Mixed Race Studies

Is the Discourse of Hybridity a Celebration of Mixing, or a Reformulation of Racial Division? A Multimodal Analysis of the Portuguese Magazine Afro

Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Reasearch
Volume 11, Number 2, Article 24 (May 2010)
29 pages
ISSN: 1438-5627

José Ricardo Carvalheiro, Assistant Professor in the Communication and Arts Department
University of Beira Interior, Portugal

For many years the study of “race” relations was dominated by paradigms—of assimilationism and multiculturalism—which highlighted difference and division (as a problem, or a virtue). In more recent years the idea of racial and cultural mixing—creolization or hybridization—has become an important concept in ethnic and racial studies. The starting point of this article is the observation that the idea of racial and cultural mixture—hybridity or mestiçagem—was a key ideological feature of Portuguese colonialism in its last decades. If hybridity is not therefore a new discourse in Portugal, what is the place for it today and what kind of hybridity is being referred to? What might the Portuguese case tell us about discourses of hybridity more generally? The article explores these questions through a combined visual and linguistic analysis of the lifestyle magazine Afro as a site where contemporary discourses about “race” intertwine.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
3. The “African” Minority in Portugal
4. Afro, a Magazine in the Market
4.1 What does the existence of a lifestyle magazine such as Afro mean?
5. Racial Actors in Visual and Verbal Texts
6. Transnational Representations, “Race” Questions and Hybridity
7. Stories About Mixing: Layers of Discourse
8. Conclusion
Acknowledgments
References
Author
Citation

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Henry Ossawa Tanner’s Negotiation of Race and Art: Challenging “The Unknown Tanner”

Journal of Black Studies
Published online before print 2011-03-17
DOI: 10.1177/0021934710395588

Naurice Frank Woods, Visiting Assistant Professor of African American Studies
University of North Carolina, Greensboro

This essay is a response to an article recently published by Will South titled “A Missing Question Mark: The Unknown Henry Ossawa Tanner” in the journal Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide. Tanner was the foremost African American artist of the late 19th century. He has emerged as an exemplar of Black achievement in the arts and is now included in the canon of American art of that period. While Tanner labored to remove the equation of race as the defining factor for his artistic output, he never lost sight of his racial identity. South’s article suggests otherwise and he reconstructs Tanner as a “tragic mulatto” who, on several occasions, passed as White to advance his career and social standing. South’s conclusion seriously jeopardizes Tanner’s hard-fought reputation and greatly diminishes his celebrated cultural significance. I weigh South’s evidence against documented sources and conclude that Tanner unabashedly affirmed his “Blackness” throughout his life and art.

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Painting the World’s Christ: Tanner, Hybridity, and the Blood of the Holy Land

Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide: a journal of ninetheenth-century visual culture
Volume 3, Issue 2 (Autumn 2004)

Alan C. Braddock, Assistant Professor of Art History
Tyler School of Art, Temple University

Henry Ossawa Tanner’s global vision of Christ circa 1900 projected an ideal of hybridity that embodied the artist’s personal resistance not only to racial stereotypes but also to racial thinking as such.

In 1899, Henry Ossawa Tanner painted Nicodemus Visiting Jesus (fig. 1), based on a story from the Gospel of John in which Christ tells a Jewish Pharisee of miraculous visionary powers available to those who are born again. By signing the painting “H. O. Tanner, Jerusalem, 1899,” the artist touted his firsthand knowledge of Palestine, where he spent eleven months on two separate trips between 1897 and 1899. The Nicodemus is one of several paintings with biblical subjects that Tanner produced around 1900 after expatriating himself from the United States. Frustrated by pervasive racial discrimination on account of his African ancestry, Tanner left Jim Crow America in 1894 to live in France for the rest of his life, except for occasional family visits to Philadelphia and artistic expeditions to Palestine and North Africa.

By 1900, Tanner had become an international success—exhibiting regularly at the Paris Salon, winning awards, and attracting more critical praise than many American artists, including his former teacher at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Thomas Eakins. In 1897, Tanner’s The Resurrection of Lazarus (fig. 2) was exhibited to great acclaim at the Salon, awarded a medal, and purchased by the French government for its Luxembourg Gallery of contemporary art. Expatriation in Europe actually enhanced Tanner’s artistic reputation in America during these years, for he exhibited often in New York, Chicago, Pittsburgh, and Philadelphia. In 1900 the Nicodemus was purchased by the Pennsylvania Academy and awarded the prestigious Lippincott Prize. Yet it was only in the European art world and in biblical subject matter that Tanner found what he called “a perfect race democracy.”…

…The present article focuses precisely upon Tanner’s ambiguous racial construction of Christ circa 1900, a topic overlooked in previous scholarship on the artist but one having significant consequences for our historical understanding of his work and more broadly for how we interpret American art and identity from an international postcolonial perspective. Put simply, I argue that Tanner and his biblical paintings at the turn of the twentieth century—especially the Nicodemus and others depicting Christ as a figure of universality—offered a critique not simply of racism, but of “race” itself as an epistemological category. In that respect, Tanner’s work offers an important international model for de-colonizing art by interrogating race at a moment when the dominant culture in the United States was deeply invested in segregation and difference. Those investments, of course, were articulated most famously in the Supreme Court’s Plessy v. Ferguson ruling of 1896, allowing individual states to establish “separate but equal” public facilities based on racial difference. Such institutionalized segregation prompted W. E. B. Du Bois to identify the “color-line” as the “problem of the twentieth century.”

For Tanner, however, the problem was not simply one of crossing or negotiating the “color-line” in painting but rather how to put that line, and the very idea of race, under erasure by highlighting the elusiveness—and therefore the universality—of Christ’s identity. What makes Tanner’s case especially interesting is the relationship that obtained between his pictures and his person, seen here in a photograph of around 1900, when he was about 40 years old (fig. 4). Tanner was a relatively light-skinned man whose complexion and physiognomy did not conform to stereotypical conceptions of blackness, but rather prompted a variety of (often overlapping) racial identifications, including “mulatto,” “Latin,” and even “Aryan.” In the eyes of many contemporaries, Tanner and his work were complex hybrids that resisted clear racial definition, in a manner akin to the universality of Christ and the demography of the Holy Land. My purpose here is to examine the visual and historical evidence of that resistance by closely reading a selection of Tanner’s paintings in relation to various writings by contemporary critics and by the artist himself…

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Affirming Blackness: A Rebuttal to Will South’s “A Missing Question Mark: The Unknown Henry Ossawa Tanner”

Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide: a journal of ninetheenth-century visual culture
Volume 9, Issue 2 (Autumn 2010)

Naurice Frank Woods, Visiting Assistant Professor of African American Studies
University of North Carolina, Greensboro

George Dimock, Associate Professor of Art History
University of North Carolina, Greensboro

Will South’s recent article proposing a heretofore “unknown” Henry Ossawa Tanner who was conflicted about his African American identity and who, while in France, sought to pass as white demonstrates an impressive mastery of archival sources and a flair for persuasive re-interpretation. It is all the more problematic therefore that he misinterprets the available evidence and thereby diminishes the cultural significance of Tanner’s work. Most ingeniously, South builds an elaborate yet spurious argument by restoring a question mark to Tanner’s declaration “Now am I a Negro?” in a famous epistolary exchange with art critic Eunice Tietjens in 1914. In so doing he refashions the foremost African American artist of the nineteenth century as a tragic mulatto—a man who saw himself “as mostly white,” who worked while in France to “systematically…remove race from the equation of his life,” and was willing “to conceal the African American component of his extraction.” South concludes with a critical appraisal that undermines the integrity of Tanner’s art by claiming that “his achievements, ultimately, were grounded in a life of complex compromise lived in between his blackness and his whiteness.”

With or without the missing punctuation, Tanner’s response to Tietjens resounds as his most important statement on race. It reflects his utter frustration with America’s practice of applying a rule of hypodescent (the “one-drop rule“) that defined him as an innately inferior being and constricted his opportunities as artist and citizen. What Tanner was rejecting in his response to Tietjens was not his race but the American art establishment’s continual labeling of him as “Negro” whenever his talent was evaluated. By way of contrast, the Paris art world showed “steadily increasing interest” in his work, linking him with his fellow countrymen, James McNeill Whistler and John Singer Sargent, without “slight[ing] his art in the exploitation of his race” as was the custom in the U.S. press. Tanner considered himself principally an American artist and he affirmed his right to join the ranks of the cultural elite based on artistic merit and racial equality. Tanner’s life and art challenged his nation’s disingenuous notions of race. When taken in context, his question to Tietjens, “Now am I a Negro?” is far from being a renunciation of his black ancestry and heritage as South would have it. Rather it functions rhetorically as sardonic irony in response to the cruelties and stupidities of white racism…

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The First Black Prairie Novel: Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance’s Autobiography and the Repression of Prairie Blackness

Journal of Canadian Studies/Revue d’études canadiennes
Volume 45, Number 2 (Spring 2011)
pages 31-57
E-ISSN: 1911-0251; Print ISSN: 0021-9495
DOI: 10.1353/jcs.2011.0022

Karina Vernon, Assistant Professor of English
University of Toronto

This essay situates Chief Buffalo Child’s Long Lance: The Autobiography of a Blackfoot Indian Chief (1928) within the cultural context of its production, the anti-Black racial climate of the Canadian Prairies in the early part of the twentieth century, in order to analyze the textual repression of its author’s Blackness. Although the Autobiography has been discredited as a fraud because, as Donald B. Smith discovered, Long Lance was not in fact Blackfoot as the Autobiography claims, but “mixed blood” from North Carolina, this essay reclaims it as the first novel penned on the Prairies by a Black author, for it tells a true—more metaphorical and allegorical than factual—story about the desire on the part of displaced “new” world Blacks for Indigenous status and belonging. This essay examines the implications of claiming the Autobiography as the first Black prairie novel and explores how reading it as fiction rather than autobiography extends our understandings of “passing,” racial identification and transformation.

Cet article situe l’autobiographie Long Lance: The Autobiography of a Blackfoot Indian Chief (1928) du Chef Buffalo Child dans le contexte culturel de sa production—le climat racial anti-Noirs des Prairies canadiennes au début du XX^e siècle—afin d’analyser la répression textuelle de son auteur noir. Donald B. Smith a par la suite considéré cette autobiographie comme une imposture, ayant découvert que Long Lance ne faisait pas partie de la confédération des Pieds-Noirs, mais était plutôt un « sang-mêlé » de la Caroline du Nord. Cependant, l’auteur du présent article considère cette autobiographie comme le premier roman écrit dans les Prairies par un Noir puisqu’il raconte une histoire vraie—quoique plus métaphorique et allégorique que factuelle—du désir des Noirs déplacés du « Nouveau » Monde d’acquérir le statut d’indigène et d’appartenir à leur monde. L’article examine les conséquences de la classification de cette pseudo-autobiographie comme le premier roman des Prairies écrit par un Noir et explore les manières dont sa lecture en tant qu’œuvre de fiction plutôt qu’autobiographie nous aide à mieux comprendre le concept de « passage », d’identification et de transformation raciales.

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Racial group boundaries and identities: People of ‘mixed‐race’ in slavery across the Americas

Slavery & Abolition
Volume 15, Issue 3 (1994)
pages 17-37
DOI: 10.1080/01440399408575137

Stephen Small, Associate Professor of African American Studies
University of California, Berkeley

One of the fundamental developments to arise as a result of the settling of the Americas by Europeans was the creation of racial barriers, group boundaries and identities both in law and in practice. Contact between diverse ethnic and national groups from Europe and from Africa was closely followed by social and sexual interaction. These relations were increasingly interpreted and explained by Europeans by employing the idea of ‘race’ (and ‘race’ purity and domination). The idea of ‘race’ inevitably led to the idea of ‘race-mixing’, an idea saturated in imagery and mysticism, but very clearly framed by the powerful group and individual economic, political and psychological interests of Europeans.

A significant section of the voluminous literature on slavery across the Americas focuses on the creation of racial barriers, boundaries and identities. Most attention has focused on the ways in which notions of Europe and Christianity interacted with notions of Africa and heathens to demarcate group boundaries. But significant attention has also been devoted to people of ‘mixed-race’. There are studies of single territories, as well as comparative studies. As one reads this literature one can detect a consensus around the characterizations of the definitions, circumstances and attitudes of people of ‘mixed-race’. It is argued that there arc fundamental differences in their ‘treatment’ in the territories of the British Caribbean and North America. It is maintained that in the British Caribbean people of ‘mixed-race’ received preferential ‘treatment’ and occupied an intermediate status between black slaves and free whites, while in North America they were placed in the same category as blacks. It is further suggested that in the Caribbean people of ‘mixed race’ rejected any association with blacks and sought to establish a distinctive ‘mulatto’ identity. This characterization of three-tier and two-tier systems is often described as ‘racial continuum’ and ‘racial caste’ and the primary explanation offered for the growth of this intermediate group is demographic: it developed where Blacks vastly outnumbered whites…

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Asians in S.A. claim multiracial identity

San Antonio Express-News
2011-06-26

Elaine Ayala and Kelly Guckian

San Antonio’s Asian residents are more likely to self-identify as being of more than one race or ethnicity than their U.S. and Texas counterparts, according to new 2010 Census data. The trend indicates not only intermarriage with whites and Hispanics since World War II, experts said, but more of a willingness or opportunity among Asians to intermarry outside their group.
 
Data compiled by the San Antonio Express-News points to the impact of a strong military presence in San Antonio over several generations, among them Anglo and Hispanic soldiers who brought home “war brides,” said Mitsu Yamazaki of the Alamo Asian American Chamber of Commerce, who studies demographic trends.
 
San Antonio stands out from other U.S. and Texas cities in another way that may fuel more intermarriage among Asians, said Texas state demographer Lloyd Potter: It doesn’t have an Asian enclave…

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A Mixed Race Take On What It Means To Be ‘Free’

Tell Me More
National Public Radio
2011-06-24

NPR Staff

A lonely young New Yorker finds a puppy while jogging. A middle class couple tries navigating the treacherous waters of admission to a sought-after preschool. A new mother grows jealous of the chic and thin mom living across the hall.

It’s all stuff you may have seen before—but not quite. At least not if Danzy Senna has anything to say about it.

These are all characters in Senna’s new collection of short fiction, titled You Are Free. The stories start with the familiar, but soon take subtle turns to reveal racial and other tensions lurking not too far below the surface.

Senna herself is mixed race. Her father is half African-American and half Mexican, while her mother is Irish and English. Growing up in Boston, Senna was raised to self-identify as black.

“I think growing up black or growing up biracial is something that’s part of your daily language and your daily awareness of the world you’re living in,” she tells NPR’s Michel Martin.

But she doesn’t see her work being about race or mixed race. Instead, Senna uses race as the background of her fiction, as a way to understand the culture and characters…

Read the entire story here.
Read the transcript of the interview here.
Listen to the interview here (00:13:32).

White women’s complicity and the taboo: Faulkner’s layered critique of the “miscegenation complex”

Women’s Studies
Volume 22, Issue 4 (1993)
pages 497-506
DOI: 10.1080/00497878.1993.9978998

Karen M. Andrews
Kobe College, Japan

In Faulkner’s social milieu, the proscription against miscegenation between white women and black men was so deeply ingrained as to be “common sense.” White male hegemony promoted a double standard which tolerated one form of miscegenation, between white men and black women, while virulently prohibiting the other form. Miscegenation virtually came to mean only the taboo form, thus silencing the reality of white male exploitation of black women. As James Kinney argues, the “post-war apologists for racism tried to convert the rape victim into the rapist, to reverse reality in order to justify past and present inhumanity” (227).

In works such as Absalom, Absalom! and Go Down, Moses, Faulkner critiques the sexual and racial injustices wrought by this double standard. Moreover, he exposes the whites’ paranoid and often violent reactions to the taboo—the “miscegenation complex”—in several novels, particularly Light in August, and in stories, such as “Dry September,” [Read the full text here.] “Elly” and “Mountain Victory.” In “Dry September,” probably the most anthologized of his short fiction, Faulkner demystifies the “miscegenation complex” by exposing the complicity of whites, male and female, who exploit the taboo for personal and political gain.

“Dry September” entails a multilayered critique of the miscegenation/rape complex. At the most obvious level of analysis, Faulkner employs the character Hawkshaw as a counterhegemonic voice among the radical racists, Unlike the other white men gathered about the barbershop, Hawkshaw critiques the belief that any rumor of the interracial taboo involves a black…

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Why this Supreme Court could be the best hope for gay-marriage advocates

The Washington Post
2011-06-24

Justin Driver, Assistant Professor of Law
University of Texas, Austin

Eight years ago Sunday, the Supreme Court handed down a significant victory for gay equality when it declared anti-sodomy laws unconstitutional in Lawrence v. Texas. In response, Justice Antonin Scalia bitterly dissented, predicting that the court’s opinion would inexorably lead the judiciary to permit marriages for gays and lesbians.

It took the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court less than five months to vindicate Scalia’s prediction when it cited Lawrence in finding that the state’s own constitution protects same-sex marriage. The conservative justice has not, however, had an opportunity to directly consider the merits of same-sex marriage.

…Many advocates of same-sex marriage who worry that it is too early for a federal lawsuit cite the quest decades ago to eliminate bans on interracial marriage. The court did not invalidate such laws during the 1950s, they note, when interracial marriage remained extremely divisive. Instead, it waited to issue Loving v. Virginia until 1967, when only 16 states retained anti-miscegenation statutes. “So long as interracial marriage intensely divided the country, the Warren Court was not prepared to insist upon a norm of equality,” Yale law professor William N. Eskridge Jr. and attorney Darren Spedale wrote in May 2009. They further suggested that it would be daft to believe that the current court would issue a favorable same-sex marriage decision while opposition remained strong. Judge Richard Posner ventured a similar analysis for the New Republic last year: “Until homosexual marriage becomes as uncontroversial in most states as racial intermarriage had become by 1967, the Court will, in all likelihood, stay its hand.”

But in 1967, most Americans did not welcome interracial marriage. To suggest otherwise is profoundly misleading. While Americans registered greater approval of such marriages in the late 1960s than in the previous decade, national opinion remained clearly opposed, even after the Supreme Court decided Loving. A Gallup poll in the 1950s revealed that nine out of 10 whites disapproved of interracial marriage; in 1968, a Gallup poll showed that three out of four whites continued to frown on interracial unions. The 1968 figures taking account of all races were not much different: 73 percent of Americans disapproved of the practice.

The modest number of states that had anti-miscegenation laws when Loving was decided, moreover, hardly indicates that citizens in the other 34 states considered race irrelevant to marriage. A clear majority of Americans deemed race exceedingly relevant and had no compunction about expressing this belief to pollsters. In fact, Gallup did not register a majority approving of interracial marriage until 1997—three decades after Loving recognized the constitutional right.

By contrast, even some of the bleakest same-sex marriage polls of recent years would have cheered advocates of interracial marriage in the age of Loving. A 2008 Quinnipiac University poll, for instance, found that 55 percent of respondents opposed gay marriage. And the most recent round of data, collected this year by Gallup, CNN-Opinion Researchand the ABC News-Washington Post poll, found that slightly more than 50 percent of adults responded approvingly to questions regarding same-sex marriage…

Read the entire opinion piece here.