Mixed Race Studies

Giving Loving Day Its Due

Truthdig
2011-06-11

Marcia Alesan Dawkins, Visiting Scholar
Brown University

If you’re reading this, then you’ve probably been invited to commemorate or at least think about Loving Day this year. And with good reason. In 1958, newlyweds Mildred Jeter and Richard Loving were indicted on charges of violating Virginia’s ban on interracial marriages and were banished from their home state. The U.S. Supreme Court overturned the law in 1967.

Many multiracial individuals and interracial couples celebrate the anniversary of the Loving v. Virginia decision, June 12, as Loving Day. While celebrating this important civil rights milestone, we should remember that increased visibility of interracial couples and offspring does not promise increased racial harmony. Let’s face facts. It’s very sexy to congratulate ourselves based on reports that today’s interracial families can live harmoniously in the former Confederacy. We’re entertained as we watch Khloe and Lamar’s relationship work out. It makes us feel good to think that we have overcome, that we have reached a state of racial harmony and that we are all finally equal—and becoming equally beige and beautiful.

But a desire to congratulate ourselves doesn’t erase the fact that racial mixing has been occurring in our nation and hemisphere for more than 500 years. Colonists and indigenous people married and engaged in extramarital sexual relations. White indentured servants mixed with African indentured servants and then with African slaves. And there’s a long history of black freedmen and freedwomen intermarrying with Native Americans, as well as white males (often forcibly) having sex with black females. There are the interracial children fathered by U.S. soldiers and born to foreign lovers and “comfort women” in war-torn Asian and Middle Eastern nations. Add this to centuries’ worth of Asian and Hispanic immigration and 40 years’ worth of official interracial marriage patterns and you have what many might call the recipe for a melting pot where race doesn’t matter.

Sadly, this isn’t the case…

Read the entire article here.

Drôle de Félix : A Search for Cultural Identity on the Road

Wide Screen
Volume 3, Number 1 (2011)
ISSN: 1757-3920

Zélie Asava

With the emergence of la culture beur in the 1980s—and the birth of a new type of filmmaking influenced by postcolonial politics, world cinema, the new hood films of the African-American community and its hip hop culture—questions of identity, multiculturalism and being mixed-race came to the fore.  Since then, many films have tackled the representation of France’s ethnic minorities onscreen and attempted to  move towards representing the dream 2007 presidential candidate Ségolène Royal expressed of a ‘Mixed-Race France’. This article will explore representations of ethnicity, gender and sexuality in Drôle de Félix/The Adventures of Felix (1999), through the figure of Félix, a homosexual, mixed-race (French-North African) man searching for his absent father and his ‘true’ identity.  The film focuses on the demystification of imperialist absolutes and divisions to reveal what lies between, in the interstices. Through its focus on transgressive identity it transforms traditional representations to explore what lies beyond.  This article interrogates the representational schema of Drôle de Félix, by exploring the cinematic stereotypes and taboos challenged and maintained in the film in comparison to traditional beur cinema and established ideas of Maghrebi-French characters in French cinema.

Read the entire article here.

The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family [Review]

The Journal of American History
Volume 98, Issue 1 (2011)
Pages 154-155
DOI: 10.1093/jahist/jar004

Brenda E. Stevenson, Professor of History
University of California, Los Angeles

The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family. By Annette Gordon-Reed. (New York: Norton, 2008. 802 pp. Cloth, ISBN 978-0-393-06477-3. Paper, ISBN 978-0-393-33776-1.)

Annette Gordon-Reed’s much-lauded book (it has won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, and was a national best seller) is an ambitious attempt to re-create the lives of several generations of one slave family in the American South. Gordon-Reed traces this family from one of their original African ancestors, who arrived in Virginia during the colonial era, through the antebellum decades. This is not just any extended enslaved family, however. Her black and mixed-race subjects are the Hemingses—the founding father Thomas Jefferson’s slaves and family, by marriage and blood.

Building on the research and analysis of her book, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy (1997), Gordon-Reed, a legal scholar by training, adds admirably to her primary- and secondary-source research base for this work, carefully synthesizing the historiography descriptive of the social relationships in American slavery and drawing on the rich data and analysis supplied by historians and archeologists at Monticello. Gordon-Reed treats readers to a journey of no short distance (the book is almost seven hundred pages in length!) in which she explores several avenues of possibility that might shed light on the social lives, relationships, and family ties…

Read or purchase the review here.

The Hidden History of Mestizo America

The Journal of American History
Volume 82, Number 3 (December, 1995)
pages 941-964
5 illustrations

Gary B. Nash, Professor Emeritus of History
University of California, Los Angeles

This essay was delivered as the presidential address at the national meeting of the Organization of American Historians in Washington, March 31, 1995.

La Nature aime les croisements (Nature loves cross-breedings).
—Ralph Waldo Emerson

On a dank January evening in London in 1617, the audience was distracted from a performance of Ben Johnson’s The Vision of Delight by the persons sitting next to King James I and Queen Anne: a dashing adventurer who had just returned from the outer edge of the fledgling English empire and his new wife, ten years his junior. The king’s guests were John Rolfe and his wife Rebecca—a name newly invented to anglicize the daughter of another king who ruled over a domain as big and populous as a north English county. She was Pocahontas, the daughter of Powhatan. The first recorded interracial marriage in American history had taken place because Rebecca’s father and the English leaders in the colony of Virginia were eager to bring about a detente after a decade of abrasive and sometimes bloody European-Algonkian contact on the shores of the Chesapeake Bay.

The Rolfe-Pocahontas marriage might have become the embryo of a mestizo United States. I use the term mestizo in the original sense—referring to racial intermixture of all kinds. In the early seventeenth century, negative ideas about miscegenation had hardly formed; indeed, the word itself did not appear for another two and a half centuries. King James was not worried about interracial marriage. He fretted only about whether a commoner such as Rolfe was entitled to wed the daughter of a king. Nearly a century later, Robert Beverley’s History and Present State of Virginia (1705) described Indian women as “generally beautiful, possessing uncommon delicacy of shape and features,” and he regretted that Rolfe’s intermarriage was not followed by many more.

William Byrd, writing at the same time, was still commending what he called the “modern policy” of racial intermarriage employed in French Canada and Louisiana by which alliances rather than warfare were effected. Byrd confessed his preference for light-skinned women (a woman’s skin color, however, rarely curbed his sexual appetite), but he was sure that English “false delicacy” blocked a “prudent alliance” that might have saved Virginians much tragedy. Most colonies saw no reason to ban intermarriage with Native Americans (North Carolina was the exception).

In 1784, Patrick Henry nearly pushed through the Virginia legislature a law offering bounties for white-Indian marriages and free public education for interracial children. In the third year of his presidency, Thomas Jefferson pleaded “to let our settlements and theirs [Indians] meet and blend together, to intermix, and become one people.” Six years later, just before returning to Monticello, Jefferson promised a group of western Indian chiefs, “you will unite yourselves with us,… and we shall all be Americans; you will mix with us by marriage, your blood will run in our veins, and will spread with us over this great island.”

In 1809, almost two hundred years after Pocahontas sat in the theater with James I, the sixteen-year-old Sam Houston, taking a page from the book of Benjamin Franklin, ran away from his autocratic older brothers. The teenage Franklin fled south from Boston to Philadelphia, but Houston made his way west from Virginia to Hiwassee Island in western Tennessee. There he took up life among the Cherokees and was soon adopted by Ooleteka, who would become the Cherokee chief in 1820. Reappearing in white society in 1818, Houston launched a tumultuous, alcohol-laced, violent, and roller-coaster political career, but he retained his yen for the Cherokee life. After his disastrous first marriage at age thirty-six, he rejoined the Cherokee, became the ambassador of the Cherokee nation to Washington (in which office he wore Indian regalia) in 1829, and married Ooleteka’s niece, the widowed, mixed-blood Cherokee woman Tiana Rogers Gentry.

…This brings us to a consideration of the virulent racial ideology that arose among the dominant Euro-Americans and that profoundly affected people of color. How most Americans came to believe that character and culture are literally carried in the blood, and how the idea of racial mixture was almost banished officially, has its own history. How would it come to happen, as Barbara Fields has expressed it, that a white woman can give birth to a Black child but a Black woman can never give birth to a white child? How would it come to be that the children of Indian-white marriages would contemptuously be referred to by whites as half- breeds?

The sequence of legal definitions of Blacks in Virginia demonstrates this progression. In 1785, the revolutionary generation defined a Black person as anyone with a Black parent or grandparent, thus conferring whiteness on whomever was less than one-quarter Black. Virginia changed the law 125 years later to define as “Negro,” as the term then was used, anyone who was at least one-sixteenth Black. In 1930, Virginia adopted the notorious “one-drop” law—defining as Black anyone with one drop of African blood, however that might have been determined…

…There is nothing new about crossing racial boundaries; what is new is the frequency of border crossings and boundary hoppings and the refusal to bow to the thorn-filled American concept, perhaps unknown outside the United States, that each person has a race but only one. Racial blending is undermining the master idea that race is an irreducible marker among diverse peoples—an idea in any case that always has been socially constructed and has no scientific validity. (In this century, revivals of purportedly scientifically provable racial categories have surfaced every generation or so. Ideas die hard, especially when they are socially and politically useful.) Twenty-five years ago, it would have been unthinkable for Time-Life to publish a computer-created chart of racial synthesizing; seventy-five years ago, an issue on “The New Face of America” might have put Time out of business for promoting racial impurity…

Read the entire article here.

Racial mixture, racial passing, and white subjectivity in Absalom, Absalom!

The Faulkner Journal
Volume 23, Issue 2 (Spring 2008)
pages 3-22

Masami Sugimori, Instructor of English
University of South Alabama

In his 1987 study of the critical reception of Absalom, Absalom! Bernd Engler points out that “since the mid-Seventies the only interpretations to gain favour have been those which, at least partly, regard Absalom, Absalom! as the conscious realization of an open work of art” (246). Somewhat testifying to how the text’s indeterminacy specifically concerns the interconnection of race and narrative, Engler’s survey also shows that noteworthy monographs from the decade include those concerning “Faulkner’s attitude towards racial questions” (252) as well as “the novel as a study in narratology and/or epistemology” (256). Indeed, even as Quentin and Shreve finalize their reconstruction of the endlessly uncertain past by reading Charles Bon’s white-looking body as “passing white,” Faulkner does not supply any evidence for Bon’s racial mixture outside the white character-narrators’ invention.

Engler is quick to note, however, that most race-related scholarship does not fully attend to the novel’s open-endedness, as exemplified by four studies from 1983: “Walter Taylor,  Eric J. Sundquist, Thadious M. Davis, and Erskine Peters begin, as do most others, with the dubious assumption that Bon’s identity as Sutpen’s part-negro son has been clearly established in the text” (253). And it seems that this problem is still compromising the Absalom, Absalom! scholarship. (1) For example, while critiquing the discursive domination of “‘legitimate’ white caretakers of history,” Maritza Stanchich bases her postcolonial reading upon the same white “legitimacy” and uncritically follows Quentin and Shreve’s re-creation of Bon as “a free mulatto who can ‘pass’ as white”: “When the narrators of different generations are faced with Bon, a free mulatto who can ‘pass’ as white and threatens to upset the South’s rigid race caste, their pre-Civil War and post-Civil War fears overlap and intermingle… The strategy of the narrative seeks to uphold white domination by representing all characters of color through Rosa, Quentin, General Compson and Shreve, the ‘legitimate’ white caretakers of history” (608)…

Read the entire article here.

Re-articulating the New Mestiza

Journal of International Women’s Studies
Vol 12, #2 (March 2011)
Special Issue: Winning and Short-listed Entries from the 2009 Feminist and Women’s Studies Association Annual Student Essay Competition
pages 61-74

Zalfa Feghali
University of Nottingham

This essay provides an overview, critique, and the beginning of a refiguration of Gloria Anzaldúa’s theorization of the new mestiza as set out in her seminal 1987 book Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. By examining both Anzaldúa’s precursors and the articulations of hybrid identities of her contemporaries, this essay depicts the complex dynamic that characterizes the mestiza’s need to develop, beyond borders and attempts to fashion a more contemporary, transnational mestiza. Using the writing and criticism of Françoise Lionnet alongside Anzaldúa’s and other critics, and utilizing postcolonial and feminist theories, this essay hopes to provide an alternative articulation to conventional understandings of hybridity and mestizaje in contemporary thought.

Introduction

The purpose of this essay is to provide an overview, a critique, and the beginning of a refiguration of Gloria Anzaldúa’s theorization of the new mestiza. Anzaldúa’s mestiza exists in borderlands, and is “neither hispana india negra española / ni gabacha;”1 rather, she is “mestiza, mulata, half-breed / caught in the crossfire between camps / while carrying all five races on [her] back / not knowing which side to turn to, run from” (Borderlands/La Frontera 216). However, according to Anzaldúa, and despite the difficulties engendered by her very existence, the mestiza is also a figure of enormous potential, as her multiplicity allows a new kind of consciousness to emerge. This mestiza consciousness moves beyond the binary relationships and dichotomies that characterize traditional modes of thought, and seeks to build bridges between all minority communities in order to achieve social and political change. Anzaldúa locates the new mestiza consciousness at a site that, as Françoise Lionnet suggests, “is not a territory staked out by exclusionary practices” (“The Politics and Aesthetics of Métissage” 5).

Although there are clear precursors to Anzaldúa’s work, one of which I discuss at length below, many critics and thinkers choose her work to engage with. This has to do with her unique place in the “canon” of Chicana/Mexican American writing—what she calls the “Moveimento Macha.” Writing from the position(s) of queer Chicana womanhood, code-switching between English and Spanish, and mixing poetry and prose, Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera, at the time of publication in 1987, represented an important break from the mainly male-dominated pool of “traditional” Chicano writers and inspired a generation of women, Chicana and non-Chicana alike, to write about their experiences as border-crossers with hybrid identities. Anzaldúa’s work remains popular because it retains much of its original subversive potential, its cross-disciplinarity providing new and varied methodologies to analyze borders. In many ways, it has also played an important role in refocusing American studies as a transnational discipline. In her presidential address to the American Studies Association in 2004, Shelley Fisher Fishkin identified Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera as epitomizing the transnational nature of American studies, and credited her work for opening up a space for “American studies scholars [to] increasingly recognize that understanding requires looking beyond the nation‟s borders, and understanding how the nation is seen from vantage points beyond its borders” (“Crossroads of Cultures” 20)…

…A “Cosmic Race”

In his original essay of 1925, Vasconcelos lauds the people inhabiting the area of Mexico for their mestizo/a culture, which, as Rafael Pérez-Torres has put it, “locates itself within a complex third space neither Mexican nor American but in a transnational space of both potential and restraint” (“Alternate Geographies and the Melancholy of Mestizaje” 322). In its traditional meaning, mestizaje “reflects a simultaneously racial, sexual, and national memory, an embodiment of colonization and conquest” (Bost, Mulattas and Mestizas 9). In fact, one of the reasons that Jose Vasconcelos won popular acclaim for his theories was the attractiveness of the idea that an entire population, which literally embodies a history of violence, can forge an identity that moved beyond such a violent history—and flourish. Anzaldúa herself refers to this very specific history in her hope that the emergence of the new mestiza will bring an end to rape, violence, and war.

For the purposes of his essay, Vasconcelos sees this group as the first stage in the creation of a new, cosmic race that will eventually take on characteristics and subsume genetic streams from all the races on earth. This cosmic race will take on the best or most desirable traits from each respective race. Eventually, according to Vasconcelos, the lines between the “original” races will blur to the point that any one individual’s “racial heritage” would be completely indistinguishable from another‟s, thus becoming the ultimate mestizo/a (something akin what critics would now call a “post-ethnic” or “post-racial” world). This emphasis on the special character and potential of the mestiza/o Mexican subject has made Vasconcelos‟ theory very attractive to Mexican and Chicano/a activists, particularly nationalists. As many Chicano/a activists have done, Anzaldúa uses a narrow interpretation of Vasconcelos’ essay in the hope of finding a solid theoretical grounding for her own project. However, this has brought her much criticism, as Vasconcelos’ theory has been rigorously undermined. As Didier Jaén puts it:

It is true that mestizaje is one of the central concepts of the Vasconcelos essay, but of course, it is also clear that the racial mixture Vasconcelos refers to is much wider, much more encompassing, than what can be understood by the mestizaje of the Mexican or Chicano…But even if we expand the concept of mestizaje to include all other races, this biological mixture would not fulfill what Vasconcelos expresses with the idea of the Cosmic race (“Introduction” xvi).

Clearly, Vasconcelos’ utopian vision of mestizaje leading to a new, privileged subject that lives in a race-less world does not hold up theoretically or pragmatically. For example, he clearly delineates the “four major races of the world” before envisioning a fifth, cosmic race which embraces the four “original” races of the world. Despite the fact that the original text was written in 1925 and must be read with one eye trained on that time’s theoretical and scientific reach, it is problematic in the way it combines scientific language and terms with a more mystical outlook (something that is echoed in Anzaldúa‟s work, albeit for a different purpose). It thus presents itself as scientific fact and knowledge while in fact holding little or no solid scientific basis.

My main objection to Vasconcelos’ analysis comes from the implications of his own underlying premise, namely, that there are four races of humans: the Black, the Indian (as in American native), the Mongol, and the White. Out of these four races, Vasconcelos imagines that the fifth, mestizo, cosmic race will resemble a symphony:

Voices that bring accents from Atlantis; depths contained in the pupil of the red man, who knew so much, so many thousand years ago, but now seems to have forgotten everything. His soul resembles the old Mayan cenote of green waters, laying deep and still…This infinite quietude is stirred with the drop put in our blood by the Black, eager for sensual joy, intoxicated with dances and unbridled lust…There also appears the Mongol, with the mystery of his slanted eyes that see everything according to a strange angle…The clear mind of the White, that resembles his skin and his dreams, also intervenes…

Clearly Vasconcelos’ theory is based on fundamental racism on his part. Yet despite having borne heavy criticism for his theory, Vasconcelos’ essay was reprinted in 1948 and became a rallying point for Chicano activist and Mexican nationalist movements. In addition to Vasconcelos’ popularity as an alternative Mexican historian, this is most likely why Anzaldúa espouses his theory. However, as I plan to show, Anzaldúa’s work also falls into many of the same traps as Vasconcelos’. It has been important to look at Vasconcelos’ work in such depth as I will show that Anzaldúa’s work, while in many ways vastly different, may have the effect of re-inscribing Vasconcelos’ racism…

Read the entire article here.

Mistaken identity

The Boston Globe
2005-02-20

Holly Jackson

What if a novelist celebrated as a pioneer of African-American women’s literature turned out not to be black at all?

IN THE LATE 1980s, scholars of African-American studies carried out the most impressive American literary recovery project to date, excavating and reprinting the works of numerous unjustly forgotten African-American writers. The most ambitious of these efforts was Oxford University Press’s 40-volume Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers, published in 1988 under the direction of Henry Louis Gates Jr., currently the chair of Harvard’s department of African and African American Studies.

Here at last, Gates explained in his foreword, were the literary ancestors of Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison. With one exception, all these works had been previously out of print, making it difficult for scholars to track down copies. In fact, it was Gates’ discovery of one such ”lost” novel, ”Four Girls At Cottage City” (1895) by Emma Dunham Kelley-Hawkins, that prompted him to put these neglected texts back into print-”in part,” he wrote, ”so that I could read them myself.”

In the following decade, scholarship on black women’s fiction exploded alongside popular interest in the work of contemporary African-American writers. In particular, the flourishing of black literature in the 1890s-the decade that saw Jim Crow become federal law and witnessed the highest number of lynchings in American history-has remained a fruitful area of scholarly inquiry. For African-American writers of that period, the creation of a literary tradition was a political imperative. As Pauline Hopkins wrote in 1900, ”We must ourselves develop the men and women who will faithfully portray the inmost thoughts and feelings of the Negro with all the fire and romance which lie dormant in our history.”

But despite continual scholarly interest in Kelley-Hawkins as an important voice of the period, the woman who Gates credits with inspiring the Schomburg Library has never fit comfortably within the African-American canon. Most puzzling has been the apparent whiteness of her characters, who are repeatedly described with blue eyes and skin as white as ”pure” or ”driven” snow-a conundrum that critics have largely sidestepped by arguing that these women would have been understood as ”white mulattos,” or very light-skinned women of color, by Kelley-Hawkins’s original audience of black readers. Furthermore, while the novels of contemporaries like Frances E.W. Harper or Pauline Hopkins are explicitly concerned with racial uplift and protest, ”Four Girls at Cottage City” and ”Megda” follow a group of adolescent female friends in eastern Massachusetts from carefree youth through Christian conversion to appropriate wifehood, with no mention of the difficulties facing black women.

Meanwhile, Kelley-Hawkins herself remained a complete historical cipher. While she had been identified as an African-American writer as early as the 1970s, when her first novel, ”Megda,” was mentioned in several reference works, the most basic facts of her life-down to the date and place of her birth-were totally unknown.

As it turns out, these novels, and their author, are far more anomalous than scholars have realized. Judging from archival documents that I have recently uncovered, Kelley-Hawkins does not appear to have been African-American at all…

Read the entire article here.

The Mulatto: an unspeakable concept

Working Papers on the Web
Department of English Studies at Sheffield Hallam University
Volume 5 (September 2003) (Racial Disciplines)
ISSN: 1478-3703

Julian Murphet, Senior Lecturer of English
The University of Sydney

The discourse of race has necessarily produced its own supplements; and there has been no more intriguing categorical supplement to racial discourse than that of the ‘mulatto’. In this essay, I explore some of the meanings of this supplement as it was produced, accepted, and then retracted in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—first as a legalistic and sociological category, and second as an ideological signifier in the domain of fictional and autobiographical literary genres.

Shifting and stuttering between a ‘both/and’ and a ‘neither/nor’ binary logic of racial identification, the mulatto is a peculiarly homeless signifier that hesitates in the no-man’s-land between monolithic racial alternatives and casts an immanent doubt upon both their houses. As early as the 1910s, meditation on the mulatto would precipitate speculation that, far from being an isolated ‘problem’, the ‘man of mixed blood’ was the springboard of societal progress: ‘the advance of civilization is dependent upon this process of racial intermixture’, which could be spotted everywhere across Europe and the rest of the world. As racial discourse has evolved in a myriad of directions and forms according to the structures of the political and sexual economies in which it operates, this supplement has of course known various, often incompatible applications. Nowhere, perhaps, has the supplement been as ‘dangerous’ as in the USA, for reasons, and with results, which will be discussed in this essay. Nevertheless, if there is a consensus of opinion about this supplement today, it would seem to be that it is unspeakable. The ‘strategic essentialisms’ employed by the various Black peoples since the 1960s in the name of civil and human rights have finally settled all doubts in favour of a performative ‘one drop of blood’ rule whose essentialist origins are, precisely, those of the ultra-racist American South. As a recent article on the subject in Australia has put it, ‘When “self-identification” was introduced in the early 1970s as the means by which Aboriginality would be determined, it was a repudiation of all those racist notions of half-caste, quarter-caste, and “quadroon” which had been used to deny indigenous people their culture, their land and their children … [P]eople could claim Aboriginality if they fitted three criteria: indigenous ancestry, self-identification and community acceptance.’  The presumptions here are as perplexing as they are inescapable: the notion of the ‘mulatto’ or ‘half-caste’ is a racist one, that has been superseded by a new performative identity which nonetheless contains an appeal to a dualistically conceived ancestry. There are Aborigines and there are white people, and this is notracist. Only the supplement is.

The unspeakableness of ‘mulatto’ today is, of course, an index of its historicity—our retrospective distaste for it springing from its contamination by an essentialist doctrine of races, from which we have emerged into the broad light of ‘culturalist’ day. Any such transcendence of nineteenth century racialism, which invariably decodes for us as racism, is surely a boon of the great modern revolutions in ethnography, biology and social science. What is less clear, however, is how, in the context of a specifically American state-racism, this concept in particular once helped to open a loophole in the dominant ideologies of racial identity, and uniquely contributed to the development of our very ‘culturalist’ paradigm of race; and how, in that same context, the mulatto has always been unspeakable anyway: a dirty secret or scandalous aporia to be resolved back into the imperturbable binarism of black and white (which is rather a different binary from that of Negro and Caucasian)…

Read the entire article here.

Plessy and Ferguson unveil plaque today marking their ancestors’ actions

New Orleans Times-Picayune
2009-02-11

Katy Reckdahl

Today, Plessy versus Ferguson becomes Plessy and Ferguson, when descendants of opposing parties in the landmark U.S. Supreme Court segregation case stand together to unveil a plaque at the former site of the Press Street Railroad Yards.

Standing behind Keith Plessy and Phoebe Ferguson will be a large group of students, scholars, officials and activists who worked for years to honor the site where in 1892, Tremé shoemaker Homer Plessy, a light-skinned black man, was arrested for sitting in a railway car reserved for white people.

People often think that his ancestor held some responsibility for the legalized segregation known as “separate but equal, ” said Keith Plessy, 52, a longtime New Orleans hotel bellman whose great-grandfather was Homer Plessy’s first cousin. In actuality, Homer Plessy boarded that train as part of a carefully orchestrated effort to create a civil-rights test case, to fight the proliferation of segregationist laws in the South…

…Plessy, born in 1863 on St. Patrick’s Day, grew up at a time when black people in New Orleans could marry whomever they chose, sit in any streetcar seat, and attend integrated schools, Medley said. But as an adult, those gains from the Reconstruction era eroded.
 
On any other day in 1892, Plessy could have ridden in the car restricted to white passengers without notice. According to the parlance of the time, he was classified “7/8 white.”
 
In order to pose a clear test to the state’s 1890 separate-car law, the Citizens’ Committee in advance notified the railroad—which had opposed the law because it required adding more cars to its trains.
 
On June 7, 1892, Plessy bought a first-class ticket for the commuter train that ran to Covington, sat down in the car for white riders only and the conductor asked whether he was a colored man, Medley said. The committee also hired a private detective with arrest powers to take Plessy off the train at Press and Royal streets, to ensure that he was charged with violating the state’s separate-car law.
 
Everything the committee plotted went as planned—except for the final court decision, in 1896. By then the composition of the U.S. Supreme Court had gained a more segregationist tilt, and the committee knew it would likely lose. But it chose to press the cause anyway, Medley said. “It was a matter of honor for them, that they fight this to the very end.”…

…”You don’t know American history until you know Louisiana history, ” Plessy said…

Read the entire article here.

Race, Ethnicity, and Difference in a Contemporary Carioca Pop Music Scene

Diagonal: Journal of the Center for Iberian and Latin American Music
Volume 6 (2010) [Rethinking Race and Ethnicity in Brazilian Music (c1600-Present)]
16 pages

Frederick Moehn, Assistant Professor of Music; Affiliate, Latin American and Caribbean Studies Center Africana Studies
Stony Brook University, State University of New York

Parts of this paper are from my book-in-progress, tentatively titled “Chameleon in a Mirror: Essays on Sound and Society in a Brazilian Popular Music Scene”, for Duke University Press.

In my research on popular music making in Brazil, primarily in Rio de Janeiro and largely among middle-class subjects, one of the things I have sought to analyze is how individuals conceptualize mixture, understood on a variety of levels but always in relation to the dominant discourse of national identity in the country. As you all know, this is a discourse which holds that Brazil’s history of miscegenation corresponds to a natural facility with cultural mixing. Moreover, it is widely presumed that this purported capacity is most fabulously in evidence in the sphere of music making. There exists a comfortable fit between celebratory discourses of national identity as rooted in miscigenação, on the one hand, and the way many contemporary Brazilian musicians—not just in Rio de Janeiro but generally in urban areas—talk about their practice, on the other. Such talk, in turn, has real bearing on musical sound as mixture becomes almost an imperative in some scenes: to make “Brazilian” music, following this logic, is to mix (and not to mix risks seeming rather un-Brazilian, or at least overly traditionalist). What theoretical tools can we bring to bear on this naturalized and seemingly self-evident logic of cultural production, interpretation, and national identity? In this paper I will examine a variety of aspects of these dynamics in an effort to reflect on our central theme of rethinking race and ethnicity in Brazilian music…

…Hybridity theory and difference

Let me return for a moment to the question of mixture and its association with racial contact. In Brazil, of course, we also encounter the influential modernist theory of cultural cannibalism, or anthropophagy, as a specifically artistic discourse about difference, appropriation and recombination, arising around the same time as race mixture begins to be positively valued in debates over national identity; that is, the 1920s and 30s. These modernist tendencies predate the emergence of the hybridity theory that arose in the postmodern postcolonialism of the 1980s and 1990s. As Joshua Lund has written, the resurgence of hybridity in the human sciences during these later decades “was met with the incredulous response in Latin Americanist circles that can be summed up by the question ‘So what else is new?’“ Hybridity, suddenly the fashionable cultural theory, “had always been a generic mark of Latin America’s geocultural singularity.”…

Read the entire article here.