Mixed Race Studies

Gouldtown: A Very Remarkable Settlement of Ancient Date

J. B. Lippincott Company, Philadelphia (Digitized by Google)
1913
237 pages

William Steward, A.M.

Rev. Theophilus G. Stweard, D.D., Chaplain, U.S. Army, Retired

Studies of some sturdy examples of the simple live, toghether with sketches of early colonial history of Cumberland county and Southern New Jersey and some early genealogical records.

CHAPTER I: Gouldtown; its tradition; its people; its general History.

In Judge Lucius Q. C. Elmer’s history of Cumberland County, New Jersey, written in 1865, occurs this statement:

“Gouldtown—partly in the Northern part of Fairfield, and partly in Bridgeton Townships—although never more than a settlement of mulattoes, principally bearing the names of Gould and Pierce, scattered over a considerable territory, is of quite ancient date. The tradition is that they are descendants of Fenwick.”

Judge Elmer, a distinguished Supreme Court Jurist of New Jersey, was the son of General Ebenezer Elmer, of New Jersey, who was an officer in the Revolutionary Army, first as an ensign, and shortly after as lieutenant in a company, and later, being a physician, serving as a surgeon; he served, in all, during the war of the Revolution, a period of seven years and eight months. In 1814, he commanded a brigade of militia called out for the defence of Philadelphia against the British, and was ever after that known as General Elmer. Judge Elmer was born soon after the close of the Revolution in 1798, and had ample opportunity and ability for research in his native county. He died in 1888.

Much interest has always been taken in the community of Gouldtown by the neighboring communities, and this was always of a friendly character; in early times because of its traditional descent, and later because of the ethnological features recognizable.

General Elmer and his son were accustomed, on Sunday afternoons to meet in a schoolhouse and catechize the children of Gouldtown, in the neighborhood, in the years following the Revolution. These children and youth would not all be mulattoes (the term “mulattoes” is used in this book in its general significance, applying to the people of color of mixed blood) however, for in the community were pure white families—as for instance the Woodruff’s, the Luptons, the Fullers, the Seeleys, and the Whites, and others; traces of whom are to be found only in the farms they left, which were known by their names as the “Fuller Fields,” the “hite Fields,” the “Jay Fields “; the names remaining a century or more after their owners had vanished. Only one of these names has been perpetuated in a village, and that of recent date and several miles distant from the original location. This is Woodruffs, about three or four miles northward from Gouldtown. It is a wealthy farming settlement on the line of the Central Railroad, and has a Methodist Church and a schoolhouse and post-office.

Gouldtown is comprised in two sections—following the two family names of Gould and Pierce, which were always known by their separate names, Gouldtown and Piercetown, but both known comprehensively as Gouldtown. It is remarkable in that it has perpetuated its family name in its locality for nearly two hundred years; also because it is a community of mulattoes who, contrary to the pet theory of some astute ethnological scientists, have perpetuated themselves generation after generation for almost two centuries; remarkable, too, for the known longevity of its people, who do not begin to grow old, as is often said, until they come to three-score years, and a number of whom have reached the century mark, one of whom (Ebenezer Pierce Bishop) is still living, at this writing, who is one hundred and six years old, and one of whom (Mrs. Lydia Gould Sheppard) was buried in the year nineteen hundred and eleven, at the age of one hundred and two, in the Gouldtown Cemetery, and a number of others who are still living at ages between seventy and ninety-five years…

Read the entire book here.

Becoming Yellow: A Short History of Racial Thinking

Princeton University Press
2011
248 pages
6 x 9 | 7 color illus. 16 halftones
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-691-14031-5

Michael Keevak, Professor in the Department of Foreign Languages
National Taiwan University

In their earliest encounters with Asia, Europeans almost uniformly characterized the people of China and Japan as white. This was a means of describing their wealth and sophistication, their willingness to trade with the West, and their presumed capacity to become Christianized. But by the end of the seventeenth century the category of whiteness was reserved for Europeans only. When and how did Asians become “yellow” in the Western imagination? Looking at the history of racial thinking, Becoming Yellow explores the notion of yellowness and shows that this label originated not in early travel texts or objective descriptions, but in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scientific discourses on race.

From the walls of an ancient Egyptian tomb, which depicted people of varying skin tones including yellow, to the phrase “yellow peril” at the beginning of the twentieth century in Europe and America, Michael Keevak follows the development of perceptions about race and human difference. He indicates that the conceptual relationship between East Asians and yellow skin did not begin in Chinese culture or Western readings of East Asian cultural symbols, but in anthropological and medical records that described variations in skin color. Eighteenth-century taxonomers such as Carl Linnaeus, as well as Victorian scientists and early anthropologists, assigned colors to all racial groups, and once East Asians were lumped with members of the Mongolian race, they began to be considered yellow.

Demonstrating how a racial distinction took root in Europe and traveled internationally, Becoming Yellow weaves together multiple narratives to tell the complex history of a problematic term.

Read the introduction here.

Passing Novels in the Harlem Renaissance: Identity Politics and Textual Strategies

Lit Verlag Munster
2003
224 pages
ISBN 3-8258-5842-1

Mar Gallego, Associate Professor of American Studies
University of Huelva (Spain)

Passing Novels in the Harlem Renaissance offers an insightful study of the significance of passing novels for the literary and intellectual debate of the Harlem Renaissance. Mar Gallego effectively uncovers the presence of a subversive component in five of these novels (by James Weldon Johnson, George Schuyler, Nella Larsen, and Jessie Fauset), turning them into useful tools to explore the passing phenomenon in all its richness and complexity. Her compelling study intends to contribute to the ongoing revision of the parameters conventionally employed to analyze passing novels by drawing attention to a great variety of textual strategies such as double consciousness, parody, and multiple generic covers. Examining the hybrid nature of these texts, Gallego skillfully highlights their radical critique of the status quo and their celebration of a distinct African American identity.

Whiting Up: Whiteface Minstrels and Stage Europeans in African American Performance

University of North Carolina Press
December 2011
336 pages
6.125 x 9.25, 15 illus., notes, bibl., index
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8078-3508-1

Marvin McAllister, Assistant Professor of English
University of South Carolina

In the early 1890s, black performer Bob Cole turned blackface minstrelsy on its head with his nationally recognized whiteface creation, a character he called Willie Wayside. Just over a century later, hiphop star Busta Rhymes performed a whiteface supercop in his hit music video “Dangerous.” In this sweeping work, Marvin McAllister explores the enduring tradition of “whiting up,” in which African American actors, comics, musicians, and even everyday people have studied and assumed white racial identities.

Not to be confused with racial “passing” or derogatory notions of “acting white,” whiting up is a deliberate performance strategy designed to challenge America’s racial and political hierarchies by transferring supposed markers of whiteness to black bodies—creating unexpected intercultural alliances even as it sharply critiques racial stereotypes. Along with theater, McAllister considers a variety of other live performance modes, including antebellum cakewalks and contemporary stand-up comedy by solo artists such as Dave Chappelle. For over three centuries and in today’s supposedly “postracial” America, McAllister argues, whiting up has allowed African American performers first to appropriate artistic products of a white imagination and then to fashion new black identities through these “white” forms, therefore enhancing our collective understanding of self and other.

Blackness and Race Mixture: The Dynamics of Racial Identity in Colombia

Johns Hopkins University Press
1993
432 pages
ISBN-10: 9780801852510; ISBN-13: 978-0801852510

Peter Wade, Professor of Social Anthropology
University of Manchester

Drawing on extensive anthropological fieldwork, Peter Wade shows how the concept of “blackness” and discrimination are deeply embedded in different social levels and contexts—from region to neighborhood, and from politics and economics to housing, marriage, music, and personal identity.

Table of Contents

• Preface and Acknowledgments
• I. Introduction
  • 1. The Racial Order and National Identity
  • 2. The Study of Indians and Blacks in the Racial Order
• II. Cultural Topography
  • 3. A Sense of Place: The Geography of Culture in Colombia
  • 4. Antioquia
  • 5. The Atlantic Coast
  • 6. The Chocó: Rain, Misery, and Blackness
  • 7. Heroes and Politics: Quibdó since 1900
  • 8. The Chocó: Poverty and Riches
• III. Chogoanos on the Frontier and the City
  • 9. Unguía: History and Economy
  • 10. Unguía: Ethnic Relations
  • 11. Medellín: Working in the City
  • 12. Medellín: Living in the City
• IV. Blackness and Mixedness
  • 13. Images of Blackness: The View from Above
  • 14. Images of Blackness: The View from Below
  • 15. The Black Community and Music
  • 16. Whitening
  • 17. Prestige and Equality, Egotism and Envy
• Conclusion
• Epilogue
• Appendix A: Tables
• Appendix B: Figures
• Appendix C: Transcripts of Responses by Chocóanos to Questions about Medellín
• References

Illustrations

• A suburb of Quibdó
• A street band in Quibdó
• A woman mining by hand in the Chocó
• A mechanical gold dredger in the Chocó
• A main street in Unguía
• The central square of Medellín
• La Iguana, an invasion settlement in Medellín
• El Salon Suizo, a bar in central Medellín

Maps

• Colombia
• Colombia: Northern region
• Colombia: Northwestern region

Introduction

The study of blacks in Colombia, despite the seminal efforts of a few dedicated researchers, is neglected relative to the ethnohistorical and anthropological study of the indian populations. The idea of a “racial democracy” in Colombia is still pervasive, and despite refutations of this myth from academic and popular circles alike, some people of all colors and classes can still be heard to avow the insignificance of race as an issue, especially as far as blacks are concerned.

The reasons for this have, in my view, to do with the complex interweaving of patterns of both discrimination and tolerance, of both blackness or indianness and mestizaje, or race mixture. This interweaving takes place within a project, managed mainly by elites, of nationhood and national identity which holds up an image of Colombia as essentially a mestizo or mixed nation. Blacks and indians can, therefore, although in different ways, be both excluded as nonmestizo and included as potential recruits to mixedncss. Such a racial order, I believe, is not characteristic of Colombia alone, but has echoes in many regions of Latin America. In this book, I examine the coexisting and interdependent dynamics of mestizaje and discrimination in a variety of contexts, at different levels of resolution and in distinct realms of social action.

To talk about “blacks,” “indians,” and “race” in Latin America, or indeed anywhere else, is in itself problematic. It is generally accepted that “races” arc social constructions, categorical identifications based on a discourse about physical appearance or ancestry. This is not a universalizing definition good for all places and times because what is to count as relevant “physical difference” or relevant “ancestry” is far from self-evident. There is apparently the “natural fact” of phenotypical variation from which culture constructs categorical identifications according to social determinations, but positing a nature/culture relation mediated by this “productionist logic” (Haraway 1989, 13) obscures the fact that there is no prediscursive, universal encounter with “nature” or therefore with phenotypical variation. These have always been perceived and understood historically in different ways, through certain lenses, especially those ground in the colonial encounters that have privileged the phenotypical differences characteristic of continental space, rather than those characteristic of, say, “short” and “tall” people. As such, racial categories arc processual in two ways: first, as a result of the changing perceptions of the nature/culture divide that they themselves mediate; second, as a result of the interplay of both claims to and ascriptions of identity, usually made in the context of unequal power relations. The second process is of particular significance in the Latin American context because one feature of a racial order based on race mixture is ambiguity about who is and who is not “black” or “indian.” In the United States, South Africa, and many European countries, although ambiguities do exist, there is more general agreement between claims and ascriptions, and thus more clearly defined categorical boundaries to races, than in Latin American countries such as Colombia. There, the boundaries of the category “black” or “indian” are much disputed and ambiguous, even while clear images of a “typical” black or indian person exist for everyone, including “blacks” and “indians.” In this book, although I will not always enclose the terms “black,” “indian,” or “race” in quotation marks, it should be understood that if by their very nature they are not self-evident categories, this is especially so in the Latin American context.

Ambiguity about blackness or indianness does not, however, mean the insignificance of blacks or indians, or more exactly, of people for whom blackness and indianness is an important aspect of personal and social identity. In this book, my concern is with blackness, and I focus on a region of Colombia, the Chocó province of the lowland Pacific littoral, where this is particularly evident. There, blacks form about 80 or 90 percent of the population, and blackness has been and still is a critical feature of regional history and identity. I look at the region’s inhabitants, the Chocoanos, in the heart of this province and also in the two sites of my field work: one right in the north of the Chocó, in an area heavily influenced by nonblacks; the other, beyond the Chocó, in the city of Medellín. My aim is to examine the coexistence and codependence of blackness and nonblackness, of discrimination and race mixture in these regional contexts. My contention is that the Chocoano material illuminates the more general nature of the Colombian racial order and Colombian national identity. By the same token, the Colombian material sheds light on other Latin American nations in which discrimination and mestizaje also coexist and in which projects of national identity have also had to deal, albeit in different ways, with a past and a present of racial heterogeneity.

Blacks are present and blackness is an issue in other areas of Colombia besides the Choco: the whole southern Pacific littoral is, if anything, blacker than the Chocó; the areas around Cali and Cartago have significant black populations; the Caribbean coastal region has concentrations of blacks in various areas, and more generally has a heavily negroid population; there are pockets of blacks, often migrants, in most cities, including Bogota. I do not pretend to cover all these different contexts, some of which have already been studied (see, for example, the works by Whitten, Friedemann, and Taussig listed in the References), but I do introduce two other Colombian regions into the picture, although neither is my principal focus. One is Antioquia, the other the Caribbean coastal region, both neighbors of the Chocó. Their presence in the book has two purposes. One is mainly from the central Chocó, Antioquia, and the Caribbean region; my second was in Medellín, provincial capital of Antioquia. Some knowledge of these other two regions is thus clearly indispensable in order to comprehend the ethnic interaction between their people and the Chocoanos. The second purpose is more strategic. My aim in this book is to examine the interplay of discrimination and mestizaje. My main focus is on the Chocoanos. But this interplay had very different outcomes in different regions, according to local conjunctures of political economy and demography, and Antioquia and the Caribbean coast form perfect counterpoints to the Chocó in this respect, with the Caribbean coast intermediate between the evidently black Chocó and heavily “whitened” Antioquia. In short, if the national racial order of Colombia is based on the contradictory but interdependent coexistence of blackness, indianness, mixedncss, and whiteness, then it makes sense to examine other regions where these elements and conceptual categories worked themselves out in different ways. The first chapters therefore explore these two regions before turning to concentrate on the Choco itselfc In the rest of this introduction, I elaborate the themes ot blackness, indianness, race, and the nation…

Race and Multiraciality in Brazil and the United States: Converging Paths?

Pennsylvania State University Press
2006
384 pages
6 x 9
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-271-02883-5
Paper ISBN: 978-0-271-03288-7

G. Reginald Daniel, Professor of Sociology
University of California at Santa Barbara

Although both Brazil and the United States inherited European norms that accorded whites privileged status relative to all other racial groups, the development of their societies followed different trajectories in defining white/black relations. In Brazil pervasive miscegenation and the lack of formal legal barriers to racial equality gave the appearance of its being a “racial democracy,” with a ternary system of classifying people into whites (brancos), multiracial individuals (pardos), and blacks (pretos) supporting the idea that social inequality was primarily associated with differences in class and culture rather than race. In the United States, by contrast, a binary system distinguishing blacks from whites by reference to the “one-drop rule” of African descent produced a more rigid racial hierarchy in which both legal and informal barriers operated to create socioeconomic disadvantages for blacks.

But in recent decades, Reginald Daniel argues in this comparative study, changes have taken place in both countries that have put them on “converging paths.” Brazil’s black consciousness movement stresses the binary division between brancos and negros to heighten awareness of and mobilize opposition to the real racial discrimination that exists in Brazil, while the multiracial identity movement in the U.S. works to help develop a more fluid sense of racial dynamics that was long felt to be the achievement of Brazil’s ternary system.

Against the historical background of race relationsin Brazil and the U.S. that he traces in Part I of the book, including a review of earlier challenges to their respective racial orders, Daniel focuses in Part II on analyzing the new racial project on which each country has embarked, with attention to all the political possibilities and dangers they involve.

Table of Contents

• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I. The Historical Foundation
  • 1. Eurocentrism: Racial Formation and the Master Racial Project
  • 2. The Brazilian Path: The Ternary Racial Project
  • 3. The Brazilian Path Less Traveled: Contesting the Ternary Racial Project
  • 4. The U.S. Path: The Binary Racial Project
  • 5. The U.S. Path Less Traveled: Contesting the Binary Racial Project
• Part II. Converging Paths
  • 6. A New U.S. Racial Order: The Demise of Jim Crow Segregation
  • 7. A New Brazilian Racial Order: A Decline in the Racial Democracy Ideology
  • 8. The U.S. Convergence: Toward the Brazilian Path
  • 9. The Brazilian Convergence: Toward the U.S. Path
• Epilogue: The U.S. and Brazilian Racial Orders: Changing Points of Reference
• Notes
• References
• Index

The Great Southern Babylon: Sex, Race, and Respectability in New Orleans, 1865–1920

Louisiana State University Press
2004
282 pages
6 x 9, 27 Halftones, 2 Maps
paper ISBN-13: 978-0-8071-3112-1

Alecia P. Long, Assistant Professor of History
Louisiana State University

With a well-earned reputation for tolerance of both prostitution and miscegenation, New Orleans became known as the Great Southern Babylon in antebellum times. Following the Civil War, a profound alteration in social and economic conditions gradually reshaped the city’s sexual culture and erotic commerce. Historian Alecia P. Long traces sex in the Crescent City over fifty years, drawing from Louisiana Supreme Court case testimony to relate intriguing tales of people both obscure and famous whose relationships and actions exemplify the era.

Long uncovers a connection between the geographical segregation of prostitution and the rising tide of racial segregation. She offers a compelling explanation of how New Orleans’s lucrative sex trade drew tourists from the Bible Belt and beyond even as a nationwide trend toward the commercialization of sex emerged. And she dispels the romanticized smoke and perfume surrounding Storyville to reveal in the reasons for its rise and fall a fascinating corner of southern history. The Great Southern Babylon portrays the complex mosaic of race, gender, sexuality, social class, and commerce in turn-of-the-twentieth-century New Orleans.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• 1 “It’s Because You Are a Colored Woman” Sex, Race, and Concubinage after the Civil War
• 2 The Business of Pleasure: Concert Saloons and Sexual Commerce in the Economic Mainstream
• 3 “Where the Least Harm Can Result”: Sex, Race, and Respectability in a Single Neighborhood
• 4 “Unusual Situations and Remarkable People”: Mary Deubler, Respectability, and the History of Storyville
• 5 “As Rare as White Blackbirds”: Willie Piazza, Race, and Reform
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Biibliography
• Index

North from the Mountains: A Folk History of the Carmel Melungeon Settlement, Highland County, Ohio

Mercer University Press
2001
220 pages
Paperback ISBN: 9780865547032

John S. Kessler

Donald B. Ball

The newest book in Mercer University Press’ new series The Melungeons: History, Culture, Ethnicity, and Literature is North from the Mountains: A Folk History of the Carmel Melungeon Settlement, Highland County, Ohio by John S. Kessler and Donald B. Ball. It is the first substantive study of the Carmel Melungeon settlement since 1950. Tracing their history from about 1700, this book contains extensive firsthand information to be found in no other source, and relates the Carmel population to the Melungeons and similar mixed-blood populations originating in the Mid-Atlantic coastal region. This study combines a review of documentary evidence, extensive firsthand observations of the group, and information gleaned from area informants and a visit to the Carmel area. The senior author, until about age eighteen, was a resident of a community nearby, hence the personal insight and perspective into the lifestyle and inter- and intrarelationships of the group.

Then I Was Black: South African Political Identities in Transition

Yale University Press
2000-06-19
304 pages
6 1/2 x 9 1/4
Cloth ISBN: 9780300080131

Courtney Jung, Associate Professor of Political Science
The New School

Do race and ethnicity present a danger to the consolidation of effective democratic government? Can liberal constitutionalism provide a stable basis for governance of a polity historically erected on racial and ethnic division? In this book Courtney Jung argues that when ethnic and racial identities are politically fluid and heterogeneous, as she finds they are in South Africa, ethnic and racial politics will not undermine the peaceful and democratic potential of the government.

Jung examines three important cases of politicized racial and ethnic identity in South Africa: Zulu, Afrikaner, and Coloured. Working from extensive field research and interviews, she develops a model to explain shifts in the political salience, goals, and boundaries of these groups between 1980 and 1995. Jung challenges the common assumption that cultural identities overdetermine political possibility, pointing out that individual members fail for the most part to internalize the political agenda of “their own” ethnic group. Group engagement with the state is also conditioned by contextual factors, not determined by its constitution in ethnic or racial terms. South Africa is no more divided than most other societies, she concludes, and no less likely to consolidate democracy as a result of its politicized cleavages of race and ethnicity.

The Making of Racial Sentiment: Slavery and the Birth of The Frontier Romance

Cambridge University Press
August 2006
256 pages
Dimensions: 228 x 152 mm
Weight: 0.55 kg
Hardback ISBN: 9780521865395
Paperback ISBN: 9780521073042
Adobe eBook Reader ISBN: 9780511239465
Mobipocket eBook ISBN: 9780511247484

Ezra Tawil, Associate Professor of English
University of Rochester, Rochester, New York

The frontier romance, an enormously popular genre of American fiction born in the 1820s, helped redefine ‘race’ for an emerging national culture. Ezra Tawil argues that the novel of white-Indian conflict provided authors and readers with an apt analogy for the problem of slavery. By uncovering the sentimental aspects of the frontier romance, Tawil redraws the lines of influence between the ‘Indian novel’ of the 1820s and the sentimental novel of slavery, demonstrating how Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin ought to be reconsidered in this light. This study reveals how American literature of the 1820s helped form modern ideas about racial differences.

Contents

• Introduction: toward a literary history of racial sentiment
• 1. The politics of slavery and the discourse of race, 1787–1840
• 2. Remaking natural rights: race and slavery in James Fenimore Cooper’s early writings
• 3. Domestic frontier romance, or, how the sentimental heroine became white
• 4. ‘Homely legends’: the uses of sentiment in Cooper’s Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish
• 5. Stowe’s vanishing Americans: ‘Negro’ inferiority, captivity, and homecoming in Uncle Tom’s Cabin
• 6. Captain Babo’s cabin: racial sentiment and the politics of misreading in Benito Cereno
• Index.