Mixed Race Studies

Eurasian Women as Tawa’if Singers and Recording Artists: Entertainment and Identity-making in Colonial India

African and Asian Studies
Volume 8, Issue 3 (2009)
pages 268-287
DOI: 10.1163/156921009X458118

Shweta Sachdeva Jha, Assistant Professor of English
Miranda House, University College for Women, University of Delhi

Scholarship on Eurasians has often addressed issues of migration, collective identity and debates around home. Women performers however do not find themselves discussed in these histories of Eurasian peoples in India. This paper aims to account for individual agency in shaping one’s identity within the meta-narratives of collective identity of migrant peoples. I focus on two Eurasian women entertainers in the colonial cities of Benares and Calcutta who chose to forget their mixed-race past to fashion successful careers using new identities as tawa’if singers and actors in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This, I shall argue, was possible within the wider context of emergent colonial modernities in colonial India. By choosing micro-level case histories of these celebrity entertainers, I want to argue for including popular culture as an arena of identity-making within histories of migration and gender. To engage with popular culture, I shall extend our perception of historical ‘archive’ to include a varied set of materials such as biographical anecdotes, discographies, songbooks, and address the fields of poetry, music and history. Through this project I hope to rethink ideas of gender, culture and agency within wider debates of migration and identity-making.

Racial Classification in Assisted Reproduction

Yale Law Journal
Volume 118, Issue 8 (June 2009)
pages 1844-1898

Dov Fox, Academic Law Research Fellow
Georgetown University Law Center

This Note considers the moral status of practices that facilitate parental selection of sperm donors according to race. Arguments about intentions and consequences cannot convincingly explain the race-conscious design of donor catalogs. This prompts us to examine the expressive dimension of wrongful discrimination. Even practices marked by innocent motives and benign effects can give reason for pause when they needlessly entrench divisive assumptions about how people of a particular race think or act. Race-based differentiation in voting ballots, dating websites, and donor catalogs helps us to tease out the subtle normative tensions that racial preferences occasion in the contexts of citizenship, romance, and reproduction. These reflections suggest that racially salient forms of donor disclosure are pernicious social practices, which, while operating beyond the reach of the law, ought to be condemned as bad policy. The Note concludes by developing reproductive choice-structuring mechanisms that aim to balance respect for intimacy, autonomy, and expressions of racial identity with responsibility to work against conditions that divide us.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• I. Race and reproduction
  • A. Free Market Sperm Donation
  • B. Race-Conscious Donor Catalogs
• II. the expressive dimension of racial discrimination
  • A. Discriminatory Intent and Discriminatory Effects
  • B. Discriminatory Expression
• III. the moral logic of donor classification
  • A. The Social Meaning of Reproducing Race
  • B. The Architecture of Reproductive Choice
• Conclusion

Introduction

Few choices matter more to us than those we make about the person with whom we will share a life or start a family. When having children involves assisted reproduction, selecting an egg or sperm donor occasions similar gravity. Such decisions typically bring to bear a patchwork of preferences about the particular physique, disposition, or values we find desirable in a romantic or procreative partner. To many, race matters. Just as some people in the search for companionship are looking for a significant other who shares their racial background, many of those who wish to become parents would prefer a child whose racial features resemble their own.

To help those who use donor insemination have a child of a particular race, sperm banks routinely catalog sperm donors on racial grounds. Twenty-three of the twenty-eight sperm banks operating in the United States provide aspiring parents with information about donor skin color, and the largest banks organize sperm donor directories into discrete sections on the basis of race. This practice of race-conscious donor classification invites us to rethink those racial preferences we commonly take for granted within intimate spheres of association. Insofar as race tends to reproduce itself within the family unit, race-conscious donor decisionmaking serves as a promising point of departure from which to ask whether and how our multiracial democracy should seek to preserve or diminish our collective self-identification with racial solidarities.

This Note proceeds in three parts. Part I describes the practice of racial classification by the world’s largest sperm bank. Part II argues that antidiscrimination arguments about bad intentions and bad consequences struggle to make sense of the race-conscious way that sperm banks design donor catalogs and online search functions. This suggests that certain classes of discriminatory behavior require a richer moral vocabulary than traditional frameworks allow. In these cases, we do well to examine what might be called the expressive dimension of wrongful discrimination, which turns on whether a rule or action instantiates public values that characteristically erode worthy forms of social recognition.

Part III works out the social meaning of racial classification in assisted reproduction by reference to similar classifications in the more familiar settings of voting and dating. These analogies help us to tease out the subtle normative tensions that racial preferences occasion in the contexts of citizenship, romance, and reproduction. This Part argues that racial classifications marked by innocent motives and benign effects give reason for pause when they needlessly entrench divisive assumptions about how people of a particular race think or act. These reflections suggest that racially salient forms of donor disclosure are pernicious social practices, which, while operating beyond the reach of the law, ought to be condemned as bad policy. The Note concludes by developing reproductive-choice-structuring mechanisms that aim to balance respect for intimacy, autonomy, and expressions of racial identity with responsibility to work against conditions that divide us.

Read the entire article here.

Traveling with Her Mother’s Tastes: The Negotiation of Gender, Race, and Location in “Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands”

Signs
Volume 26, Number 4, Globalization and Gender (Summer, 2001)
pages 949-981

Sandra Gunning, Professor of English, Afroamerican and African Studies and Women’s Studies
University of Michigan

The autobiography Wonderful Adventuers of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands ([1857] 1984) by) Jamaican mixed-race “Creole” Mary Jane Grant Seacole (1805-81) reveals a great deal about the complex interplay in the nineteenth century between gendered mobility, black diaspora identity, colonial power, and transnational circularity. As a black entrepreneur and “doctress” who ran combination lodging houses and taverns in the Caribbean and Central America, Seacole relocated midcareer to Turkey during the Crimean War (1854-56) to service the needs of English soldiers on the battlefield. After losing her business when the war ended sooner than expected, she settled in England and attempted to recover from bankruptcy…

Creole Performance in Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands

Gender & History
Volume 15, Issue 3, November 2003
pages 487–506
DOI: 10.1111/j.0953-5233.2003.00317.x

Rhonda Frederick, Associate Professor of African & African Diaspora Studies Program
Boston College

Mary Seacole’s autobiography has been read as a feminist performance as well as a paradigmatic Victorian travel narrative. While these assessments address important aspects of the memoir, neither affords the author’s Jamaicanness significant space in its analysis. This essay addresses the silences left when Wonderful Adventures is removed from its Jamaican context, then offers a reading of it from this perspective. Grounded in histories that document nineteenth-century Jamaican social categories, the article analyses Seacole’s book using Caribbean literary perspectives that explore raced, ‘coloured’ and geographically-located identities. The result is an interpretation of the memoir that offers insight into Jamaica’s Creole population, its status and colour politics, and identity concerns. All have been expertly shaped by Seacole’s rhetorical manoeuvres.

Read or purchase the article here.

Mahtani wins prestigious geography award

Inside UTSC
University of Toronto, Scarborough
2012-03-29

Minelle Mahtani won the Glenda Laws Award for geography, which is given to early and mid-career scholars for outstanding contributions to geographical research on social issues.
 
It is administered by the Association of American Geographers, and endorsed by the Institute of Australian Geographers, the Canadian Association of Geographers, and the Institute of British Geographers.
 
“Her contributions to geographic research on social issues build bridges between the academy and other centers of knowledge, like the policy, media and not-for-profit worlds. Her experience as a former national television news producer provides unique insights into critiques about media and minority representation as well as geographies of news consumption. She has also paid scholarly attention to geography’s expertise in an era of specialized knowledge economies, challenging the ivory tower to produce anti-racist geographies in the academy and challenging geographers to teach for inclusion,” the award presentation reads in part…

…Mahtani has also written about issues of race within the academy. She has written about the discrimination faced by women of colour geographers, and suggested that geography’s historical engagement with colonialism and imperialism works to ensure the domination of whiteness among faculty and students of geography.
 
Mahtani is especially interested in documenting the experiences of mixed-race Canadians, and has published a number of papers on mixed-race identities. She is an editor of the forthcoming book entitled Global Mixed Race to be published by New York University Press.
 
Mahtani brought her expertise on multiraciality to aid in the editing of Lawrence Hill’s memoir, Black Berry, Sweet Juice: On Being Black and White in Canada. In a recent visit to UTSC, Hill, author of the bestseller, Book of Negroes singled out Mahtani for encouraging him to consider the relationship between geography and identity.
 
Mahtani also designed the first course to be offered in geography and mixed race in Canada, entitled “Spaces of Multiraciality: Critical Mixed Race Theory”, taught in the department of Social Sciences here at UTSC.

Read the entire article here.

The idea of nature in “Benito Cereno.”

Studies in Short Fiction
Spring, 1993

Terry J. Martin

Although many critics have analyzed specific natural images in Melville’s Benito Cereno, no one has yet focused exclusively on the role of nature in the novella, nor looked fully at its problematic relation to Delano. Such an examination can both reveal much about Melville’s artistry and enhance our understanding of the protagonist’s special kind of self-delusion. Midway through the novella, Delano performs an act that is at once typical and revelatory of his ideology: overwhelmed by fears for his life and doubts about providence, he turns to nature for reassurance:

As [Delano] saw the benign aspect of nature, taking her innocent repose in the evening, the screened sun in the quiet camp of the west shining out like the mild light from Abraham’s tent–as charmed eye and ear took in all these, with the chained figure of the black, clenched jaw and hand relaxed. (96-97).

The personal qualities that Delano attributes to nature (i.e., its “benign[ity]” and “innocen[ce]”), together with the religious associations that the sight evokes, reveal a kind of Emersonian belief in the transcendent goodness and moral providence of nature. It is, in other words, God’s benignity that Delano sees suffused throughout the scene. Delano is not a thoroughgoing pantheist; he retains the idea of a personal God, noticeable especially when he later declares, “There is someone above” (77). Nevertheless, for Delano, just as for Emerson, this transcendent spirit is shadowed forth in phenomenal nature, and Delano would no doubt agree with Emerson that “particular natural facts are symbols of particular spiritual facts” (13). This belief in effect turns nature into a vast allegory of the divine spirit. For Delano, the mere appearance of benignity in nature warrants belief in the transcendent reality of benignity…

…Delano’s belief that nature possesses a transcendent moral order legitimates for him the interpretation of natural signs. To be sure, Delano’s behavior is no different from that of most of his contemporaries when he interprets, for example, the color of skin according to this ideal order. If all things signify. then surely white, being the opposite of black, must entail different spiritual characteristics as well. Indeed, Delano has only to look to nature” to find objective corroboration for his belief that whites are “by nature . . . the shrewder race” (75) and therefore naturally superior to blacks: the (apparent) dominance of the whites and servitude of the blacks on the San Dominick offers sufficient proof of Delano’s premise. But Delano has also observed what he takes to be the evident inferiority even of free blacks at home. Blacks have presented themselves as “good-humor[ed],” “easy,” “cheerful,” and “harmonious in every glance and gesture; as though God had set the whole negro to some pleasant tune” (83). They are, he thinks, fit “for avocations about one’s person,” like “natural valets and hair-dressers; taking to the comb and brush congenially as to the castanets, and flourishing them apparently with almost equal satisfaction” (83). Furthermore, blacks are, in Delano’s view, exempt “from the inflicted sourness of the morbid or cynical mind” (84). However, he also deems them essentially “stupid” (75), displaying the “docility arising from the unaspiring contentment of a limited mind, and that susceptibility of blind attachment sometimes inhering in indisputable inferiors” (84). For Delano, skin color is simply the seal that providence uses to stamp inferior goods.

Of course, who knows what happens when the races are “unnaturally” mixed? Delano conjectures about the effect: “It were strange, indeed, and not very creditable to us white-skins, if a little of our blood mixed with the African’s, should, far from improving the latter’s quality, have the sad effect of pouring vitriolic acid into black broth; improving the hue, perhaps, but not the wholesomeness’ (89). It will be seen from this that the racially crossed offspring are at a distinct disadvantage in Delano’s world, in which natural signs correlate with spiritual identity, because their identities are as uncertain as the effect of mingled magic potions. In fact, the mulatto represents a special semiotic problem for Delano precisely because the mulatto is neither black nor white and is hence unable to be interpreted with any degree of certainty. Delano is therefore even willing to consider the possibility that a mulatto with a regular European face is a devil (89). After all, a belief in the inherent allegorical qualities of matter requires that the mulatto be something less than white but greater than black, and devilishness at least presupposes intelligence gone astray…

Read the entire article here.

Hitting the Right Rhythm to Tell Marley’s Story

The New York Times
2012-04-06

John Anderson

Of all the friends, lovers, relatives and Rastas that the director Kevin Macdonald wrangled into his new documentary, “Marley,” one of his favorite finds was Dudley Sibley, a onetime recording artist and the janitor at the Jamaican recording studio where Bob Marley cut his musical teeth.

“He lived with Bob for 18 months in the back of Studio 1,” Mr. Macdonald said recently over breakfast in Manhattan. “No one ever thought to talk to this guy. My researcher in Jamaica said to me, ‘Oh, by the way, there’s this guy I’ve met who says he lived with Bob.’ I said, ‘Oh, yeah, yeah, I don’t believe that.’ But I met him. And he was for real.”

Making a definitive biographical film about Marley, the reggae superstar, who died of cancer in 1981, has always been problematic, plagued by a shortage of archival footage, disagreements over music publishing, and the fact that Marley had 11 children by seven women and never wrote a will…

…The people Mr. Macdonald set out to interview included “everyone who’s alive and was intimate with Bob,” he said. They included Neville Livingston, a k a Bunny Wailer of the original Wailers (later Bob Marley and the Wailers) and Marley’s relatives, black and white. (His absentee mixed-race father, Norval Marley, who was considered a white Jamaican, is a ghostly presence.) Anyone familiar with Bob Marley would assume that, if anything, the difficulties inherent in getting his inner circle to sign off on the same film would keep the full story from getting on screen for 31 years. But Mr. Macdonald said he got total cooperation. Ziggy Marley, Bob’s eldest son, said the family is happy with the result.

 “This is what we wanted it to be,” Ziggy Marley, a successful pop performer, said by phone. “I’ve never read one book about my father,” he said. “Who are they? They don’t know him.”

Rita Marley, Ziggy’s mother and Bob’s widow, concurred…

Read the entire article here.

Feminist Race Theorist and Sociologist to Lecture

Hamilton College, Clinton New York
College News
2012-04-07

France Winddance Twine, professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, will present a lecture on Tuesday, April 10, at 4:15 p.m., in Dwight Lounge, Bristol Campus Center. Twine will discuss “The Future of Anti-Racism & Racial Literacy After The Trayvon Martin Murder.” The lecture is free and open to the public.
 
In addition to editing several collections on race, class and gender, she has authored Outsourcing the Womb: Race, Class and Gestational Surrogacy in a Global Market and Racism in a Racial Democracy: The Maintenance of White Supremacy in Brazil, as well as A White Side of Black Britain…

For more information, click here.

I Do Choose To Run: Personal boxes and the ethics of race

The Stanford Daily
2012-04-09

Miles Unterreiner

In an eloquently argued New York Times Sunday Review article on March 16th, entitled “As Black as We Wish to Be,” author Thomas Chatterton Williams advances a provocative and thought-provoking argument: “mixed-race blacks have an ethical obligation to identify as black — and interracial couples share a similar moral imperative to inculcate certain ideas of black heritage and racial identity in their mixed-race children, regardless of how they look.”
 
Is this a good argument? Do mixed-race individuals have an ethical obligation to identify as members of one race, rather than many or none? And is there a special obligation in the case of mixed-race African-Americans, given this country’s long history of racial discrimination?
 
I must respectfully disagree with Mr. Williams and answer all three with “no.”…

Read the entire opinion piece here.

A Heritage Celebration: Event recognizes both Hispanic and Native American roots with symposium and several performances

San Marcos Daily Record
San Marcos, Texas

2011-08-12

San Marcos — San Marcos will experience a unique, two-in-one heritage celebration in a combination of two nationally recognized heritage months — Hispanic and Native American — on Saturday, Oct. 1 from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the Centro Cultural Hispano de San Marcos, 211 Lee Street.

A Sunday Matinee will also take place at 3 p.m. the next day at the Texas Music Theater.

“We’re bringing attention to the fact that most Hispanics in Texas have Native American ancestors and can celebrate two national heritage months,” says Dr. Mario Garza, chair of the Indigenous Cultures Institute that is producing this event. “Most Hispanics can legitimately embrace a Native American identity because they still retain much of their indigenous culture like customs, foods and even their Native language.”…

…“Roberto Dr. Cintli Rodriguez will be one of the speakers in our Indigenous-Hispanics Symposium,” said Dr. Lydia French, managing editor of Nakum, the Institute’s online journal. “Dr. Rodriguez is one of the major figures in the historic struggle against the Arizona legislature’s anti immigrant law SB 1070 and ban on ethnic studies programs.”…

…Dr. Nicole M. Guidotti-Hernández and Margaret E. Cantú-Sánchez will be joining Dr. Rodriguez as presenters on the “Education: The Indigenity Challenge” panel.  Dr. Guidotti- Hernández teaches Women’s Studies at the University of Arizona and her published articles include “Reading Violence, Making Chicana Subjectivities” and “Dora the Explorer, Constructing ‘Latinidades’ and the Politics of Global Citizenship.”

Cantú-Sánchez is pursuing her doctorate degree in English at the University of Texas at San Antonio and is developing her “mestizaje” theory, which proposes that a balance of cultural and institutional philosophies of human knowledge ensures a better grasp of one’s identity…

Read the entire article here.