability and economic impotence gave early Portuguese physical anthropology a less explicitly “colonial” orientation than in other, more central Western European imperial powers. I describe the various national and international exchanges leading to the birth of this naturalist anthropological tradition at the University of Coimbra, drawing particular attention to the foundational role played by the technological assemblage of large osteological collections aimed at the study of the somatic characteristics of the metropolitan “white” population. I situate these technical developments in the context of wider sociocultural and politico-economic processes of both “nation building” and “empire building.” These processes had a strong effect on the kinds of questions asked and the kinds of answers that seemed compelling and acceptable to early physical anthropologists.

This article is about a long-standing tradition of scientific imagination concerned with “the systematic study of human unity-in-diversity” (Stocking 1983:5): the anthropological tradition. I focus on the emergence of a particular field of inquiry within this very broad scholarly tradition, but I analyze this process from the perspective of a peripheral arena of scientific production within the Western European core: the metropolitan academic sphere of the Portuguese Empire during the late nineteenth century. I suggest that this relatively peripheral condition combined with a complex historical conjuncture of internal political and economic crises gave early Portuguese physical anthropology a less explicitly “colonial” orientation than in other, more central Western European imperial powers. This started to change in the 1930s with the rise of a powerful dictatorial regime—Salazar’s Estado Novo—that supported the emergence of a “colonial anthropology” strongly oriented, at least until the 1950s, toward the field of physical anthropology.

The development of the discipline of physical anthropology started in Western Europe at the end of the eighteenth century and spread to other parts of the world during the second half of the nineteenth century. This process of discipline building produced a remarkable degree of international consistency, but it also engendered considerable variations, especially before the second half of the twentieth century (Blanckaert 2009; Dias 2005; Stocking 1988; Zimmerman 2001). As the editors of this supplemental issue of Current Anthropology note, these disciplinary variations remain poorly studied outside core Western European and North American areas, and this article joins recent calls to rethink the history of anthropology more inclusively (Handler 2000; Kuklick 2008) and to focus on diversity in world anthropological production (Cardoso de Oliveira 2000; Krotz 1997; L’Estoile, Neiburg, and Sigaud 2005; Ribeiro and Escobar 2006).

My contribution to this “world anthropologies” agenda is to bring to the surface a little-known Western European perspective on the origins of modern anthropology and the discipline of physical anthropology. In clear contrast to the American anthropological tradition and its four-field approach, the Portuguese anthropological tradition—as I show elsewhere (Santos 2005)—was built on two different but closely intertwined variants of anthropological research. One was more culturalist—focusing on “people,” “language,” and “customs”—and the other was more naturalist—focusing on “race,” “body,” and “fossils.” It was from within this naturalist camp that emerged in the late nineteenth century the first studies of “physical anthropology.” As in the French context (Jamin 1991; see also Blanckaert 1988, 1995, 2009), this early tradition of physical anthropology was so prominent that it was often labeled with the unmodified term “anthropology” (antropologia) and contrasted to its other half, “ethnology” (etnologia)—the ancestor of modern social-cultural anthropology and modern archaeology…

…Before plunging into an analysis of such disciplinary transformations in late nineteenth-century Portugal, I would like to give a brief account of what happened to the entire field of anthropological production from the early twentieth century onward so as to make more explicit the linkages between my “archaeological exploration” and the contemporary anthropological scene.

After a very short-lived First Republic (1910–1926), the dictatorial regime established in 1933 proved very stable and long-lasting but had a very negative effect in the academic sphere. This authoritarian regime repressed freedom of speech, rejected liberal economic reforms, and set out to build a Third Empire in Africa. Anthropologists did not oppose this enterprise and were called on to produce useful “colonial knowledge.” Physical anthropologists—most of whom still espoused a holistic conception of the discipline—played a salient role in this process. By and large, their work offered “scientific” support to the regime’s colonial rhetoric, which emphasized the civilizing mission of the Portuguese imperial expansion and opposed racial miscegenation (Pereira 2005; Santos 2005; Thomaz 2005).

This rhetoric started to change in the post–World War II period, and the major intellectual figure behind the new official ideology was the great Brazilian anthropologist Gilberto Freyre, whose work on the formation of Brazilian society praised the allegedly humanistic nature of the Portuguese colonial endeavor and civilizing engagement with miscegenation (Castelo 1999; Vale de Almeida 2002). This new official rhetoric again constrained the work of anthropologists, but it was more in tune with the liberal antiracialist and cultural relativist anthropology that became internationally dominant in the post–World War II period (Vale de Almeida 2002, 2008). Starting in the 1960s, there emerged increasing epistemological and institutional divides between physical-biological and social-cultural anthropologists, and the latter gained the upper hand in colonial affairs (Pereira 2005)…

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Making Güeras: Selling white identities on late-night Mexican television

Gender, Place and Culture
Volume 12, Number 1 (March 2005)
pages 71–93
DOI: 10.1080/09663690500082984

Jamie Winders, Associate Professor of Geography
Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York

John Paul Jones III, Professor of Geography and Development
University of Arizona, Tucson

Michael James Higgins (1946-2011), Professor Emeritus of Anthropology
University of Northern Colorado

This article examines discourses of whiteness and color in Mexico through a discussion of White Secret, a widely available skin-lightening cosmetic product. In an analysis of a televised infomercial advertising the product, we examine contextualizations of whiteness in Mexico, as figured through the product’s representations of light-skinned female bodies and advanced cosmetic technology. We consider the ways that White Secret can speak to broader conceptualizations of whiteness and identity and, furthermore, argue that such an engagement points to the need to interrogate the geographical and epistemological limits of current understandings of whiteness based in Anglo-American and Latin-American contexts.

‘la güera’: fair-skinned. Born with the features of my Chicana mother, but the skin of my Anglo father, I had it made. No one ever quite told me this (that light was right), but I knew that being light was something valued in my family. (Moraga, 1981, p. 28)

These lines from Cherrie Moraga’s 1979 essay, ‘La Güera’, succinctly describe the chromatic privilege into which she was born. With her mother’s Chicana features but her father’s white skin, Moraga, in her words, ‘had it made’. The only güera in her family, she could escape the correlation between being Chicana and being ‘less’ (p. 28), a connection that haunted her mother and other family members. Although her essay goes on to chart her denial of ‘the voice of [her] brown mother’ (1981, p. 31) and her struggles to grasp the specificities of various forms of sexual and racial oppression, Moraga’s initial discussion of an upbringing that ‘attempted to bleach me of what color I did have’ (1981, p. 28) captures several processes that we analyze in this article. As Moraga quipped, she was ‘“anglicized” ’; the more effectively we could pass in the white world, the better guaranteed our future’ (ibid.).

This article analyzes one contemporary path to that ‘white world’ as it operates within the context of Mexico. We examine discourses of whiteness and coloration through an analysis of ‘White Secret’, a cosmetic product marketed across Mexico that explicitly guarantees lighter skin and implicitly offers the lifestyle associated with such a chromatic change1. Historian Kathy Peiss (2002) has recently charted the ways that US cosmetics companies have relied upon and reinforced connections between healthy bodies, ‘made-up’ (female, white) faces and modernity, in efforts to market their products globally and create international mass markets. In this article, we trace similar links between bodies, race, cosmetic products and modernity, as we raise questions about whiteness and identity in Mexico, processes neatly packaged within a 30-minute, late-night infomercial peddling a skin-care solution that can produce in two weeks a white skin tone which previously required generations of racial miscegenation.

To think through how this skin-lightening product and its marketing strategies become legible and convincing within Mexico, we draw from a number of literatures that together help unpack the secrets of White Secret and the desire for white skin on which it depends. As Moraga’s autobiographical reflections and Peiss’s documenting of ‘American cosmetics abroad’ both make evident, in many contexts, ‘light’ was—and, we would add, still is—seen as ‘right’. White Secret is located squarely within this framing, as it explicitly promises white(r) skin and implicitly offers the improved socio-economic position of white privilege. As we subsequently suggest, what remains ‘secret’ in White Secret is why Mexican women want to move away from that ‘brown body’ of which Moraga wrote—a desire for lighter skin that signals the traces of a colonial past and present in Mexico. Postcolonial studies, driven ‘to invert, expose, transcend or deconstruct knowledges and practices associated with colonialism’ (Sidaway, 2000, p. 592), provide one particularly useful means of prising open these silences around questions of bodies, race and desire, as White Secret, as both product and text, resonates with many practices linked to colonialism and its deployment of racialized discourses. Postcolonial studies, in conjunction with whiteness studies and examinations of race and ethnicity in Latin America, create a useful theoretical framework through which to engage White Secret. It is to this White Secret that we now turn…

…Stepan (1991), in her analysis of eugenics in Latin America, suggests that historically, a whitening thesis in Mexico focused on a mestizo (mixed ‘blood’) ‘cosmic race’ rather than a ‘pure’ white race. This ‘cosmic race’, made famous by Mexican intellectual José Vasconcelos, was composed, at least in theory, of a racial configuration whose racial and ethnic mix surpassed all initial ingredients. The path by which Mexico could reach this ‘cosmic race’, however, led through eugenics to a set of practices that in Latin America constituted ‘above all an aesthetic-biological movement concerned with beauty and ugliness, purity and contamination, as represented in race’ (Stepan, 1991, p. 135). At the pinnacle of this movement was lighter skin, a location at which beauty and purity were concentrated and from which the ‘brown body’ denied by Moraga was successively removed over time.

Across Mexico’s ancient practice of whitening, Latin America’s eugenics of the early 1900s and a White Secret of the twenty-first century, then, the aesthetic and the biological are imbricated in a chromatic system that revolves around purity and contamination, beauty and ugliness. In all three instances that span Mexico’s post-conquest history, the chromatic system in operation is also a hierarchy of lightness for which, as Moraga noted, light is right. In this system where darker pigments signify what Ann Laura Stoler (1995) calls the ‘enemy within’ (p. 52), being Moraga’s ‘brown’ and ‘less’ remains the unspoken…

Read the entire article here.

The Loving Story – HBO Screening Event

Multiracial Network Blog
2012-01-24

It is a rare occasion for Marc Johnston, MRN Chair, and Heather Lou, MRN Incoming Chair, to find themselves in the same city outside of the annual ACPA Convention. So what do these two fun-loving higher education and student affairs administrators choose to do when they are reunited in the City of Angels? They attend the amazing HBO Screening of Nancy Buirski’s The Loving Story (2011) at the Simon Wiesenthal Museum of Tolerance, of course!

On a recent evening in LA, Marc and Heather settled into their seats to view the story of Richard and Mildred Loving—an interracial couple arrested and exiled from Virginia in 1958 for violating anti-miscegenation laws. The documentary captured footage of the couple’s relationship, family, challenges, and triumphs—including the monumental 1967 Loving v. Virginia Supreme Court case, which struck down anti-miscegenation laws in the 15 states that still had them, legalizing interracial marriage across all of the United States.

After viewing The Loving Story, Marc and Heather wanted to share their personal thoughts on the documentary, along with potential implications for higher education…

Read the entire article here.

Sui Sin Far / Edith Maude Eaton: A Literary Biography

University of Illinois Press
1995
288 pages
ISBN-10: 0252021134; ISBN-13: 978-0252021138

Annette White-Parks, Professor Emeritus of English
University of Wisconsin, LaCrosse

Foreword by Roger Daniels

Winner of the Association for Asian American Studies Outstanding Book Award in Cultural Studies.

This first full-length biography of the first published Asian North American fiction writer portrays both the woman and her times.

The eldest daughter of a Chinese mother and British father, Edith Maude Eaton was born in England in 1865. Her family moved to Quebec, where she was removed from school at age ten to help support her parents and twelve siblings. In the 1880s and 1890s she worked as a stenographer, journalist, and fiction writer in Montreal, often writing under the name Sui Sin Far (Water Lily). She lived briefly in Jamaica and then, from 1898 to 1912, in the United States. Her one book, Mrs. Spring Fragrance, has been out of print since 1914.

Today Sui Sin Far is being rediscovered as part of American literature and history. She presented portraits of turn-of-the-century Chinatowns, not in the mode of the “yellow peril” literature in vogue at the time but with an insider’s sympathy. She gave voice to Chinese American women and children, and she responded to the social divisions and discrimination that confronted her by experimenting with trickster characters and tools of irony, sharing the coping mechanisms used by other writers who struggled to overcome the marginalization to which their race, class, or gender consigned them in that era.

Table of Contents

• Foreword by Roger Daniels
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. A Bird on the Wing
• 2. Montreal: The Early Writings
• 3. Pacific Coast Chinatown Stories
• 4. Boston: The Mature Voice and Its Art
• 5. Mrs. Spring Fragrance
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index

Biracial/Bicultural Identity in the Writings of Sui Sin Far

MELUS
Volume 26, Number 2 (Summer 2001)
pages 159-186

Vanessa Holford Diana, Professor of English
Westfield State Unviversity, Westfield, Massachusetts

At the turn into the twentieth century, American culture witnessed related literary and political shifts through which marginalized voices gained increased strength despite the severe racism that informed US laws and social interaction. Many authors and literary critics saw connections between literary content and social influence. For example, in Criticism and Fiction (1891), William Dean Howells, proponent of nineteenth-century American realism, warns readers to avoid sentimental or sensational novels, which he claims “hurt” by presenting “idle lies about human nature and the social fabric.” He reminds us that “it behooves us to know and to understand” our people and our social context “that we may deal justly with ourselves and with one another” (94-95). He argues that the writer of fiction is obligated to write that which is “tree to the motives, the impulses, the principles that shape the life of actual men and women” in the US (99). His is both a demand for aesthetic standards in fiction and an insistence that the failure to achieve “true” representations of American people will result in the disintegration of national humanity and, consequently, of national unity. The irony of Howells’ standards is that despite this impulse toward national unification, his own tenets of American realism have for years served to exclude from the canon those writers who were greatly interested in creating “tree” representations of American characters in order to promote a society in which Americans could finally “deal justly with ourselves and with one another.”

One artist who wrote with the goal of creating an America where we would “deal justly” with one another was turn-of-the-century Eurasian journalist and fiction writer Sui Sin Far. In an essay entitled “The Chinese in America,” Sui Sin Far laments western literary depictions of the Chinese that portray them as “unfeeling” and “custom-bound.” “[F]iction writers seem to be so imbued with [these] ideas that you scarcely ever read about a Chinese person who is not a wooden peg,” she protests (234). She argues that in general the Chinese “think and act just as the white man does, according to the impulses which control them. They love those who love them; they hate those who hate; are kind, affectionate, cruel or selfish, as the case may be” (234). Through this comparison Sui Sin Far decenters whiteness as the standard of what is “human,” a move that is in fact central to much of her work, as Annette White-Parks has argued in an essay entitled “A Reversal of American Concepts of `Otherness.'” Sui Sin Far’s characters are often people who resist assimilation, and through them she depicts Chinese communities in North America populated with characters rich and diverse in their complexity. This study builds on White-Parks’ conclusions by exploring the role of genre manipulation in Sui Sin Far’s literary and political innovations. In addition, I will argue that Sui Sin Far’s specific focus on the position of biracial and bicultural individuals (both in autobiographical and fictional representations) is a major strategy in her redefinition of “race” as a category in American thought.

Like Howells, Sui Sin Far demands in fiction a truthful depiction of Americans; her rewriting, however, represents an adaptation of mainstream realism because it focuses on Americans who had, before she wrote, little voice in American literature. Amy Ling characterizes Sui Sin Far’s writing as among one of “the earliest attempts by Asian subalterns to speak for themselves” (“Reading” 70). Offering alternative perspectives on American identity and culture, Sui Sin Far, along with many of her contemporary writers of color, actively challenged mainstream readers’ preconceptions and contributed to a social climate in which increasing numbers of writers of color made their voices heard in print. In doing this, she engaged a shift from margin to center that posited the “Other” as speaking voice, thereby dramatizing the injustices that plagued race relations in North America.

Current critical approaches to turn-of-the-century American realism locate within the project of national identity-building a trend of revolutionary revision, through which marginalized writers disclose the inequalities in US culture and show the establishment of a unified and “true” American identity to be impossible while racism continues to enforce social exclusion and hierarchy. At the same time, literary critics are rethinking the genre of sentimental romance to better understand the ways in which women writers employed and subverted this genre and the rhetorical devices it employs in order to dramatize (and put an end to) social injustice. Drawing from elements of both realism and sentimental romance, Sui Sin Far uses short stories, articles, and essays to pioneer the act of self-representation for a people who existed in late nineteenth-century mainstream American imagination and literature as uncivilized, heathen foreigners. In her short stories, articles, and autobiographical essays Sui Sin Far achieves far more than her modestly stated goal “of planting a Eurasian thoughts into Western literature” (288). Her fiction challenges and shifts socially constructed definitions of Chineseness, constructions that enact what Judith Butler would term the “regulatory norms” that inflict exclusion upon marginalized peoples.

A focus on Sui Sin Far’s depiction of Eurasian characters and on the subject of interracial marriage illustrates her multifaceted understanding of the crisis in US race relations. Through the treatment of these subjects, she enacts a revolutionary revisioning of race differences. The stories found in Mrs. Spring Fragrance and Other Writings, including “Pat and Pan,” “Its Wavering Image,” along with excerpts from “The Story of One White Woman who Married a Chinese,” “Her Loving Husband,” and Sui Sin Far’s autobiographical essay, “Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian,” exemplify the artistic and psychological complexity of Sui Sin Far’s treatment of the biracial character and of interracial marriage. In particular, by addressing these themes, Sui Sin Far deconstructs Orientalism by dramatizing the destructive ways in which North American culture defines the Chinese as inhuman “Other” in order to prevent interracial understanding and maintain profitable power structures. Sui Sin Far’s fiction and essays illustrate the lengths to which members of the dominant culture will go to preserve a notion of racial purity based on hatred and ignorance, and she explores the terrible effects that racism has on its victims…

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Stand Back Ladies and Gentlemen! The Wonders of the World! Conformity and Confrontation in Winnifred Eaton’s Freak Show Setting in “The Loves of Sakura Jiro and the Three-Headed Maid”

Winnifred Eaton Project Symposium
2007-03-15 through 2007-03-16
Owens Art Gallery
Mount Allison University, Sackville, New Brunswick, Canada

2007-03-16

Christine Mayor
Mount Allison University

The freak show claims true wonders but encourages fraud, offers multicultural exhibits only to reinforce white supremacy, and asserts authenticity while promoting an exotic and aggrandized racial performance. While many have critiqued Winnifred Eaton’s false persona, questioned her authenticity as an “armchair ethnographer,” and accused her of reinforcing Orientalist stereotypes, this essay will concentrate on her deployment of the freak show in the short story “The Loves of Sakura Jiro and the Three-Headed Maid” to challenge widely held American values at the turn of the century. As Pat Shea argues, Eaton’s fiction skilfully balances “concession and resistance,” ensuring commercial success and readership while parodying and subverting white supremacy (19). Eaton capitalises on the potential of the freak show to entice and entertain readers, thus giving her freer reign to critique aspects of the nation, the ideology of whiteness, and the entertainment industry, while playfully exploring her own sideshow hoax as Onoto Watanna.

Historically, the freak show is not simply a form of entertainment, but is also a powerful tool for defining the self through negation, and “allow[s] ordinary people to confront, and master, the most extreme and terrifying forms of Otherness they could imagine” (Adams 2). In the public setting of a sideshow, each audience member is encouraged to identify with the uniform, “normal”, mass, and is distanced from the exotic, disabled, and/or freakishly skilled “Other”. As Robert Bogdan argues,

Americans viewing such displays of non-Western people did not confront their own ethnocentrism…[but]merely [had] confirmed old prejudices and beliefs regarding the separateness of the “enlightened” and “primitive” worlds; they left the freak show reassured of their own superiority by such proofs of others’ inferiority. (197)

…In this manner, Eaton’s image of the freak show may serve as a metaphor for the entertainment industry and a defence of her own passing as Japanese. Eaton, as a mixed-race subject, stands in as a “racial freak” that aggrandizes and exoticises her own identity to gain wider marketability and popularity. Ferens explores in detail Eaton’s conceit of the freak show, stating, “The dime museum may be usefully interpreted as a trope for the popular publishing industry of which Winnifred was, by 1903, a seasoned worker. The two businesses have a similar social function and structure: a metropolitan location, a publisher/manager, a press agent, a stable of expendable writers/performers, and a broad, unsophisticated customer base” (147). The ease with which these two industries can be paralleled further highlights the various ways in which difference is produced and staged to be profitable. Eaton describes in her fiction, the tactics used by the sideshow manager to increase the interest in the acts, which are strikingly similar to the way Eaton packaged herself as an artist. Eaton created for herself a Japanese persona presented through a pen-name, pictures in exotic dress, and authority through racial and familial authenticity. Eaton’s Japanese persona was her commodity and allowed her work to be judged apart from Western literary standards, as, “The naïveté and lack of literary technique that would have disadvantaged her as a white writer suddenly became part of what reviewers recognized as the “peculiar charm” of her untutored style” (Ferens 118). Eaton’s passing thereby allowed her to simultaneously critique and exploit the dominant system, as well as forcing readers to question how we understand and construct the identities of others. Eaton’s playful and cynical arguments that appearances are all that matter in either industry, and that each person must compete as best they can, serve as a critique of the discriminatory American capitalist system and defend her own elaborate hoax…

Read the entire paper here.

The Interracial Family in Children’s Literature

The Reading Teacher
Volume 31, Number 8 (May, 1978)
pages 909-915

Margo Alexandre Long

Books about interracial families have just recently begun to reflect America’s pluralistic society.

A Discussion of the interracial family (a family unit in which members are of various racial backgrounds) in American children’s literature must begin with a brief historical account of the interracial family in the United States. Lystad states (1977, p. 238):

Children’s books reflect the attitudes and values of a people, as older generations go about educating younger ones to the ideals and standards they feel are most important… Changes in book content over the decades… reflect changes in people’s feelings about what is significant in their world and what is to be prized in human relationships and achievement.

In any given society, then, children’s books generally reflect the values and attitudes of those who dominate that society.

Race mixture has occured extensively throughout history. Yet many sociologists and anthropologists have stated that intermarriage is one of the strongest fears of many Americans, and indeed a great motivator for maintaining segregation. Myrdal (1944), for example, used a sociological survey to demonstrate White Americans’ fear of intermarriage as far back as 1944. Zabel (1965) suggested this trend in his review of the legal literature which prohibited interracial marriage, and Henriques (1975) substantiated this from a historical perspective. Most recently. Stember (1976) cited novelists, pollsters, psychoanalysts. Black leaders, and segregationists in postulating that “presumed sexual consequences are the biggest threat to integration.”

The U.S. has a tradition of miscegenation legislation specifically aimed at prohibiting marriage between Black and White. The first was…

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Ambiguity in Jean Toomer’s Cane

Berkely Undergraduate Journal
Volume 24, Issue 3 (2011)
pages 79-92

Amanda Licato
Department of English ’13
University of California, Berekely

When Jean Toomer’s modernist experimental novel Cane was published in 1923, both he and the text were taken to be representative voices of African American life, even though Toomer explicitly renounced these labels during Cane’s pre-publication promotion. The larger project of the Harlem Renaissance, during which Toomer lived and wrote Cane, was to validate and celebrate African American artists and their work. As a result, the author’s claims of racial ambiguity and multiracial identication, and their expression in his work, were poorly received. This paper looks at the tension between the aesthetically ambiguous qualities of the text as well as its role as a cultural artifact that can be explored and interpreted against different backdrops. Cane’s aesthetic elements work primarily through the text’s structural and linguistic ambiguity, a blurring of various themes that allow for readers to search for and conceive of their own meanings and experiences. To that end, I examine interpretations of racial identity in Cane during three signicant cultural periods: Cane’s initial publication in 1923 during the Harlem Renaissance, its re-publication at the cusp of the modern Civil Rights movement in 1951, and our current age of supposed “post-raciality” in which the modern reader first discovers the text.

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Yellow Rose of Texas

The Handbook of Texas Online
Texas State Historical Association
2012-01-21

Jeffrey D. Dunn

James Lutzweiler

“The Yellow Rose of Texas,” one of the iconic songs of modern Texas and a popular traditional American tune, has experienced several transformations of its lyrics and periodic revivals in popularity since its appearance in the 1850s. The earliest published lyrics to surface to date are found in Christy’s Plantation Melodies. No. 2, a songbook published under the authority of Edwin P. Christy in Philadelphia in 1853. Christy was the founder of the blackface minstrel group known as the Christy’s Minstrels. Their shows were a popular form of American entertainment featuring white performers with burnt cork makeup portraying caricatures of blacks in comic acts, dances, and songs. The plaintive courtship-themed 1853 lyrics of “The Yellow Rose of Texas” fit the minstrel genre by depicting an African-American singer, who refers to himself as a “darkey,” longing to return to “a yellow girl,” a term used to describe a mulatto, or mixed-race female born of African-American and white progenitors. The songbook does not identify the author or include a musical score to accompany the lyrics:

There’s a yellow girl in Texas
That I’m going down to see;
No other darkies know her,
No darkey, only me;
She cried so when I left her
That it like to broke my heart,
And if I only find her,
We never more will part.

Chorus: She’s the sweetest girl of colour
That this darkey ever knew;
Her eyes are bright as diamonds,
And sparkle like the dew.
You may talk about your Dearest Mae,
And sing of Rosa Lee,
But the yellow Rose of Texas
Beats the belles of Tennessee.

Where the Rio Grande is flowing,
And the starry skies are bright,
Oh, she walks along the river
In the quiet summer night;
And she thinks if I remember
When we parted long ago,
I promised to come back again,
And not to leave her so.

Chorus: She’s the sweetest girl of colour, &c

Oh, I’m going now to find her,
For my heart is full of woe,
And we’ll sing the songs together
That we sang so long ago.
We’ll play the banjo gaily,
And we’ll sing our sorrows o’er,
And the yellow Rose of Texas
Shall be mine forever more.

Chorus: She’s the sweetest girl of colour, &c.

“Dearest Mae” and “Rosa Lee,” the only named females in the song, are the titles of two songs also appearing in Christy’s Minstrels songbooks. These songs were published earlier (1847–48) and are similar in style. Both are sung by a black man in a courtship setting with lyrics similar to those found in “The Yellow Rose of Texas.” Dearest Mae, who was from “old Carolina state,” was described as follows: “Her eyes dey sparkle like de stars, Her lips are red as beet,” and “She cried when boff [both] we parted.” Rosa Lee lived in Tennessee and had “Eyes as dark as winter night, Lips as red as berry bright.”

…In 2011 Yale Divinity School Library archivist Joan Duffy uncovered material indicating that the song’s composer might have been John Kelly, a famous minstrel banjoist, comedian, and composer who took the stage name “J. K. Campbell” in 1851 at the request of a fellow minstrel performer. According to Edward Le Roy Rice (1911), in 1859 and 1860 Campbell was working with George Christy’s Minstrels at Niblo’s Saloon in New York City under name of J. K. Edwards before changing his stage name back to J. K. Campbell. A minstrel “comic song” composed circa 1861 by “J. K. Campbell,” entitled “Ham Fat,” is similar in style to “The Yellow Rose of Texas.” One of the lines reads: “You may talk about your comfort, But Massa is the man…”…

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