Mixed Race Studies

North of America: Racial hybridity and Canada’s (non)place in inter-American discourse

Comparative American Studies: An International Journal
Volume 3, Number 1 (March 2005)
pages 79-88
DOI: 10.1177/1477570005050951

Albert Braz, Associate Professor of English
University of Alberta, Canada

Canada is one of the largest countries in the Americas, indeed the world. Yet, for such a territorial behemoth, it is barely acknowledged in inter-American discourse. There are two main explanations for this peculiar state of affairs. First, Canada remains extremely ambivalent about its spatial location. Second, hemispheric studies have become increasingly oriented along a US/Hispanic America axis. Even more than Brazil, the other forgotten giant, Canada is seldom considered in continental dialogues, whether they originate in the USA or in Spanish America. This general elision is regrettable for a series of reasons, notably the fact that the Canadian experience can complicate some of the verities about (inter) American life and culture, as is illustrated by racial hybridity.

Canada! . . . Canada is so far away, it almost doesn’t exist.
—Jorge Luis Borges

I don’t even know what street Canada is on.
—Al Capone

Canada is one of the largest countries in the Americas, indeed the world; or, as Richard Rodriguez jokes, at least for the people of the USA, it is ‘the largest country in the world that doesn’t exist’ (Rodriguez, 2002: 161). In any case, for such a territorial colossus, Canada is barely acknowledged in inter-American discourse. There are two main explanations for this peculiar state of affairs. First, Canada remains extremely ambivalent about its spatial location. Second, hemispheric studies have become increasingly oriented along a US/Hispanic America axis. Thus, even more so than Brazil, the other forgotten giant, Canada is seldom considered in continental dialogues, whether they originate in the USA or in Spanish America. This general elision of Canada, I will argue in my article, is regrettable for several reasons. To begin with, you can hardly attain a real understanding of the continent if you exclude such a large portion of its landmass. No less significant, the Canadian experience can complicate some of the verities about (inter) American life and culture. This is particularly true of racial hybridity. For such prominent figures as Símon Bolívar, José Martí, José Vasconcelos and Roberto Fernández Retamar, racial crossing is one of the key elements that differentiates ‘Nuestra America’ from Anglo-America, the USA. However, what they do not seem to realize is that two racially-mixed communities or nations, the Métis and the Halfbreeds, blossomed in the so-called Great White North. Moreover, the leader of one of those groups, Louis Riel, became one of the great exponents of racial hybridity and continental identity in the Americas. Indeed, as I will try to demonstrate, Riel’s writings underscore the urgency of placing inter-American studies in a truly continental context; that is, of bringing the north of America into America…

Read the entire article here.

Métis, mixed-ness and music: Aboriginal-Ukrainian encounters and cultural production on the Canadian prairies

The Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies
University of Washington
Canadian Studies Center
Walker-Ames Room, Kane Hall
Wednesday, 2011-04-20 19:00 PDT (Local Time)

Marcia Ostashewski, Fulbright Visiting Research Chair in Canadian Studies

Aboriginal/non-Aboriginal intermarriages, often described as “mixed-race,” have been the focus of historians and anthropologists, and represent an important legacy of the colonial pasts and present of both the United States and Canada which require further investigation. As an ethnomusicologist, Ostashewski is investigating a legacy of Aboriginal/Eastern European settler encounters and relations in music, dance and related expressive culture on the Canadian prairies. In this presentation, she focuses on Alberta-based musician Arnie Strynadka, “The Uke-Cree Fiddler”—looking at the ways in which his musical life and performance represent a particular encounter and fusion of ethnicities, examining experiences of hybridity and intercultural relations in the context of this unique, western Canadian musical life.

For more information, click here.

Eurafricans in Western Africa: Commerce, Social Status, Gender, and Religious Observance from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century

Ohio University Press / Swallow Press
2003
392 pages
6¹⁄₈ x 9¼
Copublished with James Currey, Oxford OCBCEK
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-8214-1485-9
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8214-1486-6

George E. Brooks, Emeritus Professor of History
Indiana University, Bloomington

Eurafricans in Western Africa traces the rich social and commercial history of western Africa. The most comprehensive study to date, it begins prior to the sixteenth century when huge profits made by middlemen on trade in North African slaves, salt, gold, pepper, and numerous other commodities prompted Portuguese reconnaissance voyages along the coast of western Africa. From Senegal to Sierra Leone, Portuguese, including “New Christians” who reverted to Judaism while living in western Africa, thrived where riverine and caravan networks linked many African groups.

Portuguese and their Luso-African descendants contended with French, Dutch, and English rivals for trade in gold, ivory, slaves, cotton textiles, iron bars, cowhides, and other African products. As the Atlantic slave trade increased, French and Franco-Africans and English and Anglo-Africans supplanted Portuguese and Luso-Africans in many African places of trade.

Eurafricans in Western Africa follows the changes that took root in the eighteenth century when French and British colonial officials introduced European legal codes, and concludes with the onset of the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars, when suppression of the slave trade and expanding commerce in forest and agricultural commodities again transformed circumstances in western Africa.

Professor George E. Brooks’s outstanding history of these vital aspects of western Africa is enriched by his discussion of the roles of the women who married or cohabited with European traders. Through accounts of incidents and personal histories, which are integrated into the narrative, the lives of these women and their children are accorded a prominent place in Professor Brooks’s fascinating discussion of this dynamic region of Africa.

Table of Contents

• List of Maps
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Western Africa Ecological Zones and Human Geography
• Chapter 2: Commercial Networks Biafada-Sapi, Banyun-Bak, and Cabo Verdean–Lançado
• Chapter 3: Portuguese, Luso-Africans, and European Competitors
• Chapter 4: Western Africa and the Onset of an Era of Droughts, Famines, and Global Economic Transformations
• Chapter 5: The Evolution of “Nharaship” in Senegambia
• Chapter 6: Trade with the Kaabu Empire and Serra Leoa
• Chapter 7: Era of the Second Cacheu Company
• Chapter 8: Expanding Slave-Trading Networks and the Corruption of African Social and Cultural Patterns
• Chapter 9: Senegambia Luso-Africans Supplanted by Franco-Africans
• Chapter 10: Geba-Grande and Serra Leoa Luso-Africans Challenged and Supplanted by Anglo-Africans
• References
• Index

Introduction

The geographic scope of this book was essentially determined by Eurafricans and their African landlords, while many of the chronological chapter breaks derived from the disruptions to trade caused by European wars and commerce raiding. Western Africa, depicted on Map 1.1, extends some three thousand kilometers from the Senegal River in the north to the Bandama River in the south and fifteen hundred kilometers east from the Atlantic littoral to the bend of the Niger River, equivalent to the part of the United States that lies east of the Mississippi River. The great majority of the inhabitants of this vast and geographically diverse territory speak languages belonging to two principal families—West Atlantic and Mande, the former principally in coastal regions, the latter mainly in the interior.

The peoples of western Africa have been linked by commercial networks since ancient times. Mande-speaking traders and smiths pioneered caravan routes from the interior that connected the riverine networks of West Atlantic–speaking groups, promoting long-distance trade in salt, gold, iron, kola, malaguetta pepper, and numerous other commodities. By the third century a.d., western Africa’s trade networks connected trans-Saharan routes, and exchanges with North Africa multiplied over the centuries. The huge profit that Maghrebian middlemen exacted from Europeans for gold, ivory, malaguetta pepper, and other western African commodities was a principal factor promoting Portuguese reconnaissance voyages along the coast of western Africa during the fifteenth century.

When Portuguese mariners arrived in western Africa, they were constrained to accommodate to centuries-old landlord-stranger reciprocities concerning the host societies’ treatment of itinerant traders, hunters, migrants, and other travelers. Portuguese had to use African modes of barter commerce, pay tolls and taxes, visit only where they were invited by African hosts, and adhere to local customs and practices while ashore. Lançados—venturesome Portuguese and Luso-African inhabitants of the Cape Verde Islands, who were allowed to reside in African communities—were subject to numerous constraints. African landlords refused to rent lançados more land than needed for dwellings and stores, rendering them dependent on indigenous communities for food, water, and other necessities. Of inestimable consequence for the lançados, however, they, like African strangers, were permitted to cohabit with local women, usually relatives or dependents of infuential members of communities who sought the advantages that came with affiliation with foreign traders. Wives were invaluable to the lançados as interpreters of languages and cultures and as collaborators in commercial exchanges—roles subsequently undertaken by many of their Luso-African children.

Luso-Africans, the children of Portuguese traders and African women, represented a new and unprecedented element in western African societies. In social and cultural terms, these children, raised in African communities, acquired much more of the heritage of their mothers than of their Portuguese fathers, many of whom died or departed after a brief stay. This imbalance is conveyed in the word Luso-African itself, in which the short prefix Luso (derived from Lusitania, the Roman name for the area of Portugal) is combined with the longer African. The same can be said for the words Anglo-African and Franco-African, as well. Eurafrican serves as a generic term.

Raised in African societies, Eurafricans’ lifeways were chiefy determined by the social status of their mothers. But there were significant differences in this regard between stratified and acephalous societies. The stratified and patrilineal societies of Senegambia—Wolof, Serer, and Mandinka—excluded Portuguese and Luso-Africans from marrying free persons. Luso-African children were denied membership in the “power associations” that educated youths and conferred adult status in these societies. Social outcasts, Luso-Africans lacked the rights and privileges of other members of their age sets, including the right to cultivate land. Luso-African males in these societies sought employment as sailors, interpreters, and compradors working for Portuguese and fellow Luso-Africans, with the bleak prospect that whatever wealth and possessions they acquired would be expropriated by rulers and other elites. Female Luso-Africans shared the same disabilities and became interpreters and intermediaries for European traders and African elites. Luso-African men and women contested their pariah status. They wore European-style garments, displayed crucifixes and rosaries attesting their adherence to Catholicism, spoke Crioulo (which derived from Portuguese and West Atlantic languages), and asserted that they were “Portuguese,” “whites,” and “Christians”—claims derided by Portuguese and other Europeans…

Read the entire Introduction here.

French110s: From Haiti to New Orleans

John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute
Duke University
Fall 2010

Deborah Jenson

Haiti Lab: Undergraduate Opportunities

The first Humanities Laboratory at Duke, one of the key goals of the Haiti Lab is to bring innovative, interdisciplinary research more fully into the undergraduate experience at Duke and, indeed, to invite undergraduates to participate as researchers themselves.

The Haitian Revolution  (1791-1804) was a successful revolution against slavery, leading to the defeat of the French armies of Napoleon Bonaparte and the establishment of the first black republic in the New World. During the revolution, many Creole planters (white and of mixed race) and their households, including slaves, sought refuge elsewhere; by 1809, the population of New Orleans actually doubled with this “Haitian” influx. How did the culture and literature of nineteenth century New Orleans reflect Haitian influences? We will read fascinating Francophone New Orleans literature about the socio-racially complex cultures of slavery, the bourgeoisie, and the planters’ “aristocracy” in Louisiana. Did you know you could learn about the U.S. Civil War through French-language New Orleans novels that also integrate Creole poetry from colonial Saint-Domingue? Or that the first African-American short story was written in French, about Haiti? We will read about the drama of the historical Haitian maroon slave and poisoner Macandal, and about the Haiti-influenced libertine culture that bound together white men and women of color in the common law structure of plaçage. Students will do cultural research projects on subjects such as the cultural roots of Creole and Cajun cuisine, the Quadroon Balls, or the “voodoo queen” Marie Laveaux. In this course on French literature in our own historical and regional “backyard,” students will also explore the Haitian inspiration of Durham’s historic black “Hayti” neighborhood. Course taught in French.

For more information, click here.

ASNAMST 173S: Transcultural and Multiethnic Lives: Contexts, Controversies, and Challenges (AFRICAAM 173S, CSRE 173S)

Stanford University
Spring 2011

Stephen Murphy-Shigematsu

Lived experience of people who dwell in the border world of race and nation where they negotiate transcultural and multiethnic identities and politics. Comparative, historical, and global contexts such as family and class. Controversies, such as representations of mixed race people in media and multicultural communities. What the lives of people like Tiger Woods and Barack Obama reveal about how the marginal is becoming mainstream.

For more information, click here.

Greg Carroll Draws Large Crowd for Talk on Melungeon Heritage

West Virginia Archives & History
West Virginia Division of Culture & History
Volume 11, Number 8 (October 2010)
page 2

Archives historian Greg Carroll drew a large crowd for his talk [2010-09-09] on groups of people in the Appalachian area and beyond commonly called Melungeon. To view photos of the evening, [click here]. If you were unable to attend and would like more information regarding Melungeon, mixed race, or tri-racial isolate groups, you may contact Carroll at (304) 558-0230 or greg.b.carroll@wv.gov.

In full agreement with this suggestion of glandular disturbance is the general opinion of biologists that the human hybrid shows a typical instability in mental and moral respects—a want of balance.  His motives and actions are incalculable, his impulses stronger that his self-control. I feel more and more convinced that the inmates of our prisons and asylums are to a large extent recruited from these types of mixed race, who numbers are constantly rising on account of increasing intercourse between populations from all parts of the world.

Jon Alfred Mjöen, “Race-crossing and glands: Some human hybrids and their parent stocks,” The Eugenics Review, Volume 23, Number 1, (April 1931) 31-40.

Race mixture

Eugenics Review
Volume 25, Number 3 (October 1933)
pages 161–166.

K. B. Aikman

Abridged from a paper read before the Eugenics Society on June 20th, 1933.

The immense advances in the last hundred years in the medical sciences and their application have greatly reduced death-rates, not only in civilized countries, but in savage countries as well. As a result there has occurred a general increase of population and thus of migration, which has had important effects-economic, social, moral, religious and biological—both on the peoples who have provided the emigrants and on those who have received them.

We must accept it as a fact that large numbers of different races cannot live side by side and compete for their daily bread without the production of racial mixture. There is one exception to this generalization: in proportion as there is intense antagonism, usually religious, the mixing of the races will be lessened. The practical drawbacks, however, to such a method of race-separation, are proved by the history of India. We need merely note that race-mixing will take place when opportunity occurs and ask ourselves how far is this process desirable. It is a question that cannot be answered in a word, because the nature of the races crossed is important.

THE PRIMARY RACES

Mankind may be divided into three Primary Races: (1) The Negro, blackskinned, with short woolly hair and, typically, African; (2) The Mongolian, yellowskinned, with long straight hair and, typically, Asiatic; (3) The Caucasian, whiteskinned, with abundant wavy hair and, typically, European. These groups may be subdivided, but I propose to do so only in the last case, classifying the Caucasians as the Fair Caucasians of the north and west of Europe and the Dark Caucasians of the south and east.

So great are the differences between these three Primary Races that they are comparable to the differences between the species of the zoologist rather than to those between the varieties. Therefore, the crosses between Primary Races will be described as hybrids, and the offspring of the more closely related varieties and of the half-breeds, as mongrels.

EFFECTS OF HYBRIDIZATION

It may be said that the bulk of medical opinion is against hybridization between the Primary Races and that the best eugenic opinion is definitely against it. Thus, Major Leonard Darwin wrote: “Theoretical reasons can be adduced for believing that inter-breeding between widely divergent races may result in the production of types inferior to both parent stocks: and that this would be the result of miscegenation is at all events a common belief.” Professor Ruggles Gates also supports this view. The biological objection is based upon the fact that, in these crosses, groups of inherited characteristics remain associated or “segregate,” with the result that the offspring has a “chaotic constitution.” Each variety of man or of animal, in the course of time, acquires a constitution adapted to its particular mode of life and to the diseases to which it is exposed. When such constitutions are mixed by inter-breeding, a new constitution is produced, which is not adapted to the mode of life of either parent and too often is not fitted for any actual environment whatever.

As examples of simple skeletal maladaptations, we find hybrids with skulls too large to permit of their birth; others with teeth too large for their jaws; and others with either the upper or the lower jaw a misfit with its neighbour. There are, however, many more complicated disabilities, such as altered resistance to disease and disharmonies of the internal secretions. It is found that the greater the difference between the races crossed, the less likely is the result to be beneficial: that the Caucasian is nearer to the Mongolian than either is to the Negro, and that the Dark Caucasian is nearer to the Mongolian than is the Fair Caucasian, and so the Dark Caucasian cross is the less harmful of the two.

These generalizations, to which there may be exceptions, are supported by the American, Professor N. S. Shaler:

“It is not only a general belief that hybrids of blacks and whites are less prolific and more liable to diseases than the pure bloods of either stock, but also that they seldom live so long. Statistics lacking on this point, I have questioned a large number of physicians well placed for judgment in this matter. All of them agreed that the offspring of a union between pure black and white parents is, on the average, much shorter lived and much less fertile than the race of either parent. My father, a physician of experience and a critical observer, who had spent more than half a century in Cuba and the slave-holding South, stated that, in his opinion, he had never seen mulattoes, that is a cross between white and pure black, who had attained the age of sixty years, and that they were often sterile. The judgment of medical men seems to be that when the blood of either race preponderates, and in proportion as it verges to one or the other, the longevity and fertility increase or decrease.”…

Read the entire article here.

Human hybrids in various parts of the world

Eugenics Review
Volume 21, Number 4 (January 1930)
pages 257–263

Rachel M. Fleming

Political issues involving the right of so-called ‘superior’ races to preserve privileges denied to other races on account of their so-called ‘inferiority’ are tending to darken counsel in the study of racial biology. Another form of political effort is a desire to demonstrate separateness of physical type, so that a subject race may claim autonomy. It is only with painful slowness that man is learning to study himself scientifically and dispassionately, and to apply biological and genetical laws) to his own case. Humanity to-day is the result of long racial crossing; it is difficult to apply the term “pure” to any physical type. All human races are capable of fertile crossing one with another, and man’s tendency to wander both over land and sea, frequently unaccompanied by the women of his own type, has led to marked heterogeneity of inheritance everywhere. The story of the “Sons of God” and the “daughters of men” is world wide and possibly as old as the oldest prehistoric find. And yet in a book published in 1928 we read, “Only a pure race is a strong race”; while the facile statement that the coloured half-caste inherits the worst of both sides, as if the laws of heredity bowed to our colour prejudice, is commonly quoted and believed…

SUPERIOR HALF-CASTES

E. Rodenwaldt has therefore rendered a great service to the study of human heredity by seizing the opportunity of examining the results of an experiment in human crossing which has been worked out in Kisar, an island in the East Indies 127°35’E. long., 8°5’S. lat. His results are published in Die Mestizen auf Kisar (in German) in two volumes, one of which gives detailed measurements and photographs of the Mestizos (half-castes) whom he observed. It contains a remarkable family tree showing the very complicated inter-marriages between the descendants of Mestizo families, and also, by an ingenious device, indicating their skin, eye, and hair colour heredity. No student of human heredity can afford to omit the study of these volumes. The Mestizos of Kisar are ideal material for such a study. The Dutch East Company had a station here in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and soldiers of Dutch, French, German, and British nationality became the ancestors of the Mestizos. From 1819 onwards the island was no longer a station for troops, and the half-caste families formed a group which felt itself superior to the natives and tended to inter-marry. Thus we have available for research a sort of natural experiment in human breeding which has gone on for about two centuries…

…ANGLO-NEGRO AND ANGLO-CHINESE

Recently the writer visited Cape Town and had many conversations with workers among the ‘coloured’ (half-caste) colony there. One worker of long experience had observed the same rule of a higher cultural level and a general demand for better living conditions among those with a large admixture of white blood. He suggested that encouragement of intermixture between the best of the coloured people and the whites would tend to raise the standard of life in Cape Town. Some ‘coloured’ people with a large admixture of white blood showed such small traces of native inheritance that they had “passed over” into the white section and were making good there. Needless to say, this solution is most unpalatable to advocates of  ‘race purity,’ and there may be sound objections to it. On the other hand, it may ultimately be less harmful than the present cruel system of stigmatizing the half-caste socially, and so creating a moral and social environment for him which adds undesirables to the community. For some time past the writer has been in close contact with girls of Anglo-Chinese and Anglo-Negro origin who are unable to find employment because social stigma refuses to allow them to mix in our society in the ordinary way. They are British citizens, and they are the weakest of our citizens, and as such need protection. Whatever action may be taken to prevent such intermixture in the future, if it can be proved to be undesirable, it certainly seems a bad policy of citizenship to penalize half-castes for a fault of birth for which they are in no way responsible. Liverpool, always to the fore in attempts towards civic betterment, has formed an “Association for the Welfare of Half-Caste Children” (Hon. Sec., Mr. G. E. Haynes, B.Sc., University Settlement, Nile Street, Liverpool), and a wholetime research worker [Muriel E. Fletcher] has been appointed. We hope that other seaport towns may soon follow this example of scientific research into a serious problem…

Read the entire article here.

Race-crossing and glands: Some human hybrids and their parent stocks

Eugenics Review
Volume 23, Number 1 (April 1931)
pages 31-40

Jon Alfred Mjöen, Director
Vindern Biological Laboratory (Oslo, Norway)

(Paper read at the ninth meeting, 1930, at he the International Federation of Eugenic Organizations.)

The earlier displacements of population, the migrations of which history relates, usually took place during long epochs of time.  Amongst the greatest were the migrations of the Arabs, the Semites, and the Mongols.  These wholesale movements of population were of quite a different character from the Viking raids from the Mediterranean lands and Northern France, the Gothic invasion of Italy and Spain, the Norman’s conquering expeditions to England, the expulsion of the Huguenots, or the emigration of Puritans to the United States, and the Walloons to Sweden.

But even the most stupendous invasions that history records, hardly assumed such dimensions as the movements of population we have witnessed in our own days.  The system of control that is called inspection of passports shows, for example, that the racial elements of alien origin which in a three-year period after the War have crossed into Central Europe from East, number no less that 600,000.  The emigrants from the East settled in Berlin, Paris, and other large cities (according as the rate of exchange varied), and to-day they form a constantly increasing contingent of Asiatics, Russians, Poles, Galicians, Greeks, and various others.  New York alone was invaded, in the course of a three-year period, by a similar contingent of foreign racial elements amounting to about on and half million.

Nobody who with open eyes has observed the masses in the great modern cities, Paris, Berlin, New York, Chicago, will have failed to be struck by the manner in which the racial physiognomy of the population is in process of changing.  Clean, open racial features are becoming more and more rare in these masses in the slums, which in the real sense of the word are amorphous.  All unity of form is dissolved, and a hideous confusion of all possible coulours and shapes from all the races of the earth has taken place.

The picture which we see before our eyes everyday, so to speak, on journeys in Europe, North Africa, and America, raises a question of importance: What will be the effect, the final result of this gigantic blood-mixing?  The picture gives an impression of lack of guiding-instinct, lack of stability and balance.  But is this lack of balance a result of social or biological causes; and have we any reason to believe that crossing with foreign races will have a deleterious effect upon the native stock?…

…Hybrids’ Tempermental Instability

In full agreement with this suggestion of glandular disturbance is the general opinion of biologists that the human hybrid shows a typical instability in mental and moral respects—a want of balance.  His motives and actions are incalculable, his impulses stronger that his self-control. I feel more and more convinced that the inmates of our prisons and asylums are to a large extent recruited from these types of mixed race, who numbers are constantly rising on account of increasing intercourse between populations from all parts of the world.

A special group of individuals which is causing a great deal of trouble in our northern countries, Norway and Sweden, is the Gipsy (tater) group. We know very litte about their origin, except that they are badly race-mixed and have all the characteristics of unbalanced hybrids.  They are vagabonds, beggars, loafers, and criminals.  Whole families of this hybrid population are filling up our prisons and asylums.

One hears, of course, of prominent hybrids—Booker Washington, the American teacher and reformer, was a Mulatto, and Porfirio Díaz, President of Mexico, was a Mestizo. But they are exceptions to the rule, and they are few compared with the enormous number of human hybrids all over the world.  We find it very often stated that the famous Swedish writer August Strindberg, was of very “mixed ascendency.”  I do not know how far this is assertion is to be relied upon.  But what would be likely to be the result if we advocated race-crossing on such premisses?  If by deliberate experimental breeding of men we could produce 10,000 ‘Stindberg blends,’ we should obtain no small contigent with Strindberg’s brutality, his melancholy, his capriciousness, his violent temper, his pessimism, his cynicism towards women (though he married four times), and all his lack of self-control—and yet we might be cheated of the expected types with Strindberg’s creative genius…

Read the entire article here.